GA 488 | Learning to Manage People with Summer Davies

So if you want to have real understanding of what's going on in your business, those employees who are the ones interacting with your customers, interacting with your product every single day, they know more about it than anyone else in the organization. You've got to have those skilled people right at the front lines who can help have that conversation to do things like escalate innovation, drive productivity, highlight concerns, all those types of things.

Today I'm excited to welcome Summer Davies to the show. Now, Summer and I had a really fun conversation, wide ranging conversation. We had a sort of a plan going into this thing and then lots of just natural questions popped up in my mind as we were going through. So it's a little all over the place, but it's all sort of intertwined and aligned with this, with the whole idea of one of Summer's passions is like helping middle and frontline managers thrive in the organization. And so we sort of talk about that popular adage of how, you know, the accountant's really good at accounting and so they get promoted to be the accounting manager. And, and sometimes that doesn't always work out so well because, well, they've never managed people. And so we sort of talk quite a bit about that and how to, how to improve that situation and, and whether someone that doesn't have any accounting experience could then step in and lead that accounting team. And so Summer weighs in on, on her opinion on, on what's best there. And we also then got into the whole idea of like, things like micromanaging and, and why that can be so problematic of overcoming that. So again, not necessarily completely dialed in with the whole Lean movement, but it's all about people. So obviously it's perfectly aligned with the Lean movement. So I think that everyone's going to really enjoy this one. I know I did. Well, show notes can be found over@gemba podcast.com just look for episode 488. Again gembapodcast.com look for episode 488. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Summer, welcome to the show. How are you?

You? I am great. I'm so glad to be here.

All right, where are you calling in from?

I live just south of Denver in a very small town called Parker that you would only know if you were actually from Colorado.

Okay, got it, got it. All right, all right. Well, yeah, I'm excited to have you on. I think this is going to be a cool episode. So, as you know, Summer, we like to get things going right out of the gate with our guests sharing A quote. So what do you have?

Yeah, I have quite a few I like, but my favorite comes from a poet who's based in Iowa. His name is Brian Andreas, and his work is kind of ethereal. I absolutely love it. And the quote that I come back to often, especially in the line of work that I do is, anyone can slay a dragon, but come back and love the world again. That's what takes a real hero. And I love that because I think it's powerful, especially for people who are leading others. Sometimes it can feel a little bit dragon slayerish. And it's nice to have a reminder that the goal is continued success, not just the one battle.

Yeah, no, I love it. That's great. That's great. Well, Summer, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your. Your background and how you got into this line of work and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, my background is, I think, kind of unusual. I work in the HR space, but that was absolutely not my planned profession. I have an undergraduate degree in equine reproduction, which means I went to school to make very expensive horse babies. That is not the way life ended up going. And I ended up in the HR space because I was put into the position of being a leader, being a people leader when I was quite young. I was about 23, 24. I was totally unprepared. I had no skills, and I was a hot mess, disaster. And I think it was probably really rugged. I know it was really rugged to work for me. And it was really hard for me to come into work every day because I just felt so unprepared. And I ended up finding some information about leadership development and finding a way to improve the situation. In my experience and thinking. I love this, and I want to do more of this. And so ended up building a career around helping people understand. How can you be your authentic and true self and be a really effective leader irrespective of where you happen to work? I had the privilege of doing that in a number of different organizations and all over the world and working with just large numbers of leaders and finding ways to help them connect their authentic personality and purpose to the way that they lead their teams, whether that's, you know, frontline leaders, all the way up to people who are leading big, big organizations. So that's what I do. And right now I spend a lot of my time working with frontline and middle leaders who are looking to build those foundational skills and then correlating that to the value that they bring to their organizations, which is a lot of fun.

Mm. I have just, like, a random, random question just came on when you were describing, you know, the whole idea of helping people authentic self, and, you know, finding your best and being your best. What if someone is like, what if they're like, a jerk? You know, like, authentically, just normally, like, melancholy, don't like people kind of just whatever you like. What do you do in that situation? You know, I mean, I'm sure you've interacted with some people whose bedside manner, if you will, wasn't so great. And, like, what do you do in those situations? Because when their authentic self might not be, you know, so good as far as leading other people, you know, I.

Think that's a good question. And I've definitely, of course, encountered this, and I kind of put that group of people in two camps. So you have people whose authentic self might be very abrupt. They might just be a little bit abrasive. And because they've been in an experience where they get a lot of negative feedback about that curtness or how direct maybe they are, they've started to build a Persona of I'm a jerk as a. A protective layer versus really just owning, hey, look, I'm an upfront and honest person. And learning how to navigate that in a way that can allow them to be authentic and have that experience of their personality without having it be negative, negatively impacting others around them. So you have those people who just have some personality traits that. That just need some skill building around them, and then they can go on to be their authentic self. And then you have people who just really are unkind people. And in those instances, those people are probably navigating some degree of trauma or pain. Most people, their true self is not mean or rude. They're navigating some kind of pain. And you've got to figure out how to help them get some support so that they can address that and then let whatever amazing bits of their personality have been hiding under all those layers come back out. And sometimes that takes a lot of work and a lot of. A lot of try. But I will tell you, working with thousands of leaders all over the world, I have never worked with somebody that I came away saying that's just a bad person. You know, that person doesn't have any goodness in them. I've never experienced that. I've always found that if you can get below the crusty layers, there's authentically good in there if you can help them get it out.

Yeah, no. So interesting. I even think about, like, young people, like teenagers or whatnot. I see this. I've coached youth sports for many, many. And you'll see the. You know, I see this a lot with young. Young men in particular, because I coach football and soccer and different sports like that. Not always boys, but a lot of times boys. And you'll see like, the sort of, like, cocky, you know, sort of attitude or whatever. But really what I've discovered is it's a facade for. They're. They're really insecure, you know.

Yeah.

And so they mask it with this too cool for school sort of show. Right. And. But when you can really break down and get into their heart and be like, hey, what's going on, man? You know, and obviously, as a coach, there's not like a counselor or something like that, but you can be surprised what you can. You can. You can learn from these young people. It's not just young people. I'm sure that happens to us adults as well. But, yeah, some. So many times we. You know, there's a. What you see isn't always what's actually going on.

You know, I think that's really important. And that. That theory, that thinking applies to so many settings, and almost always it's an insecurity or it's a feeling of, you know, to be my authentic self, to say what I really think, to approach something the way I really want to. Is it safe? Because my organizational culture tells me that it isn't. My past experience tells me whatever the case might be, links back to this. And then we create this Persona, whether it's tough guy Persona or jerk Persona or. I sometimes see this in women where they get this kind of unusual voice going on, where they speak kind of funny and use just really flighty mannerisms to mask an insecurity. And. And it's. It's the same thing no matter who you are. It's. It's this. I don't think that being my authentic self is safe. So I'm going to create a facade that's not really who I am.

So when. So if somebody's listening to this right now, and they might. Maybe they manage people or supervise people or something like that, and they're like, oh, yeah, I could totally see and XYZ employee or something like that. Like, what. Where. Where's that line between, hey, I'm. I'm professional manager to counselor, or you need to seek help from other professionals? Like, how do you balance that?

Well, that. That is a really tricky one. But the place to start is around trust And I actually have a quote that I love about trust. It's an Irish proverb, and I won't try to say it in Gaelic because I don't speak Gaelic. And it would be. It would be embarrassing. But what is. You are the place that I will stand on the day when my feet are sore. And I love that. When we think about managers and thinking, okay, can you create a feeling that people want to be around you? Even when they're struggling or they're in pain or they, they have to admit they've made a mistake, they still want you to be the one that is around them helping them. And if you can create that kind of relationship with your people, you have to worry less about am I crossing the line here, whatever, and more about am I creating a human experience for this person to be able to be their best and to speak up when they're not? And that's. It's really, it's really challenging in some corporate environments to do that. But I've actually got a great story that I tell all the time because I think it's so powerful and it's an old one. This will date me just a little bit because this happened when I was a kiddo. But in the early 80s, NASA launched a space shuttle. You may remember this. They. They launched the Challenger. And it was a really pretty amazing venture that they were going to launch this. There were some really cool people on the, on the flight, and it was live televised, which was kind of a big deal. And a few minutes before or a few minutes after it went up, full thing exploded. Everyone on board passed away. And that was really tragic. Even more disturbing, in the weeks after that, they found out that there were people who worked at NASA who knew unequivocally that's what's going to happen. They knew the shuttle was going to explode. There were people at NASA who knew months and years before that there was a very serious problem with the shuttle. But they did not work for managers who had the skill set or the organizational mechanism to be able to escalate those concerns. So those people had to watch, knowing this is what's going to happen. And I think that that's just a powerful example of corporate culture where we can say, when you start to build that type of environment, you're fostering disaster, or the other way. Can you create an environment where brilliant ideas can thrive and concerns can be risen and addressed right away? Because you've created that trusting environment. And it's just an extreme example where, gosh, if you don't it's really hard to recover from. And NASA obviously has recovered, but it was pretty rough.

Yeah, you hear a lot about that. And, you know, even like in the healthcare world, you know, of a, you know, a healthcare professional is just afraid to speak up or whatever, and then, you know, harm can happen to patients and that sort of thing. So. Yeah. Okay. Well, hey, so earlier on you were mentioning your connection with middle and, and frontline managers, and I wanted to kind of circle back to that a little bit. And I'm curious, like, why do you. You sounded very passionate about that, about middle and frontline managers. So why. Why is that so important to you?

So I believe that middle and frontline managers are the key to the future of work. And the reason for this is they are the absolute closest to the employees who do the thing, who understand your customer. So if you want to have real understanding of what's going on in your business, those employees who are the ones interacting with your customers, interacting with your product every single day, they know more about it than anyone else in the organization. You've got to have those skilled people right at the front lines who can help have that conversation to do things like escalate innovation, drive productivity, highlight concerns, all those types of things. And if we look at the rate of change that the working world has experienced, we're experiencing far more change now than we did 10 years ago, than we did 100 years ago. And there is no indication that that's going to slow down. So you've got to have that really agile and interactive front line of managers in order to keep organizations moving forward at that rate of change. That's where that speed is going to come from. But so often, and I'm sure many people listening will have had this experience, people are promoted based on technical competency. So if you're an accountant and you're the best accountant, they may promote you to be the leader of the team of accountants. Now, being an amazing accountant in many ways does not correlate to being an amazing manager. And then those people who are leading for the first time are kind of left to just figure it out and struggle and be able to either figure it out and move forward or not so much. But oftentimes they're left alone. And there's some really powerful data coming out around burnout rates. For those, that group of people, what we call quiet quitting, which is not my favorite term, but those people who are just saying, hey, I'm just not going to put in the effort because I don't feel emotionally connected to this role anymore. And a lot of it is because they just never got the skill building that they needed to feel like, I'm coming in, I'm doing it well, I'm connecting with my people. And so then they struggle quite a bit. There was a terrifying study that came out that said on average, managers are waiting 17 years to get training professionally. And that's too long. That's a lifetime. So it gets me really fired up because I think it's just such a critical population in most organizations.

So let's stick with that accounting example. So you have the expert accountant, just a great accountant, world class Accountant, and hey, Mr. Mrs. Accountant, why don't you lead this group? Oh, okay. But on the flip side, you might have someone who fantastic manager of people and maybe they manage the manufacturing. I'm just making something up, right? I know nothing about accounting. And now you appoint them to be manager of accounting. Now they've managed people all along time, 15, 20 years. Great at people that know nothing about accounting. Is that good or bad in your opinion?

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I know nothing about accounting. Is that good or bad in your opinion?

I take the second one over the first one every day of the week. And the reason is I'm building in an assumption about the second one and that that person is good at managing people because they have the ability to say when they don't know something and to speak up and say, hey, look, I don't understand this accounting process. Help me understand. Do you understand it? And let's together set what success looks like if we can do that. You are so much further ahead around goal setting and managing measuring work, because you can be really honest about what I do and don't know. The danger for that technically proficient manager is they want to lean on that thing that got them there, that thing that they know they're great at, which is their technical skill. And it can be really hard for them to say I actually don't know that process or gosh, this is a new way of doing it. That's not the way I would do it.

Right.

That's where they get into some sticky water. And the one who doesn't know anything about it, they will have to have the ability to manage their own ego and say, hey, I don't know this. You guys do. Maybe none of us know. Let's go get some resources to figure it out. But that second manager can actually be really effective because they can get out of the way of the great people who do the work.

Yeah. So interesting. Also, within our, our community here, most folks listening are in this sort of lean, continuous improvement space and, and many companies, Toyota and different companies like that, who we all sort of look up to in our, in our little movement here. It's not unusual for them to sort of move leaders around. Right. Into different areas. And they probably know something about that new area, but perhaps probably not an expert in it. Right. But to your point, they're, they lead with humility and, but they're not incompetent, you know, but, but you know, you know, they, they lean on their, their team members. Right. And, and really try to get the best out of them. But yeah, I think when you have that, that, that essence of humility, it's very attractive to people who are being led by humble leaders. Right.

So it's absolutely true. And the technically proficient leader can be effective in that way if they get that transition moment.

Yeah.

To say, hey, this is, this is a time where your technical proficiency is not the job. And this is a place where I see organizations miss a lot is they miss the conversion of value and that individual no longer understands, how do I add value here? They were super clear as an individual contributor. Right. Here's my tasks, here's what I do. I'm great at it. I'm adding value. Now your job is different. And so helping them understand the way in which that they are going to be adding value as a manager so that they can make that humble decision to say, okay, yeah, maybe I would do it this way. What are your ideas? That type of transition is powerful and if you miss it, it can be hard. It can be hard to turn back the clock on that.

Yeah, yeah. Now what about like this whole idea of. And I've seen this a lot, you know, and in particular with that, the expert accountant who's now a manager with micromanagement, you know, just like sort of, you know, people sort of hunger for autonomy and, you know, being able to sort of do their own deal. But then they got this expert accountant boss who's now all of a sudden in their business. And no, no, no, that's not how we close the books. Here's how we close it. You know, and. And you start that, that micromanaging, like, what. What does it take to sort of fix that? Or, you know, maybe even how often does that actually happen in your experience?

You know, I wish that I could say it doesn't happen very often, but it can't. It actually happens quite a lot. I see it quite a lot. And we're actually starting to see a trend for increased micromanagement as people start to figure out, okay, now we're. We're virtual, we're going to stay this way. We're hybrid, we're going to stay this way. And you have managers in the role who don't know how to effectively manage and measure work remotely. So they're having a hard time understanding productivity on their team. And the response to that is either increasing visible busyness, which I'm happy to describe what I mean when I say visible busyness, or increasing the number of fingers that they have in the pie. Just trying to say, okay, I need to understand that my people are being productive, which means I need to insert myself in all of their work in order to do that in both of those things is just a lack of an ability to measure work, set clear goals, and help their people prioritize. So on the first hand, we see people starting to micromanage because they want to see their team be super busy. There's a great study that just came out from Microsoft, actually, I think they just published it last month, showing dramatic increases in the amount of times that people are spending in teams meetings. Like over 100% increase over last year of the amount of times people are spending in meetings. And there is some assumption that that's managers coming in and just saying, I got to see your work. I got to be, you know, we got to be meeting and talking. Otherwise, I'm not sure you're being productive. So we see some of that type of stuff going on, or managers who are just burning their people out by trying to be involved in every detail. So there's lots of statistics that unfortunately say, gosh, this is getting worse, not better. And the simple fix, which I'm going to say sounds really simple because it's not a complex fix, but it is a hard human change, is teaching managers to be able to diagnose what they're seeing in front of them. So, Ron, if it was you or me working together, I might want to say, okay, what is Ron's skill build skill level. You know, how much does he know about this work? What have I seen from him in the past and what is the task and how can I adjust my approach to Ron based on that combination of what do I think he knows, what have I seen from him in the past and what is the task and start adjusting. Does he need a lot of direction here or can I step aside? Then can we have a conversation about what do you need from me? And then I help provide that. So it's. It's really a diagnosis of what's the skill level, what's the task, and then adjust your approach based on that. Which sounds simple, but an application requires a little bit of practice. I find when managers, when they conquer that, they see dramatic changes in their relationships and the productivity of their team.

Interesting. I want to. You. You mentioned it. Wasn't you just sort of been passing? But the whole idea of remote hybrid and all that seems to be the big discussion right now. Obviously, you know, somebody, you know, wants to work from home because they did during COVID and did great, and now they don't want to have to drive to the office and this and that. But then on the flip side, you'll see, you know, there are some studies that show that if. If you do come in, you might. Depending on the job, of course, you might be more. More effective, more productive if you can interact with your colleagues or whatever in person. Like, where do you stand on it? Because I feel like it's really tricky. I mean, in full disclosure, we are, I would call it hybrid here at Gemba Academy. I mean, people come in a couple days a week, but for the most part, they'll work from home two or three days a week. So. So I don't. I'm sort of, you know, I don't have a strong opinion either way. But. But sometimes you see that strong opinion. Oh, no, you. If you don't let people work from home, you're a terrible person. You know, where do you stand on it?

I think you got to look at the work. You have to analyze what is the work we're trying to get done here and how do we add value to that work and that will help steer. In what cases is all remote hybrid or all in the office? The appropriate decision where I definitely, definitely have a strong opinion is just saying we have to be in the office because that's how we did it in the past, or our CEO, cfo, whoever wants everybody in the office so we're in. Those are terrible reasons to do something Anything, including driving where people work. There are just amazing benefits of allowing people to work virtually for. For the individuals, for sure. So to your point, oh, you're terrible if you don't let them work remotely. I do think that there's some amazing benefits to humanity for doing that. There's also some really powerful benefits to the talent pipeline. So if you think about the way you can expand your talent pipeline, if you allow virtual workforce, you may be able to pull in talent from other places in the world that bring tremendous value who have great additional perspectives because they're no longer chained to geography. So there's great benefits to organizations thinking about allowing that as well. And then you got to be realistic. Like, to be honest, my husband's in law enforcement. You can't do that from home, right? Yeah. Generally you got to go into the office to do things like that. So there are places and times where the work is going to say, hey, you got to be in here. But the work should really drive the decision.

Yeah, it's going to be super interesting. I, you know, with the whole AI movement stronger than ever and gaining traction daily. I do, I do. You know, your husband, he's good. You know what I mean? You know that. All right. The nurse, the nurse, the doctor, you know, they're good. The electrician, the plumber. Right. But that person who wants to work from home because they code all day, you know, like, that's, that's where it's going to get tricky, you know? And I'm wondering what's going to happen with our economy and the future and what kids end up studying. Like, don't study programming because you're out, man. Unless you're the one programming the AI robot, you know what I mean? So that'll be interesting to sort of monitor this whole remote. Because the people who add value with their hands, your husband and the nurse and the doctor and the electrician, feel like they're going to be safe, for lack of a better word. I don't know what else to call it. Right. But I don't know. What do you think about all the whole AI stuff?

On one hand, I love it because I'm so excited by some of the things that we're able to do. Really cool stuff coming. And on the other hand, you know, we need to be really mindful about how do we continue to engage the human side and where that collaboration adds value. So this is another place where great managers are able to say, hey, listen, these types of tasks that our team gets done, do these remotely, you Know, you don't need to collaborate with others, you don't need to interact with others. Let's just do it. And then let's pick these three or four things that would really benefit from a lot of different perspectives and brains on it. And whether we do that physically in person or we do that intentionally collaborative. Collaboratively using technology, either way. But being mindful about that, that's where a great manager can help unlock a team and say, let's be thoughtful about that. We're not collaborating on everything because that's going to be really inefficient. And that's where we'll see AI just eat us alive.

Yeah.

But we are really intentional about the places where a human brain.

Yeah.

Is going to add value here. Multiple human brains will add value here.

What's been your experience just with personality types? You know, like during COVID the extrovert was dying and the introvert was kind of like, sorry, I'm cool, you know, like, I don't mind connecting on zoom, you know, or whatever. Right. Like, where do you see that within the management and leadership? Just the role of personality types?

You know, I see us heading towards a place where there is just an incredibly increased expectation that people can create or be given an environment where they can be their authentic self. So it's coming back to this, you know, if I don't want to interact with people as much or do I have the opportunity to put myself in those places, I think Covid drove a huge portion of that because we did see cash. People actually can get a lot more done remotely than we thought that they could. So that's cool. That opens up some doors. But this next generation that we see coming into the workforce, they have an expectation of that type of inclusivity and that type of spectrum for working situations that we've never seen before. So I think Covid and those generational expectations coming in to change the environment and expectation of work is really powerful. And I've seen a pretty big flex towards that as we start to say people expect inclusivity, People expect respectful environments in a way that they certainly didn't do 50 years ago, probably didn't do 15 years ago. And it. It will be even different 15 years from now as that generation settles into the workplace and really drives some of the trends that we see.

Yeah, yeah. Hey, so maybe to wrap things up, we've also, many of us have seen the old Gallup Poll, you know, and how the massive percentage of actively gets disengaged employees. Right. Like, what is it 70 something percent or something like that. Right.

And.

And just most people are. Whether they're quite. They've already quietly quit or whatever, they're just not loving their job kind of thing. Like, what can we do as leaders of people, leaders of companies, or even if we're not a leader, we're. We're that frontline manager kind of thing, which is a leader, but I know, you know, not like C suite type leader. Like, what can we do to turn that thing around?

Yeah. Actually, Gallup just released this year's or the past year's data for this year, and right now we're sitting in about 23% of the workplace would describe themselves as thriving. 23%. That, to me, is a human crisis.

Yeah.

Right. As humans, we should be coming into work and feeling like, I have a life's purpose and what I'm doing matters. I enjoy what I do every day. And I know that that sounds a little bit Pollyanna, but I do genuinely believe that as humans, our goal should be to create a society where that's true for most people. Maybe it can't always be true for everyone, but, gosh, wouldn't it be cool?

More than 23.

But it should definitely be more than 23.

Yeah.

So I think that this point is so important, and I do think it's driving a bit of a crisis for us. And starting with those frontline managers who touch the most amount of people, who have such a tremendous impact on individuals, helping them understand, how do you step into that role and add value? And how do you shift some of your behaviors so that you are enabling a group of people to be thriving at work? If you can get that group, that frontline manager, to just understand that concept, we would see tremendous changes in the way people experience work. And so a lot of times it's just messaging to them. Here's how you add value. Here's how you can align the way you spend your day to that added value. And here's some things that can help you be your authentic self, because the more authentic you are, the more likely it is that the people around you will feel safe to be authentic as well. So I think it's some simple stuff, but you gotta get to get to those folks early in their career so that you can start minimizing that damage as quickly as possible.

Good stuff. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, Summer, if people want to connect with you individually, what's the best way?

Yep, so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time there. It's just Summer Davies. And then you can also find my business on leader-shop.com leadership and if you were listening to the micromanager thing and thinking, oh, I'm a little bit afraid that I might be a micromanager, I actually have an assessment up there right now. It's totally free to download and it's intended to help somebody understand where am I over managing? Where am I under managing? And maybe it's for you. You just, you want to take it and take a look there or you want to share it with somebody that you support or care about. You know, secretly email it to your manager. You do what you want to do. It's your computer, but it's there. You can Download it on leader-shop.com at any time. And then I also work with leaders so you can find me there. If you're. If you're interested in getting into some skill building.

Perfect. Love it. All right. Yeah. And everybody can just kind of scroll down on whatever you're listening to. We'll have everything linked up here on the show Notes. So. So. Well, yeah, well, thanks for coming on, Summer. This was a lot of fun and it, I kind of warned you before we hit record, we're just going to zig and zag all over the place and we sure did.

I love it.

Yeah, a lot of fun. All right, well, hey, take care and appreciate you coming on.

Thanks, Ron.

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