page title icon Organizational change

Risto Siilasmaa | Transforming Nokia

245: Risto Siilasmaa: I realized I was practicing Paranoid Optimism

Risto Siilasmaa Show Notes Page

Risto Siilasmaa led Nokia in one of the most successful and largest corporate transformations ever. He creates Paranoid Optimism in keeping the organization out of bankruptcy to thriving in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Risto was born and raised in Helsinki, Finland. He had a younger sister, who taught him to manage stress by constantly giving him a hard time.

He got acquainted with the first personal computers at school and soon determined that he needed one himself. After working odd jobs he managed to buy a Commodore 64, learned how to code and became a teenage freelance journalist in the field of IT.

He is a founder of F‐Secure Corporation, a Finnish cybersecurity company and served as the President and CEO of the company between 1988‐2006. Since then he has held the position of Chairman of the Board of Directors.

He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Nokia Corporation. He joined the Nokia Board in 2008 and became Chairman of the Board in May, 2012. Under his tenure Nokia has successfully transformed from a mobile phone manufacturer to a leading communication technology company.

He is also well known as a business angel investing in several technology startups.

He is an active contributor in many European and Asian industry associations and public debate

and a distinguished speaker. His preferred topics are entrepreneurship, leadership and AI.

He is also the author of Transforming Nokia: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change. The book has been translated to several languages.

His hobbies include crossfit, coding and studying Chinese. He aims to instill a spirit of entrepreneurship, accountability, openness for change and an appreciation for experimentation into both the society at large as well as to the companies he works for.

Risto currently lives in Helsinki, Finland with his wife and 3 children.

Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @rsiilasmaa chairman of @nokia to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow – Click to Tweet

“Often times leaders lose their ability to go back to school.” – Click to Tweet

“For the chairman to do something that chairman usually don’t do, it wakes people up.”

“When the chairman does something that chairmen usually don’t do, it wakes people up.” – Click to Tweet

“Toxicity of success is every time you feel that you are successful, it changes you.” – Click to Tweet

“Many powerful leaders have failed because of the toxicity of their own success.” – Click to Tweet

“You don’t need to change the people because they are bad, you just need to wake them up.” – Click to Tweet

“When you think about what could go wrong you can take action to prevent it.” – Click to Tweet

“Paranoid Optimism automatically leads to scenario planning.” – Click to Tweet

“When things are unpredictable you just can not have a single plan.” – Click to Tweet

“Almost anything you think about could be dressed up in scenarios.” – Click to Tweet

“Are we just optimists and not at all paranoid?” – Click to Tweet

“You can get that feeling of ownership and accountability regardless of the job you hold.” – Click to Tweet

“I have to believe that you can be more successful if you take good care of your people.” – Click to Tweet

“You need to always have respect for your people in order to create trust.” – Click to Tweet

“Be a good human being.” – Click to Tweet

“My life is a long search for great people and a never-ending struggle to keep them really close to me.” – Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Risto Siilasmaa led Nokia in one of the most successful and largest corporate transformations ever. He creates Paranoid Optimism in keeping the organization out of bankruptcy to thriving in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Advice for others

Learn who you are and don’t pretend.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Himself

Best Leadership Advice

Be openly who you are with your failures and weaknesses.

Secret to Success

I love learning.

Best tools in business or life

Scenario planning

Recommended Reading

Transforming NOKIA: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach

Contacting Risto Siilasmaa

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rsiilasmaa

Website: https://www.paranoid-optimist.com/

Resources and Show Mentions

Douglas Gerber: How you create high-performance teams

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

245: Risto Siilasmaa: I realized I was practicing Paranoid Optimism

 

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we uncover the leadership life hacks that help you to experience, breakout performance faster and rocket to success and now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach. 

 

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

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay Fast Leader legion, today I am thrilled because I have somebody on the show today who’s going to talk about something that I think we all can learn from at all levels of an organization from the very top of the largest and even small organization all the way down to the frontline. Risto Siilasma was born and in Helsinki, Finland. He had a younger sister who taught him to manage stress by constantly giving him a hard time. He got acquainted with the first personal computers at school and soon determined that he needed one himself. After working odd jobs he managed to buy a Commodore 64 and learned how to code and become a teenage freelance journalist in the field of IT. He is a founder of F‐Secure Corporation, a Finnish cybersecurity company and served as the President and CEO of the company between 1988‐2006. Since then he has held the position of Chairman of the Board of Directors. He is chairman of the board of directors at Nokia Corporation. He joined the Nokia board in 2008 and became chairman of the board in 2012. Under his tenure Nokia has successfully transformed from the mobile phone manufacturer to a leading communication technology company.

 

He is also well known as a business angel investing in several technology startups. He is an active contributor in many European and Asian industry associations and public debate and distinguished speaker. His preferred topics are entrepreneurship, leadership and AI or artificial intelligence. He’s also the author of Transforming Nokia: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead through Colossal Change. The book has been translated into several languages. His hobbies include CrossFit coding and studying Chinese. He aims to instill a spirit of entrepreneurship, accountability, openness for change and an appreciation for experimentation into both the society at large as well the companies he works for. He currently lives in Helsinki Finland and is married and has three children. Risto Siilasmaa, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Risto Siilasmaa:    I’d love to do that.

 

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

 

Risto Siilasmaa:    Well, my current passion is machine learning because I have experienced myself that as a leader you get to stand in front of an audience and talk about various topics to communicate the company message and oftentimes the topic that I’m talking about is not something I truly understand myself. I’m just like a parrot somebody has created a presentation for me I learn it by heart and I’m fairly convincing in repeating those statements I don’t even know if they are true especially if we talk about something complicated. Oftentimes leaders lose the ability to go back to school. And we don’t only lose the ability we lose the desire either because we feel that we are so high on the value chain and we don’t need to anymore so we delegate learning to others. Or we are afraid that will reveal how stupid we are. We’ll, reveal that we don’t know things that people assume we do so we lose the ability to learn. And I was doing that for machine learning is such an important transformational technology. So I was trying to encourage others to learn it and to use it for the company’s benefit without understanding. 

 

So then I woke up I had this entrepreneurial awakening and realized that I don’t need to have others do it I can do it myself. I started coding again after a break of 30 years and started doing different machine learning models and that has been so much fun. Maybe that’s the number one passion that I have at the moment.

 

Jim Rembach:    Well, as you’re explaining and talking about the passion and I start thinking about what you wrote about and really what you lived with Nokia as well as going back to you starting F-secure, which is a cybersecurity company that you’re chairman of as well, is that you have the ability to really focus in on doing what is necessary. Even in the book you talk about F-secure having to clean the restrooms whenever you need it to and you’re not afraid to do that. Also when you start thinking about bringing that to a larger organization you weren’t necessarily caught up in something that you talked about which is a toxicity of success. I think all of us at all different levels of an organization can really fall into the trap of that toxicity of success. I think it’s important that we talk about, what is that?

 

Risto Siilasmaa:    Well, first of all I’m poisoned by as well and I don’t always realize what I’m doing wrong but I try to stop and sort of think about the wider picture, am I doing the right things? Am I thinking about the right topics? Am I thinking about those in the right way? And sometimes I see the light sometimes I don’t and with machine learning I’m very happy about going back to school. Actually encouraging a lot of our employees to start studying I’ve had so many conversations where people come to me, engineers, they are ashamed that their chairman knows more about their profession than they do and then they tell me that they’re spending nights and weekends study and that’s really music to my ears because that’s a cultural change. For the chairman to do something the chairman usually don’t do it wakes people up. And that’s a very powerful leadership action to do something that you’re not supposed to do. 

 

Toxicity of success means every time you feel that you are successful you have accomplished something especially if others tell you that it changes you. And that changes an insidious incremental change it’s like boiling frogs they don’t realize that the water is getting hotter and we don’t realize that we are being changed by the success that is attributed to us. Maybe deep inside we realize that it’s not you do my actions that we are successful but typically the face of the company, the CEO, is always given all the credit. Oftentimes it’s the predecessor who started things going in the right direction. Therefore the praise that you get the feeling that I’m not worthy but still I want to believe that leads you do you become afraid that you’ll be revealed so you may become less prone to taking risks less prone to experimentation more set on your ways because what used to work should still work. And I don’t know any other way and I don’t dare experiment because I might reveal that I’m not certain of what we do. So many powerful leaders have failed because of the toxicity of their own success. Many others are afraid of the change or they are aware of the change and therefore they can resist it and they can retain their desire to learn an experiment. The flexibility that is such an essential part of all leaders.

 

Jim Rembach:    Well, as you’re talking I start thinking about going through some of the transformations that was required and in the book you talk about just the history at the time and what was happening, there’s launches of competitors when you start talking about the device of business that Nokia was in at the time you start referring to also the economic climate, we’re talking about back in 2008 and how that was just had some global impacts, there was some significant changes. You had even said, I heard you mentioned before is that when you have a culture that doesn’t have some of the things that you’re talking about that are so critically important you either have to change the organization or you’re changing the people within the organization. When you start talking about the legacy aspects of that toxicity of success how many of those people do you have to get rid of you might ask and I think it’s important to talk about where you are now in Nokia in regards to how many employees are badged as Nokia employees versus what it used to be? 

 

Risto Siilasmaa:    Well, you don’t need to change the people because the people are bad. You just need to wake them up. And you can wake them up in many different ways. Typically explain to them what the problem is, what are we doing wrong? What will happen if we don’t change? And you need to tell them, in what way do we need to change? What would be good behavior? And then you need to start taking action. You need to lead from the front you need to show symbols of changing yourself and doing your part. 

 

I remember a story about a new CEO coming to a company that had an actual physical rule book and everybody in the company hated that book. They hated it from the bottom of their hearts. And this CEO learnt about that hatred and he wanted to change the way the company operated. So he took the book went into the parking lot where he had a big barrel, sort of named the old barrel, and he burnt the book in that barrel and it was videoed and translated to all the employees. It was such a powerful symbol to everybody, see I wanted to change the old behavior and there was no book anymore. But of course the leadership often is fairly ingrained in their old ways and you may need to change at least individuals at the top you ought to send a message that we are serious as well as to get people in who naturally believe in the new way of operating who leave that culture automatically they don’t have to learn it they leave it already. 

 

Jim Rembach:    To me and I think what you’re talking about going back and connecting it with the book and it’s part of the subtitle is you’re talking about really implementing a framework that you call paranoid optimism. Now, for me when I first saw paranoid optimism and I just really focusing in on the first word which means paranoid for most people they freaked out or freeze but that’s not what you’re talking about. Can you explain a little bit about what paranoid optimism means because I think all of us going back to what I had said previously is that we can learn that at all levels. 

Risto Siilasmaa:    Yeah, having been an entrepreneur for well since I was 22 and I of course faced a lot of challenges and made a lot of mistakes and failed time after time. After about 15 years of being a CEO and growing up to be a CEO I finally realized that actually need to stop and think about how do I lead and how do I want to lead? What has worked for me and what hasn’t worked for me? And I realized that the way I had somehow learned to think is best expressed by those words paranoid optimism. I believe that that’s part of entrepreneurship it’s part of the feeling of ownership and accountability for everything the company does. The founder of a company can never hide we cannot run away because we are accountable. If we didn’t decide something ourselves at least we recruited the people who decided that or we recruited the people who recruited the people who decided that, we are accountable. Therefore we can when we see a problem somewhere anywhere we can tackle that we feel that it’s our responsibility. And in order to preempt these challenges you need to think, what can go wrong? And when you think about what can go wrong you can take action to prevent it. And that actually leads you to be optimistic. I have seen the width of the different alternatives that face to come and I’m prepared we are prepared we know what to do to prevent the bad ones and execute the ones that we want to happen. So basically, what I’m talking about is scenario planning paranoid optimism is automatically leads to scenario planning. 

In the kind of marketplace where most companies are at the moment it’s a combination of complexity something that is unpredictable and very, very complicated. When things are unpredictable you just cannot have a single plan you have to have multiple plans because you don’t know what will happen and because it’s complicated you need to plan ahead. So somehow you need to combine the stability to plan because you don’t know and the fact that if it’s sufficiently complicated and you don’t have a plan you will not succeed, therefore, scenario planning and that’s paranoid optimism for me. It starts from the sense of ownership which leads you to think about what bad can happen. You preempt those you think, what do I want to happen? You work to make that happen. And therefore you sort of have a map in front of you where you have different paths through the future. Some of those paths are not great some of them lead to a disaster some of them are really, really good. And every day you can look at you forward-looking indicators and try to figure out on which path are you. When you feel that there’s sort of a probability cloud which you can shape because every action you take will have an impact on those probabilities and you want to shift them as much as possible towards the good paths and as much as possible away from the negative paths.

Jim Rembach:    One of the core elements and characteristics in emotional intelligence is called perspective-taking and I think that’s what you’re talking about is taking a different perspectives that aren’t the most ideal because we have to deal with them and people call it a VUCA world with a lot of uncertainty and all of that, volatility. But when I start thinking about that whole particular process because I’ve been involved with some of that sometimes in certain people they’ll just continue to scenario base and do what ifs what ifs what ifs what ifs what ifs and it’s like it never ends. It’s like, okay, we kind of have to start stop this creative thinking process because it’s just going way on too long and we have to start actually executing because one of the biggest problems in organizations is really execution getting things done. So how do you actually put some parameters on that whole scenario-based component so that you’re just not doing that and never taking action?

Risto Siilasmaa:    Well, the idea is that you take action every day. If there’s a scenario at that to which you cannot come up with good actions and it’s not a good scenario it’s not a real scenario. Let’s take an example, back in the days when the iPhone was new and Android was just coming to the market and Nokia Symbian ecosystem was going down the drain under the pressure of the iPhone mostly but also Android devices and we were wondering what can we do and we had partnered with Microsoft on the Windows phone in an exclusive relationship our market share remained very, very low and we couldn’t really see Windows phone winning against Android and iPhone. So what are the scenarios that could happen? Microsoft had announced that they want to become a devices and services company. So maybe they wanted to start making their own smartphones that was a scenario a disastrous scenario for Nokia because we had an exclusive relationship with Microsoft and if they become our competitor we would still have an exclusive relationship with them and we couldn’t get out of that relationship. So how could Microsoft start making mobile phones or smartphones? They could acquire somebody. Okay, who could they acquire? They could acquire HTC. So how do we know if they are in the process of acquiring? What can we do? We can talk to the investment bankers who often slip something by. We can go and meet with the HTC CEO not asking him whether he is in discussions with Microsoft but exploring strategic partnerships exploring if there’s some way we can do more with them and we can sense if there’s something going on. Just as an example down a tree of multiple scenarios we end up at a sort of a leaf in that tree which is HTC and Microsoft. 

What actions can we take? Well we can go and meet the CEO. We can talk to investment bankers. We can put our feelers out at least something we can do. And then of course we can plan ahead if they would decide to announce such an acquisition, what would we do? We would sue Microsoft so let’s do a study in advance based on what could we sue them. And maybe we can even do some preparatory work in order to sue them the same day they announce we are not caught by surprise. It’s not under our control where the Microsoft buys HTC or not we can try to influence it but in the end those two companies will make their own decisions. So almost anything you think about you can dress up in scenarios and it soon becomes a tree but you don’t want it to become a hedge cause then it’s just too much work to do and you get buried under the different scenarios. And that’s of course the typical challenge where you have to find the balance and there’s no one way of doing that you just have to figure out your own way in your own situation how many scenarios is reasonable. 

Jim Rembach:    Talking about the whole scenario components and I think it’s a tactic that I think is critically important that again all of us at all levels could really focus in on. You talked about three questions that reveal the right facts, are we discussing the right things? Because when we start looking at the scenario components, thinking about just own internal meetings I think we can always start asking these questions. And they are, are we discussing the right things? Are we discussing the right things in the right way? And are we comfortable challenging the leaders opinions? There’s several components in the book and you finally start talking about it is this trust element and having that freedom and security and not feeling like there’s going to be  repercussions when you actually do all of that challenging and so some of those values and components have to be there. And you talk about that in entrepreneurial leadership and there’s 10 things that you talk about, we’ll get to that in a second, but when you start talking about these three questions to me it’s not just that you’re asking them internally I think you’re also kind of taking that outside the organization and starting getting to the customer start getting to maybe suppliers and you’re continually asking those types of questions to see if you’re focusing on the right things which will feed the scenario based planning. So when you start looking at those three questions would you do something different when I start thinking about those forward thinking indicators and where we’re going? And how would that particularly change or it still be the same thing for everyone? 

Risto Siilasmaa:    I think those three questions work really well if you’re a new leader in a new situation. I’d say you’re hired as the CEO you’re hired as a project manager in a company you haven’t worked for before. And you get to your team and you want to know whether the team culture is a good one. So you observe in your own team also in your manager’s team as part of a department leadership team or the company leadership team. And you want to ask yourself those three questions, are we talking about the right topics? Is there something that we are missing? Are we only talking about a single plan without any alternatives? Are we at all thinking about how things could go wrong? Are we just optimists and not at all paranoid? And then you want to think about are we talking about things in the right way? Therefore is it okay to challenge others with respect? Is it okay to voice concerns? Is it okay to for example ask the team, hey, what’s the big thing we will miss next? Most technology companies have missed a big generational shift at some time. Nokia definitely has and it almost killed the company. 

Just half a year ago our new head of mobile networks sent not an email but a social media message in the company social media platform to all employees asking them, what’s the next big thing we will miss? And I think asking such a question is a great cultural message it means that the leaders can ask questions about failing of course, in order to prevent that failure. 

The third one can we challenge the leader? If we can’t then we have an Emperor without clothes at this possibly because when the leader starts failing we will not be able to challenge the leader. It’s better to start challenging the leader under good times because then it will not be such a surprise when the leader is challenged during bad times, we will learn how to do that with respect and probably we prevent from those bad times from happening.

Jim Rembach:    What you’re talking about there as you mentioned in the book something about the shattering complacency and that is we always have to be unsettled to a certain degree. I think ultimately from a cultural perspective and you’ve kind of said this yourself is it you’re creating a culture of continuous learning it never ends it’s a daily element. For you when you even start talking about going back and learning into code oftentimes when you start even thinking about like for example the differences between machine learning and AI those are two different things but oftentimes they get lumped together if you don’t know that and you’re talking about that in a modern business environment like you said you could have a whole lot of trust issues that result because you don’t quite know. So that learning component and humility are critical core values that today’s organization must have otherwise they fall into that same toxicity of success and comes a never ending cycle and downward spiral. And in the book you even mentioned and you talked about rim and all of them that essentially just went away because they could not break the cycle, the downward spiral. But again I think we’re talking about—and in the book I see it over and over that you’re really talking about building high-performing teams and I had the opportunity to have Douglas Gerber on the show, he’s episode 223, talks about measuring your opportunities to be able to build that high-performing team. If  I’m talking about building the high-performing teams I think it goes into what you had talked about is that entrepreneurial leadership and that’s why I said I wanted to get to and hit those 10 points because again I think all of us can leverage these things. Now I’m not going to put you on the spot and say name all 10 but I would like to kind of hit on a couple of these. I’m going to read them real quick because I want you to talk about some that are critically important that without fail we have to make sure that we’re executing upon.

You talk about holding yourself accountable, facing facts, being persistent, managing risks, be a learning addict, maintain an unwavering focus, look to the horizon, build a team of people you like in respect, ask why and never stop dreaming. Now obviously they’re all important but when you start looking at some that are without fail we must have in your opinion what are they?

Risto Siilasmaa:    At the core of entrepreneurship as I mentioned before is the idea that you are accountable and you can get that feeling of ownership and accountability regardless of the job you hold. As a young teenager while I was coding during the night in the evenings I worked in a butcher’s shop and the team that worked there selling meat to customers and such pride in what they did they wanted to be the best in that. When there was a dirty spot somewhere the first person who saw that clean it up. It was not that I’m here to sell it’s not my job to clean that it’s all hands on deck all the time so that we can have pride in what we do. So that sense of ownership how do you beat that to others? How do you help others to feel that? I’ve often said that in a way a job could be compared to a car. 

Most people don’t wash their rental cars. Why don’t they wash it? Even if they had rented it for two weeks they typically never wash it even if it’s good it’s really dirty because they don’t have that sense of ownership. If it’s your own car you have more of a sense of pride for the car and you take good care of that. For people who think of their job as a rental car I think it is an unfair situation they deserve better the company deserves better and the people deserve better. If you feel that way find a new job something that you feel that pride for and then you can have that sense of ownership and that’s accountability. And the company as well they need to take action in order for as many as possible of their people to feel that sense of ownership. So that’s at the core of everything. Maybe I’ll mention another one from your list which is giving me a lot of trouble and that’s partially about the trust that permeate and that has to permeate everything but it’s about hiring a team that you genuinely like and respect. 

There are so many very, very successful tech companies where the top leader is not a nice person we all know many examples and some of our most respected tech leaders exhibit this behavior and it bothers me deeply. I sort of have to believe that you can be more successful if you take good care of your people. If you are not prone to getting really angry really quickly without reason without cause if you treat people with respect you need to always have respect for your people in order to create trust and that sense of camaraderie. I struggle with what’s going on in this industry and maybe you have some consolation for me maybe you can explain how come? But I have to believe that being a good leader in the way that I define good leadership actually increases the probability for your business to be truly successful. 

Jim Rembach:    For me I think what you had said a while back in this interview is critically important then you talked about leading and modeling from up front. I think if you start looking at people who are in positions of power that you know aren’t really focusing in on the employee experience and the human experience internally ultimately are going to pay the price because it’s going to affect the external experience that’s one of the things that we talk about a lot. Things take care of themselves in the world ultimately rights itself. Sometimes it just takes a little while but those companies will have the same downward spiral because they do have that toxic environment and nature just kind of weeds those out after a while because they become less agile, less adaptable and it’s what you even talk about in the book to me it was all. Like you said sometimes it was the environment I was in I’m not really that type of person but I’m stuck in it and really when they get the opportunity those people they become your champions in the transformation. 

Risto Siilasmaa:     They sort of become your environment.

Jim Rembach:    Absolutely. I know I’m a victim that I tell my kids that all the time and so that’s why I said, am I going to essentially tell you who your friends or supposed to be? Yes I will because I know it’s going to impact your behavior. You’ve actually shared a lot of your stories, and on the show we talked about getting over the hump and you actually get three or more and so I appreciate you telling those stories. The book is actually loaded with a lot of situations that you came across that you had to do things differently and you therefore got over the hump and obviously it became a positive outcome as a whole because now Nokia is really leading the way in in 5G infrastructure and what we’re going to be seeing as a huge impact and effect to our lives with the Internet and things and all of that. I know that you’re going to continue to have significant amounts of success. But when we start going through all of this one of the things that we need is that inspiration in order to have some of the resilience and transformation. One the show one of the things that we like to focus in on are quotes. So is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?

Risto Siilasmaa:    One of my favorite quotes in my opinion defines entrepreneurship in a perfect way and the quote goes something like this, there are those among us who see things as they are and they ask why and there are those that dream of things that never where and ask why not. In that first part people who observe the environment they ask why they are curious they’re like scientists they want to understand how things work. But then people who dream of things that never where and ask, hey, why not? They are entrepreneurs they change things they build things that never where. I think that’s a beautifully said and a great definition for entrepreneurship even if it was not originally meant that way.

Jim Rembach:    I think that’s a great and really value statement when you start thinking about it. Also when I start looking at where you are and things that you’re doing with coding you talked about machine learning, I know artificial intelligence is also important to you, being able to create a culture of high performing teams you talked about a lot of different things associated with transformation all of that but when I start thinking about goals I’m sure you have several but I’d like you to focus in on one, so could you share with us what is one goal that you have?

Risto Siilasmaa:    Be a good human being. Because in the end when we think back about our lives I don’t think we will be thinking about money or titles or medals or we think about our family we think about our friends we think about our colleagues who hopefully are also friends. And with all these people we want to feel a sense of trust they trust me I’m trustworthy I can trust them because they want to do right by me and we respect each other. I believe that my life is a long search for people that I really like to have close to me. There aren’t that many people who really you can trust unfortunately. But when you find one grab on to him or her do what you can spare no effort in keeping that person close to you because it’s rare to find these people.

Jim Rembach:    And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you their 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 gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award-winning solution is guaranteed to create motivated, productive and loyal employees who have great work 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, Risto, 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 a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. 

 

Risto Siilasmaa:    I’m a thin. I’m usually not fast because I like to think things through. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Oh, that’s just find but are you ready to hoedown? 

 

Risto Siilasmaa:    Yeah.

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

Risto Siilasmaa:    I am.

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

Risto Siilasmaa:   As you can see ‘m not really quick here because I want to find the absolute best advice that I have received. Probably be openly who you are with your failures and weaknesses don’t try to hide. 

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

Risto Siilasmaa:    I really love learning.

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

Risto Siilasmaa:    Scenario planning.

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

Risto Siilasmaa:    Probably the book, There’s a Strategy for your Strategy. Because I’m intellectually drawn to that concept. It asks you to think about things at a higher abstraction level. Don’t just work on your strategy but actually realize that you have to have a strategy for creating your strategy.

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/Risto Siilasmaa. Okay, Risto, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25 and you can take all the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take every single thing you can only choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Risto Siilasmaa:    I would probably take the self-knowledge because that would have helped me be open to who I am without trying to pretend that I know more or I’m better than I actually were. That would have helped me learning faster and it’s the core piece of self-confidence. Because if you really can be who you are you are self-confident enough to be weak and not know things and that helps you learn.

Jim Rembach:    Risto, it’s an honor to spend time with you today can you please share the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Risto Siilasmaa:    I’m very active on Linkedin, very active on Twitter and I can be easily reach through both. 

Jim Rembach:    Risto Siilasmaa, 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. Tor 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 

 

 

Samuel Bacharach | Transforming the Clunky Organization

222: Samuel Bacharach: Leaders listen, apologize, and move agendas

Samuel Bacharach Show Notes Page

Samuel Bacharach was a new professor at Cornell and was called out for not following procedures by an office administrator. Initially, he refused to listen but then apologized for his behavior. A year and a half later, this woman helped him to negotiate a salary bonus. From then on, he built his career on the interpersonal stuff.

Samuel Bacharach was raised in Brooklyn, East New York before moving to Jamaica, Queens. Growing up in two working-class neighborhoods he had absolutely no aspiration of going to college and becoming a Cornell professor. Simply put, anyone growing up in the neighborhoods of New York during that era develops a sense of survival, a deep appreciation of what it means to be on a team, and get people on their side. In many ways the core of what Sam believes in goes back to those days.

He stumbled into his academic career at Cornell University, coming to the faculty in 1974. He is the author or editor of over 100 academic articles and 20 books. Sam has always had an interest in leaders and leadership. For him, leadership boils down to the skills of execution. In Get Them on Your Side and Keep Them on Your Side he introduced readers to the concepts of political and managerial competence.

More recently, he published The Agenda Mover and Transforming the Clunky Organization. The Agenda Mover explores the skills that leaders need to develop to get things done, and Transforming the Clunky Organization discusses the characteristics that keep organizations from thriving and meeting their potential. He is currently transitioning from his academic role to spending more time on his writing.

Sam’s legacy, as an academic and author, is that everyone can lead, and that in the final analysis, leaders are those with deep empathy, street smarts, and the political savvy to move things ahead. Charm and charisma are simply not enough. Everyone can make it if they develop some fundamental core skills.

In collaboration with his wife, Yael, he founded the Bacharach Leadership Group, which focuses on training high-potential leaders at universities and Fortune 500 companies.

Sam lives in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @samuelbacharach to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow – Click to Tweet

“The capacity to lead in life, in your career, in anything, is in your hands.” – Click to Tweet

“You’re not trapped in your personality.” – Click to Tweet

“Getting things done in leadership is in your control.” – Click to Tweet

“What’s important is our capacity to change.” – Click to Tweet

“For God sake, get something done.” – Click to Tweet

“Clunkiness and myopia cause inertia and things get stuck and a leader can’t afford to engage in that.” – Click to Tweet

“You’ve got to have the political skills and competence to move ideas through the maze of clunkiness and the over-focus of myopia.” – Click to Tweet

“As a leader you’ve got to juggle, how much space do I give them and how do I make sure they don’t squander this organization.” – Click to Tweet

“How much control do you want to have; how loose, how much autonomy do you want to give?” – Click to Tweet

“Think about leadership; what you’re really talking about is facilitative versus directive leadership.” – Click to Tweet

“The leadership challenge for you is to understand the world you live in and the context of your business.” – Click to Tweet

“Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Getting something done is difficult.” – Click to Tweet

“Good ideas are simply not enough; you’ve got to get stuff done.” – Click to Tweet

“Leaders listen, leaders apologize, but leaders also move agendas.” – Click to Tweet

“Empathy is the key to success, political success, economic success, social success.” – Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Samuel Bacharach was a new professor at Cornell and was called out for not following procedures by an office administrator. Initially, he refused to listen but then apologized for his behavior. A year and a half later, this woman helped him to negotiate a salary bonus. From then on, he built his career on the interpersonal stuff.

Advice for others

Empathy is the key to everything.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

A sense of insecurity.

Best Leadership Advice

Believe in the people you work with.

Secret to Success

I know that I’m not the smartest person in the room.

Best tools in business or life

I can work with a team and I stand by context.

Recommended Reading

Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures)

Transforming the Clunky Organization: Pragmatic Leadership Skills for Breaking Inertia (The Pragmatic Leadership Series)

The Agenda Mover: When Your Good Idea Is Not Enough (The Pragmatic Leadership Series)

Contacting Samuel Bacharach

Website: http://blg-lead.com/

email: samuel.bacharach [at] gmail.com

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

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

 

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

222: Samuel Bacharach: Leaders listen, apologize, and move agendas

 

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.

 

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

 

Okay Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who first of all is very quick-witted but then also is deeply tenured in a lot of different ways as well as in experience. Samuel Bacharach was born and raised in Brooklyn East in New York before moving to Jamaica Queens. Growing up in two working-class neighborhoods he had absolutely no aspiration of going to college and becoming a Cornell professor. Simply put anyone growing up in the neighborhoods of New York during that era develops a sense of survival a deep appreciation of what it means to be on a team and get people on their side. In many ways the core of what Sam believes in today goes back to those days. He stumbled into his academic career at Cornell University coming to the faculty in 1974. He’s the author or editor of over 100 academic articles and 20 books. Sam has always had an interest in leaders and leadership. For him leadership falls down to the skills of execution and get them on your side and keep them on your side. He introduces readers to the concepts of political and managerial competence.

 

More recently he published the agenda mover and transforming the clunky organization. The agenda mover explores the skills that leaders need to develop to get things done and transforming the clunky organization discusses the characteristics that keep organizations from thriving and meeting their potential. He is currently transitioning from his academic role to spending more time on his writing.  Sam’s legacy as an academic and author is that everyone can lead and that in the final analysis leaders are those with deep empathy, street smarts and the political savvy to move things ahead charm and charisma are simply not enough. Everyone can make it if they develop some fundamental core skills. 

 

In collaboration with his wife Yael he founded the Bacharach Leadership Group which focuses on training high potential leaders at universities and fortune 500 companies. Sam lives in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City. Sam Bacharach, are you ready to help us get over the hump? 

 

Samuel Bacharach:      I’m ready. But if I can get you over the hump position is the question? 

 

Jim Rembach:    I’m sure you can. Now I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you share what your current passion is before we can get to know even more about you? 

 

Samuel Bacharach:      This is the first time I was introduced with such a background go so dramatically back into my youth but I think as you grow older you go back to where you came from. I found lately that my current passion for all the hoopla is really to let people understand that the capacity to lead, and I spell leadership of a small L, I also mean that the capacity to lead in their life that capacity to lead in their career their capacity to lead in anything is in their hands they’re not trapped by their personality. I sometimes see this in my students, it’s easy if you’re this as panache, charismatic kid that comes from a great home and you go out there and you can do it but some of these kids need to learn that it’s in their hand. Like in like in organizations a lot of people out there with all this personality and charm and they keep talking to that. My passion right now is to really make people, and I don’t use the word empowerment in a loose way, but make people aware that it’s in their control getting things done and leadership is in their control. And that in a lot of ways going back to the beginning of my own biography. I’ve done these big corporations but some spending a lot of time working with corporations, I’m also spending time doing a lot of pro bono work and doing work with where I can really impact people’s lives and empowers them in that level. 

 

Jim Rembach:    As you were talking I started thinking about the depth and breadth of all of the research and knowledge that you’ve had exposure to over the course of these past couple decades in that I start thinking about the whole practical application piece. You and I talked about that progression and age and wisdom comes as I became certified in emotional intelligence empathy being important but then you say everybody could do it. But I’m like, EQ or emotional intelligence perspective there’s a whole lot of deficiencies in certain leaders that they really need to work on in order for them to transform a clunky organization or get people to follow with them.

 

Samuel Bacharach:      We all have deficiencies. We spend a lot of time coaching leaders on specific ways and we all have deficiency. But I think the first thing we have to do is make people aware that through understanding, self-reflection, training, reading, focusing your mind on the deficiencies you can make a difference in doing that. We all talk about training and teaching, what the heck that we really want to do we want to do that? We want to make sure the people can change their behaviors in ways that are functional. Look for those of you the whole world live happily ever after. But even in our personal life what’s important is our capacity to change. All of my work, which is not rocket science, but all my work is based on knowing—one of the things you wish you focus on, giving people the tools. 

 

We live in a world with a lot of—I come from old world I believe in a check list world. Tell people seven eight things that you think can help them and in fact you can make an impact. Tell organizations, tell leaders the things they’re doing wrong how can I do things different don’t make it diffuse make it concrete make it real and everything. Emotional intelligence, you’re certified in emotional intelligence, but you and I know that at least 60% of the stuff you knew before you were certified and that is you knew it because you are mostly intelligent enough to be able to get certified in emotional intelligence you knew you’re moving someplace. Sometimes I think the world is like The Wizard of Oz place, was it the Scarecrow, I was wondering—they all have the knowledge but thought they were an idiot but they just needed a degree. My whole point in life is tell people you’ve got this capacity let me help you tap it, here are the things you need to do.

 

Jim Rembach:    It’s funny that you say that the reason I became certified because I used to be very deficient at it. 

 

Samuel Bacharach:      There you go. For me training and leadership is signing out leaders, doing organizations giving them the skills to make the difference in a very concrete way not just giving them. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Talking about, talking about competencies and talking about skills I mean in the book, Transforming the Clunky Organization, men, I really like the framework and the model that you have associated with breaking inertia. You talk about the five challenges of breaking inertia, and I’ll just go ahead and read those real quick. You talk about questions that need to be asked. So you say, why is the organization sluggish? And so what we need from a challenge perspective is to evaluate its clunky and myopic tendencies to talk about what’s out there and so we have to apply contextual competence, which is leaders as explorers. And you talk about what can be done about it. We talk about applying ideational competence, which is leaders as innovators. And you talk about what support is needed and then you mentioned applying political competence, meaning leaders as campaigners and then how to implement managerial competence, leaders as sustainers. Now when you started talking about these five challenges of breaking inertia I have to really kind of go to the point of waiting scenario. If you start looking at levels of importance, where does that lie? 

 

Samuel Bacharach:     Let me take it one step back because you made my work sound more sophisticated than it is, I’m flattered, let me talk for a moment about the inertia issue why inertia. We’re sitting there, what do we really want from our leaders? We were living in a world right now and we turn on the news it doesn’t matter what your politics, what do you want? We want execution. For God’s sake get something done, in corporations get something done. Most of the time they’re stuck with this inertia. In organizations what I’m arguing is that in organizations inertia is always—it’s the clunky message that interest groups different businesses but that doesn’t mean your organizations not successful. Take a look at some of the largest organizations the complex ends in the—and it’s hard to get anything moving through them, so that’s the notion of being clunky. On the other hand, in some situations you got people so micro focused so myopic that they can’t get out of their mindset. You think all the organizations think of what’s going on in our country or politics on one hand you get this big clunky mess on the other hand you got micro focusing, micro macro focusing that myopic vision. We haven’t going on in news today, do we have any rocket scientist? So what does a leader do? A leader has to understand these tendencies and has to move things ahead in spite of these two forces that caused inertia. Clunkiness?  Clunkiness and myopia cause inertia to get things to get stuck and a leader can’t afford to engage in that he can’t afford to get stuck a leader must execute in spite of that. That’s the challenge of political leaders, that’s the challenge of corporate leaders and that’s what I’m trying to deal in this book. What I’m saying is there are and what I’m saying is there four or five things they have to do to make sure that won’t happen and that (10:44 inaudible) spoken.

 

Jim Rembach:    As you’re talking though, for me it’s like—you mentioned something about corporations and large organizations, I see that in small organizations too. 

 

Samuel Bacharach:     Absolutely, absolutely. You see, clunkiness is the whole idea. For example, why the word the word clunky for example? Why the word myopic? If you sit back for a moment and you just take the words in  any situation you’re corded either the situation is very clunky—think of the old world I’ve got all these elements—I worked for a lot of major corporations and one of these got an office in Bangalore, I know an office in Research Triangle,  San Jose, you name it I work in one of these large organizations, academia, worked in Walden Universities, they are large successful clunky organizations and now you’re sitting there in your office in the research office and you want to move something ahead, how do you do it? It’s impossible. On the other hand, you get all these people in these organizations I call myopia, micro stuck the same thing is true in start-up organizations with the move so fast. What happens in start-up organization sometimes get caught in all this myopia they micro focus or they become clunky by overreaching too quickly. And this same dichotomous tension and in dichotomous tension we face our life. 

 

My challenge to leaders is to understand this economy as the obstacle as the thing that causes the inertia. And then I said to people, okay, how do you break inertia?  it’s like the way you break it in your work, your bacon number one, by understanding the context in which your organization is operating by beating the signals in the environments, pick up new ideas. And then then we all hear about ideation by moving ideas to the organization, that’s the innovative part, coming up with ideas. Think of your own world, you can think of what you want to do in your career you expand what you want to do in your career and then you build on it you ideate on it so that’s the whole idea of leading for discovery. But the problem in the world we live in people have plenty of great ideas. Look at our Congress there’s plenty of great ideas. Look at our major corporations, our corporations are totally innovative. People think, that’s great, yeah right, so what if you have a great idea in organization and you can’t get it through the system? Great idea is simply not enough. Then I ask our people you’ve got to deal with delivery you’ve got to have the political skills, the confidence to move ideas through the maze or clunkiness and the over focus of myopia.

 

Jim Rembach:    As you were talking to I started thinking about, okay, so the political aspects I kind of get that. I get that whole influence and psychology—

 

Samuel Bacharach:     And they’re forming coalition and winning people over. 

 

Jim Rembach:     I get that part, for me though when I started thinking about the actual execution piece because you call that—there’s a particular part of the book for me that just totally blew up at me when you start talking about the execution piece. In the book you talk about it being monitoring for tight and loose execution. What I’ve often see is that people put in tight types of measurements in place and expect to have a loose outcome, that’s more innovative and creative, or they do the reverse and want to have something that’s a little bit more structured.

 

Samuel Bacharach:     I’m very taken by—this one’s a heck of a good question on emotional intelligence, I’m very taken by that. One of the things that’s haunting me in my entire career is that distinction sometimes goes by the wayside so I really kind of very thankful that you picked it up and I think it’s actually a very important point with coordinate. If you think about it that distinction is at the heart of all leadership and management training. Let me just give you an example, I don’t know if you’ve had the good fortune to have a child or any children—three good Lord, your main worry is oh, my god it’s 10 o’clock at night where are they? On the other hand you go, well, I don’t want to squeeze them I have to give them the space I got to give them a little autonomy if I get too tight about this I’m going to choke their creativity I’m going to stifle their growth on the other hand you’re standing there, if you’re a neurotic father as I am you’re trying to think, okay, I’ll call him a 10:30. I’m saying this jokingly, attach to management challenge that’s the management challenge. It’s the challenge of understanding of how tightly or loosely you want to be. 

 

For example if you want to be innovative and give everybody all the space in the world you’ll be very loose and if on the other hand you’re very concerned about the tight execution you’ll be very prescriptive. But in this world where uncertainty is all around you’ve got to sort of balancing you as a leader have got to juggle you got a juggle. Just like as a parent, how much space do I give them? And how much do I make sure they’re safe?  Same thing as a leader in organizations, how much space do I give them? And how do I make sure they don’t squander this organization to death? That balance. We can talk about that. That is one of my favorite points is all too often ignored, that is the key question to me in management that is the Ying and Yang of management. How tight? How much control do you want to have? How loose? How much autonomy you want to give? So if you think about it control- autonomy everything else besides that mattered this is the heart of the whole thing you’re absolutely correct. 

 

Jim Rembach:    You had mentioned before we actually started this interview that you’re actually working on yet another book to actually dig deeper into that particular time.

 

Samuel Bacharach:     That was more as a threat than a promise but be patient but be it the case yes and I am. Because in doing this volume, and I would welcome that conversation and the future was still even off the air, doing this value that notion actually became, and I went back to some earlier things that actually became very important to me and in a real sense. Let me give you an example, think about leadership, what you’re really talking about is facilitative versus directive leadership the idea of do want to be the leader that facilitates all these group? How many times you’ve been in the meeting? And there’s a leader saying, okay, they’re discussing I’m giving the ideas they’re putting ideas they’re doing ideation there ideating you to death there are more in the room and they’re wonderful they’re cohesive and you’re going, dear God, when is this meeting  going to be over so can we get this project moving? Okay? Alright? On the one hand we live in a world of interacting, how do you balance the two? How do you call off that meeting and say, okay, enough let’s move on. I know how Michael that actually sounds. For example, example in design, in innovative organizations if you are working in a lot of organizations you know that design and programs, they need resources. There are also tech junkies out there. If you can tell me the opportunity—or this machine we need them? When you give them enough resources, let me say, wait, wait up to here because I can’t do everything I know it sounds interesting but let me you even the terms of evaluation. Think of all the evaluation and the feedback systems, you now have a matrix list of everything on the list, that’s great. You got the 50 items you want them to do, you wanted to fly to Europe, maintain course, get along with everybody, live happily ever, deliver the party, got a 50-point list. What if all they’re doing is operating towards your list? What if you want to say, I want a more subjective evaluation? Let me give an example, you’ve got kids—you’ve got kids in school?

 

Jim Rembach:    Yes. 

 

Samuel Bacharach:     Okay, so now the teacher comes and says okay, here’s the list 62 things we did right for your kids. And you’re going, yeah, but they still somehow and in your stop big way stood up here some place. Point is, one is subjective how do you loosen tight? That’s the world people live in. Let me just make a little point here, people love making things tight because it’s good about execution but the truth sometimes it makes things tight because, as they used to say in the in the military it covers and other parts of their body because it say, oh, here are the 37 things we did it exactly what you wanted us to do it. I’ll give you one of my favorite example, years ago I was on a plane, not years ago I have on the plane quite often since then, I was sitting next to a friend of mine who is still flying, and this flight is 747, but this case he was sitting next to me. He said to me, any idiot can fly a 747 because it’s self-prescriptive by the numbers. If it is that tight—I said to him, well, then why are the pilots in those days they got paid well?  I’m not sure what their salary is but hopefully they’re still getting paid—if that’s the case if anybody can fly 747 then why do they get paid so well? And he said for the five minutes an idiot cannot fly 747. 

 

The point is, when do you loosen and when do you tighten? Great question. I get carried away I think I just talked about my entire new book out nonstop from New York, but that’s the idea, that’s the idea. I’m working on that I think it’s a very important point. It’s also by the way in startups organizations isn’t any type of organization.

 

Jim Rembach:    For me  well and for me as you were talking I started thinking about something that has resonated with me for a long time about this particular issue and talking about leading and so when you start referring to like creatives are a creative group or a group that likes to ideate is you don’t give them the entire beach to go play in the sand with you give them (21:39 inaudible) 

Samuel Bacharach:    And that’s why one of the one of the interesting questions is—I’m too old to be planning with this really on the money. Here is the question, let’s talk about ideation, I’ve been in lots of ideation session with my group we get tons of points on the board, I remember one of the group in Virginia and there’s all the ideas on her boards and the point was the following, as a leader you don’t want to constrain that but you also want to take those lists and help frame it. If you are in a hotel business you’re not in a bowling business, you want to frame it so we’re talking about constraint creativity. You as a leader, and that’s why I said is a leader you have to understand your environment and what the competition is doing, you bring the frame you let their inside work within the frame that you and your colleagues worry about and sometimes they’ll shake your frame. The leadership challenge to you is to understand the world you live in understand the context of your business understand your competition so you can frame the process and they work within that frame. 

 

Jim Rembach:    It’s almost like really the art of divergent and convergent thinking.

 

Samuel Bacharach:    That’s right, that’s right, you’re good the idea is exactly that. Currently right now we’re running a two days tutoring session where we’re taking a group of people Lida gave it to them all much in a moment and what being run right now in fact though we take we started with

 

the leadership team put out all their broad ideas, the framed ideas, they’re just brought team which is in converging, we’re now taking group about 30 people would you believe in their room, they put all the ideas on the board now the leadership team comes back together and we all now begin to converge. We look at what’s on there, and convergence to me has to do with beneath the themes how many ideas can we instill down? It is exactly that. One of the things that I think we forget, and I discussed it and not to plug the book, and that is exactly why I talk in the book as leading for ideation. That ideation not occur without that some tightness if needed. I hope your participants is not thinking the two of us having like one super intellectual trip here. But it is neither important question for people to think about I mean they really are. Think of you own world, again I go back how much control do you want to have? When do you choke your organization to death? Or when do you—you have no guidance at all. Many of our corporations—if you go back to Kodak for example, you go back to Kodak and really look, everybody talks about Kodak. When we pictures today lets go and ask Kodak. The point is if you go back to the organizations that blockbusters and you begin to realize at the heart of all of these things is leaders not dealing with these type of issue. It isn’t because they didn’t get along with their mother and they didn’t have a deeper understanding of life. I’m not a big personality, I believe that personality gets you in the door and the psychological potion gets near the door. Leaders have to listen but why are they listening? They’re listening so they can pick up good ideas and they can work with people move things forward. The world is not simply dictated by your charm you have to have these skills. I have a very executable notion of leadership it’s not simply about this psychic mindset.

 

Jim Rembach:    As I’m sitting here thinking, wow, going back to your bio and how many things you’ve contributed all of those things I know you’re obviously a very inspirational person. And one of the things that we use on the show are quotes to help inspire us. Is there one or two that you can share that you like?

 

Samuel Bacharach:    Yeah.  When I left for graduate school, my father passed away, who worked in Brooklyn in a place called Domino Sugar which is now condominium, I left for graduate school to go to the University of Wisconsin, in his old Plymouth and he sit there and he said to me, now you’re going out there—when I grew up out west was Ohio and he said to me, look the only thing I can hope is just try not to screw it up. Every time, whether it’s before this interview, anything else the whole idea is just not to mess it up. To me messing it up is understanding one simple thing, good ideas good intentions are a dime a dozen getting something done is difficult. Sometimes I read or see an idea—thank you for the statement about my career, sometimes I see ideas and what people have accomplished they’re able to take a simple idea and push it so far. Think of something, how many have ever though in your entire life, we all travel with our parents when were younger, how many are in your entire life have ever thought of a concept, Oh, AirBnB, we didn’t think of Air BnB but we all know what B &B what but we didn’t push them, years ago simple notion. 

 

I sat in my basement in Ithaca, New York with some called bit net it was the Internet, before the Internet. I said, oh, wow this would be a great way of doing libraries and books and I had this idea. Well, folks, there ain’t no backrag.com there isn’t amazon.com. You can’t screw it up, good ideas are simply not enough you got to get stuff done. And that said, and that’s what I put all my focus on in my work, giving people the capacity in organization and their life to get stuff done.

 

Jim Rembach:    With the getting new things screwed up things that happens as well and they’re learning on things and we share those on the show about times where we’ve had to get over a hump. Is there a time where you’ve been able to do that that you can share? 

 

Samuel Bacharach:    Sure, sure. Daily. I think the learning opportunities that we learned them all is from interpersonal relations and interpersonal learning opportunities. I have been very blessed by the people I work with and sometimes I think I’ve been blessed by the fact that every so often they were cursed by my presence. I worked with number of people and one of them is a woman I worked for the last 17 years or something. When she came to work for me I understood how bright I was, because I was a professor, all the time very quickly I understood that I may have the degree but she had the wisdom and the sweet spot and we became a great team. We became a great team because of hopefully our capacity to listen to each other to tell each other to shut the heck up and I think you learned from interpersonal stuff. But the one person, I want to share with you very quickly on learning—when I came to Cornell many, many years ago, and I mean many, many years ago, there was a woman working and I made phone calls, long-distance phone calls you folks remember what long-distance phone calls were? I made long distance phone calls, the reason I made this long distance phone calls, I was only there for six months but my heart was broken my dead girlfriend was living in Switzerland so I made this long distance phone calls. The woman that is in charge of the office call me and said to me, you’re not supposed to be making long-distance phone call from your office without permission. I got irate. I said, I’m a professor here and I walked up the stairs and said, and as I got up the stairs I remembered my father and I walked down stairs and I apologized to her. Here’s the point, a year and a half later I received the grant and the then dean, who was a dear friend of mine many years ago tell me that he would give me like 1/10th of something of my salary and I should be thankful for it. This woman calls me a few days later and said, I got to talk to you, and she said between you and me, she said, you’re entitled to 2/10th salary go back and negotiate. I went back and negotiate and got 2/10th salary. Had I not apologized to her had I been the same arrogant s.o., whatever you guys want to call it on polite terms, I never would have got next to money. Had I not learned to work with my colleagues in this office I couldn’t publish about my colleagues if my life depend on it. So my career has been based on that that’s the stuff I’ve learned. The interpersonal stuff, leaders listen leaders apologize but leaders also move agendas. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader legion were with Dr. Samuel Bacharach and let’s take a quick message we’re going to come back for the hump day hoedown. 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 gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award-winning solutions guarantee to create motivated productive and loyal employees who have great work relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work, visit beyondmorale.com/better.

 

Jim Rembach:     Alright Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump day Hoedown. Okay, Samuel, 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. Dr. Samuel Bacharach, are you ready to hoedown? 

 

Samuel Bacharach:    Sounds a little too ready, since I’ve never been to a hoedown I will fake this real good. 

 

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

 

Samuel Bacharach:    A sense of insecurity.

 

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

 

Samuel Bacharach:    Believe in the people you work with. 

 

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

 

Samuel Bacharach:     I know that I’m not the smartest person in the room.

 

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

 

Samuel Bacharach:     I can work with a team and I stand by context. 

 

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion it could be from any genre, of course we’re going to put a link to Transforming the Clunky Organization on your show notes page as well. 

 

Samuel Bacharach:     The one book outside of my books which I like, there is one book and that that book is actually an interesting book it’s a book called, Big Enough to be Inconsistent. It’s a book about Abraham Lincoln and the emancipation proclamation and the whole notion of what was going in his mind as he was dealing with the emancipation proclamation as a leader. The book is called, Big Enough to be Inconsistent.

 

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

 

Samuel Bacharach:     Empathy, nothing else, that’s what I’ll take back. Being empathetic to people. Empathy is the one skill I would take back with me.

 

Jim Rembach:     Why?

 

Samuel Bacharach:     Because empathy is the key to everything. It’s the key to political success, emotional success and social success. If I understand where other people are coming from I understand their aspirations their pain. Whether I understand that in organization as a leader and say what other divisions are coming from. I understand where the businesses are coming from. Where I understand in my own personal life, where my children are coming from where my wife is coming from what if I understand in my own world where my friends are coming from where if I understand where my allies and my enemies are coming from I am empowered and I’m empower myself by understanding either. People think empathy is a touchy-feely notion and it is the key to success political success economic success and social success, the only thing I would take with me is empathy. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Dr. Samuel Bacharach 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?

 

Samuel Bacharach:     Yeah, you can get me at sb@blg-lead.com or samuel.bacharach @gmail.com, http://blg-lead.com. I always welcome a little chat and some email exchanges. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Samuel Bacharach, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and 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 to fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

 

END OF AUDIO 

 

Amy Radin | The Change Maker's Playbook

210: Amy Radin: Where’s your junkyard?

Amy Radin Show Notes Page

Amy Radin (RAY-DIN), was used to getting organizational resources to innovate and drive change. Then she met Drew and gained a new perspective that caused her to never again complain, or tolerate complaints from others, about not having resources.

Amy, author of The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation In Any Company, is a native of Brooklyn having been born and raised there long before it was the cool borough.

Her passion for all things innovative is evident back to her teenage years. The daughter of a pharmacist/small business owner dad and an artist mom, Amy learned, through her early experiences at Harold’s Pharmacy, what it really meant to serve customers, meet their needs, earn their loyalty, and stand out.  She sees understanding people as the starting point for innovation of any type. Technology, in her view, is just an enabler.

Amy is a proud graduate of the New York City public school system. She was a member of one of the first graduating classes of John Dewey High School, an experimental school whose structure and programming approach were based upon a progressive philosophy of education.

At Wesleyan University, Amy studied in the College of Letters, one of the first integrated curricula in Literature, Philosophy and History. She loved the study of language, and during a semester in Madrid and over the course of a summer at Middlebury College became near-fluent in Spanish. She decided to round out her liberal arts education, complementing it with a MBA in Marketing, earned at The Wharton School.

Amy is the kind of person who is drawn to “what is possible” with an emphasis on getting stuff done, not simply dreaming.  She undertook a complete career pivot in 2014, leaving the corporate world to engage with entrepreneurs as an independent advisor, and author of The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company.

She is married to Mitchell Radin, her husband of 34 years. They are the proud parents of 3 children, Jared, Molly and Shira [“SHEE-RA”], and share their home with their rescue cat, JJ.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @amyradin to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow – Click to Tweet   

“We as human beings tend to prefer just sort of sticking to the status quo.” – Click to Tweet  

“Change is hard and it takes magic gluing of the right people to get you from where you are to some place very different.” – Click to Tweet  

“Change is emotional and it’s physically difficult.” – Click to Tweet   

“In today’s world, speed is critical. You can be right and late and it just doesn’t matter.” – Click to Tweet   

“There are people moving much faster than you, no matter what it is you’re trying to do.” – Click to Tweet   

“It’s not running faster on the same treadmill, it’s changing how you go about things to compress time.” – Click to Tweet  

“How you treat your customers determines if there’s going to be money in the cash register at the end of the day.” – Click to Tweet  

“It’s a matter of recognizing how big a role the contact center people can play and then making room for them at the table.” – Click to Tweet 

“The people who are talking to customers have incredible insight about how customers are feeling and engaging with products or services.” – Click to Tweet 

“Everybody should spend time with customers, it’s eye opening.” – Click to Tweet 

“Any change initiative in an organization, if there isn’t active sponsorship from the top, it’s hard to get any place.” – Click to Tweet 

“Start-ups don’t have a monopoly on innovation and big companies don’t have a monopoly on bureaucracy.” – Click to Tweet 

“Can you form interesting collaborative relationships that bring together people with different perspectives, skill, and experience?” – Click to Tweet 

“Listening is an underrated skill.” – Click to Tweet 

“Establish and invest in a diverse network of relationships.” – Click to Tweet 

“In a world of constant change and unknowns, even if you think you know everything today, it’s going to be different tomorrow.” – Click to Tweet 

“My key to staying relevant is constantly investing in relationships.” – Click to Tweet 

“It’s not what I know, it’s that I know who to call.” – Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Amy Radin was used to getting organizational resources to innovate and drive change. Then she met Drew and gained a new perspective that caused her to never again complain, or tolerate complaints from others, about not having resources.

Advice for others

Be

Holding her back from being an even better leader

Fear.

Best Leadership Advice

Try it – there’s nothing wrong with trying.

Secret to Success

Having a network that I give to and full of people that are willing to step up and help me.

Best tools in business or life

Intellectual curiosity. I am a constant learner.

Recommended Reading

The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Contacting Amy Radin

Website: http://www.amyradin.com/book/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/amyradin

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

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

 

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

210: Amy Radin: Where’s your junkyard?

 

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.

 

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

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay. Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who really gives clarity around something that quite frankly, I think just about every single organization can benefit from. Amy Raiden, author of the Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in any company is a native of Brooklyn. Having been born and raised there long before it was the cool borough. Her passion for all things innovative is evident back to her teenage years. The daughter of a pharmacist, small business owner, dad, and an artist’s mom. Amy learned through her early experiences at Harold’s pharmacy, what it really meant to serve customers, meet their needs earn their loyalty and standout. She sees understanding people as the starting point for innovation of any type. Technology and her view is just an enabler. 

 

Amy is a proud graduate of the New York City public school system. She was a member of one of the first graduating classes of John Dewey high school, an experimental school whose structure and programming approach were based upon a progressive philosophy of education. At Wesleyan University and studied in the College of Letters, one of the first integrated curricula in literature, philosophy and history. She loved the study of language and during a semester in Madrid and over the course of a summer at Middlebury College became near fluent in Spanish. She decided to round out her liberal arts as occasion completing it with an MBA in marketing earned at the Wharton School. Amy is the kind of person who is drawn to what is possible with an emphasis on getting stuff done, not simply dreaming. She undertook a complete career pivot in 2014, leaving the corporate world to engage with entrepreneurs as an independent advisor. She is married to Mitchell Raiden, her husband of 34 years. They are the proud parents of three children, Jared, Molly, and Shira, and they share their home with their rescue cat, JJ. Amy Raiden, help us get over the hump please.

 

Amy Radin:    It’s great to be here Jim and looking forward to having this conversation about how to execute innovation. People love to talk about innovation, it’s hard to get things done and helping people do that has really become my passion.

 

Jim Rembach:    Well, and I appreciate that. And so, when we start talking about passion, one of the things that I found very interesting when I was reading the book is how much you actually infuse emotion into this whole process. So your book, when you first open it, really lays out the road map, it’s a playbook right? But to me it was a road map because it’s kind of visually that way where you go from–discover position with purpose and go all the way through to achieving impact. And then in every single part, each individual part of this book is chapters within that area, but then you put everything through a scrubbing process or an iterative process where you were asking about the capabilities, connections and culture. So how did you actually come to the conclusion that you needed to do that as far as with these three C’s for all of these particular areas.

Amy Radin:   Right. I guess, what happened with me is that no matter what role I played in my career, and even as, as you can tell from my early education experience, I was always drawn to what’s different and what’s next. We as human beings tend to prefer just sort of sticking to the status quo, we don’t love change generally. And for some crazy reason I was always different I always wanted to go towards the white space. And really what I found largely when I started to work on digital transformation back in 2000, and that was when people were just saying like, wow, there is some commercial possibility around this thing called the Internet. We have to see how it’s going to affect our businesses and our lives. There was a lot of resistance, a lot of ambiguity, a lot of uncertainty. And what I found just from being a hands on operator, because I had real goals. In those days I was at city we had a budget and we said, okay, well you’ve got to make this stuff happen with the Internet. What I really saw as a practitioner of change is that the real key–you can buy technology you can get on to space, you can find designers but the really hard part is can you attract talent and can you build a culture where people are really working collaboratively because change is hard and it takes that sort of magic gluing of the right people in the connecting and the right environment to get you from where you are to someplace very different.

 

Jim Rembach:    As you’re talking, I started thinking as well, you’d mentioned something about people not liking change. And I’ve had the opportunity to chat with a lot of folks who’ve actually studied this particular area. Some will even say that they’re, well, it’s not that people don’t like change is people fear change for a couple of different reasons. First of all, if we do this change, how is it going to impact me, my job, my life, my family? That is one very real fear. The others are, is that our body was designed to be in cruise control, it’s way God made us. So in other words, we put everything into a habit, right? And then we repeat the habit. And at any time we disrupt the habit, that’s the part that becomes somewhat uncomfortable. And then also we don’t want to feel confident and competent because of the change.

 

Amy Radin:    Right? I think all of those things are right, Change is, it’s emotional and it’s physically difficult. I was a pretty mediocre science school in high school but one thing I remember from my high school physics class is Newton’s first law, the law of inertia and I take that very much applies to us. People will stay on their–an object will remain in motion on its current path unless it’s forced out of position by something big and that’s usually something bad, imagine a boulder coming down a hill and it gets slammed to the side. So that’s us were kind of cruising along. I think a lot about one of the principles of behavioral economics, loss aversion. The theory of loss aversion says that we will discount upside and overweight downside. So if we see the opportunity to earn $2 on a bet, we assumed that we could actually lose $4 if things don’t work out, so it’s really natural.

 

I think the other thing that happens when you’re inside any kind of an established organization and it could even be a startup that’s been around for a while, I don’t think big companies own the space on bureaucracy and just getting complacent. But big companies, especially big public companies, especially those who are regulated, they are engineered for predictability and continuity they just want the cranked to keep turning continuously. Any change, innovation, those are just continuity they’re like bolts being thrown into the gears, the system setup to not tolerate that stuff. And so I think the question for established teams in any kind of organization is, sure the continuity is important, now you want to run a healthy business and serve your customers with quality, but how do you allow for some discontinuity? And that’s where the change comes from. 

 

Jim Rembach:     You know, it’s kind of interesting that you’re saying that because as you were talking about that I started thinking about how we often have this quest for speed and velocity. And because of what you were talking about, the reverse actually happens. In our quest for the speed and velocity we have all this repetition that occurs and we need people to follow it in order to increase our speed, but yet that in fact creates so much friction that it slows us down.

 

Amy Radin:     It is, it creates friction. I think speed, you raise a good point about speed because I think in today’s world speed is critical. You can be right and late and it just doesn’t matter because there are people moving much faster than you no matter what it is you’re trying to do. And I think one of the challenges is it’s not sort of running faster on the same treadmill it’s changing how you go about things to compress time, it’s been really eye opening to me. Since leaving the corporate world I’ve spent a lot of time with many startups, coaching them on enterprise business development and marketing and things like that. It’s been really eye opening to see how a startup who does not have resources, who’s investors are on their backs to show returns, how they get things done. Compared to the corporate world, even something as simple as a market research study, do you need to do the $200,000 study that takes five months to get the results? Or can you do a series of very well structured man on the street interviews to get enough clues to get to where you need to go. So, they have a much better sense of when good enough is good enough and that mindset, allows them to move quickly. They simply don’t have the resources so they have to be much more resourceful and scrappy. That is one of the big time compressors.

 

Jim Rembach:     As you were talking about that I started thinking about something that we were discussing prior to actually getting on the interview and it’s how you have constructed the different parts of the book which is–it’s in three. And you talk about that it is structured, in seeking, seeding and scaling. And one of the things, as I mentioned to you that kind of stood out for me is I was looking at the structure and the way that you have it is I also started seeing different parts of the organization in my mind. And so for me, doing a lot of work with the frontline, in contact centers, customer service and having that background and developing those front line leaders and call center coach is that I started seeing the seeking part being so critical. So many organizations at their frontline aren’t capturing the things that they need to in order to be able to hand, insights off to the people who can actually do the seeding and then subsequently the scaling.

 

Amy Radin:     Yeah. And I guess, for me, and I know you shared in my bio that I, my first job is really working behind the counter in my dad’s store and so I was a frontline person. How you treat your customers determines if there’s going to be money in the cash register. At the end of the day It’s very, very real and visceral. And then I was really lucky to have worked– i started my corporate career at American Express where the culture was such that as a member of the marketing and product team, my colleagues and I, we naturally would involve the employees who are frontline, the people on the phones all day in the call center. Whenever we started a new project we do marketing campaign or some big new innovation, one of the early steps was always to do something as casual as, you know, have a brown bag lunch with a group of Reps. Go sit in the contact center and monitor calls really get that input. So I think nowadays there’s certainly structured ways to get insights, through technology and databases and all that and all kinds of tools for capturing insight. I also used to just read call center logs. I remember riding the train early in my career and just reading printouts of customer comments. And so I think the information is there and it’s a matter of recognizing how big a role the contact center people can play and then making room for them at the table from the beginning of the process. I’ll tell you one quick story that I bet you’ll enjoy since you work a lot with contact centers. When I was at e-trade, we ran a companywide innovation challenge and the idea was to engage employees to get business plan proposals, not just because we want to proposals but because we really wanted to sort of reignite the innovation DNA in a company that really was a disruptor when it was founded. Everybody in the company was predicting that people and technology we’re going to win. Companies with 30 employees or tech employees a very, very tech driven company. We ran a very rigorous process with outside judges and serious challenged the winning team was a group of call center representatives. Out of about 60 or 70 proposals that were submitted in probably high school graduates maybe two year college and their proposal and plan trump those of people who others we’re assuming we’re going to get a slam dunk. So to me that was very, very heartwarming and exciting.

 

Jim Rembach:     I’m sure that brought a full circle for you talking about being behind the pharmacy counter. 

 

Amy Radin:     It’s funny the companies I worked the people were sometimes refer to the people in the call center as back office and I’m like, wait a second, we’re in the back we never run a direct consumer virtual remote business. The people who are talking to the customers are the people who are on the phone or the people who are on chat, they had incredible insight about how customers are feeling and engaging with products and services what’s working for them, what’s not working for them. That’s very important insight to get and an executive should do it as well not just mid-level people. Everybody should spend time with customers it’s eye opening.

 

Jim Rembach:     It totally is. And even what you’re talking about in regards to those call logs is that there’s technology these days for all of that with speech analytics and you’re being able to look at key phrasing, words spotting emotional detection, all of these things have become quite sophisticated over the past couple of years. It used to be that only the very largest of large organizations could utilize some of those tools because of the cost. And now over time, scalability is starting to take effect and a lot of organizations can take advantage of a lot of that discovery that they weren’t able to do before. However, it just goes back to that whole inertia thing is that, well, we’ve never really done that I’m not exposed to that and it goes back to that whole seeking thing. And the reason I bring that up is because you said something that I think is critically important as you talk about the innovation DNA of an organization. So if I don’t have an innovation DNA within my organization, where do I need to start that?

 

Amy Radin:    Big question. First of all, and I’ll tell you how I got started on this. Part of it was I guess, my wiring, going back to how I was raised and my education. The way I got started working on innovation per se was, I was in this digital job at city and really my responsibility was to figure out like what’s the impact that digital of the business that at the time was generating $5,000,000,000 in earnings. We were about a quarter of earnings it was a very important business and analysts cared about a lot. My boss came to me one day, the CEO, and he said, Amy, I want you to make us more innovative because we’re not innovative and we need to be innovative. And at the time I was like, okay, is he thinks I’m really special or I’ve tried the short straw, I am the only person crazy enough to do this and you don’t say no to the CEO. So it’s like, okay boss, I’ll go figure it out. And honestly I started networking and reading and saying like, what is this? And as luck would have it, there was a gentleman named Larry Keeley he’s a real authority on this whole topic of how do you create a discipline around innovation. And I was very lucky being at a place in the city who had those resources. He came (inaudible 17:18) but I think the thing is to go out and start asking, who in your network would know anything about this and where do you start? But I think for me it’s a couple of lessons the CEO has to care, right? Any change initiative in an organization, if there is an active sponsorship from the top, uh, hard to get any place he or she needs to create accountability across his or her entire direct report team.

 

17:51

So it’s not enough to say, Oh, I’ve got this head of innovation because you have sort of a target on your back, right? If your colleagues aren’t putting some skin in the game. I’ve always found that there are always people in the organization care about this. Anybody who sees a career runway in front of them and has ambition is going to be scratching their head and saying like, doesn’t management get it? Like what are they doing? The world is changing, we now all carry a computer in our pockets. We all know about one click shopping. You go on and on. So all this innovation has pervaded and taken over our lives. So people know it’s a matter of identifying them, empowering them and protecting them and putting some structure around what it is you’re asking them to do linking innovation for real business goal, having a real business objective. At e-trade I used to keep a list of people I called the hand raisers and it’s like anybody who reached out to me, it was like they care and built an informal network. So I think ultimately you need some dedicated resource, but as soon as people in an organization, no, that’s a senior executive who cares and the CEO is nodding their head up and down people will start to just identify themselves.

 

Jim Rembach:    Well, I know what you were just talking about. I mean, you talk about tribe, community champions a lot of folks have actually formalized that particular process of doing all of that networking and connecting and have all those hand raisers and all those pot stirrers because they can do what you said when they collaborate and work together, they can actually raise the tide for everybody when you started talking about this innovation DNA.

 

Amy Radin:  Everybody is, you know, we’re in a low unemployment situation. And even beyond that, there are so many specific skill sets that are in demand and so being perceived as a brand that is on the move and interested in, and active about continuing to adapt where the world is going, is going to automatically make it easier for you to attract better people. So yeah, it’s like the rising tide that lifts all ships. There are things, the networking and the informal actions to just like watch for who’s stepping forward. I’ve done some things in the past, like when we first got going at city on our innovation efforts, we would organize brainstorming sessions where we were deliberately very collaborative. We would invite in people from product, people from tech all parts of the organization, analytics, etc and we’d brainstorm. We’d look at different aspects of the customer experience or different segments of our customer base and say, okay, let’s just think about how could the introduction of digital channels impacts customer relationships. And we would implement test. So those kinds of, sort of semi structured collaborative sessions also started to draw people in and everybody likes to be on a winning team they’re excited about this stuff. We gradually influence the entire organization to the point where instead of digital just being sort of the domain of the department and innovation being the domain of just smoke with people, there were many, many people in the organization supporting our projects with their managers understanding that this stuff really mattered.

 

Jim Rembach:     What you’re talking about here in all the words and descriptors and momentum and movement and inspiration all of that is just loaded with emotion that we had talked about before and it’s in your book. But one of the things that we’d like to do on the show in order to help with that emotion charge is look at quotes that people like. So is there a quote or two that you could share that you like?

 

Amy Radin:     Yeah, one of my favorite quotes from the book, Comes Forwards The Ad and it said, big companies have funding scale, brand, infrastructure but they also have bureaucracy and don’t see near term value of innovation. Startups are hungry they bring speed, burning passion and agility that they may be furiously and passionately barking up the wrong tree. The point is startups don’t have a monopoly on innovation and big companies don’t have monopoly on bureaucracy. And I think that’s a major aha and conclusion and takeaway from the book is that–we all talk about the importance of diversity, but really a great way to get moving is can you form interesting collaborative relationships that bring together people with different perspectives, skill and experience? I get very irritated, I’ve been working startup, I say, uh, those big companies, they’re dinosaurs, they’re going away. And then you meet with corporate people and they say, oh, those startups they get away with murder. And I’m like, you know what? Listening is an underrated skill. If these folks in these different camps don’t see themselves as a different camps, but listen and realize they have a lot to learn from each other they will all advanced their objectives.

 

Jim Rembach:    Oh, that’s such totally true. I think we all have our own circumstances and situations and we have to learn how to iterate and pivot and adapt within our own environment. And that’s one of the things that also we focused in on the show is times when people have gotten over the hump on something and what they’ve learned from that. Is there a story where gotten over the hump that you can share?

 

Amy Radin:     Yeah. I talked a little while ago about this issue of resourcefulness, we never have enough resources. I think the big aha moment for me when I realized, wow, you really can break the orthodoxy of the corporate world, you can’t do anything with budget or a team. I met at an early stage founder named Drew and he was advancing a medical device that is basically the moral equivalent of an inflatable airbag that would open in that split second when an elderly person began to fall. The statistics on the number of deaths that occur every year because of elderly people falling and the cost to the health care sector are just–it’s fright. And so he, for a personal experience, became very passionate about this. So you know, you can imagine from medical device, the bar is unbelievably high on getting approval and so you had to sort of catch 22 situation where he couldn’t get even his early stage funding until he could prove that there was some chance of this working, but he couldn’t prove that there was a chance of this working without some resources.

 

So what he did was, he went down to a car junk yard on a Saturday morning with his son and comb through the cars and found an airbags that were reusable, not destroyed, not bloody or anything. He took them to his tailor with some bicycle inner tubes and for a couple of bucks sewed up a crude prototype to raise his first few hundred thousand dollars angel funding. And so that story I’m like, wow, I will never again complain or tolerate complaints from others about not having resources. It’s kind of like, where’s your junk yard? What can you do? And so that was a big one for me because having spent over 20 years in the corporate world, I was used to a way of doing things. And then I took myself out on the street and said, I really want to change my career. I want to use my expertise to help other people. And I could do that in a bigger way outside the corporate world. But it’s a little like, all of a sudden you’re like naked. Where’s all that structure? Where all those resources? Where’s that budget? Where’s my CFO? Kind of figure things out. So that’s a story I probably think of on a daily basis.

 

Jim Rembach:   Amy, thank you for sharing that. 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 gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award winning solution is guaranteed to create motivated, productive, and loyal employees who have great work 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 Amy, the Hump day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insight fast. So 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. Amy Radin are you ready to hoe down?

 

Amy Radin:     I am ready.

 

Jim Rembach:     Okay Amy. What is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

 

Amy Radin:     Fear.

 

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

 

Amy Radin:     Try it. There’s nothing wrong with trying.

 

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

 

Amy Radin:     Having a network that I give to and full of people who are willing to step up and help me.

 

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

 

Amy Radin:     Intellectual curiosity. I’m a constant learner.

 

Jim Rembach:     What would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion and it could be from any genre. Of course we’ll put a link to your book on the show notes page as well.

 

Amy Radin:     I’m just finishing a great book by Yuval Noah Harari he’s a futurist philosopher called Sapiens about the history of humankind and on this whole topic of change and how did humans get to be sort of the dominant species, if you will, it’s a fascinating and quite accessible read on a complex amount of information. It’s on my bedside right now and quite enjoying it.

 

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/amyraiden. Okay, Amy, this is my last Hump day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you can take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you, but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

 

Amy Radin:     I think that what I would take back is the–how important it is to establish and invest in a diverse network of relationships. I happen to have a 25 year old child and I push her on that topic every day because in a world of constant change and unknowns, even if you thing you know everything today and you’ve mastered the skill or function that is going to drive you through your career it’s going to be different tomorrow or even tonight. And my key to staying relevant is constantly investing in relationships. So I tell myself it’s not what I know it’s that I know who to call.

 

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

 

Amy Radin:     If you visit my website, which is www.amyradin.com, you can find some free resources on the website, a download or content from the book, a one page pdf infographic of the the Seed, Seek, Scale framework. And also you might want to take the Change Makers quiz and sign for my monthly e-newsletter. So I’d love it if you would do that.

 

Jim Rembach:     Amy Radin, 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 onward and upward faster.

 

END OF AUDIO

 

Chris Dyer - The Power of Company Culture

181: Chris Dyer: In mid-air you change directions a few times

Chris Dyer Show Notes Page

Chris Dyer quit his job and started a business in 2001, just two months after the biggest terrorist attack in American history. He took inspiration from tragedy. He rented every room in his house to pay the mortgage, created a backup plan and took the risk.

Chris was born and raised in Orange County, CA. He has two younger brothers, and his parents are still together. Growing up his parents created many opportunities for the brothers to travel and play, all while giving them a great deal of independence. Chris claims today’s helicopter parents might faint if they watched his childhood unfold. He hung out with adults, learned from neighbors, made new friends at the campground, and in many ways had to fend for himself. With three boys at the dinner table there was never enough food. Not because his parents didn’t try, but because the boys’ appetites seemed to be unquenchable.

As Chris entered high school, his abilities to navigate situations independently thrust him into leadership roles. Chris was captain of the water polo, soccer, and swimming teams. He was class president and he served in a leadership role with the school all four years. Involved in drama, computers, and anything related to school spirit, his ability to learn and lead served him well. Chris’ early career started in college, as he coached hundreds of children in competitive swimming. After he graduated, he held a few key jobs and then started his own company in 2001.

Chris Dyer is the Founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a background check and intelligence firm based in California and author of the book The Power of Company Culture. He is the host of the live radio show TalentTalk on OC Talk Radio and iHeartRadio, an in-demand speaker on company culture, remote workforces, and employee engagement, and a frequent contributor to Forbes, Inc, HR.com, the Society for Human Resource Management, and more.

Chris still lives in Orange County, CA, married his high school sweetheart Jody, and his three adopted kids from Russia, Luba, Dmitri and Vladimir.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @chrisdyer7 to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet  

“If you got to go to work every day you might as well love it.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet  

“Not everyone is transparent in the same way.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“Being a positive company is very much about the vocabulary and the approach.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“The average company or the average person would say, what’s the problem or let’s problem solve.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“When we give people information and help them understand why we want the change, you get more and more acceptance.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“The number one thing they keep coming back to that makes people happy and engaged in the workforce, is that they were heard.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“Go do the thing that scares you – go do the big thing you’re not prepared for.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“You have to be prepared for failure.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“If you’re going to ask someone who’s never done it and never taken a risk in their life, they’re going to tell you that you shouldn’t.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“When it comes to business and life decisions, we often take opinions from people who’ve never done anything like that before.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“Revel in the success of being able to help people and love it.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

“The more you can learn the better decisions you can make going down the road.” -Chris Dyer Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Chris Dyer quit his job and started a business in 2001, just two months after the biggest terrorist attack in American history. He took inspiration from tragedy. He rented every room in his house to pay the mortgage, created a backup plan and took the risk.

Advice for others

Surround yourself with people that have done it before.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Knowledge. I feel like I can always learn more.

Best Leadership Advice

It’s your job to deal with the tough things and you need to learn to enjoy it. Revel in the success of being able to help people and love it.

Secret to Success

Follow through.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Books

Recommended Reading

The Power of Company Culture: How any business can build a culture that improves productivity, performance and profits

Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind

Contacting Chris Dyer

website: https://www.chrispdyer.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdyer7/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrisdyer7

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

181: Chris Dyer: In mid-air you change directions a few times

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.

 

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

 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who’s going to give us a much better perspective on something that so many organizations struggle with. Chris Dyer was born and raised in Orange County, California. He has two younger brothers and his parents are still together. Growing up his parents created many opportunities for the brothers to travel and play all while giving them a great deal of Independence. Chris claims today’s helicopter parents might faint if they watched his childhood unfold. He hung out with the adults, learned from neighbors, made new friends at the campground and in many ways had to fend for himself. 

 

With three boys at the dinner table there was never enough food not because his parents didn’t try but because boy’s appetite seemed to be unquenchable. As Chris entered high school his abilities to navigate situations independently thrust him into leadership roles. Chris was captain of the water polo, soccer and swim teams. He was class president and he served in a leadership role with the school all four years. Involved in drama computers and anything related to school spirit his ability to learn and lead served him well. 

 

Chris’s early career started in college as he coached hundreds of children in competitive swimming. After he graduated he held a few key jobs and then started his own company in . Chris Dyer is the founder and CEO of People G—a background check and intelligence firm based in California and the author of the book, The Power of Company Culture. He is a host of the live radio show, Talent Talk, on OC Talk Radio and iHeartRadio, an in demand speaker on company culture, remote workforces, employee engagement and a frequent contributor to Forbes, Inc, HR.com, and a Society for Human Resource Management and more. Chris still lives in Orange County, California. Married to his school sweetheart, Jody, and adopted three children from Russia, Luba, Dmitri and Vladimir. Chris Dyer, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Chris Dyer:   I’m ready, let’s go. 

 

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

 

Chris Dyer:   Yeah, my current passion right now is really talking about the book and our company culture really trying to help employers and employees have a better work day. If you got to go to work every day you might as well love it you might as well be effective and you might as well have a relationship with your employer that you love. 

 

Jim Rembach: So speaking of a relationship with the employer with a lot of the work that you guys do at PeopleG, how do you actually see that manifest itself with the clients that you’re working with?

 

Chris Dyer:   There’s an odd kind of mix here between our core work and then the work that I do more without leadership standpoint. My four business does background checks and we are really focused—our purpose is to try to make the world a slightly safer place. We look at stopping that sex offender from getting that job at a daycare center and you would think that would never happen that they would never even try and yet they do, it’s like a magnet for them. Or keeping that that person who had been embezzling money from having access to your money or your stocks or whatever it may be. And so that’s a really important thing that we do—we feel like that helps create that environment where the right people are getting the right jobs. On a personal level actually I think that most people should be eligible for jobs but not—our business is not about keeping people from getting jobs it’s about ensuring that the right person is in the right job and that the wrong person is not the wrong job, that’s going to cause a problem.

 

Jim Rembach:   Well, I think that’s a really interesting clarifying point that you just made at the end. For me as somebody who’s been part of using an organization such as your own that’s not the perception that we typically may get it’s more so of something that has negative connotations to it. But I appreciate you actually seeing the positive side to it as well. And I also think that when you start looking at the Seven Pillars of Culture Success that you have outlined in the book for the most part are some positive things and there’s a negative that got flipped into a positive, we’ll talk about that in a second, but many of these things seem like they’re just everybody should know them they’re common sense, why these seven pillars?

 

Chris Dyer:   Right, so I went back and I really realized we had a big problem in 2008 2009, recession hit and it was obvious that this was a great moment for me to work on the company maybe reinvent the company because we had a lot of time on our hands there wasn’t a whole lot of orders coming in business was down we had a lot of time to reflect. So I took that time to say, let’s make the company better we know the recession is not going to stay forever at some point they’re going to get better when it does I want us to be the best version. I noticed everybody else was laying off their best people they were cutting everything they could and when the recession started to shift they weren’t ready to take advantage we were because we were back sharpening our swords and doing our rocky montage we were getting ready for when it was really time to jump back in. I realized that it wasn’t a great kind of blueprint for what is a great company culture. Do I have to go and try to be exactly Google? Do I have to go hunt down the CEO of Zappos and do a mind meld with him? How do I go from where I am today to being a great company culture? And it really set me on this path to learn, to read, to ask as many questions of really smart people who I admired who are killing it what they did, how they did it and then that led me to the radio show and sort of interviewing these people on a more formal basis and I came to this conclusion that the best companies ones who are doing really well that we all admire that are in the newspaper all the time and everyone wants to work for they’re doing these seven things. Maybe they use a different vocabulary, maybe they don’t quite you say it the same way but they all do these seven things really, really, really well and that’s what makes them great it’s not ultimately what they do with it. If we say transparencies code number one, we start with transparency. Not everyone is transparent the same way they don’t apply it the same way but it is important to their company and they find a way to talk about it and to make it work for them. And how it works for them is different it’s how it works for a company down the street but because they are intentionally thinking and talking about it that’s what’s important. 

 

Jim Rembach:   So then going down the rest of the list you have positivity, I think that’s so important, because for me I always see people focus on the negative side and especially when you start talking about the strategic planning process and people you going to SWOT analysis for example. First of all the acronym itself going through the public education system, SWOT, meant something that really wasn’t good. Plus you’re also talking about your weaknesses and threats and everybody just focuses on that too much. At a matter of fact there was a study that came out that said 85 percent of the discussion that happens in the boardroom is all negative threat based talk. If you’re spending all that time on negativity what do you actually generating? You’re generating more negativity, you’re giving it fuel.

 

Chris Dyer:   Right. 

 

Jim Rembach:   How does a company actually make that switch especially when you start talking about a legacy company? It’s easy for us to say, okay we’re going to start anew, you really can’t do that you have to transform. How do you from that negative state to having more positivity? 

 

Chris Dyer:   Actually being a positive work force positive company is very much about the vocabulary and the approach. At some point you are going to have to talk about weaknesses and threats and things like that, that’s going to come out. But to your point if you are starting with a focus of the positive like you say, what are we doing well? We get into a meeting and we’re having an issue internally the first thing I’ll try to bring everyone back to earth. What are we doing well? What’s working? Let’s start there. We get everyone baseline there we know what’s working we know what we’re doing well. Now, the average company or the average person would say what’s the problem? 

 

Let’s problem solve or let’s deal with this difficult thing. What we say is, where’s our opportunity to get better? Where’s our opportunity to help enlighten or to show someone what they need to know? And when you just phrase it that way it’s amazing how different the whole story changes as opposed to—I have someone internally that likes to say, oh, this is a difficult client. And I’m like, I go back and say no. This is a helpful client because they tell us when we don’t do things right they are vocal about their displeasure they’re vocal about things that they want changed. The only way we’re going to get better is if we have that kind of vocal client as opposed to someone who says nothing who doesn’t tell you and then just leaves you it goes to your competitor because they don’t want to conflict.

 

Jim Rembach:   So the other pillars that are part of the culture success are measurement, acknowledgement, uniqueness, listening and mistakes. Instead of going into those there’s something else that you had in the book to me that just stood out and I think it was so important for us to discuss and that is what you call the levels of understanding and you refer to it down at the individual level. But what do you really mean by that levels of understanding?

 

Chris Dyer:   The levels of understanding is a nice little X Y axis we could build here but not to terrorize anybody with thoughts of algebra. Essentially if you imagine the diagonal line going from low on the left and it’s getting up and higher to the right. And if I came to you and said, hey, I’ve got an idea for a business, do you want to invest? You probably say, I need to know a little more of that Chris. , your answer should be no. Then he walk up to you and say, give me money I have an idea. If you look at that example we often go to employees and say, I need you to do this thing and we don’t tell them why we don’t explain we don’t give them the background we don’t share with them anything we just say—instead of doing it this way you got to do it this way now and they’re like, why? You don’t get to know that, that’s board room you just got to do it. Then you get resistance. 

 

Of course you get resistance they don’t understand why there’s no reason for it they like doing it the way they’re doing it and that you’re going to have conflict in general and you have unhappy employees. So when we give people more information we help them understand more and more of why we want the change you get more and more acceptance. You get passive acceptance to give them a little more information you might get actual acceptance they really deeply understand and they’re passionate about whatever it is you’re asking them to do or to think about. You may even get them to be champions you may get them to be so excited about they’re going to go around telling everyone else in the company they should change. So, I find this is all about information it’s all about training and conversations. One the really big discoveries or really big things that a lot of if it’s Gallup or the Harvard Business all these incredible surveys and data that’s been done about employee engagement the number one thing they keep coming back to them makes people happy and engaged in the workforce is that they were heard. It’s not getting paid more money it’s not a pizza party all these other things that people think about it’s just, was I’m heard? 

 

And often that’s a part of this level of understanding. I’m going to tell you why we want you to do this, this is why it’s important given them that opportunity to tell you how they feel what’s going on instead of pushing the green button you start pushing the red button or just make it super simple and then they say why. Well, if you push the green button now this is going to happen so explaining why. But if I don’t do the green button that you have a conversation the person gets to be heard and ultimately this is the opportunity for the people on the top—the boardroom,  the CEO, the senior level management to get the important information back to them that maybe some of their decisions are stupid. Maybe the people at the top don’t always make perfect decisions and don’t always know everything they need to know and are asking people internally to do things that don’t make a lot of sense. So you have that two-way street have that conversation you make sure they understand you’re going to understand them better and you’re going to be able to enact change much quicker.

 

Jim Rembach:   And I really like the way that you laid it out, what you essentially were just talking through within me looking right now at the levels of understanding table it’s saying from an individual understanding perspective moving to and understanding what the potential engagement may be from that and then also the level of support that you’re going to get from those individuals. If there’s no understanding on the individuals part there are more than likely going to be oppositional they’re not going to be neutral they’re me oppositional and you’re not going to get any support from them you’re going to get the resistance in the friction like you’re talking about. And then the next step you go into, well they’re unaware so they just really don’t know all the details they may know something about it they’re going to be indifferent and they’re going to be neutral moving all the way up to going to cognizant knowledgeable and then that deep insight. And to me it’s also one of those things going back to the pillars that you’d have to incorporate so if we’re going to help with the—our levels of understanding the positivity is our main focus. We’re going to talk about—yeah, we’ve tried things like this before we’ve made some mistakes so that’s taking some of the negativity and flipping it into a positive so there’s a lot of ways that you can incorporate those pillars into this level of understanding and really work at that change process and hopefully have it be bi-directional. We’re doing bottom-up and then we’re also doing top-down and that will ultimately will help with your transformation process.

 

Chris Dyer:   Absolutely. When you can add that in there it adds so much to your company just that simple process of, can I be transparent and explain to you? Can we measure this? Can we have a conversation? And we make sure that everybody’s heard. You just slow down for just a moment—I forget where I heard this statement, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. And that is really true when it comes to change when it comes to asking employees to do things differently or to enact something new inside of an organization. You got to slow down and get everybody on board and then, man, does things speed up really quickly once everyone’s there.

 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, so I think you just described where the Fast Leader show comes from in that it’s not about shortcuts it’s not about making hacks that will take steps out what it’s about is slowing down doing the right things and that’s how you get your velocity. 

 

Chris Dyer:   Right. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Thanks for sharing that. Now what we’re talking about here the transformation process being able to really make these changes within individuals and an individual’s all the way from the front line all the way up to the top of the organization there’s a lot of passion that does go into it a lot of energy that we need. One of the things that we focus on the show are quotes to help us give some of that. Is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?

 

Chris Dyer:   One of my favorite people is Betty Davis, she’s just an ornery funny lady. I remember get hearing this quote from her and it’s always stuck with me which was, attempt the impossible in order to improve your work. It’s just a reminder that you have to—I struggle with this concept of crawl, walk and run and then I’ve heard a lot and there’s some Six Sigma stuff around that but that’s never really works for me it’s more like the jump off the cliff. Go do the thing that scares you. Go do the big thing you’re not prepared for take on the client there’s no way in the world you should be able to service and figure out how to do it, take the big leap. Maybe if I have my organization was as big as Google or something maybe I would be able to change that but for now I like just going after the impossible that’s how we grow that’s how we get better that’s how we find new and awesome things to do as opposed to this tiny little incremental changes. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Talking about that risk and jumping off and all that we often talk about humps that we have to get over. I have to say Chris—reading your bio being a captain on many sports teams being part of student government starting your business at an early age and having success—have you really had any humps to get over Chris?

 

Chris Dyer:   Absolutely. Everyday I’ve screwed it up too many times to even remember and I think what people need to remember is that they have to be prepared for failure you’re prepared to have mistakes and have that parachutes or that cushion at the bottom of the of the building if you don’t make the jump. You can’t forget about what happens but you need to take those leaps and those risks. I could have kept working at a very steady job working for somebody else and in 2001 right after 911 two months after I quit my job and went and started a business in the middle of a recession after the biggest terrorist attack in American history that  was probably the riskiest thing I’ve ever done. But I knew when I watched those planes at those towers that I did not want to spend the rest of my life working for somebody else and hating my work. I hated where I worked I hated what I was doing I took inspiration from tragedy and said, I want to go do something I love to do and do what I’ve been dreaming of and not waste my life. And then of course I made sure I had a back-up plan, if they didn’t work out how was I’m going to eat? How was I going to survive? I rented out every room in my house so that I could pay the mortgage. I did other things to make sure I wasn’t going to end up in the cardboard box on the street but I took the risk nonetheless.

 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, so I’m sure like with many of us and you start talking about just jumping and doing all of that there’s that point at which you have that hesitation even a lot of people that are around you saying no don’t do it. So, for you when you were going through that what happened at that moment? 

 

Chris Dyer:   Well, it was a lot of sleepless nights you worry and you second-guess and you think through it recalculate and you pivot you do all these things because you take that jump and I think what people don’t tell you is that in midair of that jump you actually change directions a few times and maybe you don’t end up landing where you intended to land when you first pull that left off that cliff and that’s okay you figure it out as you go along. One of the biggest things too is to make sure if anyone who is thinking about taking a big leap or thinking about doing something like that’s scary to them is you need to find people who can be mentors for you who have done it who have been successful at it. And you need to socialize with them and get their opinions and everyone else you need to shut the heck up. , that’s the nicest way that’s not how I really wanted to say it but that’s the nicest way I’ll say it on the podcast. Everyone else will just distract from you they will tell you no because they’re too afraid to do it. And if you’re going to ask your neighbor or your cousin or someone else who’s never done it who’s never taken a risk in their life they’re going to tell you no because they care about you and they want to keep you safe and they think they’re giving you the best advice to do that but that’s not going to get where you need to go. You need to talk to someone who’s been an entrepreneur, who’s taken the risk, who has had failure in the past too and knows how to help you navigate that and really use them as your guide. If I was going to go climb a mountain I wouldn’t ask my neighbor who’s never climbed that mountain how to get to the top I’d ask someone who’s done it before. And yet when it comes to business and life decisions we often take opinions from people who’ve never done anything like that before and allow it to keep us down.

 

Jim Rembach:   That’s an excellent point that everybody really needs to walk away with. There’s so many of these folks out there that talk about who you surround yourself with who are your influencers and who you congregate with and who you listen to. That other side that you said is so important is that the people who are closest to you are going to protect you they have this block that they just won’t be able to get over very few can that they’re going to want to not give you the bad news and what they see. But then also like you said you almost have to ask them that question, would you do it yourself? And if they’re saying no don’t take their advice. 

 

Jim Rembach:   If you’re following your passion and make sure you got that parachute, I say take the risk and give it a try. Calculate the risk you don’t want to end up losing your home and your car and everything—your marriage and everything else. That’s not a risk with a parachute but—you can go try your business, a lot of people start a business and they keep working during their day job until they get far enough along there’s lots of ways to do it.

 

Jim Rembach:   Even from inside an organization perspective there are certain things that you may see that you want to undertake or areas or avenues of the business that you see opportunities and personal growth and  you thought you have to take that risk in order to be that entrepreneur the one who’s the innovator and all of that and you can’t allow things around you and people around you and even quite frankly looking at the organization itself and what they’ve done the past to stop you have to keep moving forward.  

 

Chris Dyer:   Hmm-hmm absolutely.

 

Jim Rembach:   You got a lot of things going on you—you have kids the book the company, there’s a whole lot of moving parts that are happening here but when you start thinking about a goal that you have what would be one goal?

 

Chris Dyer:   Yeah, I’m really trying to figure out what’s the right thing for me as it relates to the book. I’ve written the book and I do a lot of speaking around that and I’m actually been doing a lot of reflection on what does that mean? Where do I want that to go? Is this something nice to have? Is that something I transition into all the time where I do more thought leadership and write more books or do all that? I’ve done this and I’m going to stick with what I’m doing. So, my goal right now is to figure that out. 

 

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 gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award winning solutions guaranteed to create motivated, productive, and loyal employees who have great work relationships with our 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, Chris, 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. Chris Dyer, are you ready to hoedown?

 

Chris Dyer:   I’m ready. 

 

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

 

Chris Dyer:   Probably knowledge. I feel like I could always learn more. There’s always that—remember that movie the Matrix, where he would sit down and they’re like injected, like do you know Kung-Fu? Now you do. That’s like my dream, that I could just have information installed to my head in a matter of seconds. I think knowledge is one the more I learn the better off I am.  

 

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

 

Chris Dyer:   I joined a CEO group a few years ago and one day of my mentors turn to me and said, Chris the day I realized that I’m the CEO and it’s my job to deal with the tough stakes the big stakes the big issues of the day and started enjoying it my whole life changed and that perspective really change. I used to be upset when people would bring me these big—I was like, oh, another thing I got to do. But as a CEO that’s my job that’s why I get paid the big bucks I’m supposed to deal with the big stuff. So, I started enjoying it and being happy when people came to do with that and reveling in the success of being able to help people and that was a big shift for me.  

 

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

 

Chris Dyer:   I think follow-through. I recently had on Facebook, I was talking about the book and someone made a comment like, sort of I do so many things how do I do it and someone popped it and say, oh, Chris’s actually follows through. And I went, that’s a really good way to kind of categorize a lot of people who dream about doing things if I decide I want to do something and I put that down as a goal and I thought it’s true I follow through and I think that’s been one of the big reasons why I’ve been able to do the things I’ve done.  

 

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

 

Chris Dyer:   Books. Absolutely books. The more you can get perspectives and learning and find inspiration as humans we only know what we know.  When we have to make a conclusion or a decision we only take the information that’s in our head to be able to make the best conclusion or decision we can. So, the more you can learn the better decisions you can make going down the road. 

 

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

 

Chris Dyer:   Thank you for shamelessly plugging my book first so I don’t have to do it. But yeah, I just recently read a book that I absolutely love it has changed my life it is called Work Clean, and it is this amazing kind of—if you love cooking shows or you like to know about chefs and food you’re into that and you also want to talk about work productivity from work standpoint it’s an awesome kind of marriage of the two. I realized that my messy office and my sloppy ways and my messy bag not only was a problem but it was probably because I didn’t have an actual process I didn’t have a system no one ever taught me how to be organized personally. I’m very organized in the computer and with my business and my goals but personally I’m kind of a slob. And I like things clean I didn’t mind to clean them, this book just unleashed a system for me and my life has totally changed. I’ve redone my office redone my closet re-organized my home the stress level has nearly evaporated from just having clutter everywhere so I highly recommend it. 

 

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/Kumar Mehta. Okay, Kumar this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity 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 choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why? 

 

Chris Dyer:   This is going to sound a little bit bad but I think I’m going to take back stock market knowledge and go back and be able to invest correctly. But I say that in the sense that I would love to be able to: A. make a bunch of money off knowing which the right stocks are. But then B: maybe take that money and do something really great with it from a charity standpoint knowing some of the things that have happened since that time right. Some of the tragedies some of the places where we could make an impact. I’ll keep a little extra for myself for my yacht but he rest of it we can send to charity and maybe impact people of hurricanes and floods and all these  things that out there that we could really impact. 

 

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

 

Chris Dyer:   Sure you can find me on Linkedin, Chris Dyers. You can find me on Twitter, chrisdyer7. Facebook, Snapchat, all that. I’m sure you can find me somewhere. Happy to connect and you can also go to culturetoceo.com, if you want to learn more about my speaking gigs, the book or anything else or you could find the book on Amazon. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Chris Dyer, 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 

 

 

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.

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

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who 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. 

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, 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 

Lori Bocklund of Strategic Contact

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

Lori Bocklund Show Notes Page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hump to Get Over

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

Advice for others

Learn change management and improve.

Holding her back from being an even better leader

Time. I live in a constant state of triage.

Best Leadership Advice

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

Secret to Success

I have good problem solving and critical thinking skills.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Communication

Recommended Reading

ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community

Contacting Lori Bocklund

Email: lori [at] strategiccontact.com

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/stratcontact

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

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

Empathy Mapping

Lassoing the Wild West Contact Center Technology

Contact Center Executive Priorities for 2018

 

Show Transcript: 

Click to access edited transcript

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Laurie Buckland:     I am. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Jim Rembach:   Who needs customers anyway? 

 

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

 

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

 

Laurie Buckland:     Yeah, we will. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Laurie Buckland:     It’s a small world Jim. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Laurie Buckland:     There you go.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Jim Rembach:   No problem. 

 

Lori Bocklund:   Let’s hoedown. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

END OF AUDIO 

 

 

Customer Experience Podcast logo

menu

Episodes

About

Blog

Contact

Listen

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

iHeartRadio

Stitcher

© 2020 Influence to Action Inc.

Privacy Policy | Terms Of Service