The Leadership Habit

In this episode of The Leadership Habit, we will be focusing on the topic of Change Management. We interviewed L. Bonita Patterson, the founder, and CEO of a company called Polaris Consulting. Bonita specializes in people optimization and organizational change. She joins us today to share her knowledge and experience on the topic of change management. Bonita has over 20 years of experience in senior management and leadership roles in Fortune 100 mid-sized and small companies. Her strength as an executive coach, consultant, and advisor lies in her understanding of human behavior, organizational complexities, and sustainable change. Join us for this discussion where Bonita will explain the 5 words to remember for successful change management: Why, How, Who, Roadblocks and Confetti!   Full Transcript Below:  Jenn: 00:03        On this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit. We will be focusing on the topic of change management. We interviewed L. Bonita Patterson. Bonita is the founder and CEO of a company called Polaris Consulting. Bonita specializes in people optimization and organizational change. She joins us today to share her knowledge and experience on the topic of change management. Bonita has over 20 years of experience in senior management and leadership roles in Fortune 100 mid-sized and small companies. Her strength as an executive coach, consultant, and advisor lies in her understanding of human behavior, organizational complexities, and sustainable change. I’m excited to welcome you to Bonita. I hope that you get some great habits that you can incorporate to your leadership habit today. Jenn: 00:55        Bonita, I am so happy that we get to talk to you. You are one of Crestcom’s expert faculty members and you supported a recent Change Management module that we are using currently in educating our leaders. I’ve been really excited to interview you. You have an extensive leadership background. You are the founder and CEO of Polaris Consulting Group and Bonita Patterson, please introduce yourself to our listeners. The Challenges of Change Management Bonita: 01:25     Well, hello everybody. I’m thrilled to be here and I was just overjoyed to work on that change management module, it’s so meaningful, and working with you folks is always such a pleasure. And you know, my background, I have a corporate background. I worked in a large corporation for over 15 years. Then when I left there I worked for medium and small size companies and then started my own consulting firm and I spent many, many years in management, in the chair that our listeners are in, dealing with the issues that our listeners deal with on a daily basis. So I have a lot of, not just book knowledge and educational knowledge, but a lot of experience in dealing with tough situations and anticipating roadblocks and barriers and making things smooth and correct the first time. Jenn: 02:16         Yeah. Which is challenging, right? Especially when we’re talking about change, you know? And if the change strategy can go off 100% perfect the first time, I think that gives you permission to maybe buy a lottery ticket because it’s not that common – the chances of it happening might be very low. But no, that’s great. And you know, I know our listeners will really appreciate being able to hear some of your experience and how you even work with your customers to help them find success. So we’re really excited to be talking about change management on today’s podcast episode. Bonita, I know that you have a really great strategy for how you look at being successful with change. It’s your five tips and you had talked about it in terms of words, like a very simple approach. What is- or how would you describe- a successful tip or tips for people to think about change management? Bonita: 03:14       Well, I think of it this way. All you have to do is remember five words to nail change. And the five words: are Why, How, Who, Roadblocks and Confetti! Jenn: 03:31         Ooh! I like the confetti. I mean, that’s an exciting word. Bonita: 03:37       You know, if you do all five of those things- and we’ll do a dive into what those five things are- but they help you cover all your bases because we know Change is a lot of moving parts, a lot of variables. And the reason it fails is because people focus on one or two or three things. They don’t focus on all five things. And I’m telling you if you focus on all five things, it will be successful. Jenn: 04:02          So it’s focusing on the Why, the How, the Who, Roadblocks. And my personal favorite, Confetti! Bonita: 04:09        That’s my favorite too. Like the ice cream sundae at the end of a long hard drive. The Why Jenn: 04:18           Because change is hard. You know, whether many organizations can fail at change and maybe it’s seen at a big level and it could be very public or it could be just something small. But change is hard. But I love this very simple approach for how managers can look at if they’re facing a change, maybe in a procedure or a task or maybe it’s a product change, that they can reference these five words before they go down that path of change management. You’d said that you were going to give us a little bit more information about each of them. So let’s start with the first one, which is “Why”. Bonita: 04:57         Why. Well with everything, think about even in our own lives with anything, before we are personally really willing to change, there has to be a reason. What is the Why? You know Simon Sinek is always talking about, the Why- he has it nailed. You have to know your Why because people need a sense of urgency. When you do your risk-benefit analysis and we all do it internally about everything. We don’t necessarily call it that, but we’d look at why should I do this? Why shouldn’t I do this? You can weigh things to the Why should I move forward? If there’s a sense of urgency and especially if that sense of urgency has a lot of positivity. This is the wonderfulness we are going to walk into. We are going to move into if we do this, so the Why should be encouraging. It should be something that draws people in. And not a fear-based Why. Sometimes Whys are fear-based because sometimes companies change because they don’t want to go into the ditch, right? So if that’s the reason that’s driving it, I say before you speak to your employees and your leadership team, you need to figure out what are the golden nuggets, the attractors that people will be excited about because change is hard. Change is worrisome. But if you’re also excited, as you all know, you can be in a situation where you’re afraid and you can be frozen with fear. Or you can be in a situation where you have that little tingle in your gut where you’re kind of afraid because you don’t know what’s happening, but you are also very excited. I want to get on with it and just get there. And that excitement makes it easier for you, makes it easier for the leadership team. And it makes it easier for the people to overcome the hurdles they will have to overcome to move from what they’re doing now to what they need to do in the future. Jenn: 07:00          That Why, and I love that look of, Why are you changing? Are you changing because you’re afraid of losing relevancy, our market position or XYZ, employees? But how do you elicit that excitement? What is the possibility or the future that the change can bring about? So making those decisions from that place of like, where can we go if you make this change? Like how high is that limit? Or is it the sky? Can it even get higher than that? Is there such a thing? It’s really exciting to think about, you know, just the reframe that change does get a very negative connotation and oftentimes because it is associated with fear and words like risks, but risks in a really daunting way instead of, hey- if we take this risk, this is what we could potentially grow into. So yeah, maybe looking at that Why and making it really exciting. Like, if we do this, this is what’s possible for us. This is what it could look like for you, for communities, for XYZ. That’s exciting. I love the Why! Bonita: 08:08         You used my favorite word and that is reframe. My favorite thing is the reframe. I think the reframe is- reframe with sincerity, not with manipulative intent of course- but it is the most powerful tool. Shifting the way we view a situation. Do you see possibilities and not danger? Be aware of potential danger so we can avoid them, but really be energized by possibilities. Jenn: 08:37            Hey, and trusting that we’ve all, at some point in time in our life, we have changed. And it’s not necessarily as scary as what we’ve made it out to be. We just may not have realized that the change was occurring when it was happening. It could be simple things like changing behaviors, maybe changing the activities that you enjoy doing. When we look at it from a personal level, I think we can see change as a very natural thing. I like to joke around with some of my millennial clients that I work within a coaching practice to say, for example, when did you stop playing with these childhood toys? Why aren’t you so upset that you’re not playing with them? Right? They’re like, well, I naturally grew into different behaviors. I had different interests. And so you pivoted, you changed, you went there and you met yourself and it’s really just not that complicated, but we make it more complicated than what it needs to be. We change because it’s a natural thing that may need to happen to align with the future direction that we want to go to. Bonita: 09:42          I’m so glad you said that because you hit on such a key. And that is reminding people, you’ve done this before. All of you have ever done in your entire life is change. Period. From day one. You’re an expert at it. Remember that, and let’s tap into it because you’ve done it well many, many times. Let’s just do it well again. The How Jenn: 10:09           Yeah, absolutely! Okay, that’s fantastic. I’m loving this conversation so much and I’m excited to talk about your second word, which is the second tip and that’s How. Bonita: 10:22         How! So the How is- what is the strategy behind it? What are we going to do? What is the strategy, the parameters, the guidelines for this change? And we really want to focus on giving people a framework for how to go there. And a framework for making decisions about it along the way and it needs to have some bit of flexibility because we’re dealing with change, which means there are unknown things that will pop up. So in your strategy- and as you’re laying out your plan and your strategy- you also have to plan time for unexpected occurrences. Because 100%, there will be some unanticipated- no matter how genius you are. And I’m sure you and your staff are the brightest people on the face of this natural earth, but there will be some changes that you have not anticipated. Maybe some unintended consequences that start emerging and you have to shift. Or maybe something that you never even imagined would happen in a particular way. So always leave room for flexibility. So even in your timelines and schedules, schedule the time for the unknown because if you schedule time for the unknown, it gives you freedom and energy to actually deal with it instead of ignoring it and just plowing ahead by checking off the next thing on the list, Jenn: 12:00           Which is easy to do. Especially when you are, maybe you have some deadlines and you’re very focused on, we told our shareholders, or I told my boss, depending on who the intended audience of change is. Sometimes we just want to cross it off the list. We said we are going to do this and so we don’t even face the unknown, right? Because we were like, we were supposed to finish this by this date, so let’s just ignore that and keep plowing through. And then the consequence is that change likely does not end up occurring the way that they actually wanted to see it. So it moves them further away from that vision, and might even put a bad taste in the mouth of the people impacted by that change because maybe you were a little sloppy or lazy, with how you wanted to address it. And you know, believe me when I say lazy, it makes sense, people can be really busy and have a lot of things going on and it can be really easy to say – oh well, it’s okay, I don’t need to look at that. But again, that short term pain of just investing, hitting that head-on, leads you to that long term gain. Right? Versus having to come back and try and do some PR or change the strategy on change. You know, you can set yourself up for success by just addressing that head-on. Bonita: 13:20         And you know, you bring me to a real pet peeve of mine. There is a tool we use in change. Everybody’s used it, it is a powerful tool. It is so abused and misused and it causes a bad taste- it leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. And that is the Pilot. Often when we are changing, we set up a pilot. What is the purpose of a pilot? Well, the purpose of the pilot is to test it out. It’s like being scientists and experiment. What is working? What is not working? How do we tweak it before we roll it out on a grander scale and impact the lives of yet even more people and even more close customers and clients? But somehow we have a super tight schedule. We were going to do this, you’re gonna do this, we’re going to do this pilot. And at the end of the pilot, we’ve got two weeks and we roll it out – Boom! If you’re going to do that- so I have a thing that I always tell my clients- either do the pilot for real or don’t do it at all. Don’t buzzword it. Don’t say, We’re going to have a pilot because it sounds so B-school”. You’re like, “oh yeah, I’ve got the methodology down, this is what we do”. Do it for real or do not do it? Because if you are not for real, you’re going to get people excited and then you’re going to rip the rug out from under them. And good luck capturing their hearts and minds and passion again, Jenn: 14:48          Right! We all by nature we have to trust the experiences that we have. And those experiences, good or bad, shape our ability to want to maybe try something again. And so if you are starting with that negative or poor perception, it is that much more challenging to get them on board when you actually really need that. Bonita: 15:10        And a real tip for making it happen in the right way, is in your scheduling. In your initial planning, you have to allow space for unanticipated occurrences, which is what I was just saying before, but now even applied to the pilot, schedule it! Make sure. And as you are dealing with whomever you have to get an OK or a buy-off from in order to meet a certain timeline, help them understand. Well, guess what, let’s schedule it here. With all intentions of doing it sooner. So we will under-promise and over-deliver, rather than the opposite. Jenn: 15:52          Love that! Love that expectation, right? It’s, it’s really the one, it’s much better for any party involved to under-promise and over-deliver. I would much rather do that than the opposite. Bonita: 16:04       When I’m getting an estimate on something or whatever, say your car, whatever it is, an estimate. And somebody says, “well the ballpark is…” I say get me a real conservative estimate. I want you to give me the worst case scenario estimate, don’t tell me it’s going to be X and it comes in way higher. I’d rather the opposite. And they look at me and go, “OK, yeah, we’ll make sure that we include some other possibilities when we give you your estimate”. So it’s the same thing. We tell them this pilot’s going to take the six months even if we think we can do it in three, and we ended up doing it at four and a half. And guess what? We’re not late, we’re early. The Who Jenn: 16:45         Yeah, and you likely addressed all of the things earlier, the unknown you gave yourself time to be able to address the unexpected. Let’s move on to your word number three, which is the Who. Bonita: 17:05       Who- is the people. We always forget about the people. The people are going through two types of change. There is the change-change and then there’s the internal change. Are you giving people enough information and enough time and enough opportunities for input to help them make the shifts they need to make to get on board? And have you cascaded it in the proper fashion? Is the executive team on board? Is the senior team on board? Is Middle Management on board? And then cascading from there. Then the employees- because guess where change dies? Change dies in middle management. Boom. Period. End of story. It’s been that way since the dawn of time, it will be way till the end. So if you don’t get middle management on board, so they can start modeling the new behavior, so they have the right attitude when their people are going through change, it’s going to die on the vine. Meanwhile, if you do get them on board- Whoa! It just fuels the change and fuels the excitement and makes it that much easier, that much more successful. Jenn: 18:17          Yeah and middle management is likely who the majority of your employees have exposure to. And if they see that individual really embracing the change and that the individual is also having a deep understanding of why that change is needed, and what possibilities will open up as a result of that change. All of that enthusiasm can start to be generated. People can get excited, but you know, I’ve definitely worked where I have reported to and worked with mid-level managers that have said, “I don’t know why they want us to do this, but this is what we have to do, so you have to do this”. And of course, then as an employee, you pick up that same attitude. You say, well, basically we’re doing this because we have to, even though it’s not necessarily a relevant change or a great change, all because of that messenger and how they’re packaging it. And it really can kill that morale and really burn that change management strategy. Bonita: 19:14        You’re absolutely correct, which means- as you or even taking it out to the management ranks, whatever size your management team is- you need to make sure that the level of fear in your management team is minimal. If They are afraid for their jobs and they are concerned about what’s going to happen, there’s no way they’re not going to convey that to their people in some way or other. They’re going to convey that energy to their people and then that’s just going to have a mushroom effect. Jenn: 19:52           Absolutely. You know, sometimes we forget how easy it is in a conversation with people to know when they’re afraid of something. Right. We sense that from each other. I think we’re all connected in that way where we can see that or if our boss is acting uncharacteristically and how they’re showing up, like you can see that and then when you’re starting to observe that, it’s natural that you then take on that fear and start to say, oh my gosh, do I need to get out of here and start to look for a new job? Things are really going to go downhill and if we just address it head on and say we know that fear can be a very, very big impact or ugly thing that needs to be addressed. It’s the elephant in the room. It’s the reason that people want to change or resist change and if we can address that head-on, that’s where we can get the people to be excited or our employees to be excited and want that change. But yeah, if I’m afraid who wants to go and do something when we’re terrified. Bonita: 20:49        Exactly. If you feel like by participating in this change, you’re accelerating your demise, where’s the benefit? What’s in it for you to actually do it? So you hit it right on the head, Roadblocks Jenn: 21:03          Right? No, that’s great! Let’s, let’s talk about your fourth word, which is Roadblocks. Bonita: 21:09       Roadblocks! What can you anticipate? What possibilities can you anticipate where the wheels may come off the cart? So that enables you to set up a situation where it doesn’t happen or it happens minimally. You have early warnings it is happening so you can avoid it. And so how do you get that information? You often get that information not by just having a bunch of managers sitting in a room, coming up with a plan that they would get an “A” for in B-school. I keep saying B-school, I mean Business school. I’m so buzzwordy. B-School, right? But you need to get the people that are actually doing the work. That actually interface with the clients and customers, that actually interface with other departments on a working level. They really understand how the information flows, how we connect with the client. Get them involved to help you anticipate barriers. And you can set it up in a way so it’s not just a complaining session. Set it up in a way that this session is about us being detectives. We’re putting on our Sherlock Holmes hat and we’re trying to figure out what could we possibly run into so that we have plan B, a plan C, plan D in our hip pocket to deal with it when it comes up. And we have the foresight to see it coming before we’re right in the middle of it. So get them involved because there’s a natural resistance to change. This gives them a legitimate opportunity to voice their concerns and to come up with solutions, keep us out of that ditch to keep us out of that territory. And it creates more buy-in because by doing that, they’re beginning to create a process with you. Jenn: 23:12         Yeah. The partnership is formed. You are aligning with the people that are going to be doing that hard work and they are the ones that more often than not have more experience than you do in relation to that role and what will be needed to accomplish the change. So it is really important to think about how you can partner with them, gain some insight. So what you said- being that detective- but really just being curious, you know, more often than not, people aren’t giving resistance because they just don’t love change. They have genuine concerns that do need to be addressed. I don’t think they intentionally are saying, “I really want to be difficult to make sure that this doesn’t work”. No, they want your company to be successful just like you do. But, they also have a different point of view that when you don’t acknowledge that or you ignore it, you’re missing a big piece of your puzzle. I didn’t know how annoying that is when you put together a puzzle only to find that you’re missing pieces because it just does not look the way that you want it to. Bonita: 24:19      It’s like, actually it’s even- I’ll build on that. It’s like putting the puzzle together without the picture. Jenn: 24:27        Yeah, absolutely. Bonita: 24:31      And then you’ve got the pieces. You don’t even know where you’re headed. Whereas the box cover would provide you with that vision of what you want to end up with. So by getting them involved and having that box cover for them, starting the discussion with, “this is where we’re going, we’re really excited about it.” We know we’re going to run into some things along the way, so let’s figure out what we might run into and how we might avoid it. But always keeping the focus on the excitement of getting there and that way it doesn’t devolve into just negative energy, but it’s very helpful. People begin to get excited at that point. It’s interesting how talking about potential roadblocks and solutions can actually get people excited. Particularly if they feel like they have a voice in the solutions. They have a voice in how we get there. Jenn: 25:22       Yeah. People want to feel a part of it. And you know the other piece of that that I think you might have something to probably respond, but the manager’s job or whoever is actually working to uncover those roadblocks, they’re ability to suspend their own ego, especially if they are the biggest champion of that change or maybe the originator of that change because oftentimes the, and might be the ones that do not want to see the roadblocks because they want to see their vision come to life. But really as a manager, as a leader, it doesn’t matter what level you’re at, you have to be able to suspend your own ego. It’s not directly about you. This is about the change taking place because it needs to solve X or to create X and you know, improve X. But it’s not about you. Right. It doesn’t need to be me versus you. It’s just always being open and curious and wow, thank you so much to that employee that may have brought to light something that we have not even considered looking at. Thank you. Instead of, “we’re not going to go down that road because that’s going to conflict with my change management strategy and that doesn’t feel good.” Right? I mean it is an issue because I think people do put that pressure on themselves to want to say, “Look, I drove this change and I did this!” And we feel sometimes that the change might be a bad thing. Whereas really to be able to pivot, to be able to be flexible, you will again end up looking better in the long run because you were able to adapt instead of just pushing your way through, Bonita: 26:57       Boy, you really hit on it! Learn to take credit for the pivot. Not just for the original plan. Learn to take credit for growing and changing with the process and leveraging your people and getting them excited. That shows that you’re a true leader. The Confetti! Jenn: 27:16         Absolutely. All right. Let’s, let’s talk about our last word, the one that you and I both love, which is Confetti! I mean, I think I already know where this is going, but I love that word because I know where you’re going to go with it. I think it’s so important to people with change. So what is the confetti word representing? Bonita: 27:38      Excuse me. But for some reason when I say confetti, I also visualize cupcakes. So for me confetti comes with the cupcakes! That is about finding success and celebrating. Celebrate, find wins and structure it to have some early wins. So you can start celebrating and the wins don’t have to be big. Small, incremental changes. Those are changes. Those are wins. And you celebrate it and it gets the momentum going. It reinforces the fact that hey, we have actually changed. Oh, that didn’t seem like that was a big change. But now that you think about it, we did do it and now we’re not doing it the old way anymore. This is awesome. Okay. We took step one and two. Maybe I can take steps three and four! And it really just gets people energized, but there’s one caveat I have with the confetti piece. Please make sure they are absolutely legitimate. Make sure these are real wins, not some manufactured thing that looks like wins because we’ve juggled some statistics on a piece of paper and made it look like a win. We can talk about it because people can smell it. When people know that you have basically stepped in it and they’re not- even if they are looking at you smiling- they’re not buying it and you’re losing the crowd. So you want to keep the audience, your clients, your employees. Just make sure they’re real wins and you are celebrating the new behaviors that you want to see and you do not celebrate behaviors that you do not want to see. All too often I see people celebrating because we hit a milestone. We hit a milestone in the person that gets the most credit as the person that had the worst behavior going through it. And that sends a huge message because you’re trying to not just hit there, you’re trying to hit there with a certain behavior that you want to propagate going forward. So you have to really look at what are you celebrating, who are you celebrating? Are you celebrating enough people that were involved in it? Look at those factors, so it’s real, legitimate wins and then people get really excited. And again, it makes the rest of it going forward easier and easier because more and more people are on board. Jenn: 30:18           Great. Well and then you brought up that it is really easy to look at a high performer or maybe someone that has accomplished a great deal of success. And I think people can sometimes ignore the bad behavior because they don’t want to see it. Like the consequences that they could potentially cause is for people to disengage or to just not connect or disengage overall from your culture because they’re seeing this big change management strategy or change management effort and the face of that are the poster child for that is someone that may not be acting in a way that you actually want to put on a pedestal, but by their position and association with that change in the visibility of that change, they’re getting that recognition. And so people may just completely forget about the benefit of the change because they’re so frustrated by the fact that there was this individual that didn’t maybe communicate in ways that were respectful, solution-oriented. Maybe they didn’t take that feedback. I mean we’ve all worked with the people that can be really challenging leaders and they may even have those positions where they can act in that way and they’re not held accountable, because people are afraid for changing them out of the change. Recognize that your face of change- if you see that face of change and you start to hear those problems because the rumblings happen- when people are sensing and they’re not really connecting with that individual. You need to address that head-on stop tolerating bad behavior because of past success. Bonita: 31:57        Absolutely, and another powerful tool when you’re celebrating the wins, a great tool for leadership is to ask a couple of people what changed? What did you go through in making this happen? How did you shift personally? What happened to you? And for them to share maybe a story about how they had to shift as we went through this thing? Jenn: 32:24          Well, it’s exciting how you can, then you can then empower all of your employees to share their story and say, “Hey, you know what? Even if it’s peer to peer, I did not want to do that because I knew that there was going to be maybe a learning curve or an increase in the amount of time it takes to do something, even though it is going to be a win”. And talking about those real examples of, hey, “I really thought that what they were asking me to do was just not something I wanted to get behind.” Because that’s a natural thing, right? And it makes sense. Also as humans, we like to focus on what we know. We want to be comfortable. We want it to be safe. It’s a very natural human condition. But we also know that amazing things happen on the other side of change. And so building in all of those people that can become advocates and champions for change will really just help propel that success and then you get to see the confetti flying from all over in the organization because you have so many different champions that are saying, look, let’s do this together. Look what we can do! What are the possibilities? Going back to that beginning word – look where we can grow now or how can we use this to build into our future successes? And you know, talking about the celebration. I think people can be so focused on again, work, work, work. We forget all of that hard work that we did. And forget to even celebrate or even find value in celebrating because we think there’s so much work to do we don’t even have time to celebrate. Bonita: 33:59         Absolutely. Absolutely. We are always talking about social proof in any kind of marketing situation, right? Social proof. Who else has done this? How have they liked it? How did they come to you? We see it all over the place. You watch commercials and I just lost 150,000 pounds in two weeks. You know, so people want to see other people being successful in doing it. And when you celebrate and give people opportunities to celebrate them doing it and hear other stories of their peers who have had success in making this change. And it’s also a great opportunity to set up something on maybe if your company has an intranet, to set up a place where you can start capturing the stories, Jenn: 34:46           Spotlight your successes. Bonita: 34:47        Absolutely. And so having some sort of vehicle where stories or spotlight it. And, you start to spotlight, you spotlight the people that they would expect to be spotlighted- but you spotlight the little known people or the people that are really in the background that have success. So that you mix it up and then you keep people engaged because you have people, high-visibility people and then more background-people and everything along the way. You hear all of these different stories and it just, it gets people encouraged. Jenn: 35:23          Absolutely. Well, and you’re showing the culture then, right? Which is that piece that any organization to be successful in any strategy, whether that’s a change management strategy or anything else, we need to recognize that everyone plays a valuable role in the organization’s success. There are a lot of people that you may not see that are contributing and their efforts matter just as much as someone at the top. And yes, they contribute in different ways, but everyone, it’s the power of everyone working together. And that’s where that magic is. And it’s amazing when you can recognize and show people, “Hey, I see what you’re doing. You may not always be up on the stage or you may not be doing this, but I still see you and I deeply value your contributions and I am so happy to have you working here.” So we all need to hear, we want that. You know, we like to end our podcasts by talking with our experts about their leadership habits. So we talked a lot today about the five words that people can use to help them find success and change management, which were the Why, How, Who, Roadblocks and Confetti. And I think you have shared so many great stories and just tips for how people can really approach change management and hopefully in a very open and exciting way. I know that you have deep expertise within leadership development, so now I have to pivot out of change management and ask you, Bonita, what is your Leadership Habit that you practice to create success? What’s Your Leadership Habit? Bonita: 37:02        Well, my leadership habit is twofold: Respect and Courage. Jenn: 37:08          Tell me more. What does respect and courage mean? Bonita: 37:11        Respect particularly comes through with you’re in a difficult situation. You often don’t have to remember about or really reflect on respect when things are going great and we’re working with people, we understand each other and we’ve got great communication and things are flowing. But when we start running into obstacles or conversations become difficult, I think it’s very important to remember respect. I mean you have to have a difficult conversation or we just talked about meeting things head on, dealing with issues and there will be issues along the way. Always. To have, first of all, have the courage to step up and deal with it. To actually have that conversation or take that action and then in the midst of that, remember whatever the situation is, however difficult there, you demonstrate respect for that individual all along the way, even if it’s the most difficult of conversations. Treat that person with respect and have the courage to actually deal with it. Too many times in management and leadership, I run into managers, however powerful they are or seem to be, and they seem to have a lot of aggression and bravado. It is surprising how many of them are so risk-averse that they will not have those tough conversations. And so those two things, respect, and courage, they will get you very far in leadership and get you very high in leadership. Because you will be dealing with what you need to deal with and you will be treating people with respect even if you’re delivering a tough message. Jenn: 38:54           That’s great, Bonita, those words are really, really powerful. Respect and courage. I mean it’s what we all need and we can do great things too. When we let courage guide us and we step into that role, great things can happen. Bonita, I’m so happy that we got to talk to you today about change management and just thank you so much on behalf of Crestcom for taking the time to talk with us and share more insight into the change process. I really enjoyed our conversation today. Bonita: 39:25        I did too. Thank you for having me and it is always, always a pleasure and I look forward to the next time. Thank you. Jenn: 39:35           Thank you for listening to our interview with Bonita Patterson. If you liked what you heard, feel free to leave a review for us on any of your favorite podcasts, streaming services, and if you want to learn more about Crestcom, head on over to Crestcom leadership.com. Until next time.   The post Episode 3: Change Management with L. Bonita Patterson appeared first on Crestcom International.

In Episode 2 of our podcast, our host, Jenn DeWall speaks with talent management expert Kathleen Quinn Votaw. She is the president and founder of Talentrust. Talentrust is revolutionizing how companies find, keep and grow great people. After nearly two decades of earning accolades in the staffing industry, Kathleen determined that traditional models don’t always serve the best interest of clients, especially rapidly growing companies. She has vowed to disrupt the stagnant staffing and recruiting industry, and she is here to share with us the Talentrust 2019 hiring guide. The 2019 hiring guide highlights six key areas that you as a business leader and manager can focus on to overcome talent scarcity and find the right people. These key areas include Strategic HR, Culture and Brand, Engagement, Technology, Recruiting Imperatives and Social Enterprise. Join us for this informative episode and find out what might be missing from your recruitment and retention strategy. Transcript: Jenn :   00:54    Kathleen, I’m so happy to have you here. On Crestcom’s The Leadership Habit podcast. You are one of our expert faculty members that supported our February module, “Take Charge of Talent Management, and you really are an expert with a deep understanding of what companies need to do to be able to hire and retain their talent. I’m curious for those that don’t know much about you and your background; you’re the founder and CEO of a company called Talentrust. Tell us what you do. Kathleen :    01:21    So Talentrust is a human capital consulting company. And what we do is we help clients throughout the country solve their people puzzles. Our first step is to go in with a gap analysis and make sure we diagnose the issues that are causing them pain. Sometimes it’s cultural, sometimes value, sometimes it’s engagement, sometimes it’s strategic recruiting. So we really focused on that diagnosis so we can really fix what’s broken. I’m also an author of a book called Solve the People Puzzle. And I’m also a keynote speaker. Jenn :    01:56    And you know, right now, especially in the U.S., but also globally, talent management is a challenge. It’s hard for companies to find good people and actually get them into the organization. It’s one of the biggest struggles. What have you seen going on right now in the world of talent management? Kathleen :    02:13    Since some of the key trends that we highlight in our 2019 talent imperatives is that retention is becoming almost more important than recruitment. It is so important to retain those people who are building your brand, building your culture, serving your clients right now. And we have some techniques that we can train our clients on and obviously your clients as well on how to focus on retention, but retention is becoming as important as recruitment. And then the second key trend is that it’s about them. It’s not about you; the candidates find you versus you finding them. And so you need to have some kind an employment brand so they can find you. Because most companies aren’t Google, Marriott, Zappos- they don’t have a household brand name, and they need to know what you stand for in order to find you because the best out there are working. So what’s your message to them that they’re going to find you? So those are two key trends along with the rise of the individual. Really, people can choose where they want to go. If you’re good at anything, sales, marketing, operations, accounting, finance- and then you name it- engineering, you can name that job, and you can go where you want to go. So it’s really the individual is in the driver’s seat Jenn :    03:43    Which- if you’re an individual looking for a new career, a new opportunity, that’s really exciting. Kathleen :    03:49    Absolutely. Jenn :    03:50    That concept of the rise of the individual is so interesting. You know, I think part of what you said earlier is that really companies need to start focusing their strategy on retention. How do we keep our employees? Because no more are people feeling inclined to necessarily stay if they feel like they’re not getting the opportunities for growth or that they may not have the salary that they want. There are many reasons that people choose to stay within an organization, but also many reasons for how they choose to leave. So it’s really interesting to see that pivot in the way that companies look at talent management. We have to try and retain our good people before they take all their knowledge and walk it into someone else’s organization. Kathleen :    04:31    Really, Jenn- that’s key. And there’s so much choice right now. There’s a choice for the individual, and that’s why we focus on this key trend of the rise of the individual because they have a lot of choices. Jenn :    04:45    And you’re 2019 hiring guide. You had mentioned a challenge, and that’s especially impacting companies in the U.S. But also global organizations. They’re experiencing what you called talent scarcity. What is talent scarcity? Kathleen :    05:00    The scary statistic, Jenn, is that 6.2 million people are looking for jobs, which sounds like a good number until you realize that there are 6.9 million positions open. So it’s really an inventory problem. There are not enough people for the jobs that companies need to grow and achieve their objectives, especially in manufacturing, construction, any of the trades- we have made trade work- or working with your hands- not too sexy. And we need to make that kind of welders and construction workers and electricians and plumbers, all these things that we all need. We need to make that sexy again. It’s cool to work with your hands. My mom and dad sat at the kitchen table with me when I was growing up saying you have to get a college education. You have to. You must get a college education. Well, I agree that a college education is a great thing, but I a high school education for somebody who doesn’t aspire to go to college and then to go to vocational school and working a trade is a wonderful thing as well. People can make a lovely living in the trades, but we’ve made it taboo. Administrators have made it taboo in academia. And the kitchen table at your home has made it taboo as well. So we’re in a real crisis mode, and it’s going to last for a long time. Jenn :    06:42    I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and my father was in the trades, and I had many friends that have had and continue to have really successful careers in the trades. And I’m actually really envious of them because they don’t have any student loan debt now. And another great perk of looking at a trade is that there’s a better return on your time investment. I’m with you on encouraging people that this is a great career path. Trades are a great opportunity, they are lucrative, and they’re versatile. I feel like also within a trade, you get a lot of different exposure to many different aspects of the business and there’s a lot of diversity within your role. Seeing how many of my friends were able to create success in trades, I can totally see why it’s something that we need to make not taboo again. Jenn :    07:33    So Kathleen, we talked about talent scarcity and the rise of the individual where top talent is able to pick where they want to work. How can a company overcome these challenges? You know, in your 2019 hiring guide, you spoke about six key areas that organizations can focus on, and I was hoping that we could walk through these so other people can understand what they can do if they’re facing talent scarcity challenges based on that impact of the rise of the individual. Kathleen :    08:03    Absolutely. Jenn and you know, we have a ton of resources on our website too, but I’ll walk through all of those key takeaways and the talent imperative for 2019 there’s a lot of things to focus on. Remember I’m a 30 year veteran of this recruitment human capital industry. So for your listeners, take away one key thing and do something different from the six initiatives and you’ll be ahead of the pack. So our first initiative that we’ve focused on is strategic HR, and we’ve been mean to HR for far too long. Jenn, think about it. We, you know, they do payroll, they do benefits, we blame them if we don’t have the right people, we blame them if people aren’t being paid enough, we dump things on them. Harvard Business Review wrote an article that we should blow up HR. Fast Company wrote an article saying we hate HR. “Stop It!” is my mantra. Kathleen :    09:05    Start putting strategic HR at the table. Make its report into the CEO, the owner, the president, whatever you call yourself, start putting your people first. We talk about how people are our most important asset. Well, let’s start putting them first and showing them that they’re our most important asset because you can have all of the initiatives and innovation in the world, but if you don’t have people to execute on it, nothing’s going to get done. So we have to look at HR as more of a strategic function versus an administrative function. And today it’s highly regarded as an administrative function in most middle market companies, in most middle market companies. So they need some training. They need to- you need to sit down with your HR people and understand where they want to spend their time, how they want to spend their time because we know that people will do great work when they love what they’re doing. Kathleen :    10:07    I got a call from a company in L.A., sometime in December- at the end of the year. And the owner said to me, Kathleen, something’s not quite right. Something’s not working. And what we found out is that their HR leader hated recruitment. That could really be very problematic if you need to bring in 65 people in a year which this company does. You know it’s a very important piece to their organization. So get really clear on what you need in a strategic HR leader and get really clear that they align with your values. So that’s, that’s message number one for us. Jenn :    10:47    Yeah, that’s right. HR isn’t just about payroll, and my experience working with some organizations and HR, there’s so much more that HR can do. They can contribute to that overall culture. You know, in HR- I would say they do a lot -and it’s time that we expand the way that we look at their functionality. It’s no longer just looking at HR as just simple functions. It is understanding how they fit into that big picture and the organization’s short and long-term growth goals. You know, if we don’t have an HR department that’s going to focus on the people who are at your organization, who else is going to work on keeping your people right? You might have a great leader that’s doing it on their own, but not every leader even has that as a developed skill set to understand how to really focus on retention and engagement. You mentioned a little bit about culture, which is also the second key area. Tell me a little bit about culture and brand and why this is the second separate key area of focus. Kathleen :    11:52    The second key imperative we want you to focus on is culture. Culture is your employment brand. We believe it’s foundational to have good systems and processes around your people. So I talked a little bit in our introduction about knowing who you are so people can find you. Culture is actually the sum total of your values, your attitudes, your beliefs and your traditions and how people experience you. And culture became really sexy in 2015, but nobody has a process around it. They don’t know how to measure it. They don’t know how to inspect it. And so there are some great tools out there that you can use that can automate really, where is your culture right now? So you can work toward improving it and building the right organization. Also, your brand is important because people can’t find you. I mentioned that earlier. It’s so important for people to be able to find great companies that are doing great work. So some examples of that are, companies- like small little companies here who are doing innovative work that people can’t find on the internet, they don’t even know that they’re hiring. So it has this close circle to them, and they tend to hire friends and family. But there are so many great people out there. I was presenting yesterday to an organization, and one of the owners has a small company, only 12 people, and he is scared to actually hire anybody who’s not a friend or a family member because he doesn’t have the processes and systems. Gallup suggests that only 27% of workers are actually engaged and believe in the values of their organization. So, that’s a terrible statistic, right? Kathleen :    13:49    And people will look up your reputation on Glassdoor, Yelp, Google, you know people put things out there- and think of why- when you go to a restaurant, why do you post something on Yelp or TripAdvisor because you either had an amazing experience or you’ve, had an awful experience. It’s not, oh, it was good. It’s usually polarizing. So, we now have reputations, and we don’t even know it. There are companies that we go into, and they are not attending to their Glassdoor reputation or their Google reputation, and they can actually take a proactive approach on how people experience the organization. So that’s what we mean when we look at culture and brand and caring about your people, making sure that you care about their whole person, not just their skills that they bring to your company. You hire a whole person and guess what? You hire their family too. Start talking to them about what they need in their life. I have, a woman who works with me and she takes Wednesday every single week, and she calls it her “Ziggy Day” -she’s a grandma, and she does not want to miss out on being with him. So she works four days a week, very hard for our organization. Wednesdays are sacred to her. She takes family time and so I have another woman on my team who also works three-quarter time. She works four days a week, and she takes Fridays to be with her two children. So listen to your people and what they need to be happy, healthy and whole. Jenn :    15:37    Yeah. See your people as people, you know. It’s something that I think, you know, some companies still have that tendency to say work is work. So shut down any emotion, any inkling that you have a personal life outside of here and walk in our door and then be prepared to hustle and do what you need to do. But when we treat them like that and in a vacuum, we’re ignoring everything else that’s happening. And I think that’s where you see that rise of diversity and inclusion being a very important piece, too. We need to talk about things that are impacting our people outside of work. Whether that’s at the personal and familial level or whether that’s at the current events level. Kathleen :    16:18    Absolutely. Jenn :    16:20    It’s interesting, it seems so basic, but I feel like we wouldn’t have issues with retention or engagement if we actually saw the person as a person. Kathleen :    16:32    Think about it, we set up an adversarial relationship between employers and employees in this country. And you know, my subject matter expertise is, you know, people in the U.S., we don’t work outside of the U.S. at this point, but we’ve set up an adversarial relationship. We don’t tell each other the truth. We hide things. We try to just get by. So the more the employer takes the lead and starts having those critical conversations, the more the employee will trust and open up. This is not a onetime fix. You don’t walk into a team meeting and say, okay, tell me the truth. They have to believe it, so they adopt it. So start modeling it. That’s my message to the listeners. Start modeling transparent, trustworthy relationships with your employees. Jenn :    17:28    Yeah, that walks the walk, the person that you would want them to be or that you would think about how you would want to be treated. Exactly. You know, it’s great, and that’s definitely a topic that I could go on and on about because I love what we can really focus on that engagement. But I know you have a third area of focus that companies can work on to overcome the talent scarcity and that they’re facing right now within talent management. What’s the third area is engagement. I touched on it a little bit, but so many employees are not engaged in what you’re trying to do as an employer, and there’s two really good, there are two really main takeaways they want people to take from this section. I mentioned retention is just as important as recruitment. Start using your marketing material to have some internal dialogue with your employees about why they should stay with you. We call it re-recruiting, and we adopted that from the CEO of Zillow. He believes that you should be recruiting your people every day because they have so much choice. There is so much choice out there, why do they continue to choose you? So take some of your marketing material and repurpose it to your people. So they know a big client that you signed on it, a project that you’re working on, some financial funding that you’re looking to philanthropic outreach. Kathleen :    18:50    Make sure your people know who you are, what you stand for, what you’re doing, what’s coming so they can get excited about their future. And the second key takeaway is the people who are with you. There’s a trend that’s been established and some companies, but they’re called stay interviews. So really understanding why people stay with you because you know, if you’re aware, you know, they have a choice. So for somebody in my organization, I would really want to know why they continue to choose to work for us versus going and having other experiences because the average lifecycle of an employee is about 2.4 years right now. So two and a half years. So people are very open to change- the employees, the candidates, the job seekers are, are quite bullish right now. And they know if it’s not working somewhere, they can go somewhere else. Kathleen :    19:50    So it’d be great for owners to know, presidents, CEOs, again, whatever you call yourself, why people stay with you and what kinds of things might cause them to leave. So it’s really important to have those critical conversations. And last, make sure your benefits are as robust as you can afford. Every company- you know, we work in the middle market, and that’s anywhere from about 10 million to a billion in revenue, and there’s a big diversity in benefits and what you can afford to give people. So be as generous as you possibly can. One thing that people love is the gift of time. I wrote an article once called, “Go to the School Play.” And I heard one of the founders of Ogilvy speak and she said, “you know what? You’re never going to be remembered for what you did at work, but your kids are going to remember you. And they’re going to say you were at every sporting event and at the school play”. And you know, that’s really who you are. Work is what you do. So that’s a great article to download from our website. You know, go to the school play, the work can wait. I say to my people all the time. We’re not curing cancer. Go do what you need to do with your family. We’re doing great work, but your family comes first. Jenn :    21:19    Well, when you give people time, we all know that life is short and at some moments in our lives we have that reminder, and it’s more noticeable than others, especially when we lose a loved one or have a relationship change. But again, you know, going back to that, treat people like people concept, recognize that and give them time to create meaning in their life, to be happy. And that benefit of being able to give them the time is that they come back to you, and they feel that they’re more engaged because you see them and they want to work harder because they feel they were able to feel like their purpose fueled their happiness and filled their time outside with the things that matter. Kathleen :    22:01    You’re spot on there, Jenn. Jenn :    22:03    Let’s move on to area number four. Technology. Kathleen :    22:07    Oh, in technology- and full disclosure/disclaimer, I’m not a technology person. However, technology is becoming well-used in the human capital space. Artificial Intelligence is starting to help companies select people. Virtual reality is helping people train people. I heard a Ted Talk in Denver, TedX in Denver. They’re using virtual reality to train inmates on what it looks like on the outside if they’ve been incarcerated for a while. And the gentleman who was speaking as a mental health professional and he said, you know, it’s been amazing. One of the inmates, he’ll never forget, put the virtual reality on. And he started to cry, and he said, you know, I forgot what it felt like to be free. And so virtual reality is helping people train on machinery. Also on welding. There’s a great company here in Colorado and, and they couldn’t find welders. There’s a shortage as we talked about earlier of people in the trade. So you know what they did? They opened a welding training school. They just weren’t going to take it anymore. They put their destiny in their own hands. They started a welding school, they took one of their buildings and repurposed it. And we’re using virtual reality to train people on welding. So Virtual Reality is going to huge in training cause you can simulate what you want people to do. So it’s super cool. So I know enough to be dangerous. And then analytics, like measuring things, there are great little tools out there like Amplify, that helps measure engagement. TINYPulse is a really nice integrated tool that you can use to keep the pulse on your company’s culture. You can do Cheers for Peers. There’s a suggestion box, and you can benchmark it against the rest of the industry. Kathleen :    24:21    There’s also applicant tracking tools. They can also act as a CRM tool for the candidate population. So there is so much out there that is low cost- not no cost because a lot of these are software-as-a-service (SaaS) opportunities. So it is an investment, but it’s a very wise investment to get ahead of this talent scarcity issue. So you can really have the statistics and the data to show your executive team what you’re doing. So the technology is really fun. It’s really fun, and it’s enabling us to be more data-driven about the human capital space. Jenn :    25:06    It’s very interesting about the way that companies and organizations are using artificial intelligence for training. I had no idea that it was being used in that way. So that’s really exciting to think. You know, I’ve seen it done before in the sense of doing a simulation of a day in the life where it’s about a four-hour simulation. And it might be someone that accompany, is considering maybe promoting to manager or director or a c -suite level and they put them through a simulation to see how they would handle the challenges that will come up. And that part is really interesting. But I love just really how you can embrace that to help your training needs. Training is so important to everything that we’ve talked about so far. The other thing that I’ve seen companies do with technology is the virtual interview. You know, where they’re able to have a screen, and they give you a question, and you have two minutes to formulate an answer and then two minutes to give your answer. And it’s great because it saves the time of the individuals interviewing and they can see what this person would be like and whether they would want to move forward and bring them in for an in-person interview. You know, it’s surreal. If you even look back 10 or 15 years ago, we were still using paper applications. Okay. Maybe a little bit longer than that, but it was definitely in my recent history, and you know, everything that we do now, it’s just, it’s so much different. Kathleen :    26:29    Yes. Acknowledge and embrace technology, and it will help you be better. It’s great. Jenn :    26:35    I think the one thing I would say- and this is probably a grievance that for the companies that are still using that process too-for their online applicants systems to have an individual upload their resume, but then they still require you to enter the exact same information that’s on your resume into their processor into their screen. I think it feels like a time waster. It can definitely feel like it’s redundant and it extends that process of actually applying, which can feel really daunting for some people. And it can make you think like, if are there limitations in the organization’s technology? Do I really want to work here? And so, you know, again, technology can really help to alleviate concerns and help us moving in the right way, whether that’s in our applicants, whether that’s in how we interview people. So many different ways. I agreed. So let’s move into the fifth area recruiting imperatives. What does recruiting imperative mean for the people that have not heard that phrase before? Kathleen :    27:44    So it’s really important that recruiting should be treated as a sales process within your organization. And that is a huge paradigm shift for people, Jenn. They don’t really understand that they need to build a process around getting people engaged and interested in the company or they’re never going to find them. So I talked to you earlier about the employment brand. That’s the first step to your recruiting imperatives. And then the second step is lead generation. Where are the candidates going to come from? How are you going to fill the top of the funnel with people who are culturally adept at working with you and also have the skills to work with you. And then third, engaging them in some way over time. What we tend to do is it’s a one and done. So if I want to work with you, Jenn, and I think you’re a great candidate for our company, I’ll give you a call if you don’t call me back, game over, right? Well, you have to touch people just like you do in the sales process. It’s Marketing 101, and people don’t really look at you if they’re gainfully employed until they get 8 to 12 touches. They have to know about your company. They have to understand who you are in order to engage. Because most of these people are gainfully employed. You heard the numbers earlier. I’ll give you an example. One of our clients that we’re doing work for out in Minneapolis, St. Paul, one of our recruiting team members had to touch a candidate 14 times before he would take an interview with our clients. Does your recruiting department have that kind of rigor to reach out 14 times to the same candidate? And ultimately this person was hired and is a great fit for the organization, but it took 14 communications touches to do so. And recruiting systems, unfortunately, are still hiring people that fail about half the time. And we have to be really careful to hire for the culture- attitudes, values, beliefs- first. “Culture trumps everything” as my friend, Gustavo Grodnitzky says, he wrote a great book, called Culture Trumps Everything. And it does, because when you think about why you let people go, it’s not usually because of their skills. It’s because of their behaviors, and people get terminated or separate from the company because they don’t fit the values, the attitudes, and the beliefs. So recruiting is a sales process and we have a six-step process that we bring our clients through. We teach them, and we actually manage it for them. So there’s a lot of rigor around it. There’s technology involved, but we have to get out of the old post and pray and hope that people will come. That’s not Field of Dreams. They’re not just going to come if you post a job. Jenn :    30:54    Well, you touched on it earlier, about the brand. I know that many of my friends that are looking for opportunities or for people that I’ve worked with, really one of the first steps that they’re taking beyond finding that job, is to go right over to Glassdoor to understand and see what that organization’s culture looks like. You know, to the extent that you as an organization embrace Glassdoor. I think you can really use it to attract higher caliber and quality candidates because as a top performing candidate, one of the things that you want is culture. As you know, career coaching. When I do that with my clients, the main thing that my millennial clients want is a culture. They want that right culture where they can fit in, there are opportunities, and they are jumping into Glassdoor and if they’re seeing that the culture that you have is horrendous or that there are no growth opportunities or maybe that they don’t offer trainings, they’ll just kind of walk away. They don’t even want to bother with it upfront if they’re seeing that it’s not going to meet their needs. So on the flipside of that, is when you’re in HR, I also think that you have to be looking at Glassdoor to understand what your current employees are seeing. Do you know what I mean? I know that whether it’s someone posting about their current salary and how they can be destructive to someone if they see that someone is making more than they are and they’re still employed with you. So I think paying attention to Glassdoor can just be a great way to be able to understand how people are seeing your brand and how people are experiencing your culture. And you can use this as data to make different changes. Kathleen :    32:36    Glassdoor is a great tool, but it’s not the only tool. Google also has reviews, Indeed has reviews. So don’t just focus on Glassdoor. It’s one of many that have surveyed your company and your culture from a candidate perspective to get involved in the discussion. But one thing I want to make sure you and your listeners understand, Jenn, is that 32% of candidates will choose a better culture over money. They will take 10% less compensation to work in a culture that they believe they fit and they will thrive in. Everybody wants cultural alignment. They don’t want to work for somebody that they don’t want to work for, and they’re not going to just- money’s like the fourth or fifth criteria for people when they’re taking a job- it’s culture, it’s attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, the type of work you’re doing, it’s purpose. So get real clear on that and then the money will come. But just get clear on that first. Jenn :    33:40    No, that’s a great point. Just focusing on an understanding of what they’re looking for and what they want to see and how they’re making their decisions on whether or not to go with you and especially now. I think it is a pivot from where they were historically just with the cost, you know, let’s move on to your final point. The social enterprise. This is the sixth area to focus on. What does social enterprise mean for someone or a candidate looking for a new job? Kathleen :    34:09    So I first was introduced to social enterprise through an organization called the Association for Corporate Growth. And every December we celebrate companies that- and it’s also ACG Global- it’s a 15,000 person member organization, and they celebrate companies that purposefully give back. So think of Toms shoes. Every time you buy a pair of shoes from Toms shoes, they give a free pair of shoes to a child who has none of Ben and Jerry’s, Ben and Jerry’s. A wonderful little company. Two guys are making ice cream. All it is is ice cream. But for every pint of ice cream they sell, they give to children. They give donations to all kinds of charities. So it’s really integrating your social impact with what you’re trying to do as a business. So engineering companies could be aligned with Rotary International, that’s all about clean water. You know, there are so many ways you can kind of take your social values and work alongside your financial goals and your business goals and start telling people what you do, what you stand for. And a lot of times business owners give graciously but never talk about it. In this talent scarcity environment, it is a marketing tool to tell people what you do and what you stand for. I’ll give you an example for my company; we support Goodwill Industries because it’s about the dignity of a job for everybody. We also support organizations like Girls Inc. and Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce because we really believe in women leading alongside men every day in every position and really closing that gender gap and inequality. So that’s what we stand for. That’s why we do what we do. What do you do? What’s your message? What are you embracing socially? It’s okay to own it and talk about it because those people who are aligned with those social values are going to seek you out. And wouldn’t that be groovy? Jenn :    36:28    Then you feel like your work has an added layer of meaning. Kathleen :    36:30    Absolutely. Yeah. No, you’re spot on there, Jenn. Jenn :    36:33    I too am helping to contribute to Goodwill as your organization does. I too am contributing to supply someone with a pair of shoes or with Warby Parker, a pair of glasses. I love the Ben & Jerry donates based on their ice cream sales because I’m obsessed with that ice cream. So, you know, now it’s even greater to know that every time I buy that pint that I’m doing good. You know, I’m joking, it’s not an extreme level of good, but I at least know that there a contribution that I’m making. And you know as an employee, it’s even more important. You really do get to feel that you’re a part of creating social change. Kathleen :    37:09    Right! Even if it’s a small part, even being a little small part, people really dig that. I mean, it’s not just business to consumer organizations, it’s B to B organizations too. So you know, just give it some thought because it’s something that could really help distinguish you in this very, very tight market with talent. Jenn :    37:30    Thank you so much for your time today, Kathleen. Do you have any last thoughts or insights that you want to share with our listeners? Kathleen :    37:37    No, I really appreciate this opportunity. I love Crestcom international and thank you for having me. And please visit our website. I’m sure Jenn will tell you more about that. And we look forward to sharing more resources with you over time. Outro:    37:55    Thank you for tuning in to our interview with Talentrust, CEO and founder Kathleen Quinn Votaw. For additional resources on talent management, or to download Talentrust 2019 Hiring Guide that we discussed today. Head over to Talentrust.com\resources that is Talentrust with one t in the middle. Or head over to our show notes and follow our link.   Develop your leadership qualities and your leadership pipeline with our Crestcom L.E.A.D.R. Program! For additional resources, visit Crestcom’s HR burnout solutions page. The post Episode 2: Trends in Talent Management with Kathleen Quinn Votaw appeared first on Crestcom International.

On our premiere episode of The Leadership Habit, Leadership Development Strategist, Jenn DeWall, talks to the CEO who authored the book The Leadership Habit, Tammy Berberick. Tammy tells us about the exciting mission of Crestcom International to develop stronger, more ethical leaders all around the world. She talks about common challenges facing CEOs today, and how they can engage and retain their employees while improving their bottom line and encouraging innovation. Transcript below: Intro:                              00:01     Welcome to the leadership habit podcast from the Crestcom Leadership Institute, the show that brings you inspiration and information to help you transform your leadership style. We use our experience developing leaders in over 60 countries worldwide to help you develop the skills and tools you need to reach your leadership potential, join us in our mission to create a better world by developing stronger, more ethical leaders. How can you make leadership a habit today? Jenn DeWall:                 00:36     Welcome to episode one of The Leadership Habit. I’m Jenn DeWall, a leadership development strategist and I’m excited to be launching Crestcom International’s new podcast. The Leadership Habit. We are kicking off the first episode introducing you to Crestcom CEO Tammy Berberick. Tammy holds an MBA and has held numerous executive level positions leading transformational change within both small and large organizations. Tammy has coached over 100 CEO’s and key executives on leadership, change management, organizational design and strategy. She also literally wrote the book on Developing Great Leadership Habits. It’s called The Leadership Habit available now from your favorite bookseller. Welcome, Tammy. Tammy Berberick:         01:27     Well, hello and thanks for having me, Jenn. I’m excited about being here. Jenn DeWall:                 01:33     Tammy, you have an impressive background and a really great, admirable, respectable history of developing leaders. So tell me why is leadership development important to you? Tammy Berberick:         01:47     Well, Jenn, I am blessed, truly blessed, to have the opportunity now in my life to work in an organization where my personal mission is aligned with the organization’s mission. I’m passionate about leadership. And I love to help people do great things and have impact together. You know, leadership, my definition of leadership, Jenn, is the ability to engage a group of people to perform well above their perceived capabilities to achieve a shared vision. Jenn DeWall:                 02:33     Yes! Leadership is pretty powerful. Thinking about how we can unite people to work together and just really help empower them to be their best selves. So Tammy, you’re the CEO of Crestcom, and for those that are unfamiliar with Crestcom, how about telling us a little bit more about what Crestcom does? Tammy Berberick:         02:52     Yeah, absolutely. At Crestcom, Jenn, we believe that we can make a difference in this world by developing great leaders. Leaders who are ethical and strong in their beliefs. Leaders who will make more thoughtful decisions going forward and leaders who are committed to lifelong learning, not only for themselves but for those they lead. And when you look around today, I mean I just watched the news last night and this morning, you realize the importance of what we do. You realize the urgency of what we do. We live our mission by developing, or we live our mission by delivering an interactive leadership development experience. One that produces real results. Every word is important in that because what we do is always going to be interactive. We are experts in leadership development and we will always ensure that it’s applicable and it has measured results. We hold our participants accountable for their action plans. And we’ve been doing this for over 30 years in well over 60 countries. And we know from our experience and from research, we know what it takes to have an effective program, an effective program with sustained behavior change. So what we do will always incorporate three key elements. Implementation. It’s got to be practical got to be able to implement it and it’s got to be measurable and include accountability. We, in order to have sustainability, we’ve got to hold our participants accountable to implement and then they’ll get it. Leadership will become a habit, a daily habit for them. Jenn DeWall:                 05:20     I want to ask you a few questions about leadership habits, but before we get into it, you mentioned something about the accountability piece and I think that’s really important to bring up. What Crestcom does is building in that accountability, because I know myself personally, I have attended leadership trainings. I have been to different classes because I do love to develop, but the biggest challenge that I have is actually following through. Sometimes I get that information and I don’t necessarily utilize it. Tammy Berberick:         05:53     You’re absolutely right. And let me just take you through a little bit more about our program and our methodology. Our program is a 12-month program. We don’t believe in these one off type of training programs. We believe in developing a relationship with our participants and we believe in a 12-month type of process. So we facilitate two leadership modules every month and it’s 24 interactive modules in total. And then during the class, our participants actually practice the new tools or the new processes and then we hold them accountable to implement the concept in their organization before they leave our class. We have them pull out their phones and write down their ideas and their action plan and our mobile learning portal. Then from there, after the class, we do a few things. First of all, we send some reinforcement material a few days after the class to keep them in action, to keep them thinking about what they learned in the sessions. And then we also send a summary that automatically comes out again, sort of a summary of what they learned. Again to trigger are you in action? Are you in action? Are you thinking about this as you’re going through your day to day? And then we don’t stop there. In fact, what we do is we have what’s called a debrief meeting with them. So we go to their office and we meet with their team and we talk about this. We get the, the supervisors and the CEO involved because we’ve been sending them summary so they know what the participants are learning. So we have a dialogue about the learnings and we talk about what struggles you have, what have you implemented? And we can see that right up on the screen because we’ve got their learning portal online and what are you still struggling with? And what we want to do is create this culture of openness, create this culture where people are learning together and, and people feel like it’s okay to be vulnerable, and to help each other be better leaders. And so this is not easy and, and oftentimes we get busy and that’s why we put so much structure around our process because we need to help you as much as we can get in to the habit. The habit of leadership. Jenn DeWall:                 08:56     Well, yeah, it’s understandable. I mean if you think about it, we all have a million things that we’re running to. I know myself personally, I have, the day of work and then going home, taking the dogs for a walk, cooking dinner; or if you have children, it’s putting them to bed. It’s a lot. And so it sounds like that structure is just something that’s so valuable. And the other piece that I thought was interesting that you said is just that connection, that collaboration that’s created with that leader who attended the program, they’re managing their company. There’s that connection to say, we’re in this together and we want to support you, so let’s see what you were able to execute and implement as a leader. How did that go for you? It sounds like you’re actually introducing a lot of those coaching conversations, which we know today are so important. Tammy Berberick:         09:44     And there is no failure here. There’s only learnings. Jenn DeWall:                 09:49     Tammy, thank you so much for helping us learn a little bit more about what the background of what Crestcom does, the background of Crestcom as well as understanding a little bit more about the leadership habits. So now what I was hoping to do is get your insight into some of the challenges leaders in organizations face today. So there’s a recent report that was published by the Deloitte University Press, and it said that 80% of company leaders recognize that there is a leadership skills gap in their organization, but half of those leaders don’t have a plan for closing that gap. Why do you think that is? And why should we better prepare new leaders for increased responsibilities. Tammy Berberick:         10:35     Well, Jenn, those are great questions. And let’s start, let’s start with the “why”. Why is it important to develop our leaders? And let me personalize this for a minute. I run an organization and with today’s low unemployment rates, it is difficult to find good people. And so that means that the people that you have, those folks have to be developed to take on more responsibility. And not to mention that it is critical that you retain these people because they have other options. So you’ve got to make them fall in love with your organization and you’ve got to let them know that you care about them as people. There’s just so much change happening today. Jenn, if you look at just in a year the change that’s going on in the world and the change in our world, and our state and in our industry. That means you’ve got to learn how to deal with change and you’ve got to be agile. So what, what we’re really wanting here at Crestcom, personally what I’m wanting is to have and to develop a group of employees who are lifelong learners, employees who are genuinely curious. In fact, I just read an article about this in this month’s Harvard Business Review. These types of employees will, instead of reacting to change, will proactively anticipate changes that are occurring in the market. Just think about that. Think about the impact of having an employee base made up of lifelong learners, right? Think about the energy level. Think about the fact that you would become more of an agile, innovative organization. I mean, I bet there’s studies on this and a lot of analytics in companies that you would get into, that an organization full of lifelong learners is far more competitive and far more profitable than other organizations. So that, to me, that’s the “why”, Jenn. And your second question is, well, if the “why” is so key and there’s so much value in it, why aren’t they doing it, right? Why aren’t they investing in their people? Why aren’t they closing these gaps? There’s probably several reasons, but I think the primary reason may be time. But in reality, development really creates time. Good leadership development actually builds capacity, and gives you back time. And so we’ve got to spread that message around. We’ve got to make sure that leaders understand that. And then secondly, some of the organizations don’t see a return, or they haven’t seen a return on investment from their previous development. And to me, this means that you probably have had the wrong development. Because we take this seriously here at Crestcom, we believe in value or we’re not, we’re not after just selling a commodity here. What we’re after is offering value and having impact and we want to see that impact with our participants. I mean, that’s why we do this, that fuels us up. That’s why we’re in this business. So I think finding the right organization, that is going to be your partner and is an organization where your folks can engage and you can see the return is important. Jenn DeWall:                 15:37     And building that in, you know? At a lot of companies, you mentioned it earlier, time can be a barrier to development. Maybe not realizing that it’s actually an expectation, especially with what I’ve read about the millennial generation. It is an expectation that an organization provides developmental opportunities or opportunities for growth. If not, you’re going to lose that employee and you’ll incur those higher turnover expenses, the on-boarding. That’s where training, I think, the cost seems like it’s actually high. Whereas, if you look at it as a developmental opportunity and an investment and you do that head on and you’re intentional and you focus on saying “you’re new” or “you’re young and we want you to be successful, here’s those opportunities”. That’s where that return on investment is. And if we don’t do it, we don’t get that return on investment to our bottom line. So, it kind of dovetails into that. What kind of real-life results do you think that organizations see when they actually invest in training? Tammy Berberick:         16:40     Well, we get testimonials from our clients all over the world, and I love reading these testimonials, by the way. I mean, they totally make your day. But they, they say things like not only did this development make me a better leader in my organization, but it also helped me be a better spouse. It also helped me be a better parent. I mean our development impacts your whole life. I also remember interviewing one of our participants, while I was in Trinidad. And she tells about a story and she was negotiating this, this big deal in her company. When she had first gone into the initial negotiation, she really wasn’t satisfied with it. And then she had attended our session on negotiation- and this is a true story. And she talked to me about it after she did that, she went back and re-did her negotiation strategy and approach and she saved over $500,000, for her company through that negotiation. And she tells you that this is attributable to her development. And so, there are soft impacts and there’s what you call hard dollar impacts. But when I think about it, they’re all impacts that really show up. They show up in the energy of your organization, they show up in the decision making in your organization. They show up just in the everyday interactions. You want folks to want to come to work. And I love being able to go into our learning portal and, and pull down some of these action plans and these results. And just to read some of the things that they implemented. Some of these are small things, small things maybe to me or to you, but maybe big things to them. And then some things are like huge things that they’re going after, something that triggered a thought right there in the class and it triggered something, then all of a sudden they’re going after something big, something very big for themselves and for their organization. So, I love the fact that we can view that and that CEOs and supervisors can also get in to our tool and view this. I mean there’s complete transparency there in terms of what the return is. And the other thing I would say is people keep coming back. We have a huge repeat business. And so we must be doing something right. Jenn DeWall:                 20:21     Yeah, absolutely! Well, you said it earlier, it’s not only about how can I make you show up in a way that you can be more influential and more successful at work. Right? It doesn’t stop there. It carries over into our personal lives. It really, it sounds like just impacts that overall happiness, that quality of life. We’re not just talking about leadership as a generic topic. We’re talking about your ability to enjoy your life, to be able to be the person that you want to be, to be that leader inside and outside of work. Tammy Berberick:         20:55     Our life is precious, right? And we’ve got to take that seriously. And so every day is precious. We’ve got to make sure it’s good. Jenn DeWall:                 21:03     Yeah, and it’s great that these developmental opportunities hold that space for people to focus on their own development, their own goals. You talked about that creativity piece, attending those classes, thinking of new ideas. I mean, it’s great to think about how we can challenge ourselves and amaze ourselves. $500,000! To negotiate that in that negotiation is amazing. Those are great things to realize and it’s exciting. Tammy Berberick:         21:35     Well, one of the other things I didn’t mention- that I love seeing- is that our public classes, Jenn, our public classes have peers from different industries. And so I may say, for instance, my takeaway is one thing, but you are from a different industry and your takeaways another. And all of a sudden I’m like, wow, I didn’t even think of it like that, right? Because we’re all coming at this with different perspectives with different experience. And so then that multiplies my learning, right? So I’m learning from others in the class. Jenn DeWall:                 22:17     It’s like travel. Travel gives you that opportunity to see things in a new way and being able to participate in a class and hear a concept, but talk to someone outside of your industry and share those ideas. Think about how you can implement it. That’s a wonderful thing to know that the trainings are a catalyst for conversations. They are a catalyst for innovation and also that expansion and that networking between organizations who knows what type of partnerships can be generated from that. Jenn DeWall:                 22:51     So now we’re going to turn the corner a little bit. You’re talking about those results. You’re a CEO, which is a position that many people strive to achieve and it’s, oh my gosh, it’s something that I admire so much and I hope that I can be there one day. My question for you is, to the CEOs that are listening or the people that want to be CEOs, what advice would you give a fellow CEO about how to close the gap, to create a learning and development culture? So we talk about that training piece and what we’re doing as an organization to help people. But really there are some things that need to be addressed in the culture to prepare for these expansions. So what advice would you have to close that gap? Tammy Berberick:         23:45     Well, I would say ownership. And what I mean by that is you’d need to put more ownership on the employee. And you probably weren’t expecting that answer. You probably were thinking, that I’m having this big checklist of all the things that the CEOs would be doing, but really, there’s so much value in, in having an associate or employee take ownership of their own development. Right? Where do you want to go? Let’s talk about what your strengths are. Like, let’s really talk about how you’re going to grow those strengths. How are you going to leverage those strengths? Let’s talk about what you’re passionate about. Alright? So let’s talk about this, this combination of passion and things that you’re good at and figure out where that’s leading, right? So I put more ownership around, I would put more ownership with the employee. At Crestcom, we do a short session with companies and the folks who go into our program and we get feedback. And, then we coach CEOs. One of the things we tell CEOs is it’s important to not force this on your employees. I mean, employees need to want to do this. And so that’s why we do this mini- oftentimes we do this mini leadership skills workshop for organizations where they can actually experience our training. Then, the CEO can see firsthand, let me see how my employees react to this. Do they like it? Are they engaging? Is this something that really works for them versus me pulling my employees to attend something? I don’t think that works. I think that we’ve got to have people that really want to develop themselves and then we offer that, uh, that opportunity. I think that’s key. Then the second thing is hiring people, right? Hiring people for talent and, and, and people that want to grow themselves, right? So those two things, Jenn DeWall:                 26:27     Yeah, you need the right people to be able to execute that organizational mission. And you said something too, about not only finding that ownership, but starting the conversation and that if you haven’t started the conversation with your employees yet, chances are they may be feeling lost, disconnected, and they’re wanting that connection and opportunities to grow and develop. So for CEOs, it’s about starting those conversations instead of pretending that development is something that’s in a silo and not part of our day to day responsibilities. That’s huge. You’ve been in the learning development space and you’ve had a really great career with a lot of successes. In your opinion, how has learning and development changed over the years? Tammy Berberick:         27:17     I think the delivery has changed and I think we will continue to see change in that realm. So we know today that face-to-face, live-facilitated development is best practice, right? We know that you can see the whites of their eyes and see are they getting things and that’s best practice and that is our methodology today. But we also know that with technology, interactive technology improving every year, there’s going to be movement to where that can really be a nice blend. You might have heard of this concept called the flip classroom? Jenn DeWall:                 28:17     No, I’m not familiar with that. Tammy Berberick:         28:18     So several of the schools, some of the schools are piloting this. And basically what, happens is that that the students are doing a portion of their learning online, self-paced with an interactive type of self-paced learning and then they are meeting face to face for more of an immersive experience to practice what they learn. And I think this is an interesting concept and this is something that we’re currently exploring with Crestcom. In the next few years you may see more- and our continuing education portion head in this direction because it’s interesting. And the whole thing for learning is that previously, learning was the manager’s job or HR’s job. And now like I said, learning is really going to be more personal and it’s going to be driven more by the employee. So that means we’ve got to really understand how various employees learn, right? We all learn differently and we all want different methods of delivery based on our learning styles. So what we’re going to see is that the learner is going to be more in the center of the learning and development and we’re going to be focused on them, and then develop the best practice in those skills around how they can best take that learning in. So this is a really exciting time for Crestcom, it’s a really exciting time for our industry. We’re going to see a lot of changes over the next few years. Jenn DeWall:                 30:24     It sounds like there’s just that opportunity to personalize, to make it accessible. Again, time is one of the biggest barriers to people wanting to do this and blended learning, having opportunities to do it on demand, or opportunities to meet face-to-face. People want options. And the more that we give those options, the more that you get those options, the more success others will have. I’ve just really been enjoying this conversation, but I want to dive in again. I’m going to give you another statistic. So, according to the Udemy in Depth: 2018 Millennials at Work Report, 42% of millennials said that learning and development is the most important benefit when deciding where to work. So how does this desire from the newest and largest workforce demographic impact organizations today? Tammy Berberick:         31:21     I think this is key for organizations to understand. Millennials want a career path, they want development and they want to continuously know where they’re heading. When I think back to when I started, it was, I was just so happy to have a job. I wasn’t like, when’s my next promotion? I wasn’t into that. I was like, head down, just keep my head down and work as hard as I can. But today, they’ve got more options for one thing. So we’ve got to- as CEOs and leaders- we’ve got to make sure we’re attractive to the largest working generation. And so that means we’ve got to focus and, and, and we can’t be bugged by that kind of discussion, right? We need to know how to be open to that discussion. We need to know that this is just who they are. This is what they’re wanting. And, and we need to be able to have those discussions. And, frankly, I love this. This goes along with my previous point, is I want our employees to own their own development. I want our employees to be pushing me in terms of their, their path. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to get that path. What they are going to get is they’re going to get some clear feedback and they’re going to get some opportunities to learn. And that’s really what they’re, they’re wanting. And, I often see that, “oh, millennials don’t want to work”. I don’t think that’s the case. I think millennials need an open dialogue about where they are and where they’re going and, and how do they get there. And the other thing I would say about this workforce is that they want to work for organizations that have a worthy purpose. They believe their time is very valuable and they want to make sure that they’re aligned with that purpose. And all that I think is positive. Jenn DeWall:                 34:31     Yes. And you touched on it, many people can be bugged or bothered by this desire from that large generation to have developmental opportunities. But really, if we think about the benefits of that investment, we have the benefits and improve performance. We have the benefits and improved morale and engagement. Does it come with requiring a little bit more up-front time? Sure. But the long-term gains can be incredible for any organization. And so it’s, it’s great that I think millennials are challenging their organizations to think about how to think of their people as people that want to do the best that they can. They’re not just a means to an end. These people want to be the best. They want to figure out how they can support you, and development is one of those ways. And then on that flip side, recognizing again that human need to want to have that purpose, that meaning to their work. Just say like, I am so glad that I can help them do x, y, and z because that’s going to make a difference in someone or something’s life and purpose. So let’s get a little bit more personal now, Tammy. Um, your position, I’ve said it many times as CEO is extremely respectable. What does the road to CEO look like, and how do you prepare yourself to grow in your career? So maybe you are talking to one of those millennials that really wants to grow to be a CEO one day. So thinking about what does that road to CEO look like? Tammy Berberick:                 35:30     That’s a very broad question. I think because the road is so different for everyone. I’ll just share, where my path was and send them my insight. My undergrad and my first job out of college was at Arthur Andersen and I was a CPA, and this financial foundation and that true understanding of a P&L has been so extremely beneficial throughout my career. And I know you’re like looking at me. Oh, that does not sound fun. But I’m telling you that I’ve been in so many different functions and having this background as a foundation has been very beneficial because I understand KPI’s, I understand levers of a P&L. And for me that was very helpful. Especially when you’re running an organization, you’ve got to be able to know your P&L and know what is important to know how to grow your business. Then secondly, I later worked in a much larger corporation with great leaders. They were great leaders from all over the world, great leaders from all different organizations, from Frito Lay and Pepsi, Kraft. And I mean, I can go on and on, Walt Disney, and what I got to see so clearly, is what good looks like. I got to see some of the behaviors of a great leader. And then the third point is, I owned my career path. I mean, I keep saying this is great that employees own their career path. I mean, I owned my career path. And everyone’s path is different and my path would be very different from your path. But the learning there is you got to know what your path is and, and you’ve got to own it. I took several cross-functional moves in this organization and, I mean I moved from finance to sales to HR to IT to strategy and, and everybody was like, are you crazy? Why are you doing that? Because it was a ton of work, right? Because I go into these organizations at a fairly high level and really don’t know much about them. So there was just such a huge learning curve for me. And it would have been much easier for me to stay in my function, say of finance and just to simply grow that way. But that was not my path. That is not what I was wanting. So you’ve got to know if, if, what, what your path is. And I was willing to pay the price, meaning I was willing to work hard, really hard to get up to speed to where I could add value in these cross-functional moves. And even though I was really working very hard, a lot of hours, I was also having a stair-step type of transformational development. Um, I wasn’t just having small incremental development steps. I was taking transformational type of steps and learning new skills and gaining new perspectives and learning how to deal with new stuff with different styles of personalities in the different divisions and the different functions. And basically, I was preparing myself to run a company. I really wanted to understand all aspects of a business and, and know them, not just from a cursory level but from a deep level. And that’s what I did. And so I was well positioned to do that. So if you want to run a business and you want to be a CEO sometime, then you’ve got to put yourself in situations of growth. And that also means potentially risks of not doing so well. And I was going to use that f-word, the failure. But what I mean by that, is where you might have not done so well, right? You would have learned, but you may not have done so well in certain areas because not all of those areas were my strength, right? I was building skills, I was building general perspectives, but I was also really honing what I love to do, which was I love meeting people and, I love what, the other thing I realized is I love change. I love moving and learning new things and then being able to stabilize that once I learned how can I make it better and then stabilize it. So it was all good learning for me. Jenn DeWall:                 41:21     You know- one of the things you said, I’m just thinking, what would we say to the younger self, to those individuals – what I heard you say, Tammy, is that part of it is being really intentional. Have a plan, right? You have to know where you’re going. It’s not just about getting up and hitting snooze, waking up, going to work, and coming home and watching shows on the television and then doing the same thing over and over. So, being intentional with where you want to go and finding those opportunities. And then, the other part you said is that embracing failure piece. Maybe not looking at failure as that awful detrimental thing, but really embrace failure as part of your stepping stone in the process. And one of the favorite quotes I have, is that “comfort should scare you”. So looking at it. Thinking about how can we pull ourselves out of our comfort zone to Tammy Berberick:         42:16     I love that, if you get comfortable, it’s time to move. Jenn DeWall:                 42:20     That’s great advice. I mean, thinking about what I could have learned when I was just starting out, it would be helpful to think about it as the true marathon, but actually have a finish line in sight, right? Don’t just allow yourself to sit there and say what finish line? You have to set up some goals for yourself. Tammy Berberick:         42:36     Right! And the finish line changes, right? Once you hit this, what’s your next finish line? Right? I mean, you really are on a journey, right? The journey of learning and journey of growth. And to me when I stop learning, it’s going to be a sad day. Jenn DeWall:                 42:54     Yeah. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, right? This is great. What leadership advice -we talked a lot about how we would help the younger selves- but this is interesting- talking from CEO to CEO. It’s got to be hard for some CEOs to really talk about their opportunities to improve their leadership and, or what they could do to manage some of the challenges, because who do they turn to, right? If they don’t have that network of CEOs, who do they turn to for their support? So what leadership advice would you give to a fellow CEO? Tammy Berberick:                 43:34     First of all, I would say to hire great people. Hire people that you want to spend time with and enjoy, you know? I love coming to work because I love seeing the people here. But also make sure that you’re hiring people that think differently than you do. And that’s not easy, right? Because, it would be easier for me to work with a group of people who think exactly like me, right? Because we’d get up, we’d all agree and then, ready, go! But at the same time, the decisions would not be the right decisions. They wouldn’t be the best decisions. And, and so you’ve got to value that. You’ve got to be able to value that diversity. And then you’ve got to be able to show yourself be able to be vulnerable. And I think that people in, maybe I shouldn’t generalize this, but I think people in higher level positions feel like they’ve got to have all the answers and they’ve got to be all buttoned down. And I think that really it’s about relating, and people want to work for real people. And to me, being vulnerable is being courageous and being human. One of the questions, Jenn, you asked me, before you got started, you were asking me about what leadership advice would I give my younger self and I’ve been thinking? I didn’t have an answer to that originally, but now I don’t know if this is leadership advice, but, I would play more. I started working at a very young age. I started working at the age of 12, and I know that sounds crazy, but I did, I was just so driven by work, I wanted to work and I wanted to be independent. And I never stopped working. And, I mean today I love it. I mean my passion is my work. But I also plan play. I plan play and I plan downtime. And one of my personal goals this last year was to laugh more. Jenn DeWall:                 46:30     Cool! I love that goal. We need to remind ourselves of that. I mean, again, we talked a little bit about what’s going on in the news. We get so caught up, we take ourselves so seriously or we become so bogged down by our day to day responsibilities that we forget to laugh. Just taking time to have play and recognizing that it’s important. I remember once I was having a conversation with an executive and he was talking about the differences in generations and he said something similar to you. He started his job and he was happy to have it, but it was head-down type job, and he said, “Today what I see is people want to have fun at work”, and he actually likes it. It was an adjustment for him, but he sees that value in the organization, of people having fun, having play, laughing, and how that can actually aid the successful outcomes that they achieve as an organization. So one last question for you, Tammy, -and this is a closing, even though I really loved our conversation. So as a leader, what leadership habit do you practice each day? Tammy Berberick:         47:38     I think when you look at our book, The Leadership Habit, in the last chapter, which maybe should really be the first chapter now that I think about it, but it’s a little too late, is on personal growth. We as leaders often forget about ourselves. We sometimes forget about taking care of ourselves and what I mean by that, taking care of ourselves physically, taking care of ourselves spiritually, and emotionally. So I take that very seriously. Every morning I do a gratitude meditation and I exercise and that really fuels the rest of my day. And I believe how you start your day is key. So take good care of you. Jenn DeWall:                 48:38     That’s Great. Thank you Tammy for being here. Tammy Berberick:         48:41     Thank you, Jenn. You made me think! Jenn DeWall:                 48:45     Yeah, absolutely! I think that’s a great closing comment, too. Focus on yourself. Focus on what you can do to fuel yourself, whether it’s gratitude or exercise, but just really focus on that self-care because the world needs you and we need you to take care of yourself so we can receive those contributions. Tammy Berberick:         49:04     Yes! The world needs more great leaders. Absolutely. Jenn DeWall:                 49:10     Well, thank you so much, Tammy. I we really appreciate your time and coming in and talking to us. Tammy Berberick:          49:16     Thank you. Outro:                             49:19     Thank you for listening toTthe Leadership Habit podcast. If you liked today’s show, don’t forget to subscribe through your favorite streaming service like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information, find us at crestcom.com. Until next time, make leadership your habit.   Develop your leadership qualities and your leadership pipeline with our Bullet Proof Manager® Program! The post Episode 1: Introduction to Tammy Berberick, CEO of Crestcom International appeared first on Crestcom International.