https://youtu.be/REO1Q2Bkiqs
Dave Turano is the President of JCE Consulting, helping organizations improve leadership, communication, and sales, and the host of Cut Through the Noise Podcast. We talk about the habits of highly successful businesses, the overlooked benefits of daily standup meetings, and why great leaders don’t tolerate mediocrity.
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Build Trust with Dave Turano
Our guest is Dave Turano, the president of JCE Consulting, providing coaching and training services to organizations that want to improve effectiveness in leadership, communication, and sales. Dave is the host of the Cut Through the Noise podcast, where he peeks behind headlines and current events. So Dave, welcome to the show.
Steve, thanks for having me. You've got the tables turned on me this week.
That's right. I visited your show a few weeks ago, and now it's my chance to ask you some penetrating questions and find out about your thought about management blueprints and generally, you know, helping leaderships and helping teams get much healthier. So let's start with your journey. So what's been your entrepreneurial journey and what made you decide to go on your own and how's it going?
Well, it's going well. That's a good question to get started. It's going well. It's been eight years this fall. I'll be out on my own. I started JCE Consulting, which is JCE stands for the names of my kids, Jack, Chris, and Emma. And the journey, I wish I could say I had a master plan, Steve. I didn't. I can just say that over the course of my career, as the years went by, I started to become antsy, you know, and I got to the point in my life and within the jobs that I had where I just wanted to do things my own way.
I got tired of kind of listening to other people. And so finally, and it was getting worse and worse and worse to the point where I was almost kind of unemployable. I just wanted to do things my own way. I had no choice but to just finally say, put up or shut up and do it. And so that's what I did. And in 2013, I took the plunge and I'm still here. So it's been a great ride.
That's awesome. Well, you know, I hear this unemployable thing often I certainly feel like that once you taste the freedom of entrepreneurship, however challenging it is often You don't want to go back, right?
Never. I get the chance to talk to so many really really good people smart people who have great jobs And a lot of them, you know, a lot of them are very happy in their jobs, but there are a good percentage of them that aren't. And they're completely, for lack of a better phrase, they're trapped by the paycheck, or they're imprisoned by the idea that they have to report or work for somebody else. And it's hard to get people to consider that being independent is actually liberating. And it's not as scary as it seems before you do it. So I'm sure you probably had those same feelings before you got started too.
I actually, I could, yeah, absolutely. So I felt totally trapped and, you know, I tried to rationalize this idea of the intrapreneurship that it's a thing, that it's possible to be entrepreneurial inside an organization until I got the rug pulled out from under me one day and I realized that I just had a job and I had the team, you know, there was a team, there was kind of a business that we were building, but it I could just be pushed out and someone else took over from me.
So definitely, definitely relate to that. So let's talk a little bit about how you built JC Consulting and my favorite topic, management blueprints. So any management blueprints such as e-myth, scaling up, great game of business, have you used any such blueprints or any frameworks or was there a business, Brook, that particularly inspired you and kind of implemented some of the concepts? Please talk to me about that.
Well, you're talking to somebody who really didn't do any reading through high school. So I would do anything not to read a book as a kid. I probably read four books in high school and then everything else was, I don't know if they still exist, but Cliff Notes. So they were like shorthanded books on, rather than read the book, you just read this little short book. But then about, I'd say 18 years ago, 17, 18 years ago, I had a boss who started buying books for me because she thought I was smart and she thought, oh Dave would like this book or this book reminded me of Dave and she would visit me and bring me books and thinking that she was doing like good and all I thought was oh my I got to read this thing now.
Now next time she comes back I'm going to have to tell her what the book was about. But that actually got me into an unbelievable pattern of starting to read. And then over the last 18, 20 years, I've just become relentless. And there's so many books that I could point to and say, that was the best book I read, or this was the best book I read. Most of what I gravitate to is focused on business, communication, leadership, sales.
Everything that I talk about on a regular basis is what I typically read, but depending on the subject, like a lot of the stuff, like for example, like a book that always has stood out to me is Tribal Leadership. I love that book. I don't want to get into all the details of the book, but from a leadership perspective, I always, that book always resonated with me. A flip side to that could be Delivering Happiness. I enjoyed that Zappos book. I read that a number of years ago. And then there's all the traditional books, the Jim Collins stuff and Good to Great and all that. But that to me, although valuable, they felt a little bit more mechanical.
As far as just other books I've read, just anything to do with building positive habits, like The Power of Habit or Grit or The Slight Edge are books that I've just thoroughly enjoyed over the years. And I've got piles of books here, piles of books there, and then downstairs. But as far as a blueprint goes, I have read so many things that it's just a hodgepodge of all that, and then I've eventually just found my own way of doing things. Candidly, my way has evolved over the years. So whatever I created last year has evolved this year. It's never a standard, it's just something that I'm constantly adjusting and tweaking. So I don't know if that answered your question, but that's what came to mind when you asked it.
But I can always ask a second one, right? The follow-up question. So you talk about, two things that stood out for me from what you mentioned here or kind of rattled off. One is this idea of habits, that you can create habits and essentially it becomes a mechanism for you to run your business or to basically run yourself. Can you, can you mention a couple of ones that have really worked for you?
Just in general in life or in business?
Well, in business.
In business. Anything, anything can be a habit. But, say for example, if you're a manager, you're managing a team, a habit of steady communication with your people would be something that I would highly recommend. A lot of companies inside of organizations, there is a disconnect. It's not unusual to have a disconnect between employee and manager or the management team. And oftentimes that's because the steady communication is broken.
So the habit of a one-to-one meeting, you know, once a week or twice a month, the habit of a standing team meeting once a day, even for 10 minutes, the habit of a group meeting that's more strategic on a monthly basis would be something that I would recommend but if I were coaching, say, a salesperson, a habit of using your phone to connect with somebody versus the habit of hiding behind a text, for example, or a blanketed email would be examples of things that I would highly encourage.
Anything that opens up, I mean, I'm a communication coach. I focus on managers and leaders and salespeople, and I help resolve conflicts between departments. The habits that I always encourage are those that are embedded in communication. What are we doing to open the lines? And when those things aren't happening, when the communication lines aren't open, is when other problems start to result. So that's where I would pick to go first.
In business, any action can become a habit. Steady communication, like weekly one-to-one meetings or daily stand-ups, bridges the common disconnect between employees and management.Share on X
So, I have a specific question on this and then a broader one. So the specific one is you mentioned the stand-up meeting. What do you see as the main benefit of having a daily stand-up meeting?
If you're going to have a daily stand-up meeting, it's really about what are we doing today? What do we need to get done today? If you and I were partners, for example, and I would say on the delivery side of the company, and you were say on the sales side of the company, you and I getting together at the beginning of each day to talk about what's on my plate, what's on your plate, How are we gonna communicate? How are we gonna get this done between now and five o'clock or tomorrow morning, allows us to trust that I've got it, I know what I need to do, you know what you need to do, we know what we need from each other.
And it just allows for a little bit of peace of mind and it gives us the chance to have a focus each day versus letting the day happen to us. So, you know, in every environment is that necessary? I don't know, but most of the time in a selling environment, I would say it's never gonna hurt.
Okay, so that's the stand up. So stand up is all about what should we do today or how do we get something done today? And what about the broader question would be what kind of other meetings are there that you would recommend for companies to embrace other than the standup, the daily standup?
Well, like I said earlier, the thing that I would absolutely do is I would have some form of a one-to-one with your staff. If you're managing a group of people, you owe it to them to spend one-to-one time with them.
