GA 550 | Assessing and Improving an Organization’s Culture with Garrett Delph

Oh, my gosh. Most businesses operate in chaos, which means they pass that chaos into their people, which means most people out there that work for businesses that are in chaos are stressed out at home, too, and in their personal lives.

Today, I am excited to welcome Garrett Delf to the show. Now, Garrett is the founder and CEO of a company called Clarity Ops. And so basically, Clarity. Clarity Ops is all about helping companies and leadership teams be more efficient, trying to help them drive sustainable growth and really grow and build strong cultures. And so if it sounds familiar to what we're all trying to do with Lean, it is. And in fact, even before we hit record, I asked Garrett, I said, hey, are you familiar with Lean and Six Sigma and Continuous Improvement? And he definitely is. And I think they're actually using aspects of it in their work, but they're also going out it in some different ways. And so that's why I was excited to have them on. I think it's sometimes good for those of us are so entrenched in sort of the Lean and Six Sigma and just Continuous Improvement world to see how other people just right on the. Right on the edges of what we're doing, what they're up to and how they go about it. And as you'll hear, many of the same things that we're doing, they're all about people. They're all about processes and looking at the right metrics and that sort of thing. And so we just really walk through how Garrett and their team go about helping companies, and we spend some quite a bit of time on the people side of it and how they go about assessing an organization's culture and what they might do to improve. So I really enjoy the conversation. Garrett's a really, really good guy, really nice and humble, and I think you're going to enjoy it as well. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 550 again, gembapodcast.com episode 550. And be sure whatever app you're listening on to, scroll down and go connect with Garrett on LinkedIn and check out what they got going on over at Clarity Ops. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Garrett, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Hey, thanks, Ron. Going great. Thank you.

All right. Where are you calling in from?

San Diego. San Diego, California.

Nice. Nice.

Yeah.

Terrible weather out there, you know, really rough.

So funny. It actually has been terrible the last week. Really.

It was terrible for San Diego.

I know that's not fair. That's not fair.

65 or something.

Yeah, yeah, like 68.

Oh, yeah.

Got to watch myself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to put on those extra wetsuits, right, when you get into your water or whatever.

Right, yeah. Put on a long sleeve shirt. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Although we're in Texas, and while we're recording this here in the sort of middle of September and we're in that annoying time of year, it's like, why is it still 98, you know?

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it probably stays pretty warm there through, what, end of October?

I mean. Yeah, it's just. It's just all over the place. I mean, I remember, you know, Thanksgiving, we're out sweating in the backyard kind of thing, you know, so it's just. I feel like in Texas we have, like, summer and then we have winter. We don't really have fall. Or one day you wake up when all the leaves are on the ground, you know, and it's like, okay, I gotta deal with all those leaves now. So.

Yeah, I feel like the weather the last couple of years has been strange.

Yeah, you know. Yeah, for sure.

Pretty strange.

For sure.

But all good. All good. Yep.

Good stuff. All right, well, hey, man, I'm excited to have you on to the. Onto the podcast and for our conversation, and as you. As you know, Garrett, we like to get things going out of the gate with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you have?

Yeah, probably one of my faves when, you know, when it comes to business specifically, is you cannot manage what you cannot measure. And that actually that quote had a big impact on my career and still does to this day. So that's probably up there. Top three.

Good. Awesome. All right, well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Garrett. Tell us about your background, how you got involved in your line of work, and what Clarity Ops is all about and what you guys are up to these days.

Yeah. Happy to, man. Thank you. I'm an accidental entrepreneur and had several startups. My first sort of five years of breaking away from corporate America, and what led up to Clarity Ops was a couple of businesses that challenged my capability to scale. They required international scale and they required a very robust tech stack. And both of those businesses were hyper dependent on both people and process. So unlike a lot of classic manufacturing, where you have bots and you have machines doing most of the work, the businesses I built were very dependent on humans doing processes in sort of the assembly line fashion or the value chain fashion. So in. In building both of those, what I became, what I came to Realize just in my networks and building was that mostly, mostly businesses that depend on people in process tend to focus on revenue, but not focus on Rails. And Rails, meaning process and articulating a process in a way that you. You produce profit, but you also eliminate, you know, by design, waste, and you eliminate bloat, and thereby you also care for the people. And so it learned a lot of really fantastic lessons, most of them hard lessons through a lot of pain, a lot of loss, a lot of delay, a lot of failure. And that really led me to sort of my halftime moment where I was like, okay, what do I love and what do I want to do with that love and passion moving forward? And I looked at the marketplace specifically in this, the domains that represent what I just mentioned, people in process, and continue to see this is a very large problem in organizations who are up against the stat. You know, nine out of 10 businesses fail. That stat has. If anything, it's gone up. I think. I think it's above 90%. And. And so my goal, with clarity ops is to take all of the things I learned and built along the way and introduce them to organizations that are struggling, either because they're in growth mode or they never built Rails in the first place, and give them a fast and easy way to implement tools that will help them get on track, maintain traction, and ultimately sustain into the future as they grow, irrespective of who is at the helm. And when I say the helm, I mean especially those. The. The. The managers and technicians that drive the train, you know.

Got it.

And so that's. That's. What's. What's going on.

Okay, good. So as we were talking about before we hit record, you know, our audience is mostly folks in the sort of context, what we would call, just, generally speaking, continuous improvement world, whether that's Lean, Six Sigma, something, you know, in between. So are you. Are you dabbling in that sort of area or you. Are you sort of taking a different approach?

Yeah, well, definitely dabbling in that area. I would actually. I would say both feet planted in that area. I think the differentiation here is, although I do have experience with Lean and Six Sigma, I'm not necessarily certified any.

Right, right. Yeah.

I'm, you know, a bootstrap guy.

Yeah.

And I've pulled from all of my educational sources over the past 25 years, and I've built my own tools.

I see.

And primarily I did that because a lot of those for me, for me and my teams, they were very heady and they required a ton of extracurricular Time to pursue them and get certified, if you will. And I just didn't have that sort of luxury when it came to time, so I needed to invent and build internally.

Okay, so give it. Give some examples of, like, I'm curious to hear, like, you, you go into an organization and whatever they're, they're. They're struggling, struggling, whatever, you know, overtime, through the roof, they're just not making a lot of money. Maybe the business is there, but they just, they can't get it out the door. Like, what are, what are some of the things that you're looking at when you walk into that sort of a situation?

That's great, Great question. So part of them are principles. For example, I have developed a hypothesis that in general, most businesses that depend on people and process, I think, are clubbed into three pillars. People, process, and performance. And I found that just in my surveying and building relationships with business owners, they don't even have that top of mind in terms of how do you structure your org, how do you organize governance? And so that's one thing that our discovery process leads with, you know, clubbing the biz into these three pillars. Then when it comes to, for example, maximizing efficiency, what I like to do is take a look at the value chain and break it into sort of five buckets. Budget, activities, players, speed and quality, and say, all right, what is your intended output for this product or service? Do you have a budget for it? Does it need to, you know, does it need to be governed in that fashion? And have you defined every single micro and macro activity in that value chain? Have you identified all of the players needed to process those? Right, so there's an example, another example. And by the way, this is called AT Clarity Ops. We call it a fast operational solution. And FAST stands for frameworks, assessments, systems, tools and techniques, of which we have entire library of. But another one is something I. I learned the hard way. And so I formed a model called a quad core management framework. And so now we talk about continuous improvement, right? And making businesses efficient for profit and growth is usually. I found what managers do, especially the C suite level to their managers. They find great people. And then they. Because they're great, usually they deem them as superheroes. And so they fill up the back of their truck with way too much, always and always. And they just expect them to do and perform and execute, you know, and meet their KPIs or their OKRs and. Chief Center. Chief center. And what I found was it's a very destructive way to do Business, you harm the business and you harm the people. And so what the quad core management framework does is it introduces our clients to a new way of distributing the activities and key focus areas that usually they all dump onto one manager and they distribute it into four different, different manager types. Right. So you have strategic, you have management of people, you have project management and then you have process management. And usually we, you know what, us founders and C suite people, we'd like to dump all of those into one person. It's too much. And so there's another example of a framework that can be implemented that makes for great speed, hyper efficient and increased quality across the board. And, and you know, we haven't even gotten into the cultural.

Yeah, I want, let's go there because I'm curious to get your, I mean, within the lean world, you know, we have sort of, you have the so called lean house and one of the pillars is, is continuous improvement.

Right?

So those are all the, the things that we can do, all the tools, all the techniques and processes and so forth. But then the other pillar is respect for people. Right? And so this is sort of like a pillar of like the Toyota production system. Like, you know, making sure that, you know, understanding it is ultimately all about people. So like how do you, how do you go about sort of the people side of the equation?

Yeah. So on the people bucket we have a list of, I think we have 12 components under our people bucket. It always starts with vision and mission because I really believe that the people should be reminded about continuously how they're contributing to the vision and mission of the company. And you and I both know that most founders either forget about or never really get clarity around their vision, mission. And then we see that in the rest of their org. So vision, mission number one, core values.

Real fast though, not to cut you off. Sorry. I am curious. Even just vision and mission can be very difficult. So how do you go about like helping people identify if, let's say if you ask someone, hey, what's your mission and your vision? And like, I don't know, you know, like how do you go about that process?

Well, it's very personal. Like I don't believe that I can, that anybody can tell a founder or a CEO if perhaps the founder is no longer there, how to define your vision, mission. But one thing I always encourage is what is your dream outcome for the business? Like what is your dream outcome? And then can you distill that into a clear sentence? And I think in the beginning, Ron, it's not necessarily a Matter of being right or wrong. It's about starting somewhere because you can always iterate. Yeah. So that's always been my approach.

Yeah. Okay, cool.

Yeah. From there you get into core values. And the reason I think that must be a number two is because I think core values are the things that determine what we believe and what we follow. And what we believe and what we follow determines the decisions we make. And as we know, the decisions we make determine the output of our activities as relate to projects and goals and tactics. From there, another big one, for example, in terms of caring for people, is having a good old fashioned employee handbook in place. Right. The one that talks about like, what are my benefits and when I want to take vacation, what's the process for taking vacation? Things like we value accountability. Right. And we're going to measure your performance. Mm. So. So you know the. Again, these are the things, they're process related. I think everything in a business is process related, including culture. Another thing is critical path to caring for people is giving them razor sharp, clear job descriptions. And job descriptions have to come from the top. Because in my opinion, a responsible founder or C suite will architect from the ground up. Let's say vertically and horizontally in the org chart how all of the bespoke roles in the org contribute collectively to the outcome of the business. And I've seen to the degree that you get that right, is the degree that usually you have success if you have product market fit, and the degree that. To which you don't, generally is the degree to, to which you have increased chaos, disorder, unhappiness, high stress and so on. Then from there, caring for the people, building career paths. You know, people, most of us, when we join a company, especially a company that is, is, you know, they're there to win, they want to win the marketplace. They're going to grow. And ambitious people, they want to know that they have a track to grow in title and in pay. Let's be honest, all of us work for money, but most businesses don't communicate. Hey, when you hit these milestones or when you achieve these goals, you're on track for a brighter future. And again, we're going back to. We got on this conversation about culture. How do you protect culture in tandem with protecting process? Yeah, they both need each other. So there's some examples.

Yeah.

Under the people column.

Yeah, got it. So I'm curious then like again back to sort of your. You've been called in to help a group of folks or a company or whatever it might be.

Yeah.

Are there Any like, are you look, I mean, clearly you're looking at their financial side of things, I assume. But are there other indicators in addition to financial indicators that something's up? Like, how do you know? Let's say you spent two or three days sort of assessing a group. Like, what would you see? What are some of those indicators? That there's an issue?

Yeah, so there are internal indicators and external indicators. And so if a business, for example, has performance reviews, those will be great internal indicators that something is broken. If those performance reviews are bad in general, collectively, an external indicator, which I think is maybe perhaps one of the strongest, is the customer feedback and delivery analytics. So are you delivering on time or are you late? What are your quality coefficients and what are your customers saying about their happiness regarding your deliverables? And those show up in public, which I think is really harmful to the biz. So there's, you know, three examples of not looking at financials but looking at some other empirical evidence.

Let's say that, you know, like right now we're here and we're recording this in middle of September and you know, a lot of debate, debate on who you're talking to about are we in a recession or whatever it might be, like what do you do when you go into a company and maybe the good company, good process. Good, good processes, good people, but the businesses isn't there. Right. The sales folks are struggling to win orders or whatever it might be, and people are just hesitant. I was talking to someone that's in the conference world recently and you know, he's just like, man, it's just people are saying I got to wait till this election's over or whatever it might be, you know, before I spend any money. Like what are you, what are you doing in those types of situations when maybe the market is the, is the, is the problem or the bottleneck.

Yeah, it's a great question. Just as a note on that question, Clarity Ops does not focus on businesses that are struggling with client acquisition or are struggling with go to market strategies perhaps, or struggling with product market fit. However, I'm happy to answer that because I have expertise in it.

Okay.

But I think, you know, number one is, hey, is your PMF aligned? You know, if you're not getting business, perhaps you have wrong product market fit alignment and you need to reevaluate and readjust another issue. Could be a classic inflection point like we're seeing right now with AI. You know, there's a lot of businesses that have their act together, but the market changed Underneath their nose and they missed. It happened to code happened at IBM, we see a lot of blockbuster. Yeah, yeah. A lot of historical use cases and then sometimes processes are great, but it may be a function of you got a really bad lead pipeline, you know, and you're going after something changed and you're going after the wrong leads and those leads don't convert because they're the wrong target. So there's a lot of, lot of moving parts there. Yeah, definitely worthy of, of evaluating. And you know, these questions have come up, by the way, Ron, you know, when working with our customers and it's not like I go, sorry, I can't touch that. But I always disclaim, you know, not, not my, not my focus, but I'll give you my some opinion here.

Yeah, no, that's good, that's good. I'm wondering then maybe as we sort of start to wrap things up, if you, maybe there's someone listening right now and they're leader of an organization and they, you know, everyone's got opportunity. Right. I don't. Even if things are good, you can be better.

Right.

And like, what are some practical tips that you could, you could say to, to someone who's, who's leading an organization who, who wants to be better, who've, maybe their, their efficiencies are definitely not as efficient as they could be. Like, are there some practical pieces of advice that you could give that person?

Well, yeah, yeah, like who's the Persona? Can you give me an idea of like what Persona you're referring to?

It's a plant manager or general manager, if you will, of a, oh, I don't know, 150 person facility who produces some widgets, you know, so they're manufacturing or something, I don't know, just something like that. And you know, so not a, not a fortune, you know, 50 company by any means, but you know, they employ a couple hundred people who depend on this job to feed their families and they're passionate about making sure things are as well as they can be.

Yeah. And they're, and in this case, are they, they struggling kind of with the classic inefficiencies? Yeah, they need to.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, they're missing shipments and, and customers are kind of, kind of, kind of angry, you know, calling up and employees are stressed out, they're overworked. I'm getting into this now. I've seen of many, many, many times.

Right. So yeah, we sure have. I'm going to answer the question and I'd love to make a comment regarding the people part. But I really would go back to the basics of you cannot manage what you cannot measure. So clearly things are broken and you have gaps and you have delays and you have quality issues. Why? Chances are very high that you don't have internal governances in place to manage all of the moving parts. So I would go back to the value chain of the production again, whether that's people and or process, bot or machine. And I would lobby and highly recommend that you copiously rip that engine apart and seek to find out all of the gaps. Start. You got to go through it methodically. But what is your budget? Like I mentioned earlier, what are all of the activities? At Clarity Ops, we have a thing called a workflow journey map. Unlike a value chain map, where it's just sort of a visual schematic, what our workflow journey map does is it defines the players, the activities, the benchmarks associated with those activities, every micro and macro movement and the required timeline to deliver according to quality and speed. And we go through those step by step and evaluate. And I think that is probably the best way to go after all of this waste. The root causes for the delays or the being over budget, the root causes for the quality issues, et cetera. It's there. You just have to have a team, a leadership team that is willing to raise their hand and say, we have a problem and we really want to deal with it. And if you are willing to do that and roll up your sleeves and put in the elbow grease to solve it, it is solvable.

Yeah.

And then I was actually just listening to, I think was your most recent podcast or the one before that. And I think you guys, I forget the name. You guys were talking about, like, you know, a very common tactic for organizations just to cut people to save cost. And the reason I, I like the approach I just shared with you is when you go through that exercise, you actually end up with surplus in resources, in profit, in supply. And then as a business, you can make an objective decision and go, okay, we're actually going to prune our human resources because we needed that to get our margins up. Or we're going to accelerate our sales because we have new supply to meet increased demand. Yeah, and that's a beautiful thing going back to. You cannot manage what you cannot measure when you can measure it. Now you can make really good business decisions as a result of the data that you get back once you're clear objectively about the truth and the facts.

Yeah, so I lied. I got one more question.

Okay.

I remember before the interview, I was poking around on your website.

Okay.

And clarityops.co.com had to find out the hard way.

I know, man, I wanted that calm. But, yeah, I'm gonna have to pay barely for it. Right.

One of the things that sort of like in the. Why Clarity Options is not meant to be a commercial for Clarity Ops. Although, sure, it can be, but one of the things was that you.

You.

You tried to stay emotionally neutral is what it says on your website.

Yeah. Yeah.

Talk a little bit about that. Emotionally neutral. I thought that's. That was pretty. That's a pretty good marketing slogan. You know, number one. So well done to your marketing team. But what's it really mean and why do you think it's important?

Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate the question. My experience has been both as an operator and also as a operational partner and consultant is us. Those that are in the business, we're usually so close to it. We're so close to it, we end up with blind spots. We're so close to it, we have ego attached to it. We're so close to it that we're actually confuse objectivity with subjectivity. And then there's also a ton of emotions that go into our passion and love and drive to win. And so by hiring somebody like, you know, a partner, whoever that is, and this is why I put it on my. My site, is I have the luxury of coming in and being emotionally neutral. I'm not attached to anything except for helping you win, succeed in a more profitable, efficient way. And I have found that to be a very, very powerful position in terms of initiating change and sustaining that change into the future. That. That is the.

Yeah. And I'm wondering if that could even be, you know, just for folks who are going about it on their own. You know, again, a leader of a company like, you know, I love studying the stoics, you know, and just sort of control what you can control. Right. Like, you can't. You can't. You can. Only thing you can control is the reaction to the stimulus. Right. Like, that's it. That' that's what we have to control. So I'm wondering if this is even just being emotionally neutral could be a sort of a beautiful goal even for that internal operator. Right. Like, to just stay calm and control what you can control. Easier said than done. I had a rotten day yesterday and I was grumpy, running around, you know, and it's just like, ah, gosh, reset the next day and try again. Right.

But, yeah, well, you know what, Ron? I'M totally with you, man. I agree with you 100%. And here's why. Leaders have a heavier crown. They're paid more to deal with more pressure. Yeah. So I would actually contend on your behalf that, you know, eq, emotional intelligence and being able to govern those things in an objective way and be emotionally neutral is probably a really great goal and requirement for those that are going to be effective. As it turns out, like you said, it's much harder to do than to achieve.

Well, yeah. Even for you. I'm sure when you're looking at your own company, Clarity Ops, it's a different feeling than when you go in and go help Bob's Manufacturing down the road. Right.

You know what? You know what? It's. Again, I appreciate your thought there. I actually pursue coaches and consultants because I understand the power of accountability of a third party looking on the outside in, you know.

Yep. For sure. Good stuff.

If you don't mind, I was going to comment about the people part.

Yeah.

You had shared earlier, and I just wanted to articulate that one of the reasons I'm so passionate about what I'm doing now is I've had this big epiphany over the years that at the end of the day, it is people that make businesses successful in general, it's because of the people. A lot of moving parts there. And when a business is not responsible to care for their people, they overload them with stress. And that stress comes in lots of different forms. I won't get into that. But here's the problem with that, is that stress travels with them into their personal life. Yeah. It goes home. If they have a family, it goes to their family. If they have a partner, it goes into their partner. It affects them. Their mental health, it affects their physical health. Right. And so my big epiphany a couple years ago, Ron was, oh, my gosh. Most businesses operate in chaos, which means they pass that chaos into their people, which means most people out there that work for businesses that are in chaos are stressed out at home, too, and in their personal lives. Yeah. And that really affected me. And. And I really do believe that when you can help a business govern, create order, then you do the opposite for the people. You give them peace.

Yeah.

You give them happiness. You give them, you know, an even keel when they go home, they're not all wound up. And that. I think that is an amazing thing. Wanted to comment on the people.

Yeah. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Very good. Well, Garrett, man, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you carving out time to come on with us. If folks wanted to connect with you personally, what's the best way?

Yeah, thank you. I'm on LinkedIn so they can My handle is Garrett Delph and at ClarityOps Co as well.

Got it. All right, well, we'll get everything linked up in the show notes, so everybody just scroll down on whatever app you're on and go connect with Garrett. And hey man, this has been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much, Ron. Really appreciate you having me.

All right, take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 lean and 6 Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.