How Keith Lucas Aligns Personal Purpose with Team Performance

Keith [00:00:00] The search for product market fit is not an academic exercise in your garage. It is starts there with some inspiration when it's getting out there and working with people.

Hector Hello and welcome to another episode of the How to Scale a Business Podcast. My name is Hector Santhe. Esteban, I am your host for today, our special guest, Mr. Keith Lucas. He is the author of Impact, a book about how to do exactly that and make an impact with your life and your business. I'm excited to dig in today.

Hector So Keith, welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you. Happy to be. Take us into your world. we're gonna dive into the book and, all the sorts that, all the things that are in there. But, you've been helping a lot of people and you've sort of made it your mission to, impact people for, for no pun intended.

Hector catch us up on some of the key stops along the way though. And then, we'll dive into a little bit about the.

Keith Yeah, happy to. I, I started my career as an engineer, aerospace, but then software engineer, worked in Silicon Valley for a long time, almost 30 years working [00:01:00] in or with startups in one way or another.

Keith Most notably, I was at Roblox early on for about 10 years. I started as, head of operations, but eventually became chief product officer. Chief Technology Officer I have for the last seven, eight years, been an advisor to startups and that advising and my experiences building teams led to my book Impact, and that's what I do now.

Keith I'm try to help entrepreneurs build teams that can create, innovate, and solve problems over and over again.

Hector I love that. And I'm sure my 7-year-old who's, spent many a an hour on Roblox, is grateful for your work there. when you look back on your time, Are there stories, are there turning points that really made a difference in, cause so, so many people might take what you've done in your experience and ride off to the sunset and say, you know, I'm done Cy, or, go into the, [00:02:00] obscurity if you will. But you sort of taken the opposite approach and you sort of, you know, found a reason to take your experience and take what you've learned and now are sharing that with startups and lots of startups what is it that made you want to take that route?

Keith Oh yeah, that's a great question. it's all a really, to be honest, a sense of giving back. I've been incredibly fortunate in life to be, have met certain people, to have been given certain opportunities, to have the wherewithal to make good on those opportunities. And it's really driven by a sense of helping, I think.

Keith always been a bit of a teacher. In a way it's conform how I've mentored how I've coached, when I've been building teams. But really, I'm motivated every day by helping founders be more successful.

Hector it seems like this, you know, you mentioned [00:03:00] gratitude and a lot of people think that that's just a, an airy fairy sort of concept or that it, it doesn't have any, you know, real practical business application.

Hector In your mind, what do you see as the, sort of the benefits or the, maybe the payoff, for lack of a better term, of bringing gratitude into your life or your business or your organization?

Keith another great question. I'm gonna quote Tony Robbins here, and I happen to, I'm a big fan of Tony Robbins he talks about how life is, whatever you focus on.

Keith And so the very selfish, in a selfish way, the reason for gratitude. That if you are focusing on that, you're focusing on all the things you have and what you should be grateful for. And if you are not, if you're focusing on what you don't have, you're just gonna be miserable. So there's a, a selfish, reason for it.

Keith I think there can also be a, or I know there's a performance reason for it on [00:04:00] teams. one is to always be grateful to the people around you for the work that they do, particularly if you're a leader. I always have made a habit of thanking people for their contributions. I know it always meant a lot to me when I got thanked, and so I always made that a practice.

Keith I think it's motivating. It's just good to be seen doing work and doing good work. I think there's also, a sense that, a team in general that operates from gratitude and has that sense of it, is gonna be more optimistic. And optimism, I've found, is also a key to being entrepreneurial. It's really hard to be a pessimistic, entrepreneurial.

Keith You, you can be, paranoid in a good, healthy way of all the things that could, go against you. So you can. Plan appropriately. But you still mean to be optimistic. And I think gratitude can lead to optimism.

Hector Yeah. I remember one of one time [00:05:00] talking to a team member and she mentioned, she's like, you are the only, she called me a boss.

Hector I don't like think myself as a boss. Like she said, you're the only boss who ever thanked me for my work. And I go, really? for me, to your point, it just seemed like something natural, something I enjoyed. You know, maybe I had good managers or leaders coming up, you know, as, as I was, you know, growing in the business world.

Hector and I, could see the tangible difference in her output, right? I mean, she, she worked harder. she was more attentive. She, and so perhaps some people can see it as this airy fairy thing, but it does result in real, tangible outputs.

Keith absolutely. And if I can build on that, one of the keys to coaching that I talk about in my book is the alignment of personal purpose with the purpose of the role or in the company.

Keith and I can share in a minute a, a personal slurry on that. But when you align these things. You really, you [00:06:00] really build on motivation. When someone identifies, for example, that the work they're doing is not only contributing to the team, it's also helping them grow as an individual.

Keith It's also helping potentially lead to career advancement and other things, maybe other things they want in life. That's. Empowering and, inspiring. And that's also where the connection to a, an inspiring mission that a team has also plays a role in that kind of alignment. So when you thank someone, you are really tapping into that personal motivation, where they're connecting their effort and the impact of the team and getting excited about it.

Hector Yeah. One of my favorite books as I was, you know, getting into business and sort of growing as a leader was called The Purpose Economy and, and sort of talk about how people have different levels of purpose, right? You have [00:07:00] a personal purpose or you, could have a one for yourself. You have a relational purpose, you know, for your team or your family, or even sort of a societal purpose and, and really knowing and understanding.

Hector Our team members or even our organization's purpose at a deeper level, or even just having clarity around that, seems to provide so much for the organization, for the individual, for the team. because it, like you said, it provides that sort of guiding light or sort of a North star that everybody's heading towards.

Keith Exactly. if you're open to it, I'm happy to share a personal story where it made a huge difference in my life. Please do. when I was transitioning from, say, leading, I don't know, a handful of people, the tens of people, and, and it was becoming really, an effort. it's a, a, common transition.

Keith It is actually the transition that my book is about. and when I was doing that, As I said, it was becoming stressful and for me, I was not [00:08:00] operating in the most constructive way. I'm really achievement oriented in sort of a get stuff done way, not in terms of accolades, but just get stuff done and that drive to get stuff done and have a team getting stuff done.

Keith I was fairly intense and that was demoralizing to some people. And so I'm grateful to my boss at the time for getting me a really capable coach who helped me align what my role needed and what the company needed, what, what I wanted. And he, he really got to know me. He really understood what I was about, where I wanted to go in life, what was important to me, and.

Keith What was important to me was leadership. I ultimately wrote a book on it, but it's been really a key thing in my whole life, is just really thinking about leadership and I wanted to be a good leader, and he, he tied [00:09:00] that behavior that was demoralized and he, he cas as an impediment to my own personal goals.

Keith that I was undermining my own progress in life. And the minute he did that, it really was an unlock for me. And it, allowed me to apply that like achievement oriented, done energy to that. So it wasn't about like counting a five or whatever it was just, oh, What would a leader do right now?

Keith And so it really, by aligning my goals. The goals and the role. By pointing out that alignment, it really transformed my leadership and the entire team benefited. So it really had an impact on the entire team's performance, to your point.

Hector it seems like a lot of, well, I think it's new. It's come upon in the last maybe decade plus or so of this, you're talking about, encouraging [00:10:00] purpose.

Hector Being, not necessarily the the task master, right? but sort of the servant leader. and then on the other side there is the, you know, to your point, the no nonsense results oriented get stuff done. perhaps you might put those on, on separate polls or some people might see those as opposites.

Hector You seem to connect the two, it seems like there is a, you know, there is a connection between these things and a startup success. There is a way to bridge that. How does that come together in your mind? Or, or what is that bridge, if you will?

Keith so that really is the, essence of the challenge for a startup leader.

Keith Is you want to drive performance, which are things like focus and urgency and, the pursuit of mastery. But you need to do that in a way that doesn't squash creativity and that doesn't squash problem solving, solving, and it doesn't Squash [00:11:00] intrinsic motivation, which is really a, a Daniel pink, right, somatic and real fuel for effort.

Keith so that really is the challenge is performance and entrepreneurial, creativity. And it's not a balance. It is the way that I think about it. And, and the bridge or the, bridging idea. It can, it's an engineering problem. And, in a system of things that you do. That allow you to drive performance and support creativity.

Keith And at the heart of it just, two simple things is this idea of aligned autonomy, which is having an, some clear things that people aligned to and a way of aligning that is, that, that gets people headed in roughly the same direction without being overbearing. The second part of that equation, to align autonomy [00:12:00] is another idea I call mission athlete.

Keith And this is the profile of people who really thrive and belong on an entrepreneurial team. They're they're mission oriented. They seek growth in their own personal capacity. Like an athlete, they inspire and elevate their peers. They, improve in performance. So if you put those two things together, aligned autonomy and mission athletes, that's really the system that I've described in my book to connect these two of high performance and creativity.

Hector It really, you talk about systems and engineering things, and I think that it, the most successful businesses, organizations, leaders, they do exactly that. They seem to sort of put things in place so that the culture, if you will, sort of, perpetuates these things, that it's something that continues on and is not just coming down from the, leader, but is actually [00:13:00] being embodied by the team members.

Hector what do you find helps in being able to, translate is the word that's coming to me right now, but, but to be able to get that ethos, to get that mindset, from the leader into the rest of the team.

Keith Yeah, so there's a, number of components but I'll, I'll try to give you the high level we can start with something really simple, and this is usually a great starting point when I'm coaching because, it really reveals a lot.

Keith It's also a great starting point for any leader when they're walking into a situation with a team to assess what's going on. And that's three questions. What are we doing? Why are we doing it, and how do we know we're making progress? If you think about the what and the why, that covers a lot. without a clear, what people will, will be unmoored.

Keith They'll be working on all sorts of things [00:14:00] without a clear why. They won't really know how to amplify the what. they'll lack some motivation. And the measurement of making progress is a further refinement in aligning people around some clear goals. So if you are assessing the team, and you can imagine like five people on this team.

Keith If they can't all say what they're doing, or maybe they can, but they don't know why, or maybe they know both of those, but they don't really know how they're measuring progress. You're not gonna have any sort of speed and you're gonna have reduced impact. So when I'm coaching a leader, I, I start with those and that usually will lead into a number of details, but that's, one of the places I start.

Hector Yeah, I think it's so, so helpful for people to have clarity because you, you mentioned that if they don't have that clarity, they don't know where to go. And then to your [00:15:00] point, they're not as motivated to get there. but with those, they can, you know, they can actually do that when we get back from break.

Hector Keith, I'm, I'm curious, we've talked a lot about, you know, what I call general, not general, but timeless strategies, things that, you know, could be that you can. Implement in 2025 and 2035. 2045. I'm curious about some of the specific tactics, that you are, finding, working right now, and also some of the mistakes that a lot of the startups that you're advising are, are making as well.

Hector And so, we're gonna get into that a little bit more, right after this. Quickly. Hey, y'all, today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media, and we are a podcast and content production company. Well, we'd like to think of ourselves as like the fractional media part of it.

Hector The chances are, if you're listen to this, you probably have a product, a passion, a mission, a message, a service, something you're trying to get out to the world, but you might not have the time, the team, the tech skills to tell people about it. That's the case we can help. Go to amplify media.com. That's A-M-P-L-A-F-Y media com.

Hector So check the show note for the link. With that, let's get back to Keith. So, Keith, one of the things that I really enjoy about bringing someone on like you is that you [00:16:00] have a, a larger sample size, of data that you're able to see outside of just one business. And so you're probably able to notice, trends, commonalities, things that are similarities if you will, things that are happening.

Hector And one of the biggest, curiosities that I have are about the, the mistakes that a lot of startups find because. Most oftentimes, people are just out there winging it at if not, you know, at first, and they're, they're just doing what they, think. Is obviously right and a lot of times it takes someone like you who's been around, the block a couple of times to say, Hey, if you, did this or if you adjusted this, you might, see, you know, some much better results.

Hector And oftentimes there small changes or perspective shifts. Are there things that come to mind like that with the, at the startups that you work with, where? You go in and you're like, man, if we just, let's fix this and we'll see, you know, some outsized returns, or if we just adjust this at the start, things will be so much better.

Keith Yeah, there are, and, I'll give you a handful of them. one [00:17:00] common one that, actually comes up a lot is, I'll ask how we can accelerate time to market. and really next time in front of actual users. and I think that makes me so critical in startups to get real world data from real world people about what they're doing.

Keith That the search from product market fit is not. An academic exercise in your garage. It is, starts there, with some inspiration, but it's getting out there and working with people. So one of the most common things I do is come in and I try to accelerate how fast they're moving by maybe making the first release a lot smaller.

Keith And I, I gave one company that advice recently, and it has been really helpful to them. another common one is [00:18:00] that, and it's surprising. I get it. I've been there, but it's, surprising how long companies go without having three simple things, which is a, clear vision of the world they wanna see.

Keith A clear mission of what they're doing next to bring 'em out in that world. And a clear set of values that will determine values or standards of behavior that will determine who will get hired and promoted and exited. And without those just three basic things, there is a lot of ad hocness to the team.

Keith But once you have those three things. It's not the ultimate, but it means it really is a, a leveling up. So that's the second thing. the third thing, one that I'm working with the company now on is this idea that, How to help [00:19:00] companies realize that busy work.

Keith Isn't really the most important thing that is doing fewer things that really matter. Things that feel existential, things that are directly connected with outcomes, things that are really most tied to having a large impact. those matter a lot more than busy work, and it's a trap that I've fallen into and everyone falls into.

Keith I'm doing a lot of busy work. And forgetting what really matters. So those are the like three things that come up a lot.

Hector Yeah. The audiobook that I'm listening to right now is, cow Newport's, I think most recent one's called Slow Work and or Slow Productivity, one of the two. But it talks about exactly that, that we're so caught up in this slack driven world where it's all about, busy, busy, busy and doing, doing, doing that.

Hector It comes oftentimes at the expense of what's actually important. And it sort of leads me to [00:20:00] my, the last thing that I, I'm curious about, or last kind of topic that I, I'd love to get into, and that's sort of the, tactics because startups are, starting up in a environment that is the tech is evolving, the AI is evolving, and the economy and policies, I mean, there's, there's so much, so many things that are moving and, and constantly shifting.

Hector what are you finding is helping. Startups to succeed despite the sort of, rocky waters or the, you know, to all these currents that seem to be going and pushing in all these different ways. How have you found startups to be able to, you know, adjust for things like that?

Keith I'll give you the example of one in particular I'm working with now that's doing a great job.

Keith the first thing they're doing, and, and to be honest, I'm not, I don't have in-depth knowledge of, how they're doing it, but I know that they're doing it. is one or two people working. intensely with AI coding, framework. They're both engineers, but they're using AI to [00:21:00] greatly accelerate how, you know, time to release a prototype, time to release a new feature, and time to release, an entire introductory product.

Keith It has allowed a lot more rapid experimentation, so that one technical thing of leveraging AI and coding can allow a really small team to build stuff very quickly to get that really critical feedback from an outside audience. the other thing they're doing, which is more of a timeless thing. That they are making really, I would say, quick and crisp decisions about adjusting based on what they're learning.

Keith So they started out, with a, a vision, of the world they wanted and, and a mission and a sense of the product they [00:22:00] wanted to build. They built something and it had some initial success, but they realized it was not quite what they were going for. And so they pivoted just a little bit to do something very much aligned, but more powerful.

Keith And it's really exciting the path they're on now. So those two things, you know, something new like, AI coding and something more timeless like iterating. Making decisions and doing an intelligent adjustment to what you're doing. Those two things are really critical and, I think they're really helping this company be successful.

Hector Yeah. It seems like the speed of creation, or let's call it the speed of innovation and then the speed of iteration have accelerated, I don't even know how many fold, I mean, exponentially and it seems like. There is a group of businesses, entrepreneurs who are, playing in those [00:23:00] possibilities and then some that are sort of shutting off from it.

Hector And I'm afraid that too many business owners are not aware of what's possible with sort of the tools in tech, whether it be AI or what, whatever it may be. Because, you know, the things that we can do now weren't possible necessarily a year and a half ago, or, they would've cost.

Hector Four or five, 10 x more and taken, you know, months or years and, and now these same things can be done in days and weeks, a $20 sort of AI subscription. And yes, I think it's impo important for business owners to sort of start opening up to what that might look like because I, I don't think that they're giving it enough credence.

Hector Quite,

Keith yeah. And I think they're, There are exceptions, but I think anywhere where AI touches the people who embrace AI and and leverage it are gonna have a significant advantage over the people who don't. So I completely agree with you on that.

Hector Yeah, I liken it to, we [00:24:00] used to build huts with our hands and now we use cranes and bulldozers.

Hector It's, we're still building houses and we're still, you know, engineering and architecting. But the level of what, what we can create is so much greater because of these tools. And, and I think to not utilize them, like to your point, puts that business at a, a huge disadvantage. As we round out here,

Hector I got two more questions for you, Keith. The first is, if people wanna find about you, about the book, get more involved with what you're doing, where's the best place for people to go?

Keith So the best place is to go to my website, keith v lucas.com, and that you'll learn about me, about my advising, about my book.

Keith You can also follow me on linkedin@kvlucas.com or kv Lucas on LinkedIn. And I post regularly articles and other things from my book and things I'm learning as an advisor.

Hector Great. Follow on LinkedIn for [00:25:00] sure. And, we will link up the book and, and all those websites in the show notes for you listeners as always.

Hector my last question, Keith, is in your opinion, what is the secret to scaling a business? Oh, that

Keith he saved the easiest for last. when, in terms of scaling the team, team, it really is having a foundation of culture, which is a foundation of. a set of behaviors that, are successful on your team.

Keith These are your values and a really crisp and clear idea of the kind of people that, amplify your team, the people you're gonna hire, promote and retain these two factories. The behaviors you create. cultivate and the people you hire and promote and retain, these are foundational to your culture.

Keith Without that foundation, it's hard to scale, but with that foundation, it's a lot easier to scale because you can, create [00:26:00] small groups and you can have a sense of how they'll operate because of that culture.