Two men. Same engineering background, same math degree, same tutoring franchise, same curriculum, same role: owner. One of them built something worth staying for. The other, Jess wanted to mail an anonymous highlighted copy of a leadership book to.

What This Episode Is Really About

If you've ever worked for someone who couldn't tolerate a good result unless it came from their exact process, you already know what this episode is about. You don't need the theory explained to you. You've lived it.

Most people think the divide between good bosses and bad ones is about personality, or standards, or how hands-on someone is. It's not. It's about whether the person with authority can trust an outcome they didn't personally control the path to. That single distinction decides whether the people underneath them grow or shrink, whether talent stays or leaves, and whether "different" gets treated as a threat or as evidence something is working.

Jess spent years inside the exact same franchise system under two completely different ownership groups, and watched that one variable produce two completely different companies.

In This Episode

• The two ownership groups who ran the identical franchise curriculum with opposite results
• Why one owner treated Jess's judgment as an asset and let her train other instructors
• The successful location Jess launched from the ground up for the second group, and what happened right after
• The comparison trap: getting measured against a predecessor instead of against your actual results
• Why Jess was eventually told to stop iterating, and what that really meant
• The moment reading Multipliers by Liz Wiseman made an old frustration make sense
• The Trust Tell framework: See it. Own it. Release it.
• What to actually do if you're stuck under someone who won't loosen their grip
• How this connects back to the Feeling Audit from Episode 26

The Big Idea

The gap between leaders who make people better and leaders who quietly shrink them isn't skill, and it isn't intention. Most people who diminish others have no idea that's what they're doing. The real tell is simple: can they tolerate a good result that didn't come from their exact process? The Trust Tell names where that gap actually lives, in three steps: see where the control is really coming from, own the fear sitting underneath it, and release the grip on the how so people can actually own the outcome.

Memorable Lines from This Episode

"The system was never the problem. Trust was the problem. And it always is."

"Rigidity isn't value. It's a symptom."

"It's a little spite, a whole lot of impact running on the same fuel."

"Give them a pen and let them go, and don't pay attention to their handwriting."

"We hate when it's done to us, and yet we turn around and do it to others when we're scared."

Resources

Book: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman — https://amzn.to/3RROcUE

Your One Thing This Week

Pick one relationship where you hold authority, whether that's a team member, a business partner, or your kid, and run the Trust Tell on yourself honestly. Are you managing the outcome, or are you managing the person? If you're honest, and a little brave, you'll know the answer in about ten seconds.

Connect with Jess

If this one landed, come find me at BigIdeasMadeSimple.com. That is where everything I am building is taking shape, and where you can connect directly. One idea in your inbox every week, nothing else. And if you know someone currently working for, or leading, someone who can't let go of control, send them this one. The right idea at the right time changes everything.

Follow Jess: @thejesswebber on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Key Themes

• Trust versus control in leadership
• Managing tasks versus managing people
• Multipliers versus Diminishers
• Comparison culture and lost talent
• Fear disguised as rigidity
• The Trust Tell: see it, own it, release it
• Franchise systems and inconsistent leadership
• Callback to the Feeling Audit (Episode 26)

Hey there, I'm Jess Weber, and welcome back to Big Ideas Made Simple, the show that

connects fast-thinking, high-capacity people with ideas that actually move the needle, so

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you can stop overthinking and start building the life you're capable of.

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Today I wanted to talk about the difference between managing tasks and managing people,

and why most people don't realize which one they're actually doing in the moment.

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This

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Idea came out of a memory that I hadn't thought about in years.

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And it surfaced during a random call with somebody that I was playing catch up with and

hadn't talked to in ages.

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And the conversation deviated to bad bosses and previous work experiences.

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And I was telling her a story that I used to tell back in the day when it was happening.

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And

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I realized during that retelling that I'd never articulated the framework.

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So that that's what today's about.

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This this all begins with two men.

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Both had engineering backgrounds, math degrees, deep like building and you know, just

ability to understand numbers like most people never will.

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And what was funny is both bought into the same exact tutoring franchise, running the

exact same curriculum in the exact same role.

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Owner.

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One of them built something that was so incredible that I would still work for him if I

lived in that city today.

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The other, I wanted to mail anonymously a annotated, highlighted copy of a leadership book

with sticky notes that just said, you need this.

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So same system, same curriculum, same me, wildly different experiences with these

individuals.

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And by the end of the episode, you're going to know exactly which one you would rather

work for, but more importantly, which one you might be.

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So we'll go back to where it started.

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Before I was a speaker, podcast host, ~ coach, I worked in education and specifically

math.

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both in schools and in a tutoring franchise where there is a standard of curriculum, same

material, same brand promise, no matter where or what city you're in.

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And I worked in that franchise under three different ownership groups over the years,

which meant that I got a front row seat to something that most people never get to see.

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The exact same system run by different people, producing completely different results and

wildly different experiences.

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For the people who are working inside of that ecosystem.

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And here's what I believed then and I still believe now.

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The curriculum is incredible.

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I mean, like it's really good, so much so that my child will end up there potentially in

the future.

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But it's curriculum that still needs a human being who knows how to understand children

and learning and not just be.

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a great facilitator of an assessment.

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if a high school student walked in, I wasn't going to sit them down and ask them to prove

to me that that they could count by twos before working up through every grade level in

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order because that's the default sequence.

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I was going to ask questions, figure out what their gaps were and build their curriculum

from there.

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The same outcome the curriculum promised just the system got a little bit faster without

insulting a 16 year old and starting them with, you know, a first grader worksheet.

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That first ownership group I worked with understood that immediately.

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The owner, again, like I said, engineering math background, and from day one, he was

wildly respectful of my experience, my degrees, and he thought of me as an asset on the

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team.

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So if I came to him with a judgment call about a student, he didn't need me to justify it

against the ~ operating manual.

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He trusted that I knew what I was doing because I did.

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And he let me eventually help him run team meetings, not to cover content, but actually to

help the instructors learn how to better work with the students to create a better

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experience instead of just executing lesson plan after lesson plan.

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The other ownership group was completely opposite in pretty much every way that mattered.

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And this is the part that I still hold on to probably a little bit too tightly.

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That was the group that I came in to establish offices in and helped them actually launch

a brand new location from the ground up.

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I built the whole thing.

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I exceeded the standard expectations from the franchise parent company.

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So it worked.

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And it worked well enough that my discernment based approach actually proved better than

anything else.

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And so I kept pushing to bring more of that ~ perspective and judgment into how the rest

of these centers and locations ran.

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But the thing that I kept running into was ~ a very tiny short little brick wall.

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She was the director who had been brought on before me, and in her

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their eyes she could do no wrong so every person that came before me or after me it didn't

matter they all got measured against her this tiny little like five two brick wall not

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kidding and it wasn't against the results that she produced it was actually against her

her beliefs her mindset her character if you did something the way she did it then you

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were golden

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But if you didn't defer to her exact method and specifications, no matter how well your

version worked, you were forced out.

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And I watched it happen to the person who was brought in before me.

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I watched it happen to me.

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I watched it happen to people that I had personally brought in and trained after I left.

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Same industry, same curriculum, same brand, completely different environment.

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Built entirely by how much the person at the top trusted and ~ built the team underneath

them.

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And so I was in those franchises for years trying to grow things.

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You know, I had the proven model given to me first by the other owners as well as the

franchise parent company, and it worked so well with that brand new location.

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And I kept trying

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To bring my approach, bring my discernment further into the system that wanted zero

deviations ever from the way that they started their first location.

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And it frustrated me because I was directly told to stop thinking, stop iterating, stop

being creative.

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And it got to the point where there was no common ground because there wasn't a version of

growth that they were actually willing to let happen if it meant trusting anybody else's

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judgment over their existing brick wall.

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So we parted ways, not because I had failed at anything other than being a clone of their

original hire.

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I literally launched and proved success.

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And kept trying to make things better, but better wasn't the point.

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For them, sameness was the point.

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And here's what I think I forgot to mention the first time that I told this story

recently.

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It actually frustrated me so much watching this franchise that could have been thriving

and impacting more kids in the area if it were under different ownership that I actually

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developed ~

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this this little dream where if I had the money and the bandwidth, I would go buy out the

the ownership group that frustrated me so that I could run that center system the way that

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I knew how.

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Not because I wanted to own a tutoring franchise.

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Not because I I wanted to be in the world of math.

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My undergrad degree was history all, so totally different deviation.

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But I could not stand watching

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An incredible curriculum and an opportunity to help kids not hate math get smaller than it

needed to be over and over again because the person running it couldn't trust anybody

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else's version but their own.

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That's not bitterness, in at least the standard sense.

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If it were just bitterness, I believe that by now I would have let it go.

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But it's part of again my mission with a little bit of edge to it.

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It's it's a little spite, a whole lot of impact running on the same fuel.

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And so here's where this gets interesting because a few years after that, I was introduced

to the book Multipliers by Liz Wiseman.

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And not very far in, maybe 30, 40 pages, I started thinking about that experience with

that second ownership group, so much so that while I'm reading this thing, I wanted to

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annotate the heck out of it.

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And mail it to them and be like, here's the sticky note.

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This is the place that you need to grow.

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This is the place that you failed.

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This is where you hurt your people.

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This is where you limited yourself.

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And I felt so so and I think all of that came because Wiseman spent so many years

researching what separates leaders who make the people around them.

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Smarter, more capable, versus the leaders who shrink everything they touch.

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And so her entire book is this premise of the first group being multipliers and the second

group being diminishers.

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And the whole thing that's so wild about it is that the diminishers have no idea that

that's what they are.

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They think they're being thorough or they're protecting quality or they believe that they

are the glue that holds everything together and they're the only reason that the system

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works.

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And so what they're actually doing is taking somebody else's ownership and quietly handing

it back to themselves one small correction, micromanagement at a time, until the person

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then stops making an effort.

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They stop thinking for themselves because why bother when they're

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Creativity and their brain power is just going to be overridden, anyways.

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And so the thing that I really was surprised by when I was reading this the first time is

Wiseman's research found that teams led by multipliers were operating at capacity or very

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close to it.

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Teams led by diminishers were accessing less than 50% of what the same people were

actually capable of.

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So literally, same talent, same skills, the only differentiator was the leader.

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The difference wasn't the people, it was whether the person above them trusted what they

could do.

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And that is why these two experiences, these two ownership groups, popped into my head so

vividly during the read.

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Because it wasn't about managing the curriculum, it was about the experience and the

people.

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And so that second group that frustrated me so much, they were literally managing a

comparison.

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Every new hire got measured against one identity, one person, one operating style.

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And the second that you refused to be a copy of her, you became a problem to be corrected

instead of a person to be trusted.

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No matter how good your results were.

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And

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This is why I think this makes this useful, not just a funny story.

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Because it's not about the franchises.

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It's not about the bad bosses.

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It is about a filter that you can run on literally any relationship where one person has

authority over another.

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Whether it's a boss and an employee, a parent and a kid, or you know, how you're leading

people in any experience.

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And so

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I call this the trust tell.

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And it's three steps.

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See it, own it, release it.

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A different mechanism than what I taught you with the feelings audit a couple weeks ago.

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But it's built on the same belief that the block that you're experiencing is not usually

the one that you think it is.

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And you're not gonna be able to move ahead or fix it until you actually look at it

directly.

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Okay, see it.

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The tell is simple.

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When you get handed a task or somebody hands you one, do they also hand you the authority

to solve it your own way, or do you need to solve it their way?

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And that's the whole thing.

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It's not about how many times they check in or whether or not they have their standards

printed on the wall, but it's whether or not they can tolerate a good result that didn't

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come from their exact process.

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So

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Did you get the thing that they needed without following 100% of their playbook?

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That's it.

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Then you can step into the second section, own it.

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And here's the place that I think almost nobody wants to admit about themselves.

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The urge to control somebody else's process instead of trusting their judgment is almost

never about the person's competence.

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It is about you.

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It's about your own fear.

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And it could be fear that if you let them do it differently, it might work, but it's

different than your standard and and or different than the way you would do it.

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And you question what does that say about you?

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Or fear if you aren't the one who has your hands on everything, you become replaceable.

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Fear that a deviation is a crack in a dam that you're not going to be able to catch.

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Rigidity isn't value.

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It's a symptom.

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And the tighter that somebody holds on to something, especially an exact process, the less

sure they usually are that the outcome would survive without it or them.

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And that's where it gets uncomfortable, y'all, because I want you to run this test both

directions.

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Think about somebody who has authority over you right now.

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And think about if they are managing the task or managing you.

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But then also in the flip side, think about the people that you have authority over.

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Is it your team, your kids, a business partner, a virtual assistant?

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I don't care.

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And ask the same question about yourself.

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Because the frustrating truth of it is, most of us have been on both sides of this exact

fear.

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We hate when it's done to us, and yet we turn around and do it to others when we're

scared.

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So I want to challenge you today.

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Release it.

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This is the part that actually can change something.

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If you're on the receiving end of working with a diminisher, you're not gonna fix them.

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Wiseman's research is so clear that most of this is unconscious, meaning that you can't

argue someone out of a fear that they don't know that they have.

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But what you can do is get out from under it.

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And that's what I did by finding a different environment that actually wants my judgment

instead of my obedience.

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But I know that.

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Today, not everybody can leave the second that they see the problem.

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So if you are stuck with a diminisher right now and you're not in a position to change

your environment, to walk away, here's something that I think can help you.

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Instead of asking what they want you to do, ask what the finished result needs to look

like.

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What is their definition of done and get them to say it out loud.

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Then go build it your own way, but bring it back to them in the casing that they were

looking for.

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Their reaction to that single exchange is going to tell you more than you probably

realize.

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If they let the outcome stand, even though the path is different, you found a crack of

trust that you can actually build off of.

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But if they still can't let go and they want every detail, then you haven't fixed, you've

actually gotten real data on whether or not it's worth you staying.

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And on the flip side, if you're the one doing the diminishing, the release here is even

simpler, even though it's probably a harder swallow.

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Stop managing the person.

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Start managing the definition of done.

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Tell somebody what the outcome needs to be, and then let go of the path that they take to

get there.

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That's it.

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If you can transition from

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Managing a person to managing a task, give them a pen and let them go and don't pay

attention to their handwriting, it is gonna feel so different for you.

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And that's why I keep going back to these two gentlemen, these two owners, same

background, same industry, same opportunity, same role for me.

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One ran his business by trusting people he hired to be as good as their part of the job as

he was at his.

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The other one ran his business by trying to clone a person and lost every other talented

person who came after her.

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No matter how good they were, no matter how much they proved, no matter how many results

they got, because they weren't her.

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And the system was never the problem.

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Trust was the problem.

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And it always is.

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Your next right move this week is so simple.

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Pick a relationship and run the trust tell for yourself.

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If you're the one in authority, check, are you managing the outcome or are you managing

the person?

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And if you're honest and a little bit brave, I I guarantee you will know that answer in 10

seconds flat.

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Now, if this is an episode that struck a little something for you, I would very much

appreciate the feedback.

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I'd love it if you hit subscribe wherever you listen, leave a comment or review, and tell

me which side of the trust tell you landed on.

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I'm not asking you to go make it public on socials this week.

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Just tell me where the conversation is happening because the engagement that I get is

helping me more than you realize.

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And I appreciate every single one.

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So that is this week's episode of Big Ideas Made Simple.

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I'll see you next time.

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Thanks for listening.