An Interview With Sara Connell
… Allowing my people to fail. In the past, I wanted to save them from failure. I’ve come to realize that very few failures are fatal, and for the ones that could be fatal, we all come together as a team. We have multiple people involved in strategizing a plan of attack to mitigate the risk of the failure impacting our company. If it’s one person and they want to try something on their own, instead of telling them no and that they are wrong, I have to let them try it and learn on their own. By telling them they are wrong, I rob them of the opportunity to learn. Failure is the best teacher and I actually tell my own people to let their people fail because that is going to teach them. Then you can come in and help them out and they’ll learn a lot from the experience.
Beginnings are a Genesis. That means that not only are they a start, but they are also the origin of all that follows. This means that the way we start something, the way we start our day, for example, creates a trajectory for all that follows. How do highly successful leaders start their day in a way that creates a positive trajectory for a successful, effective, productive, and efficient day? How do you create habits that make these routines permanent? How do you get inspired to develop the discipline necessary for such a lifestyle? In this new series, called Morning Routines and Habits Of Highly Successful People, we are talking to successful leaders who can share the morning routines and habits that have helped them to achieve success.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rod McDermott.
Rod McDermott is the CEO + Co-Founder of Activate 180, which provides expert insights and best practices to achieve ultimate job satisfaction and career success; the CEO + Co-Founder of McDermott + Bull, one of the fastest-growing executive search firms in North America with offices domestically and internationally; the President + CEO of M+B Interim Leaders, which he founded along with Angela Anderson in 2011 to address an increased client need for time-sensitive solutions to important leadership challenges; and the Founder of the M+B Executive Network, a community of in-transition senior-level executives seeking guidance to land their next role, serving over 10,000 members since inception.
Rod has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, growing companies from the ground up and challenging industry norms. His ultimate goal is to meaningfully contribute to the greater good, which is showcased through his passion for hard work, fostering relationships, and conceptualizing solutions for professional development.
Rod resides in Laguna Niguel, California, with his wife Laura, their four children, and three dogs. He is a multi-thousand-hour turbine aircraft pilot and flies his CJ2 Jet for business and for his other passions, which include philanthropy, skiing, and traveling. Rod received a bachelor’s degree in economics and business from the University of California, Los Angeles.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodmcdermott/
@mcdermott.rod
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I received my entrepreneurial spirit from my father, as my childhood was the launch of my entrepreneurial journey. Growing up, my dad ran a fairly large business in San Diego and he would come home and share stories and experiences with me at dinner. I learned so much about business over that dining room table. I have always sought advice from my dad, especially as a kid, asking him questions about his day, his business, and anything else he had to offer.
My dad was the one who helped me start my very first business when I was 10, which gave me the entrepreneurial bug. From that moment on, I knew that I never wanted to work for someone else, especially long term, and that I wanted to control my own destiny. This drive led me to hire my first employee when I was 13 and has inspired the paths I have taken in my career leading to now.
What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.
My inspiration in business has always been my dad. He ran a number of companies and taught me about business, but most importantly, he taught me about leadership. How to inspire, how to celebrate successes, goal setting, forecasting, and much of what I’ve needed to know in starting and growing my businesses.
I also had an executive coach I started working with over 20 years ago, who taught me the importance of enjoying the journey versus just enjoying the destination. He was the key to showing me how to be happy along the ride, even when there are bumps in the road. This lesson helped me inspire other people, especially when times were tough. I now teach others how to stay the course and enjoy their own journeys, even during the trying times when things aren’t necessarily fun. Failure can sometimes be as fun, if not more fun than success, as it’s really, really challenging. Failure makes you bring your A-game to the table, and that’s fun. You have to be engaged and present during very challenging times and I’d say that some of my best years were the years I made the least amount of money and we made the least amount of progress. We may have even shrunk our business, but it taught me to be all in.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?
There were a number of people who helped me along the way and encouraged me to be who I am today. My father and my executive coach who I already mentioned — both were obviously along for the journey. I’ve also been a part of a CEO roundtable for about 15 years where I have been able to commiserate with peers and learn from their experiences. There are six others in the group that I have learned from and have been very helpful and beneficial to my success.
My business partner, who I founded my company with, has always had a “things are going to work out” attitude. He broke his neck playing football in high school and, at one point, was told that he may not walk again. Since then, he has walked, skied, golfed, and always made a point to have fun. Every challenge is little to him because he was faced with the heaviest challenge of all at just 16 years old. His attitude toward life, challenges, and bad things that might happen in business has always inspired me to look at the bright side. He has inspired me to believe that no matter what we might go through, we are going to get through it. I may not know the how, the when, or what we are going to do, but I know we will get through it. He really has taught me that things are not always as bad as they seem.
I’ve had one other inspiration in my life who taught me a very valuable lesson through a difficult experience. He, unfortunately, died in a tragic accident at the age of 43. He helped me through a challenging time in our business when we had a couple of people leave to start their own business and stole some of our confidential information to get them started. It put me in a negative headspace; I felt taken advantage of because we had provided them a career opportunity and also supported their families during the recession. I felt utterly betrayed. This mentor gave me some great insight and advice. He encouraged me to delegate the issue to an attorney so I could focus on rebuilding the business and being the inspirational leader the rest of my people needed me to be. That advice has stuck with me for a long time.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or takeaway did you learn from that?
I was always a very hands-on search consultant and I made sure that my clients knew that I interviewed each candidate before I sent them forward to the next steps. In one particular case, I was away at a conference when one of my key partners interviewed a candidate and expressed that he was a sure fit for the job a client was seeking to fill. My partner didn’t want to wait until I got back to schedule an interview with him, and expressed that he wanted to send him forward. He went ahead and sent him forward to the client from my computer, so it looked like it was coming from me.
Shortly after, the client called me to ask questions about the candidate. Most of the questions I knew the answer to as my partner had given me all the details, but there was one question that I couldn’t answer. He asked me if the candidate was British and I wasn’t sure. He then asked if he had a British accent and I told him that I didn’t know because I didn’t actually have a conversation with the candidate. I had to explain that I didn’t personally interview him, my partner did. I told him that I have always trusted my partner’s judgment on who is a good fit as he’s been spot on when it comes to identifying the right fit for other candidates we’ve previously sent forward to the client, but you can understand the confusion.
Even though that happened to me 20 years ago, it was a good lesson for me. Now, I still set the precedent for how I introduce potential candidates to our clients. If I have not personally interviewed a candidate, I start the conversation with my clients by stating that qualifier. A good lesson for me, a little bit funny, and the client never held it against me. We continued to do a bunch of work with them and, by the way, the candidate did get the job as he was that good.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
These have probably changed a little over time. The one that resonates with me the most and has been instrumental to my success in the last five years is focusing on building the right leadership team and bringing in the right leaders that report to me. My focus is to make sure our teams are aligned on the kind of company that we want to be, what our vision is, what success looks like, and the kind of culture we want to develop. Then, I get out of their way to let them do their jobs. When we first launched our company, I didn’t do that as much. I was more “command and control” and I had more of an “I should know everything” attitude about the nuances of our business. I have now surrendered that approach. I believe it made us successful early on, but I think it also slowed our ability to scale because one person can only know so much. Being a driven leader who had to be in the weeds and know all the details kept me away from the bigger picture, which I recognize today is much more important. To me, the leadership trait is to know and trust your strengths and those of your people. Hire really well, hire great leaders, align on a vision, and then get out of their way.
A second is the desire to be a role model leader. If I tell my employees and my leadership team that we want to dedicate our company to our lives, not our lives to the company, I have to be a role model for that. I have stopped working all hours of the day and night and stopped emailing people on the weekends and evenings. I want to take that time for myself to reset, rejuvenate, and enjoy the time I have with my family and hobbies that give me a well-rounded life. I want the same for my people. I recently found out that my COO has been working 6 days a week over the last couple of months. I told her that I appreciated her dedication, but that’s not the type of role model we need for our company. I don’t want others on our team to look at that and think that’s what is required to be successful in our business. So, I provided a space for us to sit down to talk about the type of resources she needed to support her so that we could get the best version of her.
The third is allowing my people to fail. In the past, I wanted to save them from failure. I’ve come to realize that very few failures are fatal, and for the ones that could be fatal, we all come together as a team. We have multiple people involved in strategizing a plan of attack to mitigate the risk of the failure impacting our company. If it’s one person and they want to try something on their own, instead of telling them no and that they are wrong, I have to let them try it and learn on their own. By telling them they are wrong, I rob them of the opportunity to learn. Failure is the best teacher and I actually tell my own people to let their people fail because that is going to teach them. Then you can come in and help them out and they’ll learn a lot from the experience.
I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Do you have a book in your life that impacted you and inspired you to be an effective leader? Can you share a story?
I have three books that I think have been very inspirational, both to me personally and also to our company. The first one is the Dream Manager which I read in 2008. It’s written by Matthew Kelly and it talks about the concept of a company being the catalyst for employees to reach their dreams. I agree with his message immensely and believe that we should dedicate the company to our lives, not our lives to the company. If a company wants to be an employer of choice, it should be a catalyst for people to live their dream lives and their best lives. The Dream Manager has helped us do that. We’ve given the book to many of our employees and it has been very instrumental in their lives, including my own, and has driven a lot of our philosophy in the company.
The two other books are The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome, both written by Jack Stack who I just had the pleasure of meeting over dinner this week. Both speak to open-book management and the idea of a scoreboard for your company’s successes. He believes that if you don’t tell your employees what their score is in the company and what position they play in achieving the end score, how can they truly help you? The Great Game of Business is not just about open-book management, but really clear open-book management, to the point where you actually share with your employees what line item in the income statement they populate. Is there a cost of goods sold? Are there sales? You know where they live on your income statement and what impact they have on the ultimate score and in the game. What impact do they have if you don’t share that with them? How can they help? What does that mean in the context of the greater picture? This book has provided us with a solid roadmap to our people’s impact on the business and it’s been very inspiring to me personally on how we can mold this philosophy into our company.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
Activate 180, which is our company that has been in the works for the last three years. It’s our newest company and we used my other businesses as a beta test to really perfect the model. In 2021, our largest company grew by 80% and we could not hire fast enough to handle the business. Many of our employees have shared that their Activate 180 coach has helped them better manage the stress, anxiety, and uncertainty that comes with processing massive amounts of work so suddenly. We teamed them up with a coach who can very objectively, and also confidentially, listen to their challenges and then help them overcome them. This put our people in the best space possible to be able to tackle the challenges they were facing.
This new business started because we saw the impact it had on lives. I saw the impact it had on people pursuing their dreams, both personal and in their careers. We had an employee who was a diabetic athlete. His goal was to play professional basketball internationally. When we discovered his goal, we paired him with a coach to focus on his number one priority — getting off of his medications for diabetes. He worked with a health coach to change up his diet and adjust his supplements so that he could start pulling back on the insulin. He got in shape and I’ve seen the impact it has made on his life. It’s been amazing and incredibly fulfilling to see. I know this sounds heady, but I really think that if we do this thing right, we can change the world. Maybe not for everybody, but certainly for the people that we get to work with.
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. This will be intuitive to you but it will be helpful to spell this out directly. Can you help explain to our readers why it is important to have a consistent morning routine?
Having a consistent morning routine sets the foundation for my day and makes me feel good about myself. The steps that I take every morning give me energy and help me start the day off in a really good space. If I don’t follow my routine, I don’t have the same level of energy and that can sometimes be reflected in my interactions with people and how I get through the day.
Can you please share your optimal morning routine that can create a positive trajectory for a successful, effective, productive, and efficient day? If you can, please share some stories or examples.
I make sure I wake up at a certain hour to get a workout four days a week. When I get back from my workout, I try to have breakfast with my daughter. I only have one child at home still, so I make it a point to spend the mornings with her when I can. We hang out a little bit before she leaves for school, then I get into the shower, grab a coffee, and do all the other stuff to get my day started.
The other thing I like to do at least three mornings a week is to make time to read for about 20 minutes from whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. Oftentimes, after I eat breakfast and get ready to head to the office, I won’t drink coffee at home and instead, I’ll stop at a Starbucks that’s two blocks away from my office. I’ll enjoy a cup of coffee while reading for about 20 minutes and it really gets my mind going for the day. I try to split my books 50/50 between business and biographies.
Speaking in general, what is the best way to develop good habits? Conversely, how can one stop bad habits?
I have to be very intentional when I want to change a habit and start developing good habits. To help with this, I like to create to-do lists. For example, if I want to work out four days a week, I might create a calendar that’s crafted similar to a Monday through Sunday calendar. I’ll check off which days I worked out, the kind of workout, how many days, and how many minutes. I’ll do the same thing with dieting. At one point, I lost 30 lbs, and to get there, I had to be very intentional about what my daily calorie intake was, so I tracked it every single day. I used an app to keep track of all the different foods I ate and then I had a chart that I created where I would write in how many calories I took in that day and how many I thought I burned. I could then calculate what the net negative was and I could watch the weight burn off over a three-month period of time. I’m a pretty healthy eater, but I also like to cheat. To make sure I don’t overdo it, I allow myself a certain amount of cheats and I keep track of how many times I’ve cheated. It really is about being very intentional about building habits and then creating methods to help me maintain those good habits.
Stopping bad habits is also about being intentional. I string together one success, after another success, after another success, to see the impact it has on me and how I changed my behavior between each success. One of the books that we have everybody read in our Activate 180 program is Atomic Habits. The idea of the book is to change the little things almost at the atomic level and see how those changes have big impacts over time. If every day I can change 1% of some of my bad habits, and the next day changes another 1%, and the next day another 1%, you start building on those and you have a compound effect of each of those changes. Then, before you know it, you’ve changed your life.
Doing something consistently “day in and day out” can be hard. Where did you get your motivation from? What do you use to motivate you now?
Part of it is driven by the feeling I get when I maintain consistency — I feel really, really good when I do good things. I’m intentional about the things I want to accomplish throughout the day, and conversely, I feel really bad if I don’t accomplish the things on my list. So, I make lists and I check those lists off throughout the day to get the things I need to get done, done. I also have a coach that I talk to twice a month about how I’m doing against the objectives I set for myself. Having a coach helps hold me accountable because I know I don’t want to report back to him in two weeks with the stuff I said I would do, not complete. My coach has been really instrumental in helping me make the changes I want to make in my life.
I also believe in accountability partners for personal matters. When I went through the weight loss process, I had a friend in my CEO roundtable join me. We both agreed to hold each other accountable to lose 30 lbs. We had another objective that we set probably five years ago that changed our personal relationships. We’re both hard-charging business guys and sometimes we can be a little sharp with our significant others. We decided that we wanted to be sweeter husbands to our wives, so we held each other accountable to do just that. We’d have to report to each other once a day to share if we had accomplished our goal. If we didn’t, we had to tell the other why we weren’t sweet, how we may have reacted to something, and then find a solution to turn the experience around for our partner. One day, my buddy sent me a text after I told him about an experience where I wasn’t so sweet to my wife. He said that I needed to stop whatever I was doing and pull over to a flower shop to buy a dozen roses for my wife. This day, I happened to be a hundred miles from my house, but I had them ready to deliver to her when I got home.
The funny thing was, a year and a half later, the four of us were hanging out at a friend’s wedding and our wives started talking amongst the group expressing how much sweeter we both had become. We had to come clean and tell them that we were holding each other accountable for doing it.
What other resources would you suggest to our readers?
Activate 180 embodies this philosophy: utilize our coaches to help those employed find more engagement in their jobs and achieve their goals across multiple pillars in their lives.
I believe that the best employers out there care about the full human experience — not just their employees’ identities at work — and that they truly want to help their employees live their best lives. This is our purpose and mission at Activate 180 — to be the catalyst in making that possible for both the employer and their employees. Come discover what we are all about.
Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would want to continue inspiring other CEOs to realize that they’re not just responsible to their shareholders, investors, and customers — they are also responsible to their employees, and this should be their main priority. If CEOs can help their employees play at their best level and live their best life, they’ll create a strong alignment with the vision and mission of the company. Retention is not attributed to the benefits you provide to your workforce, retention is attributed to feeling valued and cared for. If you can help your people live their best life possible, they’ll take care of those shareholders and customers for you. If you take care of your people, they’ll take care of your business.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them 🙂
Well, interestingly enough — it wasn’t a private meal — but I had the opportunity to meet with Jack Stack who wrote the books The Great Game of Business and A Stake in The Outcome. Jack runs his company with the philosophy of having the employees know the scoreboard every step of the way, while also having a major stake in the outcome. The company is now 100% owned by the employees through an ESOP. When he bought the company as a CEO back in 1983, it was worth $16 million and it was 70% owned by management, and 30% owned by the employees through an ESOP. Today, the ESOP has bought out management. He’s still the CEO of the company and they’ve grown the business to almost $600 million and they paid out, over that 35 years, over $150 million dollars to their employee-owners. It’s really a cool success story about what businesses can do by doing good for their employees. It was great to have the opportunity to sit down with him over dinner.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Readers can follow along with Activate 180 at www.activate180.com.
Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.
Rod McDermott Of Activate 180 On The Morning Routines and Habits Of Highly Successful People was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.