Patrick Seaton and Rhealize Owner Dona Baker talk Organization and Direction with Peter Mingils

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1:06Welcome to Building Fortunes Radio. Make sure you check us out at buildingfortunesradio.com. Along with Kisk, our keep it simple circle marketing partners, we are here to help our humongous AM and humongous FM radio customers build their businesses and make the world a better place. With Building Fortunes Radio, we know how much your business means to you and the people important to you. So join us to make the world a better place. Spread the word, tell a friend, and go make a difference in your world. Now onto our show with your host, Peter Mingles. Take it away, Peter. Hello, everyone. Peter Mingles here. You are listening to us on Building Fortunes Radio. This is a Thursday night, 11 p.m. if you will, on the eastern coast and we are here with Patrick Seaton. Patrick Seaton. This is actually his radio show on innovative management tools. For a lot of people that might be new, I met Patrick as a result of a speed networking event through a gentleman named Manny Lopez, a good guy doing some work with a lot of

2:10different people in business and also helping his local communities. To a breakout meeting, Patrick was on explaining a little bit about what he was working on with his innovative management tools. So he took a lot of the decades-long experience that he had. He loves it when I say how old he is. The decades-long experience. But he put them in a digital form, which was kind of unique, and as he was kind of explaining to the group some of the things he was doing, I was kind of intrigued with this and I invited him to do some radio shows with us because I said, you know, a lot of people in our building forces radio listening audience are business owners or they work with companies and you know they are interested in improving their business and reducing the friction associated with any changes and things like that. So we started to do these radio shows and you can pick them up if you go to buildingfortunesradio.com and look for innovative management tools. And also you could also see Patrick's great website, innovativemanagementools.com.

3:11But through the year or two that we have been doing this radio show, he has announced he is an author again, he has got a couple of good books and he has got some great tools and he has got a super special guest today that has been here before introducing his AI program called Ask Alex. So you are in for a treat today, you will probably want to get your note taking devices and certainly listen to this probably a couple of times because there is always some really great gems that Patrick mentions and sometimes he has a special offer, he is telling you about some of the things he is working on and he is going to have like I said a really special guest today which makes this a North American conference, if you will, we have me here in Florida. We have Patrick over in Mexico and his special guest over in Canada. So Patrick, thanks for being here. Thank you Peter and yes it is fun and great to be back. We are in show number 79, believe it or not, which is really amazing and great and fun.

4:14And it is my distinct pleasure to welcome back. My favorite guest is Donna Baker from company Realize up in Canada and Edmonton and Donna is a, she can give you a little bit of background on herself but she has a vast experience in HR, quality, safety and most recently building a SaaS platform for HR talent matching between employers and candidates. And so it is always fun to have Donna come back and I am going to try and pick the topic that is going to be right up her wheelhouse and she is going to be able to share her pearls with us. And so Donna first wanted to just give a little, yeah what I said, give a little background

5:18on yourself and what Realize is and a little bit about your Ikimai platform and then we will jump into the show. Sure, well thanks for having me back on this show, I really appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you. Well, I am, as you say, up here in Canada and I have a company Realize and what we do, we call it strategic talent advisory. So I'm not quite what I would call an HR person because HR we would kind of align it with the administrative function that is done in a company. I would include things like benefits and sometimes even payrolls kind of put in with that as well. And I have done all of those things but the most interesting thing to me is helping organizations to figure out, first of all, like given their strategy, what is the organizational structure that they want to have and then what are the roles that need to fit within that structure

6:25and then helping them to create those roles, writing the job descriptions, creating the competency, matrices, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason for that is it ties into another area that I is sort of like the core part of my background and that is adult development and learning and particularly focused on learning in organizations. Well, I'm out full. I'm out full and a brain full and so in a few sentences and this is pretty to the test, how do you explain the program you're building, Ikemi, to the listeners, what is it because I know that you're actively looking for both candidates and companies to try it and use

7:25it and so what would you like to tell them about that? Yeah. About eight years ago I was sitting in my office where I was a director of HR and figuring out why we were spending so much on job hiring platforms, but when we looked at our data, I realized that we were hiring most people through referrals in business. And then I was curious as well, like, well, why aren't we hiring more people from these expensive posting platforms that we're using? And as that investigation kind of went on, I looked at the platform and I was like, well, why are we even using resumes on these platforms because we're having people enter data into their kind of, they make up a little account and then they add some information about themselves and then they add their resume and I'm like, we're making people do double work, this isn't

8:28making a lot of sense. They don't need to add a resume if we get them to put all their information in. So that is the essence of the software is it does other things go to as well. It takes information about the job. It standardizes the questions that we ask the employer about the job. And then what we do, what we say we do is we're closing the information gap between what is known about the job and what is known about the candidate because programmatically inside software, we're able to compare the answers that candidates give us and the answers that employers give us and then see where the overlap is between candidates and jobs that are posted. So then that is what we think is much, much more efficient than people reading resumes or even having software read resumes because the information in the resume is only a small

9:29fraction of the information that is needed in order to make a good job match. Yeah, I would think that resumes are backwards looking and a lot of questions that you want to know from a candidate I think and that's what I've looked for in the past is what's their forward vision? What can they bring moving forward? Yeah, what they did was great, but if it was 12 years ago, I hope they've grown from that and they're a different person and what can they bring new and does that match with what I'm looking for? Definitely they have grown and we don't look forward when I'm doing say work with candidates, say career planning and things like that or even just looking for a job. And I do a lot of that work right now, testing our software but also just trying to understand how people find jobs and what their challenges are. And I find that they are, sorry, you know what, I just totally lost my train of thought.

10:37So that was like how train of thought. Forward thinking, forward thinking, that's what I said. That the candidate's coming in there forward thinking, yes, you know what, I just totally forgot what I was going to say now, let's move on, forget it. No, that's it. You know, and I see, I think I understand where you're going and it is, you know, if a position is really, how can you help us move forward and with ideas then there is a certain moment when you need to talk about that, understand that and, you know, what do they bring to the table that can help move that piece forward over just you did it in the past and, and things like that. So I can't do it. Okay. Yes. Thanks. Thank you for that. You're welcome. You're welcome. So tonight, even though it's maybe a distant cousin to what you were just talking about,

11:39the topic that I wanted to bring up is the whole idea of reorganization and restructuring within a company and how, from a senior management point of view, we go into reorx as a way to clean up, straighten up, you know, tighten up, whatever it might be, and it might be because people have left and we don't have someone to fill it, the job, so we're going to consolidate and there could be a whole variety of reasons. But what I wanted to talk about was the importance of how to do that so that you don't create confusion within the company and confusion, whether it's just on paper or with the people and with their day-to-day work and operations, no senior management goes into a reorx thinking

12:47my goal is just to create a lot of confusion and people don't know what's going on tomorrow so that we pretty much are stalled. They're going into it thinking, from their perspective, we want to quote-unquote clean this up and make it more streamlined, but that's not always what happens. And so I thought, you know, who better to have this discussion and banter back and forth than with Donna, who has probably seen this, maybe even from the senior management, I, when I was in corporate, I saw it from the department level and I was like, this tsunami was hitting us, I was not at the top making those decisions. So I think it could be real interesting to talk back and forth on this from our different perspectives.

13:48Yeah, I'd love to do that because, yeah, I have a lot to say about it. And I think I have a lot to say that paints people in a fair light, that the people that like at the top that are making decisions from their changing things and the people that are working at the customer level or at the level of tools and they're not hearing what's going on, it's not an intentional thing that they're being, not being communicated too sufficiently. It's a, I think that there's some very common human biases that take place and we just severely underestimate the amount of information we have to share, but let's not say the amount of information, but the frequency of communicating that a change is going to happen has to be done over and over and over before the majority of people in the organization hear it and

14:54understand it. I would say frequency and quality. Oh, absolutely the quality as well, yeah, like where does it get put and what is that message? Yeah, what are the questions that people have and how they get answered, yes, yes. I think that is really a good point because it may be saying in a different way people at a certain altitude within the company, they assume that when they communicate to whomever that the message will go down and just keep going through the waves and it will stay intact, it will not get reinterpreted, repositioned, summarized, consolidated, put into a different angle or whatever and they don't have the feedback loop to know, did it really stay intact

15:54as it went through? It's kind of like that telephone game we used to play, you know, with kids and the explanation that might seem crystal clear at the top for why the organization is going to be structured like this, if you lose X percent every time it gets through the telephone game, by the end, you know, you started off with, I love my grandmother and at the end, it's Godzilla's eating Hong Kong, yeah, it could literally be that, well, and certainly it gets misinterpreted sometimes too, like it gets shared around the water cooler, kind of things, we come a lot of coolers around the fridge with the water bottles of it, it gets shared around and then where there's gaps, then people make up and it's information and it's usually

16:58not flattering information, it's usually scary stories about, you know, what terrible things are going to happen? Yes, and if everyone from the senior management was communicating the same way down at the same time and it was consistently going through the different altitudes, that would be one thing, but the reality is one senior manager might say it one way, another one another way and at different moments, so some people feel like, well, how come you know stuff that we don't know and so now we get into all of this, you know, the negative spiral, how come our managers are saying it, how come we didn't hear it that way? And as you said, we all have our biases and I've been talking the last week a lot about cognitive biases and so when you said that word, I'm really curious to know what you see being the biases that

17:59are coming into play in this and perhaps the biases from both senior management point of view for the senior managers and the frontline staff or the middle management staff, there are different biases that are going to play into this. Yeah, I would say like the bias that I see at the top of the leaders is confirmation bias, so that's the whole idea that something you believe that you look for validation that that belief is true unconsciously, like you're not, you don't realize you're doing it most of the time, you just, it's a way that we comfort ourselves and we go, oh well, I know that I could give you an exact story about this, a company I was working with where they had a change in their CEO coming up in the next six months and I was working with a marketing team and the communications team

19:03and we really wanted to do a, like start, at least we wanted to start six months ahead of time, we could, we wish we could have started even sooner, but six months ahead of time telling the staff that there was going to be this change and the CEO who was going to be incoming said, they all know who I am, like we don't need to do that because like that's nonsense and how much do you say that's going to, oh my goodness, like we're not going to be spending money on that and it when it turned out that the next year when they did the review with staff to ask what this person's title was, most of them still thought that the person was in their old title or that they didn't even know who that person was because there have been a whole lots of new staff that had come in and they had a large turnover in the organization, like almost a 50% turnover, so like in a year you've got half your staff that's new staff and so I were like we were like well okay you know like okay

20:13but for that person they were like well they felt like that they knew better because like of course they had, they were going out to every single location, they were very visible, any time they were out there they knew a lot of the staff by name, they worked in the organization for like 15 years, they were so well known but they were well known for the work they had done before, not for the work that they were going to be doing. Yeah, yeah and probably within a certain circle. Absolutely yeah like the leadership team knew but you know I would think like one level down from the from say directors into managers and I think some of the managers didn't know that that was happening. Yeah. And it just some of the directors didn't really discuss things like that with their staff, like that they were very focused on maybe the project they were working on is something and they just didn't even think to have that conversation

21:13because the older things that very often your communications team, your marketing team or however maybe even in the c-suite itself you create what you are to say to everyone so everyone gets the same message because you asked about the biases that take place at the worker level and I'm not so certain it is a bias other than maybe there is a bias around this but it's the whole thing that if you're left out of something there's a tendency to think that somebody doesn't care about you and so if you didn't hear the news you're like well why am I with the last person to hear these things something that really directly impacts you. Like there's a program I use called print and they talk about unconscious biases and that when we get out of sorts we go into shadow behaviors. So the shadow is like you know that a behavior that happens because we get emotionally activated over something that occurring in our

22:18in our situation and that would put a lot of people into shadow like not knowing what kind of changes are taking place in the organization so you get people that are disgruntled and that they're like maybe they're sad maybe they're angry maybe they're dispirited that they just they just feel like giving up because they're like why bother if they can't even bother be bothered to tell me about something this important that affects my job then why should I care. Well and when I think about through through the change lens it's this change and they have questions and if they no one came to them to tell them about it where would they go to ask questions for clarification or what does this mean or how it was impact or it from what what I've heard is going to change direction that impacts my job what does that really mean on my day

23:18to day now I don't know what I'm doing and that is not necessarily a bias but it creates the space where much to what you're saying why should I care and go out of my way if no one even had in their mind the decency to share with me this big news so I must be like worth zero. Yeah I'm important yeah and you do hear that you hear that language that's being in in the HR team that I was and in this one company that people will tell like especially we had built trust with the employees because that that it was I worked with some really wonderful HR managers in especially in this one company where I was at where they were humanistic and sometimes

24:21HR gets a really bad rap because they they become like the hammer sometimes for decisions that are being made but this person I was trained under was very much like being empathetic and putting yourself into the shoes of the employee and trying to break those biases down and I didn't recognize that for years that this individual was trying to counter confirmation bias and saying you know these employees are just doing their job day to day they're not really reading the news letter thoroughly so you know like a lot of them they're they're just trying to get their job done at go home and and like have a life and so like if they're not tuned in to all the news that is coming across their email or their desk and somewhere like you know like being talked about in some in in a meeting then maybe it's because they got other stuff on their mind and you need to hear it

25:22over and over maybe they only heard it once they're only saw an email once and so it wasn't enough to kind of register in their in their attention well or even it's it's too there's too much space between their daily activities and what's being announced on news letter let's say let's say there's a oh we're reorganizing the whole marketing department and you know this is blah blah blah blah blah blah blah to somebody doing the day to day they're like okay but I don't do the blah blah blah I'm doing one two three four so who's going to help me understand how blah blah blah impacts one two three four so they don't eat that and so they do read it they go okay so somewhere up above there's somebody's got a new boss or something but they don't they they don't know how that really impacts them in their day to day

26:25no and in fact if you're talking about marketing I'd say like you know a fair majority of the organization doesn't know what marketing does at the best of times no they don't and not if you know this is like no commentary on marketing people or marketing departments it's that what marketing does is start complex and it's really hard to understand it when you don't work in the department and see all the activities that they do most people just associate it with advertising yeah true true well depending on which department you're in advertising or while advertising and uh lead generation yes if you're in the sales department or like you know like events maybe like that the company has or something like that like it's it's not really understood like to me when I was when I was in my roles like as you mentioned HR health and safety and quality management

27:28and so we were an I feel certified company when I was leading the quality management area and there's a principle in ISO that everything in the organization anything that touches the organization touches the brand and so then the brand is everything like that's your identity as an organization so everything speaks up to the brand we have to know what the brand is we have to be able to assess especially in ISO what is the impact on our brand that we have or look as you know the customers employees the other stakeholders to the organization because that's all going to impact how the company is perceived so then what what is happening and and what is the layout and you know like is are we are we consistent are we doing things right so I had that coming

28:29into an HR director role and so I always assume that HR also spoke up to the brand and that health and safety did as well so then we were able to unify everything it's like that anything we do in these departments it better be in alignment with what we say we're about up here or we're going to have confusion for people throughout the organization and maybe outside the organization too like those all those departments kind of were more internally focused except for the quality management and the customer survey yeah and you just said a word that I want to kind of wrap up this part and then segue into the second piece to share with it so for the the senior management who are thinking about we need to restructure reorganize do something

29:31to for whatever the reason might be but that's what we're going to do what would you what would your message be to those people as being one of a senior management at some point what would you say to them as things to think about or talk or or to contemplate this is directly for CEOs do not assume that the people around you have shared understanding of your strategy and your vision that I it's it's it's all I can almost oh I'm I'm almost certain that I can like most organizations you go into you're going to find that there'll be one two maybe all that have a different understanding of what that direction is then what the CEO tells me when we're meeting

30:34together it's very very uncommon to find an organization where everybody has the same message so right there you're fighting like a battle I would say of trying to communicate because your team may not even have been aligned on the last message and the last structure never mind this new one since that you have kind of kind of got true true but the good news the good news is it presents an opportunity yes yes sure does I would I would say to the CEOs very similar to what you just said that even though it looks good on paper it's really important to be able to

31:38tell the story say the story out loud be able to explain the changes explain why p7 is being plugged into part two and you know because if you can't explain it and it makes sense and it sounds logical and convincing how will others naturally find the logic and the the reasoning behind it and so I would say look at it and use yourself as the litmus test because if you can't convince yourself and and make it sound right and then it's not going to sound right I mean it's just it yeah and sometimes it's a hard thing to do because there is especially when you get into like the administrative areas like where does payroll go does it go

32:40under the CFO or does it go under the HR area I like sometimes companies that they have like a C-suite HR person in C and a CFO and like it could be that the payrolls under usually it is under the under the CFO but sometimes it could be under HR sometimes HR is under communication yeah and so you know it just really depends on the organization see there's all these kinds of different arrangements there's some that are so that are more conventional than other arrangements so that it just really depends on the organization and how they see themselves how they see those areas like where they where they play things I've even seen human resources come under the CFO but like it doesn't really matter that much it just matters that like you say that it makes sense within the organization why you do it that way true and I would say you know align those where they could go in different areas

33:46align it with the person who can best serve that department with guidance and leadership don't just say well it's always been under this department so it's going to be under this department well that's the person who left and you have now has someone who does not have that skill then don't just say well we have to do this way because we've always done it that way be open be think outside of the box and say where would this best serve because remember a leadership's role is to serve those in their areas it is not the other way around so how can I best serve those people and that means if I can't then I really either need to learn the skills or I should be raising my hand and saying how can we serve these people better oh yes like I think that what I've seen happen is like yet somebody who has a particular

34:50perspective on the organization because of their role like a CFO you wouldn't expect them necessarily there's some very good ones well they're all good because of them being able to do their job but some are able to understand say the HR perspective because they just maybe it's interesting to them or for whatever reasons but they may understand the whole arrangement of it others may just understand like the benefits part of it or like you don't like the pain benefits sort of thing and maybe contract you know like that and so they may not get the other parts of it about the engagement of employees and some of the other things that we're trying to do to develop people and things like that exactly exactly yeah there's it just depends like you said on who the person is and so long as they can respect the perspective I think it isn't a problem

35:50and if it's like that because you know a person can get mentoring outside of the organization or from somebody else in the organization if they kind of needed that but if the boss of that organize of that part doesn't respect the perspective of the areas that they are and doesn't even try to understand what those perspectives are then I think that that's when you're going to run into some issues yeah so let's now jump to the other side where from the worker point of you front line the front line supervisor the middle management point of view and there are a couple things that you said in before that really jumped out at me that I think are we're talking about you know one is you know the don't assume that communication is working and when it's not it just falls apart and that creates a lot more chaos the further down it goes but

36:57the first topic before I forget it is when you talked about trust and I've seen it in New York that I was in as the department manager and we looked at the whole orchard the new one that was just dropped on us with no explanation and we would sit and look in okay who's who and who's going to report to him and love a redone and we always find two or three like why is this person you know voted oh yeah and so when you said trust it made me think of character trust and competence trust the two kinds of trust and we would look at that person say we really didn't trust them as a coworker why would we trust them now as the leader and they were not really they hadn't proven themselves we don't trust in their competence so we just had like this double whammy and

38:01it just gave us all this extra fodder for saying this was not thought out well and the ramifications that are the impacts is that we spent and management probably never knew it because it looked great to them we would spend hours and I'm sure I mean all the departments were spending hours and people were spending time just trying you know trying to figure it out no one gave us the red rider secret decoder ring to figure out the message and so we were trying to do it on our own and we wasted a lot a lot a lot of time yeah understand it getting pissed off about it really in some cases because we didn't we weren't in the preview to know you know your dummy's just just accept this there's a lot to unpack there because I think you know like go at it go at it

39:10unpack that suitcase people get promoted in organizations for many different reasons and so then the ones that the people working in in the ranks we would say that don't feel that they're confident then I would say that usually it's an organization that are rewarding service some royalty to you know like to the boss or you know to something like that or um that's the the leadership team lacks a good definition of what competency looks like for a particular role and this is where like again like you know you get a CEO and you get the CFO and you know depending on what industry you're in and I understand you were in a man's factoring company correct and then in software and it's software okay so like you get usually

40:11a CEO who's a specialist who's grown up in the ranks of that type of environment and so then they are definitely like not coming from an HR or learning organizational learning kind of perspective very often and then what they don't have is a good understanding of what are the competencies that you need to have overall as a leader in order to be ready for this transition into a more senior role whatever it is if you're coming from like a worker into being a supervisor supervisor into a manager etc and it's even worse when they let them skip levels because something of trained on like studied quite a bit in the last four years is that the time it takes most of us and I'd say like the large majority of people in organizations is true that we have to spend two to three years

41:12doing a job before we're ready kind of for the next transition because especially when it's when it's a management goal and you need to have that time to understand like how to deal with people and so then if you get skipped up the level like if you take it just from being in a somebody on knowledge worker or whatever like somebody who's the the schmie and then you're put into like some management role very often they just don't know how to handle that kind of situation so again what you see is dysfunction you see the a person that maybe makes decisions you don't agree with or maybe isn't very kind with staff or something like that but they're in their shadow behavior because they know that they're struggling themselves and so yeah it creates a big it creates a whole chaotic mess of problems

42:13yeah and and you just keep doing that all over and I'll be very politically correct it just creates a cluster yes and it's unnecessary but it like it happens a lot I get that's what I do a lot of my work in is I get the call there's somebody we have to make a decision about what we do with something and you know it's a decision that was made in the last org restructure and now it's the organization has grown up around the person and they are missing some pieces in their management and they're not coming along with with the way that everyone else is growing and in those situations it's always the person's fault the workers fault not the system or the decision that was made it's you know we got to do with the situation with the person and easiest ways you know what are we going to do get rid of them but um well that is usually what happens like and you know my perspective on this is this similar to yours is that the majority

43:16of problems in organizations are system problems they're not people problems yeah and then that's hard to understand that um and actually I just wrote a paper on this is so interesting that you brought this topic up for your show tonight because I was thinking about Robert Roussa who is an author and he wrote trust in the balance and so he had three kind of things that are necessary when we're working together to create organizational trust and this is another thing you need to have results like people have to actually deliver on their commitments since what they say they're going to do both to customers and to themselves and you need to show that you genuinely care about the people in the organization and be consistent between what you say and what you do and where most of them fall down I think that they they usually are good at the delivering on commitments so they wouldn't be in business and very often organizations can show

44:20that they genuinely care about people but they often they they don't have that consistency before between what you say and what you do like we're very transparent and we let our we keep our people informed and that and the amount of informing that the staff actually want and need compared to what they get is greatly out of sync usually oh yeah oh yeah definitely definitely and because we're talking about reorgs very very often what happens is there's there's some trigger event that that says we need to reorganize the company could be someone leaving this in your position there it could be a retirement it could be a downsizing it could be a merger something is going on to typically I was in a company a couple one company that it just seemed like they

45:22they had a little timer going off and oh and two years okay it's time to redo it we're going to do I think they just get bored yeah you know we're bored at the top so we're just going to do this but let's let's go into the assumption that you have you know there's some trigger and there's a void and what is the natural response is you know well are we gonna look for someone outside who doesn't really know the company the culture of this that's that's a longer road runway to get them in and get them you know into their seat or do we hire from within and that's a conscious decision we like the hire from within instead of pulling from outside which is really a great and noble way to run your business but that creates what we were just talking about in that well that could be a bias as well bias that's even at the board level yeah like there's there's

46:28there's I've seen that in companies a lot like we always real hire from within because you can't understand this beautiful company unless you've worked in it and you were born here you know basically it's sort of and I'm being a little dramatic but that I don't agree with it necessarily that I I don't know like most businesses are not so complex but that they can't be figured out because the CEO doesn't have to understand all the workings of the the line people like you don't necessarily have had to have worked as an entry-level person in the company upgrade to the CEO I think that's like a concept from the the 50s it's a traditional kind of thing but there's other people that they take the opposite stance and they say we will we don't hire people from within we always hire our CEOs from outside you know to do a new blood or whatever

47:29but and and I don't know that that is either way is is necessarily a like a hard rule it really depends what does this organization need to take it forward into whatever the next challenges that it has to do or opportunity that it wants to take advantage of yeah so that's those are I love those questions I love I love talking about that with with leaders but I really have come to respect Patrick the approach you use with your IMT with your innovative management tools because you showed me the light not doing things always just exclusively top down that there is a lot of benefits getting the input of the worker into some of these ideas on like what

48:29this is organization look like in our next iteration and it really really does actually tie back into what I was just talking about with that concern integrity and results like that that that you could you would really build a lot of trust in an organization with your people because you would be giving them the direction of where it is you want to go but getting the input from throughout the organization on what it looks like what makes sense in terms of who reports to who and how those how what are the hands off handoffs between you know between departments and things like that I'm sure you have lots to say on this well my perception has always been from what I saw and lived is that when there was a reward coming up it was like this secret top this top secret

49:36mission and if we told if we brought people into the fold to ask their opinion what makes sense oh my god they're gonna they're gonna go off and run and tell everyone and let the can out of the bank before it's announced which just shows that they don't have a level of trust that they would rather just do it and deal with the consequences and just kind of throw the throw the earth chart over the wall and say okay now I'm gonna deal with it well and maybe there in it just like context of everything so like there's there may be situations in which you don't want to say something because it's going look say it's a four-profit company and they're on stock exchange and announcing that you know like it gets out that the the CEO's leaving or something like that like that kinds of things I do understand why they sometimes don't want to let that out of the bag but on the other

50:40hand like when you have when you're like we could get away with a lot stuff not get away with we could we could get a lot of information because we had quality managed by program in our organization and you know you did lean management as well so that is a vehicle for gathering the opinions of people throughout the organization so well I mean you can do it under the offices of process improvement for pizza right exactly exactly yeah yeah so before I ask you for your thoughts to the CEOs on the what kind of from the workforce point of view as you're talking about the people who skip I would I remembered a person who was in the first corporate the first company I was worked in she came in as in is the software company so it was this way back when we were actually

51:46sending out discs so it was the production department was sending out discs copying and sending out discs okay and she was just she was a worker a frontline worker in that she was then jumped to the manager of no supervisor of the warehouse then she was moved to manager of customer service then she was director of sales and now she's VP of HR oh wow I mean cool for her that she gets to go and see all these different areas and it can work it can work but it might not have it's set like listening to your tone as you're telling the story I don't think it did work for this individual it was just sort of like they were shuffling them because I didn't know what to do with them well no I mean she's she's really really good and

52:48way back when when I was starting my company and I thought you know who would I want on my 18 I said I would want this person because I really appreciated her her skills and abilities but I'm also really amazed that it wasn't just like you know it wasn't just going up within the area from supervisor of warehouse to manager of warehouse to director to VP to you know it was you know bouncing between these very different areas and and that actually have seen there's ideal with a bank like I have a client that's a bank and in the States and they do this purposefully with their managers that are that they are wanting to develop into more senior roles so you could be in the quality management department one one was in the software development area

53:55and you could get moved into HR you could get moved into finance so you could get moved into some of these other areas but then many of these managers have MBAs and so like they're they're a master's degrees and certain you know subject to all it's to business and so they make this transition as a way to understand the perspectives of those departments and I really applaud that I think that that is an amazing commitment to organizational learning and to those individuals development yeah I do too I like that but but in that case it's very intentional yeah and everyone moving from from zebras to cantaloupe knows that when they move to cantaloupe they're not going to be the experts and they are neat they need support they need guidance and they can ask all those questions and no one's going to look at them and say what the heck why were you moved here why were you moved into this exactly exactly so if there was a reason and it's very intentional and that's

54:58known so therefore it makes sense why they're doing it and there's a message behind that so that's a very different and very unique in to what I've seen yeah and yeah yeah well so what would be your what would be your message to CEOs on reorganization on reorganizing a company restructuring and from the frontline workers supervisors middle managers point of view if you could talk on their behalf what would you say to the CEOs well I would I would offer the recommendation to have an inventory of the skills and the mindsets and the kind of the where all your people are at your organization right at the moment and start with start with

56:00the leadership team go to the managers like take it down as many levels as you can this is something that I'm working on with organizations a lot right now and we found a way to actually do it in a very methodical way and using technology to make it a lot faster than what it's ever been in the past and so like it's something that what do you have good structure then you can do it very like quickly and widely throughout your organization that aside having that sort of inventory of your people and then like the succession plan that a lot of organizations haven't really put if it maybe they've built it like several years ago it hasn't been updated they don't have a lot of thinking like you know like a lot of minds on it necessarily and maybe was created in a meeting

57:00and they don't really have people that are in the leadership team going over it and considering like who in the organization do we have where's our where are our weak points where we need people from the outside to bring in and again having those you know what is excellence or you know it doesn't what is confidence even the heck with it with tech with excellence let's just get confident and we'll deal with excellence after the fact so what is what does confidence look like and somebody who like you know I got I got toss the health and safety department I'm like quite literally after being in the organization for a little while and I went in kicking and screaming I really didn't want to do it because I really felt it took it really needed somebody with a background in health and safety and I did not have that and I would say it took me six months to learn the

58:01structure of health and safety and what it was trying to achieve I had to work daying hard it was almost like taking a like a night program and I had health and safety people inside the organization mentoring me like that and then but from that I was able to then start to understand what is the level of of competency we need in a person working here doing health and safety if I couldn't have done that when I first got the department and I made mistakes I hired people and then I had to let them go because they didn't work out because I didn't know what I was doing and that wasn't their fault that was my fault they there was nothing wrong with the people that they they were perfectly fine doing the type of health and safety that they were suited to doing it's that I did not understand what it was that's competency for doing health and safety

59:05in the organization the size that we had and I see that happen over and over again where a person CEO a CFO doesn't know the perspective of the area that they're hiring into or for and then they hire somebody completely inappropriate because they they have a belief that they understand what what is needed and what usually ends up happening is to go with the person they like and that person and maybe that's what's happened like that person you were talking about that sent from one location to the other she may have been a person who is really well like and they're like well let's let's give her that because she look how what a good job she did over here you know like the kind of default to these things that are personality traits instead of actual actual like like okay this person has a body of knowledge and they're going to bring structure to some Saturdays this yeah and didn't have the tools we have today to you know because

1:00:13you know we're talking literally 25 years ago so you know oh oh yeah it would have been so hard yeah like at least I had the internet you know but I also had like you know like there's just so much better information about how about some of these things yeah and this is why I love having you on the show Donna because what you said your message to CEO I'm going to come in it my message to CEOs is going to be totally different from the other side and my message is just be aware that if your story on a reorg is not clear we will fill in the blanks where there are gaps and not in a good way and not in a good way we are skeptical we are confused and confusion

1:01:23makes us feel uncertain and doesn't give us trust and that will lead us down a path that waste money time the risk of this is this is so messed up I'm going to leave you can have knowledge walk another door emotional frustration confusion stress all of that comes into play and so reorgs are necessary however part of the responsibility I think is that with a reorg you need to have explanations and make sure people understand it don't just assume because the old saying when you assume you make an A out of you and me and we just can't allow that don't assume that that the communication is right so yeah that's rough and I had them

1:02:24your little I was going to say they're little gap in information by the time it ripples down through the organization it's not a little ripple it's a tsunami oh absolutely it grows into a great big ugly beast yeah yeah yeah see your your the best the best kind of learning I guess I had on on how much communication is needed you know I can you hear that that kind of saying that you know people need to see things eight or ten times before they actually register it like a billboard or like an advertisement or something well this one CEO I worked for he was doing like a live presentation to all staff for like they could see it on their phone or on their computer or wherever like he did this I think it was once a month and he'd been doing it for months and then we had a in this

1:03:28presentation he would give them all an update and this guy was really open like he told them lots everything that was kind of going on in the company that they needed to know and he had a really good little show that he did anyway we did our our quality management survey on the on the staff members and the number one thing that came back his feedback was that they just didn't feel they were getting enough information and he goes well you know what he goes it's spoken he goes I thought we were doing great but we that's not what they needed they need something else yeah yeah absolutely absolutely so um I think the the lesson here and all of this is that when there are reorgs do you know just just doing the reorgon paper obviously is not enough there's a whole lot more that needs to be considered and put in place for messaging for explanations and maybe not for the

1:04:35senior and well it's definitely not for the senior management well it could be get them all aligned please but then it's more so for everyone else in the organization and that is really the message um for the sake of time I'm going to move right into the conversation framework we'll finish with song but the conversation framework for this week is for those who don't know conversation frameworks are they are the tools that I created for change facilitation they are facilitated small group activities typically done within four hours of hyper focused on a topic and one of the tools is called reorganize and it is a way for senior management to think about we're going to we need to do we're going to do we're thinking about doing a reorg so before we pull the trigger and announce and throw the paper at everyone we're going to map this out from different perspectives

1:05:43one perspective is departments which departments should fit to get would fit together forget who's in the department who's leading but how do departments best or group together another perspective is by titles to see if you know some people are like titles but you know if you have from VP down to a supervisor and then everyone else has VP director and manager in this and it's like okay do you really need a VP over this or you know it helps to see it visually so that you can just ask the questions when this gets announced is this really going to make sense is it going to land the way we're expecting energy we need to come up with explanations messaging not justifications because it's our choice but knowing that it's going to create a lot of discussion and until like a productivity it gives the senior management and the company an opportunity to look at it

1:06:49step back and say can we explain this in a way even to ourselves and if you can't like I said if you can't explain to yourself then how do you expect others to explain it to somebody else so it's it's this way to visualize it and say does this make sense if not we can play around we'll play around with it and come up with some different scenarios until we find the one that is best for right now and there will never be a perfect org yes I never is that tool and I and I have to say it is an excellent it's like you know it reminds me of Patrick it's like you're they show a general in a war room with with all of their officers and they're moving like a little people around on the you know yeah yeah it keeps you here it keeps you like this map of the organization it's really a cool tool that you've developed yeah yeah that's that is the idea

1:07:54you know it's kind of like if we put our soldiers here we put them over there is that going to do there you know we're going to have a go oh my gosh we're just we're exposed to here we better move them over there and you know we don't have anyone to lead these troops oh my gosh what are we going to do well you know and that's the kind of thinking it's being more proactive what's the best way to organize this for whatever time it's going to be um and being able to just feel comfortable that with what we know today and where we're at today and what we're trying to accomplish today this is the best way to organize the company that's it and so that is reorganize as a framework a tool a collaboration and it's a great way to bring some of those other people in even if you didn't show them the whole thing but you just said you know what you're one of the the people that we really value your opinion here's this part if we were to rearrange it the

1:08:55pieces of puzzle this way forget about the people and who but did this make sense and they go uh no that's not going to work because of a b and c oh we didn't know that well why did you wouldn't know that because you're not down at the 500 foot level you are at the 50,000 foot level and that's where you should be but your decisions at 50,000 feet impact those at 500 feet which is going back to last week again the whole topic of impact and the the impact our decisions have on the organization so I'd invite any listeners to go back and listen to last week show on that one and how it ripples down as well these are very much tied together absolutely yeah it's good stuff so um with that closing comments before we bring Peter he may have fallen asleep here on us I don't know yeah so Donna do you give any closing thoughts before

1:10:00we get Peter's comment um the the only last thing I will say is I feel like CEOs can also benefit themselves by working top down in the organization where they look at what it is they actually want in need to take care of and then look to see if everything is covered off like I know that there's certain tools that are out there like um there's uh there's a whole program that um for a cold scaling up and they have the whole thing where you map out like where all of the different activities but the organization is responsible for it needs to rest somewhere and so that's that's another thing that I'm sure your your tool also you can put that in in there is it right down to that kind of uh function level like what's this function that we need but I find that a lot of times um that it there's some confusion but the kind of the organization

1:11:07starts from the top down and and all of the tasks or all of the kind of work is a waterfall from yes from the the the main position in a department or unit and um maybe this is a little bit different in organizations that are flat but somebody at some point has to be make to make the decision about whether the organization goes one direction or another I'm saying most organizations have got to be a head person in a department or in a oven area and all of the work from them waterfall down and it should make sense yes and I will take that and I will put an end after that and say in addition to what Donna said also CEOs it's really important maybe you are not the one you know you don't have to be the undercover boss that goes you know on the front line but you you need to have my my strong

1:12:12recommendation is to have ways to get information from the front line and connect it to what you're seeing at the top so that you don't see only a very narrow perspective without understanding the ramifications of that so finding feedback loop mechanisms the people who are on the front line who can be brought into the discussion to really understand the impact of what you are looking at and your focus don't get unfocused and try and go down the 50 feet and try and solve everything but make sure you have information from 50 feet so that when your decisions you're not creating more issues than you're trying to fix so that would be the complement to it and this is exactly what

1:13:13Donna and I talk about a lot she is and this what I love is that she's she's looking at that strategic angle and and how to get that alignment which is so important and I'm always saying okay yes but you got to you got to get the bottom two absolutely yep you like I said change my ways Patrick thank you so Peter you've been listening hopefully you haven't been falling asleep on us but your thoughts on this okay conversation I I'm going to playfully start off by saying my background was sales so I would say I don't care what you guys do I seriously don't just make sure the product ships I get paid on what we sell and we could make more than you guys doing all this stuff so I care about that's really all I care about so it's when I say this I say this playfully is I know all of this stuff is super duper important when people are running companies and building

1:14:14companies and stuff like that and that was never my gig like I if it didn't affect this the sales that we were working on and all that sort of stuff relative to the things the sales department was the guys that made things work so you guys had enough money to do all the things that you guys do so that's all I have to say about that now all right have you said that I have a a huge level of respect of course because the sales guys are like the cavemen we just go out we hunt we kill the beast we bring it back and we do it again tomorrow so that's really where our mentality is a little bit like the end of fall man and I don't mean to say it like that it's just we want to simple all of these things that you guys are talking about are really good and very complex and super important to make the stuff under the hood work and I respect that a lot and there's a lot of work that you guys put into this sort of stuff and a lot of a lot of things

1:15:14that are put in place that never get seen to make a company work so I'm in awe but I'm glad you guys do it and and I think that we both I can speak for myself I have equal respect for the sales people because if you don't if you don't have any customers you don't have a business yeah that's right amen it's very interesting it's very interesting but again and the bigger the company the more the stuff that you guys do is more important because it could really you know it could be well I shouldn't say that I shouldn't say this way I would say that there's a lot of companies that survive and they survive in spite of themselves like they're they must be so big they can they could survive in spite of many in spite of all their levels of inadequacies and

1:16:15competence and the things that they screw up and I'm I'm dealing with it on a regular basis personally you know relative to stuff relative to either technology driven companies or the government and insurance regulations and stuff like that so some companies are just so friggin big or regulated where they have to work that somehow they clunk clunk clunk their way through things and they could use their services like crazy so all stuff is really good really good and really cool and for those people listening in you know make sure you check out Donna with her realized company and Patrick you with the innovative management tools and everybody's got their place yeah well I'm gonna I'm gonna do one little final I'm gonna push back a little bit on you Peter because it's not just the big companies because the small cut the smaller and I'm not thinking like you know micro or the only three people because there's really not an organizational structure because everyone's usually doing everything just to get it done but you know a small company that has some structure and they're reorganizing in those scenarios it

1:17:25there's a lot more emotion the people feel like family things feel more personal in some cases than they do in the big organizations where I'm just an employee a number and I'm used to the things shifting around and just like what you said yeah they can make some changes about me and make it out I never even know it I could you know I'm just doing because I'm so far down in the weeds that it really doesn't impact me and if it did there's enough buffer around it to make it work and you know there's a lot of things but you start for concentrating that and there's a change and it becomes a lot more a lot more human and impacting relations and feelings and values there's a whole lot more that gets brought in there because that's

1:18:27thread out so much that's my take I don't know if you feel the same way Donna I do I you know it's why I'm here like it's you and I are aligned on on how we see the problem and we just we just have been trained to come at it from different directions and that same challenge that I said to people like having to understand the perspective of somebody that they're they're managing like this is very true in this in this case as well like you have I had to understand what I was lacking and be able to use the tools that would get the information from the people we were missing yeah all right so we have gone way over but hopefully it's all

1:19:28listed has been an interesting conversation that you've been able to take some golden nuggets out of and Peter I think we're ready to you can pick song one or two whichever one you want and it's going to be talking about reorganizing and the need for a structure and so I want to thank all the listeners for for you know you're going through this and we look forward to next time so Peter you're taking away to the down to the end song number one oh it's time to see how we can rearrange with some new faith and some big change

1:20:34the buzzman's bike and has a shuttle time to streamline all the struggles on me the world when this together find a way to make it better why don't we sit down mix up the wall why don't we sit down mix up the wall use some up use some up find a flow find a flow up a mountain all the door it's hard to believe in time to reassess we'll take a time no need to stress blend of visions make it seamless the transition will make us dream but if you have got to see the vision re-organize for strong precision why don't we sit down mix up the wall why don't we sit down mix up the wall oh mix some up mix some up find a flow find a flow up a mountain all the door

1:21:39all hands together we're revamped ski connecting every thread build a dream the clouds ahead we'll break the old scenes evolving into better pitchering why don't we sit down mix up the wall why don't we sit down mix up the wall why don't we sit down mix up the wall come up come up find a flow find a flow up a mountain all the door cool phone Donna likes really cool i could almost imagine you singing that actually i i could too we actually like that for a long a lot yeah that's uh i that is one of them that i do enjoy yeah it just has a good tune a good flow good words good message and uh but then you know knowing that you are a singer for those who

1:22:40don't know Donna is a singer-songwriter and she sings amazingly and um i could just i could just see you on stage singing this and her to your client saying okay guys folks let's get her our heads i uh get in the right mind set let's mix up the roles you have to send me that phone with the alert so i like it all right so Peter uh Donna thank you very much for for joining us um to Donna will be back in a few weeks her monthly visit um we need our monthly fix of the Canadian and the uh her perspectives to keep us all grounded and centered and everything so she will be back and uh so thank you Donna and thank you Peter thank you for being our wonderful host for the most and why don't you drive us home

1:23:49you're welcome well thanks everybody for being here you just heard Donna Baker Donna with one and Baker BAKER EAR she runs a company called Realize make sure we put sure well make sure we put a link to her company in the show notes and Patrick Seton of course runs innovative management tools and i really appreciate the stuff that he does to help add to this and if you need Patrick you can always find him on LinkedIn i have his LinkedIn link in the description but it's Patrick Seton SETON and we're going to catch everybody next week on innovative management tools thanks everyone you've been listening to building fortunes radio on building fortunes radio dot com thanks for listening building fortunes radio is part of the humongous am and humongous fm radio network be sure to check out the building fortunes radio dot com website to listen to your favorite shows you can also hear us on humongous radio and wherever you find your favorite podcasts it's been our privilege to have you listen in a building fortunes radio we wish you the success you deserve and are willing to work for