Jason Lindstrom is a serial entrepreneur who discovered early on that the 9-to-5 life wasn’t for him. Since then, he’s gone on to launch multiple successful businesses, including a digital agency and Advisor Websites, which provides digital solutions to financial professionals across North America. Today, he’s the CEO and co-founder of Bucketlist, an award-winning employee rewards and recognition platform that helps organizations motivate and retain top talent by helping employees fulfill their personal dreams and goals. Jason is passionate about combining business with purpose and building companies that unlock the full potential of individuals.
Jason joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to share wisdom from his entrepreneurial career, building a thriving culture, and much more.
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Jason Lindstrom On Leadership, Culture And Giving To Employees
Our quote for this episode is from Peter Drucker. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Our guest, Jason Lindstrom, is a serial entrepreneur who discovered early on that the 9:00 to 5:00 life wasn’t for him. Since then, he has gone on to launch multiple successful businesses, including a digital agency and advisor websites that provide digital solutions to financial professionals across North America.
Jason’s the CEO and Co-founder of Bucketlist, an award-winning employee rewards and recognition platform that helps organizations motivate and retain top talent by helping their employees fulfill their personal dreams and goals. Jason is passionate about combining business with purpose and building companies that unlock the full potential of individuals.
Jason, thanks for joining us on the show.
It is an absolute pleasure to be here.
The Entrepreneurial Spark: From 9-To-5 To Building Dreams And Community
You said you realized pretty early that the 9:00 to 5:00 life wasn’t for you. You prefer the 6:00 to 12:00 life better, the 18-hour version, not the 6-hour version. Take me back to young Jason and your upbringing. When did you first feel that entrepreneurial spark? I have a sense you were the kid with a lemonade stand and the comic book business. I’m sure this was obvious to anyone who was around you, knowing you.
Thanks for that feedback. From a very early age, entrepreneurship was a natural place for me to land. I didn’t know it when I was young.
No one tells you that’s an option. They tell you, “Pay attention in school, Jason. Stop coloring the lines.”
Paying attention at school is not one of my zones of genius.
That would’ve been my other guess.
What I always love to do as a young guy is to build things, and ideally build things that bring people together and have a good time or a cool experience. For example, I remember, even as a young man in junior high, building this massive tree fort. I was getting a whole bunch of friends to help out, setting up multiple platforms, and turning it into the local place where everybody would gather. From a very early age, I loved bringing people together, setting what might be a silly vision, and building cool things.
One story that comes to mind, though, that sticks out as probably my first major foray into an entrepreneurial experience was when I went to university. When I went to my school, which was called Simon Fraser University, I didn’t know anybody. I was super keen to meet people, so I decided to join a club to make some friends. I’ve always loved skiing, so I decided to join the ski club, but it turns out there wasn’t a team in place. I decided I’d start a ski club from scratch.
It’s cool. I ended up getting a spot at what they call the clubs day, where it was an opportunity to recruit new members into your club. I remember distinctly at clubs day that my table was beside the rugby team. There’s this rugby club. They had probably three dudes around their table. They had TVs and a ghetto blaster. They’re having the best time. I was there with my two little tables and one chair because I was the only member of my ski team. I’m like, “I got to recruit some members into this thing.” I remember taking a piece of paper, taping it to the table, and writing at the top First Name, Last Name, and Email Address. I had to go to class because I was the only member.
Email address? You’re fudging this story. I know how old you are.
It was awesome. I went off to class. I came back about an hour or so later, and the first piece of paper was almost entirely filled up. I had 50 people sign up in that first hour off. I was so excited. I taped a second piece of paper to the table and went off to class. I came back, and the same thing happened again. I had 100 people sign up.
Over the next couple of days, I had 200 people sign up for my little ski club. It was funny. I had achieved my goal of meeting new people. I had a connection of 200 people to hang out with. On the other hand, I needed to build an organization. The first thing I did was recruit an executive to help me run this club. The second thing I did was to start charging membership fees. We started making thousands of dollars from these members.
It was cool. We set up tons of events. They’re super fun. People connected. I have friends on the executive. This one guy named Eric ended up meeting his future wife through the ski club. I’ve talked to a bunch of friends from the ski club. They said that when they look back on university, it was one of their best memories. It was cool. I learned how to recruit. I saw vision, and I had a fun time doing it. It was because of that ski club that I gained the confidence to start my first business with my good friend Bart. We created a digital agency called Tidal Interactive.
Unpacking The Iceberg: The Shy Kid’s Drive For Connection
I’m going to test a theory here. I’ll play psychologist for a minute. You’re talking about the importance of community and connection. I find most people who are either doubling down on something that was important to them or going towards something they didn’t have. Which one was it for you? Did you grow up in a big community, or did you grow up and you were missing community?
Way to dig into the iceberg issue. You nailed it. I was a super shy kid. Whenever I’d get a friend, I was super loyal to them because it took me so much time and effort to get them as one of my friends. Growing up, I saw a lot of value in maintaining and building good lifelong friendships. This, to your point, would probably be an extension of that.
That’s interesting. They’ve made incredible things out of it, but it started somewhere from discomfort. I don’t know how many CEOs I have out there. I know there are a lot of parents who tune in. This is a message for ADD. If you’re super frustrated with your kid, oftentimes boys, not paying attention in school and doing this thing on the side, how many of them have shown up as CEOs on this show? It’s an interesting story. It’s a frequent story. This thing that you were doing with the ski club and learning how to make money and build community ended up being what you did for a living. This, “Follow the lines. Follow what we’re doing,” works for a certain type of kid. It doesn’t work for others.
You nailed it. I’ve always struggled within traditional systems. Traditional school is a very traditional system that I struggled inside of. I’ve often found success literally or metaphorically coloring outside the lines, whether it’s in ski clubs, building free forts, or starting businesses.
Success often comes from coloring outside the lines — literally or metaphorically.
I was going to ask you what your first real job was, but it doesn’t sound like you had one. You and Bart went right into this from school. Did you have any jobs in schools? You were already running your own business in college, it seemed like.
We launched our first business at university. I did have a bunch of traditional roles growing up. I remember my very first job because it was such a bad experience. I was hired as a dishwasher for the seafood restaurant called Sea Lovers. I don’t know if they’re around anymore. They made delicious seafood, but they did not treat their employees very well.
I remember showing up for the first day, and they didn’t even give me cleaning gloves. Those big industrial dishwashers were scalding hot water. I was some fourteen-year-old kid trying to make a buck. I came home and my arms were burned. I was frustrated. I had a boss yelling at me. There were lots of things that I’d later go on to not want to reproduce. As you do, I value the importance of building a good corporate culture and taking great care of people. My first experience was not a good one, but there were still lots of good learning from it.
Early Missteps And Mentorship: Lessons Learned In Entrepreneurship
You started several businesses over the years. What were some of the biggest challenges or missteps in your early entrepreneurial efforts? I’m curious. By the time you got around to founding Bucketlist, what did you do differently that you learned from some of those other businesses?
I’ve had a lot of learnings. We all have. When I started a business in university, I had no money, no network, and no experience. I learned through making mistakes, or I learned through mentorship.
Mentorship is cheaper. I’ll go with that.
If I may, you’ve been kind enough to be our advisor and mentor for a couple of years. The beauty of mentorship is that you get to piggyback off of those years of experience and wisdom. There’s a study done by Gartner showing that a well-deployed mentorship program has a 600% ROI. I believe it. Bucketlist, which has been the fastest-growing business with the best culture and the most impactful product, benefited from mentorship. To answer your question of what I did differently with Bucketlist, there’s this good book. It’s all about understanding what your zone of genius is.
By Patrick Lencioni.
There we are. You’re familiar with this. With Bucketlist, what I try to do upfront is to try to get clear on what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. I try to double down on my strengths. I’m good at building things from scratch. I’m often good at scaling sales teams. Those are my areas of passion where I should be focusing my time.
Building a strong corporate culture and taking great care of people will always matter.
There are a lot of things I’m not good at. In my early businesses, I wanted to be the master of everything. This might be a bad metaphor for some people, but I heard this about Elon Musk. He runs multiple businesses, but he understands a lot of the details at an incredible depth. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could be like that?” but I realized I’m not that type of CEO. I have a handful of things I’m not good at. I’m probably more akin to somebody like Richard Branson. I’m not saying I’m the same caliber of CEO he is.
In terms of approach.
I’m good at sales, building product, and setting a vision, but I suck at details.
You love yourself a Google spreadsheet, though. I’ll push you on that. Maybe you get bored by the details, but you’ve got a spreadsheet for everything. That’s usually a founder thing.
I love tracking stuff. I love seeing lines go up into the right.
That’s a dopamine ADD thing. That’s pretty common. I can’t tell you the number of founders who get every email. I’m sure you still do. Every transaction or everything that goes to customer service years later, they’re not even responding, but they like knowing what’s going on.
I have a little folder called Leads. We get thousands of leads coming into our organization. I still have to go into that little folder in my Gmail folder.
The Pivot To Purpose: How Bucketlist Found Its Niche
I know the type. You’ve had a few businesses. You’ve sold your last business. You and Bart wanted to team up again. How did this idea for Bucketlist come about? It’s a pretty cool concept. You help companies make employees’ dreams come true. That sounds a little foo-foo-y, but this is enterprise software. Talk about what the original vision was and then how that turned into the product that it is.
Bucketlist started off as something very different from what we’re doing. I’m a big bucket list guy. I love having adventures, especially with friends. I thought it would be cool to create a platform to help people achieve life goals. Bucketlist started off as a website where people could go and create their own little personal bucket list. The first version looked a lot like Pinterest.
What was cool was that you could explore other people’s bucket lists, find inspiration from their ideas, and copy their ideas onto your list. It was neat. With that first version, we had a lot of members. We had hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, joining up every day. We scaled it to over one million users. Since we had such high SEO rankings, we also had a bunch of inbound media interests. We had articles written about us and interviews done with us by Fast Company and the New York Times. It was heady stuff. We talked a bit earlier about iceberg issues. The iceberg issue was that the business wasn’t making any money.
It’s cool to have lists, but there was no revenue. It started from this passion. It started like, “How do we figure out what is important to employees?”
What was super interesting from that first version is that we’re trying to build this consumer-facing app, but we kept having businesses reach out to us. They were often founders. They were sometimes the founders of big companies. They’d say, “We want to reward our employees with these cool experiences. We’re tired of giving out gold watches when employees hit anniversaries. We want to help employees do something meaningful. We want to help.” The line we heard is, “We want to help employees make their dreams come true.”
They normally came from founders who were deeply passionate about building good cultures. They cared about their team. The first 3 or 4 times it happened, I’m like, “This is a weird anomaly,” but after the 10th time, we needed to look into it. One of the tenth inbound requests we got was from a company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK? from a founder named Brian Scudamore.
He has also been on the show a couple of times.
He is an amazing guy. He’s a huge bucket list guy.
I didn’t know this. That’s interesting.
We pivoted the whole platform or the whole product into a rewards and recognition system. We created an MVP, and right away, they were good enough to pay us for our MVP. They’re still a customer to this day.
They were your launch customer.
They’re in the initial handful. Since I had a background in B2B software and also a background in market research, I spent a day looking into it. It’s a multibillion-dollar space that we’re getting into. There’s already some light competition, but not too much. With our differentiator of making employee dreams come true, we went to market. Quickly, we started getting traction and scaling that business.
Beyond Gold Watches: The Power Of Values-Based Recognition
What’s interesting is that everyone wants employee engagement. They talk about it. You found a different angle on that in terms of how to do that. Also, interestingly, I know you and I share a lot of the same beliefs and perceptions on core values. There’s a lot of talk about it. There’s a lot of BS. Someone was telling me his core values, and I was telling him why they weren’t very good for his company. He agreed with me.
I was like, “We’re all children. If you give us candy or you slap us on the hand, we either respond to the behaviors that are rewarded or that are criticized.” You can talk a little bit about how the product works, but how it works is that people who live the company’s core values are nominated and rewarded by their peers, right?
Yeah. I’ll share two things. You’re right. The fancy terminology is that we have an enterprise rewards and recognition platform. We can set up a platform to support whatever your needs are. One of the best and most impactful needs is to reward employees for living company values. When employees are recognized for living a value, you can increase employee engagement by as much as 40% because people feel connected to the mission, vision, and values.
It’s super interesting. Especially when managers and leaders recognize a staff member, everybody perks up. People pay attention to what leaders do. They perk up and pay attention to that. They want to copy that behavior. Recognizing core values is a great way to make those values come alive. I believe it’s a leadership superpower.
If you rewind back in history, the way we learned was through modeling. People might be gathered around a fire if you go back far enough. We learn through storytelling. The best recognition platforms anchor into storytelling, where you’ll have a leader or a respective member of a group tell a story of recognition around somebody who is a hero. As a leader, you can create these hero myths inside your organization.
You should have these stories that you tell for ten years that are exemplary stories of core values.
It’s so powerful. When you look around, sometimes, people think rewards and recognition are fluffy, but all the best organizations in the world do it. It doesn’t matter.
You’re either rewarding things knowingly or unknowingly. One of the debates I had with the CEO was that they had a core value of working hard. I’m always like, “Are you super happy if people work hard and don’t get outcomes? Do you want an 80-hour work week? You have to live by that.” What he wanted was to step up.
He said something separately. He was like, “I love it when people step up.” I’m like, “That’s different than working hard. You have to be careful.” I’ve seen core values that were whatever it takes. I was like, “Really?” Taking the client out to the strip bar and spending for the client, is that good? You need to be good with that.
That’s such a good point. A lot of organizations will come up with these values, and they don’t pressure test them.
Whatever it takes is a dangerous core. I’m not saying it’s not right for some organizations, but it’s dangerous because you have to be fine with that behavior.
I align with your camp. Two of our values are to raise the bar and get it done. At Bucketlist, what I want to see done is for people to rapidly make improvements. Those two values, I pair together to create an innovative culture, but it’s all outcome-focused. It’s like, “Let’s get better 1% every day together.”
The Dream Program Debate: Addressing Jealousy And Fostering Aspiration
Companies use this. I’m curious about your take on this. This is a little bit of a derivation of The Dream Program, which we did at Acceleration Partners. It is asking people to submit their dreams and doing it. I wrote a PDF on that. I had so many people ask me about it after the Friday Forward. We wrote a little cheat sheet on how you can do a Dream Program, which comes from Matthew Kelly’s book, The Dream Manager.
It’s interesting. It’s a fictional book about this that someone took in. John took in AppleTree Answers and made it happen. Other people have copied since then. I’m curious if you get asked this. The number one question that I always get asked is, will other employees be jealous of some employees getting their dreams or wishes granted? Do you get asked that question?
I get asked variations of that. The answer is yes, some people do. What I’d conversely ask is, is that an entirely bad thing? Meaning, what you’re doing is you’re rewarding, supporting, and helping people achieve what they want to do. We live in a Darwinian civilization. We live in a free market economy, where we hand out gold medals to people who perform the best in the Olympics. We reward people for their performance. That’s okay.
In fact, one of the ways rewards and recognition work is when you reward that top-performing behavior, everybody’s thinking to themselves, “I want a story told about me, too. I want that metaphorical gold ribbon or gold badge. I want to achieve that life goal.” More importantly, those rewards are typically available for most staff. It’s an indication for people to step up and perform at that level. They can choose to, or they can choose not to, and that’s okay. Not everybody’s going to want to go for the gold medal, but a lot of people certainly will aspirationally drive towards it.
Rewards and recognition work when you reward top-performing behavior. It’s an invitation for people to step up and perform at that level.
In reward programs, you don’t reward 1 of 1,000. You don’t reward 1 of 100. You try to make it open for people. If you can reward people for living core values, that type of program is available to everybody all the time. In a great recognition program, you can have 70%, 80%, or 90% of people participating on a monthly basis, where recognition is being handed out and it’s being done for core values. You can carve out elite awards for over-delivery and special recognitions.
That’s interesting. My answer to it was always twofold. We did fewer of these things, but at a higher level. That’s the difference between the Dream Program. It’s not scalable, and you can do a couple. This is a much more scalable thing across an enterprise. We do this at the annual meeting. If you saw someone whose mom was dying from cancer and got tickets to fly to spend time with them, and you had jealousy around that, maybe you don’t have a great culture or great people. I never saw that. People were generally happy for their colleagues. If you had a culture where that wasn’t the case, I’d be worried about the culture. It’s probably not the culture you want to do this in the first place.
The biggest objection I would get to our two-week notice program and the open transition program was people always saying if people know they’re leaving, they’re going to steal stuff, they’re going to be toxic when they leave, and all this stuff. Eventually, I heard this a lot, and I was like, “Let’s think about this. If everyone leaves your company and they are like toxic soup, stealing stuff, and horrible, there’s 1 of 2 possible things for this. One, you’re hiring some horrible people. In which case, you need to take a look at your hiring program. Two, there’s something unique about your culture that is making everyone toxic. Both of those things probably require a little digging into.”
We’ve got to address A before B or C. That’s a great story and a great example.
Scaling Strategies: Enterprise Buy-In Vs. Grassroots Adoption
I’m curious. As you were building the company, which is SaaS, there are two ways to sell your product. Maybe you’ve evolved, but there’s working at a high level, getting the highest level buyer, and getting an enterprise sale. Then, there’s this, “I show up in a team, and I percolate.” This is how Slack sold itself. It’s popping up in one team and then another team. It moves its way up, and then it gets adopted enterprise-wise. For something like this that’s pretty unique, how did you see it evolve? Did you need to get the buy-in of the whole company, or was it a leader who decided, “I want this for my team.”
About 70%-plus of the time, it’s the whole company adopting our platform. There are a lot of larger organizations that will roll us out for a division or a team. People or organizations do both. A lot of times, for larger multinational companies with 100,000-plus employees, they may not want to do an initiative like this all at once. They might be like, “New York team, you do this,” or, “US team, you do this.”
We’ve done both over the years, and both types of deployments are successful. The one important thing I would say is you do need a discrete team for this to work. If you have an organization where some people are having a lot of fun recognizing and rewarding each other before they’re cut off and not allowed to join the fund, that creates weird friction.
It drives people to better teams. It’s like a free market solution.
It’s like, “You transfer over to that, the fun team.”
You talked about getting better. People forget that if you start and grow a company, you are constantly doing a job at a level that you have never done before. I know you’re one of these CEOs of constant, never-ending improvement. What are the things that you’ve done over the years to qualify yourself to be the CEO of a $1 million company, a $5 million company, and then a $10 million company when you’ve never done any of these roles before? How do you approach learning, development, mentorship, and all of these things?
I didn’t know I was doing this, but this is something I learned from you. I’d encourage everybody who’s reading to seek out great mentors to help lift you up. Something I learned from you is that businesses have somewhat of a pace of growth or development. What’ll slow an organization down or accelerate it is bringing people along who can maintain the growth rate or make it go faster.
Businesses have their own pace of growth, and what truly accelerates or slows an organization is bringing people along. You can maintain or even increase that growth rate.
The capacity building chart.
I’ve shared that internally with my team so many times. Every time I show it to a leader, they’re like, “That’s it.” There’s an a-ha moment. In the early days, what I watched for was anytime I created friction inside the organization or I was enabling it to perform better than it was. That was one of my strengths in the earlier days, the $0 to $1 million, and then $1 million to $5 million.
As the company scales, I was getting less good at a lot of areas, so I had to start getting out of the way of other people and letting them step up and do a better job than I could. Also, those were areas where I lacked passion and a lot of conviction. I was turning over the finance or the software and engineering. Not product management or product vision, but the coding and the project management of it all. Even with a lot of the business operations, I realize there are these things that are these rocks or these books of business that I could turn over to leaders and let them run. I watch those teams start to thrive again. If I’d managed them for too long, I could sometimes hold them back.
I still love and am passionate about sales. I still love and am passionate about culture. I love setting vision, and I’m good at creating a lot of optimism and excitement in a room full of people. I don’t know if those are the three areas I should ever let go of because I’m certainly not holding the team back. That was a long-winded way of saying I look for areas where I create friction in the organization, and I’m releasing a team’s potential. If I’m creating potential and accelerating growth, that’s cool. If I’m blowing things up and f-ing things up, I have to step aside and let good people do their best.
The CEO’s Evolution: Mastering Difficult Conversations And Leadership Changes
You’re a nice guy, Canadian, and a good cop. You’re all of these things. Generally, that fits the profile of not wanting to make tough decisions and disappoint people. I got off an hour thing I did for a group of leaders at our organization on frameworks for having difficult conversations. The one thing I’ve seen you get good at, though, is having these conversations early.
Calling it quits and being like, “This isn’t going to work out,” or, “This person’s not going to work out,” and doing that early, is that something you’ve learned from mistakes over the years? Entrepreneurs are very optimistic. They want to believe they can turn it around. I’ve seen you get good at, like, “You made a mistake here. I need to fix this and go in a different direction.”
I fundamentally care about people. I want them to succeed. I used to make this classic mistake of over-promoting everybody. I was like, “You’re great. I like you.”
That seems on-brand now. It’s like, “I love you. Here. Promotion.”
It’s like, “You’re a good success coordinator. Why don’t you run the whole team?”
Canadians are so nice.
While that might be fun in the short-term, it’s like eating a cookie. You get the hit of the dopamine of the sweetness and promote somebody, but there’s all this long-term pain associated with it. Over the years, I’ve gotten way better and much faster when somebody is not performing to have the hard conversations earlier. If it’s not a fit, they exit the company gracefully.
Since you’ve been our advisor, coach, and mentor, you’re right. This is one area I doubled down on. I’ve made a lot of changes in our leadership team. What it takes to grow a company from $0 to $1 million is way different than what it takes from $0 to $5 million or $5 million to $10 million. I’ve had to make a ton of changes over the years. One rule, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, is that normally, everything rises and falls with leadership, but if it’s two quarters, or sometimes even earlier, there’s probably a change that needs to be made, whether it’s support, mentoring, coaching, or a new leader. I tend to address those issues way faster.
People and founders struggle with this. Give us an example. I have this belief. I’ve expressed this. It’s a theory I want to develop. I don’t have a name on it. The problem is cognitive dissonance. We realize, “I have Jason on my team. I like Jason, but Jason can’t sell for crap. He missed his numbers three quarters in a row. It’s very objective, and everyone knows it.” What I start to do is make Jason a bad guy. Cognitive dissonance is like, “I can’t handle these two things, so I make Jason a bad guy. Jason’s lazy. I know I need to fire Jason, and I want to make myself feel better about it.”
What we should do is the opposite and be like, “Love Jason. Lean into the relationship. Jason, I love you. Your numbers are crap. This isn’t working out. Do you want to be in sales? What can you do? How can I help you?” Give us an example, whether it’s a specific story or an amalgamation, because people struggle with this. What does it look like to have the tough conversation but support someone and be able to hold both of those ideas mutually at the same time?
What you pointed out is a great thing to point out because it’s such a common mistake, especially for kind, nice people. The default, to your point, is that you make them a bad person.
You have to solve this dissonance. I can’t do a bad thing to a good person because I’m a good person.
That’s stage one of terminating people. In my early career, I had some nasty exits that were poorly handled than I would take accountability for the poor handling of those. There’s almost always a reason you hire somebody. They might be a great core value fit. Maybe they have a great playbook. They’ve helped other companies have good success. Be honest.
We’ve terminated some senior folks. We’re a much bigger team. Normally, I break it up into 3 or 4 conversations. If it’s for performance, it’s way easier than a core value fit, but there are ways to do both. For a performance issue, a lot of times, you can ask them, “How are things going from your point of view?” Most people are pretty honest. Especially if it’s a performance-based position or if you have good KPIs in your business, which we do, we have a lot of green. There’s a lot of clarity around green and yellow.
I don’t want to get you distracted, but I want to double-click on that because it’s a conversation I have a lot of. You’re good on data. If you have great KPIs, green lights, and red lights, it forces the issue. It creates accountability. I say, “If you walk in sales and you’re at a red light nine weeks in a row, and you don’t think that that’s a problem, then you’re in the wrong space.”
Sometimes, people might delude themselves a little bit, but then you ask the next question, like, “Based upon our KPIs, how do you think things are going? Is it green?” You start asking yourself questions, and then people naturally go to the right answer. Metaphorically, too, the more senior the role, you always want to exit people to grace and compassion. It is done best if you can break it up over time. This might not be the best metaphor, but when I think back to university, when I was a single guy, I normally wouldn’t break up with girls on one occasion. I try to soften the blow a little bit. I let them know things are coming. It’s very different to have a performance conversation.
It’s like, “It seems like our relationship has some challenges.” You’re trying to avoid the blindside. I get it.
You got it. I do this in meetings, too. Normally, if you’re two quarters in a bad performance, you’ve had a bunch of performance conversations already. You’ve tried to work it out and tried to help them succeed, and then you can start introducing options. It’s good to let people know the options that are available to them because you can tell somebody, “You’re fired,” or you can be like, “There are two ways we can handle this conversation.”
Especially if it’s a senior person, you can be like, “We can co-write this narrative together. We can help you find a better future together that’s available to us, or we can exit you more swiftly and traditionally. If there are other options, I’m open to those as well.” We put options in front of people and let them choose their own destiny. That’s incredibly enabling.
We also like pairing that with always letting people know to find something you value in somebody. You could be like, “You’re incredibly kind. Your team loves you,” or whatever it is. It is letting them know that they’re still valued, and you respect them. Senior leaders get it. People who are pros can see the writing on the wall, and they’ll choose a path that they feel respected in. You can co-write that narrative together and exit them gracefully and with dignity.
Setting Clear Expectations: The Two-Quarter Performance Framework
I like that two-quarter set of narrative. I’m curious. Is that something you put in your job description? Is that something you talk about culturally? It’s all about expectations. You talk about, “If your results sucks for two quarters, there’s going to be a conversation.” Is that something that has been normalized?
That’s some good feedback. You’re putting on your mentor hat. It probably should be in our KPIs and job descriptions. It’s not there yet. It’s something I’ve been observing closely over time. We made a bunch of changes in the organizational structure, and I’ve seen certain teams start to thrive. Normally, in the first quarter of a bunch of changes, you see all the behaviors and processes start to swing and shift. You may not see the performance lifts. Sometimes, there’s a bit of a lag. I don’t have it written down yet, but it’s something that we could probably consider doing.
It’s expectation. I have another CEO I’m coaching. One of the things we talk about is that this person has very high expectations. Sometimes, that’s not communicated to people, but it’s important for them to know that. With one of the tactics that we used, we got it from somewhere else. I edited it, and they finally got it. It was that in the job description, particularly for an EA, it said, “By three months, this is what success looks like. By six months, this is what success looks like.” That six-month thing is the performance review. If we’re sitting here in six months and we’re going over this list, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
It said, “You’re handling 90% of the emails without questions or otherwise. You’re showing up in a meeting.” These expectations are so important. No one can be like, “I didn’t know what you expected of me. I heard a lot of people say, “Put the 3 months, the 6 months, the 12 months in the job interview and say to people, ‘This is going to be the performance review. Are you signing up for this? Are you not signing up for this?’”
Be as explicit as you can about doing things independently. People are like, “What does that mean?” I’m like, “You handle 90% of customer complaints without escalation.” That’s a lot more than, “You handle 50%. You handle 99%,” because then, someone can be like, “I’m the type of person who’s comfortable with that, or I’m the type of person that’s not.”
That’s an awesome idea. You’re right. There’s a lot of value in expectation management, especially when it’s done early on or a day before a big change. Something that we do, to build off of what you said, is that during the interview process, especially when hiring for senior folks, we give them the problem or opportunity that we want them to solve, like, “Tell us how you’d get us onto a 50% or 60% growth path. What would you do? Who would you hire? How would you resource it?” We get them to build the exact plan. Sometimes, in that plan, you’ll see whether they have the vision, the know-how, and the network to make it happen. That’s been helpful for us to figure out who might be a fit and who wouldn’t be a fit.
Does it matter if it’s a real plan? I know there’s a lot of criticism around companies trying to get free work. Sometimes, we give things that aren’t real, but we want to see how people lead. Do you ever get any pushback, like, “I’m not giving you a growth plan for free.” How has that looked? Are Canadians nicer?.
Canadians are nice. Once in a while, we do have people push back. They’re like, “I don’t know if we’ll want to do all this work.” We put it in their hands, like, “Keep it light. We want to see a 20 to 30-minute presentation.” We don’t ask for them to break their back and make an effort. For the expectation, the bar is set pretty low, but, and this is a big but, the best candidates put the work in. We say, “Build a 3-slide deck,” and they come up with a 20-slide deck and put 30 hours into the sink.
You’re saying they exceed expectations. This is not a surprise. Doing the minimum is never a recipe for success.
We had one guy who prepared everything in ChatGPT. They even left the ChatGPT formatting in there. They could barely speak to their own plan. I was like, “That’s not a good look.”
This is why you want interviews to mimic the work. We used to hire 90% customer service people. We would give them a poorly written customer service report with a spreadsheet with some mistakes in it and say, “Go through this and correct the mistakes. What would you change in the language?” A lot of them complain, like, “I don’t like this,” or they miss stuff.
It’s like, “This is the exact work you’re going to be doing. If you don’t know that you shouldn’t write to a client, ‘This month sucked, but hopefully, we’ll do better next month,’ then you’re not going to be good at this job.” You need to have something or someone who can act or demonstrate the aptitude that’s going to be required in the actual role.
That’s such a good example. What’s that saying? Past behavior is the best predictor of future performance. It’s so true.
Geoff Smart has been on this show. He is the top interview guy in the world. Ask hypothetical questions. Get hypothetical answers.
That’s right.
There’s another phrase I like that I’ve heard people use in politics. They say, “Hire clowns, and don’t be surprised when you get a circus.” I like that one, too.
That’s a pretty fair statement.
The Future Of Recognition: AI, Personalization, And Guaranteed Engagement
For a variety of things. What’s next for Bucketlist?
We’re at a pretty exciting time. We’re evolving as a company. There are two themes that are popping up. One, we’re stepping up to become more of an enterprise company. We’re serving bigger organizations with 30,000, 40,000, 50,000, to 60,000 employees. It’s exciting to serve these bigger populations. The other thing that we’re doing is more from a product point of view, where we’re starting to weave in AI.
We’re starting to more deeply personalize product and think about how that shows up and what that means to people. We’re getting better at personalized rewards. Something near and dear to us is helping employees achieve life goals. We’re getting better at pinpointing what somebody might like upfront and making it easier for managers to reward them with those goals.
You can do predictive analytics on what it is that they would like.
Also, the outcome and the impact of all that. The magic of Bucketlist or recognition rewards in general is when you can take care of a person or, even more importantly, a person and their partner, or an employee and their children, and make their dreams come true, that’s how you make magic. For example, I remember in the early days, we had a customer service rep, a guy named Parker. He loves supercars. He loves Ferrari and stuff. We sent him and one of his colleagues to drive a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, and a Porsche up and down this road called the Sea to Sky Highway.
These guys came back with GoPro footage, and they posted it on social media. The stories on social media were to the effect of, “I have the best employer on Earth. They made my dreams come true.” These stories get posted and shared. That’s how you build these epic brands. It’s even better if you can take care of an employee and their spouse, like their husband, their wife, or whoever. When you do that, those are the stories that get told around a dinner table.
Another good one was a girl named Julie. She always wanted to go whale watching. As her reward, we sent her whale watching with her husband on their sixth anniversary. I spoke to her afterwards. I was like, “Julie, how was that experience?” She was like, “That was the best experience in my life.” They didn’t leave her eyes, but she had tears of happiness in her eyes.
That’s how you carve out and build insanely great employer branding. That’s how you get tons of employer referrals when you post a new job. That’s where we’re going. We’re going to deeply personalized rewards. We’re continuing to weave in all sorts of personalization throughout the product. We’re also doing some pretty cool things around value guarantees.
Our newest positioning is recognition and rewards with results. We can guarantee lifts in employee engagement. We can guarantee employee turnover intent. We have the data to prove it. We did a before-and-after study. People are awfully excited about it. We’re turning rewards and recognition from a nice-to-have to a signed and guaranteed. You get all the fun and amazing stories as a side benefit.
Learning From Mistakes: The Zone Of Genius And Life Lessons
The data is clear that employees who are more engaged are more productive. There are hundreds of studies on that. You’re on the right track. You get the last question. I call this the multi-variant question because it can be single, repeated, personal, or professional. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. What’s a mistake that you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from?
I mentioned this earlier. I’ve made so many mistakes. Here’s a meta lesson. I called it life lessons, but you’re right. It’s a list of all the biggest mistakes I didn’t want to repeat. I’m doubling down here, but the most important lesson I’ve learned is to find your zone of genius and to stay in it, and conversely, whatever you’re not good at, stay out of that zone of incompetence.
You mentioned one of the books. Another book that I love is called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. He builds on this concept of his own genius and zone of incompetence. Find out whatever you’re good at and double down on that. Surround yourself with people who could support you and set you free. What’s that saying when you follow the path?
You’ll never work another day in your life or something like that.
That’s it. Do the thing that you love to do so much that you never have to be paid. If you’re doing that thing, you’re going to be pretty happy. For the people out there reading, find that thing. Go find your zone of genius. Find your passion and follow that as much as possible.
Thanks for joining the show and for sharing your story with us.
Thanks for having me. It was an absolute pleasure.
I forgot to ask you. Where can people learn about you and Bucketlist? Where do they find you?
Corporately, you can go to BucketlistRewards.com. We’d be happy to help you out. I love to help people out. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, you can Google Jason Lindstrom Bucketlist, and I should pop up first. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m more than happy to stay connected and help in any way I can.
Thank you. To our readers, thanks for tuning into the show. If you enjoyed this episode of the show in general, I hope you’ll sign up for Friday Forward if you’re not already a subscriber. This short note, which started out as something I sent to my own team every Friday, has over 100,000 subscribers in 150 countries and is one of the top newsletters on Substack. You can join at RobertGlazer.com or search for Friday Forward on Substack. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Bucketlist
- Jason Lindstrom on LinkedIn
- Friday Forward on Substack
- The Big Leap
- The Dream Manager
- The 6 Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team
