Lori Bocklund on the Fast Leader Show

Lori Bocklund Show Notes Page

Lori Bocklund and her husband lived in the Washington DC area during 9/11 and then the anthrax scare and the DC sniper. She was living in constant fear. Despite loving where they lived, they decided to move. But they didn’t know here they wanted to live. After finally figuring that out, she took an even bigger risk which paid off in her becoming one of the leading authorities on contact center technology.

Lori was born in Marquette, Michigan, so that makes her a “Yooper!” She was raised in the Midwest, with a short stint in the south in the 60s. That combination gives her a latent Minnesota accent, in spite of the fact that when she moved from Goldsboro, North Carolina, to Burnsville, Minnesota, at age 8 she said “y’all” and “yes mam” routinely.

Lori is the youngest of three but has defied the stereotypes of the youngest child throughout her life. She had an idyllic childhood, playing many sports and loving math and science, along with writing.

Lori decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and study engineering. She chose South Dakota State University for its engineering program, strong (but not very big) community, and blossoming women’s sports. As a Briggs Scholar and Track and Field and Cross Country athlete, she received an excellent education, was a member of two national championship teams, and built life-long relationships with her teammates.

Lori started her career in systems engineering, working on “nuclear survivable communications” (this was the early 80s!) and then escaping to the less scary world of air traffic control systems. These jobs had nothing to do with contact centers! She earned her master’s degree in engineering from George Washington University.

She then stumbled into call centers and found joy in using both her technical and communications skills in a sales support role. She moved into the world of consulting in 1993 where she continues to love the challenges of helping clients solve problems and improve their operations and use of technology. She started her own company, Strategic Contact, in 2004, and has a wonderful team of similarly experienced consultants working with her.

Lori is recognized as an industry leader in contact center technology. She has written a book and countless articles and presented seminars around the world. She has earned a bit of a fan following from clients and consumers of her thought leadership contributions because she has that unique combination of technical know-how and the ability to communicate it effectively, and she has fun sharing that knowledge! ICMI honored her with a lifetime achievement award in 2015. Her husband thought that meant they get to retire (but he was wrong!).

Lori lives in the great northwest in Beaverton, Oregon (where she strives to be accent neutral). She and her husband met on a bike ride and still love to get out on the roads and trails and put in some beautiful miles. She also still runs, hits tennis balls, hikes, cross country skis, and otherwise tries to stay in shape. Her lucky Labrador Retriever, Gobblet gets two walks a day and is the most spoiled member of the family.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @stratcontact to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“Spend an hour or two a week reading things you’d think everything was artificial intelligence.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“Nobody has enough time, money or resources to invest in all of the things that are being thrown at them.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“It’s up to the buyers to differentiate, and that takes time.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“Spend the time to dig deeper and do some due diligence.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“Get some help if you don’t have time to dig deeper yourself.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“It’s the wild west on both the buyer and sellers side in our market.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“Revenue increases while improving service and cutting costs are in tension with each other.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“Everybody wants to move fast, inevitably it slows down because of their inability to make decisions.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“People that want to keep all their options open are never going to get to a solution.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“People tend to reject information that doesn’t feed their position.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“The role of the contact center has elevated, I think it’s still problematic.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“The contact center is part of an ecosystem, it depends on so many other departments.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

“Just because you change all the time doesn’t mean you’re good at it.” -Lori Bocklund Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Advice for others

Learn change management and improve.

Holding her back from being an even better leader

Time. I live in a constant state of triage.

Best Leadership Advice

Do the right thing. Let integrity and honesty guide you.

Secret to Success

I have good problem solving and critical thinking skills.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Communication

Contacting Lori Bocklund

Email: lori [at] strategiccontact.com

website: https://www.strategiccontact.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/stratcontact

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-bocklund-9947a85/

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

Empathy Mapping

Lassoing the Wild West Contact Center Technology

Contact Center Executive Priorities for 2018

Show Transcript:

[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]

172: Lori Bocklund Life’s too short to live this way

INTRO: Welcome to the fast leader podcast where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligent practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Call center coach develops and unites the next generation of call center leaders. Through our e-learning and community individuals gain knowledge and skills from the six core competencies that is the blueprint that develops high-performing call center leaders. Successful supervisors do not just happen so go to callcentercoach.com. To learn more about enrollment and download your copy of the Supervisor Success Path e-book now.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who I’ve known for a very long time, I’ve tried to get on the other show to be a guest for a long time and I hope I don’t mess things up because I want to make sure that you find out about her and her work because I think she’s absolutely brilliant.

Laurie Buckland was born in Marquette, Michigan so that makes her a yooper. She was raised in the Midwest with a short stint in the South in the 60s that combination gives her a Layton Minnesota accent. In spite of the fact that when she moved from Goldsboro, North Carolina to Burnsville, Minnesota at the age of eight, she said yo and yes ma’am routinely. Laurie is the youngest of three but has defied the stereotypes of the youngest child throughout her life. She had an idyllic childhood playing many sports and loving math and science along with writing. Laurie decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and study engineering. She chose South Dakota State University for its engineering program, community, and blossoming women’s sports.

As a brig scholar in track and field and cross country athlete she received an excellent education, was a member of two national championship teams and built lifelong relationships with her teammates. Laurie started her career in systems engineering working on nuclear survivable communications, many know that this was back in the early 80s. And then she escaped the less scary world of air traffic control systems these jobs had nothing to do with contact centers and she earned her master’s degree in engineering from George Washington University. She then stumbled into contact centers and found joy in using both her technical and communication skills in a sales support role. She moved into the world of consulting in 1993 where she continues to love the challenges of helping clients solve problems and improve their operations and use of technology. She started her own company strategic contact in 2004 and has a wonderful team of similarly experienced consultants working with her. Laurie is recognized as an industry leader in contact center technology she has written a book and countless articles and presented seminars all around the world. She has earned a bit of a fan following from clients and consumers because of her thought leadership contributions and because she has a unique combination of technical know-how and the ability to communicate it effectively and she has fun sharing that knowledge. ICM honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, her husband thought that meant that they could retire but he was wrong.

Laurie lives in the Great Northwest in Beaverton Oregon where she strives to be accent neutral. She and her husband met on a bike ride and still loves to get out on the roads and trails and put some beautiful miles in. She also still runs his tennis balls, hikes, cross-country skis and otherwise tries to stay in shape. Her lucky Labrador retriever Goblet gets two walks a day and is the most spoiled member of the family. Lori Bocklund, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Laurie Buckland: I am.

Jim Rembach: I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you share what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Laurie Buckland: My current passion is reality. I’m not talking about virtual reality or augmented reality just plain old reality that’s because I think we all have too much info coming at us too quickly and nobody takes enough time to really discern hype from reality and that has big implications.

Jim Rembach: Speaking of that whole reality piece and when you put it in context and combine it with the whole need for transformation, for me I get exposed to a lot of people wanting to do customer experience transformation and digital transformation and I don’t know what camp you may sit in but some people say one fits in the other, I don’t know which. But when you start also looking at a study that I have some access to some preliminary results from it, it says that people are only able to really invest like one or two hours a week and things that are going on outside of their organization and so when you look at the rapid pace of change the need to transform I mean there’s really no way that people can keep up with reality is there?

Laurie Buckland: No, and I think that that the hour or two that you’re saying that studies pointing to might unfortunately be people absorbing information that is part of that hype that I’m mentioning. They take it at face value my big hot button the biggest on this reality thing is artificial intelligence which if you read things spend an hour to a week reading things you think everything was artificial intelligence right now. I think people need slow down and really get a better grasp of what that really means and then sort through the hype people are throwing at them and they need to do that to make good decisions because nobody has enough time, money or resources to invest in all the things that are being thrown at them but it’s tempting and it all looks too darn good.

Jim Rembach: As you started talking I was starting to think about the word, seduction. Meaning that—look the reality is that vendors have to sell their products in order to say, a viable business, they are in a sea of sameness when you start talking about marketing messages and platforms to message on and that and the other and so they have to essentially seduce people into being interested in what they have to offer. So, if you start thinking about the whole seduction as well as so many of the pay-to-play models or platforms to be built, you don’t need to drop any names here, but we all know that those things exist and being able to trust the message, doesn’t it just all feed into that transformed or I should say false reality?

Laurie Buckland: Yeah, I like some of the phrases you’re using the sea of sameness is a great phrase. That’s why vendors are jumping on the bandwagon they’ve got to make it sound like they’re me too, it’s a different kind of me too then what we’re hearing in the regular news, but they want to say yes I do this stuff too and look what I’m doing with my fill-in-the-blank, my IVR, my CRM, whatever application routing, reporting, analytics they’re all kind of pointing to the role of artificial intelligence and making it sound really good but it is up to the buyers the users to differentiate and that takes time. That means we have to dive deeper and not just get enamored with or seduced by your word is a good one a particular solution or a particular concept and spend the time to dive in dig deeper do some due diligence bring in some help. I spend more than an hour or two a week to connect this stuff and so do analysts and others. So, get some help if you don’t have time to dive in yourself.

Jim Rembach: I think that’s a real good point. You and I had the opportunity to meet at an event last year and we actually did a short video interview and we talked about the wild, wild, west and there were several things that you talked about when you were explaining the wild, wild, west and one important and key component was that due diligence piece. You talked about pressure and you talked about need to move and when you started putting all of these variables together it made for—quite frankly, really important case to make sure that you are consulting with people who do look at this stuff more than an hour a week.

Laurie Buckland: I think the wild, west is on both the seller and buyer sides in our market. The sellers are out there making massive changes the cloud which you alluded to earlier is a different way of buying artificial intelligence and lots of other innovations are coming in so there’s massive change and very fast change on the selling side from the vendors. And then the buyers are under massive pressure to move faster to accomplish revenue increases while improving service and cutting costs and we all know those three things are in tension with each other those are three dynamics that are difficult if not impossible to achieve at the same time. And so the buyers are under this pressure and get enamored with this stuff from the wild, wild, west. On the vendor side they’re living in the Wild West of I’ve got to move really fast and get something done and don’t have enough resources to do it. And so it makes for a really difficult dynamic for a lot of people I think so that’s why we end up helping people put together road maps do planning and assess what’s the priorities and what should be happening when and the interdependencies or help write down requirements and target the right vendors to meet a particular set of needs. Because those kinds of things do require some thoughtfulness and some good due diligence so that you’d spend the limited time money and resources effectively.

Jim Rembach: Listening to you I started thinking about a conversation that I had the other day with somebody about what is referred to as convincer strategies. Meaning that we all go through a process by which is part condition, it’s part wiring, you and I had talked about people’s wiring earlier and most often fall into four camps and know that it’s conditionals. So, if I’m thinking about something that’s personal based or something like that it may be different than when I’m at work but they essentially fall into these four categories which is automatic means that they decide pretty easy they don’t they don’t need a ton of information in order to be able to make a decision and move forward. There are a number of times person, meaning I need to see validation so many times before I can actually move forward and then some people are period of time. Well I’m not going to do anything I’m going to see how this all plays out and then maybe I’ll do something about it. And then other people are consistent meaning they get so caught up and bogged down in the weeds and the details that getting a decision out of them is just like pain. So, when you start talking about the different types of people that you are coming across and working with and ultimately supporting to make a decision what do you find you often run into?

Laurie Buckland: I think we probably deal with all of those and maybe varying by client but it also may be varying with people within a client environment and it’s one of the great challenges of doing projects because everybody wants to move fast that’s one of the things we hear most often at the start of a project. I put project timelines together and almost inevitably it slows down because of their inability to make decisions. Some of that may stem from a mix of practices whatever you want to call those strategies that you just laid out. I use the phrase, shiny object syndrome that might go with that automatic they just get excited about the next thing and they’re want to go in a different direction. And then there’s other people that we have the FOMO, right, fear of missing out they can’t make a decision because they’re still waiting to learn more about—well, What about this? What about that? What about this? And with the different sourcing strategies right now that’s particularly difficult because people that want to keep all their options open are never going to get to a solution that they can feel comfortable with. That’s part of the Wild West right of the challenges that people face I think.

Jim Rembach: Exactly. So, if we start talking about traps meaning that—okay, I do need to have some actions take place we’ve got to do something we’ve got to move. If you were taking in that whole thought process about those different types of people, what recommendations would you give somebody that has to make a decision to move forward, they should do what?

Laurie Buckland: Part of it is trying to give them enough information that’s targeted on their hot buttons and pain points. I’ve love to read about brain science and I’ve studied how we make decisions how people make decisions, there’s some really good books about that, people tend to reject information that doesn’t kind of feed their position so you have to work hard to get them to understand information that they might naturally reject because it doesn’t feed a given position. If you don’t know their position you got to dive in there a little bit and learn that and try and get to that. A good example is the cloud stuff. The fear they have is—I can’t make that decision because I got to know all the costs before I make a decision. There’s enough data out there and there’s enough high level stuff that you can put in front of people and say—well, here’s about how it would play out and look at the total cost of ownership timeline for them and play it out and then talk about how do you want to pay because it’s not just how much will it cost but how do you want to pay. For example I have a client right now they can look at it—these aren’t the exact numbers but you can pay $200,000 upfront or you can pay six or seven grand a month for five years, which do you want to do? if you’re going to sit on the—I buy the upfront for a long time it’s going to obviously be cheaper but that’s not how most people want to buy things these days. And so then it starts to help the decision process by looking more at how do I want to spend the money not what’s the exact number of it. Those are some of the things we have to help people sort through price and how they pay being a very key one but there are other factors as well.

Jim Rembach: That brings up a really good point for me because I’ve come across certain situations where people would like to move forward and do certain things but—I think you may have mentioned this before they’re not really certain about their internal process and they move forward down a particular path and then find something out like—hey, this is the way procurement particularly operates. This is the way that we’ve had some changes take place and we have to acquire whatever it may be. How often do you see those types of things changing and stopping a process versus somebody’s just—where they need to be convinced to move?

Laurie Buckland: It’s one of the reason why we try and get a cross-functional team out of the gates if there’s any kind of technology purchase going on. IT can have hot-button this procurement can have hot buttons a security and compliance group can have hot buttons—so we don’t want just one group of people, say the contact center is saying—oh, we need this new technology we want the variety of players that are going to be engaged in in that ultimately to be involved upfront so that you can sort through and we like to use kind of funnel visuals write them making funnels with my hands here. To say you’ve got a lot of options to start the way you narrow them is to consider those things that will be the key decision factors for your company. There’s no one right answer but we got to get the inputs from those various people because they all have different perspectives and different things that will drive a decision and then you can sort through the trade-offs in the context of that specific company’s position on how they purchase their views of security and who controls information and a variety of things, networks and all that kind of stuff.

Jim Rembach: Alright. So, you talked about something that’s critically important with any of these things because oftentimes we’re referring to an enterprise solution, enterprise impact we talked about cross-functional teams and being able to bridge those gaps and those things. If you start thinking about where things were say five years ago and prior versus where they are now, are you noticing that there are certain people who are now part of that cross-functional team that weren’t before? And you’re like, hmm that’s unusual or that’s new.

Laurie Buckland: Yeah. I don’t think there’s anything unusual right now that I would point to the security and compliance I mentioned I’ll call that a growing thing. And of course it varies with the size of the organization and the vertical market they’re in and financial services, healthcare, places like that have had to step up because of all the regulations and the certifications or compliance things that they have to think about. That’s probably the biggest change that we’ve seen and I wouldn’t necessarily call it new but I would call it really still growing and getting more and more complex and detailed and diligent, so that one’s a biggie. There’s definitely changes with how IT views things and that again can be very different from company to company and factor in size and vertical and a lot of different things but they’ve always been part of the discussion it’s kind of just changing how they play in the discussion. Because the changes on the IT departments side as well as changes in how the vendors offer and deliver solutions.

Jim Rembach: When you start thinking—I remember being part of certain types of consulting projects where the contact center is one of the contributing areas in the whole decision when it comes to technology and communications. However, when you start looking at the raising of the need to retain customers and using the whole experience as a way by which we’re now going to grow the top-line revenue by getting more customers. Have you seen that the contact center is now taking more of a driver seat in the enterprise decisions? Meaning if it doesn’t work for the contact center there’s no way it’s going to work for the enterprise because it used to be that—hey, this works for the enterprise of the contact center has to get on board.

Laurie Buckland: Right. And you mentioned in my intro I’m the youngest child I joke that the contact center is like the youngest child it gets all the hand-me-downs and that’s not a good thing from youngest child perspective most of the time. I do think that the profile of the contact center has elevated, I think it’s still problematic. We do challenges in priority survey every year we’ve done it for three years running now and our results are just published in January through contact center pipeline. It’s funny to me that the challenges and priorities still show a very strong problem in getting the respect for the contact center. It’s just still a big issue that that centers face and then the collaboration with other departments. I see improvement but I see opportunity it still needs to get better.

Jim Rembach: Who needs customers anyway?

Laurie Buckland: Right. So, I was on a webinar earlier today on journey mapping it’s part of why I think things like journey mapping and the customer experience those things have become high profile and trendy because people get it that we have to have that focus. We talk about the ecosystem all the time, the contact center is part of an ecosystem it depends on so many other departments and so many other departments impact it. There’s a strong need to have that—increase the understandings one of my hot buttons in the article about the survey results I gave three things that people if they want to start getting better awareness across other departments some things they can do some fairly practical and tangible things that are hopefully relatively easy to pull off to get people to understand the role of the Senate.

Jim Rembach: I highlighted the results of that report also on an article that I had done for a call center coach which was actually picked up and syndicated by customer thinking and I really focused in on that whole—you’re welcome—I really focused in on the whole piece that came out in regards to change and transformation and I think that for me I took a little bit different approach I guess I might put my lens to it I guess you’d say and it really connected with a lot of people I got more feedback on that particular article, we’ll link it to your show notes page, there are many that I had written throughout the year, so thanks for doing that report and hope you continue to do it.

Laurie Buckland: Yeah, we will.

Jim Rembach: When we start talking about making these decisions and the pressure to perform and all of the things associated with where we are today and the increasing consumer demands and demands on the business from a threat perspective and disruption and all that it could just be charged with a lot of emotion. One of the things that we look at on the show in order to give us some that’s hopefully positive are quotes, is there a quote or two that you’d like to share?

Laurie Buckland: Yeah, I collect quotes. I have a set of slides I put up when I’m doing my seminars at the conferences and play them at the start on the breaks so that people have something to look at and think about and laugh about. I’ll use one of my favorite quotes that I use there and it’s about change and the quote is—The only people who like change our wet babies and pan handlers—and I like it because it always gets a laugh. But it also kind of causes people to pause they have to think about it for a second and then they ahh hah they get it and I like it because it kind of catches people. A lot of business situations we have people say, oh we’re really good at change we change all the time and I’d like to differentiate that just because you change all the time doesn’t mean you’re good at it or that people like it or that you’re doing it well. And so, I like to kind of challenge people on that really very few people like change and when they do it’s really only when they’re in control of it. And so, we have to think about that and help people change effectively and that’s how you use technology well that’s how you get ecosystems to change and start to pay attention to the customer and the contact center and those kinds of things are pretty important. Change plays a huge role in them.

Jim Rembach: I think you and I have talked many times and I know all of the people on your team have gone through change management and then something else which I think would help with the whole change process since it is so painful and that is improve. What does improv actually done for the work that you guys do?

Laurie Buckland: I took my team to an improve workshop, I found out they were scared to death they told me this afterwards because they thought they were going to be on stage and stuff but it’s an improv application to the business world and they do some wonderful exercises. What we learned from that the biggest takeaway we’ve learned a bunch of different things but the biggest takeaway anyone who’s ever done anything with improv learns is that the answer is always yes at an improv if you reject something if you say no or you say yes but the improv skit will collapse. Using that skill in our business whether it’s interacting with each other or with clients it gives us a whole new way of sorting through things, solving problems, working as a team because somebody gives you an idea you don’t reject it outright you say yes and what can I do with this? And if you need to kind of take them in another direction you’re building on that and taking them along with you instead of causing them to cross their arms and get defensive or the analogy with the skit or things can fall apart, I love that. We still use that lingo when we talked with each other or when we’re talking about situation and we’ll say, what’s the yes end approach to solving this.

Jim Rembach: I think that’s a really great approach and it’s a really important thing for everybody to really know who’s listening is that one of the main objectives that when you want to get people to buy in when you want to collaborate, when you want to—or any of those things, is to never respond to whatever they say with but—or no—or anything that’s negative in any way she perform you want to try get alongside of them and that yes and is a great way to do it and it’s really habitual meaning that you have to create the habit.

Laurie Buckland: Very much so. And I have an article on that topic on our website if anyone wants to read it’s a fun thing to do.

Jim Rembach: It’s extremely important advice, thanks for sharing it. Now I know that—we have a lot of things going on—you’re continually pushing, studying, learning and really making—and that’s how I think you contribute to make such a big difference it’s important to your DNA and the way that you operate. I know that there’s also a lot of humps that you’ve had to get over. If you start thinking about a hump that we can learn from what would it be?

Laurie Buckland: Well I’ll tell the story about a—since we’re talking a lot about change probably one of the biggest changes I’ve made in my life about mid-career midlife as well, my husband I lived in the DC area on 911 that event obviously impacted all Americans in a tremendous way but I think anyone who lived in DC and New York I’m sure as well in those areas was impacted more. We had signs all over the place we had military patrols I walked the dog at five in the morning and the F16’s are flying overhead and it was just a very, very impactful, stressful thing. Then we had the anthrax threat and a lot of ongoing things and I came home from a trip once my husband had built our little stock in the basement because they were telling everybody to get ready for the next thing and it was awful. And then the DC sniper for those that remember that that occurred and that was kind of the last straw for us and we basically felt like life’s too short to live this way we’re living in constant fear. And it was an awful feeling we loved where we lived the work we did my job moves but my husband’s job don’t moved but we decided we were going to move we need to get out of there. So that’s a hard thing to decide when you love people and places. And then we didn’t know where we’re going and the next question was, okay, well where are we go? So we pursued a very methodical approach to figure out the answer to that and back to our decision-making discussion earlier we made a great decision we landed here in the Great Northwest in the Portland-Oregon area. We had to go through a lot to do that it was very exciting and incredibly scary at the same time but it worked out. And then that inspired that kind of changed that willingness to take some risks and take some trade-offs inspired me to start my own company. Months later that wasn’t the intent when we moved, but months later I got up the nerve to do that and it really was a lesson learned on both fronts. If you’re willing to take some chances and really risk things and make some big changes you can make some sacrifice you can have some big changes a very positive in your life.

Jim Rembach: Okay, so I have to ask with both of you being quite the athletic folks was it because Nike is the center of the universe in Beaverton, Oregon was that it?

Laurie Buckland: No, that actually did not weigh in but certainly the bicycling, my husband I met on a bike ride as you mentioned, and so were it were avid cyclists and quality of life, affordability, lots of different factors that we looked at. We went and visit—we had a short list we went and visited places and made our choice, and it worked out well.

Jim Rembach: For a very short time in high school my family moved out to Beaverton, Oregon and I spent the first semester of my junior year at Beaverton, high school

Laurie Buckland: It’s a small world Jim.

Jim Rembach: Yes, I tell you. Unfortunately I didn’t get to finish which is very disturbing because for me, I was a baseball player and I played first base and their first baseman graduated the year before and so I was excited to get ready to play and we ended up moving and I’ll be gosh turned if the team didn’t win the state championship that year.

Laurie Buckland: Baseball is big here people are surprised but it’s big here. Oh I see you said couple of national championships.

Jim Rembach: Crushing blow. I have fond and fearful and dreadful memories of Beaverton but since you’re there I will focus on the positive side.

Laurie Buckland: There you go.

Jim Rembach: When you start thinking about where you are doing—yes you do some things consistently and you’re doing some new things I know you and Michael love to travel and all that. I know you have several goals that you’re always working on here and juggling, I should say, but if you are to pick one that’s most important to you which one would it be?

Laurie Buckland: That’s an interesting question because I’m not the type to write down my priority list of goals or anything and I kind of view them as constantly evolving and having slightly different paths because our personal and professional lives are our—again we all pursue different goals in those areas so if I think about kind of top goals it’s around, I would say foundations. My view of live that I think probably aligned with a whole lot of people are to make an impact and contribute and help others. On the professional side you do that in ways related to your work, obviously for me, that’s helping a client solve a problem succeed helping an employee do something really well and coaching and developing them. Someone at a seminar come up to me and saying, wow! That’s was great I understand that in a way I never understood it before that was really helpful, so on the professional front that’s how I can make those contributions. In my personal life that takes on a very different flavor in terms of the role I play as an aunt to wonderful nieces and nephew and volunteer work and things like that. So, kind of continue to evolve my goals and in each of those areas but that’s kind of the foundation I think of any goals that I’m working on at any given time.

Jim Rembach: And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

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Jim Rembach: Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Lori, the Hump Day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Lori Bocklund, are you ready to hoedown?

Lori Bocklund: As long as I don’t have to talk as fast as you.

Jim Rembach: No problem.

Lori Bocklund: Let’s hoedown.

Jim Rembach: What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Lori Bocklund: I’d say time. I live in a constant state of triage and that makes it a little difficult for me and for those I lead. I think it’s something we can all work on and improve on all the time.

Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice do you have ever received?

Lori Bocklund: Do the right thing. Let integrity and honesty guide you.

Jim Rembach: What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Lori Bocklund: I think I have really good problem-solving, critical thinking skills that’s what engineers do and I get to apply them in very interesting ways.

Jim Rembach: What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Lori Bocklund: Communication, that’s an incredibly powerful tool and something I think I do well maybe a little defying the stereotypes of engineers but writing and speaking and those sorts of things.

Jim Rembach: What would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion, it could be from any genre?

Laurie Buckland: I always recommend people read ADKAR which is a change management book, that stands for awareness desire knowledge ability and reinforcement, it’s a quick and fun read it will make you very dangerous to your friends family and people you work with and understanding how people do or don’t change.

Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader Legion you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/loribocklund. Okay, Andy, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you. But you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. What skill or a piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Laurie Buckland: It would be a tough choice between the change management and the improv they’re both so valuable, can I take two?

Jim Rembach: We’ll let you do that. Why would you take those?

Laurie Buckland: Because I think they’re very simple practical insights that help you work better with people. Understanding how we change or don’t why people resist change and how you help them through that so valuable. We look at every project through that lens and then the improve, you and I talked about is just a great simple little tool for thinking things through and not rejecting what people are trying to say or accomplish but incorporating that into the thinking and how you solve problems and work with them.

Jim Rembach: Laurie it was an honor to spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Laurie Buckland: Yeah, I’m a little old fashioned and the best ways are my email, lori@strategiccontact.com or give me a call I’d love to talk to people—503-579 8560, and I love LinkedIn as a great place to connect.

Jim Rembach: Lori Bocklund, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader Show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

END OF AUDIO

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172: Lori Bocklund: Life’s too short to live this way