Illuminating Insights: Insights From a Leadership Expert With Sean Lemson

Illuminating Insights: Insights from a leadership expert with Sean Lemson

In this episode of Illuminating Insights, Trisha Hall talks with Sean Lemson, a leadership expert, and founder of Motivated Outcomes. They discuss the importance of morale and engagement in driving team performance, the impact of organizational structure and reorganization on team dynamics, and effective strategies to foster a healthy company culture. Sean also shares insights from his book 'One Drop of Poison' and his practical experience with leadership and team performance coaching.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:53 The Importance of Morale and Engagement

02:18 Sean's Role and Experience

03:16 Campaign Manager and Team Assessments

05:04 Leadership and Organizational Growth

15:27 The Impact of Reorganizations

21:17 Toxic Leadership and Continuous Improvement

28:37 Final Thoughts and Takeaways

About Sean Lemson:
Sean Lemson is a leadership expert, executive and team performance coach, and the founder of Motivated Outcomes, an organization devoted to improving performance and engagement in today's organizations through better leadership. His new book One Drop of Poison: How One Bad Leader Can Slowly Kill Your Company was recently selected as one of the top 5 books to read about principled leadership by CEOWorld Magazine.

You can learn more about his company at MotivatedOutcomes.com.

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Transcript

0:11

So, hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Tricia Hall, bringing you the podcast, Illuminating Insights, where we're talking to industry leaders and experts about value realization and how that comes through creating and fostering healthy, high performing teams. I'm joined today by Sean Lemson. He is a leadership expert and executive and team performance coach and the founder of Motivated outcomes. An organization devoted to improving performance and engagement in today's organizations through better leadership. He has a new book. It's called One Drop of Poison. How one bad leader can slowly kill your company. It was recently selected as one of the top five books to read about principled leadership by CEO World Magazine. You can learn more about his company at Motivated. com. Welcome, Sean. We're so excited to have you here today. Thank you so much for your time. I'd love to hear a little bit about your insights about how companies do get high performance from teams. Ooh, that's loaded. Um, so I would say that it's, it's not a formula, but there are some, I would say, prerequisites. And I think that, um, companies are slowly kind of waking up to the idea that, um, that demoralized or disengaged teams are not going to perform well, no matter how good your processes are, no matter how good your organization structure is, you know, uh, you, you could have eliminated every piece of waste from your workflow and you could still have underperforming teams because they're demoralized or disengaged. And, uh, you know, I say that companies are slowly kind of getting, um, Getting the hang of this. But the we've known about this since the 1950s. I mean, we've known about what motivates human beings since the 1950s. And it hasn't changed much since then. So yeah, I think that that's a first. That's one of the reasons why my company focuses heavily on Morale and engagement before we talk about performance, because in my opinion, performance follows, uh, almost naturally the, um, the morale and engagement. Sure, that makes sense. I mean, based on our own research, you know, happiness is one of those precursors to performance. And I totally understand that. Now, you've been working with and partnering with our organization for some time. I mean, Sean, you and I have known each other for years. Um, and part of what you do with our organization is you really help companies to figure out what our teams are doing and how they're doing well. But you've actually had some specific work that you're doing with our company. I'd love to hear more about that. You know, what you, because you work with some of our largest customers, but you're also helping as a, as a product donor for one of our teams. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. So this is, um, you know, when I, in my previous work, when I worked at Nike and other companies, um, I would train product owners and, and scrum masters and all the, the roles, you know, that are involved in the process. And this is, uh, 1 of the 1st times I've actually. Acted as the product owner. I mean, I've trained them, but I've never acted as one before, uh, this, and I'm, I'm really pleased to, to report that everything I've been teaching people is actually correct and it's working. I think I'm a successful product owner. Uh, but the product that I'm managing is called campaign manager. And it basically just goes after the, the, the law, the arduousness of managing, you know, potentially hundreds of teams going through a process, trying to get them, you know, all the teams to take assessments, look at the results, track the progress of the teams. That's an arduous thing. And, uh, many companies, it doesn't matter whether he's agility or any other companies, uh, assessment program, you're going to have this problem of how do I get A large number of teams through a process. So campaign manager aims to try to help that by by providing a role at the company, sort of a dashboard and a way to launch off, you know, hundreds of teams and track the progress of those teams through the process, be able to communicate with those teams. Teams that meet certain criteria. So you're very targeted communications for teams that are at certain stages of the process or are struggling to get through for some reason. So it's, it's really exciting because I, um, I think it's, it's, it's putting a lot of power into a few people's hands, but honestly, that's what they need in these larger companies to actually help make it happen. And that's super exciting because one of the things we strive to do is really help organizations to understand, you know, how is value flowing through our system? And where can we find those bottlenecks? And where can we find those obstacles? And I think that really kind of leads to, you know, the overall, how do organizations, uh, really rectify some of the mistakes that they've made when they're, Trying to really understand where do we help teams really create performance inside of our companies and I'd love to get some of your feedback around that. Well, so one of the things that the process does is it identifies what we call growth items, which are, you know, their team growth items and organizational growth items. So team growth items are items the team can take care of on their own. They've identified it and they're, they're in power to solve the issue. Organizational growth items are items they think that the leaders need to help with. And I think there's the rub, right? Um, because we can write the most amazing. Organizational growth item you've ever seen in your life. But if the leader doesn't look at it or doesn't take on the improvement, um, there are many, let's put it this way. There are many things a leader can do at that juncture that will be detrimental. Um, I, I used to show a slide that I called the crossroads slide, and I think Sally likes this slide a lot. It's a slide that kind of says, Hey, when you're a leader and you were handed all these opportunities. Organizational growth items. You kind of have two choices. You can either engage with those things and take care of them or tell the team you can't take care of them, but that's still engaging on them, or you ignore them. And if you if you engage, you will build engagement with your teams. And if you disengage or don't engage, address them, you will disengage with your teams, you will create disengagement in your organization, but there's no middle road, right? There's no kind of sorta I Oh, I looked at them. So the team shouldn't take it personally that I didn't do. If you don't communicate what's going on and actually help in that moment, you're taking away and you're it starts this vicious cycle where the team says, Hey, we put a lot of work into this and we identifying it and writing it up and nothing happens. So the next quarter when you get asked again, you're going to give Less information, you could become more disengaged. So it just becomes this checking the box thing instead of this actual growth, continuous growth. Uh, so really leaders hold the keys in their hand for engagement. Um, they can take these organizational growth items or like a gift on a silver platter. It's like, I, I work with leaders all the time who are saying, I just, I can't figure out why my teams are so disengaged. And I'm like, Look, here are the five things they want you to do to fix things. If you did these five things, they would be so grateful. They would be amazed. They would, they would want to work harder. They'd be thinking about problems to your company that, you know, the solutions to problems for your company in the shower. Right. But instead if you don't do anything or you, or, or you ask, but don't, Don't respond, then you're creating a situation where people just check the box. They just check out at five o'clock. That's it. They're done. And I think a lot of people are in that spot right now with companies. So, when you find that unicorn, when you find that leader that actually says, okay, here's here's my, here's my, my silver platter of gifts from my team, and they actually start to respond and they say, okay, I'm going to do something about this. And they started that communication loop with their team. What do you see happen in organization, Sean? Have you seen it happen? Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I've worked with leaders who are just chomping at the bit to get this report so they can see it because they recognize the gift this is to get the clarity from the teams about exactly what they want. I think the reason why leaders get a little hesitant, and I should probably just throw this in here. It's not just, it's not that they aren't motivated to try to do something for their teams. Sometimes it's, they're just too busy. But oftentimes I think that what the teams are identifying feel like they're kind of above the pay grade of the, of the leader they're being reported to. Right. Okay. So, you know, if, for example, if I tell you that if I see a pattern across teams that say that, that there's a lot of instability in the organization. Right, that there's too much churn where we're losing people, either through turnover or layoffs or reorgs, whatever, that who we're working with seems to be shifting under our feet, you know, every day, and yet you're still asking us to work together as a team, right, you have to slow down this, this change, this churn, so that we can do work for you. And sometimes a mid level manager will get something like that and be like, what could I do? To stop this churn. So I think that one of the things that we have to get better at is figuring out how do we get, you know, we would call them enter enterprise growth items or, you know, the, the higher, the next tier up, but how do we get, you know, how do we empower these leaders to have a pathway to say, Hey, I can actually handle this one for the team and I'm going to take care of that, but I can't handle this one and I need a pathway. To talk to all my peers and, and find out that, Hey, all of them are reporting this problem and I'm going to escalate that up. And eventually we get to a leader who can get the message and do something about it. It sounds like building a continuous improvement program inside of an organization kind of sounds simple on the surface, but it's really not. No, and it's, and it's, it's like continuous improvement cannot be a footnote on your job duties. Right. Just like, just like, um, uh, morale and team engagement can't be a footnote on your On your performance. Like if you're a CEO of a company and you, and you, and you have direct report, this is, I talk about this in my book, but if you're the CEO of a company, some of your, what you think of as your best leaders could actually be your most toxic leaders. Right. They just because they are performing well, it's like from a CEO, you might be thinking, Hey, I created this initiative and my direct reports got the initiative done. Yay. These people are very talented. I have an amazing leadership team. And yet what you don't know is that their teams. All want to quit. Oh, yeah. So, so yeah, they got you the result you wanted, but they got it in a very expensive way. They got it by demanding with, you know, toxic behaviors and, and so, you know, you can't have engagement be, or sorry, you can't have the outputs of those teams be the only thing you're looking at. Because if that's it, and you, and you just treat, you know, culture as a, as a footnote, you are, you're really doing that at your own risk, your own detriment. Um, and I feel like continuous improvement is just like that, which is why I was bringing this up. Continuous improvement is just like this. You can't treat it as like, oh, yeah, when we can once a quarter, we work on this. Continuous improvement means. Continuous. So I was actually just talking with another colleague earlier today about the importance of culture in their organization. And I know that you've studied this quite a bit, you know, based on your book and the other work that we've done with you. So what would you recommend an organization do to start actually doing this? Looking at and examining their culture so that they can make change because culture isn't easy to change. No, no. And I think this is an area where, uh, where we, there's a need, right? I mean, to be honest, I don't know that there are a lot of companies that are really overly, like, focusing enough on, you know, Just culture because culture is the seed of of the rest of it, right? If we use the word culture a lot it sort of wraps up kind of what it's like to work here You know kind of a thing but um, it it's uh, you know I like to tell people just so we're not negative about culture. Let me just say this I tell people all the time when they feel daunted by their culture, right? They're like I can't change that. That's just the culture here There's nothing I can do about that. And what I tell people is hey the building that you all work in You That does not have a culture that pretty sign on the side of that building does not have a culture. The culture shows up every day when the people show up every day. So if you want a different culture, you either get people to show up differently or you get different people to show up, but you get, you can change the culture. Okay. At a company. So the question is how important is that culture to you? Because if you think of it as just the result of something you can't control, well then yeah, you're going to be beat around by your culture all day. But if you think of it as something that you can shape and actually control, then, then you have, you feel more empowered about doing something. So the main premise that companies need to get is kind of how we started the conversation, which is that culture and engagement are the precursors to performance. I could put the most amazing processes and org structure in place where seamlessly flow from team to team, even though that, That's a unicorn right there, but let's just say I could make that happen, right? Uh, with if I had that, but then I had teams that were dispirited and demoralized and disengaged. Um, that's, you're not going to get performance. And again, I just want to point out, we've known about this since the 50s. Okay. I mean, the Tuckman model of forming, storming, norming, and performing. Captures the, the, the ride that human beings take as they get onto a new team. When you're forming, you get into the stage where you're just like, uh, I don't agree with what my teammate just said, but I'm not going to say anything because I don't know what they're going to do with what I say. So it's kind of like a low trust environment at that point. They just kind of hold it in, smile and nod. But after that person seems to be wrong a lot, eventually you get to this place where you're like, look, I just got to tell you this, Jim, you're wrong. You know, I don't agree with anything you're saying and that we start the storming area, right? Where the team start, you know, really bashing and that's not all teams make it through that. Right? But if you do, you get to norming. And now, you know, You know, Jim and I have been head to head and I've he knows how I feel and I know how he feels and he knows he say we made it through that. We apologize for each other. And now we're we're good as human beings. And we're going to start norming to a performance space where we're, you know, working at a normal pace. But the longer you can keep Jim and I together now, right as a leader, the higher our performance is going to go, because eventually it's going to get to the place where I can finish Jim sentences. And Jim can finish mine and he knows what I'm good at and he knows what I'm not good at it. And we both know it's safe to tell each other that we're wrong or that the other person's wrong. And when you have that kind of psychological safety that comes over time, performance is going to go up, which is why the Tuckman calls this the performing stage. And the problem with today's organizations is that too many leaders basically reorg like it's just a knee jerk. They're just like reorg, It's everywhere right now. I just wrote an article about this. Actually, they just got published. It is incredibly frustrating. Um, these reorgs send hundreds of teams back to the forming stage. So when I have leaders looking at me going, I can't figure out why our teams aren't performing. And then I say, well, when's the last time you reorg? And they say, you know, last week, I'm like, You're expecting teams to act as if they're in Tuckman's performing stage, but you keep throwing them back to Tuckman's forming stage. And we do it every three months, it seems. I know I've got customers that in the last 12 months, they've been at least through two reworks, if not three, because in today's economy, they're trying to figure out how to survive. And that's their knee jerk reaction to your point. Well, and I also think that new, I don't know when we started this or how it started, but it became kind of vogue for new, Executives to come in and, like, mark their territory by reorging as if, like, they get there to the company and the whole the problem with the company is their predecessors structure, right? That's not actually it. I'm not saying that there aren't times when that's true. Right. But to have it be true as often as it seems to be to do the numbers of reorgs we're doing now, you know, I don't know. I just feel like, um, this is a very short sighted way to run a company. And I think that I mean, I am not the originator of this. Premise if you if you're interested in or your listeners are interested in a more in depth dive into this topic, they should read the infinite game from Simon Sinek. It's one of his best books ever written in my love Simon. And it talks about this idea between this short sighted movement as a leader versus this long game. Uh, leader or he would call it the infinite game because it never really ends. Uh, you just shift the leadership as the as time goes on but the company is designed to be Infinite right and if you were going to play a game that was infinite you would have different rules Then you would, if you were playing a game that was finite, that had objectives and too many companies are trying to act as if they're playing a finite game, uh, you know, the next quarter's profits, the next quarter's expenses, the next, right, but they have the money, they can play a more infinite game if they're, if they're thinking and they play by different rules. Well, and one of the things that we often. Sarah, when we go in and we help organizations from a strategic modeling perspective, and we look at the operating models is you don't have to change who reports to who, and you don't necessarily have to change how your teams are structured in terms of which teams are together just because you're changing how the work flows and how the work goes from team to team. So, we have to look at how much change we're asking people to take in at the change fatigue that's inside of these organizations. And really, you know, let's, let's pause and think about how much we're asking people to take on when it terms of in terms of the amount of change we're asking them to manage at 1 time. Yeah, to be thoughtful of the person and not just what we're trying to do for the organization. What are your thought around that? Your on something here that I call the Tiger Team syndrome. It's basically this thing where companies will go, you know, this new bright, shiny object just came down the pipe, you know, and instead, and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the best person from that team, the best person from that team, the best person from that team. We're gonna form a new team called the this tiger team that's designed to go after this new bright, shiny object. Well, what that leader just did is throw five teams back to the forming stage. Okay? Mm-Hmm. And we, instead, I recommend that leaders follow the same model that the Navy SEALs follow, which is, let me get, you know, six team members who each have a specialty, but together, collectively, they can handle any mission. And now we're bringing teams to work rather than bringing, or sorry, I'm saying it the wrong way. We're bringing work to teams rather than bring teams to work. So essentially we form our organization in a way that is most the most flexible it can be. So I can keep this group of people together. And shift their mission instead of every time the work changes, I need to reform teams around the work as it's coming in. This is one of the reasons why reorgs have become so popular. And I think that leaders I've actually heard leaders brag about how their, their, their organizations are so flexible because they can be shifted around into other formations very quickly. It's like, yeah, but you're forgetting about one thing. All these teams are made up of human beings and human beings. Don't just automatically just trust each other. I'm sorry. I'd love it if it was like that, it would be great, but we have millions of years of social evolution to fight against here and you're not going to win just because you have a cool org structure, you know, that's not. It's not going to work. It looks pretty on paper, but we're still dealing with people. That's right. And people are flawed, and they've got their own way of thinking. And we do need time to build those relationships and get to the point where I know that, you know, George has got my back, or I know that I can trust Jim, or I know that, you know, this other person has the skill set that we truly need to get the work done. It takes time. So, um, what other thoughts would you like to share with our listeners about. Well, we can help organizations better realize value through really building high performing teams. Well, I would say that, um, 1 of the things that has to happen. I mean, I would, I wouldn't say it has to happen because obviously we've been operating this way for a long time. It's just not working well. Right but if we want to get better, um, we need to start rooting out. Right. What I call my art are the toxic leaders in the company. Now I, I need to qualify this because, um, you know, I, I, when I'm doing interviews about my book, I always have to qualify what I mean by a toxic leader, because sometimes when we say toxic leaders, we're thinking about our worst leader ever in our history. Terrible, evil human beings who've made our lives miserable, right? That's who we think of as a toxic leader, but we've all had one. Yes, most people have at least one, right? And, and certainly those people fit into the definition, but I would say that my definition is more like a toxic leader is someone who behaves in a way that works against engagement and morale, against trust, against connection with human beings. Um, and the sad part about it, but also, I guess, The, the part that you could turn into a positive is that most toxic leaders are not waking up every day going, how can I destroy my teams today? You know, they're not evil people. These are people who are good intentioned people, right? Maybe even some of your listeners. Maybe even ourselves, right? We all have behaviors that work against connection, work against trust. And when we do those things, um, we hurt our organization. Even though ostensibly we're getting output from our teams, we're getting it in a way that is working against engagement and morale. So, I mean, I won't go through these, but I have 10 archetypes in my book that are kind of like summaries of the kinds of behaviors that I see. I have kind of cute names for them, you know, like the chess master or the peacock or whatever. I have all these names for these archetypes. Um, what I have found and the feedback I'm getting from readers of the book is that even the great leaders I work with can think that under stress, they can look at this list and go, you know, when I'm under stress, I kind of turn into a micromanager or when I'm under stress, I kind of turn into a invertebrate and I just put my head in the sand and try to pretend it will go away, right? So all of us can have these traits. The reason why I'm telling you this is because I think the key to improvement, continuous improvement is through the realization of this toxic behavior at leadership levels. If you could get leaders to begin thinking Spotting their toxicity and changing their behaviors and, and having that become the culture, the leadership culture, meaning, you know, G Trish, it's great that you got your team. I'm just going to pick on you here. It's great that you got your team to deliver this, but your engagement scores are some of the lowest in the company. That's not true by the way, but just, you know, let's say, right. You know, I, that's good leadership because that's saying, Hey, I'm glad you got the results, but you got them in a way that made half your team want to quit. That's not okay. That's too expensive for us. You know, you got us these results and the results are going to make us some money maybe, but it's going to cost us so much money to replace all these people who leave that it's kind of not even financially worth it. So we want you to work on your engagement scores first. Then there's a balancing metric. Yes. Well, the funny thing is, it's not, it's not a mutually exclusive thing, right? I mean, it's like you, if you go work on your engagement, the performance is still going to come, your teams are going to give you amazing performance, probably better performance than you got by commanding them to do what, what, what they're doing. Right? So, um, I, I've told leaders I've had in the past. It's like, you don't have to worry about me when I'm, you know, When I'm arguing with you, you have to worry about me when I stop arguing, when I stop speaking, because that means I've become disengaged. So I think a misnomer we have is that we think that the most engaged people we have are the happiest people we have. And that's not true. Sometimes the most unhappy people we have are the most engaged because they're at the table trying to help us get better. Right. It's when people step away from the table that they become disengaged and that's the part where things are like, I mean, imagine being in a relationship with someone where they were passive aggressively just shutting down every time they were upset. That's essentially what we have when we have employees who don't respond to surveys or assessments who don't tell they're disengaged about their own engagement. Right? So true. So true. And we spend so much time in so much. Effort and so much investment in engagement surveys, it seems these days, but I don't know that we're actually doing anything with the result, which is what I tell leaders all the time. Do not ask the question if you're not going to take response asking. It'd be like being in a relationship and asking your partner. Hey, what could I do to make? You happier. Like what could I do to make you happier? And your partner goes, well, you know, since you asked, you could take the garbage out more and they give you like this list of things you could do, right? To make the relationship better. And then you do none of those things. That is actually worse than you not asking at all. Right. Because then you're not listening to. Yeah, right. Because you went out of your way to ask what you could do. And they went out of their way to tell you what you could do. And you didn't do anything to engage companies that run engagement surveys. They don't actually take the results seriously who don't do things with those results. And by the way, this is a mistake that I've seen companies make where they don't. Even when they want to do something with the results, they become, well, they take on my chess master, um, um, toxic behavior, which is they think they're in a position of privilege, uh, not responsibility. They see leadership as a response, as a privilege, not a responsibility. And so they think they have the answer. And what they do is they get the engagement score and they go into their cave with their other chess masters and they decide what they're going to do. You know, we're going to make a strategy for the team, for what we're going to do. And then we're going to roll it out to the teams. And they are often blown away by how unsuccessful that is. They can't believe it. They're like, you know, whereas what the company should do is, Oh, we got this engagement, let's start having focus groups now with employees to find out, to work with them, to find solutions to the problems so that we, a no, we're solving the correct problem and B we're solving it in a way that they will mostly agree with. Because they were involved in coming up with the solution, right? Right. Um, in Renee Brown's Dare to Lead book, I think she refers to this as rumbling. Let's actually, um, talk about the problem. Let's talk about the solution. Let's decide on what it should be together. It's hard to do that. Rumbling isn't possible if you don't have psychological safety, right? Because rumbling depends upon the ability to tell you what I'm thinking and you to tell me what you're thinking. Correct. Correct. So, um. We're coming up on our time together, Sean, and I want to make sure that I respect your time. And I do appreciate everything that you shared with us today. Any final thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners? Yeah, I think the thing I would tell people is the takeaway is, um, you know, that you are in control of your culture. Even if you don't think you are, you can influence your culture. Especially as you move up an organization, changing a culture is not impossible. I've heard CEOs throw up their hands and say, I can't do anything about the culture here. And they don't realize how many ways that they actually trickle culture down. And then the other thing I would tell. Your listeners to, to, to just really focus on is that team performance is not a zero sum game with engagement and morale, right? You can get engagement and morale, and then performance will follow. You aren't trading performance for engagement morale. So when I tell people focus on engagement morale, that doesn't mean you aren't going to pay any attention to performance, quite the contrary. No, I think that's a great point. So thank you so much for your, For your time today, Sean. I've really enjoyed our conversation again. Um, John's company is motivated outcomes. com. Is that correct? Yeah. And your book is one drop of poison. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.