Kendall Lyman

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.

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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. 

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