Les Deck On C Suite Teams

Welcome to Peer Innovation, the podcast with Leo Bottari and me, Randy Cantrell. Building on our previous shows, The Year of the Peer and What Anyone Can Do, we turn our attention to helping business leaders build high-performing teams. We'll talk with a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you and your teams achieve new heights. If you believe there is strength in numbers and that meeting the challenges of the future can only be achieved if we do it together, then join us for the conversation. Joining us today is Les Deck. Since 2005, Les has been a Vistage chair, chairing a group of chief executive officers in Palm Beach County, Florida. Les is an executive coach, works with a full variety of C-level executives, and helps his clients identify and therefore eliminate barriers to growth. We welcome Les to the show.

Les Deck, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you here. We've been talking about this for a little while. And, you know, appreciate you joining us today.

My pleasure. I'm happy to be here, Leo. Thank you for inviting me. I've enjoyed all my conversations with you, having you come to my group. And so I just, I'm really grateful to have this opportunity to talk with you on podcast.

Well, great. You know, one of the things that, and I feel like the timing of this is perfect, basically, because there's so much in flux right now. And, but before we get into some of the questions I have, I'd love for you just maybe, I know Randy did the intro, of course, but anything you want to talk about with regard to your coaching business or your work as a Vistage Chair, just so people in the audience get a chance to know you a little bit and what you care about, what you're about.

Okay.

Well, I've been associated with the Vistage organization for more than 20 years, 16 years as the Chair here in Florida. I was a member for 5 years before that when I was running a company in Chicago as Chief Operating Officer.

That's a long-term set of experience. I've run as many as 4 groups. That isn't what I do now. I have one really successful CE group. Some of those members have been in my organization for 15 years, others about 10, and then a whole variety of folks I try to get a variety of age groupings in my organization, and I think when you came out to see us a while back, you saw that there were some young people as well as some folks who were near the end of their entrepreneurial career. So I enjoy doing that a lot. I enjoy the one-to-ones as much as I do the, the meetings, and As you know, as I told you and Randy reiterated, I'm an executive coach as well. And this is probably an offshoot of my Vistage work. My interest in coaching is really strong and my style is a little bit different. My business model is that I coach entire C-suite teams, CEO, CFO, COO, Everybody with a top-level title. I coach them individually, but I bring them together to do strategy. So I'm with them when they plan their strategy. I have my own strategy planning methodology that I use. It's called the A-Game Strategy. And the reason for that is all the words start with A: assessment, alignment, action, assignment, accountability, and adjustment. And so, works out neat and every team wants to bring their A-game and be the team working with an A-game strategy anyway. So—

You know, I love the idea that you have adopted this business model where you're not just coaching the CFO or just coaching a CFO, but you are coaching the C-suite, both as individuals and as a team really. And tell us how that kind of came about for you in terms of why you found that particularly effective. Other than, I mean, I would imagine you really get to know an organization well when you start seeing it through all of those various lenses.

Well, that's certainly true. And how it came about, Leo, um, it wasn't as if it was my strategy and I worked it out and everything happened, um, ABCD puppy. It was probably more likely that a CEO said to me, can you coach my 'Can you coach my sales manager?' Etc. And I began to do that. And then all of the methodology and all of the theory around it worked itself out. But you're absolutely right about the perspective that you gain as someone who's doing that. I see everything because I'm a fearless question asker and surprisingly, people will respond to questions provided there's trust there. And so I know everything about everybody. I know from the organizational point of view, the pinch points, the people who have a little bit of trouble with each other, the people, I know their fears and I know their dreams. And I know when they need to vent, because they do.

Sure.

And so it gives me a perspective that nobody else has in the organization that makes it possible to just move things very carefully and slowly around. Have you considered this? Are you talking with this person about that? And why wouldn't you bring that directly up? In front of the organization. Those things, those little things often move an entire team to a place that they wouldn't be. So I know things about the organization that the CEO doesn't, probably a lot of things that the CEO doesn't. I know each member of the team better probably than anybody else does because I The initial engagement's probably 6 months or a year in some cases, and then it just goes on and on because people become accustomed to coaching and don't want to leave it.

Well, I can see where when you're really intentional about it, how well you can get to know those players and how important that is. But, you know, and I want to get into some other stuff in a little bit, but I am fascinated by the cross-functional work team because, you know, Harvard Business Review referred refers to about 70% of cross-functional work teams as dysfunctional work teams. And part of, you know, part of one of the things, and I'd love to get your view on this, I guess from my perspective, I think ideally I would love it if a cross-functional work team got together and when they met that they truly had their enterprise hats on, that they weren't the king of marketing or the queen of finance or head of HR or something like that, but they, they, they see the world through that expertise, no question about it, and through that experience. Than that lens, but at the same time, to be trusted in that team to be thinking and making decisions that are about the entire enterprise, not about protecting my budget, protecting my people, protecting my program. First of all, have you seen that? Is it realistic? And if it is, how do you go about getting there? How do you gain that kind of buy-in to do truly what's right for the enterprise and that everyone around the table can trust one another to that end?

Well, you just said the proper word, trust. And of course, I see that. Initially, when I began working with teams, that's evident. There's some reason they called me in in the first place. Things probably aren't going so terribly well. And so I use a program that is a Patrick Lencioni Wiley Publishing Company partnership. It's called The Five Behaviors of a Conscientious Team. And it starts with trust, actually, the fundamental building block of human relationships, whether they're business relationships or interpersonal in any other way, friends, whatever. If you don't trust each other, and in this case, trust means vulnerability, Yes. And so I spend a couple of days with them or even more if it's required. And there are a lot of exercises around this, but they learn to trust each other at a vulnerable level, which means then they're able to say, I screwed this up.

I don't know enough about that.

Can you help me with this?

That's trust. It's not just Trust, yes, I trust him, or I trust her. And then they have to learn conflict resolution because there is conflict and there's going to be. They have to learn to make it productive conflict. In other words, to pull all the personal stuff out of it, whatever happened before is in the past, and now we're talking about how to make things better for the company. So we can go that distance all the way over to the center of a conflict continuum where if you took two steps over in the other direction, you would be, as Patrick Lencioni says, headed toward hell. Things would fall apart. But you can be there for an instant and then step back. And that's that sweet spot where you're sharing everything you need to share, but not getting personal is a place where productive conflict happens. So they need to learn that. And most teams that I begin to deal with don't know that. They're careful so that nothing gets out of hand. And therefore, you know, lots of things that should be shared are not shared. Then there's the whole commitment piece of it. And the teaching there that is challenging is that you can agree with things that you don't totally buy into for the good of the team. And so they have to learn that. And then there's a whole new meaning for accountability. Accountability is a loaded word as we have known it. It means that somebody has the power to hold you accountable, which means they have maybe the power to hurt you, to take your job away from you. And so accountability has been scary for someone who's been being held accountable, and it's really scary for someone whose responsibility it is to hold accountable in that way. But what I teach about accountability is that the only accountability that makes any sense and brings a team forward is peer-to-peer accountability. Wait for the boss, probably not going to happen. Boss is awfully busy and may not want to hold people accountable so much anyway. But the team and its functioning depends upon being able to go to another member of the team and say, 'You committed that this would happen. You know I need this to do my share of it. I don't see that happening. What's up with that?' without the whole deal becoming personal, without animosity. And the final part of it is that the team is working, if they're working properly and as a conscientious team, on shared results. And each other piece of it, you know, I also teach people in the C-suite that when your title starts with C, It means you're the proactive one in that subject matter. You've got to bring it because they hired you because you're expert in that area. So you've got to bring that and bring it to bear on the team result. Not to defend it as one would do in defending turf or defending budget or defending your people, but to understand that if the team doesn't succeed together, it won't succeed as a team. And therefore, the results have to be not what's best for me, not what will advance my career, what's best for the team.

Yeah. Well, the model you shared is a bit of, you know, Five Dysfunctions of a Team turned to the positive and, you know, and a good model, certainly. You can definitely see how that can make such a big difference in how those are— it is the pyramid, they are building blocks, certainly. So you see cross-functional work teams and then you see the teams that report into them and you think about what's happened in the past year. What have you seen both positive and negative with regard to teams and how they've been challenged and how they've responded?

Well, it's often very difficult. Has been very difficult for the year to get people together in the same sense that they could if there wasn't COVID. And even given that, I think I've seen teams do a surprisingly good job of it.

Maybe it's that people actually are able to focus and concentrate on the subject at hand. A Zoom meeting, you know, isn't a water cooler meeting. A Zoom meeting isn't, let's get together in the conference room and kick this around. A Zoom meeting has a subject and a leader, and usually it goes someplace. And then you got work to do. So your Zoom meeting ends, and then nobody's going to walk in your office and interrupt you. So In some ways, I think productivity has been enhanced, and I think that's been at the cost of worker relationship, however, and serendipity, and one idea building on another, because I think that happens, I don't know, more naturally where you can walk into the office, sit down, and say, I'm really vexed about this, or Can you help me think through this problem? Which you're not likely to do on Zoom.

Yeah, no, I can see where you certainly lose the spontaneity. I do think in some cases though, I have seen relationships actually become strengthened by pulling people out of the office, largely because people have gotten a window into each other's homes and each other's lives and have started to know them a little differently than just a coworker who went to a central location. But yeah, there's no question that You know, it's challenging. And certainly a lot of people right now are really, you know, now some have gotten really used to this idea of no commute and not going into the office and, and, and all that for sure. But I think most people I talked to were like, you know, I would like to go in 1 or 2 days a week, but I also think that we've proven ourselves that we can be productive, we can get things done. And oftentimes because of the type of work I do, I'm not in a lot of meetings. I don't engage with a lot of people in many cases throughout the course of a day. So when I need to, I want to come in and be able to do that, and that's really beneficial. But at the same time, if I can do my work from home and I not only can be productive from here, but maybe arguably more productive, then that's okay too.

Certainly it is. I have a client who had a headquarters office full of people, all in cubicles up and down the hall. That cube farm in the center where everybody hangs out behind the upholstered walls. And he took the opportunity when people went home to turn that into a support center. There are people who need to be in the office in his business and people who don't. You have to have a customer service core, they have to have access to their tools, and he made them a better space. Safer space. Obviously, the computer server and everything that goes with the network is there and has to have people to take care of that. But for the most part, those people who are able to work from home in just the way you described, most of them are going to stay at home. There are people that have to come in, but most of them are going to stay at home. And he's going to stay at home, except what was the headquarters office has been turned into a support center. And it has small meeting rooms where you can bring in 2 or 3 other associates, sit down and all meet at the support center and do what you need to do. There are large conference rooms so that you can bring a client in And there's now a portion of it that wasn't before as a training room, and a portion of it that wasn't before is a video studio. And so then there are two, there are two or three rooms where you can do your executive work if you need to. He hasn't even an office there now.

So given that, and with the CEOs that you connect with, that this is not something most CEOs would have chosen for themselves had they not been forced into it. So here they are, and on a dime they've got to pivot, and now all of a sudden you've got all these people in many respects working from home and having to completely adjust how they did this. What do you— are you— do you think that this experiment, if you will, forced as it was, that they or surprised by some of the results? And also, what do you think CEOs learned from this experience for having to go through this pandemic about their people, about their business, about all of that?

Yeah, um, it certainly was a surprise to everybody, and, and you're right, they wouldn't have chosen it. Um, the boomer owner of a $50 million construction company wants everybody historically sitting in front of him or out there where he can go touch them. Suddenly everybody was at home and he couldn't touch anyone. And what they learned from that is you don't have to watch people. What you really need to do is to set expectations with people And they're probably going to do their work, and people enjoy flexibility. And I don't know that there's been a lot of Little League happening while COVID was going on, but they now have the flexibility that they can go pick up the kids at the center or at school or whatever and bring them back, or go to a doctor's appointment without asking.

And I think that's enhanced productivity and really surprised most business owners. There are some situations where it seems to have not, where— and one of those tasks is quoting construction jobs, and I deal with a number of those companies and The people who do the estimating really have to have a lot of tools at their beck and call, and it's just easier for them to work in a place where everything is there. The CAD room is over here, the, all of the historic resources, etc., are over here. Not, that's not all easily shared online, and so their productivity is better when they're there in the office, and people discovered that as well. I think what the business owner discovered is that they could get along being in their own home and setting up an office, or else being the only one in the office where they could get their work done and deal with people online. I think that was a surprise to most of them. I would also say that, well, it's— well, I know of some problems it's solved with respect to space. Those people who will be left at home now won't have to have corporate space to go to, so there's a savings there. And during the the run-up to COVID here, there was, there were places where people were in, you know, otherwise computer closets or storage closets that suddenly had 6 workstations in them. That can't happen anymore.

That's done.

And so I think that's an improvement in the workspace. And well, those are just some of the things that I've noticed about it. Many of them want people to come back. Many of them really want people to come back for the teaming aspects of it. And some of those same ones don't want to go back themselves. Interesting. I think that augurs well to a middle management team and to having little management people that Don't need to be asking the boss all the time.

Yeah, I would think that one of the tricky things— there's a lot of organizations, you know, I've talked about this, that are just by nature, even when everyone's in the office all the time, they're still somehow incredibly siloed. And it only exacerbates the problem now when you've got everyone at home and they have even less of a window into what's happening in the rest of the company. Um, what can companies be doing, you know, not only if they remain largely at home and continue with this way of working. But even when they go back to the office now, should we be thinking about how we finally maybe attack this notion of silos in companies a little more aggressively going forward?

Well, yes, I think so. But I'm a team coach, and I would think so. Yeah, because I think that you can't have a team if everybody's in a silo. Just won't work. I think we need to attack it in a number of ways.

The executive team needs to become a team, and in my experience, also the team 1 operations team needs to become more of a team. And I think that means a lot more intentionality around supporting the mission and the vision with corporate communications, executive-level communications. And that shouldn't be just one way. It should— there should be a conduit so that opinions and desires and wishes float back. If I have learned anything in this this whole thing. It's that we're going to do better if we invite people into a dream where they can actually enhance and achieve their own dreams than we will be giving people tasks to do.

Certainly. You know, one of the things I'd like to ask you about too The Edelman Trust Barometer, when they released their results in January, talked about something called information hygiene. You know, the idea that when people get information, they don't often take the time to vet that information in a way that is thorough enough, or they don't know what sources to trust to make sure they vet that information. And so you end up having misinformation spread about all kinds of things. Trust in media and government. Now, the Edelman Trust Barometer, just for our listeners, some may know what this is, but it's been going on for, I believe, 21 years now in 28 countries across the world. They measure trust, public trust in institutions, business, government, media, and NGOs. Actually, right now, business enjoys the highest level of trust, even, I believe, slightly above NGOs. And of course, media and government are very much suffering, and very much so in the US, in terms of trust. So what's starting to happen is that employees in particular are looking for their CEO to step up because at the same time we've had a pandemic, we've had issues around social justice, we've had a very divisive political climate. We have all these things going on. And it's fascinating how, and you're seeing more and more now with various issues coming to the table, that CEOs, you'll have 400 CEOs signing a letter against this particular thing or for that or something else and wanting to take a stand and actually provide people looking to them for a level of clarity about what's going on in the world, who— somebody we can trust. I'm wondering, first of all, how do you feel about that? And I guess, how— if you— have you talked to any CEOs who've talked about that fact that that is now a bit of an added new role, you know, for them in many respects in terms of their job?

Well, I think the place that I've done the most discussion of that has been in my Vistage group. And you know how that works. There's an issue that comes up and then there's an expansive conversation concerning the issue. And then sometimes I bring things up too. And there's been ample opportunity to bring up social justice. And I have to say that, well, I think people, business owners, most especially CEOs, are growing in this respect.

I'm not so sure that their growth and what we're seeing in terms of the support of social justice by large companies is motivated by anything more than marketing. I know that when I talk with my Vistage members who've been with me for a long time, They know, they know that the change is underway and that they'll have to react to it. A little reluctant to take any big steps there, not quite yet believing that it's the province of ordinary business to step up to that. And, you know, the response comes, you know, of kinds of forms. A lot of them now employ a whole variety of people, and they've truly stepped out, particularly in Florida, because the talent pool is shallow here and growth is high. And in the construction business we have a lot of people from outside the country now. And so they have to respect different genetic descents and racial, race of all kinds. And so they know that. They also know that the attitudes of millennials that they're going to have to hire, they are hiring and will have to continue because that's what's going to be there as boomers retire. Is that they want to see more social justice. They want to be working for a company that gives them something to do that is important and supports the world and makes the world a better place to live in. So they know. It's a little hard for them to get there.

Yeah, I think what's interesting is that Even for those who may not— I'm not going to say 100% believe in it, but who may be more marketing motivated than feel it kind of viscerally a part of them. It's fascinating sometimes when, even if the motivation isn't always ideal, usually the action towards any type of move like that tends to— we, we tend to learn along the way, you know. And, and I think that that can be a positive outcome of that, that even though we may not love the motivation for why something is moving forward, I think once it does move forward and we start, you know, learning through that process, we may discover that, wow, this is, this is really more meaningful than I would have imagined going into it. So, you know, I'm hopeful of that, that even You know, I mean, again, I think motivation notwithstanding, if things are moving in a good direction in that regard and that we can provide a mechanism and a forum for people to gain a fuller understanding of what's going on and why it can make such a difference, I think that's a good thing. Ultimately.

I do too. And I think that's the role of people like us when we're working with clients and peer groups and every place we function.

Absolutely. Les, where can people learn more about you and your work? And, you know, hey, if you're a cross-functional work team and you need someone to really work with you on that, Les is certainly, especially if you're in Florida, you know, Les would certainly be a terrific resource. But yeah, Les, tell us where people can find out more about you and we'll take it from there.

Okay. Well, probably the easiest way to find out a lot about me is to go to my website, which is Les— excuse me, it's lesdeckconsulting.com. And you can contact me at les@lesdeckconsulting.com anytime you want. I'd be happy to hear from anyone. That's great.

You call me on my phone. I have one cell phone. I've got rid of everything else. It's 630-697-0739. I still have my suburban Chicago telephone number, and a lot of people have it, so I'm not going to get rid of it.

Well, you can't make it any easier than that. You got the phone number, you've got Les at lesdeckconsulting.com. Visit the website, send him an email, call him if you are so inclined. And, um, hey, Les, it was just really great having you on the show. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Leo. Nice to be with you.

Thank you for joining us. To subscribe to the podcast and learn more about how you can engage peer innovation for your organization, contact us on the website at peerinnovation.co. Until next week, remember, the power of we begins with you.