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Eric Kish - The Everyday Turnaround

177: Eric Kish: They gave me 90 days to crash and burn

Eric Kish Show Notes Page

Eric Kish was placed in an oil refinery to turn it around. Overloaded with debt and crippled by equipment that had failed inspection, Eric thought he had no option but to go bankrupt. That’s when in desperation, Eric’s work to make a major cultural shift paid off and it fueled a historic turnaround.

Eric was born and raised in communist Romania in the early ‘60s and 70’s.

His father, a former Romanian Navy officer trained by the soviets as a rocket scientist, married Eric’s mother while at the Navy Academy in Baku, Azerbaijan, a republic of the Soviet Union at that time.

He grew up surrounded by engineering science and military stories as his father became a pioneer of the Power Electronics industry in the 70’s.

His father eventually defected to the United States in the mid-80s’ and immediately after, Eric emigrated to Israel with his mother and sister.

Soon after, Eric joined the Israeli Defense Forces, serving in its Armored Corps. After completion of his active service tour, he started his career as an Electrical Engineer in the Israeli Defense industry, while continuing to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces reserves.

Eric is best known for his turnaround CEO career, transforming 12 companies across 3 continents in 22 years, two of them taken from millions to billions in revenue.

He began his first turnaround in 1999, taking private a bankrupt oil refinery at a $7m market cap and taking it public again 3 years later at a $450 million market cap. That turnaround was followed by 6 additional acquisitions/turnarounds that created the largest oil company in South Eastern Europe. The company was acquired in 2008 for $3.8Bn.

After transitioning the company to new owners, Eric decided to return to school. He enrolled in MIT’s Sloan School of Business executive certificate program and while at MIT he was accepted by Stanford Business School in their Master’s in Business program which he graduated from in 2012.

In 2013 he joined the US Association of Interim Executives and as part of their Rapid Executive Deployment team lead a number of additional turnarounds

In 2016 Eric decided to write his first book, Everyday Turnaround – The Art and Science of Daily Business Transformation. He was soon asked to create a workshop based on the methodology introduced by the book and to become a regular speaker for Vistage CEO peer groups.

The workshop introduces The Business Navigation Framework, a practical framework to create highly adaptable and scalable organizations.

Eric is currently CEO of FastCAP systems, a fast-growing developer of Carbon Nanotubes based Composite Materials poised to disrupt large segments in the electronics components market.

Throughout his life and career Eric lived and worked in 11 countries and speaks fluently 6 languages.

Eric currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and daughter, Alina and Maya.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

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

“With increased speed and uncertainty in our lives, the future belongs to the quickly adaptable.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet  

“The role of a turnaround leader is to change mental models.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“Whatever feels like friction is what keeps your business from scaling and adapting.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“Surface pain, make it measurable and focus your organization on systematically removing everyday friction.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“Intention is something that you have in the back of your mind, when you make everyday decisions.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“If you have people playing in behavioral comfort zones, they will be happier, more motivated and highly energized.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“If you’re naturally in a place of comfort in your behavior, you will spend much less energy to deliver the same goods.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“Organizations are living things.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“If I’ve communicated my intent and prepared them for battle, they will make the right decisions without me.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“A leader has to inspire confidence.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“To put everybody’s mind to work you need to free their initiative.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“My role as a leader is to support you in experimenting to find the right solution.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“Life is like surfing, you have to wait for the right wave to ride it on.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“With money everybody knows how to do it, show me you can do it without asking for more money.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

“Use creativity and execution discipline to solve a problem instead of just throwing money at it.” -Eric Kish Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Eric Kish was placed in an oil refinery to turn it around. Overloaded with debt and crippled by equipment that had failed inspection, Eric thought he had no option but to go bankrupt. That’s when in desperation, Eric’s work to make a major cultural shift paid off and it fueled a historic turnaround.

Advice for others

Understand behavioral drives.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Patience.

Best Leadership Advice

With money, everybody knows how to do it. Show me you can do it without asking for more money.

Secret to Success

Get out of the way of my own organization.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Behavioral science. I use predictive index that helps me to understand behavioral drives and predict behavior of the people I lead.

Recommended Reading

Everyday Turnaround: The Art and Science of Daily Business Transformation

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

Contacting Eric Kish

website: www.everydayturnaround.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickish/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KishEric

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

176: Dave Mattson: I’m forever grateful for my road to excellence

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 intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

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Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who it’s really going to help us move in the right direction faster. Dave Mattson grew up in Simsbury, Connecticut born into a single income family as the eldest of four boys. The boys were raised to believe that they could have anything their heart’s desire as long as they paid for it. As a result Dave grew up as a worker shoveling snow in the winter delivering papers and mowing lawns in the summer. As he grew older he hired on to pick tobacco since that was the only job that any fourteen-year-old could legally be hired for. In high school Dave worked three jobs and eventually started his own painting company which he managed for six years and eventually sold. 

When he graduated from the University of Connecticut during his period of life they’ve learned the value of hard work, how to deal with people from all backgrounds, the importance of talking about and dealing with money and the trials and tribulations of being an entrepreneur. Dave has taken this experience and learned how to connect the dots in a conversation and develop the ability to relate the unrelated. As an introvert he doesn’t have the need to dominate conversations choosing instead to listen more than he speaks this has served him well in both management and selling. He brought his extraordinary work ethic to Sandler he is known as an over prepare and has developed a knack for understanding people and knowing what they need to become successful. 

Over the years he has learned that people love to edit not create so he shows up with ideas and encourages others to beat them up and make them better while simultaneously gaining buy-in. Mattson joined Sandler in 1988 learning under his mentor and company founder David Sandler since that time he has authored several programs started the firm’s global consulting and training company created its national branding program and risen from CEO o to partner to owner of Sandler in 2012. He has expanded Sandler into 31 countries and over 250 training centers. He tries to impart to everyone he meets that hard work pays off it’s important to be transparent in every facet of your life and the key to success is getting people to work with you not for you.  Dave currently resides in Phoenix, Maryland a suburb of Baltimore with his wife and their five children. He was a founding member of Susie’s Cause in supporting the fight against colon cancer and enjoys fishing time at the beach and traveling with his family. Dave Mattson are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Dave Mattson:     Absolutely, thanks for having me. 

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

Dave Mattson:     Sure. My current passion outside of work is fly-fishing. I’ve always loved to fly fish I can do it when I want don’t necessarily need a big crowd so it’s one of those things where I can make a decision, hey let’s go. To be honest it’s one of those things where I know there’s always fish there and I’m the variable I’m the one to see they’re not using the right fly not doing the right float not doing this there’s so many variables much like golf that you’ve got to get everything just right to get it done and you’re never great at it it’s so you’re always constantly striving to become better and better at that particular sport, so that’s what I enjoy. 

Jim Rembach:   Listening to you say that and also having the opportunity to look over your book, The Road to Excellence Six Leadership Strategies to Build a Bulletproof Business, I start seeing a lot of similarities in what you just talked about on the fly-fishing puzzle the fly-fishing problem-solving when it comes to building a business finding the right thing not being aware of where the fish are it’s a whole lot of guessing and testing and validating and I mean a whole lot of things that are going on there. 

Dave Mattson:     That’s true if you think about both of them the similarities for me are you can go into a new place you can’t live on yesterday’s successes because that was at a different spot a different time so you’ve got to look forward but learn from the past. You also cannot be impatient you have to figure out what’s going on sit back for a second look at the forest not the trees and say, okay what is going on here? And really be objective and question yourself at all times which is what I do anyways I’m always questioning myself which has gotten me this far and I’m not really going to change that. But I think when it comes to your point when it comes to fishing and that I think it is true I think we always have to always figure out how to become better always know that’s something in my control that it’s me I can’t do that what was in the environment and what was me it’s this what can I do so I step up and don’t play the victim and take control and figure out what I can do with the environment that I’ve been given. 

Jim Rembach:   I also started thinking about—okay, so Sandler is primarily known for sales selling. I’ve had Josh Seibert on the show Brian Sullivan on the show you on the show and however you guys talk so much more about the leadership aspect of the business more so than you talk about the actual sales outcome, why is that? 

Dave Mattson:     Obviously, we are known for sales tactics. People say Sandler they’ll say, Oh awesome, awesome sales training, I think when it comes to the leadership obviously that’s the topic of the new book, but I also think that you have to control yourself. Even if you want to be a professional salesperson and you want to go above and beyond the pack you want to be in that top 20% you’ve got three areas that you need to focus in on which is attitudes, behaviors and technique. Technique’s Sandler awesome at but technique by itself is only going to get you so far if you want to sustain that upward hockey stick growth pattern you’ve got to have the mindset to get yourself there where you’re not fear fearing success you’re not fearing failure you’ve got the confidence and conviction and then you really had to become a behaviorist. I think all that self-leadership stuff you incorporated is really important if you’re going to excel whether it’s in sales leadership, leadership and or sales in general so I think they’re all combined.

Jim Rembach:   That’s a good point. When you start talking about the roadmap to organizational excellence you talked about six P’s and I don’t really want to go into those on the show people can get the book and get into those because there’s a couple other points of this book that I really want to dig a little bit deeper into. Just for sake of mentioning the six PS are planning, positions, people, processes, perform matrix and passion, however, you talk about an excellence process to me that really stood out and you talked about that you must set your own measurable performance benchmarks and find a way to hold yourself accountable for attaining them and then not doing so is a major blind spot you talked a lot about blind spots in the book and that essentially leads up to having the six piece put in place so that you can become more clear and have a clearer roadway, know where you’re going. When you start talking about the excellence process one of the things that kind of has always bothered me is the difference between accountability and ownership and I think too many people want to hold other people accountable in a negative context instead of saying, you know what? I want you to own this and how can I enable you to own it? So in the excellence process insight, is that born out of that or did it come from somewhere else? 

Dave Mattson:     Well, I think to your point one, I think that we as leaders we want a culture of accountability and the people who work for us want to be able to be clear on the expectations given to them they want to know absolutely what are my guardrails so I can operate within? What do I have the right to make decisions on? And what can 

I—and that clarity to be honest Jim normally doesn’t exist. In my mind I’ve given it to you you’re sitting back not wondering, hey, can I move forward as if you don’t want to pop your head up too high because maybe you get whacked depending on the company culture. So there’s a million things to this, mutual mystification, that are going on. But if I set back one more step because you’ve said two things is I have to be congruent myself. For me to say you should be on time you should be doing this and I’m showing up a half hour late to meetings I’ve missed most of my deadlines but because on the owner I get a get out of jail card free that is garbage that’s like telling your kids not to smoke because that’s what you believe in and you’re in your third cigar at dinner it’s just incongruent. 

Jim Rembach:   That’s so true especially with the generation that we have today they’ve got to see it in you before they try to instill a pin in themselves.

Dave Mattson:    Absolutely. You’re going to lead with what you consider to be excellent not what you say. 

Jim Rembach:   Another thing that I really liked is you talked about the key attributes of effective performance that leads into that whole ownership and I want you to move things forward and I think there’s a whole lot of these blind-spot things in here as far as avoiding them. As you said tied to the overall vision and organization tied to the top three key priorities established for every function in the organization documented in job description that goes on and on there’s several things when people find the book that I think are going to be elements that kind of what you just said a moment ago. People really don’t know what the expectation is and they don’t know the performance outcome that has to be in place in order for that success to occur.

Dave Mattson:    Right. I think one of the best things that David Sandler, and I had the honor to work with him very closely from 1988 when I came to home office to 1995 when he had passed, he really managed me using three piece which is potency, protection, permission. He gave me permission to act as if, once I understood the guardrails that I could operate with it, David—I give you permission to just do your thing you may make some bad decisions I get all that but I will protect you on the decisions that you make within the guardrails and I will protect you and when you need to come tell me the truth when we’re off track. Most people they’re so afraid they don’t say anything they spend half their life hiding the mess they could have just said, hey David here’s the situation what should I be doing I think I’m way over my head on this one. That open relationship has now really carried itself to what we teach and how we run the business. 

When he did that to me I believe that I took projects and initiatives that he gave me that I probably would have taken it to a six and say, okay now David Sandler here it is you take it over the finish line, no way I blew. If he expected a hundred I give it back to him at one hundred twenty because I knew exactly what was supposed to have been done I validate and what he wanted me to do I set it back to him made sure I understood it I created a road map I had benchmarks I checked along the way and it was empowering and I really just stepped up to the plate. Now we had other people, Jim, that didn’t step up to the plate they were still operating on—I don’t know what to do, hesitancy, no confidence no conviction but they don’t own the company now so it just really offered me a chance just step it up and I always, always remember that and that’s what we do now, 

Jim Rembach:   I think what you just described right there to me is a great framework for people who you want to become high performers oftentimes they may not even see themselves but giving them that type of framework and autonomy could really be a key differentiator. I think that’s lacking in a lot of organizations today we see across the board drops in creative thinking drops in innovation drops in R&D ROI it’s just going on and on and on because that framework is lacking, 

Dave Mattson:   Absolutely. I think if we even go further than that once we’ve—let’s take any initiative that an owner or a leader says, hey this is where we’re going, how many times do they really rally the troops and over-communicate that? I know most of the clients that I’ll have will send out a memo and they’ll do a company meeting, this is where we’re headed but Jim you and I know. For me I do videos internally this is all internal stuff I’ll do videos I do town hall meetings I’ll send podcasts I’ve got people in the field who are doing what I want them to do and I use them as examples because we’ve got so many different people in the workforce I have to send that message through so many different modalities and because it takes me 18 months to socialize an idea I think most leaders stop around a month or two and say, well they got it. What do you want me to do? I sent the memo everyone understands it but that’s a huge mistake. I think if I tie it back to allowing me to be self-sufficient which is the ultimate goal of a leader, I think that’s true as well when you give me a project if I don’t know the guardrails and I don’t know what I’m able to do. I think what happens is as a leader we think about this 24/7 for 30 days. I have a 15-minute conversation with you and I think that you’re on the same page as I am you’re not you’re in the same page I was 29 days ago I’m so far ahead of you but I forget that and that’s really a big mistake. 

Jim Rembach:       That’s the big curse of knowledge that typically he talk about. 

Dave Mattson:     It is.

Jim Rembach:       So another thing that I really liked in the book is you talk about the ten commandments of acceleration for business leaders and I would like to spend a moment or two on these  ten and I don’t want to read them all but if you start talking about these ten when you start talking about things that are like critical, I tell my kids about the ten commandments honor thy father and mother for me that’s one of the most important, which one of these ten do you think really stands out as something that’s key.

Dave Mattson:     It’s different for lots of different groups. I have to say, you know your audience better, if you had to pick one for the leaders that are in your audience, what’s one pops out for you? Because I just interested in it because it’s so different depending on where you are in the world and where you are in your business. What do you think pops out? 

Jim Rembach:       Gosh, there’s really a couple. For me, I think mentoring and coaching others to create passion in themselves is really something that is a huge gap.

Dave Mattson:     I do too. Listen, coaching is one of those things where you should spend 45percent of your time in a daily function. We have four hats on any leader we’re switching these hats a million times during the day. I’ve got a supervision hat, I’ve got a coaching hat, I’ve got a training hat, I have a mentoring hat. Most of us live in supervision because we think that’s what management is and maybe that’s what management was to you and that’s the other problem leaders aren’t really trained. Sales leadership as an example is the least trained group of people in our company which is shocking because they’re required to bring in the revenue for our company, nothing happens unless sales leadership does their job they are responsible for a hundred percent of that revenue we don’t train them. 

What typically happens is, Jim, I’m looking around my sales manager disappears and I say, Oh, my gosh, I’m going to have to do their job and my job this is insane and so I look for my top stud or stud at and I say, do you know what? I’ve had my eye in you, Jim, I’ve always said that you’re the future leader I’d like you to run this group now and just keep doing what you do, Jim, I want you just to replicate yourself and life will be good for all of us and I talked you into this position and then I say, thank goodness now Jim’s off and running. Well, that’s not really what happens we really have to coach and train our people. Most people think coaching is, you coming to me and say, Hey, Dave, what should I do? Jim do this, this, this and this. Okay, well, that doesn’t necessarily work. First of all, you only do five percent of what I said and if it goes well you take credit it goes poorly it’s my fault. So I think coaching really helps people become self-sufficient, self-aware and that’s not me telling you something it’s you self-discovering therefore you will do it again on your own in the future. You know all the sayings, teach them how to fish all that stuff. 

But I think the aha moments that come from coaching when you act like a doctor and ask the right questions and let people self- discover but with a formula, I think that’s really special. We’ve gotten ten sales behaviors that I think any sales person should be able to do and those things regardless—and Jim for anyone that’s listening it’s really starts up on account development and goes all the way through the sales process all the way to account management and you can figure that out for any one of the listeners businesses. But if you’re coaching to something specific and asking you to rate yourself on each of those areas that I think are important for you to become great at in my business and because if you think you’re a three and I think you’re a three we should work on that if I think you’re a three and you’re nine on, let’s say account development we’ve got a disconnect, so we should be talking about that. 

And then the other thing is to tie in, what happens if we improve? So let’s use account development, if you and I both agree that you’re a three out of ten in that area and I say Jim what happens if we got you to seven because I noticed you want to go from a three to a seven. Dave, here’s what would happen, I’ve got X amount of people in my funnel, X amount of people who would come up back end. And I said, which would mean X amount of commission for me which then I can spend money on my kid’s education and now I’ve tied in my corporate goal to your goal which is a huge blind spot and then we say, okay, let’s get working on this thing. And now you’re motivated versus me picking—Jim, you’re no good at account development let’s talk about that today, and now here comes the PowerPoint with the death march. That’s not really what should happen but it’s what does happen.

Jim Rembach:   I think you just explained the huge difference between what is a good coach and an effective coach and what isn’t.

Dave Mattson:     Absolutely.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Looking through the book going through and talking about all these blind spots and the discussion that we had before we even got on the show, I there’s a lot of quotes that actually drive you and help you point north. Is there one or two of those that you can share? 

Dave Mattson:     The quotes that I like, let’s see—if you don’t have a plan by default you’ll fall into somebody else’s plan. I really do believe that that was an Eden to me by Sandler. He would always say, David what’s your plan? And I was always reactive I would come and just hear what you had to say and then react off of that. I learned something very interesting as he was molding me into becoming a leader. He said, watch what happens when people show up with a plan, documents, like here’s how I think we should attack it. What I realized is people react to those who brought a plan. It’s not that hey, we’re going to put your stuff away we react to it we edit it we make it better we socialize it and from that day forward to say that’s kind of cool. So, if you show up with your idea first thing you should realize is 90% of the population shows up with nothing. So, your idea by default is something that we’re going to be working on which is huge as a leader you should always realize that. 

And the second thing is, if I don’t have a plan on where we want to go as a leader what we’d like to do by default I’m going to follow somebody else’s and it could be a VP of Sales it could be this, I’m not saying it’s bad because you want other people to create the plan of action as well I get all that, but from an organizational standpoint I think that that is huge. The other quote for me is: Who you R is not who you I, and R stands for role, Jim, I stands for identity. I think people get confused, as a human I have a million, I’m a parent, I’m a brother, I’m a son, I’m a husband, I fly fish we talked about that, I’m an owner, and the list of things that I do goes on as you get older that list just expands. I is identity and so what that means is, I may have all these roles—like even today my role I’m on a podcast role I’m the brand of Sandler. I’m going to go downstairs and I’ve got 16 other different roles so there’s a million things going on. But if I do poorly in one of them, which is bound to happen I mean let’s face it, so let’s say that I did a bad job today parenting I made a mistake once again so what happens, does that mean I’m a complete failure in all the other things that I’m doing? No, it doesn’t. It just means that for that particular role I was no good at it today and I need to improve. That sounds so simple but think about a salesperson on our team they get rejected at nine o’clock do they just write that off and say, you know what? That’s one of 30 and a thing, I’ve learned from that I’m moving on. Or do they—oh, no, that was my biggest account here we go I’m getting killed I hate this, my pricing models no good I got no support and here comes the blame game and they absolutely get sucked down. What happens as you know is the way people see themselves conceptually is directly proportionate to how they operate in their role. And that’s why from a sales perspective and an owner perspective you really do need to be an I10 ten, which is self-concept. You may not going to make the right decisions all the time I get it but you have to look at yourself with a healthy self-esteem otherwise your roles will self-adjust. 

Let’s do social, pick somebody, Mike Tyson he was an R10 he was a machine at his day, a machine, people were frightened. And then what happens? He imploded because he didn’t see his self-concept as an R10. He was a kid that shouldn’t have made it that far and he’d look at me, my gosh, and all of a sudden he went from 200 million down to bankrupt because he just self-adjusted. You can look at movie star after movie star it happens all the time but it doesn’t just happen in sports and in Hollywood it happens just—look down the hallway people are adjusting all the time. As a leader you’ve had to say to yourself, that person should be operating at 80% or higher I mean they have it what’s going on? But they have other issues. So they’re looking at failure and success from a very myopic standpoint you really have to step back and say, look I’ve got a million things going on it goes up and down but here’s how I see myself. Conceptually I am bulletproof, I’m going to learn to muse, I’m arrogant not arrogant and so I think that’s the two that stick out for me.

Jim Rembach:   Gosh! As you were talking I started thinking so much about absent like you were talking about the ebbs and flows and why it’s so important to have somebody as the good coach, and they’re hard to find, I have that coach in order to help your downs cycles be as short as they possibly can because they’re going to happen, they’re going to happen. Okay, talking about down cycles and being able to move up and get over them we talked about getting over a humps on the show. You shared with me a couple stories of times that you had to get over the hump and we kind of honed in on one because it had a lot of dynamics associated with it both personal and professional. Can you please share us that time when you’ve had to get over the hump? 

Dave Mattson:     Sure. For me, I think there’s two major speed bumps in my life. Of course there’s million of them, but the ones that really shaped me more than others the first one was, I’ve been in Sandler for three years maybe four and David and I got along very well I was his protégé I was doing all the things I hit all the benchmarks he asked me to be his partner–fast forward here—and he said: “David, here’s what it’s going to buy 25% of the company we’d like to have you part of the business.” Now, I’m the only non-family member in the business so here we go. I go and try to find money, well, my first aha was hey, Sandler, look at Sandler the bankers should just look at it and give me the money this is like a no-brainer. I don’t understand, but here they’re looking at me as a 28-year old saying, no, I don’t think so. First of all you don’t know a hundred percent so we have no collateral, blah, blah, blah and I went from banker to banker to banker and got killed. Now, think about where I was I was a stud looking for money I was feeling like a dud pretty quickly, we’re going back to our previous conversation, by itself this team is like in the toilet, and so what do I do? And I happen to just mention something at a Thanksgiving thing I said, Yeah, this is really hard I thought this was going to be simple, now months into it I’m trying to do my job I’ve got a million little fear doubt worry things picking up my brain and my parents without my knowledge put up their homes, as they had a vacation home and a primary home and they put their retirement money on the line as a collateral for the bank above and beyond what I had to get me the loan to buy Sandler and so that was a huge hump. I would have never been here if it wasn’t for that I didn’t ask them and to be honest Jim if my kids asked me to put everything on the line I’m not sure I would do it. Not that I don’t love them I don’t know why they did that and I’m forever grateful they saw in me I guess that, hey I had that. 

So that was one and if I fast forward the same type of thing popped up, I’m running the business now I’m the VP of Sales I only owned 25% I’m running national accounts so I’m zipping around closing big deals and I found myself without much discussion as a single parent, boom, like overnight, I have a three year old and a six year old. I was a single parent trying to figure out—wait a minute now, first, that I actually caused this problem because I was too focused on the business side that I caused, which I would deny of course because that’s just protection which sure is a lie. Then I say well, what am I going to do? Because the business can’t survive without me, oh, my gosh, all roads lead to David. But you know what happened? That was the biggest aha moment that I had actually because I realized that I had to scale the business and all roads could not leave to me because that was a huge mistake. It was great for my ego when I was juggling all these balls and I was doing it successfully but the fact of the matter is you can’t triple your business under that model. And so that happened and I just became a process animal because there’s not enough hours in the day and what I had to do is I learn how to recipe everything. 

This is what I’m doing Tuesdays and I just categorized and became an absolute process animal to survive and that has really gone throughout the whole business. And so I look at younger people who step up and want to do X Y & Z and I see myself in them, I see people struggling around but on the other side though, Jim, when people say—well, I’ve got so many things going on I can’t do that. Well, are you not willing or you’re not able? It’s your choice, I’m not forcing you to do one or the other but you’re going to have to figure out—I don’t want you to sacrifice your family for sure because that’s super important at the same time you got to figure out and have that work-life balance but still get your stuff done because it’s not unreasonable you have to become process oriented or at least some system for yourself for you to survive and for you to really thrive that’s the bottom line. Those are two I think that pop out for me. 

Going back to the whole –would I do it as a parent? That’s a great question. I’m not there yet and I guess we’ll see what happens. As far the whole process thing I think you’re so dead on in a lot of different ways. And also that process thing—well, let me say, I have a good friend of mine who works with a lot of organizations in a legacy type of format meaning you have owner—this isn’t like millions of people right now have businesses, small businesses small medium-sized businesses, that they have no family to leave it to and so for them they have to look at putting their businesses up for sale. For many of these organizations they’ve operated for so long in a format where it’s just like well—hey, so-and-so knows how to do that. They haven’t been able to scale and they now can’t sell the business because people look at it and they’re like—where’s your processes? How can anybody step in and be able to take over and do this particular job? The typical human reaction is, well I’m protecting my space and my territory and you can’t allow that to happen because it’s a detriment to that individual because they’re not developing other people they’re not developing the business and then overall the business as a whole. 

 It’s not even true it’s a fantasy people freaked out process—I’m not a process person, oh I’m going to spend 18 hours—I don’t look at process as compliance I look at process as a playbook. You do it naturally you always want to figure out what’s the best way to do X and it could be the best way to remote there on could be the best way to get to work we all do it we do it all day long. How do we get better at this? How do we do this? We create these play books mentally for ourselves on everything that we do but when you ask people to write it down, oh, wait a minute you’re forcing me micromanagement this is not the culture that I want, I think it’s foolish. I think you can have both I don’t look at it as a compliance issue I look at it as a self-survival thrive issue because to your point when you such-and-such can do it. Well, guess what 87 percent of executives can retire this year not saying they are but they can. And so when such-and-such can do it well such-and-such isn’t here anymore they just left so what am I doing? There is no such-and-such there’s a gaping hole. Regardless of its process or a client relationship or anything I go through my company and say, if that person left tomorrow what would I be doing? How am I reacting versus getting—Dave, we appreciate the last 20 years we’ve decided to move on. What? And now I’m scrambling, so that’s just how I look at it.

Jim Rembach:   That’s a great point. I also refer to as it the hit by bus theory. 

Dave Mattson:     Exactly. It’s realistic. 

 Jim Rembach:   We’ve talked about a lot of things going on. We’ve talked about the fly-fishing, talked about building the business, you’ve got the book—there’s a whole lot of things that are happening, but if you were to talk about one goal that you have, what would that one goal be?

Dave Mattson:     Transform our company. We are a 50-year old company we’ve won tons of awards we’re primarily facilitator left we’ve (inaudible 31:34) tone our 65 training centers so people come to us or we go to you. I have five kids Jim, they’re not learning the way that I’m learning the way that you’re learning. So, my personal goal is to really shift the business to take care of different groups. I consume content differently and I have to make sure that the kids that are coming up, like my children who are in college and out, the new people in the workforce consume content differently the Millennials are consuming content differently so for us to shift it’s been huge especially when I’m 54 years old.

If you put your content online there’s no way people are going to pay you for it then you’ve just shot yourself in the foot, what are you doing? But YouTube changed everything. The younger generation has grown up in a completely different environment I know I sound like my parent, because I’m sure they said the same thing about us, but if you’re not going to change you’re going to get killed and so for us we have shifted everything over to platforms where people can access thousands of podcasts and videos we’ve got tools now and so it’s really done a lot of things for us on the unattended consequences that really catapulted us forward in a lot of different ways. The other goal which is tied in, Jim, we were really bad at tracking our clients. 

We have millions of X clients if I walk through an airport the Sandler shirt on people will yell Sandler terms. They don’t know who I am so they just love this stuff but I don’t know who any of them are and that is really—if you look at the other technology companies that are thriving whether you look at LinkedIn or Salesforce, they know who their ecosystem is and they nurture their ecosystem and we just historically never did that. We are scrambling to go find who they are because I also know that the people that we train fifteen years ago they’re all leadership roles they all love us. And so that’s really one of the goals is to get ourselves into a new place in time and then go find our past client base through technology because I don’t know who they are and get them back into our ecosystem.

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, Dave, 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. Dave Mattson, are you ready to hoedown?

Dave Mattson:  Of course.   

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

Dave Mattson:  I think continually looking backwards, Jim, and making sure that everybody is okay for the ride moving forward so I spend a lot of time building that bridge. I think that probably holds us back as a company a little more than it should but I there’s this equal—just give pull thing, I don’t know what’s the best way to do it so, if I have to look back I’d say probably do a lot more pulling. 

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

Dave Mattson: The best leadership advice is inclusion. Don’t breach your own press and really make sure that the people are clear they’re on board and you give them the ability to succeed. 

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

Dave Mattson. I’m always worried. To me I’m always looking for the reason why this isn’t going to work and then I’m pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t versus I’ve over–I’ve said it’s going to work and I haven’t really done that. So I think If I’m constantly thinking about things I’m constantly worried—entrepreneurial horror—you’ll have it that really what’s helped me get this far and I’ve watched a lot of people who have left that mentality get killed. 

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

Jim Knight:   Play book. I create play books for everything that we do which is capturing best practices and that way I can replicate it for a lot of things that I don’t do all the time, let say, but also I can give that playbook to my staff and they can increase their efficiency very, very quickly. 

Jim Rembach:      What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, it could be from any genre, and of course, we’re going to put a link to The Road to Excellence on our show notes page as well. 

Dave Mattson:     The book that that changed my life was, “You Can’t Teach a Kid How to Ride a Bike at Summer that was just a killer for me. Because it was written not in a sales environment but really in a social environment and then it bridged over to a sales environment. I also, The Power of Influence by Robert CalDini, I thought that was an awesome book as well, there’s a million of them there but I tend to gravitate towards the psychological portion of what people do and why they do it because I can attribute that to anything that I do.

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/DavidMattson—we’re going to do David Mattson for his show notes page. Okay, Dave 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 piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Dave Mattson:     I think I would take back confidence and conviction. I think the lessons is important as you learn them if you’re willing to keep an open mind. I think those lessons would come even if I was 25 but I think the confidence and conviction that you have at 50, if I could bring that back at 25 then I would accelerate all my successes and failures. But I also wouldn’t second guess—I would have could have should have—that would have disappeared because as you become more and more comfortable in your skin whenever that is for you I think if I could have that at 25, even though I was 25 going on 40 to be honest I think that would probably be the best thing that I could take back in time.

Jim Rembach:   Dave, 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?

Dave Mattson:     Sure, they can go to sandler.com, I tell you what Jim, they could go to sandler.com find a local training center and just call up and crash a class. Crash a class go see what you love whether it’s management or sales sit in me and just say, hey we listen to Dave and Jim and so they’re there. You can go to sandler.com or dmattson@sandler.com

Jim Rembach:   Dave Mattson, 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 

143: Josh Seibert: I’m not good at giving up

Josh Seibert Show Notes Page

Josh Seibert was a successful sales professional. He was promoted to a sales manager and all he had to do was teach people to be like him. Josh then proceeded to take a mediocre sales team and turn them into a failing sales team. That’s when he learn his most valuable lesson ever.

Josh was born and raised in the small town of Sharonville Ohio. Typical traditional “Rockwell” style, blue collar family of four with one sister… until his parents added another sister and a set of triplet boys to the family during his teenage years.  Although he had an older sister, Josh was the first-born son in the family which came with high expectations.  Solid values including honor, integrity and a hard work ethic were instilled by his father. Inspiration and a “Can Do” attitude was his mother’s gift to him.

Josh volunteered and served six years in the elite force of the United States Submarine Navy. He will tell you that it was truly an honor and a distinct privilege to have served our country. “The Submarine Force built and instilled in me the highest high levels of courage, commitment, respect during a time when sadly, those of us who were serving weren’t as welcomed by our society as they thankfully are today.  He has always been proud and thankful for the opportunity and for all who have ever served”.

During submarine school in Groton Connecticut, Josh found his “Bride” and even now, after over 40 years of marriage, he still refers to Ann as his bride. Ann and Josh have three daughters and 8 grandchildren…including a set of twins.

After his service in the Submarine Navy, Josh entered the world of sales with Prudential Financial in Charleston SC. After building a successful insurance practice, he entered Management and began to climb the corporate ladder and became the Director of Sales Training for the company. After a 20-year career and years of extensive corporate travel (living on planes and in hotels) and faced with yet another move, in 1999 Josh acquired a Sandler Training franchise and began to build a training & development business in Greensboro NC.

Josh is often heard on local as well as national business/talk radio. He has written numerous articles for business magazines and is a well-known informational, motivational and inspirational key note speaker. And is the author of Winning from Failing.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

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

“In every role, we’re either growing or failing.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“We learn so much more from experiential learning than we do from knowledge transfer.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“Experiential learning that follows knowledge determines whether or not we adopt it.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“There’s a difference between failure and failing.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“We have to shift the paradigm of understanding the value of failing.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“Whatever result we’re looking for, we get there by changing our behavior.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“If we’re protected from failure it doesn’t allow the full circle of the learning path.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“Those that are very good at what they do have a coach.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“Coaching is caught, not taught.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“Many leaders have never been developed in the coaching role.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“Skills are built on the job, not in a training room.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“To own it, you’re going to have to use it effectively on the job.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet

“I’m okay with failing, but I’m not good at giving up.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“A learning culture is so very different from the typical cultures in business.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

“The only thing that could hold me back is self.” -Josh Seibert Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Josh Seibert was a successful sales professional. He was promoted to a sales manager and all he had to do was teach people to be like him. Josh then proceeded to take a mediocre sales team and turn them into a failing sales team. That’s when he learn his most valuable lesson ever.

Advice for others

Learn the value of failing.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Nothing. The only thing that could hold me back is self.

Best Leadership Advice

Never give up.

Secret to Success

My core values. My honor won’t let me quit.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

My belief.

Recommended Reading

Transforming Leaders The Sandler Way

Winning From Failing

Contacting Josh Seibert

web: http://www.training.sandler.com

email: joshs [at] sandler.com

Phone: 336-884-1438

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-seibert-a06a1a4/  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SandlerSays

Resources and Show Mentions

Developing a Better Place to Work

Increase Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture

Empathy Mapping

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

 

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

143: Josh Seibert: I’m not good at giving up

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 intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions so move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more. 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because I actually have the opportunity interview somebody who’s local to me I’ve known him for a long time, actually many, many years ago. I’m just so just so glad that we get to reconnect because he’s talking about something that is critically important for us to be able to do in today’s world to really develop a stronger work-culture environment and really people –centric skill set.

Josh Seibert was born and raised in the small town of Sharonville, Ohio. Typical traditional Rockwell style, blue-collar family of four with one sister until his parents added another sister and a set of triplet boys to the family during his teenage years. Although he had an older sister, Josh was the firstborn son in the family which came with high expectations. Solid values including honor, integrity and a hard work ethic were instilled by his father, inspiration and a can-do attitude was his mother’s gift to him. Josh volunteered and served six years in the elite force of the United States submarine Navy. He will tell you that it was truly an honor and a distinct privilege to have served our country. 

The submarine force built and instill in him the highest levels of courage, commitment, and respect during a time when those that were serving weren’t necessarily welcomed by our society as thankfully they are today. He has always been proud and thankful for the opportunity and for all who have ever served. During submarine school in Groton, Connecticut, Josh found his bride and even now 40 after years of marriage he still refers to Anne as his bride. Anne and Josh have three daughters and eight grandchildren including a set of twins. After his service in the submarine Navy, Josh entered the world of sales with Prudential Financial in Charleston, South Carolina. After building a successful insurance practice he entered management and began to climb the corporate ladder and became the director of sales training for the company. After a 20-year career and years of extensive corporate travel living on planes and in hotels and faced with yet another move in 1999, Josh acquired a Sandler training franchise and began to build a training and development business in Greenville, North Carolina. 

Josh is often heard on local as well as national business talk radio. He has written numerous articles for business magazines and is a well-known informational and motivational inspirational keynote speaker and the author of Winning from Failing. Josh Seibert, are you ready to help us get over the hump 

Josh Seibert:    As best I can, thanks for having me on the show, Jim. 

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

Josh Seibert:    My current passion is in the realm of training and development, leadership development and building a learning culture. I love doing the work. I’ve been doing it for over 30 years now and I can’t see myself doing anything else moving forward.

Jim Rembach:   It’s easy to think from the perspective of Sandler and the work that you do of sales that Sandler selling systems, Sandler selling processes, however, when I start looking at your book Winning from Failing and  I was going through it, it really isn’t just sales–centric or focus it’s much more than that. 

Josh Seibert:    Yes, the focus of the book is how—there’s a lot of how to sell and the selling systems, the techniques, and how to manage sales people and to manage the sales organizations.  There’s systems and processes and techniques that are specific to those roles—the sales role, the manager role, the leader role. The book that I wrote is more about structuring a learning culture such that development can be ongoing and supported and never ever stop. So the book focuses in the passion that I have focuses more about how to build a learning culture and really span it across everything even beyond sales and in every role either we’re growing or we’re failing. In small business, midsize businesses , they struggle and many leaders struggle with how do I get from where I am to where I want to be is this huge gap? How do I get there? And how do I not get back there to that gap again? 

Jim Rembach:   And I think that’s a really good point. As you were talking and I started thinking about what I’ve read and reviewed in your in your book that doesn’t happen overnight. And it often is a situation where you where you have to build in the timeline and expectations and like you said, the systems and the processes in order to develop and get there, you can’t push the process. 

Josh Seibert:    No, you didn’t get there overnight. We have not created or I have not discovered the purple pill that will allow one to get where they want to go overnight to be developed, to grow, to train, to fill in those gaps that are significant overnight. When I do find that little purple pill, I will sell it for a whole lot more than what I charge today.

Jim Rembach:   That reminds me of us saying that my father has always had, it says, when he figures out to put ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag he knows he’s really done something well and he’s going to make a whole lot of money.

Josh Seibert:    That’s right, well done.

Jim Rembach:   There was something in the book that kind of resonated with me so strongly in that when you start thinking of human behavior and human expectations when it comes to learning and development we’ll say things and like you have in the book, “Hey, can’t we just hold a weekend training event or a single intensive or half-day super intensive or keynote speech that will transform everyone overnight?” But the  fact is that you say that, “Time and experience has shown that the only way that adults learn is by doing and the only way adults get around to doing something at an acceptable level of mastery is by failing trying again it’s just how humans are wired.

Josh Seibert:    Yeah, it is, it’s how we learn it’s how we grow. We learned so much more from experiential learning than we do from knowledge transfer and typically a one-day program on anything on management success, on leadership success, on sales success you picked the topic all of that knowledge transfer is very important in the learning process. It’s what we do with that knowledge that matters, that experiential learning that follows knowledge determines whether or not we adopted as a sustainable behavior moving forward as opposed to another binder on another shelf. We remember the 90/10 rule, 90 days after a training event, we retain about ten percent of what that knowledge transfer is. Unless there is a strategy to apply it in sustainably fail with it find those boundaries that experiential learning on the back end of it which includes the ability to fail in a determined specific quest to fail with.

Jim Rembach:   Someone referred to it as having a safe environment. Because when you  think in today’s world with a competitive aspect of it when you start thinking about dwindling and shrinking margins when you start thinking about people will say that, failure’s not an option, and that’s driven home in our heads over and over again that you just can’t fail but what we’re also doing by having that behavior, because it does come out as a behavior, is that we prevent any innovation, any creative thinking, people are just going to start following the process because it’s safe. 

Josh Seibert:    Right. One day we’ll all be minions as it were if we’re not careful that overprotection that happens Jim. I think it stems from the culture, the generations that moved forward as well. We baby boomers, I’ll speak for myself, protected our children from things that my father never protected me from and allowed me to experience those failures as I grew up in a small town in Ohio I didn’t have that and nor did he want that. I think there’s a difference and there’s a paradigm shift, I think there’s a difference between failure and failing. Here’s what I mean by that, being a failure is a self-esteem issue, it’s a self-esteem it’s a self-image issue is very damaging so being a failure is to me catastrophic. But failing from a control it from a role perspective I can be, what we call identity wise, I can feel very, very  good about who I am as a person and I should in my own eyes and eyes of God I’m perfect. Now am perfect in the roles? No, I have many roles in life, I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a son, I’m a trainer, I’m a leader, I do many things in my life and some days I do them very, very well in other days I don’t perform as well. But that is a role it’s failing in a role as opposed to a failure as a person. So first thing we have to shift the paradigm of understanding the value of failing as opposed to defining who is a failure.

Jim Rembach:   I think that’s a very important distinction that we often blur the lines on. One of the things I think, to kind of help really give—let me take a step back and say that one of the things that I really like about Sandler is that it you guys really do a good job of creating visuals and processes and frameworks that make practical sense and are just so easy to follow. One of the things that you shared in the book was called the knowing to owning a type of progression. Almost maturity processor or pathway and it talks about knowledge, application, skills, habits and then results.

Josh Seibert:    Right, you begin with the end in mind, what kind of a result are you looking for? There’s something we’re looking for when we’re about ready to make a change. And whatever that result that we’re looking for we get there by changing our behavior. If we continue to do the same things over and over again expecting a different result we know that’s the definition of insanity. So we know that if we’re going to have a significant impact on long-term results then we have to have a sustainable behavioral change that supports that result. The tough formula is to allow us to take it from knowing what we should do, need to do, want to do and owning the behaviors as it were, it’s muscle memory you just own it. I once heard and play a little bit of golf and I don’t know if you do Jim, I’m not very good at it I’m better at what I do here that I am at golf, but golf is very simple the game itself is very simple execution is the problem but it’s a very simple game. In most sports if you use sports analogies most of them are very simple in theory but execution is where it is and that’s behavioral base. Going from knowledge to that sustainable behavioral change in effect is going from knowing something to owning it. When you own it you don’t think about it you just do it and later you can peel the onion back and think about what you did, what you did right what you could have better those things. But as we pick up the phone and dial it we own that behavior we don’t think about what we have to do and that’s the process.

Jim Rembach:   Thanks for sharing that. When I start looking at this it’s almost like the arc to impact. Meaning that like you were saying earlier when you start thinking about adult learning or learning in general is that, hey we only retain so much but it’s still get its information. Information does not deliver impact nor will it ever when you start thinking about in the workplace and growing an organization or even fending off competition or any of those things that we talked about on a day-to-day life basis. It has to get to the point where we do some behavior modification you have to practice it you have to be willing to fail so that you’re not a failure because in fact if you don’t do that you will become a failure.

Josh Seibert:    Well if we’re protected from failure it doesn’t allow the full circle of the learning path to happen. We celebrate success, those good things happen we tend to engages in endorphin release and we’re happy about those things it’s a right-brain emotional experience is what happens. So oftentimes we truncate the learning from successes because we’re happy and elated and feel good about what just happened. The real learning process happens is balancing that against what it feels like, looks like, and sounds like when we do fail and we balance those two things and then we can take the next step on the learning path. 

Jim Rembach:   One of the things that you share in a book is one of those that I always see people really also confusing and quite frankly just totally messing up big time is you talk about the four roles. In the learning and development type of organization you have to make sure that you know these four roles and you know which one you’re in. Those four roles are the supervisor role, the training role, the mentoring role and the coaching role.

Josh Seibert:    Yes, most leaders of organizations or managers spend a whole lot of time as it were in the supervisor role that one is what’s required by the company of course by the organization that’s what makes it run. It’s the overseer, it’s the supervisors the one who makes certain processes take place, people are accountable measures them implements them those types of things so it’s a supervisor role. As a matter of fact most leaders will spend most managers will spend about 45% or should spend about 45% of the time in that role because that’s a very, very important role but I always relate that role to the other three roles. And then just imagine you’re on a mission to go to the moon there’s NASA they’re down there in Houston that’s the supervisor role. And they’re monitoring and they’re measuring the flight of that rocket that’s going to the moon at each stage each step they’re directing the other elements to move that. Do we turn this burner on? Do we turn that burner on? What do we do next? And how do we engage with that? Or relate those things to the coach, the mentor and the trainer role that we have when we’re running that organization. Sometimes the supervisory role pulls up an opportunity that someone is not performing. Well, if it’s a “can’t perform” that’s different from addressing a “won’t perform.” A “won’t perform” that’s a counseling issue. If someone will not do the behavior and it’s not because they cannot do the behavior then we go to the counseling role. But coaching role, training role and mentoring role all comes from they can’t the inability to. So if we’ve discovered that they’re not performing or someone is not then we have to engage that coaching role that training role and that mentor role. They have to be in a learning environment to where they can gain the knowledge through some form of training, not that the manager or leader has to do it but they have to support that training. 

We got to ask ourselves, if we’re a leader how are we actually supporting it? And in beyond the—“Josh, you need to go to training” or “Jim, I’ve signed you up for some training” that’s supervisory, that’s task assignment but how are we engaged in supporting that training that should be going on? That’s the training responsibility engaging in that developmental role. The mentor and coaching role equally important, does that trainee when they come back that employee when they come back are they seeing that knowledge that they gained or maybe the skill they started to build in that training and development session, are they seeing that behaviorally in the environment that they come back to? Is the culture I’m actually doing what the training provided for them, is it being supported and from mentor standpoint are we doing it? As leaders, are we mentoring the behavior we’re expecting those to perform? I don’t mean do their job. But if we happen to step in and perform that role we’d better be not working out of a different play book that we’ve told them to learn so that’s a mentor role. But the most important of all of these is everybody needs a coach, everybody needs a coach. If you’re a leader and you’re in management your folks need a coach they need someone there to help them “peel the onion back.” We all had coaches throughout our lifetime whether they were physical sports coaches or they were teachers or they were our parents or guardians or those that helped us along the way and those that are very good at what they do they have a coach whether it’s a sports figure or not everybody has a coach. The best sports figures have a coach and that coach isn’t on the field doing it for them but is supporting them so when they come off the field to help them be brief to learn to help that learning process go forward so someone doesn’t get stuck those four roles are crucial in building and creating a learning environment. 

Jim Rembach:   And it seems to me where I find most people making the mistake is really saying that they’re coaching or thinking that they’re coaching but in fact that is not what they’re doing they’re supervising or training but they’re calling it coaching. 

Josh Seibert:    Yes, you’re absolutely right. Personal training is different from coaching. And what I find like you do is oftentimes they fall into training and telling mode. Telling is not coaching, coaching is caught not taught I learned that a long time ago. Coaching is caught it’s not taught so if you find yourself flipping into this is  how you should do it either through mentoring or you’re in training role. But allowing the learning to happen by being there and helping that person “peel the onion back” and discover for themselves the genius and the brilliance of a coach is to allow that discovery to happen. And to become a coach there is a learning and development process that one must go through to become an effective coach or to be able to perform in that coaching role. Many leaders have never been developed and that coaching role. 

Jim Rembach:   That’s a very good point. For me, I would even say to that I have to stop myself when I want to be or need to be that particular coach to where I don’t do the instructions, I don’t do the show how an I’m like, wait a minute, you already have this in you. As a coach I’m supposed to help you see that connection so that you draw it out, let me pull it out of you. 

Josh Seibert:    That’s correct. We’re not looking at films on Mondays we’re in the Sunday game. Now is not the time to train now is the time to coach so the connections can be made so folks can grow and learn from those and begin to connect those dots when we can’t be on the field with them.

Jim Rembach:   That’s a very good point. Now, what we’re talking about here is just loaded with a whole lot of energy and excitement and emotion and one of the things that we look at on the show are quotes to help provide that. Is there a quote that you like that you can share? 

Josh Seibert:    There’s so many quotes out there that I could share with you but the one that strikes me as related to the book and related to allowing for controlled failure. We also know this in controlled failure, and I’ll get to that quote in just a second, but the control failure, you mentioned it before, means not allowing catastrophic failure for or something someone’s learning along the way what we have to go from that knowledge to application in that we have to apply it in a controlled environment such that it’s first, safe enough and allowing them to do it and then in the environment on the job to build skills. Skills are built on the job they’re not built in a training room they’re started there and they’re refined may be there but really to own it you’re going to have to use it effectively on the job. And that’s where we tend to overprotect we don’t want this person to fail so therefore we jump in and rescue them or we don’t put them in a situation where they have the opportunity of failure we protect them from failure. The quote I heard a long time ago was, “No one has ever achieved anything great by playing it safe”. So we think of all the greatness that’s ever happened it wasn’t someone playing it safe and wasn’t allowed for her it was performed by those who embraced failure’s was part of the process so no one’s ever achieved anything great by playing it safe, that’s the quote I’ve always remember. 

Jim Rembach:   That’s a good one and I think we always have to keep that little voice in our head saying, that one when we go to actually step outside of that comfort zone. When you start talking about—you write in a book of course, family, being married as many years as you had been married, the different careers being a part of the ownership group within that Sandler office there and there’s a lot of humps that we have to get over. Is there a time where you’ve had to get over the hump that you can share?

Josh Seibert:    Oh, gosh if you have gone through a lifetime as long as I have there are multiple humps that you can go back and relate to that I had to get over that we had to get over as a family but specifically to this. I would say and I write about this in the book as well, moving from the role of salesperson I was in the United States submarine Navy for a number of years. And as I went through that journey and exited that career and move into the sales career with the Prudential Financial in Charleston, South Carolina I became and learned through many humps learned how and to overcome adversity and succeed and some training, some coaching, some mentoring but tough road to go and as it were back then.  As one word in the world of sales I climbed that corporate ladder and the first rung on that ladder was when you typically in a sales organization when you’re at the top of your game and you’re at the top of the leader board you get offered the brass ring as it were and you are offered, as I was, a manager position because all you got to do and that’s I heard was Josh you’re doing such a wonderful job all you got to do is teach people to be like you and then show them what you do and wow we can make just music out of this. So, I went from being a professional salesperson into the role of an expectation of being a sales manager while the competency difference between the two was astounding and I failed miserably. In the first six months of that of that process I was able to take a mediocre sales team and turn them in to a failing sales team at that point. So to get over that hump and hang with it and figure that out, what was I doing wrong? And to get through that and succeed at that role that was probably the biggest learning curve that I went through and the most valuable hump in my life I’m one of the most viable what I remember. 

Jim Rembach:   So, I can imagine like many others they have had something similar happened to them, however, when they hit that bottom they’re actually shown a career redirection. You’re fortunate.

Josh Seibert:    ell, I would call it fortunate and persistent. I grew up in a time period and my father had the value of honor and he transferred that value to me and it’s one that I hold near and dear to my heart. I made a promise, and I had to and was compelled to uphold that honor that I that I told them that I would do, so that inspired me as well as—I’m not good at giving up, I’m okay with failing but I’m not good at giving up, so I went in to—look, I’m probably not the best at this but I can’t be the worst there’s got to be something I’m missing. During that process, the epiphany as it were, during that process was discovering that I can’t make many me’s. I can’t make them like me they have to be who they are and I have to allow them to develop and grow with their strengths so I had to not do it for them because I couldn’t sell for twelve people, seven to twelve people, and I certainly couldn’t it was clear that over six months the all you got to do Josh wasn’t working so I had to discover what would work and how it would work. What I discovered was there are certain competencies defining any role, there is one in sales, one is in management, one is in leadership, one is in engineer or a doctor there are certain competencies that make that role work. And when you can work on the gap within the strengths and the weaknesses of one’s competencies and start specifically allowing that development to happen, wonderful things happen. So, instead of trying to hire and create many Joshes that couldn’t happen I had to create a model of competencies that would help them become themselves. And they all today are very independent and that was the epiphany to stop trying to make them look like me.

Jim Rembach:   So the interesting part is that it totally aligns with what you do today because you’re teaching organizations how to essentially do the exact same thing that you went through.

Josh Seibert:    That’s what brought me to today.  I think from that moment on through more humps became successful at that particular role and climbed the corporate ladder at Prudential, end up being the director of sales training for that organization out of Newark, New Jersey, if you’ve ever been to New Jersey God love you. And throughout those rungs on the ladder going through I remember that in every rung of the ladder that I went through and then whatever position that I was in beyond that first one I had to approach it from a learning and development perspective because if it’s what carried me through that and made that strong and when I left it didn’t need me which was wonderful. So the next person that took over that role built upon what I left and didn’t have to replace it, I was very proud of that. It worked on every rung of the ladder that determining what is the outcome that we want, look at the end in mind and start building and developing the people to help achieve that and a learning culture it’s so very different from typical cultures in business. 

Jim Rembach:   So, I know you have a lot of things going on, you have the new book, you are continuing to do your work and helping to be the coach, be the mentor, be the person who helps organizations get over their humps, what is one of your goals?

Josh Seibert:    More of philosophical goal at this particular point, we all go through that process in business of growing. When you open your own business like I did in 1999, I found that my first goal was survival. Let’s just survive this business and many are that way and at some point through survival we get to that next level of what I would be or I’ve heard, it’s a sense of stability. We finally aren’t worried about the things of survival it’s just, can I keep it stable instead of this rocky boat and rollercoaster activity? So the pursuit was stability and then some form of getting it to that success that I had defined back at that time and what would be successful for me I would enjoy that success that of achieving that goal that I had mapped out in the business plan and so forth and I’ve done that a number of years. But really my primary goal now is significance, I used that word in that I’m blessed a lot of hard work and we have a very successful business. Certainly that doesn’t mean that I’m on a plateau by any means, we will continue to grow and continue to work with what we do, but significance is the next goal. How can I take what I’ve done and provide it to be some significance beyond the success that we’ve created here and that’s the passion that I’m moving forward, why I wrote the book. What we did is in the book, it’s what we do it’s how we got success. How I cause significance and transfer to the book itself is one step towards that goal of significance.

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. 

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that improves the empathy and emotional intelligence skills in everyone. It provides a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement and provides integrated activities that will improve the leadership and collaboration skills in everyone. This award-winning solution is guaranteed to create motivated, productive and higher performing employees that have great working relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work, visit beyondmorale.com/better. 

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

Josh Seibert:    Let’s go to hoedown.

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

Josh Seibert:    Nothing. The only thing that could hold me back is myself. 

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

Josh Seibert:    That’s what I heard not received from Winston Churchill, Never give.

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

Josh Seibert:    here’s no secret it’s just my core values and my honor won’t let me quit.

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

Josh Seibert:    Oh, gosh, I guess the best tool that I have in this is tough, but the best tool I have in life is my belief.

Jim Rembach:   What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, and it could be from any genre and of course we’re going to put a link to Winning from Failing—Build and Lead a Corporate Learning Culture for High Performance.

Josh Seibert:    That’s a great book right there but beyond that book there’s another one from a colleague of mine called, Transforming Leaders the Sandler Way and it’s put out by Dave Arch. Look that book up if you want to be a better leader it’s a great book.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader listeners you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going too fastleader.net/Josh Siebert. Okay, Josh, 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 knowledge would you take back with you and why? 

Josh Seibert:    Certainly the value of failing. Because back there I at 25 years old I didn’t know the value of all that struggle I was going through maybe that might have helped me pursue it a little bit better.

Jim Rembach:   Josh, it was not under spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader legion how they can connect with you? 

Josh Seibert:    Sure. They can find me at training.sandler.com—that’s our website here. You can email me at joshs@ sandler.com. If you tend to want to do that you can contact me locally at 336-84-1438.

Jim Rembach:   Josh Siebert, thank you for sharing you 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. For recaps, links from every show, special offers and access the download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help move onward and upward faster. 

END OF AUDIO 

 

 

Kendall Lyman Change the Way You Change

139: Kendall Lyman: What is your change process

Kendall Lyman Show Notes Page

Kendall Lyman was a new consultant working in the oil industry. He was a strategist working with executives looking at the market and competitive analysis. As Kendall worked to implement change, he continually ran into problems at the individual level. That’s when Kendall analyzed something different that helped him get over the hump.

Kendall was born in Utah, and grew up in the Salt Lake City area with his three older sisters. His father was both a gentleman farmer and computer programmer. Consequently, his parents raised him to appreciate hard work on the farm as well as cultural events such as the orchestra and theatre.

All of Kendall’s siblings were required to learn a musical instrument including playing for a time in the family bluegrass band. Kendall only plays the piano occasionally anymore, but still loves playing a little ragtime. Kendall’s passion for baseball has put him on a quest to see his New York Yankees play in as many cities as possible including Spring Training trips with his oldest daughter (who is a diehard Boston Red Sox fan—yes, there is rivalry in the family!)

Kendall has lived in different areas of the world: London, England; Kobe, Japan; and Santiago, Chile. And he speaks fluent Spanish. Being exposed to different situations and cultures, Kendall became fascinated in how to work with people and how to solve problems. He has an ability to see the big picture and figure out how to get things to work.

Thinking that this skill would serve him in engineering or computers, he started his undergraduate degree in computer science. But Kendall quickly learned that his skills and interests were better suited to the business world, and he consequently majored in International Marketing. After working at IBM for several years, Kendall became interested in how organizations work. So, he earned an MBA from Brigham Young University focusing on strategy, operations, and human behavior.

Early in his career, Kendall had the opportunity to work in a strategy consulting firm. While that was great experience, he felt that if he wasn’t careful he would end up thinking that all organizational problems could be solved just with strategy. Forcing a career change, he went to an organizational design firm and later to a leadership firm before starting The Highlands Group—a consulting firm specializing in strategy, organizational change, and leadership development.

Kendall spends time serving in leadership roles in his community. He is an Eagle Scout and is passionate about helping young people learn life skills, develop character, and navigate the sometimes-difficult teenage years.

Kendall lives with his wife Donna and their three children Nicole, Natalie, and Josh in Lehi, Utah.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

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

“We are pathetic at change.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet

“We need to reverse the average success rate of change initiatives.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“Only 30% of change initiatives are successful” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“We have an incomplete view of change.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“If we take a lean approach to designing an organization for effectiveness, we get our measures wrong.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“Typically, an efficiency or an effectiveness compete with each other.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“There’s a paradigm that leaders own the engagement of their employees.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“Employees have to own their own engagement.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“Individually, we deal with change differently than other people.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“We have to help people through the cycle of change.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“Too many times we’re communicating for understanding.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“If the leader is not willing to look at her behavior and impact, the strategy work is insignificant.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“How can we ease the transition of trauma of individuals and teams though change?” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“Leaders want to go fast in change, but not pay the price.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“How do I manage my own emotions to keep me as upbeat as I can be?” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“We think that everything we are juggling are plates.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

“Listen more, ask questions first, don’t assume you have an answer.” -Kendall Lyman Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Kendall Lyman was a new consultant working in the oil industry. He was a strategist working with executives looking at the market and competitive analysis. As Kendall worked to implement change, he continually ran into problems at the individual level. That’s when Kendall analyzed something different that helped him get over the hump.

Advice for others

Talk the least. Listen more. Ask questions first. Don’t assume you have an answer or know what the other person is thinking, and dialogue about it.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

I’m more reactive than proactive in managing my own emotions to stay upbeat and as positive as I can be.

Best Leadership Advice

What’s your framework for how an organization operates.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Time management and prioritizing.

Recommended Reading

Change the Way You Change!: 5 Roles of Leaders Who Accelerate Business Performance

How to Hug a Porcupine: Easy Ways to Love the Difficult People in Your Life (Little Book. Big Idea.)

Contacting Kendall Lyman

Website: http://changethewayyouchange.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendall-lyman-02ba431/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lyman_Daloisio

Resources and Show Mentions

Developing a Better Place to Work

Increase Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture

Empathy Mapping

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

 

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

139: Kendall Lyman: What is your change process

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 intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

 

The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions. So move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hook now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion, I’m excited because about the show that we have today because we have a guest that is going to help us with something that quite frankly every single one of us needs helps with. 

 

Kendall was born in Utah, and grew up in the Salt Lake City area with his three older sisters. His father was both a gentleman farmer and computer programmer. Consequently, his parents raised him to appreciate hard work on the farm as well as cultural events such as the orchestra and theatre. All of Kendall’s siblings were required to learn a musical instrument including playing for a time in the family bluegrass band. Kendall only plays the piano occasionally anymore, but still loves playing a little ragtime. Kendall’s passion for baseball has put him on a quest to see his New York Yankees play in as many cities as possible including Spring Training trips with his oldest daughter (who is a diehard Boston Red Sox fan. Kendall has lived in different areas of the world: London, England; Kobe, Japan; and Santiago, Chile. And he speaks fluent Spanish. Being exposed to different situations and cultures, Kendall became fascinated in how to work with people and how to solve problems. He has an ability to see the big picture and figure out how to get things to work.

Thinking that this skill would serve him in engineering or computers, he started his undergraduate degree in computer science. But Kendall quickly learned that his skills and interests were better suited to the business world, and he consequently majored in International Marketing. After working at IBM for several years, Kendall became interested in how organizations work. So, he earned an MBA from Brigham Young University focusing on strategy, operations, and human behavior.

Early in his career, Kendall had the opportunity to work in a strategy consulting firm. While that was great experience, he felt that if he wasn’t careful he would end up thinking that all organizational problems could be solved with a strategy. Forcing a career change, he went to an organizational design firm and later to a leadership firm before starting The Highlands Group—a consulting firm specializing in strategy, organizational change, and leadership development. Kendall spends time serving in leadership roles in his community. He is an Eagle Scout and is passionate about helping young people learn life skills, develop character, and navigate the sometimes-difficult teenage years. Kendall lives with his wife Donna and their three children Nicole, Natalie, and Josh in Lehi, Utah. Kendall Lyman are you ready to help us get over the hump? 

Kendall Lyman:   I’m ready, thanks Jim.

 

Jim Rembach:   Thanks for being here. Now I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

 

Kendall Lyman:   Absolutely. As you talked about change, one of the things that I have noticed over 20-25 years of consulting is that we are pathetic at change. We need to reverse the average success rate of change initiatives. Research shows over and over again that only 30% are successful. If that’s the case and we’re shown that it is multiple times we’ve got to reverse that trend and help leaders get better at change. We’ve got to get this on leader’s agenda and we have to help employees who are struggling with change get better at it. 

 

Jim Rembach:   The reason I wanted to have you on the show is because, I mean, change is it’s beyond the new normal it is like the new DNA if you’re not able to do it, it is a whole extinction issue, it’s the modern-day Darwinism. And so when you start thinking about change—okay, so you have outside in inside out you have all these different techniques and things like that but is it a situation where people just aren’t choosing the right one? Or is a situation where they’re not dedicating themselves to it? Really, we’re have you fallen down?

 

Kendall Lyman:   Well, I think the approach that we have today is incomplete. What I read over and over I get to read a lot of change books is that every author or consultant says that change happens one of two ways, it either happens with the individual we call that inside out the individual changes and then they get a chance to change their environment, teach a man to fish so to speak or management consultants say it, starts outside in. Change the strategy, change the organization design and hopefully it makes its way to the individual. But after doing that for 15 years we discovered, why does it have to be either/or? Because our changes weren’t successful I did inside-out change where I put people through workshops and help them individually learn the skills of change but they get back to the organization or get back to the family or get back to the team and they’re not changing and so their motivation runs out. Or I’ve done strategy work and I’ve done execution work and I’ve done lean manufacturing never quite makes it to the desktop of the employee and then leaders get frustrated that employees aren’t changing behaviors and so it can’t be either/or it’s got to be both. I think part of the problem Jim is that we have an incomplete view of change number, number one. Number two to do what I just said takes a lot of work it’s got to be more it’s not just rearranging the roles and responsibilities or the boxes in the in the structure charts and the org charts it’s got to be both it’s got to be a complete view of how change happens.

 

Jim Rembach:   Reading through the book there was one of the things that kind of stood out to me and it was some research that you had actually cited or a statement from a best-selling management author Gary Hamel and he says that, change efforts fail because organizations are designed for efficiency and change is disruptive to that end. For me it got me to thinking is that is what we’re seeing right now and our difficulty to change really an issue of the whole doing more with less the whole multitasking and the entire lean concept? For stiffer so lean we’re too know we’re too busy just doing stuff, can we really actually focus in on change?

 

Kendall Lyman:   The two things come to mind Jim, one, we are asked to do more and more with less and less and one research study that I read said that most of us can only do up to a hundred and twenty percent of our day job. Someplace between one 150 and 120 percent we kind of check out and say enough is enough. And if we are so focused as leaders on leaning and organization on making it more efficient then we’re putting more and more on our people and pretty soon they check out. The second thing that came to mind as you were talking about lean manufacturing what Gary Hamel said is lean is one approach to designing an organization and it’s an efficiency-based approach. 

 

Strategy however, is all about effectiveness it’s how we beat the competition, how do we get better than the next brand, how are we—the next Apple or the next IBM kind of thing. If we take a lean approach to designing an organization for effectiveness we get our measures wrong. And so as you think about setting up an organization and changing the organization you’ve got to be really clear about which stakeholder needs you are going to meet. Is it about efficiency? Is it about effectiveness? Which measures are we going to hit and then you design the organization and employee behaviors in the culture based on that but typically an efficiency or an effectiveness compete with each other and confuses employees and your processes and structure and systems aren’t set up to do both. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Well that makes so much sense to me because I know I’ve been part of organizations where you look at what you’re just talking about and you’re like, hey man there’s no congruence here, there’s no there’s no alignment here> You’re telling me one thing but then from an operational perspective I have to do something quite different there’s no way it’s going to come together. And of course many times I got me in some deep trouble, however, I had to point out that obvious things sometimes but that just made so much sense. Now another thing that you had said which was quite interesting—so me having a background in customer care operations and people who in the frontline, I consider myself a frontline person, is that when you start talking about work and occupancy in a customer care environment. Occupancy meaning that I’m signed in I’m ready to take a customer’s requests, support, phone call or chat or session, whatever it is (8:59)** one so I’m either doing work or I’m waiting for work. Once people start getting past an occupancy rate of like then say 84-85 percent they start getting into a huge burnout problem. Because I’m working all the time I don’t get a chance to rest, pause, it’s just like boom, boom, boom, boom. How can people work at 120%?

 

Kendall Lyman:   It’s not sustainable that’s for sure. And so that study that I was citing was saying you can do that for a short period of time. But if you’re not building the organization to support them at an even keel at a hundred percent level, they will burn out they will leave and that’s why you have high turnover rates in organizations that you’re describing. Another thing that we’ve discovered is why we have high turnover. Turnover rates is around employee engagement that used to be that we talked about employee satisfaction and so you see a lot of things in magazines and on the news about we’re stocking lunchrooms and we have pool tables and we have concierge all of those things are about satisfaction but there’s not equal research that says that employees are engaged with those things. 

 

What I mean by that is are you willing to go above and beyond? Are you willing to give it your all? Or are you kind of coasting on the job? One of the things that we discovered is that there’s a paradigm that leaders own the engagement of their employees and I think that’s partially right, I think that’s fifty percent of the equation. It’s not that employees leave companies they leave bosses. So, if a boss hasn’t created an environment or a culture or a climate that fosters engagement and high activity and fun all those things that employees want then employees are going to look for a different job but that’s only fifty percent of the equation. The other piece that we don’t talk about a lot is what we nicknamed OYOE, Own Your Own Engagement is employees have to own their own engagement as well. And with the current workforce with four generations working side by side it is hard for a leader to say what works for a baby boomer works for millennial. Instead what a leader needs to do is engage in conversations that what engages a millennial might be significantly different than a baby boomer or Generation X and that’s okay. Let’s create the conditions that will engage both.

 

Well that’s one reason why I just love the work of Dr. Shama Kahn when he talks about difference management and this is the whole thing that I have in regards to people getting what I refer to this diversity misconstrued and that is that when you start talking about difference management, I talked about, hey you can have four white guys sitting there in front of you and you know what? They’re diverse because you have one guy maybe just starting his career one guy who’s ending his career and another guy who’s dealing with taking care of older parents and another one who’s a new father, all of those differences mean different things from how they’re actually going to show up at work and what they need. So, I totally agree with that. And all of this that we’re talking about is wrapped in emotion and even when the change process we’re talking about there’s emotion and one of the things in the book that you actually talked about to me which I started applying it and seeing that it could be used in a lot of different ways and that is the emotional cycle of change, tell us about that?

 

The emotional cycle of change was a model that came from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her research in a book called Death and Dying. And what she discovered were the individually we deal with the loss of a loved one or a change differently than other people. There are cycles we go through anywhere from denial to fear to depression ultimately come out the other side of hope and acceptance but change leaders discovered that that cycle was very similar to a change process. So, for example you’re working in customer service and let’s say that a leader has the goal to lean your organization and cut it by 25%. Some in your team are going to say things like, finally this is awesome let’s get going and make the change. Others on your team are going to mourn the loss of those who left they’re going to be upset about why do we have to do it differently they’re going to wonder where leaders got this vision or this new goal. And so the tricky part for leaders is to understand, like you were just talking about, that individually we deal with that change completely differently. And so we have to help manage people through that cycle of change. The way that we’ve found to do that is a simple idea about head hand and heart. 

 

The idea of head is that some of us respond better to the facts and the logic and the rationale to the change. So, a leader, a loved one can share all the facts and reasoning others respond more to the heart the emotional side of change and the vision side of change and what’s in it for me. And other groups of us respond more to what we call hands or letting us try it on and letting us experiment with it and see. Really this isn’t so bad, the new software is as easy as the old software it’s going to be just fine. And so what we do is try to apply different drivers there of head, hand and heart to each of those emotional cycles of change just because we don’t know exactly is Jim going to respond differently than Kendal and is he going to respond more to head or more heart activities and Kendall’s more hand activities that way we kind of cover the gamut and enable people that transition through that emotional cycle of change.

 

Jim Rembach:   Well thanks for sharing that model. For me I started thinking about as you were talking that that it has to go in your communications about the change as well. You have to communicate to all of those different folks because if you don’t you’re going to have problem having them fill in the blanks and then maybe not moving in a direction that you want them to move. To me that’s just like an overall strategy and framework I think you can apply in a lot of different ways. 

 

Kendall Lyman:   And I think that’s a tricky part for leaders. I run up against a lot of leaders who say, I can’t communicate until we’re ready to tell them everything. And it’s such a poor paradigm because I want to say to them, look you’re just choosing whether to be part of the conversation or not because the conversations happening around you already. And so, what you have to do is figure out how to engage in the conversation in a simple way that we talk about it is how do you move in your communication an employee from understanding to acceptance to commitment? Too many times we’re communicating for understanding so we’re sharing the plan or sharing the goal or sharing the vision that’s a long ways away from commitment and that middle phase of acceptance. I’ve got to believe and I’ve got to trust that it’s right. I have to say, okay, yeah it is time for change and I still have to make the commitment to say, okay I’m in. I still have to jump in and give you my all my hundred percent instead of kind of waiting and seeing and waiting leaders out or rusting out on the job.

 

Jim Rembach:   Without a doubt change is swirling around us and it’s not going to end it’s just going to continue to be the way that it is and we have to learn how to be able to live within it and so when you start talking about that we need these systems and these frameworks. And one of the things we look at on the show is quotes to kind of help get us focused and point in the right direction. Is there a quote or two that you can share?

 

Kendall Lyman:   Yeah, absolutely. One of them that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as it relates to leadership is that organization, this is by Tim Clark who wrote a great book around change, one of our colleagues he said organizations don’t outperform their leaders they reflect them. An organization’s ability to adapt and adjust to shifting demands is really a function of a leader’s ability to change. When I was a young consultant  I started as a strategist and then I went to an org design firm and I used to think that I could design really good strategy or really good organizational systems and processes and almost surround the leader to enable her to change, I don’t believe that anymore. If the leaders not willing to look at her behavior and her impact and develop those around her all the fun strategy work and the lean manufacturing design work I do is interesting but it’s going to be insignificant really. 

 

Some research that I’ve been reading lately by Bill Adams and Bob Anderson in a great book called, Mastering Leadership, they’re talking about not only is the individual effectiveness of a leader but it’s the collective capacity of those leaders around her. So when I think about change I think we got to start at the top we got to start with modeling, walking the talk modeling what we want to see happen and when rest of us see that you as a leader are going to make a difference in your behavior then I’ll start doing the same for me. So that’s one of the quotes that I’ve been sharing a lot with my clients.

 

Jim Rembach:   And I’ve actually had Bob Anderson on the show he’s out he was episode 78 on the Fast Leader Show, and that book that you referred to it’s a masterpiece.]

 

Kendall Lyman:   It really is. Everybody ought to read that book it’ll change how you think about leadership.

 

Jim Rembach:   Absolutely. When you started talking about—your learnings and you talked a lot about how you’ve gained more insight and it’s caused you to go for what you feel as the better direction but those are humps that we have to get over. And you know you talked about some changes in being with—or designed firm being with a leadership firm all of those humps and getting over those humps made us who we are, made you who you are. Is there a time where you can share one of those stories with us? 

 

Kendall Lyman:   Yeah, absolutely. As a new consultant, maybe 25 years ago, I was working in the oil industry and we were doing some really neat work about some international opportunities to expand into some areas in the oilfield that others hadn’t been to and change how we explore and extract oil. At that time there was a few leaders in the oil industry that if they made a move everybody else made a move. And we nicknamed it a little bit the sheep herd mentality you get the herd going in one direction and the rest of the sheep follow. But we were trying to make a change that was different than the pack and we ran up against the change of behavior at the individual level that that I didn’t know how to deal with. I was a strategist I was working in the c-suite working in the boardroom looking at markets looking at how competitors were reacting to our shifts and change in strategy and what I kept running up against is that I was trying to work at the organizational level but the individual level was where I was running into problems. 

 

And so I started watching a couple of those other firms that were doing it right and started to explore. And what I discovered and what ultimately became why we’ve done the research we have and how we’ve changed our approach is that you can’t work at just one level in an organization. What I mean by that is that generally there’s three levels in an organization there’s the organizational level that includes the strategy and the mission vision and values and the process structure systems. There’s also a team level where most of us are in teams we have a team leader and we’re working together and then we have those relationships and how well we’re emotionally intelligent helps us in working with those teams and then there’s an individual level meaning each of us individually. Till I figured out how to work at all three levels I kept having the same success that we quoted earlier in the show, 30 40 50 percent success rate and since we’ve changed that and gotten over that hump so to speak, that’s been the difference maker for us because we’re able to help change not only how the organization works but the emotions and the behaviors of individuals and marry those together that’s for real synergy, real effectiveness and that’s where performance is accelerated.

 

Jim Rembach:   Thanks for sharing that story. So when you start thinking about some of those interventions, interactions, conflicts that you had with the frontline is there one that stands out to you? 

 

Kendall Lyman:   Yeah, I remember getting a call I’ll change industries, I remember getting a call from pharmaceutical company. I’m thinking about this because you talked about lean manufacturing and they called me up and said, do you do that change thing? And I thought, oh uh, what are we talking about? And they were leaning their manufacturing process. There were 15 plants in that process, five were significantly going to be changed or eliminated, five had no impact and five were someplace in the middle. As I got into what they were doing I asked them, what is your change process? They were really, really excited. And they said, have you been to the lunchroom? I said, yeah, I’ve been to the lunchroom. And they said, we have a video about change. I said that’s great. And they said, it’s in two languages because we’re international firm. And I said, great, what else have you done? 

 

And they looked at me and said, what else should we do? And I thought that was so impactful for me that the only way they could think about change was telling, mandating, sending a video to everybody that half the people were there to get their salad or burgers weren’t even watching the video or it had run so many times that it was just droning on. They had no concept about how the work was going to change, how it was going to impact teams, what individuals needed to do differently. From that point on I really set a quest to figuring that out which is a lot of what we write about to say how can we ease the transition of trauma, so to speak, of individuals and teams through this process so that they will buy in and we can reverse this trend of only 30 percent success rate.

 

Jim Rembach:   Well thanks for sharing that. When I start thinking about all the things that go into change after reviewing this book, I’m like, of course it makes sense but definitely we need to make it more common. I know you got a lot of things going on, you have the book you’re promoting the book I’m sure there’s probably another one that’s in your head, if you’re not already working on it, you have the consulting work, family, a lot of things but what’s one of your goals?

 

Kendall Lyman:   You mentioned there’s another book we’re thinking about. This has led us into more research and another area that we keep seeing which leaders want to go fast and change. They want to mandate it or they just want to tell people how to do it quickly but they don’t want to pay the price so to speak. And so that’s one of our goals in the next couple of years to figure out how to describe that dilemma and help leaders through that. But from an individual perspective what I’m one of my own goals is to figure out how to make this easier for leaders. 

 

I don’t think, Jim, that leaders if you look at how we’re educated—I got an MBA and I look at the things that I read now they were never discussed during my graduate program> it wasn’t discussed about the relationships between people it wasn’t discussed about how I have to have emotional intelligence and that’s actually probably more important than overall intelligence at the level that we’re working at now. We don’t talk to leaders about how they manage a transformation instead we talk about functional things finance, operations, marketing, customer support, sales. One of my personal goals is to say how do I package this or how do I describe it in a way that makes it easy for leaders that they can say, well that makes sense like you did and I now know how to do it. I think we’re still a few steps away from that but that’s a goal of mine.

 

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. An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that improves the empathy and emotional intelligence skills and everyone. It provides a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement and provides integrated activities that will improve the leadership and collaboration skills in everyone. This award-winning solution is guaranteed to create motivated, productive and higher performing employees that have great working relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better. Alright here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Kendall, the Hump Day the hump day hold on is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So, I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us some robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Kendall Lyman, are you ready to hoedown?

 

Kendall Lyman:   Absolutely.

 

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

 

Kendall Lyman:   I think sometimes we’re more reactive. Personally I’m more reactive than proactive. Reacting to people’s emotions their schedules instead of proactively saying, wait a minute what’s on my agenda? What are my priorities? And how do I manage my own emotions to keep me as positive and upbeat as I can be.

 

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

 

Kendall Lyman:   I was taught early in my career that I needed to have a—it was called meat hooks as what he said but is what it’s really saying is what’s your framework for how things operate? What’s your framework for how an organization operates? And so now in my brain I have a framework and when I run up against a problem that I can’t solve I have a bucket to put it in a hook to put it on until I can solve it. I think that keeps us from being too micro it helps us look macro at problems but then gives us time later to dig deep into the micro issues that are affecting it.

 

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

 

Kendall Lyman:   I would probably say time management and prioritizing. I read a great quote that was talking about “we are juggling objects” and we get the prioritization of those objects different and we think that everything we’re juggling our plates the reality is that our work is actually a rubber ball and if it dropped once in a while it would be fine but you can’t let the plates of relationships, values, integrity, health fall. And so I think about that as I’m starting my week and prioritizing what are those big rocks that I would need to put in my calendar this week and let everything else fall around those.

 

Jim Rembach:   What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, and of course we’re going to put a link to Change the Way you Change on our show notes page.

 

Kendall Lyman:   One of the books that I read recently that has affected me probably the most is called How to Hug a Porcupine, it was such a great book around owning your own issues owning your own emotions and not reacting to the world around you. Of course we  have to be charitable and kind to those around us but it was a great way to say, no this is this is healthy this is unhealthy and I’m going to take emotional I’m going to take charge of my own emotional health.

 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going too fastleader.net/KendallLyman. Okay Kendall, this is my last hump day hold on 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? 

 

Kendall Lyman:   I love that question. I think one of the things that I’ve learned the most is that I need to talk the least. What I take back is listen more, ask questions first don’t assume that I have an answer or even know what the other person’s thinking and then really dialogue about it that would have gotten me out of a lot of traps that would have helped me understand people better. I think that would have been wonderful to take back to age of 25. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Kendall 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?

 

Kendall Lyman:   Jim, it’s been an honor, thanks for the time. They can connect with us at changethewayouchange.com and see what we’re doing there as well as our contact information. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Kendall Lyman, 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 

 

 

076: Chris Edmonds: I’ve got to be walking the talk

Chris Edmonds Show Notes

Chris Edmonds had a heart attack in December 1993. Being overweight and behaving badly he knew he needed to be an effective influencer when coaching leaders. So Chris lost 30 pounds and then gained 20 back. He was at risk of another heart attack and found it difficult to challenge people to change their behavior because he was unable to change his own. Listen to Chris tell his story of getting over the hump.

Chris was raised in Long Beach, California, in the 1950’s. He grew up in a typical neighborhood with his dad (who ran a mortgage company), his stay-at-home mother, and his brother, 9 years older than Chris. Like any little brother, Chris annoyed his older brother, Jim, for years, quite effectively.

Chris was an active kid. He surfed at Huntington Beach, played guitar, went to YMCA camp each summer, and played football through high school. He went to Whittier College and, despite spending a great deal of time chasing a record deal, earned a degree in education.

Rather than join his father’s mortgage firm, which his dad was encouraging him to do, Chris became a YMCA executive.

In his fifteen years of YMCA leadership, Chris led high performing teams of paid staff and volunteers, managed several national projects (one focused on values clarification), experienced his worst boss ever, and – thankfully – enjoyed his best boss ever.

His best boss, Jerry Nutter, demonstrated servant leadership in daily interactions. Jerry’s team’s were high performing, values-aligned, and incredibly fun. Jerry’s approach formed the foundation for Chris’ understanding of the importance of culture in organizations and how leaders can build safe, inspiring, productive work cultures.

Chris opened his consulting firm in 1990. Chris helps leaders create and maintain high performing, values aligned teams, departments, businesses, and companies. He’s also been a senior consultant with the Ken Blanchard Companies since 1995.

Chris is the author of seven books, including Amazon best seller, The Culture Engine. He’s one of Inc. magazine’s 100 Great Leadership Speakers.
Chris has been a working musician since his college days. His Denver band, Jones & Raine, was signed to Greystone Records in 2008. Two singles off the band’s 2009 CD hit the top 100 on Billboard’s country charts.

Chris and his lovely bride of 36 years, Diane, live in Conifer, Colorado, at 8400 feet above sea level, with their flat coat retriever, Shady, the Wonder Dog.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

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

“We humans are procrastinators. And sometimes professional ones.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet

“Senior leaders drive the culture for better or worse.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Sometimes it’s not just the fear of change, we just don’t know anything different.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“I’m tired of these results, so I’m going to have to change my behavior.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Getting stuff done is important but it’s not the only thing.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“It’s easier to consider different behaviors than to chip away at beliefs.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Authentic challenging is needed to help people get aligned.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“It’s not just about the processes and results; what’s the human experience.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“You’ve got a responsibility to create an environment where people feel valued.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Spend half of your time managing performance. The other half managing relationships.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Create workplace inspiration and not frustration.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Too few leaders have crafted an inspiring work environment.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“To be an effective influencer I’ve got to walk the talk.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Senior leaders have never been asked to manage culture.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Only a handful of senior leaders have experience leading culture change.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“You’re going to have to praise progress on things that you think should be common sense.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“Treating people nice is common sense, it’s just not common practice in the workplace.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet 

“It’s about serving the needs of your team members who then serve the needs of customers.” -Chris Edmonds Click to Tweet    

Hump to Get Over

Chris Edmonds had a heart attack in December 1993. Being overweight and behaving badly he knew he needed to be an effective influencer when coaching leaders. So Chris lost 30 pounds and then gained 20 back. He was at risk of another heart attack and found it difficult to challenge people to change their behavior because he was unable to change his own. Listen to Chris tell his story of getting over the hump.

Advice for others

Focus on values and behavior change.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

My fears. I’m fearful of making mistakes and looking stupid.

Best Leadership Advice Received

It’s not about me; it’s about serving the needs of your team members.

Secret to Success

I am persistent and chipping away at working on leader to change behavior.

Best tools that helps in business or Life

My sense of humor. There’s difficult times where an injection of effective humor helps to move thing forward.

Recommended Reading

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t

The Culture Engine: A Framework for Driving Results, Inspiring Your Employees, and Transforming Your Workplace

Contacting Chris

Website: http://drivingresultsthroughculture.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisedmonds

Twitter: https://twitter.com/scedmonds

Resources

Creating an even better place to work

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

 

Need a powerful and entertaining way to ignite your next conference, retreat or team-building session? My keynote don’t include magic but they do have the power to help your attendees take a leap forward by putting emotional intelligence into their employee engagement, customer engagement and customer centric leadership practices. So bring the infotainment creativity the Fast Leader show to your next event and I help your attendees get over the hump now. Go to beyondmorale.com/speaking to learn more. 

 

Okay Fast Leader Legion I hope you’re up and ready to move because that’s what our guest today has been doing for organizations for a very long time. Chris Edmonds was raised in Long Beach, California in the 1950’s. He grew up in a typical neighborhood with his dad, who ran a mortgage company, his stay-at-home mother and his brother nine years older than Chris. Like any little brother Chris annoyed his brother Jim for years quite effectively. Chris was an active kid he served in Huntington Beach, played guitar, went to YMCA camping summer and played football to his high school. He went to Whittier College and despite spending a great deal of time chasing a record deal earned a degree in education. Rather than join his father’s mortgage firm, which his father encouraged him to do desperately, Chris became a YMCA executive. 

 

In his 15 years of YMCA leadership, Chris led high-performing teams of paid staff and volunteers, manage several national projects, experienced his worst boss ever and thankfully enjoyed his best boss ever. Hs best boss, Jerry Nutter demonstrated servant leadership in daily interactions. Jerry’s teams were high-performing, values aligned and incredibly fun. Jerry’s approach form the foundation for Chris’s understanding of the importance of culture in organizations and how leaders can build safe, inspiring, productive work cultures. Chris opened his consultancy firm in 1990. Chris helps leaders create and maintain high-performing, values aligned teams, department, businesses and companies. He’s also been a senior ion with the Ken Blanchard companies since 1995. Chris is the author of seven books including the Amazon bestseller the Culture Engine and he’s one of Inc. magazine’s 100 great leadership speakers. Chris and his lovely bride of 36 years Diane live in Conifer Colorado at 8400 feet above sea level with their flecked coat retriever Shady, the wonder dog. Chris Edmonds are you ready to help us get over the?

 

Chris Edmonds:    I’m so excited I can at steady Jim it’s delightful to join you and the legion here today. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Thanks for being here Chris. Now I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we get to know you even better?

 

Chris Edmonds:    You know my current passion is truly to help leaders craft a workplace where people are treated with trust, respect and dignity. And it’s all encompassing, all consuming, it’s what I think about constantly and it is almost a framing through which I view the business world and in so cases I even assess families because there’s values in families that could be beneficial or not, so I can’t turn this mind off around how to craft organizations, department, teams, families, communities where people are treated with respect and dignity.

 

Jim Rembach:    You’re talking about turning your mind off you’ve also got a production line of contact that you’ve been generating too. 

 

Chris Edmonds:    I do. I do. I was online a couple weeks ago, and said, I counted them up I do roughly 70 blog post a year and that’s a lot of content and probably three quarters of those have podcast around them too and you certainly as we’re experiencing here very experienced there, so that’s a little bit of extra effort but offers people another avenue to learn from you and maybe be inspired to change behavior a bit, so I write a lot.

 

Jim Rembach:    You do. I mean it’s amazing the amount of—I think I’ve shared this with you earlier, I said gosh, Chris, you’ve been doing it so long you have so much knowledge, you have so much `(4:00 inaudible)generated it’s almost like too much information.

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yes, it is.

 

Jim Rembach:    But there is one thing that stood out to me here recently that I read which to me it’s kind of a plague not just in businesses but our society as a whole and that is something that you talked about in regards to the cost of waiting.

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yeah, it’s amazing we humans are procrastinators and sometimes professional ones. That blog post and podcast was really driven by a couple of clients who had engaged me they knew they had some opportunities with the way their work environment was operating. And we went to a process of educating them about the phases I use and how I’m going to help them basically craft a more inspiring, a more productive work environment, I got the data to prove it. And they came back and said, you know, we’re not ready quite yet we’re going to wait a little bit and it was almost like it’s not that bad to have to have our leadership begin to behave so differently. And that’s what I’m very, very crystal clear about is that senior leaders, leaders of organizations drive the culture for better or worse, and it takes time and energy to fix that. It’s just like I said in my post about the cost of waiting I had Dr. Stellame—that if I continue eating fatty foods and don’t exercise I’m going to continue to be too heavy. And I was like well, apparently. Get me a couple of years to take that to heart and now I’m way smarter, and way thinner. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Thanks for sharing that. I’m kind of go on through that same effort of getting rid of some of that extra poundage to take the pressure off of my bad right knee. But you’re right it’s like—for me I had to get to the point to where not only was my knee hurting, my right hip was hurting, my lower back was hurting, my neck was starting to hurt and I’m like okay, okay that is enough.

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yeah, yeah, I get it I’ve get enough data points. And it’s interesting I’m convinced, I’ve had a couple of back surgery so this this body is doing okay but I’ve got some new parts in me. But the idea of the that organic system, that and if we don’t walk as were designed to we compensate and the musculature supports that compensation and all the sudden the pain doesn’t go away because our muscles are holding this into doing things that really aren’t healthy, aren’t effective, are inefficient and clearly are painful.  And you know what, organizations do the exact same thing. 

 

Jim Rembach:    And I think that’s the irony. I have this conversation at’s the irony no had this conversation with my kids as I was taking them to school the other morning and I was talking about insanity in the definition of insanity as adults were using so that they can really get attune and understand it. It’s like look, I’ve already been through this experience and I’ve seen other people’s event to this experience that you’re complaining about and the fact is that you can choose not to listen to me but then that’s called insanity. And they’re like, huh what. What is that? Yeah. What is that? And I said well, we talked about insanity been doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I said we have life examples and may not be necessarily first experiences but we can see all of these mistakes that other people and organizations make around this whole issue of waiting, but yet we repeat that same darn thing.

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yeah. And sometimes it’s not just the fear of change it’s that we don’t know anything different and we’re doing the best we can and I think that’s quite true of leaders as well in organizations. And so, what kind of education do we get before we finally say, Okay, I’m not going to get there for results and I really I’m now tired of these results so I’m going to have to change my behavior.

 

Jim Rembach:    It’s one of the things I always say too is that self-inflicted wounds they are the most. 

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yes do they do. They definitely this will get me no better. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Yeah we do. 

 

Jim Rembach:    And so oftentimes, especially on the show, sometimes we have to search for inspiration from places in order for us to get off or get over these hump of waiting move forward. And so we look for quotes a lot. Is there a quote or two for you that’s helped you get over hump that you can share?

 

Chris Edmonds:    You know it’s interesting, Jerry and I, we talked about fabulous best boss and one of the things he used to say, and this again—yes, we all think about great bosses we’ve had, okay bosses we’ve had, really lousy boss we’ve had, and there’s warnings that came from all of those experiences. And Jerry was very, very intentional with the way we operated as a team. We had very clear values and behaviors and he paid as much attention to how we treated each other and how we treated internal, external customers and it was a shock because it wasn’t the experience I had with other bosses, the bosses were focused on getting crapped on. And yes, getting stuff done is important but it’s not the only thing that’s important. And so Jerry would call me up my crap which he would with all of us, and I kind of push back little bit, no I didn’t really do that (9:30 inaudible)to him. So, this is what I was trying to do and Jerry would turn to me and say, “I believe you, believe that” and he let this pause. It was a big pregnant pause and then it would to my head with, “Is that working for you, it was kind of a Dr. Phil this day. How is that serving you? How is it serving us? How does it help us perform better? How does it help us be more innovative together just like aircraft. So he went to my beliefs, which were driving behaviors that’s worth serving. And he didn’t say you’re a moron he just said, “Brrrr. I believe you, believe that.” And the behavior has to change, I still to my core belief that it’s easier for me to get people to consider their behaviors to get those different results than to try and chip away at their beliefs, but Jerry worked on my mine.

 

Jim Rembach:    Thanks for sharing that because there’s something that stood out to me in that that I talk a lot about and that is learning to try to find you way next to the person who you’re engaging with or confronting whatever the case maybe. Instead of Jerry coming back and saying and then calling baloney on you and hitting you right between the eyes, he affirmed and got alongside you and said, “Hey, I will take your hand, I believe that you believe that but this is where we need to go.” 

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yeah, yeah, and he wasn’t let me off the hook. He wasn’t going to let the existing misaligned behavior. And that’s what effective leaders do that’s what effective parent do, it’s what effective coaches do, it’s what effective teachers do we’ve seen it and yet it’s often hard to do. There’s some conflict that comes from that there’s some challenging we have to do, caring, challenging, authentic challenging to help people get alighted.

 

Jim Rembach:    Yeah. There’s something that is—talking about this particular issue or subject the whole lot of empirical evidence longitudinal studies associated with people and their careers and kind of when they hit the ceiling and most often it occurs, you put an age on it it’s in the mid-40s, you kind of hit the ceiling and one of the reason that is, is because what got you there at that particular age is typical your technical skill and prowess.

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yeah.

 

Jim Rembach:    However when you start looking at how do you get past that and continue to excel your skill and your expertise needs to flip and it really needs to flip in what we’re talking about right here, it’s the dynamics associated with the human condition, human logic and being able to take that technical skill and prowess that you built and convert it to something that will now create the culture, create that next step or point of thriving.

 

Chris Edmonds:    You’re exactly right Jim. It’s one of the biggest levers that I have to create and utilize with senior leaders and it’s not just about the processes results that you’ve crafted and all your wisdom applying all this knowledge and skills that you had over the course of your career and with the leadership team it’s careers but it’s what’s the human experience here. Are you actually demeaning people, discounting people, eroding their confidence? And it’s like that’s the only thing we’re asked to do. I understand that and I have some suggestions about changing your incentives, right? But you’ve got a responsibility to create an environment where people feel valued. And I don’t know if you’ve looked at any of the tiny HR and in 2014 they did an engagement and culture report that was just brilliant. And what they basically found was that only 21% of employees feel strongly valued at work, that’s a flat out sand and it’s up to us as hopefully, guides, coaches, consultants and leaders ourselves to help senior leaders in the organizations pay as much attention to the human condition as do to them which is going out the door. 

 

Jim Rembach:    That’s very true and it’s a totally different skills that requires a totally different mode of learning as well as really practice building what you have to do things differently than  what you’ve done in the past in order for that to happen. 

 

Chris Edmonds:    It’s very funny because as I inspire leaders to begin to pay greater attention to that and I have to help them realize that, yes you’ve got production responsibilities you’ve got performance dashboard, you’ve got metrics that there’s a lot of systemic information and expectations of you around that and you just spend exactly half of your time managing performance. They look at me like I’m from another planet and the other half is managing relationships is creating workplace inspiration not frustration and anxiety and that means you got to wonder around and talk to people it means you’ve got to engage with people that means you’ve got to listen and how customers were treated, internal customers and external ones and they’re like,  “I don’t have time to do that” and I said, “Yeah you do, you’ve hired really smart people who can probably manage the performance side without your intervention talk.” You don’t have to spend more hours on the workplace but the hours you spend have to be balanced between the results you have to drive for. I get that, every organization’s in the same boat whether it’s government non-profit, for profit doesn’t matter but too few leaders, too few organizations have crafted an inspiring environment for people to exist and they spend how many hour there a week? It’s wild. 

 

Jim Rembach:    In addition to that when you start talking about going even further up the ladder, getting to the very top position that ratio shifts it’s no longer 50-50 it’s more like when you get to the very top it’s like 80% needs to be focused on relationships.

 

Chris Edmonds:    Exactly!. And they look at me like you’ve already spent 70% of my time wandering around checking on the quality of the culture. And I said, 80% but 70 % is not a bad (16:17 inaudible). But if I get in to that then their behavior changes, they push themselves away from meetings, they push themselves away from keyboards and monitors. I had a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, old-school senior leader that I’ve worked with for a couple years with he and his leadership team and, don’t matter the business they were in, but he was a tough on to pull along because every example, every role model he had of leadership was performance, performance, performance and here I am this little voice at his shoulder going and relationships, relationships, relationships.

 

 And probably two years into our relationship, we do monthly coaching calls and I saw his team live about every six months, is that I am an epiphany this morning. I said, “Okay, Lee tell me what your epiphany was? He said, “I use to see my job as managing results and processes and now I see my job as managing people’s energy. And I said, “Okay that’s awesome. Now tell me what you did today to do that? He actually had. He had.  That’s a fabulous shift, but it takes a while, it takes a while. 

 

Jim Rembach:    It does. Also when start talking about our own selves, making the right shifts and moves that can take a while as well. There’s humps that we have to get over that sometimes we have to go over in order to set us in a better direction. Is there a story that you can share with us that helped you get in the right direction?

 

Chris Edmonds:    You know it’s interesting because I often go to the help side of things and trying to be an effective influencer be in my family and my neighbor, broader community with senior leaders that I work with I’ve got to be kind of walk and the talk. And I mentioned that I had a couple back surgeries so from a physical side there’s kind of challenges of eating healthy on the road. I travel a great deal and food is one of my vices for sure. We talked about leaders having an organizational heart attack an organizations coming to a realization that they can’t keep doing what they’ve been doing is that new definition of insanity. 

 

And for me, I actually had a myocardial infraction in December ’93. I was working hard and I had a great boss and a cool environment and apparently the way I was eating and the way I was behaving, my heart kind of set me a shot a flare up. Back then they were not doing stents, I had three blockages and once I got done with the arthroscopic clearing of those I was mad, I was hungry but I realized that my life changed and that heart attack caused me to lose 30 lbs. to really be very, very intentional about exercise and about foods. And then I get busy with going out on the road again and feeling that at the end of the day I work hard and I can have that cheeseburger and all of the sudden I found I’ve gain back 20 lbs. 

 

My doctors are lovely, they’re driven, they are crystal clear with me but I had to come to the conclusion as you did, that the pain points that I was having, the energy, the gaps that I was facing day-to-day setting up trying to challenge people to change their behavior while I will be at 20 lbs. overweight isn’t necessarily a very credible platform to be on. So it’s literally only been about six years since finding a diet that would work for me at home and on the road. Unbelievable changes—lean proteins and veggies—it’s a Paleo slow carb kind of thing, but I had to get to the point where I realized that I was at risk again of having another heart episode of being too heavy. So the skeletal thing is going to push back and boy it’s going to win. But along with that discovery on my own and discipline it require, I couldn’t eat anything I wanted to anymore. I could eat as much as I wanted to of these healthy things, but men, I had to embrace that. The benefits are fabulous—new clothes are a little more expensive than I’d like, but for the energy and the optimism and the enthusiasm for this hard work, I’ve got to have the same focus to help leaders be disciplined about holding true to some of the behavior change that they’re going to need to shift their workplace from frustrating to inspiring. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Thanks for sharing that and I’m glad you’re still with us and heading in the right direction

 

Chris Edmonds:    So far I think I am. Woot! Woot!

 

Jim Rembach:    I like that way that you do the connection with what you’re referring to in regards to culture change and also the whole cost of waiting thing. The whole cost of waiting thing could be and it has been for a lot of organizations debt. 

 

Chris Edmonds:    Yeah. It really is. And what I found is that as a kind of fan of employee engagement and a fan of customer service, and a fan of servant leadership I look for research I want proof and so I look for research that extends that and deepens that and I so I grab it, I love it. And reality is that senior leaders have never been passed to manage relationships, to manage culture on they’ve been asked to do is manage widgets, products, services the very clear stakeholders, very clear expectations there. So they’re coming from this absence of true experience, of successful experience they’ve seen the change, a culture change work leading a change that’s a handful of folks that I’ve run into. 

 

So part of my challenge is that education of, it can be better, and you’re going to behave different, you have to invest you’re time differently, you’re going to have to focus on different things, you’re going to have to praise progress on things that you think should be common sense. Treating people nice is common sense, certainly it is, it just not common practice in the workplace. Once I got my arms around—these leaders aren’t dumb, they’re really not dumb, they’re really smart, they’re just not doing the best they can and I need to educate them so they can see that there’s additional responsibility that they need to invest time and energy in, and boy, they’re showing. 

 

And I know that leaders are very much looking for research as well, so let me give you a kind of a high level if you’re intentional with your team the really smart they just doing the best they can and I need to educate them survey can see that there’s this additional responsibility that that a need to invest time and energy and boy is it beneficial and you and I know that that leaders are very much looking for research as well some and give you can a higher level if you’re intentional with your team, your department, your region, your company, your multinational in creating an organizational constitution and being as intentional about serving others about values and behaviors as you are about performance you’re going to gain 30 to 35% gains in results and profits in 18 months, 40% gains in employee engagement, 40% gains in customer service, I see it every single time. The big number that people care about, I can’t get 30% in result, yes you can but it’s not a quick fix it’s not a flip of a switch this is intentional 70% shift the time, the managing, the quality of the work of course. 

 

Jim Rembach:    That’s huge. Okay, so I know, like we share you’re cranking out an amazing amount of content, you’re traveling, your help working with a lot of these organizations and we share a little bit about where you live, which just sounds absolutely gorgeous—

 

Chris Edmonds:    Gorgeous it is. 

 

Jim Rembach:    If you’re to stop and think about one thing as a goal, what would it be?

 

Chris Edmonds:    You know what, I am so blessed to have experienced—there’s a lot of us that have ideas and   the ease with which we can blog today and get some ideas out into the blogosphere right the Internet allows us to have a platform for telling people, what’s some of our DSR and what not, the benefit that I’ve had with getting published and having a hardcover book on shelves in bookstores is been a dream for a long time because ultimately my primary goal is to help leaders create workplace inspiration. And I know it can be done, this is not impossible but it’s that education, it’s that it’s the kind of constant chipping away at the belief system that my job as a leader the truly manage performance. 

 

My goal is to help more organizations get this. I would love to have small businesses embrace this because the bulk of our economies globally are built upon small businesses not huge, huge corporations. And small businesses aren’t always wonderful culture, so my target is of course—you talk about how much I travel, I would love to work, we’re locally here in Colorado with small businesses with leaders who realize their cultures could be a little bit better and to help them with that and to in essence try and make—if I can get 20 companies a year to embrace this, I probably work today with 10, but if I could get 20 companies a year of all sizes, shapes, colors, types etc. to gain traction on a more healthy, more higher-quality workplace culture that would be awesome.

 

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

 

Chris Edmonds:    I’m ready to hoedown.

 

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

 

Chris Edmonds:    The thing that holds me back is my fears. Absolutely my fears. I’m fearful of making mistakes, I’m fearful of looking stupid, I think that’s shared by a number of humans on this planet, we can get past that and try some new things actually it might make some traction here. 

 

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

 

Chris Edmonds:    It’s not about me it’s about them. It’s about serving the needs of your team members who then can in turn serve the needs of customers, it’s going to make everybody way happier.

 

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

 

Chris Edmonds:    I am a persistent little bugger who keep chipping away at getting these ideas out working on leaders, coaching leaders, pulling them back to the core it’s all about values and behaviors if we can change those expectations we can make this world a better place.

 

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

 

Chris Edmonds:    I am convinced that my sense of humor. I believe I’m hilarious, so if nothing else I laugh at my own jokes but I realize there’s times with some difficult conversations about getting companies to change, getting leaders to change, getting parents to change, that an injection of effective humor can really move things forward to help people kind of breathe a little bit again but I’m still going to hold on to—that the goal of the target that we’re driving for. 

 

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

 

Chris Edmonds:    I was immensely inspired as I was building this culture change process by Jim Collins, Jerry Porras’s, Good to Great, I still think it is one of the most fabulous books on the importance of values and behaviors in organizations, can’t recommend it more highly.

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay Fast Leader listeners you can find links to that and other bonus information from today show by going to fastleader.net/Chris Edmonds. Okay, Chris this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25 and you have been given the opportunity to take your knowledge and skills back with you but you can’t take everything you can only choose one, what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why? 

 

Chris Edmonds:    Boy, there’ so many things I would love to go back and change. From my 25th year on this planet I’d still like to go back to when I was a supervisor at that stage, it was the early stages of being a boss for the first time, you did a bunch of really dumb things best of intentions, mind you, and I go back to demonstrating the values that I wanted others to lead and live, I would held us all defined behaviors that we can agree to that would’ve made those years way more fun, way more effective.

 

Jim Rembach:    Chris, it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share with the Fast Leader listeners how they can connect with you? 

 

Chris Edmonds:    Absolutely, you can find me online at drivingresultsthroughculture.com. I am on Twitter@scedmonds, first name is Steven so I go by Chris anyway, scedmonds is where they’ll find me on Twitter. You’ll also find links to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus etc. on my website and of course you can (30:49 inaudible)high up there for my bi-weekly newsletter and be able to stay in touch with the episodes on my podcast, and my blogs, and all that stuff. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Chris Edmonds, 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

 

 

047: Warren Kennaugh: It took far much more time and effort

Warren Kennaugh Show Notes

Warren Kennaugh wasn’t totally unhappy working in the corporate world. But Warren wanted to do more of the things he loved. That’s when Warren decided to strike out on his own. But after a year in business, he was not able to buy an island and a Maserati. That’s when he found out it was going to take much more effort and time to make it. Listen to Warren tell his story and what he discovered that might help you move onward and upward faster.

Warren Kennaugh was born and raised in Sydney Australia. One of two boys and as a youth he loved pulling things apart.

His first degree was in Mechanical Engineering where he specialized in the construction and repair of heavy earth moving equipment. Having the need for more people contact (very un-engineer like) he secured a sales position in the banking and finance industry where he successfully rose through the ranks over 9 years. Just when he was positioned to lead the banks first ever national coaching practice the organization restructured and Warren saw it as his opportunity to strike out on his own.

Since that fateful day in 1996 he has built his own consultancy firm focusing on the human behavior of peak performance. Warren has worked with over 70 blue chips large corporations and advised over 300 senior managers and elite teams.

Warren’s expertise in the area of developing high performance has seen him take interim positions as Head of Sales Effectiveness for a major bank and the Director of Coaching & Facilitation for Melbourne Business School.

In 2006, Warren was asked to work with the Australia Rugby Union in preparing the team for the Rugby World Cup for the 2007 and 2011 campaigns. His success on that project has since had him working at the highest levels in world rugby, world cricket, PGA golf, rugby league and preparing the Australian Equestrian Team for the Rio Olympics.

Warren’s unique approach focuses on the evidence that we all operate from a predictable pattern of behavior that leads to success or failure in the things which are trying to achieve. Warren’s work enables an individual or team to easily identify the dynamics which limit their success which permits behavioral changes allowing them to achieve their goals.

Warren currently lives in Sydney with his wife and daughter and has a passion of old style film photography and is madly working away on his second book.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @Warren_Kennaugh and get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“The deeper we know humans the more predictable they are.” Click to Tweet

“The more there is complexity (in behavior) the easier it is to see the patterns.” Click to Tweet 

“There are three simple things we need to do to really thrive.” Click to Tweet 

“What default skills are you good at?” Click to Tweet 

“Look for an environment that supports the same beliefs and values you do.” Click to Tweet 

“If I don’t fit with the organization…you will not get peak performance out of me.” Click to Tweet 

“Am I smart enough to know when under stress…the things I am likely to overplay?” Click to Tweet 

“Greatness is achieved by never being totally satisfied with the status quo.” Click to Tweet 

“I was a bit naive about the effort that would be required.” Click to Tweet 

“Would I swap out money and certainty to…do stuff I don’t enjoy doing?” Click to Tweet 

“I think I’m getting more comfortable with the uncomfortability.” Click to Tweet 

“I don’t get too far away from my own hump…I’m slightly better at managing it.” Click to Tweet 

“Look outside your paradigm and look at other ways of doing things you do.” Click to Tweet 

“Unless you take on a really big project you’ll never know what you are capable of.” Click to Tweet 

“Follow your own path, take advice and listen, but make your own decisions.” Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Warren Kennaugh wasn’t totally unhappy working in the corporate world. But Warren wanted to do more of the things he loved. That’s when Warren decided to strike out on his own. But after a year in business, he was not able to buy an island and a Maserati. That’s when he found out it was going to take much more effort and time to make it. Listen to Warren tell his story and what he discovered that might help you move onward and upward faster.

Advice for others

Look outside your paradigm and look at other ways of doing things you do.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

The challenge to do things differently than I normally would.

Best Leadership Advice Received

Unless you take on a really big project you’ll never really know what you are capable of.

Secret to Success

Follow your own path, take advice and listen, but make your own decisions.

Best tools that helps in business or Life

A strong team around me that gives me frank and honest and not always comfortable feedback.

Recommended Reading

Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations
Fit: When Talent And Intelligence Just Won’t Cut It

Contacting Warren

Website: http://www.warrenkennaugh.com/

LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/warrenkennaugh

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Warren_Kennaugh

Resources

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

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 intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

“Developing your company’s talent and leadership pipeline can be an overwhelming task but your burn is over with ResultPal you can use the power of practice to develop more leaders faster. Move onward and upward by going to resultpal.com/fast and getting a $750 performance package for free.”

 

Today I am so excited because I have the chance to have somebody on the show that I really enjoy. He’s someone who I look up to, I actually bounce ideas off of, a deep thinker as well as a great sense of humor and a good overall being and I don’t get to see him very much because he lives happily all around the world. Warren Kannaugh was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, one of two boys and as a youth he loved pulling things apart. His first degree was in Mechanical Engineering where he specialized in the construction and repair of heavy earth moving equipment. Having the need for more people contact which is very un-engineer like he secured a sales position in the banking and finance industry where he successfully rose through the ranks over nine years. Just when he was positioned to lead the banks first-ever national coaching practice the organization restructured and Warren sought as his opportunity to strike out on his own.

 

Since that fateful day in 1996, he’s built his own consultancy firm focusing in on the human behavior of the peak performance. Warren has worked with over 70 blue-chip, large corporations, and advised over 300 senior managers and elite teams. Warren’s expertise is in the area of developing high-performance which is seeing him take interim positions as Head of Sales Effectiveness for a major bank and the Director of Coaching and Facilitation for Melbourne Business School. In 2006, Warren was asked to work with the Australia Rugby Union in preparing the team for the rugby World Cup for the 2007 and 2011 campaigns. His success on the project has since had him working at the highest levels in World Rugby, World Cricket, VGA golf, Rugby League and preparing the Australian Equestrian team for the real Olympics.

 

Warren’s work enables an individual or team to easily identify the dynamics which limit their success, which permits behavioral changes allowing them to achieve their goals. Warren currently lives in Sydney with his wife and daughter and has a passion of old-style film photography and is madly working away on his second book. Warren Kannaugh are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Warren Kannaugh:         Absolutely, Jim, great to be here today. Great to be with your Hump Day. 

 

Jim Rembach:      I’ve given our legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you better?

Warren Kannaugh:     Yeah, I look very much so. I absolutely had a passion for many years about what makes people tick, I supposed it’s the engineering element from which I come from. If you understand how a building is built or a bridge is built then it is predictable how things are going to paint out as far as structure goes and how do people get results. There must be ways, there must be patterns, and there must be parts at least resistance that people actually go through to get similar results about the success and failure. So that’s for my passion for my work perspective. No surprise of course I bring to other areas of my personal life where you mentioned the black and white photography, the art of taking  a great photo, the art of developing a great print, and many hours in the dark room whiling time away. Some diversity in approach but very much as we look at it, similar constants underneath that similar foundation in my interest. 

 

Jim Rembach:     When you started talking about the whole moving from the engineering piece and the very mechanical piece to the human behavior piece, you start having a big separation in, I guess you’d say the accuracy or the confidence levels of what you get as an outcome of whatever you engineer. So, if I am an engineer I know that if I have certain inputs and if I construct those in a certain way I’m going to get some pretty defined outputs that doesn’t happens with humans.

 

Warren Kannaugh:     The input that we know with humans are more predictable with thoughts. I heard a great quote the other day from a psychologist. The quote basically went, “The more there is complexity the easier it is to say the patterns” If we stand back and look at the building from ground level, it’s a whole lot of complexities as the building goes up 30 levels and so, however if we look at the diagram we will actually say there’s a fairly consistent approach to which level and how building’s built. Very, very similar with human behavior, if you follow me around and watch me complete task, I would have my four or five default patterns of which I would go about it before I give up, before I have a break or give up. In surmise, Jim, I think there is no doubt this quote said about complexity but role say quite predictable. 

 

Jim Rembach:     That’s a really interesting point that you bring up and so when you start thinking about what all of us have to contend with today and that we have so many things to do and only a finite amount of time to do them, however, we are working in some very similar patterns in the way that we go about our work, what needs to take place in order for us to really thrive? 

 

Warren Kannaugh:     Great question, great question. I think there’s three simple things that we need to do to really thrive. The first thing is to work at what default skills are we good at? Sometimes that types of walls for us to bump it around to work out. Sometimes it takes that much time because 10 or 20 years to work at exactly what we’re kind of good at. So if I can give you an example,  if you’re a sales person, say, you’re in sales and distribution you love people contact, you’re ambitious, you’re goal-driven, you want to make a difference, you want to be recognized, you work hard on the back, it’s quite different set of skills if you’re an accountant. Will you be want to be disciplined, will you want to be rigorous where you probably want more time to yourself, then you can be down to the introversion, extraversion. 

First thing is we need to know, the things that on default we’re good at, what skills or industry did I best fit in? What role did I best fit in? There’s no point to find a whole file of people contact who already know, makes you [6:30 inaudible] or not speak to anyone at that part we go and sign that one to be  but to be [6:33 inaudible]so, I think that’s the first thing. The second thing we need to know when I’ve got a bit of ballpark here is about what role I’m going to actually best perform in, that’s default AC for me , it’s then look for the environment that supports the same values and beliefs that I do. 

 

Quite often we can actually see someone who excels in one organization move to another organization and not apply their excellence and skill. And they haven’t lose this skill, on Friday afternoon when they’re hard performer they didn’t lose the skills over the weekend to Monday where they’re not feeling comfortable and not producing their best. Now, in that case we see a lot of organizations who look at engagement which absolutely critically important, but if I don’t fit—if I don’t fit with my manager, if my values and my beliefs and my motives don’t fit with the organization then no amount of apples in the [7:23 inaudible] membership is going to change it, you will not get peak performance out of me because I just don’t feel comfortable. 

 

And the third thing around that is I need to understand enough about myself to know when I’m under stress and pressure to what extent and what behaviors I’m going to over apply and potentially ruin my reputation. So, got the three things, the skills and the talent I’ve got which role does that actually best fit? Secondly, when I’m clear on the role I need to be really have the vision around by an organization that believe the same things that I believe, and ideally my direct manager, we’ve got on quite along but we have the same beliefs. And thirdly, am I smart enough to actually know when I’m under stress and pressure the things I overplay so I don’t end up looking I threw them ruining my reputation. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Listen to you talk while we were initially referring to the simplicity piece it got complex pretty fast [Laugh] and so it was like, “Oh, wooh wait a minute, we have a lot more variables that I thought here. When your start thinking about a lot of these things it does take a lot of effort, even if we can get the simplistic we have to go through the effort. And we need energy, focus like your term of purpose, values all of the things. And one of the things that we look on the Fast Leader show are quotes because they can help supply us with a lot of that and help us hopefully find some grounding, some energies so that we can move forward. Is there a quote or two that stands out for you that you can share?

 

Warren Kannaugh:     Yes. There’s certainly one that’s in my mind and it’s a great reflection for me. And it was one of my previous bosses said to me, “Greatness is achieved by never being totally satisfied with the status quo”. So, there’s always distinction about what else can be done, what else can be done, what else can be done, looking at, how can we move things forward, how can be better. I just think that’s a wonderful quote about not resting on laurels about—not accepting how things are. Of course, if you take that quote and put it on steroids and it’s a problem cause you’re never happy with anything but it’s just try it on the balance about being in a constant state of discontent to enable things to move forward and checking yourself and reflecting. 

Jim Rembach:     I think that’s a great point, they talked about several different studies associated with strengths can rapidly become weaknesses when they’re on hyper drive or steroids then you have to definitely balance and embed them to where that doesn’t happen, such a great point. 

 

Warren Kannaugh:     I think you’re so right. I’m originally working with a gentleman, Gary is outgoing, really the center of attention, what you describe as great leadership qualities. However, in state of stress and pressure he over [inaudible 10:24] those stage which undermines his reputation, which draws too much attention to himself, which makes it about ‘him’ not about the team. So, I think you’re exactly right, there’s such a fine line between—these are great absolutely leadership traits but in another context they don’t work. 

 

Jim Rembach:     That’s a great point. There’s a lot of factors that can affect that. Talking about your transition from being an engineer, working on heavy machinery and working with people and working with a lot of teams in sports as well as well as corporate—you yourself had gone through a big transition and with that we’ve had humps that we have to get over when anybody experiences that? Is there a time that you can remember of a hump that you had to get over that kind helped you get set in a better direction, can share that with us?

 

Warren Kannaugh:     Yeah, very much so. I would say the hump that I need to get over—you know, I went to my own consultancy, it was a very big deal. There as uncertainty about whether it was going to work. I wasn’t totally unhappy in a corporate environment but it was an opportunity for me to do more of what I wanted to do, I had some of that in the corporate world but there’s opportunity for me to do more. So I had questions about whether it was going to work, whether if I badly dissimulators, whether if I struck it on my own that I could feel the sustainable practice, so there was some real question that actually challenged at that point in time. 

 

I wasn’t unhappy working in a corporate environment but doing more of what I want really matter to me. It wasn’t enough to just to do it every now and then I want to make my life  about it and understanding how it work and not everyone wants to know that and so it’s about finding people who have an interest in that himself that I can work with. The challenges about starting my own business to time, and to get and to be without my men to men kind of reputation. It took far much more time and effort than I actually thought. And I been blessed at the moment to have the stuff that I love and I think after that—nine, ten years I think I can comfortably say I probably want to go back to banking and finance. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Let’s hope not because you’re doing some really good work that’s for sure. There’s a couple of things that stood out as you were sharing that story, and thanks for sharing it. You talked about that uncertainty piece, how were you able to deal with that uncertainty piece and get over that hump because a lot of times people hit that part and then they just go back because there’s security in that, so how did you push past? 

 

Warren Kannaugh:     I suppose in some ways I was a bit naive about the effort that would be required, so that was absolutely a blessing, to be honest with you. I set some goals around things that I needed to do at 3, 6 and 12 month period. And I loved to say, I shopped a lot in on the goals, I actually made it over the line. And by that time I’d gone from the fear of concern to more so about—I know it’s not where I need to be but I’m enjoying this more. So there was interesting changes and current shift for me is I went along that and that gave me enough to push through. It would have been easy to say, “Listen I made enough to buy a Maserati and a small island in the first 12 months and that was [14:01 inaudible] market. It wasn’t the case I made enough to get by. And I actually kind of said, “Would I swoop out money and certainty and predictability to go back and do stuff than in doing this much? And that was interesting [14:19 inaudible] now I want to do this. I can keep going at this and if I start develop a bit, there’s going to be why in front but for my own satisfaction, funny actually from where I was. 

 

I said to my wife about eight months ago I said, “I think I’m getting more comfortable with the uncertainty, more comfortable with un-comfortability.” It never disappears. I strike out a new project and I face the same questions about myself that I face when I struck out first time. So,   the irony is I don’t get too far away from my own hump but I get to know it better and I’m slightly better at managing it better. I wouldn’t suggest that Harvard come and do place and I will manage it, but I think I get a little bit better at managing it, Jim. 

 

Jim Rembach:    No, I think it’s a great point is that in itself and our decision-making process and the humps that we run into there’s habits in that. So, it’s best for us to figure out a habit by which we get over it because once we get over that first time needless to say, the second time it becomes easier.

 

Warren Kannaugh:    Without going back to the engineering analogy too much but the hump who live for one on the building is probably is the similar hump on all [15:34 inaudible]. And so, I come to accept the things that push me to uncertainty in there, in small things also do it in large thing, in some way this unfamiliarity and the uncertainty, if that makes sense. 

 

Jim Rembach:     It definitely does. We’ve talked on and off for quite a while, and we had the opportunity of meeting here in the workshop on influence and persuasion and I’m still glad that we’ve been able to keep in touch. But if you were to think about all of the things that you have on your plate, and I know there’s several including younger daughter coming-of-age, if you were look at everything you have on your plate what would you say are some of the goals that want to reach soon?

 

Warren Kannaugh:    They are really great questions. Obviously from the family perspective, with the coming of age, I’d like to see her transition nicely into, I should say, from junior school into high school, that’s what’s important. With some personal projects, I’m working on relating to the house that we live in we have a big renovation project starting there. I just finished one book and will start on the second and will start the third in the new year, so, I’m passionate about—see if I can get my message out to people, just be on people that I connect with. And really to some degree just to continue to do the work that I love to do. I will do the work with the sports people, I will continue to do the work with [17:11 inaudible] people and also balance that with my photography. Not quite any plans at the moments to do the practice on the moon, I want to do anything like that but I suppose to make small adjustments, the stuff that I’ve actually kind of got in place at the moment. It’s interesting for me, I tend not to have big goals, I tend to follow my nose and make adjustments as I kind of get along more from the perspective of where wouldn’t I be interesting to do that. And then I go out and see if that’s possible, and see that’s available and see if I can make that work, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t but it’s more an inquiring mind, I suppose, it actually gets me into thing because it can be found, because I like to do it, and because it might add some value. 

 

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

 

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

 

Warren Kannaugh:    I sure am, Jim, let’s go. 

 

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

 

Warren Kannaugh:    The challenge for me to do the things differently from what I normally would. The same thing that I ask people to do is to look outside my own paradigm and look at other ways to do the thing I things that you do. 

 

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

 

Warren Kannaugh:    Couple of years ago I did some work with the finest photographer by the name of Ralph Gibson and Ralph said to me, “Unless you take on a really big project you’ll never know what you’re capable of.”

 

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

 

Warren Kannaugh:    You must follow your own path. Take advice and listen, but make your own decisions. 

 

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

 

Warren Kannaugh:    A strong team around me that gives me a frank and honest and not always comfortable feedback. 

 

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, besides one of your own?

 

Warren Kannaugh:    Thank you, Jim. Thank you. I want to pick     moment is a book called Team Genius it’s about inside   how team’s thinking

 

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

 

Warren Kannaugh:    Jim, without a doubt what I would take back with me is to actually gain a really strong understanding of what I’m good at and where I fit. That would just make things a whole lot of easy, which saves a whole lot of bumping around and a whole lot of things of me trying things that didn’t work. So, if I could type back 25 years to kind of work at what I’m good at and fairly close to now and stick to my meeting, that would be really kind of **

 

Jim Rembach:    Warren 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?

 

Warren Kannaugh:    Yes, Jim. They can connect with me on the website warrenkannaugh.com I look forward to hearing thoughts and being challenge by questions and insights from your fast leader listeners. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Warren Kannaugh 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. 

 

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