Elevating Team Dynamics and Fueling Engagement with Kevin Herring

Unlock the secrets to transforming your team's dynamic and supercharging your leadership skills with the wisdom of Kevin Herring, a virtuoso in team building and leadership development. We discuss what it takes to evolve from a group of individuals working in silos to a high-performing, cohesive unit where purpose and belonging reign supreme. Witness how an unconventional approach to management can lead to breakthrough performance and discover the power of letting go of traditional leadership to empower and inspire your team.

We dissect the critical relationship between leadership and employee engagement,  share insights into the red flags of a disengaged workforce, and provide actionable strategies to breathe life into your team's work ethic. From fostering commitment over accountability to ensuring everyone grasps the impact of their role within the organization, this episode is a treasure trove for leaders eager to cultivate a thriving, passionate workplace.

Learn how authentic communication, from town hall meetings to cross-departmental shadowing, can bridge the gaps between teams and align everyone toward a shared mission. This isn't just a conversation; it's a masterclass in creating a workplace environment that buzzes with innovation, collaboration, and above all, a shared sense of success. Join Kevin and me, Jennifer Furlong, in this enlightening expedition into the heart of what makes teams tick and leaders succeed.

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Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:07

Welcome to the Communication 24-7 podcast, where we communicate about how we communicate. I'm your host, jennifer Furlong. What are we talking about today? I've had something on my mind for quite some time and that's team communication. We really have not had an opportunity to dive into this really important topic. The great thing about working in an organization is, I think we all can agree the people are the most important asset. But man, people are hard. People are difficult. Sometimes we don't always get along. I brought in an expert to talk with us today about how to build teams. Take your work group from a group to a team, improve the performance, and we're going to talk about some of the leadership skills that might help improve the team communication along the way. As we all know, in this area, communication is critical if we're going to have a high-performing team. I would love to say thank you to Kevin here for being willing to be on the show and share his expertise with us. Kevin, thank you so much. How are you doing?

Speaker 3: 1:40

Doing. Great Thanks for having me Appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Awesome. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? What's your origin story? How did you come to be a consultant and working specifically with organizations to improve leadership and team?

Speaker 3: 1:59

I started early in my career. Even before I started college or just starting college, I had a summer job working on an assembly line making food dehydrators. The interesting thing about it is that it was a self-directed work team that was never set up to be that. It just evolved, it just happened somehow. There were no formal leaders. In fact, I was there for weeks before I found out who the manager was. He was never on the floor, never anywhere to be seen. It's not like there were informal leaders springing up to fill the void. It didn't work that way. It was an entire team all working together, people setting their own goals or setting goals for the team and setting production records week after week through the entire summer. It was just an amazing experience.

Speaker 3: 2:54

I already knew I was interested in business. I was interested in how organizations work, how people work together to make organizations successful. That was just such an interesting experience that taught me so much about what it takes for a team to be successful, to work together as a team. What does it not take? We have a lot of assumptions about leadership and what leaders have to do for a team to be successful and to be productive. That blew a lot of those theories out of the water. Me that became a quest, a real passion, which is why when I went to college I studied organization effectiveness, organizational behavior and industrial organizational psychology, had an opportunity to work at a corporate-wide transformation. It was pretty phenomenal at Magma Copper Company early in my career. It was a showcase company written about in journal articles and books. Harvard Business made a movie of some of the work that we were doing there. It was really a great experience.

Speaker 3: 4:18

Again, I learned so much from that understanding what is required for people to work independently, to have self-directed teams, for people to integrate as members of a team, creating a unified organization or group of people working toward a common cause. I saw the amazing productivity that came out of that. My goal after that was to discover what the key ingredients were. What did you have to have in place? What can a leader do to put those things in place in their teams? How can we do it faster? We used to say it takes five to seven years to turn around a company to transform the culture. Magma Copper did it in about half that time In time. I always believed that if we understood the 80%, we could have it happen far faster than that I was shooting for a year found that we could really do a lot of that in three months. That's amazing.

Speaker 3: 5:21

If you have the key ingredients and you have the resources, you can make the key things happen in three months.

Speaker 2: 5:27

That was really interesting. The very first example you gave with the self-running team, where you really didn't even know who the manager was for a while. There wasn't clear leadership coming, but it still worked. What made it work? Because it seems like that was like lightning in a bottle. From your observations now you have the advantage of looking back. After all the experiences you've had. What were some of those key ingredients that allowed that team to function so effectively that really there wasn't even a necessity for a manager or leadership to step forward?

Speaker 3: 6:13

Let me first tell you what it wasn't. It wasn't a group of hand-picked A-team people to come in and just do amazing things. It wasn't a group of highly skilled people that were specifically chosen. It wasn't a homogeneous group. It was a very mixed group of people different ages, genders, nationalities. There were students, there were middle-aged people, there were a couple of families that were Southeast Asian refugees trying to start a new life. Some of those individuals spoke almost no English.

Speaker 3: 6:56

It was challenging On a lot of fronts. I think any leader would find it a difficult team to figure out how to manage effectively, yet somehow we pulled it all together. I think some of the key elements of any team things that we know are important for people to produce at high levels, to be highly engaged are things like a purpose, a purpose for being there in a sense of belonging. In other words, there's a cause, there's a big picture, there's something that we're all united around that allows us to create something bigger than what we could on our own, and that team was able to do that. Now, we didn't have much information about the larger organization, although we understood the final product, because we produced the whole thing and so we didn't have just pieces of it and we could see the whole process on the entire line. There it was in one facility, so we understood how what each individual did affected another, and we also could tell what our numbers were. We had the information and we didn't wait for someone to share it with us. In fact, nobody ever did.

Speaker 3: 8:16

We knew that the people at the end of the line, the packaging group, knew what our final numbers were, and so the funny thing was when somebody would write a number at the top of the board in front of the group of the assembly line. So you'd come in one day and you'd see some new number up there. And there are a couple, three individuals that typically put the number up just on their own and say today's goal is some number. And people didn't seem to pay a lot of attention to it until about lunchtime they started getting excited about trying to reach the number and people would call out and say, okay, where are we? And you'd hear a call back from way back in the vows of the packaging group. Some number would come back, and so this shouting would kind of happen periodically through the afternoon.

Speaker 3: 9:09

When you got closer to the end of the day, then the calls for data became more frequent. Right, everybody wanted to know how did we stack up against the goal? And we almost always well, actually, we always made the number. I don't think we ever missed a goal in the ensuing days. We probably didn't make it every time, but we stayed pretty close to that number until a new number was put up on the board and we went after another goal. So the communication, I think, was important because we knew what the score was, we knew how we were doing, we had challenging goals, we had a sense of belonging and purpose, because we all kind of saw this as something that was, if nothing else, interesting to do in a boring job and people just want to leave at the end of the day feeling like there's some sense of satisfaction, some mastery, and that was our way of doing that.

Speaker 2: 10:17

It sounds like y'all were able to, despite you describing it as a boring job. Y'all were able to bring in some exciting elements, like maybe even a little bit of competition. Here's our number let's see if we can get this done and then motivating one another to be able to at least get close to the number, if not reach the number or surpass that number. And it sounds like there was a lot of transparency as well and that everybody was really clear on what the mission was and the why and how are we getting there, and there seemed to be onion from everyone, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 10:57

And it was a good collegial group. People helped each other out.

Speaker 3: 10:59

when somebody was slowing down and falling behind, somebody else who was a little ahead would go over and help them catch up, and we would rotate on our own just for interest, say you got caught up, got a little ahead, you could move to another area and work on something else and people just did things naturally to keep it interesting. And I think the point there is to recognize that most people go to work intrinsically motivated to do a good job. People want to contribute something meaningful and leave it into the day with a sense of accomplishment. And I think that in most organizations we have a leader who tries to do some of that. Most of the cases does it wrong and, as a result, people don't leave like they're satisfied that they have a sense of purpose. They don't feel like they've accomplished anything significant.

Speaker 3: 11:59

And the reason is that when we talk about communications and organizations, particularly in teams, we think about what are we told about how to communicate? And when we're trying to raise productivity or performance of a group, what does HR tell us that we're supposed to do? Almost always we're supposed to clarify expectations and hold people more accountable. That's absolutely the worst advice anybody could give a team. It's actually the worst advice.

Speaker 3: 12:29

So clarifying expectations is like a parent-child kind of thing. Why don't we simply create the conditions that enable people to understand the big picture and what needs to be accomplished, like we had in that food dehydrator assembly line. We were able to do it ourselves. We didn't have a manager to mess it up for us. We didn't have someone trying to clarify his or her expectations. We were able to understand what was needed and so we just tapped our inherent desires to do a good job and built on that. And that's what happens in an organization that has the right kind of information, the right kind of conditions to succeed. Holding people accountable is what it's a compliance driving kind of activity.

Speaker 3: 13:19

You don't get commitment, you don't get intrinsic motivation, you don't get high performance, you certainly don't get engagement. So holding people accountable is an activity that is manipulative in nature. It's where people micromanage, they pressure people, they basically take on the responsibility for success instead of leaving it in the hands of the individual who otherwise could be accountable on their own. So I think that's the type of communication that we do in teams in most organization causes us to have those extremely low engagement rates that we find when Gallup does their surveys and finds that we've got less than a third of the workforce that's truly engaged at work.

Speaker 2: 14:04

You know, I've worked for different organizations and I've been a part of teams that just we were vibing right, I mean we had it just like how you were describing. The communication was fantastic. We all understood what our mission was and we wanted to do a good job. We wanted to be able to leave work feeling like man, that was a really good day. We did a damn good job.

Speaker 2: 14:30

And then I've also worked for other organizations where it was a little more challenging to even just get motivated to start the day, because by the end of the day you just feel completely beat up. Sometimes you even feel demoralized, because you're asking yourself why, what's even the purpose of me doing this? Because it seems like, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't even matter. How can leadership recognize those cracks in the pavement? You know when you can tell that your employees are starting to feel demoralized, they're starting to question. You know the why. They're just not having a good time at work and they're not buying into what's happening. What does a leader do? I guess number one how do they recognize the cracks in the pavement? And then number two what's the first step? Because it can be an overwhelming task for some organizations.

Speaker 3: 15:31

Sure, yeah, I mean the obvious thing to look for is people's engagement levels. I mean, if people are becoming not just emotionally exhausted but physically exhausted as a result of the emotional effort that they're putting into things and the dissatisfaction they're experiencing, then you can usually kind of see that that people don't have as much drive, as much enthusiasm If they're not taking initiative, if they need to be told everything to do, if, when there's a problem, they always bring it to you as the manager. I mean that should be a sign that people are not taking accountability, they're not taking things seriously, they're really looking to somebody else to do things and they're working in compliance mode. They're not really committed, they're not energized to be at work, which is what you need. You want people to be enthusiastic about coming to work and doing the work and looking for better ways to do things and that sort of thing.

Speaker 3: 16:33

So, yeah, the common signs are that people often start to bicker. They find petty things to argue about and disagree with. They work in silos, they don't share, they don't cooperate, they don't collaborate, handoffs get messed up, communication People say things like well, I didn't know that, nobody told me that when there was a problem, blaming starts occurring.

Speaker 3: 17:01

All those things are symptoms of the bigger problem. So I think some of the things that are really important for a leader to do is create that sense of purpose. You do that by helping people understand why it's important for them to come to work and do the work. What are they there for in the first place? Make sure they understand what they're doing, what they're producing. If it's a product, what's the end product? If they're only doing a piece of it, let them find out what the final product is and to see it, if that's at all possible, help them to understand what the customer needs and receives and why the things that you do are important to make that happen the right way. So the big picture understanding the organization, understanding the product, understanding the market that the business is in is really important so they can identify with the business as a whole, understanding what other teams do or other individuals in the organization do at critical junctures of the process, so that you can see how you're all connected together to create what it is that you output to the customer. So that helps create that purpose, at least the beginning of that. Now people understand.

Speaker 3: 18:25

Okay, here's why I'm here here's why what I do is important and then help them understand how they impact others' work and learn how to connect better with each other so that they see themselves as part of a whole system, not just a bunch of isolated silos. They're a part of a whole system and the leader needs to make sure that that is emphasized. We're all part of this bigger thing and if we work together well as individual team members, our team can accomplish more, and if we work as a team with other teams, the organization can accomplish more, can be more successful, more effective. So those are some of the things that we need to do is create that sense of purpose, so people know why they're there and also have the information to tell them how they're doing. How is our team doing at any given point in time? How do I know whether I or we are doing a good job or not, so we can make corrections?

Speaker 2: 19:34

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Speaker 2: 20:23

I want to ask you a follow-up question regarding making sure that the team will really all the different departments in the organization understand where they fit in the overall mission. My question is is there a more effective way to communicate that to all of the departments and others? I know some leaders like to send out a weekly update through email. Some leaders like to have the town hall meeting once a month. Some leaders like to have shadowing.

Speaker 2: 21:03

You take someone from one department and have them shadow somebody in another department, so they can learn what they do. Do you find that there are certain ways to accomplish that that are more effective than others?

Speaker 3: 21:17

Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 21:18

I'm a big fan of frequent direct communication, face-to-face communication, even if it has to be virtual. For people who are working remotely as much as possible, getting people physically in the same space, I think, is important. When that's not possible, they'll at least have some ability to do a face-to-face conversation, and a direct one, not one that goes through three or four hands before it finally gets communicated to the people who need the information. I love town halls, I love large group events where senior leaders talk directly to the core workforce instead of passing it down through the line. I think those are very powerful for helping people to really get, and if there's transparency and there's good communication, that can be very powerful helping people feel part of that bigger cause, that bigger purpose. The other thing is I love taking a tour of the site. Have the front-line leader or manager take the team out and, if it's at all possible, if there's a plant site, for instance walk through the plant and see who does what, Get people connected to those other parts of the organization. Help them see how they all fit together and know who they're talking to when they have to get on the phone and talk to somebody about a problem to fix or something. Those are very important. I think the studies show that people trust their front-line leader, whoever they report to, more than anyone else. That's where the highest trust level is. If your manager gives you information on a need-to-know basis, you're not going to have that big picture perspective because everything's withheld from you or so many important pieces.

Speaker 3: 23:15

We need to err on the side of too much information. The more transparent things are, the more trust then can be built, more credibility leaders have and the more people have the same kinds of understanding that those at the higher echelons in the organization have. We look at, most organizations still operate pretty much in a hierarchy and a pyramid-fashioned hierarchy. It may be a little flatter in some cases than it's been in the past, but people at the top have the most information, the most control over things, the most decision latitude and so on. They delegate that down to lesser and lesser degrees as it moves down toward the people at the front lines doing the work. What happens is, by the time those people the core workforce gets the information, they've got a very select amount of information that's been screened and filtered. They've got the least amount of information, yet they've got the most critical role of producing the product or servicing the customer. It's a terrible situation.

Speaker 3: 24:30

I always tell people be transparent. Give your employees, give your teams, everything you get. Share too much information. Give them everything that give them so much they don't want it. I think that's the key is what you're trying to do is build their capacity to contribute at a higher level, to know what you know, so they can make the decisions they need to make, instead of relying on you as a leader to make them. For them To do that, you've got to be transparent. There's very little that is confidential, that can't be shared. Obviously, that has to be respected. The vast majority of information that gets withheld can easily and should be shared.

Speaker 2: 25:18

What are some of the reasons you have learned by working with these managers? What are some of the reasons they withhold information? It does seem when you see an organization that's having some of those difficulties and if you have employees who are just there uninformed or they're misinformed or they just don't have no idea what's going on and it seems like there's this stoppage somewhere, usually it's that mid-level manager who's making that decision. Oh, they don't need to know that In your conversations that you've had with all these different organizations. Why is that? What are some of the reasons you have found that these managers do that? So that we can, I guess, maybe pinpoint and work on those skills with those managers so they can avoid doing that to their employees.

Speaker 3: 26:19

That's a great question. It brings to mind a group that we worked with, a plant that was really struggling and we ended up working with them for about five or six months and they increased productivity over 50% during that time. One of the things that held them back was that people just didn't have information. They didn't know the status of things, they didn't know that they were in trouble, that they were not producing at a high enough level, that they were going to lose a contract, an important contract, and a lot of those kinds of things. The reason is the leader just didn't want to share information. Because the leader was worried that he was responsible for employee morale, which was his first mistake. He was thinking that morale was in his hands, that individuals can't manage their own morale. He had this parent-child relationship going on where he was protecting everybody from anything that would be hard for them to handle. As he put it, he didn't share information. When budgets were going to be cut 25%, he didn't tell anybody. Wow.

Speaker 2: 27:31

They're going to find that out somehow.

Speaker 3: 27:34

Exactly I'm in this big meeting and we talked about it. People were shocked. It's funny because I raised the issue because I thought everybody knew, but apparently that wasn't the case. The leader said why is it that people don't know this? He said why didn't they think they needed to know what could have happened if people in terms of the choices people made if they had that information? Some people said yeah, when I ordered supplies, I wouldn't have stocked up. I would have just gotten what we need for the term and just continue to do that until things got better. We wouldn't be buying in as large quantities, we would operate differently. Those were some of the things that this leader needed to learn that his communication was affecting how people worked. They weren't making good decisions because they were making decisions in a vacuum. He wasn't providing the information. I think that's it. There are a couple of things. One is people think they have to control other people's responses. When they do that, they get manipulative.

Speaker 3: 28:48

They don't share all the information or they spin it to make it more palatable or as they think it will be anyway. The other thing is, when they withhold information, they're really trying to get people to… be objects. They're looking at people as objects to be moved instead of people who are capable of making decisions, leading adult lives, managing adult lives like they do at home, and they don't believe that people have the capability of doing more than they're charged with doing. And that's part of the difficulty is, with whole information we don't enable people to have the latitude to make decisions or we control resources so tightly that they don't have the resources they need to fully apply their expertise in the work that they do. Then pretty soon they get demotivated and they really don't want to come to work. They really get frustrated and that's when we see people start to shut down emotionally and become less engaged, because demotivation is a learned response. I mean people learn it by the experiences they have at work.

Speaker 3: 30:13

And the leader is the primary person who creates those conditions.

Speaker 2: 30:16

Yeah, so treat them like the adults. They are no more parent-child relationships going on in the workplace. That's a pretty difficult thing to balance. I think a lot of organizations today and probably most. I might be wrong, but probably most organizations today, at least the culture within those organizations still operate on that accountability type of mindset. So how does one make sure that the employees are doing what they're supposed to be doing while treating them like the adults that they are? That makes me think of performance reviews. That's always a contentious topic within any organization. Do we have performance reviews? And if we have performance reviews, what kind of performance reviews and how often? And what questions should we look at? So on and so forth. So how does that all fit into this new paradigm of no more parent-child relationships going on?

Speaker 3: 31:27

Yeah, because those are compliance activities. Right, all the things you just talked about, those are compliance activities. You don't get high performance from that, you don't get high engagement from it, and so I like to compare it to popcorn. So how do you make popcorn? You put popcorn in a pan, you put some oil, you put some heat on it and, with the conditions are right, it pops. And so managers like to think that people are like popcorn. Sometimes they can just throw them in the pan, the workforce, so to speak, or the work.

Speaker 2: 32:01

Who like the fire?

Speaker 3: 32:02

Yeah, like the fire, and if they're any good they'll pop, if they're not any good, they won't, but if they don't, we turn up the heat and put more pressure on them to try to get them to pop.

Speaker 2: 32:12

If they still don't pop, they're a dud.

Speaker 3: 32:14

They're a dud and then they're discarded, right and yeah. What people are forgetting is that the conditions have to be right. Even in popcorn, you can't use just any oil, and some oils work better than others, and the heat has to be right, and so on. People are the same way. I mean we all have the ability to succeed when the conditions are right.

Speaker 3: 32:34

I worked with a group I was working with a couple of groups at once and I was asked to help out these engineers, and what I discovered when I did an assessment of the organization is they had a bunch of engineers, a large group, very smart people, a lot of engineering PhDs, and they worked very, very hard, but they were failing miserably. They worked on this project that was way behind schedule. It was way over budget. They weren't going to meet the next milestone. That was clear and I figured it was.

Speaker 3: 33:09

The program would probably get canceled than it was because the leadership was unwilling to make changes. They were unwilling to do the things that would create the conditions for that group of people to be able to succeed. They were highly talented people, they had a lot to offer and they were wonderful people to work with, but there were underlying conditions that had to change for them to be able to succeed, and leaders in that organization were not willing to make those changes. And that's the issue here is in any organization, if you want people to be successful, you want to create a high-engaging kind of workplace where people can bring their whole selves to work, and work with purpose and be able to produce at high levels, then you have to create the conditions for that to happen.

Speaker 3: 33:59

And those conditions are not around compliance activities, not created from compliance activities. They are created when you accept the inherent motivation that most people bring with them to work and you nurture that. And you do that by creating a whole system's view that you're not operating selfishly in your own interests at the expense of others. You set the example and you instill that in your team, that you act in the interest of the whole team and business unit and you do things like focus on finding better ways to do things and you don't punish experimentation, you encourage it. You encourage people to try and fail and try again, and you set up conditions that enable people to want to bring their ingenuity, their ideas, their creativity, their innovation to bear on situations to help the team to be more successful. You have to create the provide the information to help people know how they're doing so. If you and I impact each other in the work, then I need to know what you need for me and you need to know what I need from you, and we need to make some commitments around what we're going to do to help each other. And so those kinds of activities help integrate us and unite us as a team and help us to work together for that greater purpose, the big picture that we've shown everybody. So everybody knows why we come to work and what's important.

Speaker 3: 35:33

A great analogy or example of that is the business of professional sports, which is, in fact, a business, and if you go into look we did the Super Bowl not too long ago and you look at, what is it that allows those teams to gel as a team that enables them to perform at such incredibly high levels? Well, all these things are in place. Everything we're talking about at a major level, far better than any other type of business that we get involved in typically. So they know the marketplace. They know who the other players are or who the other teams are, and they know what the standings are. They know what's at stake in every game. They know what the strengths and weaknesses are of the teams and of the players. They have a game plan. They know what each needs from the other to succeed in executing the plays. When they play, they have immediate feedback. You have a scoreboard. They've got all kinds of data that is being tracked that they get, in many cases, instant access to, so they know how they're doing.

Speaker 3: 36:51

If it's football, there are lines on the field. There are first down lines or goal lines, there are all kinds of indicators of progress and success, and so they can make adjustments. And, because they have this sense of belonging, they're part of a team. They're not in there just working independently of everybody else, but it's an integrated, interdependent group of people trying to accomplish a goal together. If something goes wrong, everybody's accountable. Nobody can say, well, it's not my problem, or I did what I was supposed to do, it's now in their hands. That doesn't happen when there's a loose ball. Everybody is responsible for making the right decision to get that ball under control and do whatever needs to be done with it, which is why people don't stand around waiting for the ball carrier to pick it up.

Speaker 2: 37:50

That's right. I love the sports analogy when you think about it working in teams. We all do have different strengths and if we can learn how to play to those strengths, we don't have to be the best at everything all the time when we're working together. I so there is a certain amount of ego that we have to be willing to let go of.

Speaker 3: 38:13

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 38:14

Yeah, do you have those types of conversations as well? Do you ever go in and you can tell immediately there are some big egos in this room? How do you have those conversations? Because you're right In a team, you might have a certain strength in one area, I might have a certain strength in another area, and it's okay to say, hey, you handle this part, because I know for a fact that I'm probably not going to do as good of a job as you would in that area. How do you call people out on their ego trips?

Speaker 3: 38:51

Yeah, humility is an incredibly important attribute for leaders, and knowing that the leader doesn't have all the answers doesn't need to have all the answers. In some cases, that doesn't even need to have very many of the answers. If they are doing their job as a leader and they're building a team's capacity by teaching them, by sharing information and giving them opportunities to operate more independently from them and become more self-reliant as a team, then they're going to get far more out of that team. People are going to be more highly engaged and they're going to produce at a higher level. But what happens is often because egos are involved. People don't want managers, don't want to share information, as like we discussed earlier, and they're often afraid that people are going to make the wrong decision and they're not going to look good to the right people, and I was asking one of the questions I asked. So if you are afraid to delegate or to let go of this particular activity or responsibility, then let's talk about what's holding you back. What is preventing you from doing that? What are you concerned about? What would happen if you did that? And they said well, what I'm afraid of is what would happen is they'd make the wrong decision. Okay, great, let's explore that. Why would they make the wrong decision? And we go down that path and we find out that, well, because they don't know what I know they wouldn't make the decision I would make, and maybe it wouldn't be a good decision, but it's not the one I would make. Or maybe they don't have enough information, they don't have the skills or whatever. They don't have the context. Okay, what's the solution to all those things? If they don't have the information, what's the solution? Give them the information right. If they don't have the skills, what's the solution? Build their skills. If they don't have context, what's the solution? Share the context, build their understanding. That's the leader's role.

Speaker 3: 40:57

And I think at some point, a leader has to decide what they want to do. Do they want to build a high-performing team or do they want to keep things status quo? Because they already know how to keep things status quo. That's easy. Just keep doing what you're doing.

Speaker 3: 41:12

I say, but if you want a high-performing team, if you want people to be highly engaged which they're going to have to be if you're going to have a high-performing team, then you're going to have to do something different. And so here's the question If you are uncomfortable with that, then Are there pieces of what I'm teaching you or telling you that you can, you can grab a hold of and you can act on it? And if the answer is yes, then we have a start. Okay, let's start Making some of those changes and move forward and see what happens. If the answer is no I absolutely can't buy into this then are you willing to take a leap of faith and Let go of the past, let go of your fears and give it a chance to work? Because if you are, we can make the changes and you can see the results and then you'll be on board. But if you're not willing to at least take a leap of faith, then we're never gonna get there.

Speaker 3: 42:11

And I can tell you, there was a guy in a we worked with in a company as a large natural resources company, and his division had always been the highest producing division in the company for years and he was a tough guy to work for and people really struggled Working for him, but he but he did produce results. And at some point the CEO sat down with them and said said, mike, I got to tell you, yeah, our company is not succeeding, we've got to do some things differently and we know that we're not managing correctly. So we're gonna do things that will help engage employees to be able to, to bring their more of themselves to work, produce more, get more engaged and participate more in deciding how the work it's done. Because we're missing all that great Information that people have, all that institutional knowledge, because we're not tapping it right now we're just dictating to people what to do and how to do it, and and so, mike, that means you're gonna have to change.

Speaker 3: 43:23

And he said behind the highest producing, you know, manager in the in the company, I mean why would, why should I have to change? And he said because what you're doing is not enough. What everybody else is doing is not enough. Everyone is going to have to change, including you, mike. You have to produce at a higher level. We all do. And and and he said well, what do you want me to do? And he said and the CEO said well, look, people hate you. They hate working for you.

Speaker 2: 43:56

It would be hard to hear.

Speaker 3: 43:59

But, but, but. But they do what I say. And he said but Mike, that's not good enough. We have to have a different environment. We have to create the conditions that enable them to choose a higher level of commitment and accountability, instead of people trying to hold them accountable all the time and getting compliance results. And so we want you to change. We're gonna teach you how to change and we want to help you Any way we can, but you have to make the change. If you're not comfortable doing it, if you're not willing to do that, then let's have that conversation and we will help you with whatever. Whatever we can do, we'll help you to transition to some other organization where you can Continue to be successful. But to be here, you're gonna have to make the change. But it's your. It's your decision. We're not gonna pressure you. You need to decide, but we hope you'll decide to stay and make the changes, because we think you can do it and we think you'll be a great asset.

Speaker 3: 44:54

So Mike did it, gave him a couple of weeks to think about it. He wrestled with it because he didn't think he could make those changes. But eventually he came back and he said you know, I'm scared to death. This is not the way I've been operating for 25 years and you're telling me to change my personality in a sense. But I'm willing to give it a try. I'm gonna need your help. I'm gonna need a lot of patience and the CEO says Mike, you've, you've got it. We're backing you, we want you to succeed, we're gonna, we're gonna help you succeed and I know you can do it. Well, mike did work at it. He worked really, really hard and he did turn around. He did become a different manager completely and the whole organization did so much better after that. It was just remarkable the results that they were able to achieve by creating the conditions that that that brought more of People's engagement and therefore more productivity from them.

Speaker 1: 45:54

Inadequate communication skills can be costly in terms of relationships, reputation and revenue. From staff to the C-suite, all employees deserve quality training that will help them be successful. If your company is looking to improve employee morale and relationships, contact communication 24 seven today by visiting wwwcommunication247.com for a free 30-minute consultation.

Speaker 2: 46:18

So if you're the leader in in that example and you approach the manager and you explain to him yeah, the they're gonna be some changes and and we would love for you to be able to come along with these changes, and the manager Instead said no, you know, and decided to leave, does that mean the leader? What did the leader fail in that instance? Or is that actually a good thing? Is it one of those things where, yeah, they're, they're kind of weeding themselves out?

Speaker 3: 46:49

So yeah, I think it's a good thing, because I think that if I think the senior leadership has to decide the strategy, the organization, what do we have to do to be successful? And and in I give another example was when I was magma copper company and they went through their transformation, initially there were a lot of the leaders who said I don't want to operate that way. It's always. It was a mining company, I mean, they had a very old-school kind of way of operating and and In some there were a number of unions and they had Some animosity there and they just said I'm not gonna work that way. And and so the CEO, burgess Winters, said well, you know, you have a choice. We're not gonna force anybody. Or we don't want you to stay if you don't want to be here and make the changes, because the train is on the track, it's going this direction, we'd love to have you on it, but if you don't belong on the train, we don't want you to sort of Drag in your feet and slowing it down Somehow. We need you to make a decision, so make it now. We'll give great packages to make it easy for you to Take your severance and then make a transition somewhere else.

Speaker 3: 48:03

But you have to make a choice, and when I work with senior leaders, quite often I'll have people who are uncomfortable, expressing their own vulnerabilities to me because I'm an outsider and or they, they truly are insecure. And they don't. They, they aren't willing to even say that they have some, a need, that they need to change anything, and sometimes that's exacerbated by HR leaders who are don't have the managerial courage to tell them what the problem is, or that they even have a problem. And so I get people sometimes I say why are we having this conversation? Why am I here meeting with you? And they'll say I don't know. The HR person said it'd be good for me in my development. I said well, what is it that that HR person wanted to see?

Speaker 3: 48:58

You do you know what are some of the things that you struggle with the most?

Speaker 3: 49:02

Well, I don't struggle with anything. I don't have any needs, you know, and so so I always go to the leadership first and I say I I want you to spell out exactly what you want to accomplish here from my coaching this individual, and then we're gonna have a three-way meeting. The three of us are gonna sit out and you're gonna tell that person what that, what it is and and how important that is. In other words, if that's a line in the sand kind of thing that they have to change, then you need to say that and I'm gonna be there to coach you if you struggle with it. And and we have that upfront conversation. So it's really clear that something needs to change or something, they need some help with something and how important it is that they make the shift, so that when I'm working with them, they understand that I'm there to help them do that and or help them choose to do something else if they decide it's that's just not a change they're willing to make.

Speaker 2: 50:03

When you go into these organizations, does compensation ever Come up? Because I know there are a lot of employees, you know, when you ask them, well, you know, do you like your job? Yeah, it's okay, but you know I should get paid more for what I do. I mean, that's just, that's something that you hear all the time. You know, across the board, you know, I, there are some industries that are notorious for not paying their employees.

Speaker 2: 50:32

Well, what kind of how do those conversations go? You know, and I don't know, I might be a little jaded, just a little bit. You know working, having worked in the academic field for so long, and you know, being an adjunct in the academic world, I can tell you adjuncts don't get paid near Enough of what you know, what, what they're having to Deal with. You know it's as far as the workload and how many students they have, class load and this, that and the other, and make sure you have a master's degree. You know, and they what? All of these qualifications for this TV, tiny little paycheck, and so do you ever have to? Do you ever look at the entire structure of the organization and say, okay, wait a minute, we're okay, all of this. Having said all of this about. You know the, the structure and Performance, and you know all of this other things. Let's talk about pay. Let's talk about you know, do you?

Speaker 2: 51:36

ever have those types of conversations as well.

Speaker 3: 51:39

Absolutely. You know, every organization has to decide where they want to be relative to market rates. Most, most pay relative to some market rate. Either they have a lead policy where they're leading the market, or they have a lag policy that they they want to stay so much behind the market and just play catch up every year. Or sometimes I just say we're gonna always be at market and that's, that's what we're gonna pay, and of course then there's always variable compensation that can be added to the mix. I know that I'm a fan of leading the market. I just think that people it's like when you look at organizations that have a customer service arm, people who interface with directly with their customers, and they're the lowest paid people in the entire organization and even sometimes paid lower than market rate.

Speaker 3: 52:43

You think, well, is that really what I want? Do I want my customers talking to underpaid, overworked, frustrated people? That just doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Speaker 2: 52:57

Yeah, customer service is not easy. It is actually imagination.

Speaker 3: 53:02

But we do that all the time. It's just amazed at how much we do that. The people who are doing the core work, producing the products, interfacing with the customers. We got to be smart about how we pay them. I'm a big fan of paying above market. It's an investment that's well worth it to help us attract people into the organization and to retain them.

Speaker 3: 53:25

Money isn't going to retain them if the conditions are horrible. When I say conditions, I don't mean just the working conditions are hot or dusty or they have a boss that yells at them, kind of thing. But if you don't have the conditions that nurture engagement, that create that sense of purpose and belonging and so on, the autonomy, the things that people thrive on if you don't have those things, then money isn't going to keep them anyway. They'll go where they think they can get that. But if we pay people well, we use variable compensation. I don't like the most incentive plans because they're poorly done. They really don't accomplish anything. I like programs like gain sharing programs or things that share in the gains. If we work together, we work hard and do well, that there are some sharing involved, that everybody gets to participate in. It's tied directly to specific things that are accomplished, the revenue or the profits that show up for the business, and people can see their impact on those things. If they can't see their impact, it's meaningless anyway.

Speaker 2: 54:52

Yeah, or if you have a-. Yeah, I know of some organizations that do have that kind of like a profit sharing type of plan, but it's only for certain level managers, Right, that seems like a pretty good way to invite I don't know just unhappiness and dissatisfaction with the employees across the board. It just doesn't seem like that's a good idea to me.

Speaker 3: 55:27

Yeah, I've known managers, in fact, who have received bonuses that they share with their teams, because their team members don't get bonuses, and they know that it's the team that enabled them to be able to receive a bonus. Yeah, also, we've set things up in some places where we've encouraged the teams to have a pool of money that every month or every quarter or something, that they could vote as a team to reward somebody who has done something above and beyond or accomplished something really special. They don't have to, but they can if they would like to. There's some rules around that so they can't just pass the pot around and rotate who gets it or things like that. But if they truly believe as a group that there is someone who's deserving, then they can vote them a bonus. That's pretty powerful. I think the recognition from the team is pretty meaningful, and then the financial bit sweetens it for them.

Speaker 2: 56:33

Yeah, what a fantastic way to show that you appreciate a lot of the service that someone provides for an organization to be able to do something like that have a vote. I'm sure that would be pretty popular in some organizations. Absolutely yeah. Kevin, I cannot believe it. We've been talking for 56 minutes now Our is coming to an end. This has been such a fantastic conversation, A lot of food for thought, just some really great advice for leaders, managers at an organizational level.

Speaker 2: 57:18

Just things to really think about in order to create that environment where your employees will feel appreciated and they can understand the larger picture and feel like they are contributing in a way to help that organization achieve that mission. I know that there are probably a lot of questions that still remain for some of our listeners who are in those positions management and leadership positions on employee engagement and how to get employees excited about being at work again. How would they contact you if they were interested in continuing this conversation?

Speaker 3: 58:05

Yeah, I would love to answer questions or talk with people. I would be happy to take calls or however you'd like to reach out to me. The easiest way is just go to superchargemyteamcom. Superchargemyteamcom will take you to the Ascent Management Consulting website. It will take you to their tools. There there is information. There is an article section Learning Center. You can also fill out a form. You can call, you can email. There are ways that you can reach me and reach our organization. If you have questions, you'd like to just talk a little bit about what you are dealing with and get a little bit of advice on how to proceed. We would be happy to help.

Speaker 2: 58:50

That's fantastic. Do not allow your team, your department, your organization to implode. You have resources here that you can certainly just reach out and contact Kevin here. That's wonderful. I'll make sure to have the links in the show notes for everyone, all the listeners. Any parting words of wisdom as we wrap things up.

Speaker 3: 59:16

I think it's important for people to challenge some of the conventional advice that they've received the idea that they need to be responsible for motivating people. Stop trying to motivate people. Stop trying to hold them accountable. Do the things that create more compliance and less drive out the commitment. One of the ways that you can help, as a manager, build a different kind of an organization and support people's engagement is to do what we like to call ask, don't tell. In other words, stop telling everybody. Start asking questions. When people have concerns or questions or a problem to solve, ask questions. Give them an opportunity to think through it. Give them an opportunity to make the decisions as to how to proceed. Begin sharing responsibility with them so that they can grow from the experience. They can learn more about the business and learn to operate more as a team, dealing with the day-to-day kinds of things that come up, instead of having to come to you as a manager.

Speaker 2: 1:00:31

Fantastic advice here. Here, as the communication nerd, asking questions is a wonderful way to explore, build those bridges and give them a sense of empowerment as well. That's fantastic advice, kevin. Thanks again for being a guest on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. I absolutely enjoyed having this conversation with you.

Speaker 2: 1:00:58

A lot of things to consider, I know listeners. I hope you were keeping track of all of the golden nuggets that you were just provided. If not, make sure you just listen to the episode over and over again, because there were so many things packed into this episode. I guarantee you, even if you just try one teeny, tiny little thing, that little tweak could make a big difference within your team. I encourage you to just give some of these suggestions a try. What's the worst thing that could happen? It could change for the better, absolutely. You all have a wonderful rest of your day and we will see you next time. Bye, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and a review.