Unlocking Why Teams Stay Stuck With Chris Hallberg

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Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Cold Start & Intro
00:03:43 – Why Goals Aren’t the Problem
00:06:00 – The Real Root of Accountability Issues
00:06:30 – Trust, Conflict, and the Five Dysfunctions
00:12:46 – Who’s Hijacking Your Bus
00:21:17 – The Cost of Keeping the Wrong People
00:27:14 – Where Systems Help and Where Leaders Hide
00:31:13 – Accountability Isn’t What You Think It Is
00:32:24 – Quick Rounds: Meetings, Mistakes, and Military Lessons
00:35:44 – Business Sergeant and Placing Veterans

Chris Hallberg (00:02.00)
If we solve this one problem, we can solve these 14 sub-problems instead of trying to solve 10 of the 14 sub-problems without going to the root.

Like great humans are never on sale. You cannot get a unicorn for the price of a donkey. Doesn’t work like that.

Skot Waldron (00:25.00)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

Have you ever wondered how we can execute better? How do we execute better to make sure we’re getting the most profit out of our companies and the most productivity out of our people? And yeah, all this stuff. That’s kind of what business is about. That’s kind of what we do on the surface. And some of us have purpose behind that, which is a big deal. It’s a huge deal, in fact, everybody.

My guest today, Chris Hallberg, is going to be on to talk a little bit about, you know, this whole productivity thing, the operations and the systems and the things that we need to do to make sure we’re running well. And he’s a fun interviewer, interviewee, and does his job really well. And he’s been doing it for a while. He has a pretty inspirational gig that he’s working on that is very fun, very impactful, I think, for our veteran community. He talks about that at the end here.

But Chris Hallberg himself is a military veteran. He’s an entrepreneur and leadership coach known as “The Business Sergeant.” He is the founder of GoExpand, which has helped over 100 leadership teams improve execution, accountability, culture, and growth. Chris previously built and exited multiple companies, including an energy-efficiency business sold during the Great Recession at an 8× multiple.

He’s a former or actually a current EOS implementer and recognized by Inc. Magazine as a Top-10 Global Leadership & Management Expert. He now helps businesses scale through disciplined leadership, operational clarity, and high-performance team development.

Are y’all ready to listen to Chris? Because here we come.

Welcome to the show, Chris. It’s good to see you, man.

Chris Hallberg (03:20.00)
Awesome to be here, Skot. Thank you for having me on your program.

Skot Waldron (03:24.00)
Well, tell me first of all, here’s what I want to open with. Okay. I want to open with this idea that most companies, and I had an interesting guest on my show a little while ago talking about goals and things like that. But you know, most companies don’t fail because they lack goals. Okay.

I don’t know of many companies that are like, yeah, we just didn’t have enough goals, and so we failed. Like we filed for bankruptcy. We didn’t have enough goals. You know, I haven’t heard anybody really say that before. They fail somewhere between the meeting that they have and the execution. In your eyes, so what actually breaks in organizations that is the real problem?

Chris Hallberg (04:13.00)
Yeah, what I’m going to quote Jim Collins from his masterpiece, Good to Great, which is I don’t know, twenty some years old at this point.

Most companies do not die from starvation. Not having enough things to eat, they die from indigestion by trying to eat too many things at once. So, when everything’s important, nothing’s important, right? So, when you leave that meeting with a 47 point 47 goals that we’re going to crush this year, that the failure happens when you allow 47 things to go on your dry erase board. The three to seven things that we’re going to crush, that’s realistic in in a year’s time, right there.

So, I think being realistic and also being committed and not getting distracted with shiny stuff. Back to Mr. Collins or Mr. Wickman or any of these other, you know, consulting greats out there. You got to keep things simple. Simple is scalable, complex, like there is a old saying, the road to business failure is paved with squirrels that couldn’t decide. So, you got to run quickly past the road, not hang out in the middle where all the trucks and fast cars are.

Skot Waldron (05:25.00)
I know. And I sit there and wonder sometimes when I see that squirrel, it’s like, what are you doing? Man, like, get out of the way. And I think that a lot of you know, we look at a lot of people that way too sometimes. So, I think that’s it.

Well, I mean, you’ve worked with, you know, hundreds of leadership teams. And I mean, what’s the common thing that leaders think is the problem. So, we thought you found them. I asked you what’s the problem. But what do you think leaders think is the problem, but really actually isn’t the problem.

Chris Hallberg (06:00.00)
Yeah, they think the problem is accountability. Hey Chris, we’re here to do “The Business Sergeant”, you work with all these great brands, you come in there with the military focus. There’s no yelling or push-ups, but there’s some very direct, let’s get fired up and execute as a well-oiled machine. That’s what people hire me for. And they’re like, yeah, my people aren’t accountable. I’m like, well, how’s the trust? Because if you can’t be vulnerable and we can’t even speak the truth, we have to like do the friendly version or the safer office version.

Then we can’t really get into healthy conflict. Now I’m talking about Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, right? You got to be vulnerable, got to trust that I can say what I need to say. You got to trust that you’re doing your job, you got to trust that I’m doing my job. We don’t have trust, then you can’t get to the second one, which is conflict, as in healthy conflict, not f you, no f you, no f you more. Unhealthy conflict. We see that sometimes, right? A war of egos, a meeting of no minds just pure vanity, ego, narcissism, all the things in business that aren’t additive.

But when you can have healthy conflict and say, you know, Skot, I love you, man, but I think you got a blind spot here. Would you be open to some criticism on your plan? I want this to be successful, or we need to work on this problem. Not your idea is bad. It’s like as a team, we need some clarity on this. Help me out. So, we can have healthy conflict. If you can have healthy conflict and you go to the next run of the ladder which is commitment and people say they’re committed but if they’re not able to have conflict they’re just like yeah whatever sounds good yeah not what I would do but it’s work they pay me so I’m just going to pretend to get along or I’m secretly hope you fail because the boss picked your idea not my idea I’m not committed to that idea so when it fails I’ll just be like I told you so.

So, once we’re like truly committed the fourth step of the pyramid, second from last is accountability. That’s what people bring me in for. But if there’s no trust, we can’t have healthy conflict and people aren’t really committed. So, I’m getting to answer your question. Commitment is what I have them. Commit to a sizable bunch of goals.

And the last thing on the triangle is the results. Everybody hires me because the results aren’t there or they feel like we’re not accountable to this 47-point plan that no one can execute and we’re upset about that. And I come in and be like, what’s the three to seven things that are like if these were true, these other things could be? Meaning this is a core root causation thing. If we solve this one problem, we can solve these 14 sub-problems instead of trying to solve 10 of the 14 sub-problems without going to the root.

So, I like to think about the Fire Triangle. I remember this from my school years, right? Heat, oxygen, and fuel. If you remove any one of those three things, no more fire, no fuego, gone. So, business issues and opportunities all have those three elements. And you can add them or you can remove them. But if you think about it, people want accountability, but really it’s about simplicity and something that’s simple, that we can all understand, then we commit to that. So much easier to hold somebody accountable when they’ve made an agreement on a specific goal or vision to be a, if you’re like, here’s the ocean, boil it. There’s going to be some disappointment. But if I asked you to grab 5 gallons out of the ocean and get that rolling, I think we could make that happen.

So, I think you people got to be realistic and they got to simplify it. And then they have to quite frankly have people opt into that vision 100% or opt out. Go work somewhere else. It’s when a leader tries to accommodate the half a degree here, the 4 degrees there. We add up all those and we’re no longer at zero or three sixty. We’re now at 32 degrees and we’re not even engaging the correct target.

So, the world has become overly inclusive, right? Participation trophies, your mom said you’re the best. What do you mean I’m not? All this stuff that’s going on in the world and my military background, you know, the sergeant might say, “hey, excuse me, Colonel, I just need some clarity on this thing. Oh, thanks for that sergeant. Yeah, that’s a good point.” Not, “hey, Colonel, like, I disagree. We’re not doing this. This doesn’t meet my standard.” Like the sergeant doesn’t tell the colonel what we’re doing. The colonel says “this is what we’re doing. Sergeant, do you have any exceptions? Do you have anything you want to add?”

So that the plan has to come from the leadership team, but it needs to be vetted by the management team because the management team spends more time with the troops than the leadership team does. So, a second bonus answer is we got to plug in that extension core between the leadership team, a management team, and the greater team.

Skot Waldron (10:47.00)
There’s a lot of discussion about the well, just the phrase, and this is something I’ll push leaders a lot on. Is how else can I support you? How else can I support you? How else can I support you? Like that phrase, right? Because we want to make sure our people know that we’re there for them. We’re there to support them. We’re there to get them. And that’s, I think they’re trying to build that trust level of, hey, you can come to me. I’m open-door policy and all these things that we throw out there.

And I often want to want them to push the next level of, okay, how can I support you? But how can I also challenge you? And where do you want to be challenged? How do you like to be challenged? And understanding that aspect of things really can kind of help push people a little bit like how they like to be pushed and understanding that aspect of things. Cause when we just lean on the one side, we create a lot of entitlement or we start trying to overprotect or do things that create the unhealthy culture that perpetuates in and in a lot of worlds, which then again erodes the trust factor. It erodes that trust factor to where we aren’t able to build onto the other things as we want to. And then that hurts the results at the end of the day.

Chris Hallberg (12:10.00)
Yeah, you can’t like again, you can’t be everything to everyone. You have to pick a lane, be very descriptive, what good looks like, what bad looks like, and create metrics.

So, you know, that now I’m you know leaning into EOS through the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and there’s other operating systems out there. My experience is with EOS, so that’s where I’ll speak from. But the operating system is quite simple. You know, who are we? Well, why do we exist? Who do what do we do? How much by when? Here’s our core values, right? You know, just eight simple questions, and then everyone opts into that or opts out of that. And I think trying to accommodate two too many different versions, like here’s an example. We have 20 people and we want to go somewhere. Well, we can’t have everybody put in a different address to the GPS and expect to get to any of them in a timely fashion. But the way buses work, right, is a bus has a route.

We talk about the right people on the right seat or changing the wheels on the moving the bus. The bus is a great analogy because you know the placard above the driver on the exterior of the bus says where what bus what number it is, right? And where is it end? And when people get on your bus and want to treat it like an Uber, taking my grandma’s house, like well, does grandma live on the bus route? No. All right, great. Then an Uber or a taxi is going to be the thing. The bus is not going that way. The bus is well, can you can I just have you take a detour?

That’s not how buses work. That’s also not how companies work. So, who’s hijacking your bus? This isn’t a Keanu Reeves movie. This is your life. This is your business. So, people want to go where the bus is going or they want to go somewhere else. But accommodating people wanting to take side conquests on your bus is something I see that happens a lot. And then another thing I see that’s debilitating is hanging on to the wrong people for too long. I like to fail fast with humans. That’s why I have an 80-day review, and if you’re not pinching yourself after 80 days saying, wow, I would not want to compete against this person, you know, in business, I’m just blessed they’re on our team. What a great teammate. If that isn’t the level, then liberate them to the market and try again. And if you curate a team of people who want to be there and your vision lines up with their vision, that’s a beautiful connection. And we can do great things together.

But as soon as we start accommodating overly, we’re no longer on target. We’re now just a hijack bus. And a lot of businesses have become too inclusive to ideas versus exclusive. When you are exclusive, you are laser focused and committed on a mission. And when everyone is rowing in the same direction on all facets of that vision, your likelihood to get there is much faster than if we’re just we’re going that way.

Skot Waldron (15:01.00)
You mentioned your military background. Is there any military thought that flows into that? Ideology?

Chris Hallberg (15:08.00)
Yeah, I mean, well, the military, what the big difference is you know, between the military and civilian law enforcement is the commitment. When you enlist or you take a commission and sign a contract for four, seven, ten years, if you’re a pilot or some other specialties, you don’t come into work. I was an MP. They’ll send me to come grab you. In the civilian business world, your very best operator can knock, knock on your door and say, “Hey Skot, love you, man. Appreciate the opportunity, but I’m out. I found another thing. My wife got her dream job. We’re moving to Hawaii.” Like there are no golden handcuffs, like people are free to come and go.

However, the other dynamic is in the military, they’ll assign you privates. And not all of them will say are a 10 out of 10, to put it lightly. Some require a significant amount of work just to breathe and walk and chew gum at the same time. And other people just make you look like a great leader because they show up. Mom and dad already kind of built that and others, you know, that wasn’t the case.

In the civilian business world, you have access to about, I think there’s around 7 billion people on the planet. So, the commitment is different, but the selection, so there are some differences between the two things. And my recruiting company, Business Sergeant, which is, you know, we do leadership training, coaching, events, speaking, team building events, and ultimately those all lead, those all those events end with, you know if you really enjoyed today, the best way to do is to import some of this and seed your organization with veterans, many times special operators like Green Berets or Navy SEALs that we have access to.

And quite frankly, it’s the Halo effect. If you take a world-class leader that’s been to Hell and Back 47 times, knows the way, and you put them into a culture that’s not doing well, this Halo effect, the circle of awesome, just kind of radiates. And people like, wow, this is what the great leadership looks like.

So when you combine four million dollars’ worth of leadership and project management training that a Green Beret goes through, and then you give them a very simple business mission that they can fully understand, and then you tell them to go do this and find people that want to do this and remove people that don’t want to do this, very quickly, the right person in the right seat with a clear, simple, executable mission can run circles around huge teams, that are having a meeting about next week’s meeting, about the next quarterly meeting.

So fewer meetings, more execution, keep it simple, put the right people in the right seats, get out of their way, and success is all but assured. Anything that complicates that or adds too much nuance to that, your odds of executing go down exponentially as you add a second, third, fourth idea.

Skot Waldron (17:59.00)
And as you continue to grow and scale, hopefully finding the people that can breathe and walk and chew gum at the same time, because that’s what it requires, right? Is to find those people, hold on to those people, create experiences to where they want to stay. But as you grow complexities happen, you know, like I mean, you’re trying to work with these people, you have different communication styles. You’re hopefully curating more of a team than what you’re getting in the military, where it’s like, by the way, you have this new person and you’re just kind of going to have to work with that person, right?

I think at some point we do that in the corporate world too, but we can we have a little bit more control. Let’s address that for a second. When leaders do pull in these people that maybe can’t breathe or walk or chew gum at the same time, but they hold on to them way too long. What’s going on there?

Chris Hallberg (19:08.00)
Yeah, I mean, either someone hasn’t explained what the standard is. So, we’re all just kind of doing in our own mind’s eye what we think is right. And that’s a very human response. Or we say, hey, at 45 days, new people need to be at this level of competency. We reassure everything.

So back to having an operating system. If I work at a company running on EOS, you know, I have to live my core values. I have to culturally fit in. I can’t fake it. This is who I am, or I’m not. I have to get want and have the capacity to do my role. And we measure getting, wanting and having the capacity through hitting numbers, following process, being a good teammate, right? And then getting rocks done, changing the wheels on the moving bus, creating new process, new capacities, new capabilities. When we have them, we’ll be able to scale. And then back to the bigger you are, the harder it gets. Yeah, if you choose that.

If you choose to make things super simple, you can steal the crap out of really simple things. Complexity is the enemy of scaling well. So, I find that we’re going to do these 47 things. Like I make that joke, but that’s like, look at most companies. They’re literally working on 47 things and wonder why they get, you know, 60%, 70%, 80% complete on 38 of those. And they deliver a few things, but they’re the wrong things.

Versus saying, “hey, we don’t need to get cute. We need to work on the basics here.” So, like if we can simplify the operating environment and just give somebody the plan. And when I say opt into the plan, we have curated the right tools, the right automations, the right technology, the right process, the right target market, the right things to say at the right times. When you systemize the business, people opt in and the system works. It’s when people say, “I want to do it my way,” or “I don’t like to say it this way.” “Can I say it that way?” As soon as you say yes to that, that is the complexity that that comes in.

So, we have a very clear avatar, a watermark of what successful people look like. And then we’re able to have a leaderboard. If people can fail privately, they will. People don’t like to fail publicly. So, a big part of the military, right, somebody screws up and everyone gets punished. Like you’re not getting away with that in the civilian business world, right? You’re not going to get 20 guys cutting scissors with or grass with scissors because someone walked on the sergeant major’s grass. Like they’re not going to stand for that. But it’s just one little yes, one little exception. Seems benign. It’s not a not a problem. But when you add up the eighty-seven exceptions, now we’ve created a layer of complexity. It’s of our own making.

So, a real great leadership team sets the direction. A management team says this is what we need to get that done. And then I find the most undercapitalized thing in business is human resources or people. Like great humans are never on sale. You cannot get a unicorn for the price of a donkey. Doesn’t work like that.

So, like I’m a big fan of paying people above a 75th percentile and then expecting another 50% more from them because an A player, a small team of A players can run circles around a massive team of C and B players. And A players don’t mind being measured with a scorecard and living core values. It’s kind of like, “do you want to live in an HOA?” Right. And there’s some upsides to live in an HOA and there’s some downsides to live in an HOA.

But if you don’t want to look at a bunch of rusty RVs and cars on blocks in your neighborhood, then you’re going to be in the HOA. But if you leave your garbage can out at daylight, you’re going to get a warning. So, I don’t like the enforcement, but I also don’t want the clampetts to live next door. So, like we have to decide what kind of community, what are the rules of this company? And the rules are to keep things classy, not to keep people down or in a box, is to keep us on task, on mission focused, in an environment where everyone knows what good looks looks like, and everyone knows what bad looks like. And when it’s bad, we don’t identify as good. We take our lumps, we apologize, we commit to be better, and then we fix it. And then when it’s good, we say thank you for fixing it.

So, I think people complicate things by allowing people to kind of create your own adventure. And that’s not how my most successful businesses operate. I have companies that have our 200 “Best Places to Work” awards. And these are not write a check to get a piece of crystal for the trophy case up front. These are engagement surveys. And in this modern age, to qualify to be in the finals, you’re going to be in the high 80s, you know, mid 90s percentile in engagement. And these are anonymous emails. If they don’t like the coffee, you’re going to hear about it in this survey. If they don’t like the benefits, like people are not shy when the business journal sends them an email and says, “what do you think about this company?”

So, like the only way to get there is to remove the people that don’t like it there. So, the first time my clients take it, they lose 40-50%, like 35% engagement is average, 65% is world class, 95%. Are you kidding me? Hundreds of those awards. Why? Because we find out through the first survey who doesn’t like it here. We find out, like, if our benefits suck, let’s fix our benefits. If we’re not holding people accountable and we have pets or friends of boss, and unhealthy, fear-based cultures and all that kind of stuff, you’re going to get lit on fire from an anonymous email saying if there’s favoritism or you know, spotty accountability or unethical practices. Let me I can go on all day on this stuff. But when people are like, “this place is awesome, you know, they’re good at what they do, they expect us to do things, they develop us, they pay us well. The benefits are great. We have time to be good family people and community people. This place is awesome.

That is what 95% of the people at the company say. That’s a curation exercise. You said it earlier, Skot. When you go to a museum and you’re like, that was amazing, it’s because it’s curated, baby. There’s all kinds of wonderful things that you could look at. Is this, is this museum did a good job? Or is this some side of the roadside show, right, with a $50 admission and be like, I didn’t see anything that was interesting in that.

So, think about your company. It takes just as much time to be awesome as it does to be sad and horrible. The investment away from your family, whatever you work for, when you go to a place for 10 hours, eight to ten hours a day, you could spend that eight hours doing wonderful things with wonderful people. Or you could be, you know, stamping TPS reports for eight hours, but not giving a shit about any of this stuff.

So, it’s just a decision. And like-minded people together hold each other and themselves accountable. People that are just like, well, it’s work. That’s why there’s all these TV shows about The Office, and it’s hilarious. Unless you’re one of the characters, then it’s not, right? Then it’s a soul-crushing experience where you have to pump yourself up in the parking lot in your car saying, I got two kids in college. This is awesome. When you know it’s not. Life is too short to spend a third of your life with the wrong people doing the wrong things.

Skot Waldron (26:41.00)
Amen to that. Amen to that. I mean, I hear a lot of when you’re talking, I hear a lot of very structured thinking. I mean, obviously being an EOS implementer for this long, you adopt a lot of that into your way of work and your thinking and your way you live probably. I also hear a lot of the military structure in there. So, I hear a lot of systems talk from you. Systems to help us be more productive, to help us perform better and higher levels.

Where do you think systems actually help? And where do you think leaders hide behind systems? Use them as an excuse to act a certain way instead of actually leading the way they should.

Chris Hallberg (27:30.00)
Yeah, it goes back to the core values. So, if our core values are to be, you know, hardworking, open and honest, speak the truth, call out things that aren’t good, serve the client. It’s what’s your impact? No matter what your business does, you’re helping somebody do something. It could be save lives, it could be get to someplace a little faster. Whatever your product or service does, it should be additive to the greater good.

So, when we’re bad or and we’re using the wrong process, or someone is hiding behind, well, you know, that’s the policy. Well, is that really the right answer? And if the answer is yeah, okay, sometimes you can’t you can’t give everybody what they want. However, if someone is weaponizing a policy, right, to do things that are maybe comfortable for them personally, but not great for the team or the client, the end user, someone downstream, then if one of our core values is like service, so we’re all in, we’re committed, like we’re experts, we love to win. And if you’ve created an environment where your people are getting the system is we’re awesome. Or you didn’t want to be awesome, go be not awesome somewhere else.

So that sounds kind of hard, but it’s not. Because when you do the hard thing up front and everyone who opts in is that, then you don’t even need to have those conversations moving forward. The group, the soldiers, they’ll please themselves because they all know what they’re there to do and they’ve opted in. And part of that in your core values is we hold these ourselves and each other accountable. So, it’s kind of my job.

Think about security at the airport, Skot. Right. If you saw a guy sitting next to you with wires sticking out of his shoes, like you’re getting off the plane or he’s getting off the plane. If you ask everybody else on the plane, he’s getting off the plane. I’m staying on the plane. Like if that really happened, there’s no way we’re flying.

So, like that’s a life and death example, right? It’s kind of polar. It’s out here. It usually shows up in a much more nicer way. But what we’re really saying is if you see something, you say something. I think that’s what the TSA, that’s what I hear at the Denver airport when I fly out security. If you see something, you need to say something. That’s the same thing in the culture at a company. If you know that this is the friend of the boss and or family owned businesses, Skot, this is like, if your last name is this last name, there’s no rules. There’s three rules, right? And if you have another last name, here’s the 72 things that we expect.

Well, if you allow that to happen, right, you’re creating animosity. It’s not a together cohesive unit. My clients that have family-owned businesses, like second generation coming up, great. Make sure everyone sees them sweeping the warehouse at least once a day. Make sure that you are harder on them than you are anyone else. Make sure when they get the reins, they’ve sat in a multitude of different seats in the organization and they understand it.

Therefore, it’s not, you’re a Nelson, or you’re a Waldron. That’s why you’re in charge. You’re a Waldron. Actually, you’re in charge because you’ve put in the time, you don’t have a special treatment, you don’t treat other Waldrons differently than a Hallberg. We’re all in this together. And it doesn’t matter what your last name is. It doesn’t matter where you went to school. It doesn’t matter if you golf with the boss. Like now I’m talking military stuff, right? Where it’s not even about the rank on your collar. Not everybody’s deployable. You don’t want to go into combat with everybody. You know what I’m saying? Like the camaraderie in the esprit de corps, which is culture in the military, is formed by sacrifice. And it’s no different in the civilian business world.

So, you got to make it clear. You got to let people be themselves, but within the confines of the mission parameters. So, if there is no mission and there are no guardrails, people are just going to do what they think is right. That I assure you is not scalable. That’s what I fix. And we get a central thing, we get excited. We reward, we recognize, and we also accountability isn’t a negative word. It’s not the A word. People think about accountability as discipline and punitive.

Accountability is, that was a great job, Skot. What you said when the customer said that your response was a 10 out of 10. Hey, everybody, next time that happens, do what Skot did. That was money. That’s I held you accountable for a positive result. And people don’t look at accountability that way. I’d like to change people’s thinking and say, a high five is accountability. A hey, let’s not do that, you know better, that’s also accountability.

Skot Waldron (32:13.00)
That’s an interesting way to think about it. I never thought about that. But that’s really good.

Okay, let’s do a few quick questions here. Quick answers, quick questions. One sign a team is misaligned.

Chris Hallberg (32:28.00)
Well, they’re not hitting the mark. They’re not winning. They’re losing.

Skot Waldron (32:33.00)
That’s a good one. Good indicator.

Chris Hallberg (32:36.00)
Yeah, sorry to be so simple, but…

Skot Waldron (32:38.00)
It’s probably something broken underneath there. That’s what’s happening, right? We’re rowing in different directions.

All right. A phrase leaders use way too often.

Chris Hallberg (32:51.00)
Oh gosh. The scarcity, weaponizing scarcity. If whenever someone goes against, like, that’s a scarcity mindset. Like, no, this process sucks. So, you know, weaponizing scarcity or abundance is something I see all the time. Oh, that’s negative. No, that’s the truth. I’d like to fix it so whether we could get into that abundance positivity zone.

So, saying negative things are positive. Oh, that’s just how corporate wants us. We can do it. You know, like walking over dollars to pick up quarters or nickels, it happens all the time.

Skot Waldron (33:28.00)
Okay, what’s one meeting you would eliminate tomorrow?

Chris Hallberg (33:34.00)
Sharing information. Sharing information is an email or a summary. Solving problems are the only reason to get together in person or virtually.

Skot Waldron (33:45.00)
Good thought there. Yeah. I mean, thinking about that as your filter of is this just an informative thing or are we actually solving a problem, executing on something in this thing? I think that’s good too.

All right. Best military lesson for business owners.

Chris Hallberg (34:02.00)
You can’t be half pregnant. It’s a binary thing. It’s a yes or no.

Skot Waldron (34:07.00)
What do you mean?

Chris Hallberg (34:09.00)
It’s a yes or no. You can’t part be partially committed. Like back to the squirrels, right? The business road to failure paves. So, you just got to decide if you’re going to cross the road, cross it as fast as you can, as safely as you can, but don’t hang out in the middle.

And there’s a lot of half commitments, half-truths, half. So, I say that all the time. You guys seem kind of half pregnant on this, and they’ll be like, what are you talking about? Like, well, are you over here? Are you over here? That goes to the black and white. All the color, none of the color.

Three Venn Diagrams, Skot, right? First one over here is black. Hell yeah. Middle one, hell and the other one, white, hell no. The grayed is the middle color. Gray is where businesses die. Hell yeah, let’s do this. Twice on Sunday. How about this other thing? Hell no. When you’re not able to say hell no to things, you end up just putting in the middle circle.

So, if you look at those Three Venn Diagram circles, when I start with the business, the hell bin is almost full at the top. And the hell yeah is about, you know, a quarter full. And the hell no has maybe a quarter in it. And over a couple of years of coaching, the hell no thing would be almost full. The hell thing would be almost nothing. And the hell yeah is about halfway up.

You have to say no about two to one, three to one for every yes. And if you’re not, you’re just saying yes to everything, that middle circle’s going to be full and you’re not going to accomplish anything.

Skot Waldron (35:38.00)
Good thought, man. Okay.

Tell me tell me about this “The Business Sergeant” thing. I’m curious.

Chris Hallberg (35:44.00)
Yeah, so it’s a free community for veterans that are still in, recently out or like myself been out for nearly 30 years. And I have a course called the Business Sergeant Academy. It’s commercially available for civilians to use, but veterans get free tuition. So, it’s a course. And then there’s a bi-monthly course discussion where we go deep into the modules and then a lot of those folks are like, this is awesome. I know a lot more now.

So, then we find veteran-friendly companies and we place those veterans. And my business partner, Michael Kracyla, is a career retired Green Beret Officer, warrant officer. So, kind of a Jedi Knight, Silver Star, Purple Heart, like the real deal. And he has access to a bunch of special operations people. So that’s kind of our premium tier is to get yourself a Green Beret or a Navy SEAL because these are humans that have been selected against a thousand other humans, a thousand times.

So, our thesis is our superhumans can understand what you do in about a quarter or two. Your best leader, you could send them to every corporate leadership school on the planet. They couldn’t carry our guy’s rucksack for an afternoon. Like there’s no comparison. So, unless you’re doing splitting atoms, molecular biology, you know, physics level stuff, and most businesses are not nearly as complicated as we make them out to be.

A tremendous leader of humans supported their military experience translated. But we also do team building keynotes, like getting your leadership team or your team to do a four-hour workshop, have a couple Green Berets show up the office and run you through some leadership training, some evolutions that aren’t too physical. And we can go to a full military simulation where you’re sleeping in a tent on a cot, shooting guns and doing all that. So, we go from mild to wild with that, but the recruiting, sales training, general business leadership is what “Business Sergeant” does.

But ultimately the coolest thing we do is we find the next mission for America’s biggest and greatest heroes. And when we find a veteran-friendly company who understands this person’s showing up with four or five million dollars’ worth of project management, relationship building, leadership, like all the things that a company needs. It’s kind of the easy button for a CEO to say, “Hey, give me one of those Green Berets and the halo effect that happens.

So, it’s just being able to give back to the community and help out other vets, feels great, but it’s also like the best hire you can make.

Skot Waldron (38:20.00)
Wow, I can feel that serving on multiple levels, and you yourself having some skin in the game in that world and being able to empathize and really feel for the veterans of the country and doing the work you do. There’s a lot of purpose driven in that, which means you’re going to care that much more.

Chris Hallberg (38:44.00)
I’m still serving. Yeah.

Skot Waldron (38:46.00)
Yeah, I think that’s amazing. I think that’s powerful, man. So, thank you. Thank you for doing that. I think that that’s really amazing.

So, people, if they’re listening to this and they want to get involved with that somehow, or they just want to get in touch with you, what do they do?

Chris Hallberg (39:04.00)
Well, they could find me at Chris at bizsgt.com. They can search EOS Worldwide / Chris Hallberg or just friend me on LinkedIn and just to throw it in there. I also am the visionary of a Agentic AI-powered software app for companies running on a business operating system like EOS. We’re an EOS authorized licensees called GoExpand.

So, if you’re running on EOS yourself with an implementer, it doesn’t matter, goexpand.com. It is basically the tech stack of those clients that I was bragging about before, the ones with the 94% engagement. This is basically a curated set of EOS tools that they all use. There’s several EOS apps that are all perfectly suitable, but GoExpand has all those tools in a more connected, dynamic environment, plus a bunch of human tools, performance reviews that don’t fight with the operating system methodology, dashboards, scatter plots, scorecards with shapes.

People are very visual. So, reward and recognition. So, five or six different people apps plus the EOS apps, plus an agentic AI agent for all your playbooks. So, stop calling people and asking dumb questions. Just ask the bot. The bot will give you, you know, 10 seconds, they’ll give you the answer. And it’s like giving another day of the week when we’re not deserving our teammates, we’re supporting them with a single source of truth. You update a process, you take the other one, throw it away. Replace it a second later, the old answer isn’t even available.

So human-powered, AI assisted is the next few years. So, this platform help anyone run their business better. So those are the three things that I’m working on. And the neat thing about being a visionary is I’ve, you know, other people run those two businesses. I naturally don’t outsource the coaching because I love it. But that’s how we keep a full-time busy for this particular entrepreneur in this season of life.

Skot Waldron (41:01.00)
Well done. Well done. Living what you teach there, Chris. Appreciate it.

Chris Hallberg (41:05.00)
Yeah, we are our own dog food there, Skot.

Skot Waldron (41:09.00)
That that’s it, man. That’s it. All right. Well thanks for being on the show. Chris, it has been really informative. Really, I think around the systems idea and the things that get in our way is really important. So, I appreciate you bringing the perspective.

Chris Hallberg (41:25.00)
Thanks for having me on, Skot. It was great to meet you. I appreciate it.

Skot Waldron (41:32.00)
I’ve never thought about accountability that way. I’m going to just be honest, y’all. Accountability is the challenge. It is the making you a little uncomfortable. It is the thing that you set an expectation they didn’t deliver, or maybe they are trying to deliver, and you’re making sure they’re held accountable, setting timelines and dates and making sure their follows, there’s follow-through, and all those things are the typical things we think of accountability.

But accountability, the way Chris says it, is quite interesting. It’s almost like celebration, rewarding, but you’re holding people accountable for representing the thing, acknowledging the thing that they’re doing. And that level of accountability, the positive result of what happens is interesting to think about. And I don’t know. I mean I’m going to explore that. I think you should too. Try it out.

See what happens there. See if people buy in to it. Because our mindset around accountability is probably something else. And I hope in this interview you got a little bit of ideas around the systems and the things that are really required to make that thing happen. And at the foundation of all of it is trust. And I will say the foundation, foundation, the basement of that is communication.

Communication is really the thing that bubbles up to making sure we trust each other well and trust each other enough to then proceed up the ladder to ultimately get the result we want.

So, thanks a lot, Chris, for being on. And thanks everybody for being here.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.