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Joe Dunlap | Now is the time to stop training

248: Joe Dunlap: It’s time to stop training

Joe Dunlap Show Notes Page

Joe Dunlap is the son of a US Air Force officer and spent most of his youth moving every two years from one Air Force base to another along with his younger sister.  He is a second-generation Bachelor and Master degree graduate.

Joe entered into Learning and Development by accident.  After completing his undergraduate degree in the Northeast, he applied for numerous jobs in Texas with little luck until a university offered him a position as a Hall Director, as long as he was also a graduate student.  Since it was late April at this time, the only department at the university that had rolling applications for grad school was the Department of Education.

Joe started a joint program in Adult Learning and Org Development with no intentions of finishing it.  Two years later I had an M Ed, he was working in HR at another university in Org Dev and some Adult Learning and here he is a long, long time later still working in L&D.

Joe started his career as a stand-up facilitator using PowerPoint and Word.  As technology evolved into eLearning, Podcasting, Video, and LMSs, he was an early adopter which allowed him to expand his competencies and services.  As the use of eLearning and LMSs grew, he became a SME for L&D technology which led him to being a leader of an L&D technology team.

Over the last few years he has researched, implemented, practiced and managed the evolving mindsets, practices, technology, and methods being used by organizations in the Digital Transformation era and implemented those within L&D as both a leader and consultant.  He is also a writer of L&D Transformation on LinkedIn.

Joe currently lives in Germantown, WI with his wife and the last of his three daughters, three cats and a dog; he’s the only male in the house, aaaaagh.

Quotes and Mentions

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

“With the growing skills gaps, how do we now deliver learning faster?” – Click to Tweet

“Move away from that training mindset and move into other possibilities.” – Click to Tweet

“Let’s talk about the problem because learning and development is only one piece of solving that particular problem.” – Click to Tweet

“Once training is done, what’s next because that’s not the end of the story?” – Click to Tweet

“How are you helping employees in their flow of work?” – Click to Tweet

“Thinking about the learning journey, there’s so many ways that people now go about acquiring learning.” – Click to Tweet

“If you just read a news article, there’s not a week that goes by where a CEO doesn’t talk about the need to become a learning organization.” – Click to Tweet

“The scale of an organization is losing its relevance to the speed of the organization’s learning capacity.” – Click to Tweet

“We can no longer focus on shareholder value, we have to focus on our employees improving their value.” – Click to Tweet

“You can’t continue to go out and buy skill sets, you need to start growing them.” – Click to Tweet

“You have to meet learners where they’re at. You can’t drag them to your Learning Management System.” – Click to Tweet

“If you are learning you are growing. If you aren’t growing what are you doing?” – Click to Tweet

“We moved away from that training mindset and started looking at that learning ecosystem for that individual and team and the learning journey.” – Click to Tweet

“Step back and embrace other thoughts and ideas and you’ll become a much better leader.” – Click to Tweet

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Hump to Get Over

Joe Dunlap had an old-school training mindset and found himself in an organization that was losing to its competition. That’s when Joe challenged himself and his team to “stop training” and to start gathering insight into ways they could add value to employees and meet them where they are in their learning and development journey.

Advice for others

Be open to change.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Fighting an organizational culture.

Best Leadership Advice

Be humble in your practice and have humor in yourself.

Secret to Success

I listen to smart people.

Best tools in business or life

Taking a personal approach.

Recommended Watching

Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates (American Genius)

Contacting Joe Dunlap

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

Email: joseph.m.dunlap [at] gmail.com

Resources and Show Mentions

Dash Trainer: Agent Training in a Dash

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

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

248: Joe Dunlap: It’s time to stop training

Jim Rembach: : (00:00)

Okay, Fast leader legion today I’m excited because we have somebody on the show today who is going to tell you why you need to stop training.

 

Jim Rembach: : (00:47)

Joe Dunlap is the son of a U S air force officer and spent most of his youth moving every two years from one air force base to another along with his younger sister. He is a second generation bachelor and master’s degree. Gradually Joe entered into learning and development by accident after completing his undergraduate degree in the Northeast. He applied for numerous jobs in Texas with little luck until the university offered him a position as a whole director as long as he was a graduate student. Since it was late April. At this time, the only department at the university that had rolling applications for grad school was the department of education. Joe started a joint program in adult learning and organizational development with no intention of finishing it. Two years later he had a master’s in education and he was working in HR at another university in organizational development and some adult learning and there he is a long, long time later still and working in learning and development.

 

Jim Rembach: : (01:47)

Joe started his career as a standup facilitator using PowerPoint and word. As technology evolved into e-learning podcasting, video and learning management systems, he was an early adopter which allowed him to expand his competencies and services. As the use of e-learning and LMS has grew, he became a subject matter expert for learning and development technology, which led him to being a leader of a learning and development technology team. Over the last few years. He has researched, implemented practice and manage the evolving mindsets, practices, technology and methods being used by organizations in the digital transformation era and implemented those within learning and development as both a leader and consultant. He’s also a writer of L and D transformation on LinkedIn. Joe currently lives in Germantown, Wisconsin with his wife and the last of his three daughters, three cats and a dog. He’s the only male in the house. Joe Dunlap. Are you ready to help us get over the hump? I am ready to help you get over the hump man. I’m glad you’re here now giving my Legion a little bit about you, but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we get to know you even better? So you actually said at gym it stopped training a lot. What I write about,

 

Joe Dunlap:: (03:00)

a lot of what I consult about right now is changing that mindset and practice that a lot of learning and development leaders have had for a long time. I am certainly one of those individuals. And where we always thought about the course, we always thought about an E learning course or a workshop or instruct something instructor led. And in today’s environment, especially with the digital transformation, we just don’t have that time anymore. We have to go over it much quicker for our clients and we have to be able to pivot on a moment’s notice, you know? And so with the growing cost skills gaps that we’ve seen, we’re hearing about this all the time. It’s how do we now deliver faster? And so what I’m trying to encourage or influence people to do is move away from that training mindset into other possibilities.

 

Jim Rembach: : (03:40)

Well, and I think what you talk about there is, to me, this isn’t really focused in on one particular industry. In addition, I think there’s a lot of things that are advancing right now in the whole artificial intelligence and business automation space, but also impacting what we’re talking about from a learning and development perspective. So when you can’t, if you can kind of give us a little bit about, uh, I’ll look into the impact of what AI can be on stopping training.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (04:08)

Oh, I mean, when you think about all of this, and especially AI is that, um, if I’m thinking about it from an employee’s perspective or an organizational perspective, is now how are we growing those skill sets? You know, five years ago, if you and I were having this conversation and someone said, get a scientist, we both were to look at each other with a question Mark in the day. That same road is making $170,000 a year for a guy to sign. Okay. So the utilization of AI, machine learning, you’re now starting to see, um, positions or occupations that didn’t exist in anybody’s tongue three years ago, four years ago. There’s not even degrees for somebody, but there are people who’ve grown up with these skill sets and have learned how to analyze data and work with machine learning who are now making a lot of money. But that’s now challenging. You know, all the employees within an organization of how are they only on moving as part of this digital transformation to grow those skillsets to be, um, help the organization remain competitive within their industry?

 

Jim Rembach: : (05:07)

Well, even when you talk about that and I don’t, this whole new job thing is quite interesting and well eaten for me. What I see AI working in the contact center space and customer experience space is that AI is being used as, you know, a job aid is being used as a, you know, process flow, you know, you know, follow the leader tool. Uh, is also when you put that into the whole learning and development mix really causing, you know, more and more or reinforcing more of that stop training, you know, type of focus. And there’s one of the things that you and I had had an opportunity to talk about is you talked about that, that mindset and that first approach and the first approach used to be build a course. Now you’re saying the approach needs to be different. What does it need to be

 

Joe Dunlap:: (05:56)

well know? And I’m

 

Jim Rembach: : (05:57)

guilty of this is that, you know, the, the first thing I typically did throughout my career is, okay, let’s go with the solution mindset. And typically that was of course it may have been new learning and may have been instructor led. Now it’s part of this digital transformation on learning new ways like design thinking and agile, which is, let’s talk about the problem because very often the problem has multiple facets to it and learning development is only one piece of solving that particular problem. And so it’s bringing the right people together at the table to brainstorm around multiple ways to do that. And more importantly, Jim, like you talked about, is that, um, you know, once that training is done, let’s go back to that idea of, okay, I did a course or I did a workshop or whatever it was, is now what’s next?

 

Jim Rembach: : (06:39)

Because that’s not the end of the story, you know, is that once they’ve gained that competency, that skill that knows whatever it is now, how are you helping them? Like you were just talking about in their flow of work, when they’re actually applying that knowledge, what challenges, uh, what successes are they having? What resources do they need on the job to help them continue to grow? Well, I think for me there’s also, you and I talked about the difference between things that are more technical than short term. Yes. In regards to job skills are concerned and then other elements which are more longterm and journey and development things. Yes. So I would dare to say one of the things that I’ve looked at a lot and have been trying to bring into the contact center world is what is referred to as blended learning. But a lot of really familiar with what blended learning is. If you could kind of help us,

 

Joe Dunlap:: (07:32)

you know, I think blended learning has multiple connotations. So you know, when you think about blended learning is what are those resources now that help that individual to continue learning and growing? So an example with a previous client, we were utilizing an internal Yammer channel. So social media, we are creating a role-based and or skill-based groups in which these people could come together and share their knowledge and expertise and resources. We’re pointing them right? Uh, we are utilizing SharePoint as a way of content management because this is where the worked and these were the tools that they worked with, uh, you know, creating short videos to very often my team and I, we would actually literally take our phones or iPhones or Samsung or whatever they used and go and show videos of people working out particular problems and sharing how they solve those problems. And then just literally posting that as a very rough video for other people to use as resources. So you start to think about that learning journey. There are so many different ways in which learning people now actually go past the means of acquiring learning, but finding out what your vendors are using and then incorporating that into your overall deliverables.

 

Jim Rembach: : (08:34)

You and I talked about, uh, the transformation of the learning and development leader. And as you were talking right there, I started really thinking about, you know, the, the nuance, the art and the science of all of this. And, and that is, for example, like SharePoint, well it’s a good tool for certain organizations, but then for other organizations it is, so you have to use a different tool so that all kinds of different solutions that really have to be explored and understood. But it does start with that mindset and be first and first of all, but I see one of the transformation points for a learning and development leader and then they think about it from even from a member perspective, as someone who’s responsible for overall performance, I may not be a traditionally trained L and D leader, but yet I’m responsible, you know, as supervisor or manager for people’s performance and getting the work done is that, you know, I need to start thinking about overall knowledge assets and manage assets. Yes,

 

Joe Dunlap:: (09:31)

absolutely. And now it’s, where do I find those assets? How am I voting on? And they’re looking for those people. And so it’s this idea of learning and development growing itself. And some of the things that I write about is go create your own work. You know, so if you’re listening, if you’re in the lunch room, the water cooler, so to speak, you’re hearing these stories, these pain points that exist across the organization. Go after them, start digging into those stories to find out how painful is this experience, this knowledge is skill, whatever it is, start finding those and start meeting those learners where they’re at like you’re talking about. Because you’ll find is I’ve found that all of a sudden you’re creating your own backlog. Before that people were saying, Hey, you built this. Can you help me build this? Or how can you, can we start to curate these resources together and where can we put those resources that help people at that moment?

 

Jim Rembach: : (10:18)

Well, and I think Joe, I mean you, you could probably give better insight into this than I can is that you are talking about how overall, you know, learning and development and the need for it and really the demand for it has quite changed. And with that organizational importance. So when we start talking about strategic value, it used to be, Oh my gosh, don’t train them cause no lead. Um, and I think that’s changing too. How have you seen the strategic importance of learning and development change just within the past couple of years?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (10:48)

Oh, you know, if you just read a news article, Jim, there’s not a week that goes by where I do not see a CEO or several CEOs who talk about the importance of becoming a learning organization. You know, and I share some of these quotes when I see them on my LinkedIn profile. Um, there was one recently I shared last week and I’m paraphrasing here by the CEO of work who said that, you know, he talked about the scale of an organization is losing its relevance to the speed of the organization’s learning capacity. And I think he hits the nail on the head is native. We cannot continue to grow our employees and grow their skill sets and our competencies. We’re going to lose to our competition if they’re moving faster than we, and many organizations are now recognizing this. In fact, there was, I think it was a week or two ago that a bunch of CEOs came out and said, we no longer can focus on shareholder value.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (11:37)

We have to focus on our employees and proving their value. And I think that that message has now made its way across a lot of industries and a lot of CEOs are recognizing. So the quote, like you said, you know, the CFO said to the CEO, what if we train them and they leave and the CEO says, what if we don’t? And they stay. Right. So like you just said, you can’t continue to go out and buy the skillsets. You want to have to start growing them. You’re going to start rescaling people. Cause there’s just not enough people who aren’t around. And that need is growing so quickly that you have to respond to it. So I think you hit the nail on that. Okay. So when we start talking about, you know, going through a transformation process, you know, you talk about the mindset, you know, I, if I start looking at an organization that is, you know, doing some of the things that they’ve just always done because their great habit, we build all these processes around them.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (12:28)

You know what, we can do it fast, but you know, the effectiveness has gone away. What are two things that you often have to cause them or you have to really encourage them to step away from? Yes, so one of the first things that I do, especially when I’m starting an initiative is I’m making sure that I’m getting buy in by all the leaders impacted. And I did this very recently with a client was we were going to roll out this leadership initiative. And so I met with all the leaders across the organization and I had several leaders maybe probably close to about a fourth of them who said, Joe right now is not the time we have these other priorities going on. And I really appreciated him saying that because it allowed me to focus on those people who were ready to embrace that at that moment and be my advocates as well.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (13:11)

And they made a world of difference because they were full head, they were fooling and supportive and they were able to push forward. And that way when some of those other leaders were finally ready to haven’t gotten those other priorities off of their fight, so to speak, they were now ready to embrace it too because I was meeting them at their right moment. Well, you know, as you were saying that I also started thinking of the fact that, you know, once they decided to essentially take themselves out and they saw other people embracing it, moving ahead, it was a threat. Yes, exactly. And it’s funny, I did a, a couple of years ago, I was with a large company and you know, like you said, it was 150 years old. They had a lot of processes in place. Uh, certainly the organization, organizational culture was very much face to face and things like that.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (13:55)

And he realized that they were just not keeping up with their competition. So they were going through this organizational change. You know, and culture always trumps everything. So you know, the CEO recognized we have to start shrinking our culture and there’s early adopters and late adopters. And so by helping in, in leading that particular change, I went for the early adopters first because they became my advocates for the people who are still kind of sitting back saying, wow, this is the flavor of the day. We’ll just wait two years and he’ll be gone. By the time they finally realized that this was not going away, there was a whole lot of stories out there and resources for them to become fully engaged with it as well as having good mentors. So to me, I think it goes back to that whole short term versus long term focus and that if I’m someone who needs to go through this transformation and I, well let me take a step back and I would say that everybody needs to go through this transformation even with call center coach Academy, see so many organizations

 

Jim Rembach: : (14:53)

that you know, really don’t understand what the whole difference between, you know, task, um, short term technical skill and long term, you know, leadership development, you know, really is, it’s absolutely, unfortunately, like you said, we all kind of opt for the classroom. We opt for the workshop, we, you know, we think that, you know, Hey, just give them the information and then therefore the action’s going to happen. And it’s just not the way it works.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (15:21)

You’re right, you’re absolutely right. In fact, actually I was leading initiative with the context in a very recently and we became aware of some pain points that certainly were not trained and there were no resources in which to help those costs in a representative with that. And so we built out a number of materials, basically job AIDS to help men with that. But it was very hard for leadership to start now embracing this idea of these huddle type of trainings versus a classroom based to bring people up with speed on these things. And I struggled with it a little bit to be honest with you because in my mind as I’m looking at this information, I knew that the customer service reps were not well versed in these topics because they were pain points. The quality was showing that, but they were focused, like you said, on the metrics and meeting service level agreements and not recognizing that, okay, you know, the, the forest for the trees so to speak, is that okay, but these pain points don’t go away if you don’t address them so great and you meet your service levels, great, you need your quality, but you’re still not helping the customer because your customer service reps don’t understand the information that’s in front of them.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (16:22)

And I’m still pounding away at that gym. I really am. There’s some people who have now started to come around and say, okay, let’s try some things. There’s sound. We’re still kind of pushing back on me on that. It’s a culture shift.

 

Jim Rembach: : (16:32)

Well, and I think what you said, kind of going back a little bit full circle, you started talking about truly uncovering, you know, the the problem and being really where the mindset set shift needs to happen. Yup. Oh, when you start talking about, you know, that different lens and, and the, and you causing people to look in places that they, you know, are just not accustomed to doing. Yes. What do you often find that is preventing you from making people to make that head turn?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (17:01)

Very often it’s the organizational culture is that, you know, they built up a, for lack of a better word, the command and control structure. And so when those subject matter experts who very often become those call center leaders, get into those roles, you know, they come with great technical knowledge, but like you just said, there’s, it’s very hard for them to look outside of just my channel right in front of me. Do you understand that there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s going on around here that is impacting what you’re doing, you know, and that can help you to benefit that. And so it’s just overcoming that organizational culture is that there’s a lot of players who can bring in hands, productivity and effectiveness if you’re willing to now embrace some of that mindset versus the straight ahead parallel linear thinking.

 

Jim Rembach: : (17:43)

Well, and you know, S and KPI’s are important for every single part of a business. Those key performance indicators. So could kind of give me an understanding of that, that when that shift has occurred, get on board, they start doing things differently. What are we talking about as far as a KPI impact?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (18:02)

You know, I’ve been incorporating some different measures lately and so one of the things that a lot of organizations are looking at is employee engagement. You know, so as we talk about the world digital transformation and social media, I’ve been incorporating some measures that might be typically used on a Twitter or Facebook or something like that. So if we push out some videos or some learning resources, not only my sharing their usage, but I’m sharing how many shares, how many likes, how many did they share that with? And so I’m trying to incorporate more measures based on the deliverable and the channels that I use that now help build a much bigger story for my client to see that there’s a much bigger picture out here than just simply for instance, ROI or some of the key measures that they’re looking at. Because you know, it’s very easy for us to get logged into like, did we meet our potty metrics or did we meet our service level of bringing through things like that. But there’s sort of, like you just said, there’s a whole lot of other story out there that once they start to become aware of it, you start to see that light bulb come on in their head is, Oh wait a minute. There’s some other things out here that really make a difference, especially when you’re talking about a call center environment to keep people here versus the kind of retention problems that most experience.

 

Jim Rembach: : (19:10)

Well, gosh, Joe, as you were talking and I started seeing the role and the skills zone, the L and D people and again, even if they’re traditionally trained or are, if they’re in a manager role, that that needs to shift and let me to to quite a significant degree for some cause I mean as you were just describing what you were doing, I mean I started thinking about internal communications. Yeah. I started thinking about internal marketing. Yes. That’s, that’s different than just communications. Yeah. Um, you started talking about, um, you know, the whole, um, you know, the cultural aspects and the cultural transformation piece, performance management. I mean, I’m starting to see a whole different level of skills that are needed inL and D people that just didn’t exist.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (19:52)

Yeah. And I think that’s part of what’s going on with the digital transformation. My personal experience with this has been, uh, in a, in an organization that was working agile is that in some cases I was leading an effort, so I might’ve been referred to as a product owner. In other cases, I’m rolling up my sleeves and I’m an individual contributor. And so I was taking on those roles as we started to see how learning was being consumed and the ways in which it was being consumed by learners, you have to meet them where they’re at. You know? So the idea of me dragging you as that learner to the learning management system is not working anymore. It’s, I now need to come to where Jim does his work and deliver to Jim in a way that he wants to deliver it. So I might need to learn how to use Twitter or Instagram or learn how to, uh, make an edit videos or learn how to be a web developer and SharePoint. And so whatever it is that your, your learners are using, you’re building those skill sets and that helps you in your future gym. Because again, you may be in instances where maybe you’re not leading that effort and maybe even learning as a part of that, but you have a role or multiple roles, you might be able to plan that becomes, that makes you much more valuable.

 

Jim Rembach: : (20:59)

Well, Joe, I would dare to say with, uh, the transformation that you’re talking about and I see it with all types of transformations that, you know, we really need to focus, we need some inspiration and, and we need some things that are, you know, continual reminders of, you know, the effort that we need to put forth in the resilience. And one of the things that we look at on the show to help us with that, those types of things are quotes. So is there a quote or two that you like you can share?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (21:24)

I do. There’s actually two quotes. So for any individual and learning development, it goes like this. If you are learning, you are growing. If you ain’t growing, what are you doing? Right. And so that’s actually a quote on my LinkedIn page. Um, and um, I lovely woman who was the vice president down at an organization, Nebraska, found that one time and massively distributed that across a whole network of people. And then I started getting all these people liking and sharing and his domestic, you mean whatever your LinkedIn messaging. I was like, wow, that’s fantastic that they really meant that much to her. Something that resonated with her and it resonated with her network, you know, as a learning and development leader is that one of the most valuable things I learned from a previous leader was you got to have humility and humor about yourself.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (22:12)

You know, because you can’t know everything. You are not the expert in everything. And so I very much follow the Steve jobs mindset is I don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. I hire smart people to tell me what to do. So as I’m growing my team, I’ve grown two teams in my history. Um, I’m bringing them on board because they bring skill sets to the table that I don’t have. I don’t need somebody else telling me or doing what I already do. I need somebody doing what I can’t do and showing me how to do. And I’ve been very fortunate in my past where I brought in the right group of people who had skill sets beyond what I had, and I’m asking them, okay, show me what it is we need to do. Tell me what it is we need to do, and helping us to lead to new discoveries and new journey.

 

Jim Rembach: : (22:53)

Well, Joe, talking about building those teams, talking about transformation, talking about taking a different path than what everybody else was going down. I mean, those are things that happen because of learning experiences that we’ve had and I’m sure we talked about getting over the hump because they set us hopefully in a better direction and most oftentimes they do. Is there a time where you’d got over the pump that you can share?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (23:14)

Yeah, absolutely. I was with an organization about five, six years ago and I was talking about it earlier. They were starting to lose to their competition. You know, they had very traditional hierarchies and processes and other organizations were being much more experimental and innovative and they were doing things faster. And the organization that I worked for realized we’re losing to our competition. We need to change the way we do. And so with that initiative, I challenged my team and they challenged me in the same mindset was we need to start thinking differently how we deliver learning and how we support performance across this organization. And so through a number of brainstorming and strategy sessions, we started coming up with ideas based on the things that we had heard across the organization of the how and the means of which people were actually learning. So we started exploring the use of video.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (24:03)

We started exploring the use of social media, the internal Yammer channel. I talked about how to become web developers and SharePoint. So we started moving away from that whole training mindset is starting to look more of this. What is that learning ecosystem is for an individual or for a team? And what is the learning journey that we create? And so that really became our mindset was it was no longer easy or no longer could we go through the idea of a one and done and we move on. It was, you’re building a course, uh, you’re doing some instructor led workshop. It’s what’s next. Now you’re following that story as those individuals, whether they be leaders or individual contributors as they go on, apply that knowledge and skill. You follow them through those experiences to say, okay, what were your successes? What were your challenges? What would have helped? You know? And you start to build up all the resources they need around that, that, that way, hopefully, hopefully over a short period of time, the next person who comes through that learning journey has a much easier than the person that went before them. And you just keep improving.

 

Jim Rembach: : (25:04)

Well, I would dare to say the whole transformation process also takes a while. Uh, and also when I start talking, I’m thinking about learning and development, you know, transforming and people doing things different, you know, that’s just going to take well. But what I still, you know, you and the whole, you know, stop training method and, and focus and all of that. Um, I started thinking about you having certain goals and also the content that you create and all of that. But if I was to look at one goal that you had, what should I be looking at?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (25:33)

One goal for me is continuous learning is I am always looking for what’s my next thing to learn about. And I’m basing that on what I’m seeing in the industry, right? So most recently, like for instance, the world economic forum came out with their top 20 skills for 2020 critical thinking, creative thinking, things like that. So those are the things I start exploring for myself. So that way when I’m having these dialogues with people, I can share what I’ve learned on my journey, which helps make me, hopefully I’m better, I better bring more value and a better partner to my clients and to the people I work with. [inaudible]

 

Jim Rembach: : (26:07)

and the fast leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on, let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

 

Speaker 5: (26:14)

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Jim Rembach: : (26:33)

four slash better. All right. Fast leader Legion. It’s time for the

 

Speaker 5: (26:37)

Oh Oh,

 

Jim Rembach: : (26:40)

okay. But they hold on as a part of our where you give

 

Jim Rembach: : (26:44)

us good insights. I’m don’t ask several questions and your job is to give us robust yet read responses are going to help us move onward and upward. Facile. Joe Dunlap, are you ready to hold down? I’m ready to hold down. Alright, so what is holding you back from being an even better leader today? Organizational culture it at, you’re still fighting it.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (27:03)

An organizational culture that exist and changing those mindset and practices will always slow you down.

 

Jim Rembach: : (27:09)

What is the best leadership advice you’ve ever received?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (27:13)

The best leadership advice I ever received is be humble in your practice and have humor in yourself, knowing that you’re not going to be the person who knows everything and it’s good to have humor about that as you actually becoming a better leader every day.

 

Jim Rembach: : (27:27)

And what is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (27:32)

Um, did I listen to smart people? I want the advice of people who are telling me what they think the solution is versus going along my own immediate solution or thought process.

 

Jim Rembach: : (27:42)

And what do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (27:47)

Uh, I think it is that personal approach. So like I talked about before, it’s embracing that other people have opinions and ideas and experiences and that I want to hear them so that I can incorporate them into my overall effort of what I’m trying to produce.

 

Jim Rembach: : (28:01)

And what would be one book that you’d recommend to our Legion? And it could be from any genre.

 

Joe Dunlap:: (28:06)

Um, I would recommend really, uh, it’s actually more of a documentary and it’s something I saw various and recently recently on Netflix and it’s the Steve jobs bill Gates story. And as you watch and it just covers their entire history from the 1970s well into 2000 and it talks about how they changed an entire industry. They’ve made an entire industry. Um, so here’s two individuals that have both dropped out of college. They both had these ideas of how to now transform the way that we work, the way that we live. And that to me was valuable as I watched that documentary because I think we’re seeing it. We see it every day is that we have these people who are transforming the way that we live and we have to open up our mindset. Anything is possible.

 

Jim Rembach: : (28:48)

Okay. Past literal age and you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fast leader.net/ Joe Dunlap. Okay, Joe, this is my last hump. Hold on question. Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25 and you have all the knowledge and skills that you have now and at durability to take back, but you can’t take it all and you can only take one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

 

Joe Dunlap:: (29:12)

What skill or piece of knowledge would I take back with me? Um, the openness to change and the reason I would do that is because I think very early in my career and certainly throughout my time as a leader, probably told that within the last seven to 10 years because I had a mindset in place of what a leader did and how they thought. And then I was giving orders and telling people to do this. And now seeing the transformation that we, and I wish I would have stepped back much earlier in my career and embraced other and processes and ideas that probably would’ve made me a much better individual contributor and leader than I am today. Joe, it was fun to spend time with you today. Can you please share what the best leader Legion, how they can connect with you? Absolutely. You can find me on my LinkedIn profile. Joseph Dunlap. Uh, I am currently an independent contractor and I live in Germantown, Wisconsin. I would love to hear from you,

 

Jim Rembach: : (30:03)

Joe Dunlap. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. The past leave Legion honors you and thank you for helping us get over the hump. 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 fast leader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

[/expand]

Charles Conn | Bulletproof Problem Solving | Future Skills

246: Charles Conn: You can easily take apart almost any problem

Charles Conn Show Notes Page Charles Conn used a really simple tool to solve the problems for a company with thousands of employees. It was this humble beginning which now finds Charles on a quest to solve the problems of the world. Charles Conn was born in Phoenix Arizona to half Canadian, half American parents, …

Access Now

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: 

[expand title=”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 

[/expand]

 

 

Lonnie Wilson | Sustaining Workforce Engagement

240: Lonnie Wilson: Engagement is a human issue

Lonnie Wilson Show Notes Page

Lonnie Wilson was working with a client on a culture transformation and was staring failure right in the face. Then he received a piece of advice from his Pastor that enabled him to step back and work on guiding the transformation at a much smaller scale to move forward faster.

Lonnie was born in Kellogg, Idaho and spent his formative years, from age 9 to 22 in Spokane WA.

He had a pretty typical family — mom, dad, and 3 sisters. He was the second oldest, however his oldest sister died of cancer at 34, making him the senior sibling.  His two younger sisters are both authors.  His dad died in 1988 at 68, but his mom lives in Spokane and is still perking at 97

His dad was the ultimate do-it-yourself kind of guy; he grew up on a farm and was incredibly capable.  He taught Lonnie a lot about “fixing things” and Lonnie was always working with him on some project around the house.  Lonnie was always a good student so coupling the fixer mentality with some decent academics and he became a chemical engineer.  From there he went on to management and now teaches managers.

Lonnie worked for Chevron for 20 years in refining and had great teachers/coaches/mentors/roll-models in management and personnel development.  While with Chevron he became very interested in Lean Manufacturing and decided to start a second career as a consultant in cultural change.  Now he focuses on not just lean manufacturing but the human side of lean, what Toyota calls “respect for people”.

He’s also the author of Sustaining Workforce Engagement: How to Ensure Your Employees Are Healthy, Happy, and Productive.

Lonnie says his legacy is his kids and his books.  And a whole slew of soccer players he coached over the years who still stop by or write and stay in touch with “Coach”.

Lonnie currently lives in El Paso TX and is married with 4 adult children, the youngest one n college. The other three are married and combined have given Lonnie and his wife Roxana seven grandkids aged 15 to 4 months.Tweetable

Quotes and Mentions

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

“The engagement issue is a human issue. It’s all about people.” – Click to Tweet  

“People don’t delegate, they assign.” – Click to Tweet  

“A person who delegates well, tells his people what he wants to do and why he wants to do it. He leaves the how to do it, up to them.” – Click to Tweet 

“There’s too much micro-management and weak delegation.” – Click to Tweet  

“Simplify and humanize your thinking.” – Click to Tweet  

“Managers have lost the concept that they’re also supervisors.” – Click to Tweet  

“Don’t try to motivate people, they come to work motivated.” – Click to Tweet  

“People don’t need to be bribed. What they need to do is have the opportunity to contribute in the workplace.” – Click to Tweet  

“Learn to use the intrinsic motivators.” – Click to Tweet  

“You can get people to change in the short-term but if you want it sustained, they have to be able to see that you are willing to make the sacrifice.” – Click to Tweet  

“If people are looking for metaphors to model the family is a perfect one.” – Click to Tweet  

“As you make changes all kinds of sympathetic changes occur.” – Click to Tweet  

Hump to Get Over

Lonnie Wilson was working with a client on a culture transformation and was staring failure right in the face. Then he received a piece of advice from his Pastor that enabled him to step back and work on guiding the transformation at a much smaller scale to move forward faster.

Advice for others

Become more empathetic and see into why people are doing what they do.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

I’ve got my own paradigms.

Best Leadership Advice

Be a good role model.

Secret to Success

I work hard and I study hard.

Best tools in business or life

I’d like to think I’m a good role model.

Recommended Reading

Sustaining Workforce Engagement: How to Ensure Your Employees Are Healthy, Happy, and Productive

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes

The Situational Leader

Motivation to Work

Contacting Lonnie Wilson

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnie-wilson-594381a/

Website: https://www.qc-ep.com/

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

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

240: Lonnie Wilson: Engagement is a human issue

 

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 & 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. 

 

Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because we’re going to have somebody on this show today who’s going to be able to give us a very, very comprehensive look into workforce engagement. Lonnie Wilson was born in Kellogg, Idaho and spent his formative years from the age of nine to twenty-two in Spokane, Washington. He had a pretty typical family mom, dad, and three sisters. He was the second oldest, however, his oldest sister died of cancer at thirty-four making him the senior sibling. His two younger sisters are both authors and his dad died in 1988 at 68 but his mom lives in Spokane and is still perking in 97. His dad was the ultimate do-it-yourself kind of guy. He grew up on a farm and was incredibly capable. He taught Lonnie a lot about fixing things and Lonnie was also working with him on some project around the house at all times. Lonnie was always a good student so coupling the fixer mentality and some decent academics he became a chemical engineer. From there he went on to management and now teaches managers. 

 

Lonnie worked for Chevron for 20 years in refining and had great teachers, coaches, mentors role models and management and personnel development. While with Chevron he became very interested in lean manufacturing and decided to start a second career as a consultant and cultural change. Now he focuses not on just lean management but on the human side of lean, what Toyota calls respect for people. Lonnie says his legacy is his kids in his books and a whole slew of soccer players he coached over the years who still stop by to stay in touch with coach. Lonnie currently lives in El Paso, Texas and is married with four adult children, the youngest one is in college and three others are married and combined have given Lonnie and his wife Roxana seven grandkids aged 15 to four months. Lonnie Wilson, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Yes, anxious.

 

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

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Well my current passion is lean manufacturing. Teaching it and creating a new and different culture in a business. A culture where they not only satisfy their clients but they satisfy their suppliers and they keep the people in the facility happy. It’s easy enough if they do it properly to have a good workplace with high morale and make a buck. 

Jim Rembach:    Most definitely. And your book is, Sustaining Workforce Engagement and I mentioned to you, for those who are watching on video can see that this book is very comprehensive. I mean, talking about the engineers’ mind coming through, in the pages it’s quite extensive. I initially asked you I said, who’s using this is a text book? And I would dare to say that you’re going to have significantly more using it as a text book then you do have right now for certain. Because when you start looking at the mechanics of workforce engagement—and here’s the thing when I start thinking myself about workforce engagement you refer to no manufacturing and things like that but engagement is something that is required and needed in all types of different industries. I mean, every single industry today is focusing in on some type of employee engagement opportunity and issue. So when you start thinking about the translation and the transposing some of the work that you’re doing in two other areas, what could you see as a potential barrier for that happening? Because I don’t see any.

 

Lonnie Wilson:   For it to happen in other areas besides manufacturing? There is none. There is none because the engagement issue is a human issue it’s all about people. And that’s what’s common whether you’re in manufacturing or teaching you’re in sales. It’s interesting when I was doing the research for the book of all of the information out in the marketplace about engagement less than 5% of it is in manufacturing. The majority of the research and the majority of the surveys and the data and the compilations and the Gallup reviews the vast majority of it is non-manufacturing. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so that leads me to believe a couple different things and I don’t necessarily want to speculate. The going back to the manufacturing world, which quite frankly has impacted every other industry is, we had the whole what I call the Taylorism effect. We had the humans that were required to produce some type of work output and that’s just the way that they were actually viewed. While engagement doesn’t necessarily take into consideration in order for you to be engaged you have to kind of pull away from that Taylorism and the issues associated with it. So manufacturing is definitely more geared towards the whole Taylorism piece. I would dare to say when you start talking about in a book some of the eclectic management skills and you talk about lost skills. Share a little bit about what those lost skills are?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Well I talk about two of them actually there’s probably several but there’s two that I really focused it on. The one that I find in this book’s common is the inability to delegate. People don’t delegate they assign. The difference being they kind of put boundaries on people and they don’t allow them to respond properly. At the core of the difference between delegation and assignment is a very simple concept and that is a person who delegates well tells his people what he wants to do and why he wants to do it. On the other hand, he leaves the how they go about doing it to them after all they’re the ones who are doing it they should be the experts in the field. And what I find is there’s too much micromanagement and too much weak delegation where they not only tell people what to do and seldom tell them why, usually that’s a missing piece. And then the third thing is they imbue them with all the house that it needs to be done and very often they box them in. So they’ve got a situation where they give them an assignment but it can’t be done because the resources and the methods conflict with the overall objectives.

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so when I start looking at—and you talk about it in the book, the system’s, the systemic approach, the system’s thinking associated with workforce engagement, what are some of the things that kind of stand out to you as, again I want to say opportunities we see that we have a lot of them and I don’t want to keep focusing in on the negative aspects we have a lot of opportunity when it comes to workforce engagement, where do you see them?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Well, I think the biggest thing is for people to simplify and humanize their thinking. One of the first things I do when I’m teaching people workforce engagement is I ask them, tell me about something that you can do all day long maybe even through the night and what is it that gets you going about that thing? And so people will talk about their hobbies and all kinds of their applications instead of their vocation. And so what I find out is if you can get people thinking about and answering the question, why is it that some of your people can get deeply involved in hobbies? What is it about the hobby that causes them to do it? What is it about volunteer activities? Some of your people—I’ve had discussions with managers who will spend 20 30 40 hours a week outside of their job as a volunteer doing basically what they would do anyway in their normal job but they just go crazy doing the volunteer activity. 

 

I just recently spoke to a guy who’s an accountant for a church and he hates his accounting job but he loves his job at the church, it’s the same thing. What’s the difference? As soon as you encapsulate and understand those differences then it’s pretty easy to translate that into making changes in your culture making changes in your workplace so your people can be not just productive but healthy and happy about it.

 

Jim Rembach:    To me I think it leads into what you were talking about in the book going into the six eclectic management skills. Share a little bit about what those are.

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Well the skills are—I just call them eclectic skills because they’re skills that people I think are taught in most of their management training but they’re not emphasized enough. And when you emphasize them and you focus in on them you get to the heart and you get to the core of what causes people to do what they do. The last one, the key one to me is just amazing and I call it questioning and integration instead of telling people what to do ask them about things. And then learning from that create an ongoing dialogue where you can take the best of both people and integrate it into a common solution.

 

Jim Rembach:    When I start looking at what you talked about those two lost skills converting them into more of the modern skills and what we’re seeing in as far as the workforce is concerned where are you finding that most people are seeing some gains in?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Strangely enough the biggest impact I’ve seen, particularly recently, and I think it’s just because I’m more tuned into it and I’m paying a great deal of attention to it is that managers have lost the concept that there are also supervisors. And they spend their time worried about the machines particularly the finances and they’re forgetting about the people. One of my mentors along the way told me he said, Lonnie, you take care of the people they’ll take care of everything else. And I think people have lost a lot of managers have lost that and their myopically viewing the spreadsheets and the balance sheets and the monthly reports and the quarterly profits and forgetting how they got there.

 

Jim Rembach:    On the service side in the book you talk about the power of the frontline supervisor and I think I’m hitting on there. When you start getting outside of the manufacturing world you start talking about, especially in today’s economy for us in the (11:44 inaudible) about servicing it’s about providing some type service and at the frontline level a lot of it is about   handling or managing the interaction it’s doing transactions it’s doing something as a point in time delivery of a service and then therefore moving on to yet something else. There’s still metrics associated with that, it’s like, okay, so how many times did you do that in the hour? How long did it take you? All of those metric components that the frontline supervisor may be looking at. And one of the things that we often find too in the servicing world is that the person who is actually the individual contributor moved up to that position of the frontline leader and therefore the skill development did not come along with it. That’s why I created the Call Center Coach Leadership Academy for customer service operations and contact centers is because typically it’s a sink or swim scenario. So when you start talking though about the shift that has happened in the past couple decades and the people who are moving into the frontline today versus people who moved into the frontline say 20 years ago,  what are they dealing with today that they never had to deal with before?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Oh, wow, good question, I really hadn’t thought about that a great deal. But I think structurally in terms of getting the work done I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference. If you’re a manufacturing first-line manager that kind of the same old stuff. But however in today’s world people have changed a lot particularly since the like say the 50s. If you go back several decades at that time people were intrinsically loyal they were just pleased as could be to have a job and now it’s different and people used to think of a job as a way to get money and now a job is a way to get money and then have the time to be able to use it. And so there’s a whole other dynamic that’s coming into play. 

 

But the big advantage that we really haven’t captured and I mean North America, South America I see the problem in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, everywhere is that 50 or 60 years ago a lot of these people came to work at the at the entry level as a machinist or as a call center person some of them didn’t even have a high school education and now these people not only have high school education a lot of them have two-year degrees four-year degrees that maybe or not maybe the other degree in the literature and they’re working in a manufacturing plant but they’re talented they’re immensely talented much more talented than they were before. And if there’s one thing that my Japanese clients almost to the client you better than my Western clients is that they tap in to that knowledge base they tap into that motivation of those people they tap into their desire to make things better they tap in their desire to contribute and thereby for all kinds of other people to work at innovation and creativity. So I think singularly that’s the biggest thing that I’ve seen over the last several years is can these supervisors unleash that talent in their people?

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, well that brings the whole question of motivation, science of motivation, the leading in the managing of motivation, into play. When you talk about motivation what does that mean from your perspective?

 

 Lonnie Wilson:   Well, interestingly enough one of the things—I teach the three rules of motivation, I discussed them at length in my book. The first rule is don’t try to motivate people. They come to work motivated and people say, well they’re not motivated now, that’s because of the way in which they were handled while they were there and people don’t feed their own intrinsic motivators they don’t give them the opportunity to be autonomous they don’t give them the opportunity to show their competence and grow their confidence and then people become demotivated. The second rule is don’t demotivate the people. There’s a million ways in which people demotivate people and very often the sad part of it is they demotivate them by doing things that they design that are well-intentioned. They’re just wrong they try to bribe them with parking spots and tickets to the hockey game and the people don’t need to be bribed what they need to do is have the opportunity to contribute at the workplace. And then the third rule is learn to use the intrinsic motivators. And that’s the key that’s why people love this volunteer work and that’s why people love doing their hobbies because they activate these intrinsic motivators. As a matter of fact, an interesting thing I learned while I was researching the book where the people who’s a landmark psychologist in the field of intrinsic motivation is a fellow named Dr. Edward Deci at Rochester Tech and he said Lonnie, these are not intrinsic motivators these are intrinsic needs. The difference being if they’re satisfied health and well-being ensue if they’re truncated then ill-health some form of illness happens. It might be stress it might be anxiety it might be depression it might be boredom, he said boredom is the most common one. And so the psychologists don’t talk about intrinsic motivators they talk about intrinsic needs and when that finally gelled in my mind and set in I said, wow, this is a revelation. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so that leads me to think about something as you were talking where somebody was asking the question, what is a more powerful way in order to be able to engage people? Is it by incentives or is it by rewards? I think those are the questions and my reply is neither. 

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Yeah, exactly. There’s a great article written by a guy by the name of Hirschberg, I forget Hirschberg first name, but the subtitle is interesting it says and it was talking about workforce motivation and it said, forget the incentives forget the in words make the workplace fun for the individual. And they don’t mean fun in terms of playing basketball and shooting hoops they mean satisfying the intrinsic motivators. And then Hershberger goes on to talk about that and he developed something that’s very, very popular in the world of psychology that managers should deeply understand but almost don’t. I find very few who do it and it’s what they call Hirschberg two-factor theory. He says, there’s hygiene factors which are things that if satisfied create almost nothing if they’re not satisfied they create dissatisfaction. Things like money, benefits, and stuff. And then there are motivators and all of his motivators are the intrinsic motivators a sense of accomplishment, a sense of recognition, competency the work itself and his thirst  will prove in time and time and time again they’re golden. The bad news about that is he was writing in the 50’s and it’s still not well understood or grasped.

 

Jim Rembach:    For me when I start looking at this from a societal perspective I mean a couple things come out to play is that we want the quick fix. Just let me get to the performance whatever it takes that’s one thing not create a harm as far as bodily harm. And then the other thing is associated with the sheer money that is actually spent into rewards and recognition programs. We’re talking billions of dollars, how do you fight against that?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   It’s kind of an uphill battle because this concept of extrinsic rewards money, parking spots, hockey tickets, passes to the to the theater, and that type of stuff for improved performance of a cell or a line or even a whole plant. Obviously, people like that because they get some kind of a short-term benefit. But immediately after the hockey game they forgot what it was about and where it came from and they just don’t work. As a matter of fact, there’s a very interesting and revealing book written by a guy named Alfie Kohn, and it’s called Punished by Rewards, he goes through how the reward system in schools, gold stars and ABC letters actually work tremendously to demotivate people and discourage them from activating. When I try to teach this concept of motivation I just asked a manager I said, okay, you’re making 350,000 dollars a year if I paid you a million bucks would you be three times smarter? Would you do two or three times harder? And no two person tell you, I’m giving it all I got. And the next question the follow up question and the coaching question is, okay, so what’s different with Mary on the line? Is she not given all she’s got? And when you can get in their head and get them to see everybody else through their own perspective and through their perspective I’ve been able to make some headway with that. But sometimes that’s not so easy this concept of instant gratification is a monster, it’s a monster. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Well, ideas, I mean—needless to say we need a whole lot of energy and a whole lot of effort to fight the monster because we have to especially if we want that long-term value that long-term impact. We can’t keep putting short-term fixes on a long-term problem. Relationships and successful relationships and long-term relationships require an ongoing vision   and an ongoing path. But we need support to be able to do that and one of the things that we look at on the show in order to support us are quotes. Is there a quote or two that you like that you can share? 

 

Lonnie Wilson:   One of the things when you’re talking about relationships I think was Benjamin Franklin said that, successes miss by pin many people because it’s dressed in coveralls and looks like hard work.  And another one I liked was the one by John—is it Kenneth Galbraith? The economist? He said that, many, many people will see success but—no, no, in the matter of changing one’s mind, pardon me, many people see the opportunity and then just get up and walk on as if nothing had happened. And so people can see all kinds of things that will occur but when it comes to them changing themselves very often things like denial and things come into play –those are a couple that I have. I have those in in each of my books. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Those are very good ones. I mean, there’s also another one that’s on our refrigerator wall that says something to the effect of, I can’t—something about their behavior, it’s just how much time I spend in reading the refrigerator I’m typically got my nose in it. But it basically goes along the lines of, I can’t hear what you’re saying because your actions are drowning it out.  It’s one of those things, I even made mention this the other day is me growing up I always heard the statement of don’t do as I do as I say that makes it a little bit difficult to actually do what I’m supposed to.

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Actually that concept is—in my book I talk about three skill sets that people need to have and that’s one of the skill sets modeling that is part of the management team and it’s the third set it’s the set that solidifies everything. You can get people to change in the short term but if you want it sustained they have to be able to see that they’re willing to make the sacrifice as well as you’re willing to make the sacrifice. Are you willing to change? And when that happens—and to be honest with you Jim, if people are looking for model the family is a perfect one. I used to play this game, I coach soccer for 32 years, and the parents would come to the game and I’d play this game and I try to match the parents with the kids if you spend a little time just looking at them and watch them you don’t even have to have a protracted discussion with them. You can see the behaviors of the kids as a mirror of what the parents have taught them. And so a lot of management people twist and turn and trying to turn into an incredibly complicated science and some of it is, make no mistake about it, but there’s a lot of it that’s just down home common sense and a lot of it you learn at home, you really did.

 

Jim Rembach:    Well, that’s it, I think that’s some of the issues we have so much influence from a societal perspective that is outside of the home where some of these things happen and occur is really unsuspecting. I even remember going back many years ago when all of a sudden, my daughter at the time is six or seven years old, started getting this really sarcastic type of behavior and was really just being very curt and hurtful and I’m like, where did all this come from? And it came from a Disney show that she was watching. They were very, very sarcastic in their humor and stuff like that, and I’m like, stop watching that. And that was bold because their influences just can be something as a parent you definitely don’t want to have them display. And I would dare to say goes back to that modeling piece if all of your people are just around a certain particular type of behavior that’s being modeled you can’t expect them to do something different. Also when you start talking about you going through and getting to where you are now being the engineer looking at it from the lean perspective and all of that I would dare to say you had a lot of humps that you had to get over that led you to where you are right now what you believe. Is there a time that you’ve gotten over the hump that you can share with us?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Yeah, it was a few years back I was working with the firm and we’re doing a lean transformation and we’re doing it kind of in the classic method and it wasn’t working it wasn’t working at all. And the company was very, very pleased with what was going on but if you sat back and looked at it dispassionately you could say, we’re just not making much change. And basically the management was so ego-involved in it that they couldn’t see what was really going on. I was staring failure right smack dab in the face and I didn’t quite know what to do with it. So I sat down and did some discussion and one of the things was I talked to my pastor, the pastor was a lady, and she said, well, I don’t know what’s going on but your problem is hubris. And I said, hmm I thought about that a little bit and I thought about how the managers are treated and she was exactly right, it really was. What I was able to do then I said, okay, we’ve got to change this so we can turn it into a success. I figured out what we were doing wrong and I knew some of the things we were doing wrong, although I thought we could overcome them, but instead I came up with a ploy and I said, we need to try some of these new techniques in an individual facility. One of the problems that we had done is we tried to do it across the number of value streams and change the whole place at once. So I recognized that that was failing and I also recognized that they weren’t about to change it. And so what I did is I said, okay, let’s try it on a small scale. So we went into one plant and we changed one plant and in record time we tripled its productivity we tripled the profitability. The plant was barely hanging on with a 5% margin the last quarter they averaged 19% over the year we got him to 14%, morale skyrocketed, and employee retention rose like crazy. They were in kind of an expansion mode and hiring and luckily as we made productivity improvements there was nobody that got fired, this company would have fired on a heartbeat but they just hired less. I’d been very, very successful implemented a lot of lean initiatives and this one just didn’t work and I spent many sleepless nights thinking about it before we made some changes. But we came through with this kind of subterfuge, let’s try something on a smaller scale, and then once we did it on a smaller scale we were able to sell them that that’s what we need to do everywhere. And they kind of backed away from the approach at least several divisions did and we started making a significant progress. But I was scared to be honest with you I was afraid that it wasn’t going to work and it was my design and I was part of the problem. So that’s where I came up with a lean mantra that we use in all of my transformation and that’s, think small think fast and think lots of cycles to the PDCA cycle, don’t try to eat it all in one bite. No way at it. That’s one of the reasons why the sixth eclectic skill is disintegration. Because one of the things that happens is as you make change all kinds of sympathetic changes occur. Some is sympathetic and some is antagonistic and you have to be able to recognize what’s going on and respond to those. When we went through this initiative things did not go well and ultimately we got it down to where we did it in a small place we came up with a different model of transformation and away we went. 

 

Jim Rembach:    I think what you also described right there is something that we all kind of need to take into consideration is something that we deploy and then we make some iterations and then we do some testing we fail fast, I think even said that a moment ago, before we go and hit them all. And sometimes that’s actually the path that’s going to get you to your outcome faster even though we may say, oh, we have to take all of our time doing that? And there was a great example of, yes, because we wouldn’t have gotten there otherwise.

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Yeah, and I had been doing these lean transformations, for I don’t know a dozen years at least at that time, and it shows you how blind you can be by being close to something. One day while I was driving home from work I thought about this transformation it was going good and this thought popped in my mind and it said, well, of course stupid that’s exactly what Toyota did they didn’t have a grand plan and lay out this orchestrated with the set of resources and stuff they took on a problem they fixed it then they took up another problem and pretty soon they had some things that they found out that works and then they expanded it. When I learned that, I don’t know how many books I had read about the Toyota production system at the time, but it just never dawned on me in a practical sense how it was. Some of the stuff is not rocket science but it’s still sometimes we’re blind to it. I was blind to that. 

 

Jim Rembach:    I think that’s a great point. For me when I start thinking about some of the discussion that you and I have had off mic when I was talking about the work that you put together here I started talking about that higher education and I started talking about academic use you have a very robust, deeply researched, as I had mentioned this is a textbook. When you start talking about goals and aspirations and things that you have with where you are now and the work that you’re doing, share with us what one of those goals are?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   I really have three things that I want to really accomplish as I go forward. In the last few years working, I’ve worked for 50 years, I can’t stop because I love it and if I did stop doing what I do I just continue to work with nonprofits and volunteer organizations, which I still do a little bit of help it out my church and that type of stuff, but I want people to be able to take this beast called lean manufacturing and apply it in manufacturing and other places. It is just a fabulous tool that everybody comes out a winner. It’s one of the places where I tell people you can have your cake and eat it too. 

 

You can get profitability and improve quality you can get improve morale at reduced cost you can get higher productivity and improve morale all of these things are totally compatible. But because we have a variety of dysfunctional paradigms a lot of people don’t believe that they think if you’re going to improve the quality you got to prepare to invest the money well. Maybe you invest the ingenuity maybe you invest the time maybe you invest the engagement and get it. That’s really one of the things that I want to do. Kind of a subset of that is that along the way a number of people have helped me including my current mentor who is a fellow named Toshi

Amino. Toshi happens to be in Japan at that time, he usually spent six months here in the States and six months in Japan, he was the retired vice-president of human resources for Honda. He and I talked, not so frequently now that he’s in Japan, but we talk a lot and he was a tremendous mentor and an advisor to me. All along people have helped me out and so I’d like to pay that forward and let people learn from my failures as well as my successes. 

 

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 solution is 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:     Okay, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Lonnie, 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. Lonnie Wilson, are you ready to hoedown? 

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Yes sir. 

 

Jim Rembach:    Alright, so what is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Oh well, I’ve got my own paradigms that I need to overcome. 

 

Lonnie Wilson:   What is the best leadership advice you’ve ever received?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Be a good role model.

 

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

 

Lonnie Wilson:   I work hard. I study hard. I still read 30 to 50 books a year. And what I’ve learned is that we all have blind spots.

 

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

 

Lonnie Wilson:   I like to think that I’m a good role model.

 

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

 

Lonnie Wilson:   I can’t think of one but I can think of two particularly for manager. There’s a very, very good one written by—oh, geez, now as it escapes me, Situational Leadership it talks about how you integrate the tasks these people need to do with the work that needs to be performed and then as a supervisor provide the link so that they can be successful. He says something that’s just absolutely golden and that is that, the success of your people is dependent upon you as a supervisor your job is to make them successful. The second one is Hertzberg book I got it on my back shelf I could find it in a bit. The book by Hertzberg, he has really written several but he talks about motivation in the workplace. 

 

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/Lonnie Wilson. Okay, Lonnie, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. Imagine you were been given the opportunity to go back to the age to 25 and you can take the knowledge and skills you have now back with you can’t take it all you can only choose one. What skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   I think one of the things that’s helped me a lot as I’ve gotten older is I become more empathetic. I’ve been able to see into people better and understand what they were doing. When I was 25 I didn’t know everything but there were an awful lot of things I thought I knew that I really didn’t know and as you get older you get a little bit more humble. So I guess if there is one thing I would like to bring back to me back to that time frame to help me even grow better and faster would be to have a better sense of empathy.

 

Jim Rembach:    Lonnie, it was a pleasure to spend time with you today. How do people get in touch with you?

 

Lonnie Wilson:   Well, I’ve got a website it’s, www.qc-ep.com there’s a ton of information on there. Maybe 60 or 70 articles I’ve written, props for how to develop leader standard work and A3 problem-solving all kinds of lean tools and it’s got all my contact information. I make a deal with everybody who’s a student and that is that if you were ever a student with mind you’re always a student of mine. And those people were listening to this broadcast or in some level is student of mine so they can give me a call anytime they want.

 

Jim Rembach:    Lonnie Wilson, 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 a     fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

 

END OF AUDIO 

 

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Leslie Peters | Finding Time to Lead

Unleash your outrageous potential with Leslie Peters

Leslie Peters Show Notes Page Leslie Peters was testing herself to be perfect and realized she needed to be on her own quest. She reminded herself not to set expectations that keep her from doing things but instead have a sense of possibility. Leslie was born in Albuquerque, NM when her dad was in the …

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Douglas Gerber | Team Quotient

223: Douglas Gerber: How do you create high-performance teams?

Douglas Gerber Show Notes Page

Douglas Gerber was a Vice President at Pepsi when one of his regional managers gave him some terrible news. He was leaving for Coca Cola. Douglas found out he left because he felt he was not really part of a team. Douglas vowed to never again let that happen.

Douglas was born and raised in Portland Oregon. He’s got an older brother and younger sister and an 80-year-old mother still driving her Subaru around the hills of Portland! He has an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management, and is a Certified Professional Facilitator and Professional Certified Coach.

Douglas has always been fascinated by cultures and languages and during his teenage years, tasted life in France and Europe, and later in Latin America and Asia. That gave him the language bug, and he ended up studying and speaking eight languages. These experiences have also made him keenly aware of how cultures and groups of people think and interact. He has extended this awareness to business teams and discovered a talent and passion for supporting teams to perform at their best.

In 2003, after a successful 20-year corporate career culminating as a Vice President for PepsiCo, Douglas left to start his own consulting firm, Focus One. He wanted to share the benefit of what had worked so effectively for him by teaching other organizations how to build High Performance Teams. His transition into this field actually began ten years earlier when he had attended a corporate leadership program conducted by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, one of the fathers of executive coaching. After reviewing his personality assessment and several discussions, Marshall challenged him with, “Douglas, what are you doing in corporate? Everything I see from your assessment shows that you’d be a great executive coach!” At the time, he laughed off Marshall’s prodding, but his encouragement must have remained in the back of his mind, because years later Douglas found his niche as a leadership team coach, encouraging leadership teams to commit to achieving high performance.

Douglas is the author of Team Quotient: High Performance Leadership Teams that Win Every Time and his mission is to help team experience the fulfillment, thrill and exhilaration of working in a High Performance Team. Just as a winning sports teams share a compelling identity, so can a business team. Douglas’ legacy will have been to touch thousands of teams and team members to transform through their team experiences.

Douglas currently lives in Hong Kong, but has lived in ten countries spanning 4 continents. He’s married with two lovely daughters, and one bambino in the oven!

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

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

“Team Quotient is the intelligence of the team; how well does the team work together.” – Click to Tweet

“You actually need to measure a team, for the team to be able to get it’s hands around it’s team journey.” – Click to Tweet

“It’s the team that will make the leader successful.” – Click to Tweet

“If the leader does not have a great team the leader will be limited.” – Click to Tweet

“It’s not easy building a high-performing team, but it is imperative.” – Click to Tweet

“If you want to get a team that’s engaged you have to spend time on it.” – Click to Tweet

“To build a team you have to challenge the team, you have to get people engaged and you need to have some fun.” – Click to Tweet

“You want to spend time on the personal side because that’s going to keep the team together.” – Click to Tweet

“One of the key characteristics of mediocre teams is silo mentality.” – Click to Tweet

“The high-performance team is only 5% of teams.” – Click to Tweet

“High-performance teams think about the team first.” – Click to Tweet

“Once you experience a high-performance team, you never want to go back.” – Click to Tweet

“High-performance teams have a huge impact on employee engagement, satisfaction and the whole customer piece.” – Click to Tweet

“You’re not high-performance if you don’t know how to work with your customers.” – Click to Tweet

“Leaders are only as good as the teams they build.” – Click to Tweet

“You can think you’re a great leader, but if you can’t build a great team, you ain’t a great leader.” – Click to Tweet

“Unfortunately, sometimes we go to work and we don’t have that sense of belonging.” – Click to Tweet

“What is a company? A company is a series of teams.” – Click to Tweet

“It’s the team unit where you can really make things happen.” – Click to Tweet

“It’s your imperative to create the best team environment you can.” – Click to Tweet

“People spend too much time on the individual leader aspect and not enough time on the collective aspect.” – Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Douglas Gerber was a Vice President at Pepsi when one of his regional managers gave him some terrible news. He was leaving for Coca Cola. Douglas found out he left because he felt he was not really part of a team. Douglas vowed to never again let that happen.

Advice for others

Empathy

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Creating a true sense of leadership throughout the world.

Best Leadership Advice

Pay attention to your people. Your people make you successful.

Secret to Success

Having great emotional intelligence and really understanding where people are coming from. And being sensitive to the dynamics of team environments.

Best tools in business or life

When in meetings, getting people to talk about their personal lives.

Recommended Reading

Team Quotient

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

Contacting Douglas Gerber

Website: https://www.douglasgerber.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DouglasGerberTQ

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglas-gerber-ab9a2a17/

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

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

223: Douglas Gerber: How do you create high-performance teams?

 

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’s really going to give us some practical application to building better and stronger and higher performing teams. Douglas Gerber was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He’s got an older brother and a younger sister and an 80 year old mother still driving her Subaru around the hills of Portland. He has an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management and as a certified professional facilitator and professional coach. Douglas has always been fascinated by cultures and languages and during his teenage years tasted life in France and Europe and later in Latin America and Asia, that gave him the language bug and he ended up studying and speaking eight languages. 

These experiences have also made him keenly aware of how cultures and groups of people think and interact. He has extended this awareness to business teams and discovered a talent and passion for supporting teams to perform at their best. In 2003 after a successful 20 year corporate career culminating as a vice president for PepsiCo, Douglas left to start his own consulting firm, Focus One. He wanted to share the benefit of what had worked so effectively for him by teaching other organization how to build high-performance teams. His transition into this field actually began ten years earlier when he had attended a corporate leadership program conducted by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, one of the fathers of executive coaching.

After reviewing his personality assessment and several discussions, Marshall challenged him with, Douglas what are you doing in corporate? Everything I see from your assessment shows that you’d be a great executive coach. At that time he laughed off Marshals’ prodding but his encouragement must have remained in the back of his mind because year’s later Douglas found his niche as a leadership team coach, encouraging leadership teams to commit to achieving high performance. Douglas’ mission is to help team teams experience the fulfillment, thrill and exhilaration of working in a high-performance team, just as a winning sports team shares a compelling identity so can a business team. Douglas currently lives in Hong Kong he married with two lovely daughters and one baby in the oven. And he is the author, Team Quotient: High-Performance Leadership Teams That Win Every Time. Douglas Gerber, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Douglas Gerber:     I am ready Jim. 

Jim Rembach:    I’m glad you’re here. I’m really excited at the discussion that we’re getting ready to get into but 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?

Douglas Gerber:      Well, I really have two passions, Jim. One is as you—in the introduction you talked about all the countries I’ve lived in. My philosophy is, if you live in a country you need to understand the people and if you want to understand the people you have to speak the language. I’ve learned all these languages, so that’s my first passion, is languages. My second passion is working with teams and helping them move from a sense of me to we. That magic transition where the team moves from self-centered to concept of collective. So that’s my current passion. 

Jim Rembach:    Well and my gosh, I’ve really enjoyed—and so for me just to kind of give everybody an insight into how this works for me is I do a deep scan of books that I have the opportunity to interview authors and in your particular book I just found myself wanting to sit there and read page by page and so I am going to do that, I don’t do that for every single book I will be doing that for yours. I think I just learned so much about how to practically put together a high-performing team and there’s so much insight in here. But I think it’s really important for us to start with the definition of team quotient and team Q because there’s really two different types of TQ that you’re talking about. In the book you about a collective team TQ, which is that team’s ability to operate as a high-performance team. And then you talk about personal TQ, so is that individual component. You also have a table in here that talks about where people typically focus their time, effort, and activity and very little of it is actually going to need a team environment. Tell us about that?

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah. Let me just get started by—we all know about IQ and we all know about EQ they’ve been around for a long time. But I realized there was something missing in the leader’s arsenal and that’s something called TQ or team quotient. After investigating this I realized that nobody had actually investigated team potion. So I ended up trademarking, so it’s trademarked in four continents around the world. The idea is that team quotient is the intelligence of the team. How well does it work together? And unlike the individuals, IQ or EQ just personal, TQ is both personal as well as collective. So that’s what we have the personal TQ and the collective TQ. Personal TQ, says, what’s my propensity to work in a team? And collective TQ says, how is the team working together? And so there’s a score just like IQ score there’s a teacher score. The team receives a score and then it’s aspirational saying, how do you move forward in the future? So that’s the concept of TQ. And what I found is that you actually need to measure a team for the team to be able to get us hands around it’s team journey.

Jim Rembach:    So talking about that  that the team journey I think you also refer to something that we’re going to talk about in a little bit talking about the state of where that is. Talking about the imperative and the breakdown of where people actually invest their and energy is in personal development, for that time and efforts typically 40 to 70 percent if people development, it’s typically 20 to 40 percent and in team development prior to actually starting on their TQ and high-performance development journey it’s about 5 to 15 percent. However, in order to really do what you were talking about from a team perspective that team development after embarking on the journey the leader’s time and energy goes to 30 to 40 percent. You talked about many of the reasons for that and then the benefits that are apparent what do you see really coming out of that that’s most impactful?

Douglas Gerber:      I think the leaders, unfortunately have been misguided here. Because leaders spent a lot of time talking about—my own personal leadership or how I lead people or their vision or strategy and very little on how do I lead a team. This whole area of team development that leaders may spend 10 to 20 percent on it but actually they should be spending 40 to 50 percent on it because it’s the team that will make the leader successful. A leader can only do so much and if the leader doesn’t have a great team then he or she will be limited. So that’s why the imperative, the imperative is that the leaders need to spend time on their teams. Why don’t they do that? There’s a couple of reasons. One is ignorance. They don’t know the power of a high-performance team. Secondly, it’s not easy to build the team as any leader knows. I often ask people in my seminars, how many of you are married? Or how many of you have long-term partners? People raise our hands and say, is marriage easy? People say, no, marriage is definitely not easy. Well, if you’re in a team of 10 people just multiply that by 10 and now we know what the difficulty is. It’s not easy building high-performance team but it is imperative. And so that’s what we do we demystify this whole area of how you build it and how you do it. 

Jim Rembach:    And in addition as you’re talking and I started thinking about all that complexity and thinking about the magnification of it because I have multiple individuals that I’m now having to be married to essentially. Of course, now we know about the whole divorce issue and how that comes into play but for me I can see how the whole energy issue is really impacted. If I’m not putting energy into all of those relationships and helping them to work it’s going to end in divorce. 

Douglas Gerber:      That’s right, that’s right. Absolutely. And that’s why as a team leader if you just let your team go on its own you don’t put the energy into it, you’re going to have people leaving or you’re going to have people who are disconnected. One big buzz words of course is, engagement. If you want to get a team that’s engaged you have to spend time on it you have to but you have to pay attention to the team that’s engaged you have to spend time on it you have to pay attention to the team. 

Jim Rembach:    Another thing that I found really interesting here is you talk about lessons from team sports and applying them in business. There’s eight things that you have identified as far as successful sports teams and what they do and what allows them to be successful. You talked about mutual reliance, challenge to do your best, awareness, identity and pride, trust and confidence, success and performance, motivation fun, and then coaches encourage team commitment. Now, one of the things when I was looking at this and I was like, hmm, does this have some gender tendency to it because it seems like very male type qualities as a whole?

Douglas Gerber:      I never thought of it that way it’s an interesting thing. I don’t think that there’s a gender  issue around building teams. Let me give you one reason why, we take up the whole area of fun and some people say, well why do you’re talking about fun and teams? I’m going to back up and just say that I was working with European team and this Swiss guy got up and I said, we should have a break this is getting kind of heavy. And he says, why would we need to break this is for business we we’re not supposed to have fun. And I said, well that’s interesting and everybody else wanted to have some fun. So the idea is that to build a team you have to challenge the team you have to get people engaged and you need to have some fun and if you’re not doing that you’re not going to build a high performance team. So I would say fun is not a masculine thing or a feminine thing  but fun is something that’s actually really critical that people miss in that whole environment. Now let’s relate it back to sports, people who are playing sports or in great sports teams they’ll tell you that—we have so much fun playing these sports. It’s so challenging there’s so much energy and juice. And that’s the feeling you want on a business team or a corporate team as well. 

Jim Rembach:    You’re talking about business and corporate team I’m thinking about this teams at all levels at the frontline. One of the issues that you have about the frontline for a lot of organizations is the higher turnover rates, well heck you have that in executive level now too, but then the other thing is I’m thinking about this as a generational issue you didn’t have to talk about the whole dysfunctional and self-absorption piece as much as we have done with the advent of the whole  device devices that we now can sync ourselves into and loses ourselves into to me it seems like it’s becoming significantly harder to build stronger teams because of everybody’s connection. 

Douglas Gerber:      That’s absolutely true. I think there’s some wonderful things that have come out of the Internet age. One of them that has not come out of it is that a sense of face-to-face connectivity and this actually gets in to this incredible area which will be very important in the 2020s as team has become more virtual and so we’re seeing more and more virtual teams. And so what I say to people is that, look if you’re going to have a virtual team try to get together at least once a year that face-to-face connection is essential.   Maybe you can do it more than once a year maybe two times a year or four times a year,   but at least once a year get together that will make a huge difference in terms of the whole connectivity of the team.

Jim Rembach:    It’s interesting that you said that because I just had this conversation with one of my coaches yesterday talking about the power of proximity. In that if you’re working and leading a remote team where everybody is disperse in different areas you still have to pay attention to the power of proximity and you just have to do certain things to replace your face-to-face connections.

Douglas Gerber:       Absolutely. And also part of this is we’re on video here, videos a lot better than audio obviously, so where possible use a video and where possibly use life-sized video even better. But if you only have audio there are certain things you could do, one of them is that, you got to get to know each other. Share photos of your kids, of your holidays, spend a little bit of time at the beginning of the meeting talking about some personal things to make sure those connections are there. Because what happens is that people naturally will go into the tasks and then business when they’re talking on the phone they go right into the tasks. What you really want to do is the opposite, you want to spend a little bit of time on the personal side because that’s going to keep the team together. 

Jim Rembach:    It’s funny that you say that that’s one of the things that I coach all the time. People want to get on the phone and like, okay, we have a lot to do so let’s get to it. 

Douglas Gerber:      Exactly, it’s the wrong thing to do it’s the opposite. 

Jim Rembach:    Yeah, yeah it actually makes things more difficult to get done. Okay, needless to say you talked about assessing the team and all of that and you do have that in the book. You talk about the collective quotient health check for the team and then you also have it for the individual and then you can total up your score. Then you mentioned something about the aspirational components of trying to increase your health check score and that ultimately leads to something that you call the TQ mango.

Douglas Gerber:      Okay, I just like to say that when you do the assessment—one of things I found, and there are a lot of assessments out there and some of them are very complicated, you can do this TQ health check online, confidential everybody on the team takes it and it takes less than 10 minutes. It’s easy and it’s easy to get a hundred percent of the team members involved in that. And then you get your score and you get a diagnosis of what’s working what’s not working and your areas to improve. The starting this gives you the starting point, are you a dysfunctional team? Are you a mediocre team? Or are you a high performance team? So that’s the TQ mango. And at the bottom is this dysfunctional team. And I get a lot of dysfunctional teams, these are people who don’t talk to one another. This is what I call a team in a state of warfare. And believe it or not there are a lot of teams like that where you have different cliques there’s backbiting people are not getting along. I actually love working with those teams because to see them transform is very satisfying. 

Next level up on the mango and this is where most teams are, this is sort of mediocre teams. A mediocre teams are sort of (16:18 inaudible) the problem with mediocre teams is that you get stuck in a rut and you just keep going on as a mediocre team. One of the key characteristics of mediocre teams is what we call silo mentality. We all know what silos are, silos are those big cylinders, so silo mentality is when people come to the meeting saying, I represent my area I represent my department and I’m here to win I’m here to win my concepts, my arguments, I get my budgets approved etcetera, that’s silo mentality. So moving from silo mentality to team first, that’s the shift that we’re trying to make. Most teams that are in the mediocre area are in that silo mentality. You have a group of individuals coming together but they’re not a real team that’s a mediocre team. The high performance team, which is by the way only 5% of high performance teams it takes a lot of work. High performance teams are ones that—they do think about the team first. You have that sense of energy, you have that sense of passion they’re not in competition they’re actually supporting one another. 

Some leaders will actually say, oh, I like my team members to compete with each other a little bit. But actually what you want is you want people supporting each other not fighting each other. That feeling you get in being a high-performance team is unlike any other feeling out there. It is something that once you have that once you experience high-performance team you never want to go back. Like a sports team, championship sports team, if you ask anybody on a championship sports team what’s that like? They said, that’s nothing like it, same thing in a business or corporate team.

Jim Rembach:    It’s funny to say that I talking about sports, you’ll hear team members say, I love these people,

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it’s the same thing when you’re on a high-performance team you—here’s this concept of team identity. In other words, when you go to work every day, you’re driving to work and you’re thinking, oh, I’m going to go see all my team members. Are you excited about that? Are you proud about that? Or are you saying, oh, no, I have to go see my team members.  So it’s that sense of identity that you’re excited to be with your team members because it is challenging and it is motivational it is something that keeps you going and that’s what you want in a high-performance team.

Jim Rembach:    Gosh, when I’m thinking about all of this particular effort and activity and all of that I start thinking about that need for inspiration that you talk about. One of the things that we focus in on the show are quotes to do that. In the book you have tons of excellent quotes because it’s loaded with a lot of case studies. And so for me when I started thinking about this particular book I’m like, okay, Good to GreatI that has sold millions of copies but you one of the things about this book that is even better is that it gives you the case studies in how to do it. 

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah, and in fact, I actually call this book the, Leaders Operating Manual for Building High Performance teams. So it’s not only what are you achieving but it’s the how to. One of the things I say the leaders don’t make this too complicated, you’ve got tons of ideas in this book and you have a roadmap but if you only take two or three of those ideas and you implement them well with your team you’re going to make a lot of progress. So don’t feel you have to go all the way, keep it simple. 

Jim Rembach:    Another thing too is I started thinking about all of this work and we’re going to get to your favorite quote in a second again there’s so many things in this book I want to talk about. I see that having this problem with dysfunction and being average and not being high-performing also ultimately affects two important things these days and that is the employee experience and then even more importantly the customer experience so if you don’t have a high-performing team the customer is victim. 

Douglas Gerber:      Absolutely. I actually want to tell you a story about that. I was working with the team in Singapore and they were on the lowest quartile of customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. There was a lot of stars on the team but they weren’t working together well, we did a program and a year later they came back and it actually shifted that whole thing around could be that on the top quartile of customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. So high-performance teams have a huge impact on employee engagement satisfaction and the whole customer piece because you’re not high performance if you can’t have great customers and you don’t know how to work with your customers. 

Jim Rembach:    Without a doubt. Okay, so, down okay so favorite quote, I know you have several probably but if you can share one or two with us I think that would be fantastic. 

Douglas Gerber:      My favorite quote is, leaders are only as good as the team’s they build. You can think you’re a great leader but if you can’t build a great team you ain’t a great leader and that’s what I really believe. When I talk to leaders and I say, you’re really bright you’re a good strategy guy you’re really good at motivating people but if you can’t build your team then you’re really not a great leader. That’s my favorite quote and that kind of sums up how I think about this whole area of team transformation. By the way, I don’t talk about team building so much I don’t try to build teams it’s about team transformation. It’s not like a one-off event that you do it’s about a year two three years to create a transformation in this team. Just like a sports team you don’t build a sports team in  a couple weeks it takes years to build a championship sports team, same thing with business and corporate teams.

Jim Rembach:    That’s why you call it a TQ journey they’re going on their journey. Even when you started talking about the mango and you explained in the book you talk about of them being in a state of the part of lingo.

Douglas Gerber:      One other things that happens almost everybody’s been through the experience, you go on a team-building day, you do a rope score so you do something fun and everybody’s having a good time you get back to the office what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens everybody goes back to their old habits. This is why we don’t call it team-building we call it team transformation because what we’re trying to do is to transform teams throughout their whole working life and when they go back to the office that they actually are transforming through that experience.

Jim Rembach:    Well, talking about transforming talking about learning all those languages living all those different places all the different case studies you’ve been through—family all of that, I know you’ve had humps to get over and they’ve helped you get to where you are today. Can you share one of those stories with us so that we can learn from you?

Douglas Gerber:      I’ll go back to when I was a vice president in PepsiCo. We had a high performance individual named John. And John was managing a region, he came to me and he said, Douglas I’ve got some bad news for you. Now, if you’re in Pepsi and somebody says I’ve got bad news for you what do you think? You got to think one thing, the guy’s going to Coke. Sure enough, he says, Douglas, I’m getting a promotion, general manager of Coke. I said, John I know you can’t leave you can’t leave, he’s a great, great guy. So I went back to HR person, Linda and Linda saying, Oh, no. Six months later we’ve got a similar job for him. So I go back to John again I said, John, six months you’re going to be a GM for PepsiCo. He said, I don’t know Douglas I still want to go. I said, why else? What it is? Oh, salary 30% salary increase. So I go back to Linda, 30% salary increase. She says, no problem we can do that. Back to John and Johns says, one last thing Douglas, I don’t have a PA. And I said, well that’s not a problem I can get your PA, I don’t need to talk to Linda about that. But Douglas I don’t want any PA I want your PA. Do you think I was going to give John my PA? No way. So the question is did John leave? Yes, he left. Was it because of my a PA? No. The reason John left, and I found out through talking to Jerry one of the people of John, John felt that he was not really part of a team. He felt that he was a high potential guy and he knew that but he didn’t feel that sense of identity, camaraderie and energy challenge of a team. Those are my early days in PepsiCo and I vowed never again to let that happen. Those were actually days it was about there was about 20 years ago I started putting a lot of tension on how you create high-performance teams. The five years that I was actually a vice president PepsiCo I never lost one team member. We got some promotions but never lost one team member. That was something that was very instructional for me. One of the things people had said to me, because a PepsiCo you have a lot of turnover, they said, how’d you do that? And I said, well I really focused on the team. I never really focused on making sure that people were happy and motivated and stimulated in this team environment. 

Jim Rembach:    Gosh, so many things started running through my mind when you started talking about that and how it really affected that whole turnover component. We often talk about how important community is. We all say that we need to have the feeling and sensation of being part of something that’s much bigger than ourselves and that applies everywhere.

Douglas Gerber:      The sense of belonging is a need that we all have. Unfortunately, sometimes we go to work and we don’t have that sense of belonging that sense that we’re part of a community and that community is our team.  We might get that with our family, we might get that from a spiritual perspective but a lot of people they just don’t feel that. It really corresponds to a basic need that we all have.

Jim Rembach:    In addition, when you talk about the work of today and going forward it’s just going to continue to grow—it’s about teamwork, it is about teamwork. Very little of it is really about individual contributor anymore it’s all about—even individual contributors working as a collective. 

Douglas Gerber:      Yeah, that’s right. Just think of a company. A company is a series of teams. There might be ten teams, there might be a thousand teams. But company is actually a series of teams. It’s the team unit where you can really make things happen. And so as a leader of that team it’s your imperative to create the best team environment you can. You’re absolutely right. And I think this is why people spend too much time on the individual contributor aspect and not enough time on the collective aspect. 

Jim Rembach:    When I start thinking about the work that you are doing with TQ you said you’ve actually trademarked and all of that in a couple of different countries, I see a lot of benefit that could be derived by organizations to use this work. But when you start thinking about goals and all of that, what is one of your goals that you have?

Douglas Gerber:     One of my goals Jim is actually to get people to start thinking about teams and team development just like they would any other development, the idea of team quotient. Let’s take this whole team thing and measure it lets benchmark it and take it as one of the most important things that we need to do, so that’s the first. The second thing is that I truly believe that if you have high performance teams people are going to be happier they’re going to be more fulfilled at work. It really is and it really is a formula for happiness because you think about the experience of working in a team like that you’re going to be very motivated. So I think for me that’s one of my missions—to help people transform them fulfill through the team environment and experience.

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

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Okay, Fast Leader legion, it’s time for the Hump day Hoedown. Okay Douglas, 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 a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Douglas Gerber, are you ready to hoedown?

 

Douglas Gerber:      I’m ready to hoedown. 

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

Douglas Gerber:      What’s holding me back from being an even better leader today is creating that sense of true leadership throughout the world on a global sense. 

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

Douglas Gerber:      Best leadership advice I’ve ever received is that pay attention to your people your people make you successful.

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

Douglas Gerber:      One of my secrets is having great emotional intelligence and really understanding where people are coming from and being sensitive to the dynamics of team environments.

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

Douglas Gerber:      One of my best tools is to—when we are having meetings getting people to talk about their personal lives before they start talking about business.

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

Douglas Gerber:      Good to Great, you mentioned that before. Good to Great was very inspiring. Before I started, this is interesting, before I came with the name team quotient I was actually thinking the name should be good to great teams but I wanted something a little bit more unique.

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/DouglasGerber. Okay, Douglas this is my last hump day hoedown question:  Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25. You can take all the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you. Actually you can’t take it all back you can only take one, so what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Douglas Gerber:        I would definitely take back skill and knowledge of building a high performance team. The performance team. The reason why is that I now realize that that’s the key to success. 

Jim Rembach:    Douglas, 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?

Douglas Gerber:      You can contact me at douglasgerber.com, my website. And I’d love to be in touch with you send me an email I try to answer all my emails and be in touch.

Jim Rembach:    Douglas Gerber, 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 

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