Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming so early. So this is about the challenges of building rental stores. So if you're looking for something else, you're in the wrong room. I've got a lot of materials, so I'm going to be going pretty fast. If you get dizzy, raise your hand, ask questions. I'll try to answer them quickly and we'll try to keep some time at the end of the presentation. About me, I was born in the year Drupal 610. I'm Bizon Bleu on Drupal.org. I'm a site builder. I'm a freelance and it all started with HyperCard. Who knows HyperCard here? One individual. Moving on. So the session plan. So basically three parts. The first part is about workflow analysis, buying versus renting. We will see that it's a very different paradigm. After that, we will be looking at the Drupal commerce offering. If you want to create a rental store, what's available, what is there. And we'll also look at a postmortem for a rental store that I did. So we'll have some concrete examples. Just a show of hands. Who is familiar or knows commerce? Okay, most people. And who is a site builder? And programmers? Hardcore people? Alright, moving on. So basically I'm going to be doing this presentation from the perspective of a site builder.  And what I do when I build sites, I usually look at contrib modules first. I do a little bit of coding of course, but I usually try to find available solutions. So workflow analysis, buy versus rent. Buying is the most common e-commerce use case. Essentially, when you go on a website and you want to buy something, you will search, find it, add it to your cart, check out, finish, done. So it's pretty simple. Step one and two, finding and adding to the cart, you know, you can repeat that a number of times and that's usually acceptable. From the point of view of the store, there are a few more considerations. The store is going to want to know what's the product, what attributes, and we will talk a little later on about attributes. In stock, what's the price? Are there attribute price adjustment?  That's an attribute. Are there taxes?  Who's buying? You need to know who's buying, so you will be managing customers and profiles, the payment methods, PayPal, credit card, Bitcoins, anyone. Do I need to send an invoice? What kind of invoice? Is there shipping? So do I need to consider managing fulfillment? Those are all considerations that a buying store needs to look at. Let's look at the renting workflow from the customer's point of view and basically more or less the same steps, but I've highlighted in red what's specific to rental. You will search and find a product and then you will have to select a rental period. So if you rent a lawnmower or whatever, how long do you want it for?  So that's something that you need to consider. You add it to the cart, you check out, and then of course there's the pickup. You need to pick up the lawnmower, whatever, and you need to return it. That's the customer's point of view. So not so common and more or less we can see that there are roughly twice as many steps as our simple buying workflow. From the store's perspective, it gets a little more complicated. Again in red, what's different, the rental period. So what are the time units? Is there a start date? Is there a name date? What about availability? If I have four lawnmowers in my store, do I have one available for you or something like that? And the booking system, the inventory, that's all, those are all considerations. And I've put two stars to some of those elements because they are more complicated and more challenging if you want. There will be rental period price adjustments of course because if you rent something for a weekend, there's a price for that. What if you rent it for two weeks or two months? The price will vary according to that also. Moving on, five, six, payment method. I've added the internal budget codes because the use case that I will be presenting is basically an internet. So there was no payment but they needed budget code so they needed to be able to add a whole bunch of tools to the cart and then pay with an internal budget code. So that might be a consideration. And of course the pickup and the return is a little more complicated from the store's perspective because I need to check that the lawnmower that you're going to go away with is functional before I hand it over. And the return is again, I have to receive, check the product, other penalties, final invoice. So it's just the issues or the considerations keep piling up. So renting can be, there's a lot more to renting than you might think. Other important consideration, adding products to the cart one item at a time usually works but it may not cut it. A bulk at the cart functionality may be essential in your case and we will see that later depending on the size of orders. A proper booking system for automatically managing inventory is an important consideration. Can anyone think of more considerations about rental stores? Things that you would have to consider by recurring rentals, that's possible. Membership, what if I'm renting videos, not necessarily movies but what about teaching videos and stuff like that. So that might be membership, I might have to consider memberships and I might have to consider user accounts and more. So there's a lot of things there. So summing up, the first part which is the workflow analysis, renting is not like buying definitely. The back end requirements do get very rapidly complex. Sure it's like buying, there's a cart and there's a checkout process but there's a lot more to it. It's like the tip of the iceberg. Alright so now that we have a basic sense of the difference between buying and renting, what can I find on Drupal? So basically if you do a quick search with keywords Drupal, 708, e-commerce and rental, you will find some interesting results. Presto comes up pretty quickly. Presto is a distribution, so it's a Drupal 8 e-commerce 2.x distribution.  So basically if you want to quickly start playing with a fully functional e-commerce site, Presto is the way to go. You can install it on simplytest.me but it has no store. So you will only see what it looks like but you won't be able to play with the store. So if you want to play with Presto you can have to install it with Composer. That's the only way. So everyone comfortable with Composer? I wasn't so it took me a while. There's also Easy Booking. Easy Booking is a distribution but it's for D7. And it's basically geared towards bed and breakfast, Airbnb, hotel room management so it's pretty cool. And Easy Booking uses the rooms module which is pretty useful also. And finally, BAT. BAT is a module which is wrapped around a PHP library and it's a booking and availability management tool. So it would allow me in my rental store for example to be able to know which lawnmower is out when it's coming back etc. So searching on Google you do find things but not so easy. What about on Drupal.org? Drupal.org I did some just for fun but I did some searches and if you search with the keyword commerce you get 1600 modules, 27 distribution, 47.x. Of course it falls dramatically for Drupal 8. Drupal 8 represents about 13% of the offering of whatever content available regarding commerce. What if we refine to stable release? Again, the modules for Drupal 7 there's quite a few of them, distribution also. But if you go to Drupal 8 then it falls down to basically next to nothing. Drupal 8 represents 8% of the offering. Of course that's understandable. Drupal 8 is, although it's more than a year old, it's taking a lot more time to mature. It's much bigger. It has a lot of new technologies into it.  You won't get anywhere. You'll be using a lot of dev versions. Of course, Google commerce 2.x just was released recently as a release candidate one. Make sure you take time to read the project page of the module, of the distributions, explore the issue queues. There's a basic stuff but if you don't do your homework you're going to get hurt. Again, just as a reminder, when you look at the Drupal core release, Drupal 837, the next patch release of Drupal 8 blah blah blah, and if you need stability and features from the widest variety, Drupal 7.  If you're really keen or you have a client that has deep pockets and a patch on the shoulder saying, don't worry kid, we're a big company, then maybe you want to go to Drupal 8, as long as you have enough time to learn all the stuff. This is just again a quick look to play commerce 2.x releases. I just did that for my own kind of, okay, so just give me a sense of where I stand. This was before release candidate one but it gives you an idea of what's happening. The D8 installs of commerce represent 1.3% of the 65,000 commerce installs. And this is what commerce looks like. July 2014 was commerce 2.x, the very first release of the dev. It reached 60,000 installs a year later and it basically peaked at about 72,000 last year. So that's commerce. As comparison commerce kickstart which is great for Drupal 7 because it's a fully functional distribution that a lot of people are using to start commerce shops. It has peaked two years ago and it's peaked more or less coincides with the Drupal 8 development ramping up. So it's kind of going down now because it's getting less input from the folks at commerce guys. It's like a lot of the developers have migrated from kickstart to, of course, Drupal 8. So that's the basic what's available commerce-wise. So let's look at this post-mortem. So this is a real life time. The objective was to create a commerce kickstart to better manage equipment rental internally. So this is an intranet thing and it's for a multinational. So basically they have many, many, many, many productions and they have an internal store where they rent all the tools, the stage stuff. And they were doing that on Excel sheet so they figured maybe we should move to something else. The implicit objective maybe from my perspective was to make Drupal commerce do something that is not really made for out of the box. So the main project task of course import a thousand products using CSVs plus the images. To implement a rental pricing scheme, not much information exists about that so we had to kind of sit down, draw and figure it out. And also they really wanted to implement a one-click bulk at the cart. For them it made no sense not to have that because they have orders of 60, 80, 90 items. They don't want to do that one item at a time. What I mean by that is I don't mean 10 quantities of product A. What I mean is product A, product B, product C. They have like 60, 90, you know, others. We'll see a little more about that. So importing the 1000 products of course everyone is probably familiar with commerce feeds and feed stampers. Everyone familiar with those modules? You will need to import twice because this is a Drupal 7 project of course. You will need to import twice because the first import you create the product entities, the Drupal commerce product entities. The second import you create the product displays which are nodes. And a node can have 3, 4, 5, 6 product entities. So the entities, the product entities need to exist first before we create the product displays. And that's what this says. Pre-requisites. Of course there are pre-requisites. If you're going to import you need your product types, right? And you need your product displays. And you need CSV files too for creating both entities. And the CSV files is, how do you say Pierre Angulat? It's the cornerstone of your project.  So you know, I would say when the client says, oh here's a very clean file. Look at this. Two days later you're going to have a clean file. So make sure that the CSV file that you get is properly suited, is properly cleaned up. So what's, and we're going to go right now quickly to some basics. But what's a product type? Well the product type is the same idea as the content type. It's a template to create specific products. There are physical products. There are digital products. Of course t-shirts, books, tools, cars, those are all physical products. In the store that I'm talking about we had I think nine or ten different product types. And the reason for that is because different products need different fields to be able to define them if you want. And also almost at the end of the project the client said, oh yeah, by the way, can we also make them purchase the product? So I needed some product type that would be rent only and I needed some product type that would purchase also. And digital downloads are good examples of digital products that you might sell. Membership, tickets, rolls, whatever, events also. The type of fields that you find on a product type are of course skew, title, price, status, images, and attributes. Attributes are very important and we'll talk more about that. Created products are all, nomenclature in commerce1.x is a bit confusing. And when you move to 2.x some things have changed names so it's more confusing but it's, yes. I was just wondering, do you have any tools that help import these products that you use for people? Yes, I just spoke about that. It's feeds, commerce feeds. And we'll see, I'm going to show a little example of how this is done. So product variations, commerce product entities, those are back store entities. By that I mean customers usually don't see products or say product entities. Alright, so importing the products, the prerequisite was a product display. A product display is almost just another content type. It's a template again. But it has one difference, it has a product reference field. So any content type, if you add a product reference field to it becomes all of a sudden a product display. There are also nodes at product display node, product reference node, product display entities. So this kind of mix of language is at one point it gets confusing. And of course the product display is the front store, it's the user facing entity. And here's a little bit of graphic of how this looks. On the left we have the store, on the right we have the back store. So on the left the store that's the product display. That's also what I call the parent entity. The parent entity because you need the product display which is a node to house the product entities themselves. Which are the product variations. So you have a name, an image, a body, a description. Be careful because the description here applies to all your variations. So if you need a description which is specific to a product entity you're going to have to create a field at the product level and rig it in. Like let's say product specs. So product specs would be at the product level and it would show in the node display. But it would be different for every, or it could be different for every variation. Is that clear? Okay, importing products, prerequisites. So you need a good CSV file.  It's your ticket to bulk create everything. Product variations must have a unique SKU. That's one of the... So when you create your commerce product entities the unique identifier is the SKU. So you need a SKU for every entry. The preferred price for Drupal commerce at least in 1.x is what they call raw minor units. So the price that you will put in your CSV is not 9.99 but rather 999. Okay, we'll see an example of that. And again, you will need those two CSV files because you first create your product entity and then you create the product display node. So here's what it looks like. So the first... At the top of the page what we see is the first CSV that allows me to create the various product variations. So we have a number of columns here. We have the SKU category, subcategory, name, price. Notice that the price which is here... Can I do a select? Which is 137.150. So that's in raw minor units. Also we have price. We have rental price. We have length. And we can have any number of attributes. Of course you can also import images. And if you import images you want the path to the image. Yes? How do you determine the SKU? Okay, so SKU basically... It's up to you. There's no module that will create SKUs automatically for you. Although some things exist. But basically your SKU needs to tell you what's the product and it needs to tell you what are the attributes. So if I only have one attribute which is 4, 5, 8 and 10 feet it needs to be reflected in your SKU. If it's not reflected in your SKU how can you tell the difference in your store between like the 4 feet whatever range and the 10 feet range? There's no way to do it. So basically for every attribute you need a specific SKU. So for t-shirts if I have size and color as attributes then I need something like maybe TS and then some kind of short code for the colors and a short code for the size. That's the only way to...  Again, don't spend some time really looking at how you want to describe your product with SKUs because once all your products are in it's kind of difficult to change all your SKUs. You can get all SKUs up. Okay so that's the top part. And the second CSV file it's basically the same information. The only difference is because here I will be creating node product displays all the product variations that belong to the product display appear here in the common separated list. So that way when the node is created these product entities will be added to the node automatically. So that's why you need those two files. Question? All good? Implementing the rental pricing scheme. This raises of course many questions. How do products and attributes play affect one another? What are attributes? What's a good attribute? What's a bad attribute? There are skewable attributes and non skewable attributes. So size and color are skewable attributes. But what if I rent a t-shirt? Do I need a separate skew if I rent it for one day or if I rent it for a week? Maybe not. So you need to consider that and of course depending on the use case this will vary and the big question was should I create a standard attribute to handle a rental pricing scheme? Of course this will require some thinking. Again just like SKU you need to sit down you need to you know pay per pen stuff do some models make sure that you have a good understanding of your product model, your attributes, the price calculations. I always like to think that a little paper R&D goes a long way so you know don't be shy. In hindsight keep it as simple as you can. Don't get fancy. If you start getting fancy it's going to bite you back at one point. So about attributes I think I can skip through this because I basically said anything but basically if you walk into a store and you say I want a beautiful and original t-shirt just for me I mean there's no attributes for that right? So someone's going to come and say okay what's your size what's your preferred color, yes? You were just saying don't get too fancy I was just wondering if you can give an example. That's a good question. The answer is coming I think. So I'll skip through this because we've got some more interesting stuff coming. Right size, color, those are both important attributes for a t-shirt. Remember attributes can affect pricing they don't have to but they can. Color has no effect but size usually will. Each attribute again requires a unique skew which is mostly true 99.9% of the time I would say especially if you need to manage inventory. So I didn't have my shop it was not a t-shirt shop it was a tool shop so length is a reasonable rope if we have a rope product then length is a reasonable attribute it's going to affect price right? 100 feet is different than 500 feet. If we have five options of length that means I have to create five product variations then I will have five skews that relate to the rope right? Oh what if I throw width in there? That's also a reasonable attribute again you know 1.16 of an inch versus 3.8 has a different cost so it was more so if we need three widths that means I'll end up with 15 product variations because I have five length, three width and if you had 10 load capacities then you're at 150 so beware of combination of attributes they can quickly spiral out of control so that's one answer to the question can you give me an example of stay simple beware of multiplying attributes try to bring things okay so for the pricing scheme basically this meant because we did discuss can we have different pricing scheme depending on context, product and quickly we said no no no no we need one single pricing scheme for every product it has to be a simple formula and there has to be no exceptions so this was a discussion with the client and the client understood that okay maybe he wouldn't get the exact price he would like on the different objects so he would have to adapt to a formula that we came up with and that was close to most of his request but not exactly dead on so here's what we came up with basically on the left that's what the client needed so there was a base price so the one day is your base price so and it will be very useful later on you'll see and then a week, 15 days, a month and they also added purchase at the end so we needed some kind of formula that can account for all that and on the right you see the key value pair that ended up in the field so it's basically but we will look at that so the simple formula was to okay can we have a unit price start with a unit price and we kick in some kind of operator is it plus, minus, is it a percent, blah blah blah we need a factor and then this will give us the final price this is what we came up with so if you have a unit price of $1 and the operator is multiply then the key in the key value pair for one day one day is one so you stay at the one day price and after that it was 3.5 for a week 10.5 for a month all the way to to $195 for purchase so basically we looked at all the prices of every product and we found the best way to fit their prices and the $195 for a purchase is there's no exception so the client really had to to really figure the unit price very precisely so that things would work out in the end but this was a big savior I mean just having the client say okay I can live with prices that are slightly different from what I want just to get that single yes I see that the formula that you have there is like multiplying could you do something like using a rate like if you had specific prices for types of products you know what I mean could you use an array that has absolute values I guess you could do you know what I'm getting at right? yeah you could do anything you want like a factor like having it linked to an array that has prices associated yeah you could do that I mean again my perspective was from a site builder's point of view what's available what modules can I go get start using that will make this work with no coding almost it could be but you would have to write the module right which is fine you know but you would have to write the module there's no module that no I mean there's very little as far as renting because it's not a very common use case thank you you could use rules yeah you could do that I was looking for again existing modules see how they could work you know like you find a solution and then someone says hey you could do that too you could probably do it maybe it would have implications so kind of there are many ways you know Drupal is there's 50 ways there's 50 ways to do the same project is that specifically just for rentals no but this is adapted to a rental use case so remember the question should the rental period be a standard attribute the short answer is are you out of your mind because we you know remember that rope you know five length three width and if we have 10 options in the rental period that means that all of a sudden I have to create 150 product variations from my little room you know and that's one product out of a thousand so makes no sense and no sense also yeah just doesn't make any sense so we had to find another way and this implementation is one solution so if you look to do this something like this in D7 right now you can do this using three modules you need commerce product option which allows you to create option sets and these are non skewable attribute it's basically a non skewable attribute you it has a dependency and then you need commerce pricing attribute basically the choice of operator it comes from commerce pricing attribute you know you could use a plus if you want a percent also I use the multiply and works pretty good in the end sorry so that's the that's what exists now and works the only issue is that since the store was launched a commerce pricing attribute is now declared obsolete although it's being used by 1500, 1600 people it is declared obsolete and the two other modules are not seeing a lot of development so you could say it's fragile or you could say it's there, it's working every new commerce update does not break it finding another solution would probably make a lot of sense this is another solution which was essentially suggested and introduced as a best practice like two years later it doesn't use any contrib module and basically instead of using those three modules we simply add a field to the line item type with the options that we want and it works it works for Drupal 7 works for Drupal 8 I tried it in Drupal 8 and you can see it in Drupal 7 all you need after that is a pricing rule at a pricing rule and you get what you want in Drupal 8 there's some development required there's nothing available off the shelf if you want to it doesn't work with a rule well it doesn't work with a rule in Drupal 8 rule is kind of behind in development it's not really available or it's only partly available so let's have a quick look this is the D7 store so it's exactly the way you saw it so okay the only thing that you're seeing here extra is this is a bolt at the cart form and the way this works so I can filter my products look for I guess it doesn't matter but basically you see the rental period here is this requires an integration but it's there so I could say okay give me this for a month you see the price changes and I can say give me four of those let's go find something else so I'm going to find something here I need this for 120 days the price has changed and give me 50 of those alright so we can go on and on and on so barring any big issues look at our cart now see so we have this stage automation show control we've got four and the price here is a per month price and we've got these sensors which cost 47 46 per 120 days and we've got 50 of those so it works pretty good looking at Drupal 8 so Drupal 8 I'm not sure I would do a store in Drupal 8 but so I created this Drupal 8 it's pretty basic and I created the rope that we spoke about and so we do have those two attributes that works in the same way so what about the rental period so the rental period is here line item types 14 order line types order item order item thank you so it's a little more so what I want to do is so I created a field rental period in here and I can manage its display in cart right here save that go back to my product see now we have the rental period and it works does it work so what doesn't work at this time in Drupal 8 is it affecting price so this works but if I do this for 60 90 days fine and if I look at my cart so I do see right that's a previous so I do see the rope I do see the price I do see the rental period but the rental period here has no effect yet on the price because I did not go that far it would need some coding or maybe rules could help us doing that so just quickly because time flies go back here does Drupal 8 have the same product display versus product entity in functioning with Drupal yes but more and more they are hiding the product display because it's the products that they are more and more hiding because when you go into your product display well because of inline entity form you do all your stuff so it's a little clearer they are trying to that's correct but the product entity still exists and the product display still exists so we spoke about that moving on so we did see this order we did speak about the so we did see the bulk at the cart function for five products it's relatively easy to go okay find them add them to the cart but of course when the order has 60 or more lines it just takes 30 minutes of your time at the bulk at the cart is great and the module that does that is commerce at the cart extras so what this module does it does everything except the rental period column is a custom integration so basically you have to create a custom handler and views and then tie that field to the other field in D7 because we're using commerce option it's an option set so we need to tie up to this option set the new way that I'm looking at doing this so removing commerce option commerce pressing attribute putting the field on the line item then you still require the handler and views but now you connect to the line item field instead of the other one but the nice thing about that is that after doing that you get rid of three modules which are which are making your store fragile if you want summing up so we've seen how the integration of the rental period works watch out for attributes I did mention that use the same rental period for all your products and stick with that and defend it in the face of your client or or make and buy you a time bank just for doing some fun stuff the integration of the bulk at the card farm farm form some coding is required the integration that you saw is a custom integration so it's not available as a module we have not looked at booking systems the most promising project from my perspective in D7 is the BAT project so I invite you to have a look at that the rooms project offers a basic booking management for rooms so you could look at the rooms module and adapt it to your use case if you want but some code of course is required some already and we are at the question period alright that's about it maybe I'll just do a quick it's 9.54 I'll show you the Presto so this is Presto the Drupal 8 commerce 2.x distribution it comes with a bootstrap team it's very very basic I created some dummy articles it has products and they created physical products and digital products so I can whatever give me two of those let's see if it works should check the card there you go it's pretty nice this is probably your quickest ticket to playing with Drupal 8 commerce 2.x if again your machine is set up with Composer then it's just a question of installing it did I run into some issues you need PHP 5.6 above and another maybe hint is if you install commerce 2.x on Pantheon beware of one thing because commerce 2.x installation via Composer brings in some some of the packages have hidden git directories and hidden Travis directories and others and if you don't remove those before committing and pushing them to Pantheon your Pantheon side will boot so that's the only but otherwise works really nice so question is there a replacement for commerce kickstart or is there a 2.x version of kickstart there's no version of commerce kickstart and reading the various comments by the folks from commerce guys I would be surprised to see a commerce kickstart anytime soon because commerce is there's so much more work still to be done that they're not going to spend some time doing that so is Presto done by someone else it's an individual who's done it so it's pretty good there's a commerce base on kit hub it's also kind of like a distribution it has some stuff that's sort of a commerce that's for base no more questions this is good thank you


Now as we launch into the nonprofit show, so grateful to have Juan Kingsbury here, founder and talent strategist with Career Blind Spot, and he's gonna tell us a little bit more about that in particular when it comes to performance harmony and why good teams might get out of tune. So stay with us, we want to start every episode and we do start every episode by saying thank you, thank you, thank you to our presenting sponsors. Each and every one of these companies are here for your greater good. So lean into them because they have poured into you, they are in your corner and they exist across the globe to help you do more good. Thanks to Julia Patrick who is not here today because she has another commitment with another presentation but Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm your nonprofit nerd, Jarrett Ransom and really excited again to have Juan with us. First of all, welcome from the bottom of my heart, so excited. So welcome to the show, thanks so much for being here. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Career Blind Spot and what we can expect for today's conversation. Yeah, the micro version, if anyone's ever taken a personality assessment and I use that term loosely, that's where I got my background using the disc assessment and many others, emotional intelligence. And then about nine years ago, I set out on my own if I do another one of these, I'll maybe tell more of the raw story but angrily because I was like, hey, it's one thing to use these but another thing to apply them regularly and a lot of it's one and done, it's a nice to have. But also I didn't know what I was doing in terms of business. So I was a subject matter expert in these tools but I angrily left and started my own business. Now I still have good relationship with the past jobs I sell their product but what I started to find was it's one thing to get results and a lot of jerks and mean people, bad bosses, sometimes don't get the credit where they still get results, they move the widget, abusing people or whatever but I was like, it still counts. It's another thing to care about people. To do both is really hard and that's why I was really excited and when you reached out because I was like, I think nonprofits we tend to focus on the carry but one of the reasons I liked you from our copy conversation when we first met was well results still insert whatever expletive you like really matters. And so to do both, I was like I wanna work with more leaders like that and now there's a mixed bag there but that's what career blind spot sometimes people think it's career coaching which I can do some I have but really it's more about a leader who like you have a blind spot if you're hiring this person and the job's gonna change even if you had the best job ever even if your nonprofit was fantastic last year some things may have changed since then. And so just like in our car we have these mirrors it's not a one and done Hey, I checked my passenger and I'm done it's an ongoing thing. So that's a career blind spots about I use those same tools team building leadership development coaching development and that's the gist of it. I love it. So here's Juan's website career blind spot pardon me.com I'm very active on LinkedIn as well. So let's get into what is performance harmony? So I've never actually heard these two words performance harmony put together so I'm curious to learn myself. That's good. I think that I talked with the branding friend and we kind of made it up. I also realized it's what I realized everyone wants it's a little squishy touchy feely but here's the other side of it.  That performance harmony is what you really want. You want, I was just Rodney King years ago said can't we all just get along and have context stuff matters but that's what happens when people are doing their role what you expect of them there's a level of trust but like we don't have to be friends but the performance move the needle, et cetera needs to happen and usually things are out of whack not terrible but like I don't know how old our audience is but we have a record player and I play with it sometimes because you can- What is that? Yeah, exactly. We're young and hip but you can sometimes hear songs off because the record's spinning too fast but it could be slightly off and so, you know, harmony is hitting that flow state from a team which I think is a lofty goal but anyway, performance harmony is what I realized it's what every leader altruistic, Brené Brown vulnerable person really is striving for but really what every bad boss also wants to I can't just do their damn job and what I realized is that's the goal that's the real summit that we're trying to hit but what it takes to get there not too complicated but easier said than done so that's the, if we're playing Candyland that's the major milestone that I'm trying to get any leader to realize this is what you really want but here's what it's gonna take. Juan, I think you're a badass I mean, that's what you said after you first met me and I think maybe that's why we really got along and so talk to us here as we talk about role, objectivity what does that mean? Yeah, and I just had this I broke down this on my own podcast careerblindspot.com or careerblindspot.com podcast but you can check that out on the website and I also, in the context of pharmacy just spoke for AZPA a couple months ago so I'm gonna put a little spin of non-profit now I'm not the non-profit expert hence my... No, but you could be a nerd too you just need that when it's your birthday I should I'm getting new glasses I might have to use it Yeah, I'll send you a pair but regardless if it's a non-profit, a for-profit a sports team, a bunch of Boy Scouts whatever it is any group is trying to accomplish something that usually requires people that usually requires certain amount of resources and or money so we're all really trying to do the same thing role objectivity is kind of step number one we don't hire people to tap their full potential or make them happy in the workplace anyway we hire them because we need a job to be done there's an objective of the role that's where I wanted to break it down so it literally means what is the objective of your role so is that in the job description like where would you find that? Yeah, it is and usually and I don't wanna get too harsh here but if you like the badass I'll keep going with it you can tell me down boy but usually it becomes a needle in the haystack of a job description and even leaders and the most dedicated people sometimes they're the worst at missing the point of actually I'm hiring this executive assistant or this business developer I need this main thing to happen there's all this stuff that goes there but I need to cure cancer getting an degree all these things matter but if we don't make a dent in this universe or the metric, the widget move we have a problem and so that's where most not just people but the people in charge of leaders we're unclear what is the most important thing like think about like a babysitter you well, you know we might want our babysitter to have our kids in bed by nine or teach them Chinese I don't know something but most parents are like just don't let them die or something like that Yeah, keep them alive that is your role, objectivity keep them alive Exactly, but if you're like a teacher or I'm sorry if you're hiring a tutor that objective, yeah keep them alive but it's also like they gotta pass math or whatever it is so role objectivity is everyone probably when things are out of tune everyone has a different finish line it's kind of like, hey you and I want to go on vacation to the beach well, you want to go to San Diego I want to go to Los Angeles pretty close, right maybe if we're really trying to go together and land the plane or launch so role objectivity is the most pragmatic and it's really simple not notice it's not objectivities it's one thing and I'm not saying there's other things that aren't involved but if you're not clear on that one thing then the rest of the job description can become this busy complicated convoluted mess and the other part going back to 2020 things change that one thing sometimes or maybe it's the same finish line but now we have a detour so if you want your team in harmony or if they're out of harmony and they're not doing their jam jobs that's where I always start is what's the point of their job and very often the person doing their job is has a very different that I'm going to LA but my boss wants me to go to San Diego close enough, right yeah, yeah so I have a question especially when it comes to nonprofits because we exist for a mission, right so is our mission that role objectivity like let's say that it is to eradicate hunger isn't that everyone's role objectivity or am I off? that's a great question and this is, I would gladly for people to tell me no but for instance, it's my topic it is important that the nonprofit is clear on like how are we trying to do that? eradicate hunger, that's a big hairy audacious goal and I get the reach should exceed the grass but if you're not clear on are we trying to go to LA or are we trying to get to the moon? okay then it's this big big thing world peace okay, that doesn't sound terrible but here's the reality you have volunteers or do you have people who actually you're paying money if I'm paying money to someone I want them to get the one thing done and right now a little off center but keep me interesting I just came from a natural path which is different than covered insurance like that stuff better work or at least I better be fooled so yes, the organization should be clear on that objective because that's everyone coming along but every time you hire a especially if you're paying them money but even a volunteer you gotta know like it's like what think of a band you know are they playing the triangle they train the two but they need to know the specific thing and if you're unclear if you're just expecting them for their goodwill right that's gonna burn out it's not gonna work yeah I love your passion it's definitely coming through so move us into individual empathy I'm curious what this means for you here yeah and actually I'll go back because they're all together but I'll give you an example even though I like to do my own yard work imagine if I or you have ever hired someone to mow your lawn but they're like well but I really love painting cool but I only want my grass mode that's role objectivity you have to be clear on that person that you're expecting to do an awesome job what is that what's the A plus what's the C minus or the passing grade individual empathy is like oh I got someone who's like a natural artist and they're awesome and the reason they're mowing lawns is they're trying to pay for art school or trying to fund their materials empathy that's another term that I think we all have or that we all are capable of but most of us really only as they suck at doing it but we underestimate at how daunting it is to be empathetic a little silly here but anytime someone cuts me off I live in downtown Phoenix it's easy to get mad but I just tell myself well they have diarrhea was making up on my head but I'm like it doesn't make sense to be angry at everyone but individual empathy going back to the workplace nonprofit is not treating everyone the same unless it's that you're actually trying to think that they're different people that they individually you're taking time really it's a redundant phrase empathy is unique custom but it's really like you have this team and maybe all of your team are doing great except you got one squeaky wheel you got one toxic maybe one germ burnt out person well are you making excuses and pointing your finger or are you actually thinking hey it's a single mom or this is a dad who blah blah blah or this is a single person who you know is not where they were they thought they'd be in later in life it's not your job to play therapist but if it's their job to make all the sales calls and they're not doing it it's to really think well who do I have here are they even cut out for it do they want to do this you know can I actually coach them is it salvageable but it's stopping and thinking like the role of activity is the most cold objective thing individual empathy is the most subjective thing is subjective right and I guess for that I would fall into are we being empathetic are we enabling the victim mentality yes yes and it's here's the thing it's not being nice the individual empathy isn't being nice and polite and in fact if you have someone that I say hey how would any time this happens in the workplace hey how is so and so oh they're nice that immediately is oh so and so doesn't carry their weight as opposed to oh they're a jerk and they I'm like oh they probably still do something but maybe they're rough around the edges they're nice it's kind of like saying hey I love you like a brother or a sister you know you don't really want to hear that but again if you're the conductor you're the person in charge you want your team to do their job you got to look like why isn't this person or is it what is it going to take for them to do a good job why did they come everyone comes for a paycheck everyone goes to work for money happy people go to work for a different thing it's not my belief your boss's job to make you happy but if you're a smart boss you at least try to make them less miserable but they need to do the job first and so it's a chicken and the egg sort of thing and is that where peer respect comes into because I'm feeling like all of this really like kind of flows together yes it's really a it's a Russian nesting dolls you know what those are yes you take one off and another one's in there and you just it's like the same thing and so my industry team development coaching EQ is based off of a lack of peer respect and most people won't admit I don't respect Jared or one but it is usually not I don't have an issue personally with her it's the job that you do or I think you should be doing and so this is the reverse order most people are complaining about most leaders are like they just won't get along or they don't blah blah blah and so what I realize is oh the problem is that smaller nesting doll all the time that someone either doesn't understand or isn't clear on their job or someone else's job because let's say Jared you're you're a badass with your job you do your role but I'm me and you aren't getting along and basically it comes down to that I'm not doing my role really well and no one's taking the time to say hey Juan you know you're nice but blah blah blah peer respect and this might be harsher words but basically you have a lack of respect for me or I have a lack of respect for like wow you're really carrying your weight you're awesome I'm not carrying my weight and so I go back to sports I don't like to make too many sports analogies but they don't have to be friends they do oh my gosh yes trust each other and so peer respect is around it's about almost peer slash role respect and a lot of us don't trust our peers as you say when it's uncomfortable when it's out of harmony we don't trust each other and sometimes we're wrong maybe you think my job should be up here but really you know I like going back to pharmacists pharmacists make good money pharmacy techs make different money and that's not wrong but it's like hey realize they see you up here you know they're here like are you guys trusting of those roles or is there some tension sure wow so I'm curious did you what sports did you play I I grew up playing baseball because my mom loved it and rebelling I end up becoming an umpire to make some side money during college I was just so boring for me I could play but I just didn't love it but basketball I loved basketball and that was my main one was basketball yeah well I love the sports analogy and my co-host of course Julia Patrick she also loves sports and often brings in sports analogies but I love what you said and how you related it to sports because as a soccer player I grew up as a soccer player um and also I've coached right and so it's really about we don't have to get along on the team you know like we don't have to get along on the team but our end goal is this so we need to work together for this end goal and I see that often and I'm curious one if you could talk to us about how you know maybe even um with a with a pandemic the COVID pandemic you know how have you seen the ship with all of your topics that you've talked about today what have you seen really in the workforce that the the people who are considered bad bosses or this or or like not the the admirable leaders but their employees are still being paid are severely under credited with being clear on role objectivity that hey we have a job to do and we can still pay you or provide insurance or whatever that they don't get the credit however but the people who really do the individual empathy and hold people accountable like I love it and this is unfortunate but I love it when someone gets fired or actually let go but in the most respectful, honest and early way okay we hired you because of this this and it doesn't seem like you can do it and so we really want this to work but here's what we're gonna do we're gonna give you you know two weeks notice or a month we're gonna that doesn't happen very often but what that tells me is that's a leader who is focused on the business but also treating someone like it's holding people accountable I keep starting to say this phrase not to open a different topic but like fire your if your medical provider isn't helping you out like you can go somewhere else now finding that other person is daunting but a lot of us just stick with someone because that's the expectation so in 2020 what I've seen is those people who are doing that are reaping the rewards like hey businesses down employees say hey I'm gonna slash my paycheck or I will need to you can't force loyalty and so if you really want those the team that's gonna have your back when the S hits the fan that that's happening more but also the other people who at least are clear on objectivity they're still employing people so it's one is not I guess one is better than the other but if you really want a team in harmony I think I was gonna say this earlier but empathy is hard and exhausting I understand why we don't do it all the time especially if we're stressed out if I'm in pain why am I gonna worry about your pain so any leader who can get results and makes time to care about their people to get results that's hard and I'm willing to help them so that's kind of a big answer here but those are the two classes of leaders that are still surviving the old school and the new school yeah and I would say when it comes to empathy and I'm curious your perspective and view here is I would stereotypically say that the nonprofit community and the nonprofit leaders are also very empathetic individuals we are the individuals that you name it we're in it's an all in kind of culture are from my existence and perspective so how have you seen if you can share about how empathy shows up in the different sectors of what you have experience in and I would love to see if you've seen a difference between yeah and I would have to say like caring and doing are two different things and so it's one thing to say hey I want to help immigrants or homeless people or whatever but to start a nonprofit that does that all of a sudden you're in a different then diagram than most people and but even then empathy my definition of it which most people do disagree is not just oh I feel for you oh I want to help you but it's like you almost could like jump back in time and realize oh they did have diarrhea on their way to work but most of us don't do that and so I think just because you're a nice person who cares about a cause doesn't mean that you're as empathetic as you could be the example I'll give is just because you have an SUV that full tank can get you all the way to LA on one tank doesn't mean you're driving it there doesn't mean you're going on adventures and so to me a good a truly empathetic person and I don't count myself with this all the time it's a it's a muscle gets results too it's not just I care for this person I also realized oh this person's hurting and they can't help me in the way that I need help right now it's the it's like when a parent that you have like a teenage son right almost 11 almost okay well maybe they're already there but like I'm sure there's times when like I don't know he falls and scrapes his knee and you want to go and you know mom him or parent him but versus also the you know what he needs to figure out how to bounce back up and dust himself off to me that's empathy the one where you go and I'm not saying it's not but to really know like look if this person's going to become the person or the performer they want to me that in terms of the industry I don't think I don't know what I'm trying to say exactly the I feel like we've gotten pulled in two different directions if you're for profit it is now cooler and more hip to kind of care about your employees but we still kind of put it on the surface doing it is a different thing and the employee is almost worse if you say it but then you don't back it up versus just saying like we don't really care about you as long as you do a good job here's your job to me I think that's a better mission statement than saying we care about you and not doing it but I believe the I can't say that I've seen one industry be better at it but to me it always starts at the top there's nothing new there and any any leader who is also very aware of numbers in the reality of tangible things and who's more empathetic to me I think is doing much better today but again that's also that's a daunting task like we were talking about like not drinking coffee or whatever like that that requires extra effort so I can't narrow to one area actually I can't I'll say my brain just saved me if you have a good team working from home you're empathetic and if you don't it's not that it's not a good team but like it people say oh I can't trust people working from home blah blah blah I'm like okay well you've hired the wrong people then right and so if you actually have a high performing team that's remote there is empathy somewhere in that group if not amongst all of your team because the other thing I don't think I quite touched on those three things role objectivity individual empathy peer respect it's not just the leader doing it it's all the people that the guitarist knows that the drummer and blah blah blah so yeah working from home leaders you have to have empathy otherwise it doesn't work yeah that's so fascinating and I do still think you're a total badass and would still nerd out with you for hours so maybe we shouldn't go for coffee but like I don't know our favorite watering hole we're literally maybe there is water and not coffee because we've both talked about that I am curious as we start to wrap up today's conversation for the episode one you talked about you know checking your passenger in the seat and that you don't just check this passenger or you don't just check your rear view mirror once this is an ongoing thing what does career blind spot teach when it comes to doing this ongoing thing with our teammates yeah it's it starts with yourself actually I'm I'm promoting you need to add this up but I have a book that's coming out calling a new work mindset it's my first book it's very short okay hour long plane ride but it starts with culture is a choice sort of made by leaders those are paraphrase of the chapter but like if your leader doesn't have a good relationship with their job with the objective of their role you could still have some superstars but it's it's going in just like if a parent has x y and z issue the kids are going to deal with it now there's no flawless thing but you're setting an expectation of how to take care of yourself and very often we get bosses managers good business people leaders not always and so a career blind spot teaches is that like look if you're if you want more loyalty respect or whatever out of these employees here are the ingredients but every time they look at you and you're mad because they're smoking in 90s commercial where'd you learn how to smoke I learned it from you dad you know like it's a book and leadership is a book and that the people who go in between but you set the tone and so that's what I'm teach over and over it's a personal accountability issue and so people who say hey I can't hire people don't want to stick around I hire lazy people or the people I keep hiring I'm like why are you attracting losers I'm being mean on purpose but I'm making it about them I was like maybe these aren't the right people for you but if you want the right people then you need to do something different so I always like to point the finger at the person who's pointing the finger it's always your fault if you're trying to do something but in an organization or career blind spot I was trying to teach is that we all have blind spots the boss probably always wasn't the boss and therefore their job changes and I'll end with this when you're a parent I'm not one I'm not one hope to be soon but you have the baby first baby job description mom or dad ding now in two weeks that job description just changed a little bit keep the baby alive but all the things five years old 10 13 20 30 you're always a parent but the job description keeps changing but it's on you of how what kind of parent you want to be and you can't force your kids to do this or that but setting that example is way better than lecturing and hoping they change this has been a phenomenal and you know all of your topics of conversation have really just been mind-blowing for me and you will be an amazing parent so as soon as that job title changes I know that you are up for the job Juan Kingsbury founder and talent strategist with career blind spot this is exactly where you can find one careerblindspot.com would love to know more about your book when that comes out we actually have here on the American nonprofit academy a book list and I would love for Julia and I to put your book I heard you say it's not quite ready but it's almost ready would love to add that to our book list so I hope that you will keep us posted and of course thank you and of course thank you to all of our presenting sponsors you see their logos right in front of the screen again they exist for you to do more good so they are here to pour into you into your mission driven goals and I hope that if you haven't already please do find them they are here to lift the energy in our world and to help you solve your community problems if you haven't checked out fundraisingevents.tv with Mr. Jason Champion make sure you do that that conversation and episode is everything from I hope I can do Julia and Jason right it's from barns to ballrooms and golf to Gaila it's a little hard for me to say that but I love how they always combine this you know kind of spectrums but one wow I am just wowed and I really would love to meet you in person you are a high vibing energy that I would love to just you know kind of go back and forth with on this conversation so again so grateful that you have joined us today live for this broadcast and of course if there was anything one said that you want to go back to and revisit of course this will be fed into the fabric of the American non-profit academy Juan thank you so much I appreciate you you're welcome thank you then a privilege and an honor thank you absolutely and to all of you that have joined us today I hope that you'll join us again for tomorrow which is as I check my calendar yes it is a fry yay so it's asked and answered Tony Bell will be joining me tomorrow and until then please stay well so you can do well thanks everyone and enjoy the rest of your day