This episode is the story of how Kristen Hadeed, author of Permission to Screw Up, went from being an almost comically inept leader to a sought after CEO who teaches others how to lead. Kristen is the founder of Student Maid. A cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive and empowered. Even while they’re scrubbing toilets and mopping floors.
In this episode, Kristen talks about how she got it wrong almost as often as she got it right. Her willingness to admit and learn from her mistakes actually helped her team and gave them the chance to learn from their own screw-ups too.
Kristen dismisses the idea that leaders in organizations should try to be perfect. Instead, she encourages people of all ages to go for it and learn to lead by acting rather than waiting or thinking. If you’ve ever wondered, what would happen to you if you actually embrace your failure? How would that affect you as the leader or an employee? By the end of this episode, you’ll know.
Get Kristen’s new book Permission to Screw Up on Amazon.
Find out more at KristenHadeed.com.
Kristen Hadeed: I was 19, so this was 11 years ago, when I started my company and my first major contract that I got, it’s a cleaning company, so I got this big cleaning contract to clean hundreds of empty apartments.
I think we had 800-something apartments to clean, and we had 21 days to do the work. I know nothing about business, I don’t know anything about leadership. I was just a lost college student.
I started this company really just to save money.
I thought I was moving to New York to be an investment banker. So this was not in my mind, this was not my career. I didn’t really take it seriously. I hired 60 students and there was no – I mean, the selection process was like, if you had a pulse, you were hired for the job.
A disaster from the beginning. We get to this complex, and I don’t know what my role is as leader. I give everyone their assignments, and I decide to sit in this air-conditioned clubhouse, just kind of like the office in the apartment complex, and I’m sitting there for eight hours.
My feet are propped up, I’m on social media, I’m ordering lunch and I remember thinking to myself, this is easy.
Maybe I should not go to Wall Street and be an entrepreneur. This is so easy.
This went on for a couple of days, and the work as you could probably imagine was awful, these are empty, filthy college apartments, it’s so hot outside, these people have a leader that does not seem to care about them at all. I didn’t even know their names.
I think it was the third day, 45 of them walked into that clubhouse where I was sitting, completely unannounced, and they quit.
Stepping out of the Clubhouse
Charlie Hoehn: They unionized really fast.
Kristen Hadeed: Yeah they did and I don’t know what the other 15 were doing, they didn’t get the memo, but the 45 people, I call them The 45, they walked in, they quit.
It was so awkward and uncomfortable. I was eating lunch and they walked in and no one was making eye contact with me. I was saying, “Hey guys, how’s it going?” No one acknowledged me.
I could hear them whispering. I heard someone say, “Do it.”
And then they got a little closer to me and one person stood forward and she did not look at me and she looked at the floor and she just said, we quit.
Then they turned around and they walked out.
That was it, I was in shock.
Charlie Hoehn: That’s all she said?
Kristen Hadeed: Yeah, “We quit,” that’s it. I couldn’t even process what had happened, you know? First of all, why? What happened?
I didn’t realize then that it was because I was just a really bad leader.
Yeah, they quit.
That moment was really the moment that changed the whole trajectory of my life. I got those people back. I had to. We had so many apartments to clean, there was no way we could do it with 15 people. I went in and I found the 15 people who hadn’t quit, told them what happened, asked if they had any ideas.
They agreed to help me because I think it sounded more fun than cleaning, not because they really wanted to help me.
I said, “How can we get them back?” One had this idea to call an emergency meeting at my house that night and promise everyone an early paycheck if they showed up.
These were college students, so everyone showed up. They needed a paycheck, and I apologized. I owned up to the fact that I had never done this before, that this was my first time really being a leader, that I needed everyone.
I think they saw me as a human and not as this distant person that thought she was better than everyone. They came back.
Learning to Lead
Charlie Hoehn: Why did they quit? What had you done that really irked all of them to form a group and quit?
Kristen Hadeed: I remember that night, no one really had a specific reason. But I would imagine that you’re cleaning dirty toilets, you’re cleaning moldy refrigerators, and you know, there’s roaches. I mean, it’s awful, and then you’re like, “Well, does anyone even care about me?”
I mean, I didn’t know to give them a water break, a lunch break. They were making just above minimum wage because that’s all I could afford. So I’m sure all it took was a couple of people saying, “This is crazy, let’s get out of here,” and then next thing you know, there’s 45 of them.
I get them back and from that point forward, I never went back in the clubhouse. I learned their names. We really became friends and we became, I would say, even more like a family.
For a couple of weeks, we were together all hours of the day and night cleaning these apartments together.
I was there with them.
I was in the weeds helping them, and what I realized now is that that was the summer that I became obsessed with leadership and was learning how to be a better leader and with learning how to build a company where people really wanted to be. Even though the work we were doing was probably the least glamorous work you could ever ask anyone to do.
Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely. Where is your company today? It’s on its birthday, right?
Kristen Hadeed: Yeah, today’s our birthday. We’ve been incorporated for nine years. Student Maid is the name of the company, we are in Gainesville Florida, and we still employ primarily students. We have people in our company of course who are not students but who fit our culture and, you know, that’s what we look for.
But everything that we do is about equipping our people with the skills that they need to be successful in life. Yes, they clean houses, but they’re taking classes that we teach on things like how to find your strengths and really find environments later on where you can use them, how to build relationships that are meaningful and that aren’t from behind a text message or an email.
How to listen, how to have empathy and compassion, and why these things are so important.
Our goal is that they’ll graduate, they’ll move on, and one day they’ll look back and say, “Working at Student Maid was what helped me become a leader.”
Kristen Hadeed and Simon Sinek
Charlie Hoehn: I want to talk about you have a forward from the well-known Simon Sinek. How’d you get connected with him? He’s kind of the thought leader of leadership right now.
Kristen Hadeed: Yeah, I met Simon right after I graduated college. Start with Why had just come out, his first book I believe, and he was actually coming to speak for our local chamber. There was an award that the chamber gave that year for female owned business, and Student Maid just so happen to win the award that year.
To get the community excited about Simon’s upcoming visit, he announced the winner over Skype and everyone was excited that he was coming. So he announced Student Maid and then later looked up the company and everything and he was really fascinated.
He was actually in a process of writing Leaders Eat Last.
When he came to Gainesville, we met up and we just formed this great friendship and I think we both realized early on we had the same belief that people should always be the priority in a company and yeah, we’re great friends today.
We work together a lot today and he’s actually – he’s the reason that the book even happened in the first place.
Reader Takeaways –
Charlie Hoehn: What is the main story or big idea you really want people to take away from Permission to Screw Up? What do you want people to remember a year from now?
Kristen Hadeed: Well, I think to answer that, I have to tell you a little bit about how the book came to be. I always assumed it would be about Student Maid and my journey as a leader but never really was serious about it.
A few years ago, Simon invited me to this conference. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know who was going to be there. I arrive and he tells me that I’m a speaker, and I was kind of mad. “Jeez, way to put some pressure on me here,” but the people on the audience were people that I would never be in the same room with.
I mean, I thought that first I was there to clean everybody’s cabin, you know?
I didn’t think I was really supposed to be in a room with these people.
But anyway, my publisher was there in the audience, so Simon asked me to talk about millennials and the challenges that we face and how businesses can help us realize our potential. So that’s what I talked about.
My publisher afterwards said, “I want you to write a book,” and we just shook on it and then came to New York. We signed the contract and everything. I didn’t go about it the traditional way where I had a proposal and was very clear on what it was I wanted to write about.
I began by writing about millennials, and then when I realized at the end was, everything I was saying is didn’t apply only to millennials, it applied to all human beings. So that direction just did not feel right.
My wonderful publisher said, “Okay, throw it away. Let’s start again,” and then I wrote about success and read about all the lessons we’ve learned at Student Maid, all the lessons I learned as a leader.
It didn’t feel right. I actually was at dinner with Simon and I asked him, I said, “How do you know when you’re writing the right book?” He said that in his experience, the right book is the one that’s really hard to write.
I thought about that and I thought, “Well this is not hard to write. What would make it hard?”
That’s when I had this lightbulb moment. I talk about all the lessons I learned but not how I learned them. I talk about yeah, we have to make people feel valued, but I didn’t talk about how I only learned that because 45 people quit on me. Or I learned to empower people by micromanaging people. I learned to build relationships when not having those relationships lost me people as well.
I had to peel it back and figure out, “How do I learn this?”
It was uncomfortable, the things I wrote in this book.
I was embarrassed. The world’s going to know about this. I think the end message here is that we don’t talk about this enough—and we have to. Because it’s the only way we make leadership attainable. If we pretend like it’s so easy, then there are people who are looking at leaders around them and they’re saying, “I’m not cut out for that.”
What I want people to do as soon as they finish the book a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, is to talk about the lessons you learned and how you learned them. Make people around you feel like they’re normal, because no one has all the answers.
No one does it right the first time, and I think we have to get more comfortable talking about that.
Writing with Vulnerability
Charlie Hoehn: Apart from the story about the 45 people quitting, what other stories fall into that category of raw vulnerability in the book?
Kristen Hadeed: I think as I was writing the book, there were two big things that were happening in my company. One is, we had to make a painful decision to close a second branch of Student Maid. It was a total failure, and it was my fault because I did not put my all into it.
I didn’t give it what I gave our location in Gainesville. So I wrote about that, and I wrote about how it feels to have to walk into a room to people who love their jobs and tell them they don’t have a job anymore.
That was really hard, because it was happening then.
The 45, that happened a long time ago. It’s easy for me to write about because those feelings aren’t the same. But when you’re actually going through something and you’re writing about it, it’s raw and it’s hard.
And there was someone else in my company who had essentially been my right hand person for eight years, nine years. And over time, I realized we had very different views on culture, on leadership, on the way that this company, the direction we wanted to take in the future. So we decided to part ways, and I was going through that too. I wrote about that, and it was hard because it was happening in the moment.
So I was a little skeptical where I thought, “Should I write about this stuff or should I just write about the stuff that happened in the past?” But I decided to write about the muck that I was currently going through.
Charlie Hoehn: So how were you able to balance like, “Okay am I just kind of venting and processing this,” or “Is this really good material?” Was your publisher kind of in your corner there and letting you know what was good and what was bad?
Kristen Hadeed: I have a wonderful team. One person who was on my Student Maid team who is an amazing writer, we hired two additional people to help us fantastic. I mean just the best team you could ask for.
They would read everything I wrote and the things that wouldn’t have an impact on the reader at all were cut and maybe there was still some stuff in the book that doesn’t have an impact on the reader.
But I think with every story, we looked at it as what does the reader take away from this? I think what is different about the book is every story that I wrote about is something that I think everyone can relate to because we all had to walk away from a relationship.
We’ve all gone somewhere without our heart being fully there and it’s never worked out and we’ve all had that failure. Also I try to really think about it through the lens of, “What is something that’s universal that everyone no matter what journey you’re on, no matter what level of leadership, you’ll get something out of this.”
Learn Your People
Charlie Hoehn: What story are you most proud of in the book?
Kristen Hadeed: So my favorite chapter in the book is chapter five, and it is all about relationships.
It’s called Upside Down and Inside Out because it opens the chapter opens with me doing a keg stand at my graduation party, and I am circled by my employees. So definitely not leadership.
It’s how I went from realizing that you have these relationships that you think are meaningful but really they’re superficial. And the best kinds of relationships are ones where you’re vulnerable and you know the person deeply and you know what experiences they’ve had in their lives.
It gives context at how they behave and what drives them.
So I realize that’s what I have to have here. I have to know that everyone in my company deeply. My mom works with me, and sometimes it is pretty hard, but I thought I knew her. Once I really became intentional about building relationships with the people on my team, I realized I didn’t know her at all. I wrote about what I learned.
Something that my mom and I would argue about all the time is money. It started in high school when I got my license. She would tell me exactly where to gas up my car, and I remember fighting and saying, “No, by the time I drive all the way over there I would burn the savings that I would have had.” She would hold up the grocery line for a coupon that would save us a penny, and I would make fun of her.
I was a bratty teenager. I would make fun of her. I never understood it because my parents did well. We were not wealthy by any means, but we had our needs met. In this exercise I did once with my company, I asked people to share a moment in their life that really defines who they are, a moment that they haven’t really shared with many people. My mom told this story about how her – she said she had to give her paychecks to her parents, that’s how poor they were, and I never knew that.
She talked about how one time, it was her first vacation. She was 14 years old and my grandpa said, “You can pick the restaurant that we can go to for dinner,” and this was a big deal because they didn’t go out to eat.
My mom picks this place that advertises hot food and clean bathrooms. It’s a total scam, nothing is as promised. She was devastated because she knew how hard they worked for that money.
So my grandpa said, “Why don’t you write the CEO and see if you can get a refund?”
And she did, and she got one. The reason it matters to me is because, one, I know now why my mom had the coupons and told me to gas up. She had to be frugal—her life depended on that.
I felt so guilty because I never knew that about her.
Something I never understood about her is every time someone’s ripped off, a different side of her comes out—I am afraid she’s going to stab someone. I mean it’s like if somebody doesn’t pay the invoice or if an apartment complex tries to jiff a student by not giving the security deposit back, I mean a different side of her comes out.
And now I realize why that is. So it just helped me understand her more. This person I lived with her for 18 years. I thought I knew her really well, but clearly I didn’t. So what did I not know about the other people on my team?
Writing Permission to Screw Up
Charlie Hoehn: That is powerful. And what else did you learn about either your team or yourself during the process of this book?
Kristen Hadeed: I think the book helped me find clarity on where we needed to go as a company and what we are put on this earth to do. I think there is a lot of pressure when you have a business. People around you are saying grow-grow-grow-scale-scale-scale, and that’s why we opened our second location. I was sort of torn.
Do we open another one even if that one failed? To be franchised? Because that is what everyone is saying I needed to do.
And writing this book, I realized that what it is I love about my job, what it is that I love about this company, what I know my team loves about being a part of this, is we want to help people realize their potential. We want to do that by going into other companies and teaching them how to emulate the kind of culture that Student Maid has. So it just gave us clarity. I think it reminded us of why we’re here and what this is really all about.
Growing up with Student Maid
Charlie Hoehn: What kind of transformation have you seen on the Student Maid team?
Kristen Hadeed: Well we hire primarily students. So we hire as young as high school. Most of our team members are college students, but many come to us without any prior work experience. I think we’re all sick of talking about millennials but I think in any company, in any team, you have to figure out how do I help all these people work together in sync?
It doesn’t matter what generation they are a part of, it is the same challenge no matter where you go. But I think this generation for sure, in Gen Z—because we employ Gen Z, the generation that comes after millennials—is totally shaped by technology of course.
Our first instinct is to Google the question we have before looking for assistance elsewhere.
So I realized earlier on, we have a lot of work to do. We have to teach people how to be confident in their thinking, kind of the independent thinkers, how to trust their own abilities.
I mean we are seeing kids now in elementary school where you don’t know the answer to your homework, you could just take a picture and it texts you back the answer and it shows all the work and you can just copy it.
It has a huge impact on when you get into the workplace. Now you are given this project and you’re like, “What do I do? Where do I go? I can’t Google this.”
I couldn’t Google what do you when 45 people quit on you?
There is no answer in Google for that. We do a lot of work on people, a lot of autonomy, which means we give them room to screw up. We actually force them to screw up, because that’s when you learn.
And you also learn, by getting through a failure, you learn that you are capable, that you can do it and that next time you can do it again. So we work a lot on that piece and then also on the relationship piece.
An interesting thing about Student Maid is we don’t text. Everything that we do is face to face, on the phone. Anything meaningful has to be a face to face conversation because texting is not the way to have that kind of communication. It is not the way to build a real relationship.
People come in and can’t make eye contact in an interview or don’t really know how to answer the questions, or they call and they say, “Hey I am on the job and I don’t know how to handle this.” But then when they leave, they are confident.
They can walk into a room and introduce themselves. They don’t need to ask for permission to make a decision. They just do it and ask for forgiveness later, so there is definitely a big transformation there.
Learning to Screw Up
Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. What transformations or feedback have you seen from readers of your book?
Kristen Hadeed: Well the biggest piece of feedback, people write in and say, “Thank you. I feel less alone. I thought I was the only one, and I thought I was the only one having these feelings or these failures.”
It just shows that it is something we don’t talk about enough, and it makes sense. In leadership, we are trained to make people feel safe. We are trained that you have to know what you’re doing and appear to be successful in order for people to trust you and want to follow you. And that vulnerability is not strength—that vulnerability is a weakness.
But really, I think vulnerability is a strength.
When you can look at your team and say, “You know what? I don’t know how to solve this, and I don’t know the direction we should take.” Number one, you are inviting them to be a part of that and to help you, but number two, you are becoming human.
No one trusts anyone who pretends to be perfect all the time because we know that you are not.
So why is vulnerability seen as such a bad thing? To me, it’s courage. It is the thing that makes you a leader that people want to follow.
A Challenge from Kristen Hadeed
Charlie Hoehn: Kristen can you give our listeners a challenge? Maybe what’s one thing they can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact?
Kristen Hadeed: I will talk about my favorite practical piece of the book. It is about the FBI. And the FBI is a way that you can give critical feedback if you need to inspire someone to change your behavior or meaningful recognition if you want to inspire someone to keep doing something that they are doing great. My failure was, for a long time, I have avoided those difficult conversations.
I over praise people, so my recognition was not meaningful.
But I learned about the FBI from a company that I love, Barry-Wemiller, they are an engineering company. They know that I share this with everyone. Each letter stands for something. It’s a sentence.
So the ‘F’ is feeling, the ‘B’ is behavior, and ‘I’ is impact. And if you communicate all three things in that order, the idea is you can inspire behavior. So if someone was late, you could say something like, “I felt disappointed that you were 30 minutes late to the meeting this morning.”
And the impact of that is now, “I’m not sure if I can rely on you. Can you help me understand how this happened?”
It is just a very productive way to give feedback because the person can’t argue with how you feel and they didn’t intend that impact most likely.
So now they are inspired to change it.
On the flip side, recognition, “I felt proud when you spoke out in the meeting this morning and shared your opinion,” and the impact of that is: “I am not sure you’ve noticed, but everyone shared after you did, because you set the way. So thank you.”
And now that person is probably speaking up again the next time they have an opinion.
So my challenge is give one FBI to someone in your life whether at work or your personal life, and preferably the critical FBI. That is the one that really helps people.
Charlie Hoehn: I love that. That is so simple and easy to remember. So, “I felt” fill in the blank “because of your” whatever their behavior is and “the impact of that is” now whatever has changed. That’s great. So Kristen how could our listeners get in touch with you, follow you on your journey, that sort of thing?
Kristen Hadeed: My website is kristenhadeed.com, all my social media is my name, Kristen Hadeed, and then if you are interested in Student Maid, you can check us out on studentmaid.com.
Get Kristen’s new book Permission to Screw Up on Amazon.
Find out more at KristenHadeed.com.
Listen to more authors on young leadership:
Millennial Reboot: Kate Athmer and Rob Johnson
The Leadership Manifesto: Bill Hicks
The post Permission to Screw Up: Kristen Hadeed appeared first on Author Hour.
