How Workforce Development Drives Business Growth

Kathy (host):
Well, hello there, and welcome back to another episode of “Help! My Business is Growing,” a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and founder of NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything that you do in your business is eventually going to end up in your finances, and to get to healthy finances is to have a healthy business. Well, the question is, how in the world do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes in to help, and today we are going to be talking about workforce development, because it’s such an important piece when you are growing a business. And of course, that is going to significantly impact your finances. So what is workforce development exactly? How does it look like, and how does it work? How do you actually implement it in your business, and how can you make sure that it’s working well for you? And as a side note, you can find all the episodes, timestamps, and the blog for this episode in the show notes. So if you’re interested in that, just please go ahead and look at the show notes. All the links are going to be in there. My guest today is Michelle Arentz. She is a workforce development consultant and founder of Lazarus Learning LLC. She is a workforce MD, helping companies enjoy a healthy bottom line by focusing on strengthening their hiring, teams, leaders, and cultures. She has woven a career tapestry of over two decades between corporate learning and development in both Canada and the US, as well as spending seven years as a high school teacher. Join us.

Kathy (host):
Hi, Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle (guest):
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

Kathy (host):
Thanks for being here. And you know, this time, we’re gonna do something a little bit different. We’re gonna be kicking it off with a scenario that I see play out all the time in growing companies, and one that has a direct impact on the finances. And essentially, it goes a little bit like this. And you tell me if you’ve seen it too: You build a company basically, sometimes banded by banded because you threw people in. You never really took a step back to say, what type of culture are you really building? And then it ends up that the culture kind of becomes messy, and because you’re not intentional of how you’re building, it ends up that you have a lot of turnover that becomes expensive, so then you’re hiring even more people to replace those without thinking about the culture that becomes even more expensive, and on top of that, the teams are not performing how they should be. Again, financial implication right there. So you end up in this ball of people mess that there’s no seemingly good way out of, and you have no idea where to begin, because everything seems wrong, and you have no clue how do you untangle out of this? So, Michelle, how do we untangle out of this?

Michelle (guest):
Oh, man, you just made me go into goosebumps about that. That is unfortunately all too real and all too common, and it is preventable and it is fixable. So for anybody who’s listening, who’s going, “Oh my God, you know Kathy, that sounds just like me. Now, what do I do?” The good news is there is a lot that can be done about that. So you know, if you are in that space, if you’re already there and you’re looking, you know the old saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Peter Drucker apparently said that, I’m going to say it also eats it for lunch, dinner, dessert and snacks in between. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t change the meal plan, right? So in an environment like that, where it’s an existing company and you’re the leader looking around and going, “Holy smokes. What just happened here? This is not what I envisioned at all.” And I, you know, to your point, I see money bleeding out the door. Not good. Okay, step number one would be, let’s assess, where are you at? Who have you got? Who are you as a leader? Who are the people in your organization? So that’s step one. We’ve just got to strategically think about, do we even understand who the people are, what I would call in the room. So that would be like on your team. So if you’re the company leader, and you’ve got a leadership team, we need to figure out who’s in the room on that team, and who’s in the room on any other team, or teams that you’ve got in the business, depending on size, right? Let me get I think about like, who’s in the building, so who’s just in the company at large. Who have we got and are, you know, we can dig into, where are they in the right places, the last place you go is out on the street to be thinking about, “Do I go externally to hire somebody?” I don’t even know if I need to get like, that’s an expensive proposition, as we know, and companies often do that because they’ve got a blind spot to who’s already in the building for them. So one move to make is, let’s figure out who all we’ve got, and then we can know whether or not, for example, let’s say turnover is the issue. Somebody left again right now, before I go down the path of saying I ought to go out on the street, spend a pile of money, possibly get a recruiter, the postings, the time, you know, all that thing that is a big drag, what about looking around and saying, maybe there’s somebody in another team or in a different department who actually could be a good fit for this role? I don’t have to onboard them. I don’t have to enculture them. I don’t have to, you know, I can get them up to speed a lot faster if I know that I’ve already got somebody before I maybe, and maybe I can backfill that person for less effort or money than going out on the street and filling the empty spot in the first place. So that’s one possibility. But, you know, I would start there like, what’s going on. The other thing I would be looking at is, what is going on in your culture. Why did your culture get to this point? You were mentioning, we’re not being very deliberate about things. Okay, I always liken it to Kathy, you know me, I love to garden, so I always put it in terms of gardening. If I said to you, you get to grow a garden and think of your business as a garden. What kind of garden do you want to grow? And that’s going to mean things like, where would you place it? How big would it be? Is it going to be full of flowers, or do you want to eat things, or both? And what kind of plants flourish, and what kind of environments, and some plants don’t like to be neighbors with others. There’s all these strategic things that you could be thinking of that says, What is your vision of what you want this garden to be? What is your vision of what you want your company to be? And culture at its core is, what does it feel like to work here? At the simplest, simplest level, what does it feel like to work here is your culture. So what do you want your company to feel like, versus what is it feeling like? And then we can start looking at, how do we fill any of the gaps between this is what I envisioned and this is what I’ve got. And then from there, we also start digging in and diagnosing things like the misalignments that can come within that culture. So I look at four basic at the minimum. I’ll look at four core things that make up a company culture. So I say culture is made up of aspirations. What do we say about ourselves, you know? What do we put out in the world? What, you know, our social media footprint, whatever you want, whatever your literature is. What do you say about yourselves as a company? This is your mission statement, your vision, your values, all that you know, all those kinds of things. What do you say about yourselves and what you’re striving to be? Item number two in your culture is your actions. Do you actually do what you say you want to be? So if you’re going to say that, you know, we are a company that you know, here’s a classic example. Our people are number one. We so care about our employees. Our employees are our most important asset. Well, your actions better match what you just said, because the minute we don’t match up, we have a disconnect, and that creates disengagement, and that creates cultural chaos. So we have to look at how actions match aspirations, and that goes all up like your leaders, of course, are going to lead the charge on that. Do your leaders know how to fulfill whatever needs to happen, and that your aspirations aren’t just something that you stick on a plaque on the wall or you shove it into a handbook and you never talk about it. Actions are about how we live culture, right? We live culture writ large in a country or, you know, we’re a region. We live culture in a company. So if we’re not talking about it, if we’re not doing it, if we’re not actively keeping it on our radar, well, how could we ever act on any of it? They always say, like as an example. This is the fundamental difference between compliance and culture. So we’re going to a quick example of that is, well, we’re going to do harassment training because we’ve got to do harassment training because I don’t want to get my wrist slapped, and it’s a compliance thing. So everybody check the box. That’s very different than having a culture that talks about, we don’t harass people here. We don’t tolerate that behavior. This is what’s okay. This is what’s not okay. We hold each other accountable for our actions. We don’t just say it on paper like “Thou shalt not harass.” That’s culture. That’s a very different thing, and it becomes part of the DNA of the organization, as opposed to this thing over there that we do once a year because HR told us we had to, and then we turn around and harass each other as an example. So that’s item number two. Is the actions. Third thing is your artifacts. That’s another piece of your culture, that’s your stuff that can be everything from the work environment that your employees are working in, whether that means I am in a warehouse? Am I in a production facility? Am I in a restaurant? Am I in an office? That can be things like your swag, your branding, your logo, what are all these touchpoint things that are supposed to reflect what you guys say about yourselves, and it’s going to tie back to actions. So again, if I use the example of our aspiration is we love our people. We’re very people-centric, and we see our employees as our greatest asset, but the break room’s falling apart.

Michelle (guest):
Your artifact doesn’t match your aspiration and you’re in action to do something to fix the break room. You see where you see where the dots are connecting here. So, right, yeah. So we think health and wellness is really important in our organization, but we won’t give anybody ergonomic furniture, and the lighting is horrible and the colors are drab and depressing, or, you know, whatever, any of any number of those things. So artifacts come into the mix, or, you know, maybe it’s like your branding. And I’m not a marketing expert. That’s not my wheelhouse. I’m the, you know, workforce development gal over here. But there can be disconnects where your branding just kind of doesn’t really add up to what you’re saying about yourself. So either, again, how does it make me feel? And then the fourth piece, and this is the really tough one in your culture, is the assumptions, the unwritten stuff that isn’t going to be on a plaque on the wall, isn’t going to be in the handbook, and it’s, it’s often hard for us when we’ve been in it for a while, but we’re the leader, and we’re, you know, we’re so in it. We’re so in that lane. It can be hard to see it, but it’s the stuff that says, well, but everybody knows, oh, yeah, I know it says that over here, but that’s not really what we do. Oh, we wrote that process down, but that’s not we haven’t done it that way in months. Or yeah, this person has that title, but everybody knows that the real go to is this person over here. That’s the kind of stuff that can come up in culturally, from the assumption standpoint, the best way to get a good feel for where your assumptions are in your company is by asking the newest employees what doesn’t make sense to you here we’ve got a blind spot. We’ve been running this way for a while. Your newest employees, or possibly your newest customers are going to be, the people who are going to get confused and go, I don’t get this because you said this over here, but I’m not. I’m not getting it from my end. So that can be a cost effective or basically freebie tool that you can use that says, What about what we’re doing over here makes sense to you, and what’s the stuff that makes you scratch your head and go what I need help? You know, it’s those kinds of things you got to start, you know, I diagnose and then I treat. But you got to start looking at what is going on. Because most of these things, like, when you said turnover, turnover is a symptom of something, disengagement is a symptom of something, people complaining about their pay is a symptom of something. It’s not the thing itself. And losing money and not getting the profitability and the revenue that you are expecting to have as a business leader is a symptom of something. What’s causing that?

Kathy (host):
This is really good. You gave us a food for thought here, Michelle and iceberg, you know, as you were talking about the four pieces of culture, the aspiration, action artifacts, and assumption in the artifacts, it really, there’s one thing that really came to my mind, is you really have to put your money where your mouth is. Oh yes, ma’am, yeah, if you know, you keep and that break room was a perfect example. Like, how are you valuing your employees? And they’re your greatest asset. When the break room is completely falling down, or the bathroom is incomplete, you know, mess every single day. I mean, simple things like this. It, it like, and I have been in companies where there was this incongruency between our people are the greatest asset. And then when you come into work, and we actually had an open office space, which was an interesting thing at that at that time, it was an open office space, yes, oh, my God. Like when I when I started my old company, I said, I needed to have an office where I could close the door. There’s no way we’re ever going to have an open office.

Michelle (guest):
I know people who quit their job over losing a closed office with a door.

Kathy (host):
I understand but it was an open office. But also, what ended up happening, we didn’t even have assigned seating, which made sense in terms of there was obviously a lot of cost benefits because people didn’t come to work, or that you didn’t have to have, you know, so many offices and everyone was in one space. But the problem was that you came to work and you were looking for a desk to sit. That for 30 minutes. Great. How are you valued as an employee? And I mean, you felt like a number, 100% like a number.

Michelle (guest):
I was just logging a wheel, right? I went to work or be in the hive. Nobody notices when I’m not here, yeah, I guess not. If there is. I mean, again, if we spend, we spend half our waking hours at work, and if I have to be in a workspace where I can’t even have a touch of something personal for myself, that makes me feel like I identify here, and people identify with me here, how on earth can you expect me to be fully engaged and give you 100% like that’s just baseline. I totally hear what you’re saying. I we’re not gambling here, but I can one-up you on a couple of things. You know, a couple quick horror stories. One break room. I’ve seen plenty of break rooms that stuff was peeling, falling apart, didn’t work, unclean, depressing, like there’s no break to be had. There two I’ve seen situ. I saw one situation in a merger and acquisition that went down where we acquired an organization where I am not making this up, they withheld toilet paper. What if you wanted toilet paper, you had to go ask a supervisor to get a role, and they did not have soap either. I mean, it literally sickens me to think like, what? And then I go back to, how does it make me feel to work here? It was horrific. And the third one to your point about the workspaces, and put your money where your mouth is, and it is going to cost you something. Imagine being in a place where HR, which is a key department that has to have confidentiality like crazy, right? Imagine having an open cube environment, where even if you had a door to your cube, the walls don’t go all the way up to the top, and you have shared ventilation, which meant people could hear all the sound through the vent system, and there was no privacy. After all, huge mistake. How could anybody trust in anything? So you’re spot on. It will Yeah. Does it take some money? Sure, but it’s the right investment for the right reasons. Because what you’re doing is you’re telling people, I do care about you, you do matter, and your comfort and your presence here is important to us.

Kathy (host):
And I think this is where a lot of especially I see this in bigger companies, there’s this penny wise and pound foolish, because, yes, it does. In a short term, it does give you savings, and your profit and loss statement looks great. The problem is, on a long term, your culture suffers and people talk you’re not going to have good performers wanting to stay in that particular companies, they’re going to have better options somewhere else where people do actually care about them and their well being, and they’re not going to be, you know, asking for toilet paper, which is just boggling.

Michelle (guest):
I mean, yes, you know, it’s an extreme. I’d like to think, I certainly hope you’re spot on. That is the best way of putting it. It It is Pennywise for pound foolish. And I think this is one of those things that too few business leaders really dig in and understand. And you know, again, I’m not a finance expert, but I care about the money. I just come at it from a different point of view the savings. Because, let’s face it, I mean, one of the most expensive things that any business has is payroll and people. So why are you paying a full paycheck to get a partial performance when it isn’t your employee’s fault? That’s ridiculous. I can’t get my work done if you haven’t given me the tools in my toolbox to do that, whether that’s literally you won’t give me the tools that I need, or whether it’s because you haven’t given me the skills and the knowledge, how do you expect me to do a great job? How would you possibly expect me to want to do a good job, or stick around and try to do that? I’ll give you a quick example, and I’m going to use very basic math, because, you know, that’s where I roll. But we’ll keep it simple. I know of an organization that, back to the turnover thing. Had some pretty profound turnover in a fairly short period of time, at least. I believe at that at the point that I was speaking to the individual, I think there was something like six people had gone out the door. Two of them had to be shown the door, and four found the door. And this was not a large company, so this, was a significant hit for them. Now, I said, just for argument’s sake, let’s say each of those six people was being paid $50,000 a year. And I’m sure it was more than that, because you know the nature of the work, but I’ll keep it nice and round for my purposes. Am I saying 50,000 a year for six people now, depending on the numbers. And these were professional people, so I could argue it wouldn’t be unrealistic to say two times annual salary replacement cost for each one of those people. So that’s over half a million dollars walked out the door. Okay, be skeptical. Oh, Michelle, come on, two times annual salary. You’re nuts. All right, let’s. Drop it to one times annual salary. That’s still over a quarter million out the door. I don’t know about you, Kathy, but if somebody wrote me a check for that kind of, you know, money, I wouldn’t rip it up, flush it or burn it, would you?

Kathy (host):
No.

Michelle (guest):
But that’s what was happening, and the leaders weren’t seeing it that way. I know what they thought was the pain of, Oh, I’ve got missing bodies, and then do we just desperately, quickly fill them in with another warm body in the room, which is going to create more churn. Think of what you could do to reinvest over half a million dollars back into your business. That and the issues that were going on there. I know the four people who found the exit did so because of some poor decisions in terms of management and leadership. It was preventable. Did not need to happen. Lost good people, lost good talent because of poor leadership and management and decisions around that. That’s why I fight this big fight that I fight about you have to think about strategically, who you’ve got, who you need to get, and once you’ve got them, what are you going to do with them to make sure that you make the most of your time together?

Kathy (host):
And I have a couple of theories. Well, I have one big theory that I have seen. You know, I’ve seen a lot of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, especially in when I was in the corporate world, and it’s and I still see a lot of things when I’m in the small businesses, but mostly in I think the difference between the smaller and the bigger businesses, the smaller businesses, they just don’t know it. It’s more about the ignorance than anything else. In the bigger businesses, it’s there’s they know it, yet they still do it for the savings and to get the money. But the problem that I’m seeing is that the employees, even though, I mean in accounting wise, they are on your profit and loss statement or on your income statement, they are an expense. But in reality, they really are an investment in the business, they are an asset. So yeah, if you fundamentally start thinking about your employees as an asset in your business, that it’s going to give you the returns. You’re going to be making different decisions if you’re thinking of your people as just expendable. Okay, doing a great job. I am just going to fire her and fight and find another Kathy, and then that Kathy is not going to be doing a good job for whatever reason, and I’m going to go and then you burn through people, and word gets around on the street that your company really isn’t a good place to work, and people are just not want to be wanting work there. And the people that you’re going to end up, that they’re going to end up in your company, generally, are not happy. They end up being resentful, yeah, and they’re not going to be doing such a good job than someone who is happy and well adjusted to the company and really has good intentions at heart. Everything

Michelle (guest):
you just said, so true, all of it, and you are right. Harvard Business Review did an interesting paper a little while back, and that one of the key things that you said is, unfortunately, in our system, Europeans do it a little differently, but in the American business system, human beings, your human capital is basically a line item, like a photocopier or a piece of office furniture. And to your point, oh, I don’t like so and so. So I get, you know, it’s like, oh, I don’t like this file cabinet. I’ll go get another file cabinet. I don’t like this employee. I just get another employee. Nah. And it’s because we evaluate it in the wrong place in the business that it gets the kind of attention that it gets in the wrong ways. And we’ve got to get leaders to stop thinking about I mean, here’s the bottom line, whoever you are and whatever your business is, whoever’s listening to this, and you’re a business leader, you’ve got a strategy somewhere. You’ve got somewhere on paper in your head, or on a napkin or whatever. You’ve got this idea in your head that you say, this is what you know, what we’re all about, and what we’re going to do, and you’re expecting a result over here, right? I’m kind of put my hands apart, like I’m if the fish was this big, you know, you have a you’ve got some sort of strategy or you should have in your head, and you’ve got a result that you’re looking for on the other end, okay, what’s in between those two points? The human beings in your business, if everybody decided tomorrow I’m not coming in and doing anything for you, there is no business I’m a solopreneur. If I decide not to work tomorrow. No business happens for Lazarus, learning this is what a strike is all about, right? So you’ve got to get the people in between right. When you start thinking about having the right people in the right seats, knowing how to do the right thing the right way, at the right time for the right reasons, you will do much, but you will get to those results much quicker and much easier than if all you really do is light fires and then put them out and light fires and put them out, and it’s the hardest thing in the world for many of us to get our heads wrapped around prevention is always cheaper than the cure. To your point, penny wise and pound foolish. And not only does it save the money, what does it save in terms of the stress and the health issue, like there’s spin out costs from that. And to your point too. Kathy, and I think this is so mission critical, people do talk. There’s a thing out there called social media, and people love to share all kinds of things. I mean, ever heard of glass door? They don’t have to be your employee to go on there and say something about, I had the stupidest job interview experience with your company. Yeah, they don’t have to be, you know, quote, unquote, disgruntled. It can work in your favor. You could have a tremendous rating on social media, or you can be absolutely slammed. And those things are typically contagious. Quitting is contagious. Being disengaged gets contagious. Negativity is contagious, and most of us like to talk more about the negatives and the positives. So what are you doing or not doing in your business to make sure that there’s less negative and more positive, which just makes everybody feel better, including you as the leader, who ideally should be sitting back and watching all the cogs in the machine work smoothly.

Kathy (host):
And you know, let’s, let’s talk a little bit, because this is such an important topic when people are unhappy at work, and this is especially important for small businesses, because small businesses constantly grow, develop. You’re reinventing things. Things are moving along, right? So what do you do when you’re doing your darness to create a great culture, to create the healthy business. But your employees are still not happy, because you know you’re constantly reintroducing things how you you’re doing things better, or you might be changing the business like there’s constant change that’s happening in the business. But your people are very reluctant to embrace that change. These, majority of them are like, how do you manage that? Because here’s an issue. Like, you might have a really good culture up to a point, but then you make a change. Like, for example, you have never asked people to do time tracking. This is a very real example. You have never asked people to do time tracking before, but because now you really need that data in your business to make better investment decisions, better financial decisions, obviously, and you you’re trying to, like, manage your workforce through that data, but your employees are completely pushing back on us, saying we hate this. We don’t want to do this. We’re unhappy. This is not the culture that we build. Like how do you manage stuff like this?

Michelle (guest):
Wow. How much time have we got?

Kathy (host):
Michelle.

Michelle (guest):
Because we’ll be here forever. It’s gonna be a marathon episode. A couple of things come to mind. We’ll break it down into something digestible for everybody, a couple of things that come to mind in a scenario like that. And I think that’s a really good one, and it is a common challenge. So I’m gonna go back to what I said very early on in our conversation about knowing yourself and knowing your people. And there are tools out there that will help you do this. I mean, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say which one I particularly work with and believe in, but, you know, I have a power tool in my toolbox that helps me help a client do the kind of assessing of themselves and the individuals in the organization to know people are kind of wired in different ways, to approach their work in different ways. We often misunderstand what that is. It’s a model that I call the head, the heart, and the briefcase. So we, all of us, bring these three things to work with us every day. So the briefcase is your skills, your knowledge. It’s the stuff on your resume, which, by the way, you could lie about if you’re a candidate, but you know, whatever. It’s the stuff that we bring to the table that’s the most obvious information about us. What can I do? The heart is the values, the interests, the passions. Do I, as an employee, care about the same stuff as the company? This goes back to cultural alignment. Do my values match the vision and values of the organization? Because if they don’t, or it’s not well aligned, it’s like bad dating. I mean, we could do it for a while, but we’re not marriage material, and we’re not going to last in the long run. And you know, that’s going to be the end of that. That’s harder to get at. We’ve got to get to know people, to know what they care about, or in a job interview. We’ve got to ask some good questions, right? That’s not going to show up on a resume. And then we’ve got that head part. This is the hardest part. So it’s your behaviors, your needs, your drives. Like, what makes you? Why are you the way that you are? Oh, like, why do you communicate that way? Or, why do you have certain preferences? You operate certain ways in the work world. Now, it’s really hard for me to ask good questions around that, and it’s probably hard for you to answer me. You know, go ahead, Kathy, tell me what makes you. Right? It’s a terrible question. Behavioral interviewing tries to get at that, but that’s premised on the notion that your hiring managers know what that is and can use it effectively. So unless you use some sort of an assessment tool that helps you get to the head part, here’s what happens. We hire on briefcase and heart, because it’s the stuff we can probably easily see. We will fire people or get frustrated with people because of their head because we don’t understand it. So getting the kind of information that helps you understand where everybody’s head is at can also help you understand who are the kind of people who might push back on a new initiative, like we’re now going to do time tracking, or what, you know, whatever it is that we’re going to do. Some people will embrace that like lunatics and go, “Thank God we’re finally doing this stuff. I’ve been waiting for years for you to implement this.” You want to know where they’re coming from and understand, have the insight to understand better where does their head go and why, and then you’re better prepared to be able to address that with them and say, “Okay, what are your concerns?” From the standpoint, you know, again, in the model that I work with, if somebody was a process and precision type person, and that’s what they think about, is the details, you know, what might be their angle on the pushback, like they might be like, “But I’m already so busy doing other stuff. This is just one more thing on my plate. I don’t appreciate one more thing on my plate,” versus somebody else who might feel like that’s just very impersonal and cold. I, you know, I don’t like that. So if you can get to know your people better, you can anticipate better, or you can overcome and react and interact on a better level, to help people get the comfort and understanding that they need. The other thing that I think goes with change management in general is we tend to just foist it on people, and then hope that they react nicely to it. And so most of us are on the back foot at the best of times. So the other thing that I would say in this case like that is, the minute you have an inkling that that’s something that you want to do, need to do, or would work well for you, start talking about it early and often, and start making the case, and start kind of selling it internally, and getting people comfortable with the idea like, “Hey, this is coming.” Because what we don’t like is when somebody just drops this thing on us, and all of a sudden, Monday morning, I’m told I got to do some completely different thing. And where am I going to fit that into my day? And how am I going to know how this thing works, and if I screw it up, am I going to get in trouble? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I don’t get support, right? Whereas if we say, “Oh, this is coming, we’ve got a lead time. We’re going to communicate very clearly. We’re going to break it down into bite-sized pieces. We’re going to tell you how we’re going to support everybody. This is when we’re going to go live. We’re going to ease you into it. We’re going to make it familiar for you so it doesn’t just drop like this shocking bombshell out of the blue,” and be very clear in all that why. We don’t talk often enough in business, the why. I’m a big fan of Simon Sinek, and you should start with why. Why would we do this? You said, rightfully, there are so many things in the data points that are going to help the business. You know, this could be a money saver, a time saver, or this or that. The other thing, let people understand, why is it important that we’re going to do this, why it matters to the business and why it should matter to you as an individual employee, to get on board with this and then approach your different people from different angles, because you know them, so you can get them comfortable with it, so that by the time you do implement it’s not just this thing that seemed to come out of the blue, and we weren’t prepared.

Kathy (host):
This change management is so important, and that’s why, if you look at the previous episodes on this podcast, you’re going to see we’ve dedicated, off the top of my head at this point, at least four episodes about change management, because this is such an important topic, because you have to think about it. You as an owner, you have been thinking about the problem that you had. You have been thinking about the solutions available to you. You have been figuring out what’s the right solution for you and your business. There’s been a lot of thought process going into this particular problem that you’ve had or this particular solution that you’re selecting, and your employees generally aren’t a part of that conversation. Yeah. So for you, you might be thinking about this for, you know, a couple of months, maybe even a year. For them, you just told them on a Monday afternoon, or maybe even on a Friday afternoon, when everyone’s starting to enjoy their weekends. And you’re like, “Hey, Monday, we’re going to be doing this time management piece. We’re going to be doing time tracking.” And they’re like, “Where did this come from? Why are we doing this? Are they trying to micromanage us?”

Michelle (guest):
Right? Why? Right? And that goes back to the cultural piece of action, you know, hey, what are my actions? And, you know, if I say that I care about people in this company, and I want to include you in what’s going on and your opinion matters, then prove it. You know, start asking my opinion about it. You know, start talking about it early and often. And, you know, the more open communication. There’s a thing that’s really important to understand, and this is just one category of it, but change like that, anything that’s kind of a change creates grief because somebody’s lost something, it’s a loss event. And so we often think of like grief and losses, like somebody died. Well, that’s an obvious one, and that’s certainly something that can happen in the work world, whether it’s an employee passed away, or whether it’s a loved one of an employee. But what we don’t often think about, and I’m learning a lot more about this lately, is like a reorg, a restructure, a different you know, it could be a merger and acquisition. Could be a layoff, could be any sort of change within the operation or the structure of the company. Also, for some people, it will create a sense of loss, and they may very well grieve that like, “Hey, this is different than what I had before. I liked it the way it was before.” I’m not saying they won’t get over it, but we have to recognize that people have an emotional stake in the game for this, and that it’s okay that they have an emotional reaction to it. That’s very, very normal. Don’t pooh-pooh it and say, “Well, suck it up, buttercup. And this is just the way it’s going to be around here,” you know. Or good luck finding people who want to come on board with your company culture. That says, I guess, I suppose you could find those people, but be very human and very humane about it, and understand that, you know, change. It’s not that. And again, it’s not that people don’t like change. It’s that people don’t usually like how change is handled. So give me a chance to get used to the idea. Give me a chance to understand what this means to me. You know, hear me out. Like, yeah, maybe I’m gonna say something. You know, don’t shut me down when I say this bothers me. Okay. Hear me out. Why does it bother me? Maybe we could learn something from that. Maybe there is something we could do differently or better. I get a, you know, I’ve got skin in the game when you actually want to listen to me, when you actually value my opinion, when you actually get me involved in what’s going on. It’s to your point. It’s the, you know, I’m the leader. I’ve been thinking about this for months, and then I just dropped it on everybody Monday morning. Well, yeah, you’re right. Your skin was in the game for weeks. Mine wasn’t. I just found out now, and so my reaction is now in the moment. Wait, what? And we do that with a lot of things in business. Your example was a great one, but there are so many of those things. You know, business leaders aren’t always the greatest communicators.

Kathy (host):
I think it goes into, obviously, it’s a skill that needs to be learned. And especially if you, you know, you started a business, the business is going well, you go hire people, you hire more people. Now you have to have managers that are managing your workforce. Now you have to manage the managers. I mean, it’s a very different skill than actually doing things that you originally started the business for because you like doing, you know you like baking, but now you’re in charge of bakers and managers of bakers, it’s a very different skill. And I see to some people, it just doesn’t come naturally, and that’s absolutely okay, but you have to be willing and be able to develop it, and be open to having maybe a coach, maybe you have an HR person that’s helping you with it. I mean, there are all ways to do this. Yeah, so I do want to ask, like, if someone is saying, “Well, I know that I’m not really that great in a leadership role as I need to be, and I need to figure out how to do this better.” What would your advice to them be?

Michelle (guest):
Wow, well, first of all, kudos for recognizing that, because a lot of folks don’t or won’t, at least openly admit it. So you know, there are varying things that can be done to some degree, depending on what level of leadership you’re at. But you know, item number one is start looking at what are your learning and development opportunities, like, where do you think you have? You know, figuring out where do you have some good skills in leadership and good capabilities, and which parts of it do you enjoy and why? And then look at where do you have some gaps. You know, there are always some core skills and knowledge that I would just call benchmark baselines of what, you know, anybody who has the responsibility for other human beings in the workplace should have. I mean, my argument would always be start by benching everybody in your organization so that we are all singing in tune, off the same page in the same songbook, and then we can individually start looking at, well, you know, Kathy needs something a little different than Michelle does, because Kathy’s either, but, you know, obviously she’s a different person with, you know, different drivers and you know, her head is different than Michelle’s, as is her briefcase and so on. But start with that bench. You know, what are those core, you know, at the core good managers need to know. How to lead and inspire. They need to have emotional intelligence and show some empathy. And yes, there’s some of that that can actually be learned. You’re not born with it. You know, it’s not a hard fix. Per se communication skills is massive. You know, you have to know how to recognize and appreciate people. You’ve got to understand some basic human psychology. You need to know how to coach. You need to know how to do performance management. You need to know how to give effective feedback. Because feedback is usually just another F word, and it doesn’t have to be, you know, there are lots of things. I have a whole series of things I call management mastery. You start there and you say, these are the core things that this is, again, culturally, this is how we’re going to operate. This is our base level as a leader, and then work it up from there. Now, if I’m a higher if I’m an executive level leader, I would argue, if you don’t already have one, dare I say, get yourself a good executive coach. You know, get yourself, get yourself in the mix with other high-performing C-suite leaders who are on a learning journey like you, growth mindset, and surround yourself with those people. Be open to the development opportunities that come from your peers who are doing that. That’s super huge as well, right? So it could be a combination of a lot of things, coaching, you know, invest in yourself. Read up on stuff, watch videos on stuff. Who inspires you? What messaging matters again? Go back to what we said at the beginning. What kind of company do you want to have? Because you’re in charge of this. If you’re the top leader, you’re the founder, you’re the owner, the CEO, whatever, everything starts and stops with you. What I, you know, and why I started with the Get Everybody Benched, is because what usually happens is we throw thunder cash at the people at the top. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that. They get the coaching, they get the development, which is wonderful, but then it stops. You’ve got to as a good leader. You’ve got to think about all the other leaders who you’re relying on to execute on all this wonderful stuff you’re learning. You must invest in them and give them the skills and the tools that they need to help do that on your behalf. So it shouldn’t really be a solo journey. So when you were saying like, “Hey, I’m running a bakery, or I loved baking, but now I’m really just in charge of a bakery full of you know bakers, and managers of bakers,” know which hats you want to wear, and know which hats aren’t yours to wear, and get somebody else who’s good at it to wear that hat. Get your HR person, get the finance person like you in right, get the right people, because you cannot wear all the hats, and a coach can often help you with that, and then you’ll have more joy in your work. And I guarantee you your workers will notice that too, and there’ll be a lot more enjoyment for them when they see that you’re shining where you want to shine, and you are letting other people shine where they need to shine, and where they do it best. But again, we’re back to know yourself, know your people. You know what’s that old line from the song? Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.

Kathy (host):
That’s “The Gambler,” which, ironically, I listened to on my way driving to this podcast, which is interesting.

Michelle (guest):
Well, see, the universe is speaking, so it’s real, but I’m just… you’ve got to know those things and that I think a good coach for a higher level executive leader, and I’m not saying that just because you’re not executive doesn’t mean people don’t deserve coaching. They absolutely do. Everybody. No top athlete ever got to where they are without a coach or coaches. If you want top performance in your company, to get top-line results for your business, do you want to be the best team in the league, or do you want to be the suckiest team in the league? That’s going to come down to your players and your coaching and your strategy and how you execute and play and perform.

Kathy (host):
So Michelle, we’ve had so much fun recording this. Awesome. That was, there were a lot of rabbit holes that we went down, and there were a lot of memories from my corporate world. If someone is listening to this and says, “Okay, that was a lot of material in this 45-minute episode. And there are a lot of ideas in my head,” I would like you to narrow it down to just one thing that they can do, one tiny step that they can do in the next week or two to get them closer to the company that they want to have. I know this is hard, just one thing.

Michelle (guest):
Just one? Yeah, man, there are so many flavors of ice cream though. Okay, I would say start by sitting back, getting really honest, and really reflecting on what we said early on in our conversation, Kathy. What is your true dream and vision of your company? What is the dream goal, and what like? What does that look like, sound like, feel like, and how far away from that do you think you are? You know, so you can’t get to a destination if you don’t know what it is. Yes, we can lose our way, but the GPS can say recalculating, recalculating, and it can turn us around, right? So think of this in terms of step back and go. What is the kind of destination that I want for my business? Maybe I got a little off course. So let me regroup, and then I can find the alternate route back to where I wanted to be headed in the first place. Start there. Have an end game and a vision and a dream in mind, and then you can start looking at how you can backfill any gaps or redirect yourself and your company to get to that vision and that goal.

Kathy (host):
Michelle, please tell us, where can our listeners find you?

Michelle (guest):
Your listeners can find me on LinkedIn. You can at Lazarus Learning or Michelle Arts. You can find me there. You can find me on my website, LazarusLearning.com. You can find me on my podcast, which is out on YouTube called Nuggets with Sauce, and my YouTube channel. I’ve got more content coming over the summer. So I’m in a few key places, and I am always happy to have a chat with anybody who would like to explore further. There are options to, you know, have a healthy bottom line for their business.

Kathy (host):
Awesome. And we’re going to put all of those in the episode show notes. So if you missed any of those, just look at the show notes. Everything’s going to be in there. Michelle, thank you so much for this conversation. It was very, very enlightening and insightful.

Michelle (guest):
Thank you so much, Kathy. I appreciate the opportunity.