Unlike the next meeting, deliverable, or deadline, working on our culture isn’t as simple as penciling it into our calendars. It’s a living, breathing process that never ends, it’s the long game that has to be front-of-mind for leaders.
We know the world is busy and how easy it is to get bogged down in the to-do list, but the more we can step out of the routine of our roles, the better our organizations get.
Weaving culture into every single facet of our teams takes a conscious reassignment of our minds. From focusing on our own silo of priorities to the needs of the whole organization. From treating culture as an afterthought to making it the guiding principle. This is what’s required of leaders today.
How do we step away from the busy work and make culture a priority? In this episode, I’m joined by Business Consultant, Leadership Strategist and host of Powerful At Work, Rosa Ponce de Leon. We talk about the powerful shifts every leader (and organization) must make.
As executives, we just have our calendar out, and we never give ourselves space to really process, think, and have conversations without agendas. -Jen Thornton
0:00:03.2 Jen Thornton: Today on the podcast, I want to share a conversation I had with my friend Rosa Ponce de Leon. We had the opportunity to talk a little while ago about leadership, about c-suites, and how when a team of leaders come together, really knit together or link together the great things that can happen. And of course, we also talk about when that doesn't happen, what problems can arise. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rosa. Have a wonderful day.
0:00:33.6 JT: The landscape of business is changing radically, yet leadership is being taught the same old way it's always been taught. When the world is changing, it's time to bring our leadership styles along for the ride. Thanks to cutting-edge neuroscience, we now have access to new tools and new language that inspires action, collaboration, and innovation in the modern workplace. I started this podcast to bring you the best of these cutting-edge tools, exercises, best practices, and modern leadership strategies. Every single week. Whether you're a company leader, a corporate visionary, or an entrepreneur, this show gives you new insights into neuroscience and language of leadership, as well as practical steps and tips you can take back to the office. So you can lead your team in a powerful way, keeping your people happy and engaged while achieving your biggest goals. Because no one has ever changed the world by doing things the way they've always been done. I'm your host, Jen Thornton. I'm a talent strategist, an executive producer, and an executive coach, speaker, and the founder of 304 Coaching. Now let's fix leadership.
0:01:37.1 Rosa Ponce De Leon: Jennifer Thornton has developed her expertise in talent strategy and leadership professional development over her exciting 20-plus year career as an A-star professional. She has led international teams across greater China, Mexico, the UK, and the US to expand into new markets, managing franchise retailers, and developing key strategic partnerships, all while exceeding business objectives and financial results. The rapid growth of her consulting firm, 304 Coaching, has been largely due to Jennifer's unconventional approach to building innovative workforce development solutions for companies who are facing breakthrough growth and accelerated hiring patterns. She is a sought-after business strategist specializing in startups and large value-based organizations. She lives in Texas with her family and rescues.
0:02:26.1 RL: Jen Thornton, welcome to the show. I'm excited because I feel like we rescheduled a few times, and I finally was able to get you on, so I'm super excited.
0:02:36.3 JT: I'm excited to be here. It'll be a great conversation.
0:02:37.6 RL: Yeah, we have a lot to talk about, so I want to jump right in. You've done a lot of work with leadership and changing the C-suite, as well as company culture, and I really, those are two separate topics, and I'm sure you can go days on either of them, but we're going to try to cover both and give us a once-over. So can we talk first about the power play aspect of it?
0:03:00.1 JT: So one of the things that's unique about a C-suite group is they have always, until they got to the top, kind of always taken care of their area. So if you are a manager of something, you kind of take care of your area. If you are a director, a vice president, you take care of your area. And so once you become part of the C-suite and you become a steward of the organization first, over-protector of your team, that's when things start to get a little bumpy. Because too often, we don't think about the C-suite person as part of the stewardship of the organization. And so they walk up to the table or try to solve problems with their mindset around their vertical, their team, their focus, versus as stewards of this organization, what's the right thing to do, regardless of the impact?
0:03:56.2 JT: Now, obviously, we have to deal with that as we get there. But at the time it's going to be good for some and not fun for others. And as stewards of the organization, we have to understand that and then think about how do we take that back down into our team. But that doesn't happen that often. Most of the time, everyone shows up with their agenda. And we say we're into the company culture, we say we're into the company agenda, but we don't look at it as a group of people really knitted together to steward the organization. And that's when you start to kind of have a little bit of those frictions, that infighting, the resource grabs and all those things that come along with it.
0:04:34.0 RL: Totally. We can definitely spend a lot of time on this, but I think I want to highlight the part that each manager is a cog in a bigger machine. And what you're suggesting is, I got to know how I fit in with the rest of them, how my performance affects the people next to me, not just wanting to be my best, but I'm actually even better if I consider how I'm impacting the people around and how I'm helping them be better. Or if I'm doing something, how I'm potentially impairing them. And I think that's the sensitivity you want to bring out here. Yes?
0:05:03.4 JT: Absolutely. And too often we're thinking about our own resource needs, our own career agendas. I hear that a lot. You'll be talking to someone in the C-suite and maybe they want to go from just a vertical to a COO or a president role. And so they start to kind of land grab or start to think more about their own career. And it's not that that's not important, but to really have a unified executive team, it's that linkage. And it's interesting, if you look at the definitions of teamwork that's out there, at the end of the day, it's just a group of people willing to work together, which isn't all that great. And so when you think about linking together or weaving together, that's an elevated mindset around a group of people. When you're linked together, you're stronger as a group than you are as an individual.
0:05:58.5 JT: But to do that, you have to lean into differences. You have to understand the give and take. You have to really think about the good of the organization over sometimes the good of your vertical and making sure that everything weaves together. Because once the team is really linked solid, what happens is the organization will move forward more quickly. So therefore, in the end, everyone will get more than likely what they need. But if you start with that, you get behind the eight ball. And we see that happen way too often.
0:06:28.2 RL: You're really elevating people here because it's easy to be selfish and driven and motivated. And we like those ambitious people. And we look at them as leaders and very confident and very, very able to deliver and hit the performance goals and all that stuff. But in reality, those fine qualities and amazing qualities can become a huge hindrance if we're looking to elevate ourselves to that area you're describing where people do weave together, do knit together, and do lock arms and together challenge the marketplace. And I think that that's something that you alluded to when you said how we promote people and how they come up through the ranks, right? What is it that we can do differently in the organization and in the culture of the organization so that we generate people that are more, I don't want to say balanced, but certainly more elevated in their influence and in the way that they show up as leaders?
0:07:26.9 JT: One of the first things organizations can do, and when I coach executives, this is one of the very first conversations I have in a new engagement, is how do you define success in your current role? So what happens is we, again, we start to rise up. So I'm the director, I'm doing awesome. And then all of a sudden, the next day, I'm a vice president. Well, if I haven't reassigned success, if I haven't said success as a vice president at this time in my organization, in my world, looks like this, unconsciously, we're going to be driven back towards what we used to, get recognized for. Our mind's going to want to go back there. Our mind's going to want that dopamine hit and all those neural pathways. Everything is driving us back down. And so we have to be really conscious and thinking about how do we elevate ourselves up and kind of level up like a video game, you get to the next level and it's hard and it's uncomfortable, but you know, you'll get better again because you've always gotten better again.
0:08:14.6 JT: And so when you get into that new position, you have to stop and say, I'm going to say goodbye to things that used to feel good. The things that got me this atta-boy, atta-girl kind of thing. And I'm going to start focusing on what success looks like here. And I'm going to only recognize myself when I hit those things. And so it's this unconscious kind of reassignment of your mind of what success looks like. And so when you start to practice that, and you can be in a in a vice president role for five years, and you may have to do that three different times because times evolve. But then again, when we get into that C-suite and our response, abilities are different. We instinctively always go back to what we've always done because it's just the neural pathways in our mind. It's just how the world works. We're all human. So therefore it works that way. And that's the big piece of it is really setting down and saying, this is what success looks like in this position at this time. And here's where I want you to keep your focus.
0:09:22.4 RL: And I want to touch on that because I feel like that requires a sense of, I got to step back and work through some human nature is resistance to change, sticking to what's comfortable, craving that safety. And saying, this is what I know. And this is where I feel good. I don't want to come in and make a bad impression as a leader. I want to hit the ground running. I want to deliver the results that I promised you. But I feel like there's a little bit of a need here for a time to grow and transition. And do you find that leaders are able to cater to that need? In other words, we may have the right intention. We mean well, but do we actually do it? Do we actually give our leaders that time to transition in a way that lets them really develop new neural pathways and scrap the old stuff and come up with a new way of existing?
0:10:10.8 JT: Oftentimes, we don't do it. And the reason why is typically we're in our own mess at the same time. And so that is why executive coaching is so powerful because it's an outside voice coming in and asking those questions and challenging the way you're thinking and helping you elevate your thoughts and your experience. But if you've got three layers of people that... Haven't assigned the right success to them, then how can they do it to the person that's reporting into them? And so it becomes a very cyclical problem. And it becomes a situation where we kind of organically sometimes get there, or we get to a place where we're micromanaging, we're overwhelmed, we aren't focused on the right things. We're trying to be straight A students as adults. And I'm always like, We cannot be straight A adults. You got to pick some A's and B's and C's in your life.
0:11:03.7 JT: And so all of those things start to happen. I know, I mean, as adults, I don't know why we think kids can be straight A students. It's tough for them. As adults, no one needs to be a straight A student. And so really helping people start to understand what does success look like and what are the layers of that success. But we don't have time. The world is busy and we get just bogged down in the to-do list. But really strong leaders take the time to step away from the stuff, and start to really put some thought around how the organization functions. And that creates the culture. And the culture isn't the to-do list. The culture is the way we think about the business and how we act inside the business. But it takes time and it takes discipline.
0:11:50.6 RL: And it takes that outside voice. I want to go back to that because I think that when we are used to a certain thing, and it's what we know, we don't even know what we don't know at this point. So you do need that outside voice to influence you. But I also want to go back to the point of those C students, because I just had a conversation with a different guest about how grades do not dictate success in any way. Grades are just, this is the mechanism that you performed in and you were graded on that, but it does not measure necessarily intelligence or drive or so many other things. And the other point that you made is that we can't afford because we have all these things to do. But I want to talk to the fact that we can't afford not to, right? Because the law of diminishing returns, which is a concept I was thinking as you were talking, and you talked about this cycle where people aren't given their transition point and now they can't give it to their people.
0:12:40.9 RL: And now we have this ingrained culture that is just stagnant and it just keeps getting worse and worse. And it's a snowball effect. And now trying to change the organization becomes even harder because now we've created a process where everyone is just expected to hit the ground running. And we're really giving people those high fives because you stepped in, and you just killed it right away. And that's just not realistic.
0:13:04.2 JT: Yeah. So when you think about the not being a straight A student, I completely agree with your past guests around grades do not dictate intelligence. And they certainly don't dictate problem solving, grit, resilience, the things that it takes to be an adult. I mean, let's all face it. The last couple of years, we've all had to learn how to be really resilient and have some grit to get through life. And our school system is actually built on preparing people to work in factories. So everyone learns the same thing. Everyone's given the same amount of information, but that's not how we work today. And when you think about leadership, it's a very similar situation.
0:13:47.1 JT: Our leadership best practices that have been taught generation after generation were created in a world that no longer exists. And so when we bring in that old way of thinking of you have to be perfect, or you're a failure, you have to know it all, or you're a failure, all those things we've been taught, and you bring it in today's world, it doesn't work. It starts to break down. And in today's world, where there's so many moving parts, you got to find what you're really good at and be fantastic at it. And everything else, just get to a passing grade and move on and spend all that energy focused on what you're really good at. And what gets you out of bed in the morning, what makes you excited, and what makes a difference. And there's no better day than getting up and saying, Hey, I'm going to do 80% of my day is going to be what I want to do.
0:14:37.2 RL: What I love about that is that it also forces you to lean to others for the things you're weak at. And I feel like that connectivity and that demand to expect that you're not out there alone, but that you're supposed to be performing in totality with the talent of everyone else. Like there's room for everyone to flourish. It's not just me getting all the accolades or me going after it and really doing those power grabs that you talked about. It's if you're winning, I'm winning and vice versa.
0:15:08.6 JT: Let's take a quick break from the conversation. Does your company need to prepare those upcoming leaders to take the reign? To learn more about our leadership academies and our coaching, and to see if your company is a good fit for our transformation programs, visit 304coaching.com.
0:15:28.3 RL: I love the idea of playing to people's strengths. Let's spend a little bit of time to that. And how do we create a culture that does that.
0:15:33.2 JT: It's always easier said than done. And I think we all recognize that. If I had this magic wand that made it all better in the work environment, I'd be very happy because I'd be solving all kinds of stuff. But when you think about playing into strengths, it's about really understanding. It just starts at hiring the right person for the right job, which I know we've all always heard that. But what happens is we are like, Oh, this person left. So let's just hire another one of those people.
0:15:40.0 JT: But we don't stop and say, what does the business need? What does this job actually entail? And then we create these unicorn positions where we want someone to be detailed and creative at the same time. And we want them to be able to use their left and the right hand at the same time. And we create these unicorn positions where no one's going to be successful. So a lot of allowing people to play to their strengths is to have a lot of clarity around the positions in which you're going to hire someone for. Because without that clarity, you cannot hire someone that's going to be playing to their strengths in that role. And then once someone is in the organization, allow them to do great work where they do great work and where they can get a passing grade and it works for the business, get okay with it.
0:16:45.0 JT: And again, not expecting that every single person has to be perfect every day because it just doesn't happen.
0:16:58.2 RL: Roles and responsibilities is such a big deal because people can define what they own in terms of their piece of the pie. But what are your thoughts around just organizational structure in general? It's great to be organized, but I feel like in that example that you gave, we hire a person and our structure is one way, but this person maybe forces us to reshape our structure because maybe there's a need for a different person to support a different innovation that comes out of this. Or we need to look at how it's changed the face of the organization and we want to be a little more resilient and flexible and bendable, what are your thoughts around that? Do you find that organizational structure sometimes don't flex enough?
0:17:35.3 JT: I think that they don't always flex enough, but I think they don't start with what's our business objective. They come at it as who's supposed to report to who, whose title is this, how is this supposed to be? And they don't say, All right, so the next five years, here's our three business objectives. And based on these business objectives, this is where we have to land. Let's start building into that. They kind of take what they have, what's our payroll budget, how many positions does that need? And they kind of make this Frankenstein kind of thing they put together to meet that. But you have to really take a long game with it.
0:18:14.9 JT: And the other thing that happens with org structures is we throw payroll at the problem. We'll have a group of people struggling. They just say we need more people. And so they just keep hiring more people, but yet the problems never go away. And when there's a team struggling, you have to stop and say, is there automation that we're missing? Is there skill sets we're missing? Is there leadership that we're missing? Why is this group of people struggling to complete their work? Let's make sure we know that before we just throw more payroll at the problem. And I see that happen over and over and over again. And then a company gets upside down and they can't afford to pay the people, but yet they can't afford not to. And so org structure is incredibly important. And it's very complex.
0:19:05.7 RL: Well, I love your answer because all I can think about is teams, right? In sports. And so I'm going to use a soccer example because that's my sport. And in soccer, you look at the team you're about to play and you can change the way that you put the people in the field. So you can have like a flat four back or you have a sweeper in the bag. The way that you actually position the players, their roles will change because the other team has a super fast player at the front. Or I now understand my opponent so well that I can use my existing talent. No matter what I can only have 11 people in this field on my team. I can have people on the bench that I can have on reserve, but I can only have 11 people. So the payroll issue is not an option. Where I can't put 12 all of a sudden. I can't bring you five people. So I love this idea of taking the time to know what our goals are. If our goal is to defeat this opponent, now we can figure out using the talent that we have, how do we make that happen?
0:19:57.9 RL: And it may mean that you're normally playing in the wing, but today I need you to play in the middle. Let's go to the practice board and get some drills in place to get you to be really good at that role in that way. And most of the time people are driven. They love that challenge.
0:20:14.9 JT: They do. They love that challenge. And if you talk to the people doing the work, they typically have the solution, but we don't always stop and ask people, Hey, just if you were in charge and you can make the decisions, what would you do? And man, if you go down to the people actually doing the work and you ask those questions, you will learn so much. And there's an organization I've been working with for a long time. And we have a situation where they've been thrown a lot of payroll at problem. And what it comes down to is they've got a software system that's broken. It's not working and they're going... And they've been fighting the change because it's going to be very painful to change out this software system. But the pain of not changing is now greater than the pain of change.
0:21:01.3 JT: But six months, 12 months ago, everyone dealing with that problem would have said this is what we should do.
0:21:08.0 RL: Wow. And then they bled out because they kept investing into the wrong thing. We're trying to keep this thing in place. I find that that happens sometimes with plans too. We have this plan, let's stick to the plan. And there's a time to stick to the plan, but sometimes a plan needs to be scrapped altogether. If we failed at the beginning in the planning phase, maybe we failed to look at the intelligence. We didn't press hard enough and we didn't have all the facts in the table and we made decisions based on faulty realities. And it's okay as a leader, to step back and go, Hang on, we need to stop.
0:21:38.8 JT: Well, and not only that, but in today's world, as fast as it moves, if we get overly attached to an idea, new information will present itself. Something will change and move. And so if we're attached to our plan, A, B, C, and D, but then new information presents itself, but we're not willing to see it or hear it or look for it, then we may move down a path that looks like it's working. But when we land, it won't be okay. And I think that it's interesting. I've been kind of starting to get obsessed about this whole metaverse marketing and where marketing is going and what marketing is going to look like. McDonald's and all these organizations have filed for trademarks for their virtual stores.
0:22:17.8 JT: And I think about forming a new marketing team today. I wouldn't form them today to think about today's marketing. I would form them to get ahead of where we're going so they land faster than their competition. But there are a ton of millions of marketing teams right now that've got their plans. But then, I mean, out of nowhere, here comes this idea of metaverse. And if they don't start moving on that, they'll get behind.
0:22:44.0 RL: And that right there requires leaders that are willing to not be tied up in their old ways. That are already used to that ability to transition quickly and not be wearing an old uniform or an old piece of equipment to where they're going. It requires that comfort and discomfort. And I think that's bringing us full circle to where we encourage leaders to give that transition time, give that space to let people figure out so that when the market is changing faster than we can move, we can tap these people and be like, You've been here before. You've been in that transition space. This is no different. Except we need you to do it faster now.
0:23:24.9 JT: Yes. We need to do it faster. And we just really need to do it different. Sometimes different is hard for our human brains, but once you get used to being really excited about something different, your brain starts to get used to that. And so it's like, Oh, cool, something's different. And it's just like, fantastic. Instead of, Oh, no, something's different. Is that you do have to train your brain to be excited about change.
0:23:46.6 RL: Totally. Totally. I'm thinking about a water analogy. You can swim in a pool is different than swimming in a river, different than swimming in a pond. But at some point, it's not a big deal. Whatever. If it's an ocean, it's still just water. I understand water and I'm going to be able to perform and it's going to be okay. I'm not going to drown.
0:24:04.1 JT: Absolutely. And there's so many great historical stories about people not willing to show up for change. Blockbuster is a great one. They have an opportunity to buy Netflix for pennies on the dollar. And it's interesting when you read interviews with the founders of Netflix, they talk about they finally got into Blockbuster. They spent everything they had. They had to be there by a certain time that next morning and stayed up all night long preparing. They go to present and they could tell the CEO was basically like, this is hysterical. Like no one's ever going to want to do this. But that group of executives had no ability to see change coming.
0:24:42.4 RL: That's scary.
0:24:47.3 JT: And They mocked it. They mocked it instead of hearing and listening. Kodak, another great example. They had the first digital camera. Their executives thought no one would want it. There's so many great examples that we should learn from that we've got to get okay as things change.
0:25:04.0 RL: Thank you so much, Jen. I appreciate the examples here at the end because I think it really drives the point home. Is there anything that you want to say in closing for our executives and they can actually carry this out? A little encouragement.
0:25:12.8 JT: I think what I would encourage you to do is find the space to think. Find the space in your day, even if it's you go for a walk. But as an executive, we just pound our calendar out and we never give ourselves that space to really process and think and have conversations without agendas...
0:25:28.4 RL: I love that.
0:25:28.5 JT: Because that's where you start to learn. It's where you can start getting curious. Grab a couple of people from your team and go for a walk outside with them and just talk about the business. I know you'll learn a ton and plus you'll enjoy a little sunshine.
0:25:40.2 RL: Awesome. Thank you so much.
0:25:50.0 JT: Thanks for listening to Let's Fix Leadership. By hanging out with me today, you're already on your path. If you're looking to learn more and to see if your company is a good fit for our coaching and leadership education then, hey, visit 304coaching.com. If you got value out of this podcast, share it with a friend, and it would mean the world to me if you would leave a thoughtful review and a rating on iTunes. Thanks again for listening, and I appreciate your work in fixing leadership.
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