“Why Employee Retention Requires Meeting Employees’ Needs”
A transcript from https://anchor.fm/glenn-e-daniels-ii/episodes/Essential-Leadership-Skills-with-Carrie-Lynn-Hotson–Retention–Retention–Retention-e1nb9mt/a-a3cflec
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. I know I’ve already been told it’s not morning time where I am, but it’s morning time, someplace. Good morning, everybody. Glenn Daniels, COO at Touch Stone Publishers. Wanna welcomes our guest today. Carrie Lynn Hotson.
So let me just first start off by saying good morning or let’s just do right good evening to Carrie Lynn Hoon.
And how are you today? Oh, good. How are you? I’m doing great. Doing great. Thanks for joining us. So I was open up with this one question. What should our listeners know about? That maybe is out of their ordinary, that they don’t really know about. It helps us get to know you and find out a little bit more.
Yeah. I have had a really unique 25 years of experience. And I utilize a lot of it to point out to my readers, all the mistakes that I’ve made during that, that period. I started my career as a police officer. I was a police officer for 17 years. I moved to the rank of Sergeant. I ran a lot of the training programs.
And then, I went back to school and got my postgraduate in human resources and became a senior manager in an organization, helping to lead and, do that strategic planning and the hiring of employees. So I really got to see both sides of an organization, both as an employee, as a junior leader supervisor, and then as a senior supervisor.
And then I decided to start my own business as an interview. so I had a lot of fun learning from the people that actually wanna apply for jobs and organizations. And why are you leaving the organization you’re in? So I started to utilize a lot of this information to help employers understand their employees and help employees understand what organizations are looking for in new candidates and in the employees that they have working for them.
I found that interesting that you framed it to say that. Started a new position, helping people get to interviews and get ready for that. But you learned from that. Oh yeah. And so then when know, they went a little bit further say I learned from the idea of why they left let’s see if G agrees with you.
Why most people leave their jobs?
Oh. People leave their organizations because of the leadership. And I actually, I used Gallup as part of my research for my book, but I also did my own survey. I asked employee. And had them fill a survey out anonymously on what makes an effective supervisor, what are you looking for in a supervisor?
And even more importantly, what are things that you didn’t tell your supervisor either because you laughed? Great question, right? Or what are things that you wish they knew about you, but you never told them and why? Because those are the things we need as leaders to underst.
That’s a great question, but your question though, and part of what I understand really sets some people back.
I was speaking with a gentleman who runs a small restaurant and he said if I followed those philosophies, I would have no employees or I would have no profit, no anything. And one of those philosophies put up on the screen is that if you’re gonna keep your employees, employee retention really requires that you meet your employees needs and their.
So his statement was if I meet their needs, that means they get days off often and they want to, which means I can’t rely on having a scheduled, tell us a little bit more, convince him, cause I’m convinced, but convince him why we need to meet our employee’s needs and find out their interests and meet those interests.
You know what? One of the things I wanna do for business leaders is actually make leadership. Being a supervisor and a leader being that restaurant odor, it is extremely frustrating. It’s very stressful. You’re trying to juggle a million plates up in the air literally at one time. Okay. He’s worried about his profits.
He’s worried about his business. Now. He is trying to worry about employees and I’m telling him, you gotta get to know the people that are coming to work for you. And he is thinking I can’t do this. So what I do is have some fun with it and I help them get really quick. That actually, if we get to know the people that we’re leading and we meet some of their needs, they will in turn, stay with you.
They will become your loyal employees. They will become the ones that brand your restaurant to other people and brand you as an owner and a leader to other people saying, you know what, this guy’s great, really enjoy working for him. I have met so many employees that. Have left organizations left making more money and speak so well about their current employer, because they do those things for them.
They meet their needs. They’re interested in you as a human being. That’s what we all want. It’s about having relationships with people and having conversations. And can I trust you with this information if maybe I’m struggling and that you’re not going to penalize me because of it, but maybe you’ll help me just a little.
And in turn, my loyalty is gonna go up a hundredfold.
Can I dig into one thing? Because that struck me when you said it quick wins. The manager, supervisor, owner needs to make quick wins. I think that’s critical. Can you give us a framework for eight quick win? Those are hard to come by.
They aren’t, if we know how to approach it.
So a really quick win. We know that we, everybody has labor shortage. Everybody’s got job postings out there. They can’t fill and they’re struggling. It’s impacting profits in impacting how much, how many hours you can be open, even because you can’t even fill shifts. So a quick win can be getting you employees.
Now I’m also a college professor. So I’m working with the people that are going to be our potential employees. And I am meeting so many people with unique qualities and unique skill sets. But you know what? They can’t get hired. They can’t pass the job postings. They can’t meet the requirements because we’re so generic in our requirements.
One of the things in my book, I say, you know what? We’ve gotta get out of this habit of, I wanna hire a mini me. I want you to have three years of experience in this. I want you to be able to do this. I want you to be able to demonstrate this. We need to look at those job postings and think, what do I really.
I want a loyal employee. I want one somebody who’s a quick thinker. I want somebody who wants to learn. Okay. I’ve met many of those people, but they don’t have the three years of experience working in your industry yet we can get them that we can teach them that piece. So your quick win can be just broadening your job posting, take out the must.
Must, and make them. I’d like to see this. I’d like to see this, but I’m open to this and now really be open to it. Instead of interviewing 10 people interview 30, and you’re gonna be really surprised who you meet, even the way that you advertise this job. Is it just a posting on indeed or are you making a little video and showing people what your employees.
What’s your company about who are you? Why do people like to work for you? Because that’s what I wanna know. How do your in current employees help you brand this? Tell people why they wanna work with you, why you wanna work with them.
See, and you just laid out some really quick. We there, it was asking for one, you gave us more than one cause like it caught my attention to say, okay, make a video that.
This would rip out, you know what, and these days use your phone. your phone is everybody as good as anything else. So use your phone and make that video. You also said to start looking for somebody who’s not a mini me. think though, that’s a way of saying. Start looking to create a diverse working place, a diverse employee market and diverse everything, because diversity is gonna be king.
This gentleman, he has a diverse working spot, but they all are meaning HIMS. They all have to have this idea that everything needs to be perfect. And they’ve had years of experience in the restaurant. So maybe he’ll pick up from that. And maybe everybody pick up from that. Let’s start looking for diversity.
Cause that’s how we get to, I think we get to that a hundred percent level when we also talk about the ideal of, we want to find people who are not like us. That’s a little bit scary though. If I can just push back a little bit. If that person has no motivation for the business.
how does that happen? And then I don’t wanna lose the second question you have in mind, but
So that’s why the book is actually divided into five parts. Okay. And so the first part is we need to get to know who we are and we have to be willing to look at it as leaders we have to really look at who are we and what are our preferences?
Who are the people that I like to hire? And. and it probably has to do with the fact that they learn the way that I learn. They do things the way that I do them. If I’m a very systematic person, I want systematic people. The issue is that by doing this and not diversifying the thought, we don’t ever, how to know how to pivot.
We don’t know how to bring in new ideas to the organization, but I’m really cautious with leaders in saying, please, don’t just jump to. Oh, she said, we need to diversify. So I’m gonna do this because unless you’re willing to really look at yourself and understand what maybe the work is, you have to do first to be open to that new, I employee’s ideas.
You’re going to do this and it’s gonna crash and burn. And you’re gonna say that wasn’t a win. No, because when the person tried to bring you a new idea, you weren’t ready to hear it. So we need to get you ready to hear it first.
So good. We have to prepare the leaders. Through, is it a self-assessment work or is it some kind of assessments we’re talking about emotional intelligence and all those type of assessments to look at yourself to start thinking I need to change or is it to say, okay, listen, I need to change.
How do you suffer that?
And this is where leaders get scary and they get defensive, are you telling me I have to change? Nope. I’m not the stuff that I do. I love to say these are your strengths. I have strengths. You have strengths. These are our. But what we have to be cautious of is how those strengths may impact people different than ourselves.
So I’ll give you a really quick example as a leader. I’m very visionary. I love to ask why I love to be thinking about the big picture. You can tell even way the way that we’re talking about the book, but when I have people that work for me that are very detail oriented that are very stead.
We have a policy. We have a procedure. I need to know what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and what the results are gonna be. I, as a leader have to say, okay, I recognize my strength is vision, but I have to be cautious when that I’m not stressing the people who need a system. So I have to slow myself down and give that to them.
I have to have those Monday meetings and the Friday meetings. I have to make the list. I have to tell you, here’s where we’re going. Step one, step two, step three. Step. Because that’s what you need from me as a leader. Are you different than me? Absolutely. Can we work really effectively together? Absolutely.
I need people that are detail oriented as much as they need somebody that’s visionary. And if we can appreciate each other’s needs and interests, all of a sudden we’re much better team and we’re being much more innovative for the organization.
you mentioned your book and which I think is your title.
You have a title and a subtitle, and I think that’s so important. The very first part know who you lead . So once you and I found it interesting also that you have a section in the book to say, can know yourself, yep. As a leader. So that’s really interesting and it’s interesting for a lot of different reasons.
That’s what we should be teaching in our classrooms should be teaching leaders, know yourself. I would contend that it’s more important to know the person I’m leading. Why did you choose that first part of your title know who you lead?
So it’s called knowing who you lead, because you do need to understand the people that you’re leading because every single one is different.
And yes, I know this is the scary part for leaders because you’ve created a system and you want the system to work with every. , but we are not a transactional workforce anymore. We’re not an industrial based workforce. We’re a people based workforce. There you go. So we need to get to know the people that we’re leading, just like a hockey team.
I give the hockey analogies in the book too. Coach has a hockey team this year. They can’t just automatically use the same playbook next year because the players are different. The people are different the way you have to inspire them the way they learn, the way they work together. It’s D.
Organizations are the exact same when we bring someone new in, we need to get to know who they are so we can leverage all their fantastic skills and assets because that’s what you hired them for. But then we don’t utilize and empower them to use this information. And, back to a really quick win that we talked about that video.
You’ve got new people working for you, younger generation, maybe, you’re a business leader. You’ve been in the business 20, 25 years. And you’re thinking of video. This is a perfect opportunity. Leverage those younger employees. Tell them, Hey, I’m gonna give you the autonomy of creating a quick promotional video of the company that we could use to try to attract new employees.
Here you go. Do it this afternoon. I’ll give you the time to do it. They know how to work. The technology. They know how to use the software, they idea and how yeah. And all of a sudden you’ve empowered me. You’ve recognize strengths that I have and innovatively we’re, going to now advertise the business in a new way.
And that just my thinking is that builds onto everything. If I tell those group of employers, I want to go make a video that promotes the company so other people can come to. They’re gonna love that they’re gonna do it. But then when that other person who comes to work, that we just hired, they’re gonna quickly bring them into the culture.
And they say this is our culture. This is what we’re all about. This is why we follow the mission and the vision of the company. If I may step on the hockey analogy for just a second okay. Yes. It’s gonna be difficult for my Colorado avalanche to repeat cuz the change is gonna happen.
We’re gonna win twice next as well, too. My best team in hockey, best team ever, Colorado avalanche. Anyway, enough of that’s all good. I wanna ask you something though. The values I think that’s important for people to grab a hold of as a leader, embrace who you’re leading and what they value that was I think a main point of what you’re teaching and showing what they value.
Why is that so important for me to know what you value?
Because now, especially with their labor shortages, people are interviewing your company as much as you are interviewing. People want to become a part of something they believe in. So they are looking up your organization. They are reading those strategic plans.
They are reading the mission, vision, and values. And they’re talking to your employees and past employees to see if you live those values. So if a value for me is that I wanna be part of an inclusive organization. I, you have it in your values. So do you really do it? Are you inclusive in your practice?
Is it a psychologically safe place for me to work? Can I be my authentic self come to work and not be labeled, not be judged? And if I am, do you as a leader, do something and stand up, to defend me for that. Do you educate your teams on diversity on and on inclusion? I’m going to be asking those questions before I come, because they’re important values to me.
So you need to.
I wanna push that just a little bit, because sometimes you hear the answer. I value my family. I need to be there when they need me. As a supervisor manager, I have a deadline that I gotta get, I have to remain protective. Yep. So even though you may be the greatest person you’re there, you may decide, okay.
Is my turn to pick up the kid from school. Or I’m not gonna be, just stay and get the extra work done. I’m gonna have to leave early because the value is that person’s family , there’s a generation out there that their value, they work to live. They don’t live to work, so they work. So they have enough money to go live.
They value that freedom, that ability, how do we make that value stick in the workplace?
so that value, yeah, that value really is about autonomy. And so one of the things that I do in the book and that I actually do as a college professor is teach alternative dispute resolution, which is mediation and mediation is all about what is the real interest behind it.
So you’re asking me that you wanna be able to pick up the kids, let’s say so it could be that it’s a relationship value and it could be a value of autonomy. I wanna be able to have some control over my own. , but that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in your business and I don’t want to, help us do well, because after all, this is also my financial security.
So this is where leaders need to potentially get creative and open to other possibilities. Yeah. I have to pick the kids up between two 30 and three 30, but you know what? I have little people and they go to bed at seven o’clock. So I would be more than happy to get back online and do some of the work.
Maybe it’s a FA a case of I could do some of the payroll. Like maybe you could offshoot that to me. You’re trying to do it as the owner and get everything done, but you know what? I’m actually really good at that. So why don’t I take that piece on and I can do that from home. I’ll get it done for you.
You’re giving me the autonomy to figure out when I’m gonna get it done, but I’m adding value to the organization. You’re not losing an hour because I had to go get the kids. You’re respecting the fact that I’m an. I can figure this out. I’m probably juggling a million things cuz I’m a really effective parent too.
And I can still support your organization. We just have to do it a little bit differently than has been traditionally done. That’s all.
Okay. How do I find out what somebody’s values are?
We need to ask them but one of the other pieces but one of the next pieces of the book is the first piece is getting to know.
The second piece is, so who am I leading and how do I figure pieces of that out? But the third part is the tough part. And it’s often the part that we’re missing as leaders, we’ve been handed books, we’ve been sending on courses and then we try to put it into practice and it doesn’t work because we don’t know how to practice it.
So when you ask I asked the question, like I asked them, what are your values? And nobody answered me. I sent it a survey and nobody answered. because one of the things we have to do is instill trust. We have to build communication, right? I’m not gonna just automatically tell you’re gonna get more from me by you sharing with me who you are.
If you make a mistake admitting to it and telling me what you’re trying to learn, even say, trying things in the book and then telling me as an employee, you know what? I tried to change how we did that meeting. Cause I know people are getting frustrated. Can you gimme some feedback? Was it any better that I gave you an agenda or do you need something else?
I’m being open to it all of a sudden. You’re interested in what I have to say. Oh, you want my feedback? That’s nice. You’re opening up to me as a human and telling me, some of the struggles of leadership. Interesting. I offered you a new idea. You liked it. Now I’m gonna tell you things about what I value and what my goals are and what I aspire to.
Because I can trust you with that information.
That’s interesting. And I take from that and see if you agree or disagree with this. I take from that, I have to trust my employees first or they can trust me. And they, I don’t, I’m not necessarily saying I run around and be this Mr. Or Mrs. Authentic and tell ’em all your problems and all the challenges.
But I am saying I have to put the trust in them to maybe run that meeting. Oh, for sure. Here’s the agenda I need to have covered, but you guys run the.
Think about the job posting me. Where did you hire them? What were the qualities you were looking for? You wanted a problem solver. You wanted a good communicator.
You wanted somebody that was innovative. Are you allowing them to do those things or are you telling them well, no, we do it this way. We do it this way. We do it this way.
As you were saying that I started thinking one of the things that I really would like to have on my team for example, is someone who puts a head down and get to.
We just wanna work and that would be powerful, except for, they’re not gonna just work if we don’t know what they value most of. Why are they coming to work and putting their head down and working for eight hours. So maybe cuz they could travel and go on vacation there or whatever that’s gonna be.
Okay. And I like that idea of ask them what their values are. But that is tough. That is tough. I think it’s more tough. Cause you have to give away the trust. That’s a really good. Real quick. Tell us about the book you labeled out. The, some of the parts, tell us so knowing who you lead important lessons on why we need to understand those we lead.
So this is a book not to sit on a shelf and get all dusty. This is a book for leaders and readers who want some of those quick wins. It comes with a free workbook that you download as soon as you buy the book, because I tell people. Don’t write it in the book. You probably won’t want somebody to read about, what are my leadership strengths and what are things that I wanna be concerned about, or feedback.
People gave me that’s private information. So just download the workbook that goes with it. And I give you a lot of exercises. You can try with your team. I have supported it with a lot of background on different books that other people have written. I’m not, gonna hear, be here to teach you how to lead.
A lot of the things already, a lot of the. So I’m just expanding on them. Let’s use it this way. Let’s try it this way. And one of the key things is then helping you put it into practice. And so one of the things you just talked about is, I need to get to know me. I get need to get to know you, but then one of the things I can do really effectively is help employees understand each other because we know in every workforce there’s conflict, it’s just inevitable.
People don’t understand each. So this now helps teams understand each other. Now I understand why you put your head down all the time and I wanna talk it out. So the two of us butt heads, because we don’t work the same way. Now as the leader, because both of us really well, and you understand how we operate, you can actually mediate those conflicts and come up with some really good viable.
Love that love that. That’s because that’s something that I had actually, honestly, I hadn’t thought about if I have a diverse team, the team is gonna, they’re gonna knock heads sometime.
Oh, all the time. And they’re gonna knock heads with other teams that operate differently than them.
Yeah. So how do we even get teams? And I talk about silos that we need to eradicate silos. There are silos in every other organization between either the floors or the teams or the leaders. And it’s because simply they don’t understand each other. Yeah. So we can have a lot of fun introducing them to each other.
It is so fun to hear Dr. Deming’s work come back up in different ways all the time. Knock down the walls between departments. Yep. Knock down the walls within your own department. Yep. Maybe that’s the real benefit of some of these tests that they have people personality type tests. So if I have my team, I’ll take a test and we’re all discussing a test.
Maybe that helps me to understand that you communicate different than I do. And if I wanna get my point across, I need, so that’s good. And your book help helps spring those out. Do you have any exercises like that, that you do in the book? You, I don’t want you to go through ’em. I want people to go read the book, but is that do you have a game plan inside your book for that as well?
I do. And actually I’m trained in predictive analytics and so it, I introduce the reader to predictive analytics and it actually does a team as. And I show readers, some of the risks we run. If we set our teams up to have kind of the same personalities, the same operating systems, it’s great. But then when they have to deal with a team that’s so different than them, they don’t know how to do it.
And that’s when I really would see in HR units or teams or branches really disputing because they were so different because the, how, the way they had been. So I use predictive analytics, a lot in coaching situations so that the coach can understand the trainee in conflict situations so that the two people, start to understand this is your strength, but this is your strength.
And because of that, the two of you operate differently, but that can be a huge advantage. It doesn’t have to be a disadvantage. It doesn’t have to mean that we label each other and have negative impressions of each other. We can creatively figure out how to make this work really well for both of us.
Okay. So for me, this may be just for me, you told me how it works, but define for me predictive analytics. I’ve heard the term, but just gimme a quick definition of that.
Yeah. And you can actually Google it to predictive analytics
has been, why should I Google? I got you here. I don’t need
There you go. It’s been around for about 40 years and it’s the concept. Who are you at default? So think about who are you at when you get upset? When you get angry, when you get stressed, what’s your default personality, because really we can only sway so much from that. We can stretch ourselves and we can try to be, for example, very detail oriented.
I can try, I can be detail oriented if everything’s going really well, but if I’m getting stressed, I’m probably gonna forget about the details because it’s just not who I am. Gotcha. So what it treats you is here’s who I am. Here’s what I like to do, who I like to be in my best day. So I give people the example.
If you had a day off, you had absolutely no obligations. What would you do? What would you like to do? Sleep? Sleep. Okay. Would you hang out with other people or would you be alone? I’d be alone. Okay. So you’d be. now one of your counterparts might say, what? No. I’d have a party. I’d call everybody over.
It’s my day off. I wanna be with a bunch of people. Yeah. So already we know that your default is to be a little more reserved, a little more introspective, where their theirs is to be much more social, to be in inter related. Like they wanna relate with people. So now think about when we work together and we get.
The social person wants to talk it out. They wanna figure it out. They wanna work with other people. They wanna collaborate. You might wanna be just leave me alone. I gotta get my work, done my head down. I wanna get my stuff done. So now the two of you are on the same team and you’re not working well together, simply because your default modes are different.
Our default modes may be different. So this just ring a bell for me. Yeah. Default modes could be different, but my working mode could be the same as everybody else on the team, but I have a different default or they have a different default. So from eight o’clock till three o’clock this is my default mode, but at 2 30, 2 45 or so I start to default because I’m getting tired and I’m so I create that.
That’s right. Like you’ve participated in the meeting and you tried to share as much as you could and you collaborated as long as you could, but really you just want, please leave me alone. I just wanna get my work done. I don’t wanna talk to anybody. I might send you an email, but I do not wanna talk on the phone.
I don’t wanna socialize. I just wanna get it done.
Or please let me have some quiet times so I can solve this problem. I don’t need a brainstorming session.
exactly right. And if the poor leader doesn’t know this about you, then I might be expecting you to react the way that I react. So if I like in stress to have a brainstorming session, I’m expecting you to come to it.
I can’t understand why you’re in a grumbling mood. I can’t understand why you don’t wanna participate, cuz it doesn’t make sense to me because it’s different than me. But if I started to understand that right away, if I knew that from the beginning, then I can also help to explain what your needs are to other people.
You know what? Let’s just let him get his work done. He’s got a great project. He’s got his view. I know what he needs to get done. I’m gonna appreciate that autonomy in. I’m gonna let him go home and do it. He doesn’t need to be in the office. It’s very distracting right now. I’m gonna let him go work in another spot because I know he wants to get the work done.
So I’m valuing who you are and what you need at that point.
That’s the power of what you’re saying. I know who I’m leading. I understand the value. I understand the mission, the predictive analytics. I understand that. And that makes a huge difference. That’s just great. I gotta tell you that’s I think that’s solid inform.
We got from today’s podcast so far, let alone, not even reading the book. Yeah. I wanna push you through a different area though. Cause this statement, that they have may put up on the screen for us. It made me start to think. Okay. So up on the screen for those, obviously on the podcast, you can’t see it, but we’re talking about the new potential employees should do.
What is it? You think a new potential employee should do. You just hired me. I come under your staff. What should I be doing? What should I do?
This is one of the things I’m actually teaching my new students and I teach the people that I’m coaching for interviews. One of the things I want you to do when you start working is use this language, explain to your trainer, explain to your leader, who you are.
Use the language of. I am a very detail oriented person. I really enjoy understanding where we’re taking the project and. If you have any reports maybe that you did previously, or if you could show me examples of things you’ve done before so that I can better understand how you like it done and what you know has been gone done before that would really assist me.
Oh, sure. No problem. It wouldn’t have occurred to them as a leader of maybe to give it to you, but now that you explained your needs, who you are and your why absolutely. Oh, yeah, we’ve got four reports over here. You can look at those. In fact, I’d love to hear your opinion on them cuz this one didn’t work that well.
We thought it was gonna work really well and it didn’t produce the profits that we thought. So yeah. Give us your ideas on it
also though. There’s the opposite side of that? I guess if you’re the leader, you should understand that person you’re working. Not sure, but you’re working to understand that person wants to detail the information.
But yet this other person just says, I just wanna work on my task.
so what you’re doing, so the question, what should we as employees, do you need to introduce yourself to people? You can do this with your own team and you can be asking questions as well. Tell me how you like to operate during the meeting.
Do you like to share your ideas right away, or would you prefer to get the topic? The agenda in an email the week before or the night before? So you have time to collect your ideas, collect your. Do that introspective ideas, maybe do some data research. Some people wanna come to a meeting really well prepared.
Other peoples just wanna talk it out. If we all understand what each other’s need. Oh yeah. We’re gonna talk about this at the meeting, but I’ll send you that report, Thursday night so that you can read it for Monday’s morning. Monday’s meeting the problem. I can send that to you.
So if we do this right away and we start introducing our team to each. Everybody starts to get to know each other and what our strengths are really they’re. Our strengths is just that we have to appreciate the strengths of other people that might be different than ourselves.
And you being the new employee, they don’t know your strengths, they don’t know your learning style.
They don’t know all those things. So maybe it’s and come upon you to go there and do that. Here’s something though that just also some thoughts that rolling through my mind. I can set this all up. Really. If I wanted to, I can set this up tomorrow. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Cause all I really have to do is go to every my team and say, listen, this is how this is this company, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But our team does this. Why don’t you guys put together video? And let’s use that as a promotional piece to let people other potential employees know why they should come to my team. Our. So I can’t use the term my team, but let them know why they should work at our team. Put that together, bring back to me.
It’s all said and done and we’ll get it out to the right people. So whenever we have someone to apply for the job, we send it to ’em okay. So now the current team knows that I trust them.
Yeah. When they do this video, you can’t change it all and edit it all and make it only what you want to show either, right?
No,
you gotta kinda let it go because even if it’s different, my suggestion, even if it’s, even if I have a different view, I’m gonna go ahead and tell the potential employer. Here’s my view, but here’s what the team think. Yep. But then my team’s gonna know that I trust them. So they’re gonna get that other person.
They just hired to trust me as well. Cause they’re gonna say, Hey, he trusted us to do this video. We did this and he gets these ideals. You need to go talk to him and tell him what you need. So my team, maybe gonna just walk through the whole steps for me. If I just start out with one simple thing of giving them the trust.
Yeah. A
lot of it is the trust. Yeah. So the book is designed so that I’m really walking leaders through the processes and I’m giving them activities. They can do. I’m giving them, I have a leadership goal planner that goes with the book that literally as you’re moving through the book there’s a checklist at the back, probably 40 different things that you can do within your organization.
Not everybody needs all of them. You get to pick and choose. These are elements we wanna work on. This is an element I wanna work on. And then within the goal planner decide, this is how we’re gonna. here’s our timelines. Who’s, here’s who I’m gonna involve. And then what’s the feedback and what do I now need to do?
So it’s a really systematic way of let’s work through the book and figure out how to keep progressing, because my business is called inspiring organizational growth. And that’s really what I like to do.
So your book. Is imitating your life or your leadership style. You saying? Okay, let’s see who we are.
Let’s assess who we are. Let’s put together a checklist and let’s decide what our goal is to fix this checklist. And then soon as we get that, we gotta start the process over again. Your book is running that same process a little bit.
Yeah. I wrote the book a lot, the same way that I would run like a training course or a leadership course.
So to feel familiar that way I was very detail oriented because I knew people needed that and they needed a process. It has 20 different lessons in it. And it’s not just you need to, it gives you a lot of the, why gives you a lot of my mistakes and examples and reasons why I’ve done this work and really in the end, it’s just to let you have some fun with being a leader.
I know it’s tiring. I totally get it. It’s very hard. And I know that you’re in leadership and business ownership for the right reasons. So let me help make this a little bit.
Okay, that’s a great spot. I wanna be cognizant of your time. So I wanna honor that. I just wanna ask you though. Cause you, you came to a little bit but I want really have you bring it out?
What are you doing right now with the book as part of it, the workbook as part of it, what are you doing right now to help leaders be better at.
so one of the things that I really enjoy doing is keynote speeches. I’m actually going to be working with the chamber of commerce where I’m living for the purpose, actually of reaching those small business owners.
So like you were saying your restaurant owner, they need help too. And they don’t necessarily, they can’t hire me as a leadership coach or a consultant to come in to just do the overview on their organization. So I love working with small business and medium business owners. Helping them with a lot of these strategies, maybe you have two people that need to get trained to be a trainer.
You bring in these new people, and then you say, oh who’s gonna teach them how to do it. Oh, here you’re off today. Okay. Monday you start training. I don’t how to train. Like you never taught me how to train. I don’t know how to train another person. What am I supposed to do? They’re all really fundamental pieces and I have really good workshops on.
and you can send two people to the workshop instead of having me come in and do the whole, 25 people, I can do that too. But it’s working directly with leaders and teams. That’s the piece that I love the most. And that’s what my business is really built around, supporting you and helping you.
Okay. So you, do you ask something, it sounds like it’s unique in a way you have a textbook and then you have a workbook that you actually take into the classroom. Okay. And you’re connected. So blatant commercial. So anyone says, I like that idea. I can send two people instead of 25 people. I take two people outta my operations.
Cause when I ask this student to have any of your leaders, any of your supervisors, four managers, kitchen, and said any of them been to any capital leadership training? No, they don’t have time. No. And that, not just to put it this way. A lot of my clients before we get started with them, that’s what they say.
, we don’t have time and we just promoted them. Cause they’re the next in line or this and that, but you’re saying, okay, I’ll get those folks up to speed. And here’s how we do it. How do they do it? How do they get a hold of you to do it? So if you don’t mind telling us your email, all that fun stuff so people can get ahold of you to say, okay,
come on, talk what?
Yeah. For. So reach out to [email protected]. And we will connect and I like to design training specific to what business leaders need. So if you want me to come into the business and do a training there, I do it virtually or an in person, especially being a college professor now. I can do asynchronous synchronous all at the same time.
Yeah. It’s all at the same thing. It’s amazing. It’s amazing what we can do for learners now. So contact me at my website and let’s have a conversation about what your needs are. And if they wanna learn more about the book, it’s really simple, knowing who you lead dot. And I, you can find out more about me cuz I think that’s really important as an author.
I think you need to know the person that you’re gonna, inspire to work with. What are my values? How do I think read my blogs? You can find me on LinkedIn. I really share a lot with people because I want them to know that I am somebody they can trust. I am somebody that has a lot of experience working with building and rebuilding relationships within businesses and with.
And it’s something that I love to do that’s the fun of it’s something I wanna help you with. Yeah.
That’s the key thing. When you make a difference with the leaders that’s and that’s why the podcast, that’s why you do you make a difference with the leaders, right? You make a difference with the world.
So that’s, I think that’s powerful, good. Outside. Just to help people build trust for you outside of the passion to help leaders. What’s another passion that you.
Farming . So I had a lot of fun making a video and for employers to say, you know what, people can build skills in some pretty different ways.
So I don’t think your job posting asked for a farmer, but here’s what I’ve learned in farming. We have 142 acre farm. We have cows and horses and we just finished doing a bunch of hay. And so in the video I’m telling people, I cannot do hay the same way my husband can. I can’t operate the machinery the same way.
I can’t lift the bales the same way, but we both have a vision of what needs to get done and I need get it done and we lead differently and we work differently, but that’s okay. So it’s just to, have some fun with people. And I got a lot of reactions to that video. You can find it on my LinkedIn account just to have some fun and show people another side of me, but also.
There’s some really unique potential employees out there that you might just be missing because it never occurred to you to look at their resume.
I thought that is also a very powerful lesson. Just if I was the lesson I took from that whole story and from your video, was that okay?
We have different ways, but our vision is the same. Yeah. If I can install my vision for what’s best for my organization, with my employees, even though they may have a different way to get there, we’re all going for the same vision that might make a huge difference. I love that. That’s great. That’s great.
And they’ll
keep coming back, they wanna help you get it done and you don’t think that your employees are invested in your business, but I betcha. They are. I betcha. They’re more invested than you think they are. And the more you value them, the more they’re gonna value working for. No.
I know James would take you up on that back.
Hey,
tell him to call me to have a
conversation. It’s a little bit different though. I think in different industries have different things, but still, maybe they don’t value it the same way you have or vision the same way you have, but I’m sure they have a vision that would support the company. If you allowed it to take place to allow it to take place.
No. Kind of wrap up real quick for you. Like I said, I wanna be aware of your time. But my last question to you is a hard one. Okay. What question should I have asked you that I did not ask you? So what question did I not ask you that I should have asked you?
That is a good question. I think probably something around, cause we were going down the road of diversity and I think we could have gone a lot further on that one.
Yes. Yeah. And so that’s probably, it would’ve been questions around that about, so what are some of those tough lessons, Carolyn, that you learned that, maybe personal biases do enter how you lead and how you manage people without even realizing it? Yeah. And I’ve learned a lot of lessons that way.
I learned a lot of lessons from people who would openly share with me about, mental health issues or, and how maybe as a manager, I didn’t serve them as well as I could have, but I appreciated the fact that they told me so that I learned to become better. And that really is what it means to be an inclusive leader.
You’re gonna make mistakes. You’re not gonna do it that well. And you have to be willing to admit that wasn’t a shining moment for. But I wanna learn and I appreciate, and I thank you for telling me
that’s powerful. Okay. That’s and I could have it’s powerful cause we could have went there.
I just, it’s such a heavy subject for me. Diversity no, you and I have been in the training I’ve been in for longer than you have a few years longer. we’ve been in this field for a long time and we see a lot of different people come through the training class and there’s a diversity in how they learn.
, there’s diversity in how they process, what, know what’s going on in their world, away from the job versus what’s goes on in my world, but also goes to things like, culture and skin, color, and age and sex, all those things we need to take. So I didn’t wanna go down that road, but you’re right.
That’s probably worthwhile a whole nother conversation. Cause you, in your book, you have a game plan. Cover
that
yeah, we could have a great conversation about that. And I’ve actually had a great conversation with a lot of my college students. I lead a lot of international students and so we’ve had some really interesting conversations about working within a different Canadian employment about different cultures, power gender.
So yeah, it’s, we’ve got some neat stuff that we can share with employers and again, help them know who they’re leading.
And you heard her ladies and gentlemen, she said we could have a great conversation, but that we will, especially closer. We get to the solution summit. We will cause that’s the solution.
We need to come up with a solution for diversity. So we will have a part to everybody heard you. I got it on tape. I’m not okay, good. We’re all set there. I honestly, it’s just absolutely fantastic to talk with someone who, I’ll put it this way. Has a. Has not has more than just a pep talk for you.
As a game plan. I appreciate that. I thank you very much for your time. It’s gonna be a great podcast. It’s going. It has been a great podcast. It’s gonna be a great couple YouTube videos off of this. Thank you very much for hanging with us today. I appreciate it.
Oh, this was really enjoyable.
Thank you.
