"Let's talk later."

"Let's talk later."

Three words. You meant nothing by it. You want to ask someone who works for you about the Jones account or see if they want coffee.

Your employee hears something else entirely. They spend the next four hours running through every mistake they've made in the past month.

This is what it means to have power over someone.

Most leaders never reckon with this. They assume that because they're approachable, because they have an open-door policy, because they genuinely like their people, the fear doesn't exist. It does. You just have a blind spot, obviously.

A lot of leaders respond to this discomfort by trying to be the cool boss. Casual, accessible, one of the gang. It feels generous. It isn't. It's a way of avoiding the loneliness that comes with the job, and offloading that discomfort onto the people you lead.

Here's what never changes, no matter how cool you are: you can FIRE them. They know it. You know it. That card is always on the table. Pretending it isn't doesn't make your team feel safer. It makes them feel like they can't acknowledge what's actually true.

I had a boss in government who understood this better than anyone I've worked for. We'd just pulled off a big success. Everybody went to the bar after. He showed up, put his credit card down, stayed for one beer, and then stood up to leave.

"I gotta get out of here," he said. "I know you guys can't relax because I'm the boss."

The room exhaled.

That's what self-awareness as a leader looks like in practice. Not a speech about psychological safety. Not a Slack message telling people to speak up. A small, deliberate exit so his team could actually unwind.

Leadership is lonely. The sooner you accept that, the better you get at protecting your people from the weight of it.

None of this is weakness. It's the opposite. It takes more discipline to hold the weight of authority quietly than to shed it by playing cool. The leaders who get this right aren't trying to be LIKED. They're trying to be TRUSTWORTHY. And the difference is everything.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. Love to see Sagan customers like David from Sustainable Landscaping, post about us on LinkedIn. We’d love to earn your business as well.

(now starts David… see the original post here)

How I went from Skeptic to Evangelist of Global Talent

This time last year I was meeting with other business owners at an SMB ETA meet up in Seattle. Shout out Kaustubh Deo for organizing. Others were talking about how you need to invest in Global Talent.

Well, 6 months after starting, Global Talent Transformed our Business 😃 

I had all of the classic excuses about why global talent could not work for me. Landscaping is a physical business, global talent won’t understand, too many nuances about landscaping and seattle. It will never work. We aren’t ready, we don’t have systems as processes in place, we don’t have time to train them, to support them. How will I find them? How will I vet them?

Now, a lot of those excuses are correct, but those limitations are the reasons why we need global talent.

First unlock, Martin Skarra said, use LATAM, use Sagan Passport.

It took me a couple of years to come around to the idea, peeling off the layers of doubt. Those two things changed everything. The quality of candidates in LATAM is amazing. They have cultural context in the Landscaping Industry as the majority of field teams prefer Spanish and have family connections to LATAM.

Having bilingual, Spanish & English Global Talent is HUGE for us! And LATAM is easy to work with as the time zones are similar to the US. 1-4 hours different right now, but we work early, so that actually is better for them and us.

Sagan is amazing, LinkedIn won’t allow enough words to explain in this piece, but they are AWESOME!

Global Talent allows you to hire specialists way faster than you could ever imagine locally. We are ~35 people, will be $5-6 million in revenue this year - still small!

We have an Irrigation Office Manager
We have a Marketing coordinator
We have a Business Development Rep
We have a Project Coordinator
We have a Recruiting and Onboarding coordinator
Next week, we have an Estimator starting
Currently searching for a Web Developer

The Cost of Living can easily be 5X+ in Seattle compared to many Latin American Cities. Top talent wages are 2-5X less

You are able to hire specialists and pay them very well compared to their peers who work globally. You can hire a Marketing Coordinator who is dedicated to thinking about marketing all day, every day, a recruiter and onboarding coordinator who is thinking about sourcing and onboarding talent all day, every day. They are just better than a jack of all trades with limited bandwidth.

They have time, experience, and expertise - they have specificity - division of labor!

It is amazing what this transformation has done for the team. How much better supported our local team is, how much better our client experience is, and how much more fun we get to have. And now that we are at 5+ people, we are building a wonderful community of exclusively Spanish-speaking, English-Speaking hashtag#GlobalTalent.

We strive to make them feel connected & appreciated. They definitely make me feel that way!