“I think if leaders started saying “Every person’s success or failure is based on how I perform, and I wanna make sure that I’m accountable to their performance.” I think things would really change, but that’s the biggest problem, we blame it on the employee and not the employer.”
0:00:00.0 S1: Forget about the crowds. And remember what got you here, focus on the fundamentals that we’ve gone over time and time again, and most important, don’t get caught up thinking about winning or losing the game.
0:00:14.1 S2: If you put your effort and concentration in to play in to your potential to be the best that you can be… I don’t care what the score board says at the end of the game, in my book, we’re gonna be winners.
0:00:25.2 S1: Welcome to the One Broken Cog podcast, join John and Brian as they share small adjustments that lead to major impacts. One Broken Cog podcast 2021. Here we come, we are headed straight for the intersection of success avenue and wealthy lane. I’m hoping all of you are gonna join us for a big party there. Now Emily from Minneapolis, Minnesota, sent in a question to results@onebrokencog.com. She asks, Why do companies avoid addressing staggering employee turnover and make excuses instead of fixing the issues causing it? When are they gonna realize it’s a them problem, not an us problem. Well, Emily, you bring up an interesting point. Now, approximately three million US workers leave their job each month and… Yes, that’s voluntary turnover. Now, of course, some turnover is unavoidable, every organization is gonna experience a lot of separation at one point or another, but 3 million is a staggering number and is a serious cause for concern for employers and recruiters. Well, my guest today is gonna give her point of view on that question and many more, as your expertise is helping companies on exponential growth trajectories to create talent strategies by hiring, retaining and developing a pipeline of top talent at warp speed.
0:01:49.6 S1: And she is none other than Jennifer Thornton. Now, Jennifer has developed her expertise in talent strategy and leadership professional development over her exciting 20-plus year career as an HR professional, she’s led international teams across Greater China, Mexico, the UK and the US, expanding into markets, managing franchise retailers and developing key strategic partnerships. All while exceeding business objectives and financial results, now, the rapid growth of our 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 accelerating hiring patterns. She’s a sought after business strategist, specializing startups and large value-based organizations, she is Sister clients and building talent strategies that complement their business strategies to ensure exponential growth. The gen lives in Texas with her family and rescues and her free time, she enjoys reading Historic Preservation, remodeling her Lake home and spending time with friends. Jen is great to have you on the show. Welcome to the one broken cog podcast.
0:02:50.9 S2: Thanks for having me… Anytime again… You live in Texas. Were you born and raised in Texas? Are you a transplant like so many of my former neighbors here in California… I am to a transplant, I think most of us are transplants in Texas, but… Yeah, I’ve lived here for gosh, 20, 21 years, but yeah. Still a transplant.
0:03:09.5 S1: Wow. So they haven’t fully adopted. You get a…
0:03:12.1 S2: No, it takes a few generations, I think…
0:03:14.8 S1: Oh my goodness. No risks, I assume. You’re afraid of dogs, right?
0:03:19.1 S2: I am dogs. In fact, we have a foster as we speak that we’re working with, so… Yeah, we enjoy helping those four-legged friends… That’s
0:03:29.7 S1: Great. You actually have an English bull dog from the bull dog rescue here in California. He is great, really great.
0:03:35.7 S2: Good. Yes, everyone should rescue. It’s a different kind of love when you save a life… It’s
0:03:41.1 S1: True anyway, they always say women like the risk you lost puppies in the form of men, but it’s much better to start with a dog first… Right.
0:03:47.9 S2: Yeah, much better. They’re easier to train to…
0:03:50.1 S1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, Jen, you’ve spent many years in HR. What led you to the decision of leaving the workforce is starting your own business…
0:03:59.9 S2: So you know, my projector into HR isn’t typical. I didn’t go to school to be an HR practitioner. I didn’t grow up in HR, I actually grew up in the operations side of the business in the retail industry, and I got my results in a way that my business partners didn’t… And I wasn’t competitive, I didn’t wanna win because I just wanted to win, I loved having incredible teams, developing teams, and I love the strategy of thinking about each higher and we were that person gonna go and how did you motivate them to get what you need and how did you pair people up? I was fascinated by human interaction, and that’s how I got my results, I was always a top performer, but I got it through talent and not because I just wanted to be number one, and so half my career was spent in the operations side, and then because of my passion around teams, I moved into HR as a talent strategist, and so that’s where I spent the second half of my life or my typical corporate career, and it was a ton of fun, I learned a lot, but what I learned on the operation side and what I learned in HR is the same thing, and when you put together a new product or a team or launch a business, anything you try to do, if you do not have a talent strategy that matches your business strategy, you won’t make it, you will fall and every time I was part of something new, we failed because we didn’t have the right team or we succeeded ’cause we did, and I got to that point in my career, what…
0:05:34.3 S2: I wanted to do my own thing. I’d been working for other people for so long, and I wanted to do what I loved, and that was talent strategy, so that’s the birth of 304 and what we do today.
0:05:46.5 S1: It’s awesome. How many companies do you think actually have a talent strategy…
0:05:50.1 S2: Oh my gosh. That’s such a great question. I’ve never been asked that before. Not very many. And it’s interesting, you think about startups and then they spend just so much time getting ready to pitch for funding, and people will hand over millions and millions and millions of dollars, but they never say, Okay, great, well, who’s actually doing this work and houses weren’t gonna get done now they’ll worry how though which it gets from point A to point B, but then who moves that widget and who’s being… Who’s responsible for how we work in creating environments, and that’s never part of the pitch, and I think that’s a disservice because if you’re gonna ask for several million dollars, you probably should know how you’re actually gonna get the work done.
0:06:37.1 S1: Why do you think that is? Do you think it comes from the fact that I just don’t know about this, or it’s just arrogance thinking their ways a better way.
0:06:43.1 S2: I think that no one… I think it’s because no one goes into business because they wanna hire a great team, no one wakes up and goes, You know what, I’m just gonna pull a bunch of really cool people together that are smart and work well together, and then just see what we do, everyone starts a business because they have a service or a product, and then they have to create a team to make that happen, so it’s just not kind of the first way we think of things, and if you are a founder or a leader, chances are… You have been creating business plans are very financially minded and that’s the right thing to do, they have to be financially minded, but it’s just not the way that people have been taught to work, they’ve been taught to take care of the numbers, but to take care of the numbers, you have to have the right people. And you know, you were saying in the opening, three million people change jobs every year, and the statistics show that it costs one and a half time someone’s salary, so if you have a 100000 employee when they leave, it just cost you 150000.
0:07:49.1 S2: And if you wanna think about finances and importance of finance and making sure you’re financially healthy, you have to think about retention and turnover, ’cause not only does it keep you from meeting your business goals, it also costs you a ton of money…
0:08:02.7 S1: No, it really does. And you would think of yourself, if some of these business leaders have been a part of a fantastic team of a great dynamic, they would wanna replicate that in their own organization, and you always hear the word pivot, that’s the word of the year, which is a burden the toilet this year, but you use that word all the time, pivot in your business will win, not with a team, if you see that you’re experiencing so much, churn is costing so much money, do you think you would address that or pivot there. You have to wonder. So that kinda leads me to my next question, Jen. From what you’ve witnessed. In your experience, what do you think is the greatest challenge? In hiring and retaining top talent.
0:08:35.3 S2: Oh gosh, I think the number one issue is that people don’t have clarity on how they want the work done, and in fact, I had this exact conversation with a client today because we’re starting to make some really good hires and things are starting to come together and you just can see the relief on their face and they’re like, Man, that’s coming together, and like… That’s because you have clarity. So when I talk about clarity around the work, you can talk to five different candidates have similar experience, but how they show up in the work environment will be unique to them, are they one that they… Someone who has a big entrepreneurial spirit and loves to break what works just to see if they can build something better, are they someone who is highly assertive, methodical, patient, patient, those are the pieces that people don’t really think about, How will we work together? And so they don’t hire, they don’t focus on bringing candidates in that work in the way that the company works, so that they’re more efficient and they’re happier and they’re just more connected to the objectives.
0:09:44.8 S1: That’s a great answer. You… And I’m glad you mentioned that. Where do you think, as far as your perspective on your clients or companies in general, where are they getting it the most wrong in regards to hiring and keeping talent
0:09:55.8 S2: Where they get it wrong is that… It’s never their fault. And it’s interesting when I get brought in, it’s typically not because things are going well with talent and everyone’s happy, I don’t get that phone call, I get the phone call that says, My team, they don’t work hard, they don’t make any decisions on their own, they don’t do this, they don’t do that. And the after someone tells me the whole long list of why everyone that works for them is horrible, I say, Well, what do you own in this… What decisions did you make that led to this… And they’re like, What? No, I tell them, I tell them what to do and I tell them how to work, and I’m like, No, you either hired their own person or you onboarded them wrong, or you gave him the wrong job, or You didn’t develop them because if your entire team is failing, you fail to hire and develop and coach the team not… ’cause if they’re all that horrible, then you at least make the wrong hiring decision, so somewhere in your process you made the decision, but people don’t take accountability, and I think if leaders started saying every person’s success or failure is based on how I perform, and I wanna make sure that I’m accountable to their performance, I think things would really change, but that’s the biggest problem, we blame it on the employee and not the employer.
0:11:13.4 S1: Wow, so you agree that the cause of the ridiculous voluntary share numbers companies are experiencing or can be attributed, what Emily mentioned is the companies are being a denial that they have any capability.
0:11:24.3 S2: Absolutely, they’re in denial, and a lot of times people are so stuck in their own perception that they’re not willing to see the truth in their company and they’re not willing to hear the truth from their employees and that is very dangerous.
0:11:41.1 S1: No, absolutely. Now, you always talk about the talent cliff, I love that term. If you wanna explain that to the audience of what the talent cliff means…
0:11:48.3 S2: Yeah, so the talent cliff is kind of this imaginary thing that happens in real life, so we start our organization are… We have this great idea and it starts to take off, and our skills and our desire and our knowledge is higher and stronger than what our production is, our sales or revenue, because that’s how it got off the ground in the first place, right? You couldn’t get it off the ground if you were not above where it was going, and then all of a sudden, because you and the team are so skilled that the product or service starts to take off, and then what happens is the employer starts to chase the revenue or chase the product, and they stop focusing on making sure that the team is growing, they’re too busy growing their financial results, and then what happened is the business starts to take off and the team does not grow, and so they’re stress. That comes into play when we’re stressed, we don’t manage in a way that’s effectively crisis manage, and then once we start crisis managing, our best people are gonna be out of there, they’re not gonna be talked to that way, they’re not gonna be in a place where they don’t get to use their brain, so they’re down the road at your competitor, then those who stick around or just kind of that yes person and aren’t making good decisions and don’t have the skillset, and then all of a sudden you’re off the cliff, your business has our art, the skill of your team, because you didn’t invest into the future of your team, and then as soon as that happens, then not only has your talent got off the cliff, but typically…
0:13:23.1 S2: So how’s your business?
0:13:24.6 S1: How, it’s a really bad situation to be in. Now is a quick question about the relation between marketing and people management, and when you look at marketing companies, traditionally, a lot of businesses really don’t have a solid marketing strategy, so they like to throw money at the problem, they look at many different methods and they try to AB test them. Do you think that companies do this with people too, meaning they just wanna throw out all this money and hire all these people to see who fits, and if it doesn’t, it’s okay, well, just hire a new batch… Have you seen this before?
0:13:52.6 S2: Oh my gosh, yes, I love talking about that. People, I always say We through payroll at the problem, and so often we look at a team and we’ll be like, Oh, they look really stressed and overworked, we should hire someone else, and so we throw a payroll at the problem, but what if we stopped and said, Hey, why is this team over worked in stress, do they have the resources they need from a skill set, is there a work that they’re doing that doesn’t matter, it’s vanity work, it’s just nice to do stuff, and it’s stuff that doesn’t impact the bottom line, and we could actually remove work off of them, is there a process problem, is there… Why is this team totally maxed out and it’s important to ask those questions first, because if you just see this team that’s inefficient and you think they need help and you just throw that payroll at the problem, you don’t ask those questions. Well, chances are, once you hire someone who they’re still gonna have those same problems and you won’t get the relief that you think you’re going to get, and… That’s a big mistake people make.
0:14:51.3 S2: They just keep hiring people without stopping and thinking about what is the important work and how is that work getting done and do we truly need another full-time person in this company?
0:15:04.2 S1: No, absolutely, I believe that you’ve probably heard this excuse before from businesses you work with is Jan list, and this sounds great, it makes complete sense, but I just don’t have the time to slow down my business right now to address this. Have you ever heard that before?
0:15:18.3 S2: Yeah, absolutely. And when people say that, then my first question is, tell me, what do you fear from… What part of this process do you have fear about because that excuse shows up because the brain thinks it’s overwhelmed ’cause they don’t know how to solve it, and so the brain… One of the things that does very well is it gives us excuses, and so as soon as someone says, You know what, I don’t have time that I know that their brain has some fear around the truth, and so their brain tells them they’re an overwhelm and that they don’t have the time. But yeah, so we have to confront that fear so that the overwhelm goes away and clarity shows up…
0:15:59.7 S1: No, absolutely, and it’s always great to get in those early adopters, those companies that are just in the Jurassic period and they want to be proactive and don’t fall in the same trap as a predecessor, so it’s always breathe fresh air to deal with those type of people now, I know you go on record in saying that running a high performance team always boils down to two things, adopting a perfect for hiring process and developing each higher according to his or her own individual and job-specific talent gaps. What is a perfect fit hiring process?
0:16:30.1 S2: So a Perfect Fit hiring process is, one, getting clear on the work, ’cause we gotta know who are gonna hire, but once we have clarity when we start the interview process, we have to use a validated personality assessment, because what that does is it allows us to then think about how will this person show up and do the work? And here at 304, we use OAD Organization Analysts and Design, and it’s a very simplistic complicated tool, it’s simplistic to take, but it gives you a really complex information about someone, and then once you have that information, how someone makes decisions, how open they are to change and versatility, do they make their decisions analytically or with emotions. Then once you have that information, you can hire people whose traits match the needs of the job, then you can use that information to develop and coach them throughout the employee life cycle, and so that information is invaluable, but so many companies don’t take the time to use an assessment, and it’s a piece of the pie that you can interview for, you can interview for skills and experience, but this assessment, you can’t interview someone and really figure out their natural adaptability, you can’t figure out their natural decision style, only a highly validated assessment can do that why
0:17:56.8 S1: Are companies resistance to utilizing these assessments, do you think…
0:18:01.5 S2: I think it’s a couple of things. One is, there’s a lot of bad ones on the market, and some of them are big feel-good exercises. What’s interesting is most assessments on the market actually are not EEOC compliant, and so they may be using something that’s not really compliant to the hiring process, and then the big thing I hear is I took an assessment one time and it was totally used against me and they have some, I guess I’m hatred towards an experience and their background around an assessment, but it’s because they weren’t the company they were with or whatever they were doing, it wasn’t a high quality assessment, and so it probably was an accurate… But that’s the big piece that you’ve gotta have an assessment that’s real, that’s easy to use, provide information that’s usable to your organization and is highly validated…
0:18:53.1 S1: No, that’s great information. I’m glad you mentioned that. Now, I know that you help global brands build rocks or teams to support rapid sustainable growth. What does a rockstar team look like? Is there a certain dynamic or formularies, it… Vary for each individual company.
0:19:06.3 S2: You know, I think they’ll vary a little bit, but the core, they’re always the same, and at the core, their truth tellers, and one of the pieces of our education program is conversation intelligence, and Conversation Intelligence helps us understand the neuroscience of the mind so that we can move people from fear to trust, and people often say, Oh well, that’s a… Wow, and feel good, and do I need to tell the truth? And I need to give feedback. And really great strong rocks, our teams are truth tellers, but they do it in a way that builds upon what they have, they do it in a way that allows people to feel secure and have some safety and environment, and they’re not judged for telling the truth, and so yeah, so if you wanna rock star team, get really comfortable with truth-telling in a way that moves people towards trust…
0:20:01.8 S1: Yeah. No, trust is key. Absolutely. Now, I know that you have an unconventional approach to building innovative workforce development solutions, what makes your approach different than most, and why is it so effective?
0:20:12.0 S2: What makes it different is that we are highly focused on making sure that the supervisors, the founders, whoever we’re working with, take full ownership of every single hiring decision, now that doesn’t mean they’re showing up to the interviews, and that doesn’t mean they’re doing all the work, it means that they have a crystal clear vision of how people are gonna work together, and then we help them create an environment that is consistent to that ambitious goal. So if your organization wants to be focused on entrepreneurial spirits, then how do you lead in a way that creates that, and so we really focus on helping executives understand how to lead an environment that they want people to work in, and not an organic… Whatever happens happens, but getting incredibly purposeful, and when the executives are purposeful about building the environment and they lead in a way that creates that environment, then that will start going trickling down through the ranks, but it also will create the next generation leaders for them because our teams will learn to lead in the way in which we lead, and so if you’re leading in a poor way and you’re leading in a way that causes turnover, guess what, the generation behind you, then your next leaders, you’re gonna do the exact same thing because that’s how you’ve shown them successful leadership acts, and so we really spend a ton of time with creating environments and leading in a way that creates that.
0:21:48.8 S1: That’s great, it’s great. Now, conversational intelligence, is that similar to neuro-linguistic programming versus somebody… Solely different.
0:21:55.2 S2: It’s something a little different. I love NLP, I’ve studied it myself, and NLP is… That focus is… It’s a therapy method actually, conversation intelligence is about understanding the words that we use and how they fire off chemical reactions within our mind, and so what’s interesting is our brain has one job and that’s to keep us alive, and so it’s very fear-based, and when we go into fear. Our primitive brain takes over, and when we were early in our evolution or cave mandates, we had a lot of fear around being kicked out of the tribe, because if we were kicked out of the tribe, we would not live and because we couldn’t buy ourselves provide housing and safety and food and shelter and warmth. All the stuff that we need to stay alive. And so when your brain feels like it’s being judged or you’re not being included in the workplace, or you might lose your job, or someone doesn’t think that you belong there, someone doesn’t think that your truth is a truth, willing to listen to your perimeter brain kicks in because again, it feels odd if you’re not a part of the tribe, but what’s interesting about that, as soon as your permanent brain turns on, your prefrontal cortex turns off, now that’s a problem because your prefrontal cortex is where new ideas comes from, it’s where we learn, it’s where collaboration happened and where we need people, we need the people using that piece of their brain, and the way we were taught to lead actually is very fear-based, and so if you think about a high-performing sales team, that leader…
0:23:38.6 S2: Maybe I’m just gonna be on everyone until they get their quotas in, and did you call this person and did you do this? And did you do that? Well, in that type of language, you’ve actually turned off their creative piece, and you need that if you want them to find a new way to get new cells in the door, if you want them to learn your methodology… And so you have to approach it in a different way. You have to say things like, Hey, we’re not making your quota. Let’s talk about that. What ideas are you using that are working, what are not working, are you open to bouncing ideas back and forth with me until we find the idea that will work for your style, and again, that’s about collaboration, and it will start to open up that pre-frontal cortex or that person can actually learn and come up with new ideas.
0:24:25.6 S1: That’s awesome, I love that. Now, Jen, I know part of your job is helping management teams negotiate the politics and find the words to get everyone to play nicely. I would love for you to tell me about the politics that you’ve run into with your clients and what are they struggling with to overcome in regards to politics and getting everyone to play nice.
0:24:43.5 S2: So the thing that, again, this goes all back to fear… The brain is a funny little thing, so what’s interesting is, you know, I think that when we were all young in our career, we looked at executives and we thought, Wow, when I became an executive, I’d have all this confidence and I would be so secure in my position, like we have this vision of what it’s like to be an executive… Well, it’s funny when you get to the top, actually, we show that the fear kicks in and because there’s a lot more at stake… Right, the higher the risk, the higher the fear. And what I find, and I found this when I worked in corporate America, I find this in small, medium and large companies that I work with, when the executives start to show up to the table, they are so focused on protecting themselves and their team, again, they’re protecting their tribe, because we are tribal humans, that they don’t necessarily think about protecting the entire company, and that’s why the infighting comes, that’s where the finger pointing comes, that’s where the blame comes, because you’re trying to kind of prove why you should not ever be voted off the island.
0:25:47.4 S2: And so we have to make sure that as leaders, if we’re leading a group of executives, that we are incredibly focused on the right tribe, and that is the organization, and then all decisions are made at that level. And then each person is responsible for making sure their subtribe comes to the table accurately, but unfortunately, that rarely happens, almost always, everyone is protecting themselves and their work and their team, and they’re not protecting the organization.
0:26:16.0 S1: No, absolutely, and we talked about the fact that a lot of these business owners and leaders are addicted to being right, and I would love for you, Genoa, to us quickly about the seven deadly sins of leadership, no one’s talking about how to fix them with conversational intelligence, yeah.
0:26:31.0 S2: So what is fascinating when you look at the brain, and we all have a little bit of an addiction to being right, all of us have a little bit of it, and the reason why is when we are right, our chemical in our mind, the dopamine gets fired off, and this is the same type of dopamine hit you would get if you were addicted to shopping or sugar or alcohol, whatever another addiction could be, and we all know about addiction is that the more you get that dopamine had the more you need… Next time for that same level of high… And so if someone is addicted to being right or addicted that dopamine hit when they’re right, over time, they have to become more right to get that same level of satisfaction. And so these are those people that early in your career, you’re like, Hey man, they were so collaborative, they were up and comer, they were always nailing it, and now that they’re an execute, they’re kind of a jerk and they don’t listen to people and they don’t wanna hear the truth anymore, and it’s because the truth takes away their addiction, it takes away their drug of choice, and so when people start getting addicted to being right…
0:27:43.3 S2: It shows up in a lot of ways, but some of the ways, when you think of the seven deadly sins, like the classic seven deadly sins, you think about gluttony and gluttony, they need that dopamine hit, there are glutton us for that dopamine hit. So they’ll fight with you over a color of a crayon, just to be right. They have wrath. And so when you think about the deadly, that lesson of wrath is when someone is addicted to being right and someone on their team comes to them with the truth and tries to tell them factual information, and then someone’s like, no, I don’t believe that. That’s not true, because it jeopardize their status, then there’s a lot of wrath, and I think that’s one of the biggest sins that people who are addicted to being right, they’re Tigranes, everyone has to believe and think the way I tell them to think. And there’s a lot of greed around being looked at as someone with status, there’s a lot of greed around, I want all of the wins, I’m not taking any of the losses, because again, a law says that they weren’t right, and it takes away their addiction.
0:28:55.1 S1: What do you think, Jane, which of the sins our business is struggling with the most out of all of them… Oh
0:29:01.0 S2: My gosh, that’s a hard question and a good one because everyone has in their own things. I think it’s wrath. When I look at leaders who are stressed out, when I look at leaders who aren’t focused on truth telling, that’s pretty dangerous, oftentimes when I get called in to work with an executive and there’s been some complaints about their leadership, and I ask them, What was the last time you learned something from your team… Oh, they’re not smart. I tell them how to think, I tell them what to do, well then, why do you hire them? If you cannot learn from your team, why are they here? And one of the fun things that we do is we think of a couple of really hard questions to ask their team, we bring their team in, and I kinda set as a quiet observer and I have that leader ask a difficult question, and if everyone in the room kinda looks at each other and says nothing and then looks at the leader, it’s because they’re waiting for that leader to tell them how supposed to think, because they know if they don’t believe and talk the way the leader has told them and don’t believe in what the leader has told them that there is wrath and there is retaliation, and it’s a really dangerous…
0:30:13.8 S2: ’cause if people are not comfortable telling me the truth about your business, then you’re never gonna get off the ground… No.
0:30:20.3 S1: Absolutely, and you have to wonder, when it comes to leadership mindset and self-awareness is so… Do you think that, because I know you’re so big on personality testing, do you think it’s just in their DNA, most business owners struggle with these things and it’s something they can overcome because who they are at their core, or it’s a by-product, the environment they’ve created through becoming a business owner.
0:30:41.8 S2: You know what, it depends on the person, and there’s a combination in there, but what I have found is some of those toughest cases, they do not change unless there is a crisis big enough to force the change, which is how all addictions work right, no one wants to give up their addiction until the pain of staying in their addiction is greater than the pain of giving it up, and so mommy toughest cases have been people who had to kinda hit rock bottom, whether that’s they crash their company into the ground, whether that is, they lost a very important relationship to them, because if you’re addicted to being right and you have all these tendencies at work, there’s chances that you act this way at home too, and so it usually has to be a pretty big crisis for some of the toughest cases to change…
0:31:32.7 S1: Yeah, you bring up a great point. I always wanted to look at a study between managing a business, how it connects to managing your home, and if there is a certain connection as if maybe somebody can run their home perfectly, but they can’t run a business to say their life. Right, but you usually see their interconnected, you watch all these shows, I watch thou the day Restaurant Impossible, and the business is tanking, usually the marriage and the family is tanking as well, so it’s very interesting. It
0:31:55.7 S2: Is, and I always tell people, leadership, how you treat it, people doesn’t end at the door when they go home at night, and so think about yourself as a leader as you’re impacting the future generation, you’re impacting communities, so if you treat someone really horrible all day at work, and then they go home and they sit down to have dinner with our family. And they’re beat down their children, their spouse, the people around them are gonna feel that, but if you treat people and say You had a tough feedback situation, but you work through it in a way that person feels like, Hey, I’ve learned something and I’m gonna be 10 times better tomorrow, and they go home with excitement and energy, then their kids are gonna fill that excitement and they’re going to have a better evening, and it provides their children and their families emotional safety, and so your leadership doesn’t end at the door. People carry those feelings and how you’ve spoken to them home. And it impacts their families.
0:32:56.4 S1: No, I agree, 100%. And a lot of times these business owners are unfortunately disconnected from those people who don’t see the impact it’s causing. Jen, it’s been wonderful, I really appreciate the time and the insights. Any last words of wisdom? Or anything you’d like to share with the audience before we wrap up.
0:33:11.9 S2: So one of the things I love to share with the audience is a great exercise to create innovation in your workplace, and it’s based in conversation intelligence, and in fact, we have all the instructions on our website, you can download it for free, but if you wanna have a highly innovative conversation with your team, make sure that you set it up for innovation and at its basics, instead of saying something like, Hey, let’s go and we’re gonna brainstorm on my product X, Y, Z is down 10%, ’cause again, that creates fear. You wanna say something like, Hey, let’s be honest. This product is down. We have to figure it out. So what I want you to do, meet me in whatever room at whatever time we’re on Zoom, and I want you to bring me the most outlandish, craziest, ridiculous ideas you can think of to drive this product, and in fact, I’m gonna give awards out for the most ridiculous ideas, because what you’ve told those individuals is You have removed the fear that their idea will be judged and you’ve opened up their pre-frontal cortex to new ideas and innovation, and that is how you get the ideas to drive your business.
0:34:18.3 S2: But again, we have a full guide and all the instructions at 304 Coaching on how to have one of those meetings.
0:34:24.1 S1: There you go. Jen, very last question. It’s just a personal question, just to get to know you just a little bit better. So you’re gonna be in an island, you’re gonna move out of Texas and move to a tropical island for the rest of your life, you can only bring one book, one movie, and one album… What would they be?
0:34:38.2 S2: The album’s easy. That would be Fleetwood Mac Rumors. The movie would probably be anything by Wes Anderson, I’m a big Wes Anderson fan, and then gosh, the book is the hardest because I am an avid reader in a book collector, and I get really emotionally attached to my books, I think they’re all my friends, so that’s like picking my favorite child… Gosh, I don’t know. One of my all-time favorite books is To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it so many times, I’d probably take it and keep reading it.
0:35:09.6 S1: Nice, I love it. Now, I have to ask you, who is Wes Anderson?
0:35:13.0 S2: Wes Anderson, he’s a great director. And he did hotel Budapest, he did worldteams. So yeah, so he does some of those fun quirky movies.
0:35:25.8 S1: Nice. Jen’s been a pleasure. Now, how can everyone get in touch with you, connect with you and learn more.
0:35:33.5 S2: So you can connect with me at 304 Coaching. We have a lot of free resources and fun stuff for you there, you can also connect with me on LinkedIn and we can continue the conversation at Jen Thornton ACC.
0:35:46.6 S1: Wonderful. Jen has been a pleasure, I had a great time. Have a wonderful rest of the day. Have a wonderful New Year’s holiday. Keep up the good work.
0:35:53.8 S2: Thank you, it was a lot of fun. Right, thank you for spending time with us today. We encourage you to join the many businesses that we have helped you achieve their objectives, align their departments and increase their revenue, you can start by reaching out to us at results at one broken cog dot com together, we will make small adjustments that will lead to major impacts to your business, your culture and your bottom line.