Tim joins us today to talk about how better conversations lead to better relationships, which in turn lead to more engaged employees.  Companies and managers who understand and embrace this philosophy will experience better relationship and better culture and ultimately a positive impact to the company bottom line. 

Where to find Tim:

• [email protected]
• www.realretention.com
• Conversational Management Certification coming in February

Transcription below (May contain typos...):

[00:00:00] Tim: [00:00:00] But if you really want your organization to flourish, you have to have better relationships. And if you are going to have better relationships, you have to have better conversations. And that's really what coaching focuses on. 

Matt: [00:00:14] Good morning. This is Matt Cunningham and I am with Tim Cosby today on our podcast. And I'm excited to have Tim here with us. Tim is the owner and founder of real retention and as a fantastic coach and author and a speaker and educator. So I've known Tim for quite some time now, and we've just become great friends, as well as just having the opportunity to do some work together.

And I'm excited this morning to have Tim join us. So Tim, welcome and thanks for yeah. 

Tim: [00:00:43] Hey, thanks Matt. Thanks for having me on appreciate it. Yeah, 

Matt: [00:00:47] absolutely. So one of the things I wanted to start out this morning with is I've known you for a little while now, and I know a little bit about where you came from in your past and career and things like that, but.

Tell the other people what got you into [00:01:00] coaching, what your career path was and how you got where you are today? 

Tim: [00:01:04] Yeah. Good question. I've always wanted to help people grow and so throughout my career, I've done some work for some nonprofits. I've been in higher education. I've worked with, teenagers work with college age students and.

All along the way, my focus has been really to help people flourish. So 10 years ago I started a coaching practice because I thought that coaching was really. Probably the most effective way to help people move from where they are to where they want to be. That was in 2010. And what happened through all of that is through that, just the experience of learning, how to coach and coaching people.

I've met people along the way and realize that this coaching approach that. I learned was [00:02:00] something that could easily be transferred to leaders in organizations and having worked for a number of organizations throughout my career. I realized that most of the leaders that I worked with really didn't know how to do this.

And so they, they were more focused on telling and kind of command and control and I'm the expert. And I'll just tell you what to do and that kind of a thing. And I never really felt that was very effective. So along the way, my co-founder and I, Mike McGreevy realized that this approach that we had learned in coaching of helping people to change without telling them what to do was really effective.

With managers, with parents, with teachers, with whoever, it doesn't really matter what you do. This approach was really helpful because it helps you to build better relationships with people. And [00:03:00] that way the people that are in your circle, the influence are more likely to stay around a lot longer. So in 2016, we started I started another company called real retention.

We first started out training people to coach. So we were training professional coaches along the way, which we still do. But we decided let's just focus specifically on organizations and specifically on helping managers. To develop a new way of relating and building relationships with employees so that they could keep their employees longer.

So we just said let's call it real retention. And we're just going to help companies retain their best people. So that was in 2016. And we're still doing that. It's 

Matt: [00:03:49] incredible. Thanks for sharing this story. First of all it's incredible to see that something as simplistic as having better relationships might actually help you keep your people.

[00:04:00] I think oftentimes people don't realize how important the value of a relationship is. So as you discovered that as you've gone through the last four years of this this process, what are some of the big aha moments you've had? 

Tim: [00:04:12] Yeah, good question. I think one of the biggest things that we realized along the way was that if you want your company to flourish and and grow, and he does if you don't, then I guess there's other things that we could talk about.

But if you really want your organization to flourish, you have to have better relationships. And if you are going to have better relationships, you have to have better conversations. And that's really what coaching focuses on. And so we developed a product called conversational management because we felt that at the end of the day, everything comes back to conversations.

And if we could help leaders, managers, whoever have better conversations with [00:05:00] people to build better relationships and build, trust that at the end of the day everybody was going to win. So that was a huge aha. In fact, what we realized is that what we're doing is really like an operating system.

For engagement in organizations. It's not another program and there's plenty of programs out there for management development and engagement and all those kinds of things. But I think what we're bringing to the table is something deeper than that. It's this operating system upon which every program operates out of.

And that was a really important aha moment. For us, because we realized that what we're doing is really core. Gotcha. 

Matt: [00:05:46] Incredible. So this operating system is really the foundation to moving forward and in that relationship structure, in that conversational structure. 

Tim: [00:05:54] Yeah. And I think, the whole thing of operating system, maybe 10 years ago didn't make as [00:06:00] much sense as it does now, I've got an iPhone sitting right here in front of me and every once in a while you get these notices that you have to update.

Date your operating system. And what I've realized is that I've got a lot of apps on my phone and on my laptop, I've got a lot of programs, but if I want all of those programs to work well together, I need a really good operating system. And apple and HP and all these other companies are doing there.

They're just creating better operating systems. So everything works better together. That's what we bring to the table. 

Matt: [00:06:36] Okay. Wow. Wow. And what kind of success have you seen? When you go into these companies and you're like, Hey, I got an operating system and you need to figure this out. And this is a pretty good thing.

Or, you tell me a little bit more about how that looks and what kind of success you've been. 

Tim: [00:06:50] Yeah back in 2016, of course, as things have changed quite a bit since 2016, I feel like it's a completely different [00:07:00] world. Isn't it? 

Matt: [00:07:01] Things changed quite a bit since since yesterday. So 2016 was a long time ago.

Tim: [00:07:07] Yeah. Wow. Maybe we can talk about that in a few minutes, but in 2016, what was happening was there were a...