Bad Leadership Is Destroying Company Culture Every Day

Do you feel like your workplace is stuck in a bad episode of The Office but with a lot less humor and a lot more cynicism? Turns out, poor employee engagement isn't just a people problem. It's a leadership problem. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs develop skills to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, I sit down with Dr. Roger Girard, author, executive consultant, and leadership maestro to uncover why cynics, apathetics, and naysayers are hijacking your workplace culture and what you as a leader can do to take the wheel back and start getting in control. I have one simple request. If there's somebody in your circle who could benefit from the insights that we're sharing with you today, please do them a favor and pass along the episode. That way, you get to share the knowledge that you're gaining today and help make them better. I'm sure they're going to thank you if you do. You know, I know as a leader, you want high-performing teams. But here's the reality check. If you've got employees who are just going through the motions, they're cynical, they're disengaged, or they're quietly quitting, it's not just frustrating but it's bleeding your business dry. Gallup tells us that disengaged employees cost companies billions and billions of dollars every year in lost productivity. Disengagement isn't an employee issue. It's a leadership issue. And it doesn't matter if you've got a ping pong table in the break room or you've got free kombucha on tap. If you're not addressing the root cause, you're stuck. And you got to do something more. And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, are you unintentionally cultivating a workplace culture where your employees feel that they're undervalued, uninspired, and disconnected? I know a lot of people go, oh no, no, no, that's not me. That's not me. But how do you know? I'd love for you to drop your thoughts and questions and any, oh my God, this is me moments in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you. And if you're tuning in live, We welcome your comments and your questions as well. So, feel free to type them in into the comment box. We will address them throughout the show. As I mentioned, today's guest is a powerhouse in leadership and organizational development with over 5 decades of experience helping businesses transform their cultures and unlocking their full potential within their teams. Dr. Roger Girard is not just a consultant. He's a trusted guide for executives and boards to help navigate the complexities, of strategic planning, process improvement, and management development. As the former Chief Learning Officer for ThedaCare, he spent 23 years driving measurable change in healthcare. And his work has also made a lasting impact in manufacturing and service industries across the country. Dr. Girard is the author of Lead with Purpose: Reignite Passion and Engagement for Professionals in Crisis, a must-read for leaders ready to tackle this disengagement head-on. Roger, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.

Well, thank you, Marc. I love being here and I hope we'll have a great conversation today.

I don't hope it. I know it.

All right.

So, let's start off with how do you serve your clients? Who are your clients? How do you serve them?

My clients tend to be primarily in the healthcare industry. Although, I've worked with teacher groups. I've worked with manufacturing. I've worked with emergency rescue. I've worked with a number of kinds of businesses. I've worked with both large and small businesses, a number of family-owned small businesses. So, there's a whole range of activity and a range of cultural differences that come into play when you have a diverse kind of population of clients like that. My clients come from a couple of places. They come from those folks who have heard me address in conferences. They come from former colleagues who have gone on to be people I've trained who've gone on to be CEOs and business owners themselves. Some of it is people have bought my books and said, hey, I want to get to know that guy. And so, I mean, there's a lot of ways that happens.

Yeah, excellent.

I do a lot of blogging on LinkedIn. And so, there's There's a number of venues where people get to know what I'm talking about and what we're doing here.

Okay. So, we're going to start off by saying, how can people get in touch with you if they want to connect with you?

Oh, just go to my website, rogergerard.com. All the information's out there. My bio, my blogs, my book links. It's all out there, rogergerard.com.

Terrific, terrific. We have talked a lot about disengagement on this show. I mean, even all the fads around disengagement, things like Quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, coffee badging. I'm not quite sure what's next. I'm thinking that maybe employees replacing themselves with blow-up replicas and calling it something like cubicle decoys or inflatable attendants. I'm not quite sure. But these are ongoing things. So, what's going on in our workplaces?

Wow! That's a very short question with a very long answer.

But I never ask small questions.

I get that. What's going on in the workplace is a product of cultural evolution on the grand scale of that word culture. There are many things happening in society that are creating a shift in how people view work, how people view themselves within the workplace, how people interact and relate with one another. Just a small example of that has been the advent of high technology in the workplace that allow to do a lot of work at home. And as you start thinking about how the larger social culture affects the business culture, you start seeing shifts in how people interact and relate with one another. Disengagement happens when people feel undervalued. It happens when people do not feel like they're living their purpose. All of us at some level know that in life we have to have some reason for being, some reason for engaging in that life with other people. It can be small or it can be big, but you have to have some kind of reason in order to get up in the morning and do the things that we do every day. That's the starting point. And when people become disengaged, they're feeling like their purpose is not being recognized.

Right.

They feel like their purpose is not being addressed either by them or by the people around them who have to support that purpose. So, that's a very quick answer to a question that has a lot of texture to it.

Hmm.

But I think it has to do with changes that are happening in the larger social culture. The business culture itself is changing as well. I've been deeply involved over the years in something called lean technology, where you attempt to take the unnecessary work out of the workflow and really home in on those things that are value-added in the work. If that's poorly implemented, it creates a great deal of trauma in the culture. And it creates a great deal of a sense that lean is mean and it's no longer consistent with our corporate values. Nothing be further from the truth if it's implemented well.

Right.

But unfortunately, in many instances, it's not implemented well. It's implemented for the wrong reasons. One of the things that I focus on is in our culture, the mistakes that leaders tend to make as they're trying to lead people. And those mistakes happen in businesses that are big and businesses that are small. They happen in small departments or very large corporations. Mistake number 1, failure to listen. If, if as a leader, we do not come to the workplace ready to listen with wide-open ears and ready to have our position influenced by what we hear, we're probably not going to have a good flow of communication and understanding between ourselves and the people doing the daily work.

We Yeah.

Have to be able to listen. And I'm talking about something that's active, not passive. I'm talking about something where, when I hear something, when I, when I hear a nurse say, we don't have enough blood pressure cuffs on the unit, we don't have enough pillows, I'm constantly running up and down stairwells finding pillows for my patients. When we hear stuff like that, we have to be so active in that, that we can't leave the room without taking some action immediately to solve that problem. Those are very inexpensive problems to solve. And I can do it in less than an hour. Why would I not?

Would it be fair to say— sorry. Would it be fair to say that sometimes leaders will look at that and just think, ah, here I have another whiny-ass crybaby employee. Doesn't she know I have more important things to worry about?

Well, I won't be that hard on the leaders. But yes, that leader who's feeling that way may be burdened by their own leadership. Maybe put under a set of constraints or goals that they don't have any control over by the board or by the senior executive of the organization. So, this is— it all rolls downhill. You know what I mean?

Sure.

Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, that supervising manager doesn't have the control they need to live their purpose either. So, I'm very forgiving of that at the lower levels of management because now it makes me want to go higher. What's going on that's causing that result? And typically, what I find in the larger organizations is it usually starts at the top. And it's unfortunate. And I've had to say to many CEOs, look in the mirror because you're the problem.

Yeah, it's interesting because I've been recently talking to groups about how we should get away from this idea that we're a big happy family in our workplaces to that I'm really pushing people to think about their workplaces being communities. And within the communities, you have micro-communities. You can have a shift. You can have a department. And it's interesting because sometimes I see some departments within kind of dysfunctional workplaces really thrive. But they thrive at the cost of everybody else looking at them going, I don't know what makes them so darn special. Like, what's wrong with them that they're having such a good time at work and my department sucks, right? So, are there any misconceptions and myths that leaders have about disengaged employees and what their role is in the issue? Because I see a lot of finger-pointing.

Well, it's blame and shame. And we've got to get rid of it. But it starts with something that you said very quickly in the beginning of that question. We want it to be one happy family. No, we don't. Who said that?

Families are dysfunctional. Nobody wants Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving, let alone at work.

Workplaces are not families. Workplaces are communities of professionals who come together to work together for common intentions. Now, if you want to use the word community, I'll go there with you. I'm a community builder. And when you're building communities of workers, you're building groups of people who come together with different disciplines. And we respect one another's disciplines. There has to be a lot of respect. I see leaders trying to use the family metaphor all the time. And it falls on deaf ears. In fact, it creates cynicism in the workplace because people know. We're not a family. Worse, I've seen leaders, executives come into the workplace saying, hey, I want you to act like an owner. They're not owners unless you've given them stock. Unless you put them on your board of directors, they are not owners. And so, don't create that expectation. It's dumb.

Yeah, there is a lot of work and a lot of stuff being done around this idea of intrapreneurship. Where people are trying to push that kind of. But again, to your point, if you're not compensating people and they're not getting the return on their time and work investment, then that's just lip service.

Yeah, there's another thing going on here that I want to point at in terms of the 2 questions that you've asked so far. We are in a day and age right now where work is being increasingly standardized. And, you know, I plead guilty in terms of my work with Lean Enterprise work in the sense that you have to standardize the work in order to understand the perfect process or ideal workflow. But once you standardize it, you have to be willing to deal with variation that's going to happen within that standardization. We are working with highly trained professionals in today's workforce. Even the people in the stockroom or the people in the cleaning business, the folks who are doing the everyday maintenance of the organization are still working with higher technologies. And as we understand that level of professionalism, we have to understand that these people are highly trained.

Mm-hmm.

And in their training, they received guidelines, certificates, licenses. They were tested and proven to understand their professions. And then, we as leaders come in and we say, yeah, that's nice. But we really want you to do this. And we want you to take this shortcut because we don't have time, or we don't have the money, or whatever. And it totally violates professional standards. At a very subtle level sometimes, a very direct level other times. And it demoralizes the worker. It demoralizes that professional. When you become a professional, you expect to be able to exercise judgment. Whether you're a carpenter, heat and air conditioning guy, whether you're a plumber, you get to exercise judgment about what's the best way to solve this problem or fix this unit. And when we start taking judgment out of the professional's hands, we demoralize them. Apply that to the physician. Apply that to the law enforcement officer. Apply that to the teacher in the classroom. And when we take away their judgment, we are taking away the heart of why they became a professional.

And a lot of times, the reason why we hired them in the first place. They had all these years of experience as professionals.

Yes.

And they've got the certificate that we insisted that they needed. And they got the education we insisted they needed. And then, we turn around and then, we quash whatever innovation or whatever steps they take to be proactive.

I talked to a high school teacher and this was just eye-opening. She took me into her classroom. I wanted to see how things worked. And she had this bank of telephones, people's handheld cell phones on the wall. I said, what is that? She says, that's our phone corral. I have to police everyone that comes in this room and make sure they put their phone there because we cannot be disturbed during the classroom. She's a cop now. Who made her a cop? That's not part of the teaching drill. That's not what she was trained to do. Then she shows me the script for the course curriculum that she has to teach. I said, who wrote this script? She said, it was given to me. She's not able to depart from that script. So now you have a teacher who's being asked to be a disciplinarian, and she has to teach from a script that she didn't write, and she's got a range of capabilities in her classroom— people who are way ahead of the game, people who are way behind the game— and she can't individuate the training for these people. She has to follow the script. Well, who wants to teach in that job?

Who wants to learn in that environment?

Exactly. I asked her, I said, when was the last time a school board member came and sat in on your class? She said, that's never happened here. Well, if I'm going to be on a school board, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go sit in on the teachers' classrooms, and I want to see what's going on. What's going on with school board members? I mean, there's so many examples of this in the real world of work where the leadership aren't— they don't really understand what's going on at the professional level. They really don't get it.

Yeah, yeah. And so, there's that distance as well. And that also creates the apathy that you were talking about earlier about, if I can't exude this, then I'm just going to come in, punch the clock, and go home.

Yeah, yeah. So suddenly, engagement's out the window. They become apathetic. They become naysayers. They start organizing around their own comfort instead of the intentions of the profession.

When you've in your experience seen kind of these people kind of taking a step into this realm of apathy and naysaying and so on, how does that attitude spread? Like, does it just become a one-off or does it actually spread like a virus?

Oh no, no, no, no. It is contagious as all get-out.

Yeah.

But people are aware of it among themselves.

Right.

I was working with a group, highly professionally trained group, in one environment I was in. These were all probably doctoral-level people. And there were 40 or 45 people in the conference room where I was doing a bit of a focus group. Process. And 2 or 3 people were standing in the back of the room just shaking their heads and talking among themselves and giggling and laughing. So I stopped the action and I asked them if there was something they wanted to share with the group because it was distracting. Um, they, they said, not really, and we don't think much is going to come of this, and we're just cynics anyway. And they gave me a whole battery of silly excuses for their behavior. And I, I said, fine, you know, if, if you really don't want to be here Go back to work. I will contact your boss. I'll let them know that I dismissed you. And they walked out of the room, and they waved to everybody on the way out of the room, and they laughed about it. And after the door closed behind them, the rest of the group applauded. Not one leader in the organization had ever done that before and called people on their bad behavior. Later on, I was visited by their vice president who came to me and said, I just got a complaint on how you handled the situation in that room. I was accused of being abusive to them by showcasing their bad behavior.

Right.

I said, I told him exactly what happened. And he started laughing. He said, don't worry about it. If you hadn't done it, I was about to. I have fired all 3 of them.

Yeah, it really is interesting because these kind of toxic behaviors and toxic environment contributors, when you do get rid of it, I talk about that in my book. That was so interesting when I had a toxic employee. When we got rid of them, people were like, oh, thank God! Did you know what she did? Do you remember that? And it's like, why did you say anything? It's like, well, I didn't want to say anything because I didn't want to get her in trouble. And I certainly didn't want to get in trouble, right? But it was absolutely amazing. It's like when you deal with the problem, all of a sudden, you kind of alleviate all this stress on your teams. And everybody for the first time can feel like they breathe.

Yeah. And what's sad is that you can prevent it in the first place. What's sad is that you don't have to have that in your environment. But it means setting the proper stage out of the gate. And a new leader coming into position, for instance, really needs to do a bit of homework around who's who and who are going to be the allies in the group and who are going to be the adversaries in the group. And you really have to spend a few days, maybe a few weeks, really understanding who the people are and what they're about. And then, you have to make some choices about who you're going to place the burden of the responsibilities on and who you're going to start taking out of the game. That's harsh. But that's real world. That's if you want a productive, constructive culture, you've got to surround yourself with people who want the same thing. You have to.

Yeah.

And sometimes, you have to go to people and say, you know what? Your behaviors are not the kinds of behaviors that are going to keep you in this position. And you're the one that can make the change. And if you're unwilling to make the change, you tell me now. And I'll help you out of here. I'll turn human resources into a job placement department. But I will help you out of here because we don't want that behavior here. You decide. And if you decide—

I invite you to seek your happiness elsewhere.

Absolutely. And you know what? I have had people come back to me later and thank me for that.

Yes, I've done the same thing.

It's like, yeah, I did the right thing. I brought them to a point of hard decision-making that they should have been at years ago.

Yeah.

Sometimes, doing this kind of leadership work isn't the most fun in the world. But it's part of it. You have to be able to have those hard conversations. You can prevent cynicism and apathy. But like I said a little while ago, it all starts with listening.

Yes.

You have to come into the environment willing to listen and be influenced. And the more people see that you've taken their ideas and incorporated them into your own, the more you're going to have buy-in.

Yeah.

I have leaders coming to me frequently saying, there's this change I want to make and I want staff buy-in on that change. Well, it's too late. If you want buy-in, you have to be willing to co-author it.

Yes.

Yeah. Let's co-author it. I had an executive who wanted me to come in and do a proposal to create Buy-in among his staff about the closure of their plant and moving it to another state. And he had already decided what's going to happen and how it's going to happen. I listened and I suggested the possibility that maybe he had to start over and bring a group of people together so that they could talk about this together and figure out the best possible plan to make this happen. And maybe even bring in some community members because it was going to affect the community too. He listened to me, thought about it for 30 seconds and said, no, that's not going to happen. I've already decided how it's going to happen. I declined to do the work. I won't do that work.

Yeah, it's interesting because it's coming down to this idea that we'd actually talked about before we actually went live. We were talking about this whole idea that there are still carrot and sticking people who very much have their ego defined as a leader. And when we come back, I'd like to talk about some more steps because you've mentioned 2 now. Which is to listen and to incorporate and bring the team together. And so, when we come back, I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into some solutions.

Sure!

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Welcome back! I am here with Roger Girard and we're having a great conversation about this idea about engagement. Dr. Girard, you have written a book. You want to tell us a little bit about that book?

Yeah, the book is called Lead with Purpose: Reigniting Passion and Engagement Among Professionals in Crisis. I put this book together as an aftermath to research that I did on my previous book called Owning the Room. Owning the Room was about leadership in general and all the basic tenets of being an outstanding high-performing leader. As I did the research for that book, I became very engrossed in how disengaged and demoralized many people in leadership and in the different professions were. And I wanted to know why. And so, I asked. And when you ask people, they tell you. All of that became raw material for this book, Lead with Purpose. And in this book, I describe what happens when professionals aren't treated well. And how that affects not only those professionals but how it affects the work, how it affects the business, how it affects everything. Because engagement is— disengagement is expensive. It's a business proposition. And highly engaged people will work their hearts and souls off for the business because it's a source of purpose. Disengaged people, not so much. Not so much. And you can't trust that they're going to do much to help you. We talked earlier in the earlier segment about listening and listening with respect, listening with a willingness to have your position influenced, and then acting on that, doing something significant to demonstrate that you've listened. You have to do that. If you haven't demonstrated that you heard what was said, Through meaningful action, you're not going to be trusted. It's not going to happen. A second, we talked about over-standardization. We have to be willing to allow people to exercise judgment, particularly those professionals who are licensed or certified to practice the professions they're in. And remember, they're all practices. Leadership is a practice.

Hmm.

Practice means we're going to keep doing it over and over again until we get it right. When we're practicing, we're learning. Everybody is in a learning mode in these different businesses. And that should be exciting. One of the things that I absolutely insist on when I'm working with clients and when I was working in the actual environment itself is an absolute elimination of blame and shame. Has to be eliminated. Can't be tolerated at all. Ever. That's hard.

So, can you define that behavior?

Yeah, yeah.

Because I want people to be able to connect with it. When you say blame and shame, people will turn around and go, no, no, that's not me.

But when you define it— Yeah, right. I spent in my 50-year career, I spent about 10 of those years in the human resources chair. And it wasn't unusual for people to come into my office and say, we got this huge problem in my department and it's so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so. Those folks aren't just cooperating, and somebody needs to do something about that. Well, early in my career, I was tempted to go into that environment, find the problem, and try to deal with it. I learned very rapidly that that never works. So, I took a new experimental approach. When somebody came into my office with those kinds of concerns, my first question was, have you confronted that person yourself? And usually, the answer is no. Well, then it's not my job to fix something that you should be fixing yourself. And rather than coming in and blaming others and shaming others with me, perhaps you need to step up and have that conversation with your colleague. If they've already done that unsuccessfully, then my next question is, would you be comfortable if I brought that person in and the 3 of us could have that conversation together? A lot of times, people will say, sure, let's do it. That's the beginning of a solution. Sometimes, they say, no, I want— I don't want to do that. Well then, why are you engaging me? Why are you asking me to fix something you're not willing to address yourself? When you do that 2 or 3 or 4 times, what happens is the word gets out. This guy means it. The word's going to get out that I can't pass this off to somebody else. I have to deal with the issues that are affecting me myself. That's part of professional behavior. You should. If you have professional standards, you should be able to confront those people who are behaving outside of the profession. That's all part of it. When it becomes— there are certain issues that I would have to get involved in just because of the nature of the issue. Things like sexual harassment or bullying. Sometimes, you can't expect people to go deal with that issue by themselves. And you have to understand that. But you have to create this sense in the organization that blame and shame is totally unacceptable. We're not going to do that anymore. That's childish behavior. That's playground behavior in the middle school. You're not going to do that here.

And it causes all sorts of, you know, because it forces people to run into hearsay mode, right? When people aren't, you know, and it could be that as the HR person, A manager's coming to you and saying, oh, I have this really big problem. It's like, do you talk? Maybe they don't have the skills for it. So maybe somewhere along the way, it's about offering coaching to be able to say, okay, why don't we sit down together and let's problem solve this together? Because I've seen a lot of times where somebody goes to talk to a manager about another employee. Then, they sit down with the employee and it's all taken out of context. And the employee's blindsided.

Sure.

This level of distrust, it just gets set on fire that now nobody can trust what you say. Nobody can trust what anybody else says. And of course, the person who came to you in the first place with a problem, they don't trust that you're going to be able to handle it properly now either.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I've had many, many situations where the reality is people aren't trained in negotiating skills. They're not trained in communication Right. They're not trained how to confront in a positive way when things are going wrong. And so, sometimes you have to take those people aside and say, let's role-play this for a minute. You want to go talk to that person that you're having problems with? Let's role-play it with me. I'll be happy to be that role player with you. But then, you're going to have to go do it yourself. I'm trying to raise the level of competency among the professionals themselves.

Mm-hmm.

And in a highly engaged environment, people want to do that. If you have the pleasure of having a very highly engaged environment, they don't go to the boss for help. They figure it out themselves. It's just different. It's a very different kind of framework. It takes time to build that.

Yeah.

Community building is a time-intensive process. But once you have it, it really works. I had a situation in one environment where a vice president and chief nursing officer, 2 different people, were attempting to facilitate a conversation in a very troubled group of nurses in a hospital environment. And I had heard the meeting was going to take place. So, I came in late and sat in the back of the room while I observed the focus group. And one of the executives at the front of the room was asking questions and trying to solicit feedback from the group. And nobody was saying a word. They just weren't talking.

Hmm.

And regardless of what the question was, nobody sat there and was willing to raise their hand and say this. Let me tell you my opinion. So, I asked from the back of the room, is there something here that you would like my help with? And the executive, not the nursing officer, but the other executive said, well, come on and take your best shot. So, I did. I went to the front of the room and I put on the flip chart 3 things. What are the most effective things in our culture around here that help you do your job? What are the things that are most irritating to you, the etcetera and headaches in your job that are getting in the way of being wildly successful? And what else are you pondering? And I broke them into about 5 groups of 3 or 4 people. And I said, brainstorm this for 20 minutes. And then, I'm going to come in and hear reports. And I'm taking your vice presidents out of here while you have these conversations. So, that's what we did.

Hmm.

The room went nuts. They had all kinds of ideas.

Because it went from being an inquisition to being contribution, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And it was, and it was in a sense confidential because the stuff was on flip charts and nobody knew where it came from. Right. Uh, and, and we were asking questions that they had answers to, but nobody was willing to be put in the spotlight. If you want community, if you want engagement, You have to create safety.

Yes.

Otherwise, you've got blame and shame. Otherwise—

It's so interesting that you say that because I was in a brainstorming session. And the exec encouraged everybody to speak their mind and assured them that this was a safe space. But the minute one person opened, he became instantly defensive, shot down the idea. And everybody shut up. And it's like, so a safe space is not defined because we say it is.

Correct.

A safe space is a safe space because we proved it is.

People do not believe your words. They believe your behavior.

Yeah.

And someday, I'm going to write a book where the opening chapter is, People Lie. When a leader does what you just described, it's a lie. And that's how it's felt. Even if the leader doesn't feel like they're lying, that's how it's felt.

I don't think that was the intent.

No.

But that was the effect.

Exactly right.

This is really fascinating, Gerard. Can you remind everybody one more time how to get in touch with you just in case somebody says, how do I do this?

It's my website, rogergerard.com, and everything's out there. My email, my blogs, my book links, everything's out there.

I love that. A lot of what we've talked about really revolves around trust. It really revolves around leadership humility. What are some practical ways that leaders can rebuild the trust and create this new connection with disengaged I'm going to give you an answer to that on 2 levels.

The first level is this word loyalty. I want to talk about that for a minute.

Sure.

And the second level is 5 promises that I invite all leaders to make and keep. The 5 promises will take you to what you're asking for. But you can't make those promises until you talk about this thing called loyalty. It's easy for people in the executive roles to say, we want to build a culture where people are loyal to the organization and loyal to their leadership. I get that. I understand it as an executive. I understand it as early in my career not being an executive and being asked to be loyal to the company. Loyalty is a transaction. It's a two-way street. I will be loyal to you if you're loyal to me. And it means keeping promises, making promises and keeping them. And it means following through when things need to be done. It's just there are so many dimensions to this. But in quick understandings, loyalty is transactional and it has to be reciprocal. Now, think about that in terms of what happens in a business when things get tight. One of the first things I ask when I hear people expect loyalty from their staff is, have you ever had a layoff here? If you've had a layoff, how does that compute? Because we talk about employees being our most important asset. Many companies have language like that in their core values. Employees are our most important asset. And then, they lay people off as soon as things go south. You don't discharge assets when things go south. That's a liability message. So, I really struggle with that. I was part of an organization and one of the leaders in this process when we sold off a significant portion of our business to another organization. And they didn't buy the employees. They only bought the files and they only bought the products. And what happened is we ended up with 250 people that we had to find a place for in an organization where we had committed ourselves to a no-layoff philosophy. We found over 4 months a place for literally every one of those people, most of them in the organization and several of them in other organizations, including our competitors. But everybody was kept whole during the entire time. Everybody spoke well of us when we did that, including those who left the organization. That's what loyalty means. What happens in most businesses is not loyalty. So, that's a context. If you want Engagement. And I tell leaders this all the time. Engagement's easy. It's really easy to understand. It's really easy to create. The problem is we don't keep our promises. Let me tell you what the promises have to be. Promise number 1, I will listen to you with respect and I will take your input seriously. Period. If I disagree with you, I'll tell you. And I'll tell you why, but I will take your input seriously. Promise number 2, I will help you learn and grow in your professional practice as you do your professional work. I want you to learn. I want you to stay up to standard. I want you to go beyond standard and learn how to be an outstanding professional. That helps you and it helps me and it helps the business. So I'll help you learn and grow. Promise number 3. I will help you in that practice to be wildly successful. It's my job as your leader to remove obstacles. It's my job to make sure you have what you need to be successful. It's my job to make sure that you can practice that profession in an environment that's safe and supportive so that you can do your work. Promise number 4. I will make sure that you're compensated competitively. And this is one of the tough ones here. There are a lot of definitions of what constitutes competitive pay. If you ask people in HR, they might tell you that competitive pay is at least 50% comp ratio, which means you're at the 50 percentile mark in terms of how you're compensating staff. I disagree with that. By the time HR gets Any kind of legitimate salary information or wage information, it's usually about 6 months to a year old. It's dated. And so, if you're anchoring your compensation, your competitive compensation around that data, you're probably already behind the data by about 5 percentile. So, I urge employers to go to the 60th percentile. comp ratio, sometimes the 65th. But make sure that your professionals are highly compensated because they're going to be shopping. Money matters. And if they're shopping, if they're looking at your competitor, and you've spent all this time engaging them and training them, all that talent's going to go to your competitor. If you want to keep them, you have to compensate them at a level where they feel Pride and respected and valued. Promise number 5. This one's tough. I'll have your back when things go south. Things are going to go south. Not all of our plans are going to be successful. Not everything is going to work the way we expect it to work. There are going to be glitches. There are going to be people outside of our organization that are going to blame us for doing shoddy work. Nobody is immune from that. When things go south, I'll have your back because that's what professionals do. If you make those 5 promises, people aren't going to want to leave. And it's been my experience that people who have left when those promises are made want to come back within a year.

Yes. And again, Being in my background in hospitality, those have kind of been my mantra when I go into new properties. You know, people— it's funny because I'll step in and people will say, oh, this guy's different. The people who've been getting away with bad behaviors all of a sudden go, oh, I'm not going to get away with what I used to get away with. And so, I quit.

Right.

But then, what's interesting is 6 months in, 8 months in, there's a knock on the door and they're like, yeah, You know, when you first came in, I didn't know where you're going. But now, people are, can I please come back? It's like, absolutely not.

That's right.

But it's really interesting because part of the challenge with the 5 promises is you have to create an environment where every single day, you're keeping those promises. The minute you go back on any one of those, especially the one that says, I will have your back, That has an understanding that I've hired people with a capacity that I filtered through when I brought them on board. I know these people are capable. And I know that they're never ever going to wake up in the beginning of the day and say, today, I'm just going to shag the dog. Today, I'm not going to do my very best. Today, I'm just going to burn as much time as I can because nobody wakes up thinking that. No, they don't. When you have this promise about, I'm going to have your back, it's recognizing the fact that you hired somebody who's got capacity and capabilities. And all you're turning around is going, you know what? We might have made a mistake. But it's not a malicious thing. And I think a lot of times, leaders will look at mistakes and go, oh, I don't know how they could screw me like this. Right? Because they forgot to put a widget in or they forgot whatever, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's very interesting.

It is interesting. You know, back to larger societal context here for a minute. Think about all of these ideas and these promises within an environment that has been polarized and segmented would be the best words I could come up with in describing it. We have a lot of people working at home now. And suddenly, they're being asked to come back into the workplace. This is tough. This is hard.

Yeah.

And I've been saying probably for the better part of 2 and a half years now, you got to be willing to come back. You got to be willing to bring them back because a lot of decisions, particularly in the leadership ranks, a lot of decisions are made in the coffee room. A lot of decisions are made by people who are together in a boardroom or a conference room. And if you're in California and the business is in Michigan, you got a problem. You're not going to be part of those decisions. You're not going to be an active participant. And you might be on Zoom. You might be a face on a screen. But you're not as present as the 6 people sitting around the table arguing with one another. And working out the final solution in a way that makes sense. Eyeball to eyeball, belly button to belly button. We're all in this together. You're in California.

It always reminds me. It reminds me of the old Friends episode where Rachel took up smoking because she found out every time her colleagues went out for a smoke, when they came back, they had made decisions and decided things and everything. And so then, she went out and pretended that she could smoke with them because she felt she was being left out of the loop. So, that's something similar, right? I like to call it creative collision space. And we have to figure out if you do have remote employees, we have to figure out what can become that creative collision space that we can get people tripping over.

Oh yeah, I have a son. One of my sons-in-laws, I've got 3 of these guys. One of my sons-in-laws, he works in technology for a big tech company. And he has a staff of about 30 people. And they're all over the country. There's no way he can get them in one room, and there's no way he can call them all back. Now, they have houses, and they have apartments, and they have families, and nothing's— he's not going to change that. So he now has to find creative ways to establish some kind of community that's remote. That's hard. That is very hard.

Yeah.

But he'll do it. He'll find a way to make that happen, and these promises will work for him too.

If it's not impossible, what will it take? Right? That's the mindset we have to adopt. If it's not impossible, what will it take? This has been a great discussion. Hey, when we come back, I'd like to talk about some cautionaries and pitfalls. One of my fears is people taking information and go, oh, let's try this for a month. And they band-aid something together which never sticks. And so, I'd like to talk about some cautionaries and pitfalls. And we'll get to that right after this. Perfect!

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We are having a great discussion and I hope you're getting a ton of value from it today. As you can tell from our discussion, you can tell that Roger and I are deeply dedicated to supporting business leaders just like you. So, if you're in the midst of planning a leadership retreat, an industry conference, or you're looking for some amazing content, or you Just need some expert guidance, we're just a message away. Our contact information is down below. Feel free to reach out for a conversation about your unique challenges or to discuss how we can collaborate to help you achieve your goals. Gerard, leaders creating culture proactively is really kind of this idea that we've been playing that we do this with Again, my biggest fear is that people will come across and go, oh, I got the 5 leadership questions now, the 5 promises. I'm going to jot them down and I'm going to— and I'm just going to make it happen. What are some cautionaries we should be aware of? What are the pitfalls?

Yeah, there are a couple that I'll be pretty direct about. Cautionary number 1, it's tough to do this from the middle. A lot of your listeners are likely not necessarily the business owners, but they might be in the middle management ranks. They might be in the senior management ranks of a business that reporting to an owner. It's tough to do some of this stuff from the middle. I've had the experience with somebody in my line of work who attempted to take these kinds of messages and implement them without the owner understanding what was going on and why it was happening. And the owner had a very different management style. That can be career-threatening territory. If you're going to start working in these kinds of methodologies, to cultivate employee awareness and employee buy-in to the mission and vision of the organization and create a very supportive culture for those who are in alignment with that, you better tell the boss first. And you better invite the boss to co-author that with you so that you're not alone in this process. I can't Don't undervalue, underestimate, under-exercise the need to co-author this stuff with people who have the power to help you be successful. That's incredibly important. So, that's cautionary number 1. Cautionary number 2 is kind of do the same thing with your peers. If you're in an organization where you're among 8 or 10 or 15 other people at the same level you are in the organization. There is a value in your doing some what I call silent networking. One-on-one meetings with people just kind of kicking the can around a little bit to see what they're doing and to share what you're thinking of doing and seeing if you get energy from that. And if they get energy from that, they might give you some cautionaries that you have to pay attention to. If you're going to be successful at this, especially people who've been around longer than you have. I would take that wisdom, and I would try to incorporate it into the work that I'm doing. Cautionary number 3, you should never be in a hurry to do this. Within the ThedaCare organization, as we were implementing significant cultural shifts around Lean Enterprise work in the organization, in the community building around self-sustaining management teams. We had people come in, in our reports on Friday mornings, with people from all over the area, from different businesses, and people from other countries would come in and watch what we're doing. And I would be in the back of the room watching these reports and listening to these people who came in as visitors. And I had one executive come to me during the presentation. We're going to do this too. And we're not going to take 5 years. We're going to get it done in 2. Well, good luck with that. But cultural change takes time. It takes 5, 6, 7 years if nothing else changes. And frankly, all bets are off because things change over time. And our cultural revolution took 11 years. It wasn't done in 2 years or even 5 years. It was done in 11. And even after 11, we had to keep adjusting and tweaking and modifying. And this isn't a perfect process. It's a dynamic process. So, don't allow testosterone to get in your way. There you go. It's not about getting it done in 2 years.

I love that. Roger, this has been such a great conversation. Do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today? Anything we missed?

Yeah, there's one thing.

What's that?

At the end of each chapter in my book, I have a set of challenges. And then, I have a 2-step dance. The 2-step dance is go and see and then go and do. As a leader, it's your job to get out of your office and go and see what's going on. If you don't go and see what's going on, you are not going to know what's going on. And when you do that, don't go out there to fix problems. If you do that, you'll fail. Go out there to know what's going on so that you can provide resources so that they fix their own problems.

Mm-hmm.

That's your job. You want to empower a workforce to fix their own problems. That's the go and do part. Give them the wherewithal to fix their own problems. Go and see. Go and do.

Thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a brilliant conversation. I've enjoyed, like thoroughly enjoyed this. Last time, I'm going to ask you this question. How can people get in touch with you?

rogergerard.com and it's all out there. My blogs, my email, my links to my books. Some of my photographs are out there if you look at my blog. So, I have a passion for photography and I've built that into my work.

Love that! Roger, thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks, Marc. I appreciate it. This was fun.

Why don't you let me know if this was of value to you? As always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, feel free to book time on my online calendar. The link is in the show notes. It's the one that's marked Meet With It would be my absolute honor to be of service. And while you're at it, why don't you go ahead, leave a comment or a review about this episode? I'd love to get your feedback. Was this of value to you? And of course, if you haven't done so yet, please make sure that you're subscribed to this podcast. That way, you get notification when I bring great experts like Dr. Roger Girard each and every week. We talk about new topics, different aspects of leadership. business operations, and operational excellence. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.