How to Set Yourself Up As A Surrogate Leader

So the big question is this, how do recruiting leaders like us who have 12 to 15 other job responsibilities win at this game of recruiting? How do we build a system that allows us to recruit effectively in a minimal amount of time while motivating recruits towards meaningful change? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Richard Mulligan and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. Everybody, welcome back to Recruiting Conversations.

This is your host, Richard Mulligan. And today I'm going to talk about one of the top 10 to 15 principles inside recruiting leaders and their success. One of the things that I recognize is that from time to time I say, this is really important. You have to get this. And while that isn't always true about everything that I talk about, this principle here is true. What we're going to talk about today is surrogate leadership.

Now, if you've never heard of the term surrogate leader, it's because I made it up. It didn't exist until I identified it and I made it up. Now, it's not actually made up. It actually is real. It is something that exists whether you recognize it or not. So if you want to call this a surrogate leader law, a surrogate leader principle, this matters. Now, it matters more today than maybe ever at any point in your life and my life.

Now, I'm in my 50's and while that's neither old nor young, that's me saying that. I am older than my kids and maybe you're older than me. That makes me young. So it's all relative, but in this time, in this space, inside business and inside leading, this principle matters. It absolutely matters. Now let's just break this down. What does the word surrogate mean? The word surrogate means in place of. So when you think about, we typically think about surrogate, we think about a surrogate mother.

As an example, if a litter of puppies had a mother leave, you could find another surrogate. mother, another surrogate dog that would take on that litter of puppies and feed them and take care of them. Right. In the animal kingdom, we think of that as in place of a lot of times we use this, even as humans talking about that's my surrogate mother, right? When my mom's not around, that's my surrogate mother in place of.

So while we use this, typically in the parenting role, this is absolutely true in the leadership role as it pertains specifically to recruiting. So let's just back up a moment. As a surrogate leader in place of someone's current leader, what does that mean? Right now in every industry, but specifically in certain industries, based on how they recruit, how they promote, there is a epidemic in this area where there's a shortage of great leaders. Now let's just walk this through.

And a lot of industries, what we do is we take good producers. These are people that are great salespeople. And because either other companies are recruiting them to become a leader, right? We might give them a better title. We might put people underneath them. So maybe another company is recruiting them and offering them that position. And we feel pressured to offer them that position. We actually go ahead and we take good producers, good salespeople, and we automatically make them leaders.

This doesn't mean that we've measured their ability to lead. This doesn't mean that we've done anything other than look at their ability to sell and we assume you're a great salesperson So you've got some Intangibles in place and that's always going to be true of great sales people And so because of that you can teach that you can lead that and so oh by the way, welcome to your new promotion Right But being a great salesperson doesn't automatically make you a great leader.

Like I can actually take my own real life example of being back at the age of 25, 26, 27, being promoted into a leadership role and then being promoted pretty quickly into a regional leadership role. And I was a relatively young salesperson that had very little experience leading people.

Now, I was a studier of success and business principles and leadership principles because I was taking on a lot of information because personal development has always been, from the time of 19, it's always been one of my core values, one of my beliefs that I should be becoming something better than I am.

And so while I had probably more skill set in the area of leadership, simply because of that single principle in itself, it didn't make me a great leader. I can tell you, I can look at. A lot of decisions that I made as a young leader and say, wow, big mistakes. And look, I'm today in my fifties , still making mistakes as a leader, but I am accelerated way beyond what I was as a good salesperson, new to leadership.

So this leads to one of the many reasons why there's an epidemic going on in business today was a lack of great leadership. Now, and here, let me just give you this. Here's another item. I think that plays into this. There's an enormous amount of information out there available, but it doesn't make it great knowledge.

It doesn't make it wisdom There's a quote by a guy by the name of john nesbitt and john said this he said we are drowning in Information but we are starving for knowledge We are drowning in information, but we are starving for knowledge. Think about that. There's so much noise. Thank you social media Everybody has a voice today. Everybody thinks they're right. Everybody's got an opinion. So we're drowning in that But doesn't make it good information that we should be applying to our leadership.

It doesn't make it good knowledge, doesn't turn it into something that automatically should be used in how we lead. And so because we have all this access to information, a lot of times it's easy for someone to follow a path that's not the right path to becoming a great leader. And so I think that plays an element in this as well. Now, let me give you the backdrop to where I said surrogate leadership is an actual principle.

Mid 2014, so if you know my story, I spent 10, almost 11 years really struggling to recruit, and then I spent three and a half years, four years actually having a lot of success recruiting.

There were two distinct seasons that I actually went through in that first season the first 10 11 years I didn't understand this and at the beginning of that last three and a half to four year window I was only beginning to understand this in the first 6 to 12 months, but here's how it became Relative and to me Knowing that this existed mid 2014 Now at the end of 2013, I had revamped all of my recruiting efforts.

I took a week and a half, two weeks off the grid, took a good friend of mine, Scott Seely. We actually planned premeditated, dissected every part of the recruiting process, and then put it back together in a full blown system. Okay, so we do this into 2013, mid 2014 rolls around and I begin to receive phone calls from internal and external recruiters. And this is where I became aware that, look, what you're doing right now, Milligan, is different, it's unique, and it matters.

And the word surrogate began to surface itself. And here's why. I got, Maybe half a dozen phone calls from like June of 2014 to end of 2014 and

the calls went a little like this I'm not calling because I was specifically looking to recruit you to our company, but I just had to meet you I was calling in one of the markets that you lead in and I was talking to someone who's not on your team right now and they said this if I leave my company the only person I'll ever go to work for is and they would say my Name Richard Mulligan Now, while that began to, to some degree, annoy me, because imagine this, I'm putting in a lot of hard effort

to recruit people, to build relationship with people, and some of the benefits of that are people saying, I'm not going to move right now, but I will one day. One day I'll go to work for Richard, like to some degree, there was this bit of annoyance that came with that, but there was definitely this aha moment that came with it as well.

And the aha moment was what you're doing in terms of recruiting efforts is leading people to a place where they would say that one day Richard will be in, in a position of leadership in my life. So what was I doing? Now, let's back into this. How does this apply to recruiting efforts today? If there's an epidemic and a shortage of great leadership and you're a great leader, okay, that's got to be the first premise. You're a great leader.

So if you don't feel like you, or you don't believe you've brought yourself to a position of leadership, hit my email up. I'll, maybe in another podcast, we'll discuss maybe 12 key influences or a number of key influences in my life that have gotten me to a place where my leadership has grown and developed. Some of those are podcasts. Look, the Craig Groeschel leadership podcast, great podcast, Andy Stanley, another great podcast, Carrie Newhoff, another great podcast.

So part of that would be like making sure you are positioning yourself well in how you lead. Okay, but the other part is how do we reveal this to people where they have these aha moments themselves where they say That's the person i'll go to work for because they're bringing me more value than my current leadership is bringing me Let me give you an example of how you could do this Look, I ask this question a lot to people, which is what's your next step?

So when people say, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to send someone a direct message on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter. My question is not necessarily what's the crafting of that message. I want to know what's also going to be the next step, because if you have a single standalone tactic, Then you're a tactical recruiter. You have to be a systems recruiter to be a successful recruiter. That's the bottom line. And the reason why is look in any sales, the secret number seven,

there's a power, there's power in the number of seven touches. So if I work to build a relationship with you and I engage you seven times, I've now only hit the average. That number that it takes to actually convert someone. Okay, so in the minimum i'm going to work out What are my seven next steps? But let me give you an example how you could do this in terms of leadership in as you're recruiting If i'm going to call you over the phone several things one.

I will not leave you a voice message Okay, that's a breadcrumb leads back to me being a recruiting leader. You don't know who I am. But if I leave you a message and say, this is Richard Milligan, regional manager with ABC company, you know that I'm a recruiting leader, right? And if you're dissatisfied and unhappy, then you'll return my phone call.

But look, we've tested that strategy out the voicemail strategy out with a large company 0. 04 percent is the response rate that we got in return messages. So if we left a thousand, we got four return calls. Now there's some of you out there right now that are saying, look, that's worth it to me. I'll leave a thousand. I'll figure out how to scale a thousand voice messages in order to get the four return phone calls.

But the catch that was the people that returned the voicemail were people that were job hoppers. These were not people that were tenured. These were not top producers. These were not the people that you're trying to recruit as a recruiting leader. Okay, so voice message It just doesn't work and it leaves a breadcrumb that says that you are a recruiting leader And so the next time you call i've identified your number as being your number and I just won't answer it Forever.

So now you put yourself in a position of the phone doesn't work at all. And we already know the phone has diminishing results right now. People have moved away from the phone. Marketers have run the phone. Thank you so much. Telemarketers you've run the phone. And now we've got to figure out a different way to communicate to people in scale. But the truth is that if you dial someone one out of 20, we'll answer the phone on the first ring.

We found that if you dial three times in one hour, you repeatedly call them. And in one hour, so you space that out every 15 to 20 minutes, they'll answer the phone in about one out of 11 is the number. So calling repeatedly without leaving a voice message in the course of an hour, that works. I'll get you more responses. Okay. Now when someone answers that phone, you do need to have a good phone script. And there's a lot of, What I would call tricky phone scripts out there.

We're not going to talk about phone scripting today. Make sure you're using a high integrity phone script. Look, if you're a recruiting leader, you fish in a pond that you're going to fish in forever. Unless you move markets, you're going to be fishing there for a long time. You have to have a strong reputation.

You need people to believe that you are a high integrity leader to be able to identify you as someone that they would work for one day, that they could, would come along and partner with one day. So if I call you and I use that kind of a phone script, a high integrity phone script, and you say, you know what? I'm happy where I'm at. I'm not interested in meeting with you. And that's the end result. I'm going to ask you, what's your next step?

Because the next step is where I get to start delivering my surrogate leadership role. So if you say I'm happy, I'm not interested in meeting with you. I'm going to put you in the category of being a cold recruit. And there's really three categories forever, cold, warm, and hot, but you're a cold recruit if you won't meet with me and you're not interested.

And so if you were to do that, what I would say was this, look out of respect for you and honoring the fact that you're happy where you're at. What I would love to say is thank you for taking a few minutes out of your

day for having a phone call with me. And as a way of saying thanks, I would love to send you one of my favorite books. And one of my favorite books is this. Now. I've got a number of books that I use. I use Tim Collins book, Good to Great. I used Darren Hardy's book, The Compound Effect. I use John Gordon's book, One Word. There's a lot of books. You may have a book or two that you're like, that's been something that's been dynamic and it's changed my life. Use that book.

Hey, and you can buy those books in bulk used on Amazon if you've ever done that those books show up practically brand new Simply because most people buy books and then don't actually read them But imagine the concept of buying a book and reading it But I would buy these books in bulk and very rarely would one show up that didn't look new So you get those books for two to five dollars apiece And so that I would end my phone call with this out of respect and a

way for me to say Thank you for taking my call today and being professional. I'd love to send you one of my favorite books What's a good address for that?

They would then respond about eight or nine out of ten would respond with an address and now most people will respond with their home address because they recognize you're a recruiting leader and they don't want you sending that to their Office because it just gets awkward a lot of times if you send it to the office If their boss were to open up the envelope, so you get the home address, which that's actually, there's some secret sauce in that because now I can engage in a conversation at home.

Okay. That's a completely separate podcast. Why is that important? But it is important. And now I get to actually go on a journey of next steps with you, because if I send the book to your home and you get it, I'll follow up seven to 10 days in a text message and say, just following up to see if you got my book, John Gordon's book, One Word. And they say, yes. And I'm going to say, did you get a chance to read it? Such an easy read. It takes an hour to read that book, by the way.

And if they say yes, or if they say no, either way, I'm engaging in a conversation. My next piece. And if you listen to my previous podcast, I every year develop one word. I can share my one word with them. And if they didn't develop their one word, I'll follow up a couple of weeks from now to see if they've developed one word. And if they have developed one word, then I'll get to find out what it is. I get to go on a journey. As a surrogate leader with them. Let me give you an example.

One time in this exact situation with that exact book, I sent that to a young lady, got the book, young lady actually responded back to me and said, here's my one word, her one word was audacious. Now, that's, that's not an, I wouldn't say that's actually a normal word that somebody would actually develop, right? It's like in this peripheral realm of something that I could even come up with the word audacious. And so I responded with, what does that mean to you?

And she said, I need to be more bold in the area of picking up the phone and reaching out as a salesperson. I find that I have issues with actually cold calling. And so there's cold call reluctancy. I'm not sure why, but I've got to be more bold if I'm going to grow my book of business. And that opened the door for me to step into ideas, touching base weekly, finding out where she was. Some incredible stories come from that.

At one point, I find out that she's actually making her phone calls from the women's bathroom because she was embarrassed to actually make the phone calls in the bullpen area where there were other salespeople, an incredible journey, she does come to work for me. That's surrogate leader, a surrogate leader takes someone on a journey of bringing value to them in a place where this person is lacking value. If this person's lacking leadership and you show up and you lead well,

right, now you got to figure out creatively how you do this and you got to incorporate it into your system. But if you figure out creatively how you do this and you do it right, this person at some point asked themselves this question. Um, It's, the question is Richard's bringing more value to me than my current leader is. What am I doing over here working for this leader?

I should work for Richard This is one of the ways that you actually change the conversation from this company value proposition mindset To who you are as a leader and your leadership value proposition.

Look i'm a firm believer in this I don't care how good your company value proposition is if you don't lead with your leadership value proposition first your vision Your core values what do you have that you can lend that you can give as a leader as a great leader as a good leader Okay, then you are missing on an opportunity to tap into the 95 percent of people that are happy where they're at. Only 5 percent today say they're unhappy.

So if you're going to lead with company value proposition, you just pigeonhole yourself to the 5 percent that are unhappy, and I would rather be in the 100%. I'd rather be being able to pursue everybody and the surrogate leader can. You're doing this right when someone says you're bringing me more value than my current leadership. Can we talk? There's lots of creative ideas on how to do this. I've given you one if you need more ideas You can always set up my calendar bookrichardnow. com.

This is really important gang. It's really important Okay, a takeaway from this should be this If you're not in a position where you're even like, I know what I would send, or I know how I could contribute, or I don't believe I'm a great leader. Look, you really need to stop and go to this place of how do I become a great leader? One of the ways you do that is you take on information. You don't know what you don't know until you know it. Am I right or am I right?

The truth is that you've got to become this information aggregator. Look, the average CEO today takes on 50 to 60 books per year. I didn't stutter when I said that that's, that's a book per week or more that they're taking on. Did you know average person? The other range of that spectrum is that the average person today reads two to three books per year. And most of those books are not self help, are not motivational, are not leadership books.

So look, I know a lot of people that are leaders that aren't even reading a book per year. So if you're questioning, man, I don't believe that I'm in a position to be a great leader or to be able to contribute a level where I can really position myself as a surrogate leader, you start there. You start there, you become the information aggregator, and in a very short window of time, you will have the knowledge and the information that you can actually go and apply to become a great leader.

Giving you some good podcasts that you can listen to here. I would take on each one of those. If you don't have podcasts that you're listening to incredible information there

that will advance you on your journey. Lots of others too, that you can listen to. So look, I hope this brought value to you today. Surrogate leadership, attach yourself to this idea. Ask yourself the question, how do I position myself as a surrogate leader? It will make you a better recruiting leader. No doubt.

Until next time this is recruiting conversations with Richard Milligan Look if this brought value to you share it with somebody the biggest compliment you can pay me Is sharing this to somebody else?

Look we are now the number one Recruiting leader podcast in itunes share this with somebody I know this would bring value to the old richard milligan who started out his journey without any knowledge around recruiting Had a false belief system around recruiting share this with somebody that's in your industry You That you are friends with that's the biggest compliment you can pay me I say thanks in advance for doing that and until next time have a great week I look forward to talking

to you again on recruiting conversations. Thanks so much want more recruiting conversations You can register for my weekly email at 4c recruiting. com If you need help creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow. com