Managing the Way

Content is summarized from the podcast:

-From an early age, Matt always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur. His dad is an entrepreneur. He ran radio stations, then bought a radio station that ended up not working out for him. But Matt always saw this passion around him.

-Received an accounting degree from Hope College

-He started selling product out of a car at Michigan State University. He was hoping to get into Meijer, a midwest  superstore, but was turned down several times.

-That product [bean bags] ended up turning into the number one selling product at Meijer, which is just awesome.

-Everything was working with the business, but they weren't making a lot of money. But they were able to invest everything back into the business and the business was growing. At that time, they saw this competitor  that was opening up stores in malls. So they did it. "Well, we know this industry better. We know the furniture landscape. We know housewares. We know all these things. Why don't we have our own concept?" Up to that point in time, everything is working. Why wouldn't a retail store work? So, they go gangbusters man. Because why would you just start with one when you can open three? So, they opened three stores.

-What ended up eventually happening was that they were focusing all of their time and effort and funds trying to build up these stores, but lost sight of the core. What happened was one day the bank came to Matt's business partner, George Julius and said, "George, we're thinking about calling the loan unless you sign on it." And he's like, "Well, I'm not going to sign on it." We got ourselves into this mess, we'll get ourselves out of it. Luckily, with time, they were able to convince them, "all right, don't shut us down." They know these stores are losing money. They know how to run this core business. So, They shut down the stores and refocused on the core business, so it was the first time they had ever really we lost money.

-They needed to create a vision statement, mission statement, core values, and start identifying these things. And so, they did what most companies do: have a small core group of leadership team at that time and round table it.

-They created a strategy of 140 pages, but what good was that? If you don't open it up after you create it will it really change culture?

-If you were to look at their one page strategic plan from 2012 to 2019, the one common thing there is simplicity. How can they make it simpler so they can communicate to everybody, not only theirselves but the rest of their team.

-Expect the best, screw the rest

-Comfort Research asked: How can someone submit an idea on how they are going to find a better way to do something?  And how do we make sure that we're not the suggestion box company, that we're not just that company with a little wooden box somewhere in the plant with the little slot on top and someone has the guts to come by and just dropped a suggestion in there? Nothing's ever done with it. It's simple: The Fab award. They will support them with time and money and other resources for the employee to make it happen. It's a $2,500 award. You get half up front because you won. The other half comes when you try to implement, and we're not talking about successful implementation, just how are you trying to find a better way. Did you try something? If it failed, fine. You tried!

-They focus on the three core values, every quarter we're able to go through all three of them and award an employee each month who shows this value.

-To be able to celebrate people like that, that warms my heart in a really big way.

-Culture and core values needs to start at the top.

Managing the Way is sponsored by Waypoint HQ. Waypoint is a breath of fresh air. A solution that enables you to be the manager that people want to work for. It helps you in holding regular, focused, intentional employee one-on-ones that will result in valuable feedback and a forum for coaching your team.

Content is summarized from the interview:

-Professor at Calvin University

-PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Akron

-Co-founder and partner of Talent Asset Advisors

-Feedback hasn't changed for a long time. This is really true of a lot of things in management. A lot of what is done today in organizations has been done the same way for 50, 70 even 100 years in some cases. This notion of this annual performance evaluation, performance review, is one of those.

-A big changes that's happened in that is decoupling of the evaluation part, the rating part of performance, and then the feedback part, which is intended to be much more development and future-looking.

- Annual meetings are created to give a numerical rating, but at some point the employee goes into a flight, fight, or freeze mode, and cannot retain any information after that.

- There's some sort of evaluative component that needs to happen, and I'm a pretty big believer about candidness, creating a culture ... If you're going to have trust and have candid conversations that an employee always knows where they stand.

-The estimate right now is about 30% of the Fortune 500 have eliminated their rating process, and that's been over about the last five years that that's happened, so it's a pretty big increase, that's a pretty big trend.

-Rank and yank was the term, and very transparent. I mean, the idea was this candidness, let's you know exactly where you stand, and if you're in the top 20% GE's going to do everything to make your employee experience great, give you the opportunities because we really want to invest in you and we don't want to lose you. The middle 70% would be those employees that are doing their job, they're contributing, they're doing what we're asking them to do to and they're fine as well. And then that bottom 10% would be employees that re not contributing the way they need to the organization, and they'd be give a year notice saying, "You got to get out of that bottom 10% or you're not going to be around next year." It worked for GE for 20 years. GE became extremely successful under that, but what happened is a lot of those managers did great work and they went off. A lot of them became CEOs of other large corporations and they said, "We're going to do things the way we did things back at GE," and tried to impose it on their organizations. And one thing we know about management is best practices is kind of a misnomer. There aren't these things that we can really take from one organization, put it in another organization and expect it to work, because it depends. It depends on the strategy, the culture, the values, all sorts of things. Time and time again this rank and yank system that got implement at dozens of the largest organizations failed, failed miserably. Stirred the pot in terms of people's dissatisfaction with performance evaluation and feedback.

-We've tried for a really long time to train managers to be better feedback providers. There's almost no evidence that it works.

-The feedback sandwich...doesn't work. People are waiting and asking, "What's that critical middle piece that I'm waiting for?" And then again, as soon as they kind of hear it they disconnect and, "I don't really remember what was said at the first, and I didn't even hear what was said at the end, and I don't really know how to improve because I'm just upset about what you said about how poorly i'm doing."

-If we're equipping them to be better feedback seekers and receivers, there's an idea that they're controlling their work life a little bit more, which would create higher levels of autonomy as well.

-Look at the things that a manager does, it's around control, it's around delegation, it's around evaluating and being a judge, when we're saying really what we need them to be is better listeners, understand things and coach more.

-Most organizations think they do have an engaged workforce, and most organizations actually don't have an engaged workforce.

-Employee engagement is a leading indicator of a lot of bad things, of a lot of lagging indicators. Things like reduced revenue, reduced profitability, higher turnover, all lagging indicators. It's already happened. Employee engagement is one of the best leading indicators for us to get on top of it before those bad things happen.

-The only common factors around effective leadership is humility.

-For you to see great increases in the employee experience and employee engagement it's going to have to be trust and psychological safety becomes more and more part of the culture.

Managing the Way is sponsored by Waypoint HQ. Waypoint is a breath of fresh air. A solution that enables you to be the manager that people want to work for. It helps you in holding regular, focused, intentional employee one-on-ones that will result in valuable feedback and a forum for coaching your team.

Welcome to episode one of Managing the Way! Today we talk to Denise VanEck, owner of Thought Design, about helping teams achieve mental shifts that create lasting change in culture. Denise goes through a wide range of ideas, but all focus on the idea of being safe at the workplace and being able to think outside of the box without being hurt by that. 

Content is summarized from the interview:

-Last 35 or plus years of Denise's career has always involved learning, training, workshop, design, coaching. But at the end of the day, it's always been about learning.

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- Was Chief Learning Officer for a big financial services company. 

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-Six years ago, around the time I was turning 50, she decided that she wanted to create a space for people to learn and to learn how to learn 

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-She works with large teams within organizations. They may start with an executive team and then add layers and layers of people down through the organization, until they are able to achieve some shifts and culture and practices throughout the whole organization. They also work with smaller startup companies and even sometimes some solopreneurs that are part of  public programs. Anyone can show up and and learn in community kind of experiences.

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-It turns out that when a team finds themselves in the kitchen and creating a dish together, working together, whatever they're doing, there isn't really anything that they do back at work as a team that they can't replicate in the kitchen. They solve problems, they make decisions, they collaborate, they help, they support, they challenge, they give feedback. All the things that we do as part of our work can be replicated in an hour and a half, creating a dish together.

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-What Denise is noticing is that for many teams, things that used to work aren't working so well anymore. The world is getting more complex. Work is getting more complex, and teams are struggling. And it isn't necessarily that they're struggling because they're not competent, they're not smart, they're not good at what they do, or they don't like each other. Often, they're struggling because they don't have the tools to keep up with the complexity or the changes that they're facing and how work is getting done.

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-The majority of what people do is actually habit, including our thoughts. And if we think the same way we did yesterday, we're going to act the same way we did yesterday. At Thought Design, they create these really unique experiences to help people kind of zoom back out and go, "Oh." And then the design part is they get to redesign new ways of thinking, new ways of acting, new ways of working. And even understanding their work.

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-One of the things that our brains are paying the most attention to is certainty. And our brains are working every second of every day to assess how much certainty we have about our experience and how much we need. And so for all of us when we don't have the amount of certainty that we need, our brain takes us into a threat state, and it starts executing all this stuff to help take care of ourself and defend ourself. So what we are experiencing is this urgency. "I need a plan, I need more certainty." And when that happens, maybe some of the bad behaviors start to come out, right? So this is where the brain science can kind of be useful because when we know that, we can actually asses a situation and we can actually dampen some of that response by basically saying, "This is a moment in which this is what I'm certain about and this is what I'm not certain about." And ironically, naming the thing you're not certain about gives you some certainty.

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-Psychological safety is knowing that I can bring my voice, I can disagree, I can offer my ideas, I can really be myself. I can take risks, I can fail all of those things in there. I am not going to be hurt; that I can do that, that this is a place where that can be done. We do that for each other. So trust and psychological safety aren't exactly the same thing, but they're all meshed up together. You can't have psychological safety without trust and vice versa.

Managing the Way is sponsored by Waypoint HQ. Waypoint is a breath of fresh air. A solution that enables you to be the manager that people want to work for. It helps you in holding regular, focused, intentional employee one-on-ones that will result in valuable feedback and a forum for coaching your team.