Helping Leadership Pivot | Lori Michele Leavitt | 433

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Lori Michelle Levitt, and Lori is the pivot catalyst. She has coached, consulted, and trained hundreds of leaders around the world. To achieve their objectives and generate extraordinary momentum. She's a speaker. She's the founder of the Abridged Group, which offers the Aligned Momentum program and software to help managers lead. When she's not writing one of her favorite getaway locations conducive to deep thought creativity, she's supporting orchestration of pivots, decision-making, and judgment calls for business leaders and their teams around the world. Anyway, here we are. So that's an interesting bio.

So thank you. Yep, that's me.

Tell me, first tell us how you got here and then let's talk about what the it is. So how did you get to be the pivot queen, if you will?

The pivot catalyst. Ooh, I hate being called queen. Okay, so there you go. You know, I've been in a role of decision support all my life, which has been a long time. And what I realized, I became an entrepreneur Well, I guess I say I went out on my own. I really didn't understand that I was an entrepreneur. We just didn't do that back then. And then I realized, once I realized I was an entrepreneur, I realized, oh, that's what happened in corporate. All the higher-ups loved me, but my team didn't like all the changes and the achievement and all the stuff that I wanted to do. But decision support was really important to me. I still do that. And as the pivot catalyst, Well, changes all the time. And what I found was that the term— why I wrote my first book in 2017, and this will kind of answer your question of why I'm also in this role— is that it kept talking about the pivot as being super fast. And I agree that in startups, if you're saying, I'm going after this market, I'm now going to go after this market, that's I said that pretty quickly, but you know what? It's not fast. And in the organizations that I work with, if you want your organization to be able to pivot, then you as a leader need to orchestrate many small shifts by many people over time.

So stay there for a moment, if you will, because there are times where I'm hearing people talk about pivot and I'm getting a headache and I'm getting nauseous because it seems like Oh, you got to be pivoting every day. I'm like, no, that's like a roller coaster ride. So how are you defining pivot? Because I have one way I think about it. I don't know if that's the right way, but how are you— what's your definition of a smart pivot?

So I define a pivot as a significant change, which is in some ways how it's used. And again, this book I'm referencing, my compelling, I've got to write this book, came up in 2013. It's been a while. I published it in 2017. It took me a while to get over that. Who do I think I am to be telling business leaders they have to think of it this way? And then I got over that and I sent the book as the gift it is out into the world. But it is, it is a shift over time. It's not a project.

That's right.

But the other way we address it, and that it is not, if you treat it as a project, you're gonna have to push all over again, right?

So I think one of the variables there is time. So I think in today's— or when I'm hearing that language more frequently today, there's an implication that it's rapid, right? That a pivot has to be rapid. And I think that probably comes from the agile movement in technology and all. Like, listen, if you have limited funds and you just raised some money and you only have a this much runway and it's not working, you better pivot. But to get a Fortune 500 to pivot, that's a whole different turning of a massive, massive shift. Exactly. So how would you think about pivots differently for, let's say, individuals, teams, and organizations?

So an individual pivot, or let's say that smaller shift, can be quick. I'll give you an example. People think I'm happy all the time. I'm not happy all the time. I have learned to shift my emotional state quickly, but I had to learn it over time. And, and that's a, that's a very simplistic example, but apply that to something that you want to have different about your life, and you haven't even pinpointed yet how you need to change, because any of us It takes a long time. Or one of the reasons I, I lead peer groups is because those things happen quicker when you have peers around you that can, that are, it's a safe place and they can identify your blind spots where you've said, hey, I kind of, well, don't worry. Oh, it's because of this. And so it, even in yourself, it, it takes time. You can make small shifts toward it, but that pivot, that significant I've shifted from this place to this place is going to take some time. And we need to give ourselves some time and not give up.

I love it. So talk for a moment, if you would, about the under— the business model. So how— who's hiring you to do what? What does that look like?

So typically, it's— I would say it's bucketed under two things. One, one category, they might call it performance management. Although I don't like that term anymore. I shift it to performance momentum. Because as managers, which is why in my bio it says I help managers lead, managers do manage work. You don't manage people, you lead people.

Right, right.

And so it's really performance momentum is a system of, okay, we're managing work, but we also have a system where we're leading people. And we understand the importance of that. Those around us understand the importance of that. And we have time as managers to do that. So, that's what—

What does that look like then as an intervention? So, what is the— how does it start? Where does it— what's involved? Like, what does that look like?

Yeah. Well, typically, when I'm working with an organization, it's always starting with the decision makers of culture, which tend to be the senior leadership team.

OK.

I'm really working on my wording to not say it starts at the top. Or it's at levels and et cetera, because organizations aren't necessarily hierarchies anymore. But whoever is that, that person or that body of people that are making decisions about the culture, typically the senior leadership team, that's where I'm starting. And they need to commit and understand that, hey, we are asking our managers to lead better. So, How do we need to change in our expectations?

So are those interventions you coming in as a consultant, you coming in as a coach? Are there tools? Give me, give me, talk about some of the business models.

Okay. So one is a consulting model where I am going into an organization and working through finding out what they want. What are they going to need to do to orchestrate that change? And the framework is the same for everyone, but where people are in the cycle and in what they need most from the framework differs for every organization.

The other thing is that classic confronting consulting on the front end, do the diagnostic, dive in, figure out what the problems are, et cetera, identify them, talk to leadership about what you've uncovered. And then come to some sort of agreement around the interventions and the path forward.

That's correct. And some of those models include software. Now, one of the things that I do is architect software. I don't code, but I will bring it in and it will power me to do better work. They might buy the software after, but it provides the more de-identified data gathering and it just helps us move more swiftly and surely through it because we have this software.

Unpack that a little bit. That's— That's really interesting. So there's software that you're using that clients can also license or utilize on their own at some point?

Yes, exactly. So the software that I initially did this back in 2001 was for— it helped many organizations, healthcare organizations move through the HIPAA privacy security regulations. And it was primarily a gap assessment and closure, a discovery application, which we still have. But the difference about it was that we brought it in in a way where they improved performance along the way. It wasn't just a compliance thing. If we're going to do this with your entire enterprise, let's make you better while we're doing it. Now we've evolved and we're actually just launching our software and, and working with a few and actually looking for a few more I'm going to call them beta clients, clients that will also bring us in so that we're sure we are doing this right within the organization and it's moving as smoothly as possible. We call it Aligned Momentum and it is a leadership operating system.

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Stay here for a moment 'cause this is fascinating to me. So I wanna go in a little bit of a different direction. So you've got your thought leadership, you've got your IP, you've been at this quite some time. It lives in books, it lives in various states. Unpack for me if you would, the process by which you take your ideas that start in your head and codify them to the point where they could literally be a piece of software. Because that's— people have a hard enough time codifying a methodology into a framework or into a training program or whatever, but literally turning it into code. And I'm not worried about the technical side of code, but how do you break that down? How do you do that? How do you even—

Oh, Peter, that's such a good question. It's a good question because you know, when you, when something comes naturally to you or when you have a creative side, it's difficult to explain.

And that's the curse of the expert where you can immediately at the speed of light get to the answer. And I'm still thinking about, I don't even know what the problem is. And then I ask you to break down how you did it and you realize there's 892 steps that were in your fast brain that aren't even in my slow brain. So I totally understand.

Yeah, and I love that you said that. I tell you, as As I also took on the role of coach, I unlearned a lot of my consulting ways.

Yes.

Because being the smartest person in the room is not the way to have lasting impact.

No, I mean, it's a way to break through as a, as a consultant.

It is. Yes.

So talk about turning—

Anyway, so how do I do this? All right. So I'm going to, I'm going to go back to the example of HIPAA only because I think it's easier for people to understand. When I explain it. So here was an industry that all of a sudden had a regulation that no one was an expert on it. And it was a huge reg, I don't know, 300 pages or something like that, with you could tell that a bunch of different departments had worked on different groups had worked on it. So there were inconsistencies, things that didn't make, make sense. And I know business. And so I knew organizations were going to have a group of people that looked at it, that might understand it or might not, and we're going to come up with policies for it, and they're going to tell everybody that's the reg, but they were actually their policies. So I knew all of that stuff was—

yeah, yeah.

And I also saw that healthcare organizations were reaching out to medical records experts because it's protected healthcare information, which had no idea how our organization ran.

Right.

Or attorneys, because that's a compliance issue, which had no idea how an organization ran.

And they're so good at saying no, right?

It's the typical entrepreneur, like, oh my gosh, I've got to solve that. This is, you know, and there was a deadline to it. And so I dove through the reg and I created a, you know, start out with this spreadsheet of all the questions and who I need to ask those questions and how they would move through it. And then worked with a development team to create it into a software. And we actually sold, like, I thought it was like $7 million worth of it in 18 months. It worked.

Yeah.

It did pretty well. I even had one organization that was working, I won't name them, but they were a project team working with a very well-known organization and they were near the end of the deadline and they couldn't get through it because they weren't asking the right questions. And they bought my Excel spreadsheet. Right.

But I think it's interesting because very few thought leaders— I mean, there are those out there— have turned their processes, their thinking, their methodologies into software. And I'm always fascinated by the process by which they've gone about doing that. You know, it's one thing to create an assessment tool where something that you can do on paper you're digitizing, but literally turning into a piece of software that others can use. That's very different. So thanks for sharing.

You know what the hardest thing is? The hardest thing, and I think that engineers deal with this too, is whittling it down to what is necessary to start, what they call in the startup world the minimum viable product. One critical—

you know, it's, it's funny that you say that because in my work with authors and thought leaders and all that, you know, someone might come to me at a stage in their career where they've been at it 20, 30 years, and here's the stack of books they've written and all the work they've done. And I'm like, get me down to the essence, right? And, and get me, you know, what is the minimum viable? If you only have a half an hour to convey some information to me, that's the, the gist or the, the distillation of your life's work. What is that? And it's really, really hard for a lot of folks to be able to do that well.

That's right. And so for Align Momentum, because I had to do so many things, we had done a balanced scorecard with large organizations, this and that. And I'm thinking, okay, I want this shift from management software to leadership software. What does it really need? If I put measurement in it, it'll be a cool thing, but it's going to look too much like management. We're not going to put that in yet, even though we're good at it and we can do it.

And so that takes a tremendous amount of discipline though, because most people probably had to whittle that. Oh, but this is so—

yeah, and I spent millions on it. I want to use it, right?

But no. So how do you find— then again, on the business side of the house, there's marketing and selling consulting, there's marketing and selling services, and then there's marketing and selling software. How are they similar and how are they different in your experience?

Well, now, so I don't do marketing or selling. Of software tools or any of that. So these are all, I'm going to say, they're going to be bucket as management and I'm calling them leadership software.

Okay. But so then let me rephrase the question then. How are you going about selling and marketing the things that you do as a thought leader?

Okay. So with the HIPAA, I, my My best step was becoming a national speaker, actually global, because some other countries were interested in what we were doing here with respect to privacy security. So that made me visible. Again, not a lot of experts. It wasn't a quote, muddy market. And therefore, there were only a few of us that were speaking in a way that CEOs understood.

Okay, so speaking brings the awareness. Yes. So it's, it's, it's a great way. And you saw an opening in that market. So if you were to go into a different space and say, oh my God, there's 300 speakers talking about resilience, let's say, okay, that's, that's crowded. But when you went in, you saw an open market.

Yes. Align Momentum is a little bit more difficult. And I'll tell you what's the most difficult.

Yes.

Is social media. Oh my word. You know, it's like you got to be there. And I'm not going to be dancing around.

Yeah, but social— I mean, I agree with a couple of asterisks there. Mastering each platform on social media is mind-blowing because the algorithms change and the best practices change. And is, you know, is Clubhouse going to be here, or, you know, whatever? But I think if you've got a tight strategy in place, those are just tactics. And then you look at those tactics and say This is, you know, who's my market? Is my market on TikTok? No. Okay. I can draw an X through that one. Don't need to go there yet. Right? Now, if you're selling something maybe more visual or whatever, or to a younger market and your market is on TikTok and that's an, you know, that's not in your sweet spot, then you do have a problem. You do have to figure that out.

Yes. And so our strategy for Align Momentum is there, there are a few clients that we're going to directly, but they're primarily referral sources that are saying, you know, we're, we're working with this organization, or we know of this organization, and we really think that they would be a great one for you to, to work with.

So that's a great— that's a great strategy. And future strategic partners.

And for the future, it will be that we'll have this down well enough that the program part of it, not the software, but the program part of it, to to allow other consultants to step in and do that program and bring the software in with them.

Got it. Well, this has been great. Any final words of wisdom or—

Yeah, you're thinking about doing a software? You were pretty interested. Do you have software?

No, no, but a lot of our clients, we've worked with them to do that. It's a difficult process and to do it well, but to really create The operating system version of what you do is great. No, we do not have a software. Yes.

Well, you know, if you had that bug to create, it's like you're not alive. I don't feel like I'm living unless I'm creating some gift. It's my books, it's the software, it's something like that.

Love it. Well, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it, Laurie. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

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