Summary
In this episode of the Org Design Podcast, the hosts chat with David Henzel, the founder of Love Not Fear and an accomplished entrepreneur with a diverse portfolio of businesses. David shares his journey from being a recovering introvert to a successful leader, emphasizing the transformative power of making decisions out of love rather than fear. He discusses the importance of creating a company culture where employees feel empowered and motivated, leading to increased productivity and satisfaction. David dives into practical strategies for fostering alignment, trust, and motivation within teams, including innovative approaches to organizational design that break down silos and promote collaboration. He introduces exercises such as the lifeline and 3-2-1 to help team members connect on a deeper level, enhancing communication and cooperation. Listeners will gain insight into David's experience with various companies, including Upcoach and TaskDrive, and learn how his philosophy of "Love Not Fear" can be applied to cultivate a thriving organizational culture. This episode is packed with valuable lessons for leaders seeking to create meaningful and impactful work environments.
Show notes
EODF - https://eodf.eu/
Love Not Fear - https://lovenotfear.com/
Where to watch of listen
YouTube - https://youtu.be/d6-7ep1Fs8w
Spotify -
Apple Podcasts -
Transcript
Damian Bramanis: [00:00:00] David Henzel He's the founder of Love Not Fear and I'm looking, right in front of me now, he's wearing a square white pin with a love, a red love heart that says Love Not Fear. And so I'm really excited to learn about the story of Love Not Fear and learn about David's experience with building organizations.
David Henzel: Beautiful. Thank you for having me on the pod. Let me tell you the story, how I found out about love, not fear, or how this came into my life. I've always been entrepreneur and never had a job. But I'm a recovering introvert. I used to be very introverted to the point that if you would have asked me years ago to speak in front of a thousand people or shoot yourself in the face, I would have considered the gun, and I was so introverted, I was had a hard time running a meeting with my own team or being on the call with a customer was like, We're terrifying for me, and a good friend of mine, he was keynote speaking and networking like a crazy person. And I saw how good this was for his business and how much fun he had doing this. I was like, Oh, I want this. But how do you do this being an introverted nerd? nerd? So
So the Toastmasters twice a [00:01:00] week for those who don't know, it's a, it's like public speaking classes. And this helped and also went to two networking events per week. And I talked to everybody and their mother that was there, even though it was like really painful, it's like, okay, next person, and it helped.
But the real transformation happened when my yoga teacher told me that every decision in life you either make out of love or out of fear, it was like this big light bulb moment in my head because I realized that, for example, if I'm public speaking, if I'm full of fear and I'm thinking, do they think I'm What I'm saying is stupid, do they think I look weird to do they think, I have a weird German accent then I can't present because it's about me and I'm full of fear. But if I turn this around and I think like what I'm sharing here can help people in their life or in their business It becomes all of a sudden very easy to do that Same with selling I hated sales with a passion. I always sold out of fear. We are a startup. We have to sell or we die And I've always felt like a used car salesman But once I understood that if I can sell out of love, if I know this product is really good for you, then I can say Hey man, please do [00:02:00] yourself the favor, buy it, it's going to help you so much, and you feel that I'm doing this with love, that I want you to succeed, and not because I want to hit my numbers, or I want to buy a new Porsche or whatever, and this, I can give you, 20 more examples. Actually, let me give you one cause it's org def. I asked at my last company in America, which was MaxCDN, we grew very fast and I asked my assistants to go to each department head and figure out because we, nobody, one department did not know what the other one was doing was like other chaos, and fast growing company. And I ask her to go to each. Team lead and ask them what did they do last week? What their plan doing this week and kind of compile a newsletter and send it out to everybody. And every time she gave me the draft, it was really not good. And so I asked her like, Hey, please sit down. I think you're doing this task out of fear, not love. And she looked at me like WTF what are you talking about?
And I explained if you do this with love, you'd go to each department had really figured out what they did and what they have to say. And you'd compile it in a newsletter that [00:03:00] people, really looking forward to getting good information, make it funny, make it entertainment, entertaining and you also do your best to understand what a CTO had to say because she was not super technical, then you would do it with love, but you're doing this task only because David said this thing has to God at Mondays at 4 PM, and this really clicked with her and never had to correct anything. At some point we had a, video newsletter where she was interviewing people and cutting it in a very cool way, so this is like how I realized how powerful it is to act out of love, not fear, and I do my best to do this in my personal life and in companies, I have a portfolio of companies right now. And we've A little over 500 employees and the idea that I always had is to create a company culture where people do their job out of love and not out of fear and this has been working phenomenally well for us, and I could get, I'm talking too much. I could get into details, but
yeah, details,
Tim Brewer: but Maybe just maybe just quickly, before we dive in, tell us a little bit about the companies that are in the portfolio at the moment. What industries are they in? What do the companies do?
David Henzel: So we [00:04:00] have a marketing agency called shortlist. We like an agency for agencies. They white label us and then they mark it up mainly in the SEO space. We have up coach, which is a software for coaches to run the coaching business better. We have LTV plus, which is a business process, outsourcing business. We have task drive for, we give people virtual assistants. We have AI operators, the latest one we launched. It's a coaching company. It helps companies to make everybody on the team use AI properly. And yeah, a few more, but, and then Love not Fear, which is the umbrella where all those fall under. And this is my, my, my coaching and training company.
Damian Bramanis: I love what you said earlier about love, not fear is the, it's about the mindset or the almost a cultural change. And If two people are working, one, one out of love and one out of fear, even if they're doing the same job and have the same set of instructions it's not only that they perform differently and produce different outcomes, but also that the person who's working out of love comes home feeling very different at the end of the day. [00:05:00] And we know that so much of work is connected to someone's purpose and how they create meaning in life. And I think Love Not Fear really gets to the heart of that.
David Henzel: Yeah, think about the shittiest job you had. You maybe gave 20 percent not to get fired. Like the quiet quitting that's happening. Like 10 employees are quiet quitting. Because they do things that are not meaningful to them with like people that they don't like. And I think if you do something that you, let's get back to the job that you don't like. Maybe you give 20 percent not to get fired. And now if you create this culture where people are excited about doing the work that they're doing, it's meaningful, they see the impact that they're having they work with people that they like, they give 80%, then they give 80%, sometimes 100%, and if you have a team like this you'll win over the competition because it's just, it changes the game
Tim Brewer: We are obviously at an org design conference and we often ask, for the people listening in, how did you end up in org design? You have a very technical background. What was your journey? Into entrepreneurship and would you call yourself an org designer now or are you coming for your own development to [00:06:00] an org design conference? Tell me about how you think about that journey for you and why you gravitate towards org design.
David Henzel: I went to 14 different schools. I got kicked out everywhere and I was not really made for, for the normal world, I guess and A friend of mine said hey, you go put computers How about we start a business together and I found entrepreneurship. This was like, really like, ah, because I People don't tell me what I have to do and I
Damian Bramanis: Angel singing.
David Henzel: Yes, the angel singing
because like school was also school was always based on fear, You know You have to do this or you don't pass. or Etc, etc. So it just didn't buy with me and I was always a a personal development geek and You and just always wanting to improve and tweak things and thinking in systems. I have a condition called aphantasia. Do you know what aphantasia
Damian Bramanis: No, tell us more. I
David Henzel: create images in my head. And I also cannot reproduce, so I can't reproduce images, but I also can't reproduce sounds, tastes, smells, or emotions. So I can have them in the moment, but I cannot recreate it. And hand in hand with this goes SDM, which stands for severely deficient [00:07:00] autobiographical memory. I have a very low res memory because memories are pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, and emotions And so everything in my head is like more logical concepts so that always came comes very naturally to me to build systems and I found EOS like I don't know 10 years ago or so And it was like oh my god all these things that I figured out over the years are like battle tested, proven, and you know I wish I would have had this early in my career.
Damian Bramanis: So some our listeners might not have heard of EOS before. Could you tell us what it means?
David Henzel: Sure.
Damian Bramanis: and what it does?
David Henzel: EOS stands for the entrepreneurial operating system. It helps you to define your mission, vision to how to run proper meetings, how to set proper goals, how to see if the new GWC gets it once has the capability or if people are aligned with your core values, it's like an operating system to make it make your life as a business owner much easier. And I really like it, but I felt a few things are missing in terms of it feels too much like command and control, and I think it's, we evolved it, we tweaked it.
Damian Bramanis: That's really interesting that command and control, sounds a little bit different [00:08:00] to love not fear.
David Henzel: Yeah, yeah yes, exactly.
Damian Bramanis: Tell us about how things have changed from between there.
David Henzel: Let me give an example at up coach, for example, at my company, before we had like very strict roles, for example, the head of product, you have a software company as well as you can probably relate. So before the head of product picked, what are we going to build? And design the design. And then we tell Hey, developer A, you built this developer B, this developer C, you built this, then they go to the dark rooms, program, something, then they come back and then marketing announces to the customer and the customer support deals with the issue. So it's like silo. And so we thought we want to change this. We want to really empower people and that they do meaningful work and they see the impact that they have with the work that they're doing. So we asked everybody and they didn't like it, but we asked them anyway to do customer support, like everybody in the company does customer support because you really want them to understand what are the issues that people having, and we want them to really understand how our software works. And you can only, if you do customer support, you have to know how it works. And then [00:09:00] our head of product did not do deep spec on the what should be built. We create the pool of ideas as just lots of different features can be built and the developers can pick whatever they want to. Build right? Another thing we did is before developers gave estimations. Okay. We are gonna for this feature, I will need like X days to do, but we give them now budgets. We say, this is a small, medium or large. Issue And a small issue has that much time, medium, this much. And it's a small issue. Then it forces them to make faster decisions, but because they know the product, they can make decisions without talking to lots of people. And we also want to really empower them that they're not just a small wheel in the machine, but they actually have decision power. And then I think this is what the real kicker is. We asked them to announce when they ship something, not marketing ships it, they announced it in a user community because then they get the praise for Hey, I just built this and he's dude, this it's amazing, but I also get the direct feedback. Oh, why did you do like this? And why doesn't it do that? And this really changed everything. We had a 300 percent increase in [00:10:00] output from a dev team. Three zero zero like control in a form like people, like what happened? How many people did you hire? How can you ship so much? This is like Christmas, it's, it was really absolute game changing.
Damian Bramanis: It's interesting what you said there, because it's not just software companies, but so many people that we talk to say that there's division in between different teams. There's us versus them, that once an organization gets a big enough size, it, you're trying to, not worry about the customer, but instead to be worried about other teams in your organization and how are you trying to constantly navigate that and the fighting in between departments and what you talked about there is bringing. um, love to that instead of that that team rivalry, which is almost fear based I think it's really fascinating way to to tie in a an organizational design problem that everyone seems to struggle with In a way that approaching it through love can really transform the outcomes that you get also
David Henzel: also with connecting people properly. Like [00:11:00] taking off the mask and be like real humans. So do either the 3 to 1 exercise or the lifeline exercise. The lifeline exercises. You share the highs and lows that you had in your life. Like very vulnerable with the team because then it's not "Mike from marketing and stephanie from accounting". It's mike who also went through depression that stephanie also lost her father when she was young
Damian Bramanis: how would you do that? Is that in a workshop, in a group session
David Henzel: we build a, Like in up coach software, we have a module that you can drag in and this and you can put the points that you had. And then yeah, it's facilitated. We do, 20 minutes. If we do it with leadership teams we do 20 minute presentation per person about their life. And then we do 20 minutes, shared experiences like, oh, I had a drug phase as well. Oh, I lost my father when I was young as well, and This is pure magic what happens, grow men cry like little kids and it's like it's such a deep connection And once you have this connection you build this deep trust inside of an organization We say ATM, alignment, trust and motivation, I think this defines what good culture is because then you're [00:12:00] not afraid, you know, to, it's easy for me to criticize you Because we know each other on a human level, you know Because we're taking off the mask, you ingredients if you want to have a successful all star team, That's, it's a sports element, alignment. We're aligned that we want to win this together, we want to play this game. We agree that this is the game that we want to play. And I know that I know you on a deep level. I know that when I pass the ball to you, that you are going to not, drop it, et cetera, and motivation. I'm, a big believer to share. To do profit sharing with people, so like we are like really aligned, like also have the same motivation was like, "Oh we're on a team together. You get a trophy. You don't get a trophy". Or the story of the, entrepreneur that buys a new car and one employee sees it and he's " Hey, you want to check out my car? Let's and it's Oh, yeah, so cool. Because if you work really hard, maybe in two or three years I can buy another one". I'm, a big fan of sharing
Damian Bramanis: Almost like that's the core ingredients to build to build a healthy [00:13:00] organization, you need alignment first, you need trust first, and you need that motivation as the foundation to build a great organization.
David Henzel: actually Alignment and trust, once this is established, the motivation will automatically fall into place.
Tim Brewer: coming back to org design, so who reports to who, where work is done in the company, how do you approach thinking about that in the different companies that you've started and run?
David Henzel: It's very different because they're very different companies have different business partners or general manager. So it's, it's not like 1, 1, straight structure. I think who reports to whom? I think it's mainly, people being responsible for certain areas. Also we like to create intrepreneurs, people like really own their position and own their life. We also have a program it's called Managing Happiness. It's how to run your life like a successful business to define your mission, vision, and values and goals and habits in the most important areas of your life, like you, yourself, mind, body, spirit, eating right, exercising, all the things that you want to do to be in your a game there. [00:14:00] Then your relationships, like how do you, what's your mission and vision for your community and family? How do you want to show up there? And then also you as a professional, what's the mission and vision there and what you want to accomplish and then take creating that into their plans, et cetera, doing peer groups where you hold each other accountable to do those things. That's the thing to really create people that own what they do and own the position that they hold.
Damian Bramanis: rewinding a couple of minutes, you mentioned two exercises. One was about the lifelines, about the high and the low points, and you mentioned another
David Henzel: oh, the 321.
Damian Bramanis: Yes. Tell us that
David Henzel: is a quicker exercise. It's similar to the lifeline. It's also about taking off the mask and being vulnerable. We asked people to share three events that massively impacted their life, two people that massively impacted life and one decision that they've made that massively impacted your life. It's like the mini version of, the lifeline. We really get to know somebody that that works with you. We just launched love in Greece with a partner company who's our partner. Franchisee, if you want to call it that and we did some 321, and I facilitated one [00:15:00] of the groups was to break out and it was really fascinating how deep people went and like how the energy in the room changed, like after people shared that as a quick exercise, everybody just like five minute preparation, then everybody shares for three to five minutes and it's really magic magic. actually.
Damian Bramanis: And and that's a way to build alignment, trust, and motivation
David Henzel: the trust piece. Like taking off the mask and seeing you for the human being and not like for the role or for the title or for the, it's like it breaks down these barriers.
Damian Bramanis: We we talked about the analogy earlier of the lobster has to grow, but it grows bigger than its shell. And so it has to shed its shell to be able to grow larger. And so that requires a time of vulnerability to be able to grow through that.
David Henzel: Yes, absolutely. I think it's key ingredients to have a better life. Just be vulnerable, be yourself. Also in the hiring process, we like to record a video of the hiring manager who goes over the job posts to explain what is expected but also that the person who interview sees the person that they're [00:16:00] going to work with. And then they can either the drag them and Oh, he or she looks cool. I can see myself working with her. We're like, Oh no, not with that. Do it. So first either dragon or pushback or at MaxCDN, we had a core value, which was built cool shit, our number one core value Because we want to attract engineering nerds who want to build cool shit and want to repel people who want to come to work with a suit and tie on who'd be offended that the company used the word shit in their core values, and I think it's really powerful because same like in, in life, like when I'm on, on a flight or me, anybody, I meet somebody, I just go deep. I don't talk about the weather.
I talk about the real me. And either that goes like the person goes like, that dude's freaking crazy. I want nothing to do with him, which is totally fine. Because then he's not the right person for my life anyway. But if, otherwise, there's people reciprocating it like really drags them in.
Tim Brewer: It's been really good to talk with you about your approach and for the leaders that are listening, which is most with, our audience is predominantly. Like everyday leaders with org design problems. [00:17:00] And it's a really different tact to think about, love, not fear in the way that they approach, both the culture of their organization, how they go about their work, the mission and the structure. So it was really interesting. Really cool. Thank you for coming along to the Org Design Podcast, Damian, thanks for joining and co hosting again today.
Damian Bramanis: And one one last question just before wrapping up if people want to learn more about the things you've talked about today What's the best way for them to be in contact or find out more?
David Henzel: You can always contact me on LinkedIn. And just mentioned, I get lots of requests that are irrelevant, like people want to sell me something. But if you, tell me that you heard me on the Org Design Podcast, or if you want to nerd out about OrgDev, I'm all yours.
Damian Bramanis: Great thank you
David Henzel: Thank you, guys. Thank you for having me.
