Andrew Larson: Every single person in the company knows where we're headed. Everyone knows that we're aligned in that same direction. When we share that also with a new team member coming on and they see that we truly live our values and we have a common purpose and everyone's aligned, they're like, "I want to jump on board this train. Let's go." And it's been phenomenal in recruiting. I think it's been phenomenal in retention. But it really is living what we said we were going to in the first place with our values. Tim Spiker: Organizational values can provide a solid framework for strategic advantage, but only if the leaders are actually willing to use those values while making decisions. I'm your host, Tim Spiker, and this is the Be Worth* Following podcast, a production of the People Forward Network. On this show, we talk with exceptional leaders, thinkers, and researchers about what actually drives effective leadership across the globe and over time. Tim Spiker: You just heard from Andrew Larson, the CEO of Gustave A. Larson Company, one of the top HVAC wholesalers in the United States. While Andrew inherited the company from his father, that wasn't the only thing his father left him. Andrew's father authored the concepts behind what has become the company values. In this episode, Andrew shares how those values are actively relied upon in day to day decision making and are being embedded into every aspect of the organization. You'll also hear why Andrew calls the pocket card of the values written on it the get out of jail card. Finally, you'll get a chance to hear how the companies values connect to the development of their leaders and why it's important to separate who the employee is from the role the employee plays. To start things off, let's hear a bit more about Andrew's father and the story behind the letter he wrote to the company back in 1970. Andrew Larson: Clearly for me, my father was my mentor, someone I looked up to. And so, he passed away about nine years ago. My brother and I run the business today. But he really was someone who was a deep thinker, and our values are really the foundation for our company today. He wrote a letter to the company in 1970 with regard to all of our values, our company's philosophies, and their beliefs, and we've really tried to wrap everything we do with regard to our culture and our values around his philosophies that he shared in that letter in 1970. And so, as we look at our Larson values, it really allows us to live today what he would want us to. Tim Spiker: When you think about your time working with him and for him, how would you describe the learning process for you? Was it the type of thing where you sat down and talked about things, or was it a little bit more of things were caught more than taught? Andrew Larson: I worked outside our company for almost 10 years before I came back. I thought I wanted to be a doctor and realized that it was really a great opportunity to come back to the family business. One of his rules was to work outside the business for a minimum of five years, to learn different management styles, different cultures, make mistakes, but most importantly, come back with something to contribute. I recall when I came back and would meet with him, he would just listen. He wasn't very quick to say, "I think you should do this." He was always really more about listening and then saying, "Tell me more. Why are you thinking this way? What was your decision-making process?" And really, he was a great question asker. He just wanted to understand my thought process. Tim Spiker: It's really amazing the connection points because as you articulate what he did and you think about that simple phrase, which is, frankly, something that we talk about with our clients all the time, "Tell me more. Tell me more about that," what a simple phrase that can just offer so much, and you're describing it to somebody on the other side of it. Andrew Larson: My father as well always wanted to make sure that he got across a few different philosophies, like that letter from 1970. One philosophy was you never called our corporate office the headquarters, because to him, the headquarters meant the most important place of a business, and that's wherever we're face to face with a customer, not at our corporate office. So that's one example. But he also wanted to make sure we were always focused on being a learning organization. He never liked to use the word training. Training is what you did to someone, learning is what you had to have inside to really get to that next place and really absorb everything. Andrew Larson: And so, as we thought about our values, and we've named them our Larson values just to have everyone come up with them a little bit easier, the first one is L, and that stands for the learning. We did that because we wanted to be the learning organization that he talked about. But then we talked about three guiding principles after each value. Our three after learning are curious, continuously improves, and personal development. The first is curious. And to us to learn, to truly learn, you've got to be curious. Curious to us as well is much more encompassing because I curious about you and getting to know you, because this world is about relationships. Serving our customers is about relationships. We want to understand how we can be curious about serving a customer better, how we can have a process be simpler and easier so we make it easier for the customer, how we can be curious about helping with our personal development and getting better and helping to shore up our weak areas while we still focus on our strength. Andrew Larson: One of my roles is to try and live five to 10 years out in the future. And so, as an organization, we've got to be curious about what is the future going to be like, how different is it going to be, and how do we make sure that we're changing our company so that we are being stronger and not simply being passed by. Tim Spiker: One of the things that I really appreciate as I listen to you describe how as an organization you approach this issue of being curious is that, in my observation, you really extend it significantly further than what we typically see in business writing. What I mean by that is if we do a search on HBR or anywhere else around curiosity, we'll find a number of articles that are almost all about being intellectually curious, but they don't usually talk about what you just talked about. I mean, the very first thing you said, "We need to be curious about you, curious about others, and then you carry that on through even to the customer." Do you guys do anything in particular to help foster that depth of curiosity that you're describing? Andrew Larson: I'd love to say there are specific things we're focused on, but I think it's really across the board, and maybe part of it comes back to how we use our values. We do quarterly state of the company meetings, we lead with our values and our mission and our vision. So everyone's aligned in terms of where we're going. Most people say you've got to say things three times. We feel you've got to say it's seven to get it across, right? So we talk about our values over and over and over again. We also give all of our employees, I also have one with me, but a wallet card with our values on it. So everyone always has those with them at all times. We call it our get out of jail card. We say, "Let the values guide you. Be curious about this issue. Focus on what's right for the customer. Make sure it's a win-win not a win-lose. But as long as you're making that decision, go ahead. For some reason, we've got to coach you later on and say, 'Have you thought about this other solution?' This is your get out of jail card. You're following our values.'" Andrew Larson: So that's one example. Also, we use the EOS process in our business, stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. We're trying to get all of our leadership teams, throughout the organization down to every level, to have what's called a level 10 meeting, our weekly meetings where we really identify, discuss, and solve problems each and every week. If we can solve three to six problems per week in every leadership team across the company, we are moving the ball forward, helping us to be better and serve our customer better. And I mentioned that because each one of those IDS sessions, is what's called, to identify, again discuss, and solve those issues is really about curiosity. Let's be curious about how do we get to the root cause, right, as we're discussing this. Let's be curious about what all those different solutions are. And then let's make sure we truly are solving this so we can move on to the next issue. Tim Spiker: It's interesting as you talk about EOS, and there are any number of other things that be similar in the marketplace where if you boil some of these things down to their core, they are at a certain level attempting with structure to drive assumption out of the process, which is to say to engage in curiosity at every level. But it has to be done if it's going to be effective. In my opinion, it's got to be done with a heart that is also curious. Going through the motions of EOS or anything else, if I'm not genuinely curious about it, it will not produce as quality of a result. So you're talking about learning as a value of our company and being curious is essential to that value. And so, you're instilling this heart and perspective, and then you lay on top of it the structure of EOS, which gives people an avenue to exercise that. To me, you're essentially combining the who and the what of leadership together to be effective, and it sounds like it's been an effective for you over the years. Andrew Larson: Very much because it really is kind of a loop. To be a learning organization, you've got to be curious. And as you're curious, that allows you to learn, and then you become curious about something else. It's this constant cycle which feeds on itself in a really positive way. Tim Spiker: We've talked about the values a little bit. Just for everybody's edification here, could you go list all of them so people can have a broader picture of what the Larson values are? Andrew Larson: Yeah, sure. Our Larson values, we've taken liberties with the last couple, but it really kind of spell out Larson. The first one is learning, we talked about that. The second one is attitude. Third is results. The fourth is service. And then for the O we used the O, the second letter for collaboration, and for the last one we used the N for integrity. Tim Spiker: I'm going to say something might sound funny, but I love that you took liberties with the letters at the end, and I'll tell you why. I've always been a little bit suspicious when the key to whatever it is we're talking about just happens to be spelled by whatever it is we're talking about. We know when all the keys to having a great culture just happened to spell C-U-L-T-U-R-E, I get a little suspicious. I'm like, "Really? Did it just happen?" Andrew Larson: We did try and fit them into Larson, but that wouldn't work, and we're like, "These are just too important for collaboration and integrity." Tim Spiker: Well, I love that. And as subtle as that might seem for me, a guy who is passionate about leadership, I actually take a cue from that because maybe foreign concept to you because of how you think, but I run into a lot of organizations who would've been more concerned with it spelling Larson than having it be accurate. So, I really love that you took some liberties with it. Attitude is the second one there. I know from some previous dialogue you and I have had that you've talked about one of the aspects of attitude being humble, and that's something that's important to you as an organization. Can you talk a little bit more about what humility means to you and how you hope that it shows up in the organization? Andrew Larson: Yeah, well, first the value is attitude, and how we display that are those three guiding principles. One is to be positive and then humble and then friendly. Let me talk about the other ones for a quick sec too. My father always wanted to make sure that we were friendly. That again based and back to that relationship, you're treating someone else as a person, as a human being with dignity, which he talked about in his letter from 1970, not simply an object. Andrew Larson: A positive, we had a board meeting yesterday that I was at, and we went to visit one of our store teams. We've got, boy, probably five new team members. A few were there that were presenting door board in terms of what we're focused on. The leader that was finished presenting said, "Hope you noticed one thing, that was all these team members when they were out of the room, had boundless enthusiasm. They were so positive." I mean, I wish we had that in every location. We're not there yet, but it was so wonderful to see, and for the board members to see, because that truly is infectious when you get that kind of a culture in a location. And that's our challenge, which is when we have 50 locations, how do we get our culture each and every location? And that's why talking about our values, hiring, coaching based on them is so important. Andrew Larson: We have interview questions that are based on understanding how someone lives our values. We talk about it in advance because that's how we want them to act and to live, so it's really important. And that last one that you mentioned was humility. For us to have the attitude, we want people to be humble. The reason is that it's not really about us. It's about our customers. It's about our team members. How do we serve them best? How do we put them first? We kind of know the right person to look for and define, but we then drill down into the questions about values to make sure there really is that fit. Tim Spiker: I'm thinking back to something that you said earlier as we were talking about your father, his desire to not call the corporate office headquarters because it's not about what happens here, it's about what happens with our customers. The moment that you said that, the word humility popped to mind. Maybe some folks would say, "Oh, that's just a little thing," but actually, as I hear that story, I don't think it's a little thing at all. I think it's an indication of the value of not putting one's self in the center of the universe. Andrew Larson: I've not really, honestly, made that connection, but I think it's maybe just because that's inherent. I know that whenever we have a new team member, I am always making a point to coach about that. In a similar fashion in our corporate office, there's also a distribution center there. When you're in the office, people sometimes say, "Oh, let's talk to so-and-so in the back." It's like, "No, anything, that's the front, right? That's who's closer to our customer getting product to them. Don't you think we're in the back?" And so, there is this constant discussion of our philosophies, and they're little things, but we think they mean a lot Tim Spiker: Sometimes people have questions around character qualities like humility where they would say, "Can you actually develop that? Or is that just you got it or you don't?" What's your perspective on that in terms of what you've seen with your leaders over the years and other folks in the organization around developing greater humility over time? Andrew Larson: We use three different criteria when we hire someone, sometimes four when it's maybe more of a leadership position, and that really is looking at the personality profiles, looking at the work experience, having the actual interview process. And that fourth one sometimes is maybe doing a Wonderlic and some kind of an intelligence test as well. But it's amazing how uncannily accurate a lot of those personality profiles are. So we use those as a funnel to make sure that we are right in the very beginning ensuring that someone, based on their answers, right, has that level of humility. I think sometimes we find someone that maybe in our profile has a high D-trait. Tim Spiker: High D, we're talking about the DiSC assessment? Andrew Larson: It could be DiSC. We use something called a Culture Index. Tim Spiker: I know people are going to want to hear that, by the way. They're going to be like, "Assessment, please tell me which assessment it is?" So that's good. Andrew Larson: Yeah. We use the Culture Index, and it's very similar to DiSC. The only difference, really, is it has a portion of it that really allows you to understand how they think they're doing in their job. And that gets us a little additional coaching for them with that in addition to simply their base profile. It's interesting to look at the differences between the two and what that means. Andrew Larson: But jumping back to your question, I think it oftentimes is hard to shore up someone's weakness, if you will. We like to focus on their strengths, and we like to help really make sure that we can put them in the right seat in the company and also to make sure they're the right person. How we use that with EOS, the term is RPRS, which simply stands for right person, and are they in the right seat? Sounds simple, but how we define that is the right person is if they live our values, and then if they're the right seat, do they get it in that position? Do they want it, and do they have the capacity to do that? Andrew Larson: And so, if they're living our values, again, one of our guiding principles is to be humble. We want them to be part of that. If they're not, we have a no-jerk policy, things like that. It's easy to tell, and someone's not going to make it very far. In that case, if we were to lose that person, they would not be a regrettable loss because they did not live our values. That's kind of a hard black line, if you will, if someone's not living our values. Tim Spiker: It sounds like the clarity around the values would be so significant that somebody who didn't fit that, I'm guessing, and you correct me if I'm wrong here, they stick out pretty quickly and pretty obviously. So can you get to those, "We need to make a change here," do you get to those things fairly quickly in most cases? Andrew Larson: Yeah. I think it's been a journey for us. I mean, we've only used and worked with EOS for the past six years, and we've obviously had our values for decades before that. But I think this whole concept of right person are they living our values and right seat, we came upon this six years ago. We have had to, as a result, share over and over again our values that we want to live. With 450 employees, we can't turn everyone over if they're not meeting our values. And so, we've had to go through over the past six years and make sure everyone on the team understands this. As you said before, is it part of their base personality or can we coach them to make sure that they're living these values? And if they can't, then they would be de-hired. We release them to find their happiness elsewhere. I think Disney said that. But as an example, in our Western region just last year, we had a conversation with one of our managers saying, "We only have one person who's not the right person, lives our values, but not on the right seat. Everyone else is an RPRS." Which is phenomenal. It's like, wow. And so, we've had a lot of hard work to get to that place. We've had to be proactive in terms of coaching teammates and team members, and if they're not right, coaching them out, if you will. Tim Spiker: One of the things that I really, really love about that as you describe it, is that it draws a distinction between the right person and the right seat. Because I could easily see in an organization if somebody is not performing so well because they're in the wrong seat, it would be easy for many to say, "We're going to have to help them move on to the next place." But by separating those two ideas, one is, "Do they live out the Larson values, do they align with our culture," it creates, I would think, a much more sophisticated evaluation process to say, "Hold on, hold on, hold on, they are the right person. Let's see if we can find their right seat for them." But I love the separation. I'm just imagining the conversations that would create internally when you're looking at if somebody isn't performing so well. Andrew Larson: Yesterday at the board meeting, when we had that one manager telling us about those new team members, he used to be a sales manager, he's now moved to the inside sales team to something called a custom experience manager. And with our board, he actually brought up, from his coaching, he goes, "It was a right seat issue. I moved, and I'm so much happier in this seat that we found this for me." And everyone knew what that meant, the board knew what that meant, but it came from him as well. And so, this wasn't a negative thing. He found a better place where he's thriving in the company as a result. So it's been phenomenal. And he lived the values both ways. So, yes, it's worked out super well. Andrew Larson: That comes back to our coaching. We're very blessed to have our implementer with EOS, his name is René Boer. I mention his name because he wrote a book, How to Be a Great Boss. We always like to say that people don't leave companies, they leave bosses. How do we help have great bosses across the company? We just had a meeting, boy, maybe a month ago with our next 50 level bosses, helping to help them understand how we can be better at coaching, how we can be better at developing our teammates. But it was super important because a big part of that is, for our coaching, we have our annual performance review. We've tried to slim it down. They really are focusing on, do they live our values? Do they get it, have the capacity to do it? And then a personal development plan, if will. And also, how do they define our goals for the year? But, when we go to quarterly coaching, we don't even take notes. We just meet with each team member, and there's really two basic concepts. The two questions are really, "How's it going? How can we help you?" Tim Spiker: I mean, super complex there, Andrew. No, I say that- Andrew Larson: It's simple. Tim Spiker: I say that jokingly. Andrew Larson: It's simple. Obviously, part of how are you doing gets into how are your [inaudible 00:21:27] for that quarter as well. But it really is, "How do we support you? How do we clear obstacles? How do we help you be successful?" That's what it's really about. Tim Spiker: When you think about simple and effective questions like, "How are things going, and how can we help?" great educations from Harvard and other institutions where you get your MBAs, there's not a lot of classes, I think, that are sitting down saying, "Okay, if you just ask these two questions every quarter and have a sincere conversation that's transparent about these two things, it can help you have a very effective organization." And yet that's what I'm hearing from you, and I have no problem believing that that contributes in a significant way. Tim Spiker: One of the things I want to come back to here, and you've mentioned it a number of times, but I want to come back to it because I find it, as you describe it, to be a very rare quality, which is you keep coming back to the values, the values, the values, the values, we use the values, we use them repeatedly. My experience with many organizations is that they have a process that they'll go through to either adopt or clarify their values. They'll write them all down, and then they'll put them in a drawer, and then they'll forget about them. They don't use them. Right here, over and over and over again in our conversation today is that Gustave A. Larson Company really, really uses their values every single day in a multitude of ways. A, am I hearing that correctly? And B, how did you get there because my observation is that's incredibly rare? Andrew Larson: We've probably been guilty historically, right? We've had our values that we took from my grandfather, Gus, from my father, Carl. They've been in every one of our branches. We've had a session historically to bring them out and to say, "Here are our values, and they're consistent with the past. They're awesome, and let's live them." But I think we were guilty of leaving it there, right? And really in the past six years since we've had EOS, we have recognized and realized that, yeah, those have been our values. But again, we didn't have all those right people throughout the organization that were living our values. Today it's very different. We are focused on customer experience. We're focused on creating that win-win relationship with the customer. And because of EOS and maybe learning the value of talking about things seven times versus three, and having now state of the company quarterly meetings, every opportunity we get, we talk about our values. Andrew Larson: We have seen the benefits. Before EOS, we may have had 10 different initiatives to do. We got them only all done half well. EOS has allowed us to really prioritize those to the top ones so we can focus on execution. I mention that because in EOS, we've got two pages of something we call the VTO, which is the vision traction organizer. But the simple point is it allows us to have our mission, our vision, our purpose, our 10-year target, our values, our goals, all on two pages that we share at every quarterly meeting, our quarterly state of the company meeting, we share in our newsletters. The simple point is every single person in the company knows where we're headed. Everyone knows that we're aligned that same direction. Andrew Larson: When we share that also with a new team member coming on and they see that we truly live our values and we have a common purpose and everyone's aligned, they're like, "I want to jump on board this train. Let's go." And it's been phenomenal in recruiting. I think it's been phenomenal in retention, but it really is living what we said we were going to in the first place with our values. Tim Spiker: As you talk about those benefits, and I appreciate the transparency around as we look back maybe we didn't implement, leverage the values as much as we could, are there any specifics that you would dig into and say, "Because we have improved living by our values very intentionally." Is there anything in particular that jumps out at you that you would say, "That is markedly different because we're doing this better now?" Andrew Larson: That's a good question. I think that for us under our value of results, we have been very focused and... Real quick, our three guiding principles there are to be self-motivated, right? It's got to come from within. You've got to be inspired from within. To be impactful and then to be accountable. And similarly, as I mentioned before, if we had 10 initiatives a decade ago, we were only getting them all half done well. Now we're getting our top three done that make the biggest impact in the business, executing on those, and driving results. It's a whole different world today. We're having record results, record profits. It's been a phenomenal experience, but it's because of our team members. That's what all comes back to. Andrew Larson: We have had an initiative to drive accountability internally called a 100% Responsibility, No Excuses. We've been searching to find ways to say how do we help everyone make sure that they're operating, we call it, in the red, to be positive and optimistic, to initiate things, to have a can-do positive attitude, to listen, to be constructive and collaborative? We've given everyone a red, black continuum in the company to help make sure they're living in the red and being focused on 100% responsibility. Andrew Larson: We came across the book Leadership and Self-Deception. I mention this because we were searching for how can we help our team members be more accountable. And going through our 100% Responsibility, No Excuses initiative I think was a little complex. Coming back to Leadership and Self-deception, it's really come back to be a little more of a simple elegant initiative, and that really has been when someone is thinking about themselves, that they need to have the self-awareness in that moment, which is very difficult though, but to simply change that narrative and say, "How can I help others on my team? How can I help a customer?" That simple flip allows that person to really drive accountability with themselves, with the organization. And it's a much more simple, elegant solution. So we're really very focused on how that helps us on the accountability side and really helps drive our results as well. And I think that's something that today has come about because of EOS, because of our curiosity for learning how we can be more accountable and how we can get better across the company. And that's driving results and performance today for us because of living our values. Tim Spiker: Well, I mean, it's really inspiring to hear that because it is such a struggle for so many leaders and so many organizations to actually use the values of the organization for decision-making. But you're talking about systems for reinforcement, systems that follow up the Larson values, that reinforce and enable them. And then when I ask you what's the difference now versus before, you mention little things like, "We were getting no initiatives done, or 10 initiatives half done previously. Now we're getting our three biggest initiatives done on a regular basis." And oh, by the way, the word record profits did not skip past me when you were talking there as well. "Important initiatives and ideas are getting completed, and we have record profits." That is a pretty good commercial, Andrew, for what it means to really live out your values. Andrew Larson: We think they're related. We're really pleased with how the values have really driven results for us. Tim Spiker: It's really exciting to hear. It's really educational to hear. It's really impressive to hear because of how rare it is in the marketplace. One way I think it might be good for us to begin to wrap up here is imagine you have new leaders, new potential leaders, new folks coming into the organization, and you see somebody that you would say, "This is a high potential person. This is a person that could do some great things here for a really long time." What are a message or two that would be important for you to share with them? Andrew Larson: When a new team member comes on like that, number one, we believe that all of them have tremendous potential. And so, to us, it really is developing a relationship with that person, making sure that they understand that we have their back. I think you do that, you build a relationship by creating trust with that person and being real with that person. We have to be vulnerable as a result. We've got to make sure that we are sharing our failures. No one's perfect. How do we continually try new things, which means we're going to make mistakes? So how do we continually make new mistakes? That vulnerability leads to that foundation of trust and that relationship. But obviously, as I mentioned earlier, with the new person, we're going to jump into talk about our values and going into scenarios, if you will, with our customers to say, "In this scenario, how would you respond? How do we create that win-win relationship?" Those are just a few examples, but we're really very focused on having everyone learn because we have a very technical industry, learning about what we're doing first before taking action. Tim Spiker: As folks may be listening here and they're like, "My goodness, I got to go be a part of what Gustave A. Larson is doing, how can people find you, find the organization, find out more? Andrew Larson: We can be reached at galarson.com. That's with an O. Happy to help people if they have questions for me too. They can reach me directly, [email protected]. Tim Spiker: Andrew, I really love of the stories that you're sharing. They are so valuable for all of us to hear and be reminded and really such an incredible story around the power of using great values in an organization. So, thank you so much for sharing a little bit about not only the company but your personal story. I should say, we mentioned your father's letter a couple of times here. With your permission, we're going to put a copy of that in the show notes as well so people can get a chance to see that original letter from 1970 that inspired all of these values. Really appreciate your time and what you're doing by example that we can all learn from. Thanks, Andrew. Andrew Larson: Tim, thank you for the time, appreciate it. Tim Spiker: There are so many things from my discussion with Andrew that I want to dig further into and talk about, but there's one in particular that really leaps out at me. I mentioned as we talked through it that Gustave A. Larson Company, really unlike almost any other company that I've had a chance to talk with somebody about or be a part of, their application of their values, using their values for day-to-day decision-making is really extraordinary. And you heard as Andrew talked about what is it getting for the company. "Well, we just happened to be completing our major initiatives and having record profits." That's what they're seeing. Tim Spiker: But there's a part of the story there that just really leaps out at me. I want to tell the story about Gustave A. Larson company by sharing a story about baseball. Imagine that you've got two baseball players. You've got Player One who is a capable player, very talented, but not yet fully what he's capable of being. And you've got Player Two who has the same physical gifts and physical capabilities but not quite as good of an attitude, not quite as hard of a worker. And so, let's say that Player One who is the harder worker with the more positive attitude, let's say that both that player and the second player, they hire a hitting coach to help them get better. The hitting coach is really knowledgeable, teaches baseball in an engaging way. He starts to do private lessons separately with each kid. Player One, the really, really hardworking, enthusiastic person goes away from those lessons and goes home and practices, practices, practices on his own. Tim Spiker: Player Two, who's physically as capable as Player One, doesn't have quite as much fire, quite as positive an attitude, not quite as hardworking, does some of the work at home, but not as much as Player One. And so, they repeat this over time, over the course of a year. You get to the end of that year and these two baseball players of equal talent, one of them is batting 450, which for those of you that aren't baseball fans, that's a really high average. So clearly I'm talking about youth baseball and not the major leagues here. But one of them is batting 450 and the other one's batting 300. Now, 300 is still a very good batting average, but for you math majors out here, four 50 is 50% higher, we can see that. Tim Spiker: If I say to anybody, "Listening to this, what's the difference between the two?" You're going to say the difference between the two is the attitude and the energy and the effort of Player One versus Player Two, and you would be right. And here's why I share this analogy related to what Andrew shared with us. The hitting coach in this story is equivalent to the application system. In this case for Gustave A. Larson Company, it's EOS. There's a great system that is at work that can help anybody who utilizes the system get better. But what ultimately was the driver of the 50% better result in our baseball story, it was the core of who that baseball player was. Tim Spiker: The reason I shared that with regard to Gustave A. Larson Company is EOS is an incredibly effective tool that so many people swear by. But one of the things that I heard that makes Gustave A. Larson Company so unique and that is helping them do things like "fulfilling our three major initiatives and recording record profits" is they are the equivalent of that first baseball player. When you look at their values, when you look at learning, attitude, results, service, collaboration, integrity, and when you hear Andrew talk about what it looks like when they fully apply being curious, what it looks like to be humble in what they're doing. And oh, by the way, those two ideas are not just important cultural ideas, they're very critical to effective leadership. Tim Spiker: So talking just a little bit more about curious and humble, it's really in interesting to note that curious and humble, that's about who people are. In the midst of developing their culture, I think one of the things that's happening there for Andrew and for the company is that they're not only creating an incredible culture but they're developing leaders as well. Because three quarters of our effectiveness as leaders comes from who we are, and they're investing heavily in perpetuating these character qualities of being humble and being curious. And you heard through the interview, you heard how that actually ends up manifesting in results and what that looks like and ultimately how that gets initiatives done and creates profits and retention and all the positive things that we want in organizations. Tim Spiker: So, I think it's really interesting to note where humble and where curious live in the continuum of organizational life. They live in who the individual is. They live in the who of leadership. And so, in the midst of building the culture of Gustave A. Larson, you also hear somebody that through that culture is developing the qualities that are part and parcel to really effective leadership. And so, then they put a system like EOS on top of it, and now this incredible accelerant happens, and it affects their company more significantly than it would other companies who don't show up with values that are as high quality as what they have, or with values that aren't as connected to exceptional leadership as what Gustave A. Larson has. That is my biggest takeaway as we got a chance to visit with Andrew Larson. Tim Spiker: Is your organization actually living out its values? I'm Tim Spiker, reminding you to be worth following and to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you've heard something valuable today, we'd love for you to share our podcast with a colleague and, if you're up for it, give us a five-star rating. Thanks for listening.