GA 617 | What Alignment Looks Like with Hanna Bauer

Think about race cars, right? My leaders, they like to go fast. They like to go all the time and busy. And we see that. We see that with great, amazing race cars. Although we've had it perfectly tuned before we started using it, just natural use is going to cause misalignment.

Today I'm excited to welcome Hannah Bauer to the show. Now, Hannah and I had a great talk today. Specifically, we talk about, like, how do we make improvement? We spend a lot of time talking about sort of emotional and cultural levers, and just the way that we behave and interact with one another plays a huge role in what we're doing as continuous improvement and really just leaders in general. So we sort of just walk through Hannah's perspective and her journey with continuous improvement. And I love talking about emotional intelligence, and it's something that I don't think gets talked about quite enough in our, in our community. And so we spend quite a bit of time talking about emotional intellig, like, like, what is it? And then how do we do it? And a lot of really good advice in this one. I think that it's going to be helpful. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode six, 17 again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 617. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Hannah, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing awesome. How about you?

I'm excited. We, People don't know this, but we've. We both have had some technology issues along the way, and the gremlins are trying to keep us from talking, but we're, we're persevering, we're fighting through them. And here we are.

Definitely resilience right here. That's it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's. Well, this, this, this. We're. We're always a little bit ahead. So right now, everybody, if we remember back when the whole cloud flare thing was happening, so that's around when we actually recorded this. So, yeah, we were talking of how scary it is thinking about how vulnerable the world is, you know, to a few service providers, right?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, and also the interconnectedness and just one glitch, right? One glitch in the system and take down many systems.

Yeah, yeah. It's beautiful when it's working, but. Right. Awesome. All right, well, yeah, I'm excited to, to talk today. So why, as you know, Hannah, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing quote. So what do you got?

Well, for me, is One of the ones that inspired me initially in this whole going into businesses, which is from Zig Ziglar, where you can have everything you want if you help enough other people get what they want. That just speaks to me because it really is about the servant, the heart of a servant leader and helping things happen for others, you know, and when you really are. Your focus is on serving others. It. Everything else just aligns.

Yeah.

When your focus, number one, is to serve. So that's. That's more the one that I always go back to.

Yeah. Oh, I love it. I love it. In fact, I'm peeking over your shoulder. We have our cameras on right now. Is that Zig Ziglar up there on your. Your left? I can't. That one.

That was John Maxwell.

Oh, that's John Maxwell. Okay. Okay. Can't see it. So. So far away. All right. All right. Well, good stuff. All right, well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Hannah. Tell us about your. Your background and then how you got into the line of work that you're doing these days.

Sure. Absolutely. Well, I think for how I got in the line of work was a lot of desperation times just trying to figure things out. But that's been one of the great things. I think one of the main parts for me has been my. I've loved learning and from the learning and the failure. So my background actually comes in. My professionally is a black belt in six Sigma as improvement. And we do like to fail in that one and fail fast.

Yeah.

Hopefully not feel often, but it does happen. But doing the process improvement also system, the systems overview, doing bio examiner. My background in psychology as well, and which is human behavior, got into communications. But all of these were really me in search of answers because I was trying to lead and figure everything out as the world seemed to be going upside down in me. I had been tasked with the privilege to be able to lead and allowed My certifications really came out of coming with answers. I was a recipient of actually a lot of search of answers with my. It's a heart procedure I had from being with a terminal diagnosis. And I was actually the first child to have a heart ablation. So what really that sparked in me was I had seen the resilience of the doctors just firsthand. Also me as a kid going through a lot of the failure and the pain of failure, but also the reward of the success when this surgery did function, that did work. So in my line of work, as I went to the university, got my psychology degree, wanted to understand a lot of People, the interactions to human behavior, all of these things started running really aligning not only in the, really the human side. Right. The love aspect, but also the excellence of how do we actually integrate what we want to do for the world in a way that is not only repeatable, but it's also being a value add with the activities that we do.

Yeah. Wow. I'm super interested to hear more and maybe we'll dig into it later. Really sort of the parallels between like the work that you've done in sort of like psychology, human behavior and you know, Lean and Six Sigma, you know, we're down value stream mapping and whatnot, all the little things, you know, and. Yeah, yeah. So maybe we can dig into that a little bit later. But maybe to start with, I'm wondering if we could. I don't know, I mean, we think about improvement and all the things that go into continuous improvement and organizations working together. Cultural factors obviously play a huge role. And I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about cultural factors and their impact on just lasting success. Like what do we need to be thinking about as it relates to having success with long term, continuous improvement.

Yeah, and I appreciate that because honestly, that that realization came to me as I was in the middle of figuring out. I think my initial looking at solutions was I needed to get more skill, I need to get more resources, I needed to get more, more get, get, get right. And didn't quite understand as a leader that we had much of what we had, what we needed really already. And if I didn't have the culture in place where it would really tap into that talent that I had, the culture that will sustain the strategy, the culture that will sustain change. Really there was consistent breaks in the system, and not only the breaks, but really shutdowns. So I came to real. I was implementing really as a response, as a leader, response to change. Initially wanting to go from survival to struggling to, hey, can we maintain this understanding that every change, even a solution, introduced another problem as we were looking at change and how much it takes to incorporate change, to stop doing something, to start doing something, whichever it is stopping and starting, shifting, adapting. It really took a toll on my people. It took a toll on the culture. And if I realized then that I didn't have the report necessary with my people, they didn't have the report necessary with each other to be able to sustain a healthy rhythm of not only daily operations, but also in response to change. So it came. How did it show up? It showed up by people leaving the Team. It showed up by not being able to retain talent. It showed up by a constant. Although, you know, we. We were committed to reducing the number of tasks, overproduction because of silos, breakdowns, blame game because we didn't have a language. A unifying, not only language, but beyond that, a unifying purpose of what is it that we're doing and having really that meaning behind the work. So that those. This is how it showed up. I didn't quite know. Oh, that's culture. It wasn't like that. It was as I was going. But come to find out that culture really is. Is true that you probably heard this, that culture will eat strategy for breakfast any day, every day of the week. Yeah. And it's true. Yeah.

And it's tricky thing is like culture just. I don't know how to say it. Like, it just happens. Like you wake up one day and this is your culture. Right. And it's like those daily actions and behaviors and just every little thing, like the way that you handle yourself, the way you communicate, the way you problem solve all these things roll up into what we call culture.

Right? Yes. And actually, you know, that's one thing because I mean, as I speak with leaders and we do talk about it, I mean, I think it's something that definitely now in this last five, 10 years, we're starting to talk about it more. Not the same before we even put culture in a box. Like it just. It looked like this. But culture really, when we, when I asked leaders, it's like, what is, what is culture? Well, I don't know. It's just there. It's kind of like you just know it. You know, when you have it, you don't. But the reality is it's like what, what is culture? The real culture is the way that we act and the way that we interact with each other, the way that we think together. Right. So you think, you think about is how we think, how we act and how we interact as a whole. So when we're talking about culture, nothing in an organization happens outside of culture. Just the same way that nothing happens. Like you make no decisions outside of yourself. You don't. A culture for a organization, a company is what they're known for. It's. Everything is the same as the character to an individual is culture to an organization. So understanding that as a leader every day you're either adding to or taking away from the cultures every single day.

Yeah.

And that's one of the things that even that I learned with Ziglar and is that well, you know, motivation. People say, well, I don't need motivation. You know, motivation doesn't last. And say, well, that's what we recommend. You know, just like showers, take one every day do. Motivation is every day. And it does take energy. It does take not only the energy to sustain it, but the intentionality of how am I going to show up today? What is the value add I'm going to do? And how do I. How am I adding value to the work overall that we're doing together?

What about just. When you think about a company, many people have values, right? You'll see posters on the wall and it's a word that we throw around a lot. Values, mission statements and all these sort of things. But talk about like what you've seen as far as values and then also when you've touched on this a little bit already, but like emotional intellig and the role that values on emotional intelligence play with an organization's ability to be successful at anything, but especially continuous improvement.

Yeah, okay, so this unfortunately is the pattern I keep on running into. I mean, you're absolutely right. We have the mission statements, we have the vision statement, we have the values. And they're nicely put in a wall somewhere or in somebody's store or it's.

In a file with some guy climbing.

A mountain or whatever you stand for you. They might even have it on the wall. They walk by every day, every day on the hallway. But here's the truth on it. I mean, values, what is the whole purpose of that? The values tells us what is priority and how do we do things, how do we things, what is it that we do? How do we do it together? And this is a big responsibility on the leaders because in the values. One of the things I keep on finding when I go into businesses, when we talk about process improvement, a lot of times it's conflicting priorities. Like, well, what is the real problem? What, you know, what, you know, what's this first, what's urgent? You know, what's not urgent, what's important, you know, all of this stuff. Because of conflicting priorities, values are there to tell us what is our priority. You know, if we, if we really value customer service. Right? I mean, like, what are the, the activities, what is the. How is. Does that show up in what we do? If we value integrity, how are we showing up in integrity in, you know, how do we live that out? Because in essence, in the mission and division, that's really our filter to be able to make decisions. I find problems consistently with leaders in what decisions Are we supposed to make? Number one question is, well, what's your mission? Nine times out of ten my leaders are not able to tell me, what is the mission of your company? What are the values? Oh, you know, we love great things. Okay, how are you measuring this? Because it's not just something that we do like we have it on the wall, but they are metrics. The mission is a metric that really all your KPIs have got to be encompassed inside that mission. The values is what's going to tell you, the impact is going to tell you what is important to us, what is like mission critical for what we do, for the decision making. So when we're talking about culture and emotional, the emotional intelligence aspect of that is because a lot of times the values might say, okay, well it's integrity. You know, that can look like a concept, you know, just like this broad thing. Or hey, we, we value hope or we value even improvement. Well, that means something to us. So in the emotional intelligence aspect is understanding. Well how if, how do I know that my team is having the is, is having the purpose or is having the morale or is having to hope? How am I measuring that? So there's a quantitative to the qualitative that we have in, in these concepts. But not only that the emotional intelligence is going to be huge in the teams. Because you're constantly reading the room, being able to self regulate, being able to understand. Well, how are you showing up in that value? Because I can't expect for my team to do something I'm not doing. So how am I showing this? Again, a leader doesn't only know the way, guide the way, but shows the way. So how am I showing, showing this and how am I then reading the room back, my team back on showing these values, whatever it is, that the values not only for the organization, but there's also departmental values, right? There's certain things that may be more that they really every group takes on a culture in itself like a subculture, right? We're talking about subculture within a culture. Something that they might be known for more that they want to be known for a particular reason. Either it could be longevity, it can be legacy, it can be accuracy. You know, there's certain things that also go along with that. But as a leader, being able to define that, being able to know how you're showing up because you have to serve as a model requires emotional intelligence. And also to be able to read your team and where they're, where they're at because we're holding them Accountable for it.

Can you maybe just for. I always like to level set on these podcasts. We. You've mentioned emotional intelligence quite a bit. Like if someone's listening and they're like what is that? What is emotional intelligence? Because it's a word that gets thrown around a lot, right? Like emotional intelligence. Like if you were to explain emotional intelligence to a high school student, like how would you describe it to them?

It's the vibe that you feel.

Yeah, there you go.

I honestly like being able, like if you can, because we tell that to everybody. You got to read the room, right? Even those calls you're reading, like even on the other part of the phone you already are reading. Even the silence you're reading, we're consistently with. It's something that we do naturally many times, but we also want to become intentional in it, especially the good leaders, because we want to. We can't teach, we can't pass it on if we can't explain what it is that we're doing. So emotional intelligence is not only that, the ability to be able to read the room, right look at, understand that I'd be able to see the different cues that I'm looking at, but being able to put them in a, in a, in, in such a way to unpack it to where I can do, do a response, do something with that either give direction either. So it will. First, first of all, starting for me as a, as a leader, self regulate. That is a big one. I need to be able to regulate where, where I'm at in response to the things. I mean that's going to require emotional intelligence, social tactfulness. The way that you act in a football game is going to be different. The way that you go out to dinner with maybe your, your in laws, right? I mean it's a different way that you go out to eat to dinner with your best buddies. That, that we're doing this that requires emotional intelligence. So not only the ability to be able to understand the context cues that are coming in, but also be able to put those context cues respond in a way that I can respond to them intelligently in a way that's also going to create a positive outcome. Right. The outcome that I'm looking, that I'm looking for.

Love it. Now you, I know you're passionate about the whole idea of aligning systems, people and values. So talk a little bit about what alignment looks like when you see these things in harmony within an organization.

Well, it looks like you just said the word harmony. You can really tell when things when you instruments are not in tune, even if they're playing the same song, they sound like a little bit off. Yeah, yeah. So that's an essence, what it, what it looks like. So when you're talking about alignment, it's, it's like that is the, the, the harmony, the ability to be able to have. Yeah, this is, and I go at the organizational level, it is alignment between your mission, your vision, your daily activities. Right. Your, your values. What, when does it become a problem? When do you start seeing misalignment? Because we may not necessarily see the alignment, but when do we immediately see the misalignment? Again, conflicting priorities, delayed decision making, things like, well, where did that come from? Why are we doing this? When we started here, you know, when we started suddenly, and I see that a lot, many times with small businesses or even large ones, where you start following the money, where you start following, you know, well, okay, was this opportunity, hey, it's close to what we're doing. So we're going to follow this. And then there's another one that goes to, to that. It goes, oh, we're going to follow that. And little bit by little bit you start to stray away from the core capabilities of your business or the core capabilities. The, the core purpose really of what you're going to do in an individual that may show up where you're doing a lot of things that, you know, you're really not in your strength zone. You're really not in the area where like some things that you already dread which is going to happen. Right. I mean we're not going to like 100% everything that we do, we know there's certain things that we have to do. You know, like even in our daily lives, I mean there's certain things that we need that are good. But the alignment comes in and not only being able to operate in your strength zone, but in the enjoyment that comes in it. Even in the business, the enjoyment of working with people. I mean, think about even in the, you will see in race cars, right? Because I know my leaders, they like to go fast, I like to go all the time and, and busy. And we see that, we see that with great amazing race cars. And they go around and they go in circles and they go super fast. But guess what they're also doing? After a certain number, they stop. What do they do? They get a line or they have to change. You know why? Because it requires stopping. Making sure that although I've done really good, although this is like the top driver, although this is like the top motor, although we've had it perfectly tuned before we started using it, just natural use is going to cause misalignment. So that is another part is in the businesses, the alignment is also the freedom of being able to say that like, hey, we need to pause so that we can consistently get. Because it just happens doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. It doesn't mean like you did something wrong. On the contrary, it's because you're actually doing something. I mean the car that goes out of misalignment because it's actually been driven. So thing is going to happen, but knowing how to align and it's going to go back again to your purpose, it's going to go back again to knowing the people that you're working with, the people that you do work with and going to the performance. What are we doing? You know, and is this what we're to be doing right now at this time? How are we measuring the performance? Because we're in an organization, we're doing something. A business is earning money. That's what you do. I mean money is to a business like oxygen is to the body. There's coming in, there's no, no business really happening. So aligning all of those together creates a beautiful harmony.

Yeah. So now also when we're talking about people and business, you know, we have things like, like you've mentioned already, a little bit like accountability. Like we've got to be able to get things done.

Right.

The company's got to be profitable or we don't have make payroll. Right. So these things are the reality. But then on the, on the other side we have things like kindness and even like empathy. And so I'm wondering, like, how do we balance, how do leaders balance things like empathy and accountability?

Oh, that's the hardest question. That's a million dollar question. Because it is, it is something. And that is why I did develop heart nomics. Because it is about transformation through love and excellence. Love, meaning the people. Right, Love, which is exactly what we talked about. The empathy, the care, the passion, the. All of these emotional things, the human centric part, but also aligned with excellence, which is the processes, the systems, the capabilities, you know, all of these other things that need to be there, the structure to work. So what is going to help me balance these two out? Having great people work together and having great processes and systems. Leadership. Leadership is what helps them both work together. So when we're talking about a leader, we. Yes, what I'm seeing a lot right now is even with the work from home that we tend to communicate with our team more in tasks like hey, this is a task and we have all kinds of apps for that. We have like you know, ClickUp or we may have even a Google Meets or something that is based on task. And we're not taking the time to also fill the other side which was is the human side. Because you can't just be a task oriented person and also expect loyalty from the person. You can't just do task and then also expect that you're going to have the next line of leadership come up just because they did task. There's a whole lot, I see a lot of very high performing subject matter experts being put in leadership positions and really in a sense set up for failure because they don't know these other emotional things. And it is necessary, it is absolutely necessary to be able to know as a leader when you need to be that coaching leader, when you need to be that empathetic leader, you need to be that visionary and also command and conquer. I mean I've trained SWAT teams where you don't, when you're out there, you're in the field, you, there's no like hey, let's talk about this, let's all this that not at all somebody's gonna get hurt. So it's straight command and conquer. So understanding that there's a time for specifically a commanding leader and that's what we're doing. But guess what they're doing after that's done?

Debrief.

Yeah, they're debriefing, they're connecting, they're building that trust. So it's not like that all the time but there are times that that's.

Called for go time.

Yeah, exactly. And there are times for the debrief and there are times for the social aspect. There are times for us to like hey, how are you? You know, we need that all of that is going to help us to perform better. We know that high performing teams have also not only the emotional intelligence but they have the psychological safety. And the psychological safety comes from because they have empathetic leaders, leaders that care. They are also 100. I don't know if you've heard of the Aristotle project by Google but that project specifically talk about psychological safety. Where is that and what is that? Is you know, having the, the support from different levels of leadership within the organization. And how does that show it up? Well, by caring, by actually having those touch points of not just on task on the project but the touch points of like you As a human, as a person, the different needs. Because we know that you again, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that still applies very much in a digital world, in a hybrid world, in a world where we're next to each other, we gotta know each other. We need to do that.

What are your thoughts on like it's not talked a lot about or talked a lot about within our community. But like, you know, I know I'm sure you've read like the whole love languages. You know there's different love languages that. Yeah. That we all sort of like. Like my wife is. Love language is like acts of service. Like she doesn't care about a gift or anything like that. But you clean up the living room or whatever. Now you're speaking her language. Right. So like, like how do those types of things play in to an ability, a leader's ability to sort of really be successful, what they're doing? Like, you know, like. Yeah, I don't even know if I'm asking the question.

Well, no, absolutely no. First of all, it's what you just did. You acknowledging, acknowledging that different people have different languages, that's the first step. And just understanding that and not because, hey, this is the way I do things and just everybody else adapt again. As a servant leader, you adapt to others, doesn't mean that you change who you are, doesn't mean that you change your standards, but you do adapt, you show it. It's like when you are. I mean I have five children. I know, I don't look at, I don't know. You don't have to say anything.

I'm good. You trust.

What can you guys say? So the way I talk to my 5 year old is different than the way I talk to my 21 year old.

Yeah.

Okay. I'm not changing my standard, I'm not changing my love. I'm not changing what my value as a family. I'm just putting it in a way that the 5 year old can understand versus a 21 year old. I'm not changing who I am as a person. I'm not like you, you know, different, different things, all this stuff. No, I'm looking at the capability, the capacity, the understanding of, you know, where they're at so that I can best adapt so that we can all win, so we can win together, so we can get out of the house on time. So I mean like, so you think about that the same way happens in the organizations, right? I mean, why do we need to know the different ways that people communicate. Because first of all, it's a human need. We're seeking to be understood. I mean, you think about that, that it is we, we're seeking to understand ourselves. We're seeking to be understood. It is a human basic need to belong. So when you're talking about a leader that takes the time to understand the languages, the needs of the people, is a leader that is looking to really not just say, hey, this is a place where everyone belongs, but really help experience people on how to belong. Now that is definitely part of the psychological safety. Once I know I belong somewhere, what happens to my productivity goes way up. My. When you talk about accountability, it goes way up. When people say that they have a micromanagement problem, really they have an ownership problem. You know, like the people that are taking ownership for their work, a lot of times that's what's going on. And why are they not taking ownership of their work? Well, because it don't you take care of better the stuff that that is yours, that you belong, that belong to you, than the ones that don't. It's a whole feeding into that need and meeting that need of belonging. So when we're talking about these languages, one is understanding the fact that one acknowledging that there's different languages. The other one, I need to know my language because I cannot give something I don't have. So I can't seek to understand everybody else when I haven't taken the time to understand me. And that part of alignment, we ask a lot from our leaders and but we're not giving the opportunity or the training or the development for our leaders to be able to do that. So understanding, hey, this is my love language. This is, this is how I respond. The better I understand me, the better I'm going to be able to also give understanding. Yeah, when I give understanding, what happens when I seek to understand, then it allows me to adapt, not compromise, but adapt, not compromise with like, you know, who I am or all this stuff, but really to be able to adapt. So the destination that we want to.

Get to love it. I love it. All right, well maybe to wrap things up, I'm wondering if you could, I don't know if there's any sort of final words of wisdom that you have or maybe there's like a small step that we can take, maybe even like today or this week to be better as leaders of people and just better human beings. Really?

Yeah. No, I thank you for asking. I like bite sized stuff, especially in this fast food world. I had to learn a lot of bite size. Just like small things, right? What is. Because the small actions really do compound for me. It starts with belief. And I actually, that's what I call my beat method. It starts with belief. A lot of the things that today is what. And I've had to check it, you know, sometimes we call it a checkup from the neck up. But it understands, is really understanding. What am I believing today? What am I believing for today? What is my belief? Because there's some outcome. How do I know I'm winning? So my. How do I know that at the end of the day I did what I was supposed to do? It starts with my belief. So I call that part of my alignment, which is believe checking in that. Then, you know, how am I interacting with that belief? You know, it's not just a concept and I have it in my head. But how do I. How am I making it come to life? You know, how am I curious about it? How am I racing my curiosity? And it's a good question about that. You know, what am I. What am I believing for today? How am I interacting? How am I engaging with that curiosity? And then what is, you know, what is the action? What is action I can do to live that out in my life? You know, if. How am I. How am I living on that belief? And. And if I do this again with that curiosity in, in. In the action, well, what is a transformation or what am I open to in that? So just starting with the belief and that's today. What am I believing for today? How can I engage with that belief? And what is a small action? How can I live it out? Just however small it could be. It could be like calling somebody. It could be from trying a new shake flavor, you know, going and calling a meeting. But really, you. We do things because we also respect something. And as a transform, what is that result? You know, what am I looking for at the end of the day today? You know, with all the things that we've done, all the people we've met, you know, how will I know that today I did live out my belief. I really did live out the transformation I want to see. So I call it the beat method. It's really quick heartbeat. So believe, engage, act, transform.

Nice. Love it. All right. Hey, Hannah, if people wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

You can go to my website. It's the easiest way. It's Heartnomics. Just like the heart. H E A R T N O m I c s dot com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Hannah Bauer or also on Facebook.

Got it. And we'll have everything linked up in the show notes. So everybody please go connect with Hannah and tell her thanks for coming on the show. So hey, this has been a lot of of fun. I'm glad that we worked through all of the technical gremlins that were after us. So we persevered, right?

Persevere. Absolutely. Awesome.

All right, well, you take care.

Thank you. You too. All right.

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