Harnessing the Power of Peer Advisory Groups within Your Company with Leo Botany

Hello and welcome to Mastermind Mastery, the podcast for professionals who want to create and run successful peer advisory councils, or as we call them, PACs for short, or they're also known as peer groups or business mastermind groups. I'm your host, Tina Corner Stolz, founder of Elix Council, where I've been in the industry running groups since 2005 and now help those like you with education, certification, and support wanting to do the same. At one time, I ran 10 groups, nearly 100 members, and sold my groups For a Good Multiple and recently released my second book, Your Seat at the Table: How to Create and Run Your Own Peer Advisory Councils, published by Forbes, and grateful to you that it's an Amazon bestseller. I invite you to join each week where we share strategies and techniques to successfully launch and become a master of running your PACs. You'll hear insights, perspectives, dos and don'ts, learn from my and my guests' mistakes, successes, and get the inside track to key takeaways. Each time we have guest, we'll be having a bit of fun. So are you ready? Let's get going and dive into today's episode.

So welcome everyone to Mastermind Mastery. This is your host Tina Corner Stolz, and I'm excited about today's topic and guest, which is Leo Bottari, and he is out in Carlsbad, California. And so Leo, welcome to the show today.

Tina, thank you so much for having me.

Of course.

And we have a really, really good topic. The topic today is about peer groups inside organizations. And Leo has a wonderful background that I'm going to have him share everything that he does, the books that he has written as well. Because if I were you out there in the audience listening, definitely some books you would want to download. But this concept today about peer advisory groups inside companies is one that is long coming and is, I feel, finally kind of gaining traction out there and is such a benefit of expanding what we all have known as peer groups for in the traditional sense, right, for privately held companies or individuals that are not in the same company now to individuals inside the same company. So, Leo, let's first start with a little bit about— just so the audience knows your background, because you are extremely qualified to talk about this topic and you've written a book on it, so that counts. So how about a little bit about your background in the whole peer group space, and then we're going to get right into it.

Sure. So for me, I really started first getting interested in this when I was at Seton Hall University. I was in graduate school there between 2006, 2008, which for me was a long time from the time I graduated college to going back to graduate school. Now, when I was in college or high school prior to that, I always felt like education was an individual pursuit. You'd have the teacher or the professor up front, you're taking notes, you're taking quizzes, you're shielding your papers from other people, these kinds of things, right? Then I found that I was part of a learning team at Seton Hall. And now this whole idea of collaborative learning, which would've been called cheating pretty much 20 years earlier, now becomes the norm. And there was this incredible power of how well we all learned when we did it together. And it really made such a huge difference. So I graduated from that program. I actually began teaching in it shortly thereafter and have since been now an adjunct professor at Seton Hall and Rutgers University for the past 15 years. But it got me interested in an opening that was available at Vistage at the time. Now, Vistage, as you all know, assembles and facilitates peer advisory groups for CEOs. And people said, you know, it's kind of a difficult concept to kind of get your head around. I said, actually, for me, it feels exactly like what I was involved in with graduate school. And so I got very interested in the subject. I headed up brand communications when I was there. And in 2012, it was late 2012, private equity had first purchased the firm. In early 2013, I was asked to lead a brand refresh there. So I'm going around the country and I'm asking CEOs like, how do you learn? How do you grow? How do you bring new thinking into your companies? And to a person, they said, I read books, I have a coach, I hire consultants, I go to events and conferences. Some said they went to executive development programs at places like Harvard and Stanford. No one, I mean zero, responded with this idea of being in a peer advisory group. So it wasn't long after that that I was reporting out to the board of directors on the status of the brand rollout. And I also took the opportunity to share with them the experience I was having in the field. And I said, you know what, Vistage has been at this since 1957. There are organizations all around the world that have been doing this for decades. I feel like every one of us is trying to sell a Mercedes to someone who doesn't even know what a car is. So I said, what if we step back, not to write some kind of hardcover brochure about our company and how great we think we are, but let's look at everybody. Let's look at all the organizations out there. And even people who, you know, through Bill George's book at the time, it was in 2011, he wrote this book called True North Groups about how to start your own groups and what that looks like. But to just explore that whole category so that we could provide a narrative that at least would help people make it part of their consideration set, right? So that's kind of where the work got all started. And since then, since that first book, The Power of Peers, I also wrote a second book, What Anyone Can Do, which looked at formal peer groups but really looked outside of that, just talking about how if we could simply just do a better job of enlisting and engaging the support of the people around us, we could do the things that anyone could do far more often and be more successful and achieve whatever aspirations that we may have for ourselves. And then finally, now that I've done, and I know we'll get into the workshop a little bit, later. But now I've done about 500 programs for peer groups around the world. And as you might imagine, the original models that were outlined in The Power of Peers have evolved since then. You learn a few things as you visit that many groups. So this, The Power of Peer Innovation, What Peer Advisory Groups Can Teach Us About Building High-Performing Teams, was the book I wrote in 2020 where it shows the evolution of those models. It looks at some of the prevailing challenges that groups have, not problems in every group, but certainly ones that come up quite a bit and kind of how to address them. But last, and I think importantly, is how to take what peer advisory groups do so brilliantly and how to bring those concepts into the teams in your, in your organization. And that kind of leads us to this conversation today, right? With peer groups inside organizations is certainly one way to do that.

Right. So I do not want to assume that it is intuitive about what this means to the audience. So maybe a good place to start is just describing what does that look like inside organizations?

So it's a great question. Sometimes people will think that if they're part of a peer group outside of their company, let's set up one inside of our company. Well, that's great, but then what does that look like? Who's involved in it? What is it that you're trying to do? So let's say, for example, that you are setting up a peer group inside your company because you would love to get— I'll use an example— director-level people in cross— as a cross-functional group come together. Maybe they get to know what each other does just a little bit better. They get to know one another. Better. We start removing silos, but we do it usually with the idea that there's something that we are trying to accomplish together or achieve in some way. Because I think the more clear you are about what success looks like, the more that it keeps a group on track. So if you're a CEO of a company, you're thinking to yourself, I'd like to have better alignment. And toward a strategic initiative that we're putting together in a more cross-functional way, as opposed to having those silos up, a group may be for you. If you're looking for— another example would be, let's say you've got a robust learning and development program, but what tends to happen in those things is that there's great content, there's great opportunities to learn, but there's no real mechanism that helps employees apply their learning and really bring it to the benefit of the organization. Groups can be wonderful at doing that because once they share what they learn among one another and then talk about, let's try this, let's try that, let's try to do some of these things that we know, you know, could help us be more successful, you're more likely to operationalize that learning. So I view kind of groups inside companies as it's kind of like a practice field really in many respects, right? Because when we're in business, it's game day every day and we're in and we're doing our thing and all that. We don't have that time just to spend time together and think about how do we learn, how do we grow, how do we be better individual contributors to our teams, but also how do we make our teams better as well.

So do you find that this is a difficult concept for companies to get their head around, to see this as a kind of a strategic initiative?

I think it can be. That's why having a reason for it becomes so important because you can't you don't go to a CEO and just say, hey, I think you guys should have groups in your company. Well, that's great. What you might do is say, what are some of the challenges you're having? And then if a group could address that specific need, then you talk about what that looks like. So it's really what business challenge are you solving for? And I think once you can determine what that is, then you can find out whether it happens to be a group or something else that could help in addressing that challenge. So I think that's kind of how to approach it because otherwise, to your point, how are we going to get people's head around the importance of starting a group? We've been in business for 50 years. We've never had groups. Why do we need them now? But there's also some reasons for that too. As you know, the workforce is changing quite a bit. By 2025, 64% of the workforce is going to be millennials and Gen Zs. And by 2030, it's going to be 75%. These are not generations that are naturally trusting of leadership. They tend to look to one another in a big way. And I think the more that we can understand the horizontal dynamics in our organization, bring people together in that way versus always think about our senior VPs, VPs, directors, and managers and look at things vertically, we realize that how much and how effective we can be, particularly when it comes to implementing change.

Right.

You know, you know as well as I do that the, you know, the failure rate and the underperformance rate of, you know, change initiatives is dismal at best. No matter what study you look at, it's really not very good. But, you know, McKinsey's talked about the fact that about two-thirds of the time it isn't because some policy was so ill-conceived or the change was so bad. It's because you couldn't get people behind it to the degree necessary to give it a fair shake. Give it a fair shake. So bringing people together and understanding the horizontal dynamics and recognizing that when any announcement takes place to employees, it's not as if they just accept that information to go back to work and that's it. They engage one another in sensemaking exercises and decide in those moments whether this is something they want to get behind, right? So again, I think as leaders, the more that we can identify those key influencers who may not have the fanciest titles in our organization but are really influential with other employees, you know, the more that we can, I think, harness that and understand that and leverage that to, to everyone's advantage.

So let's say you take the concept one step further where there is a challenge, right? Something that an organization is trying to solve. And so creating an internal peer advisory group makes sense to do. What are some dos and don'ts about how to put them together? And then second to that is typically how long have you seen them last or how do they evolve after they get put together?

Yeah, it's a great question because they don't have to last forever, particularly if you're bringing a group together for a specific purpose and once they've done their thing. But then now you may reassemble a group for another reason somewhere down the road. I think that a real key, A, is to have a very specific reason about why you're forming the group. You want to be clear about who the members of the group need to be. So one example of this might be that because of what you're trying to do, maybe I want director-level people from, you know, marketing, finance, sales, you know, whatever, all around the same table. And I'm bringing those peers together. That's one part of it. Second part would be that a really good onboarding is necessary and understand that what we're about to do here together as a group has some certain ground rules. Let's talk about what they are and what that looks like. Because I do think that people having the opportunity to meet, not under the watchful eyes of their bosses, for example, you know, is important and to do so in a way that's confidential. And respectful where people can be open with one another and vulnerable with one another is what's really going to provide kind of a rich conversation for them. And what happens in the room or however they convene on the Zoom, whatever it happens to be, stays there and they work together. And then if there are things that come out of those meetings that need to be escalated in some way, then they talk about how to do that and who does that. And have some discipline around that. But I think that when you bring people together and then you have a certain agenda, you have a certain time that they meet, you have things you're looking to accomplish, you have expectations about how people prepare for those meetings, all of that. And I think once everyone has clarity about what they can expect of themselves, what they can expect of others, and if new people are added to the group for any, for some reason over a period of time, that if you're going to enjoy the privilege of sitting around this table, here's what it's all about. Here are the things that we've agreed make each person in here a valuable contributor to this collective. So I think that's a kind of a good start, is making sure that you're clear about that, you're clear about the ground rules, and you really understand how to engage one another.

So you know what success looks like, right?

Really important. Yeah.

So what are some of the— I can think of a lot, so I think it would be good to articulate here— is what are some of the outcomes you have seen occur, some of the benefits? You've already named some that happen as to why organizations should do this and when it's good for them to do this. So in your experience, since you talked about 500, I'm sure you've seen some phenomenal outcomes. But generally speaking, can you share what some of that can be, what they are, and they kind of generally can be expected?

Yeah. So the 500 programs that I've done speak to workshops that I have led either for external peer advisory groups or internal peer advisory groups. But I think an example, it's a client I'm working with right now. It's a wonderful story. It's a client that's grown quite a bit by acquisition in the past several years. They've got about 25 plants around the country and they have these plant managers and these plants are in pretty remote locations. So it's pretty easy to feel isolated and disconnected from a lot of things when you're just kind of there doing your own thing. And obviously the company wants people to feel like they're part of one organization. So What we've done is in the East, West, and Central region for this company, we've set up plant manager peer groups and we actually meet virtually and we use the Circles platform, which created by Dan Hoffman's company, which is extraordinary. And it's a great— it delivers an entirely different experience from Zoom or Teams or something like that when you're having deep conversations like this.

Yes.

But when I think about—

We use that.

Yeah, good. There you go. So when I think about the outcomes, of that. They wanted to make sure that they didn't have these plant managers feel so alone, for one thing. They wanted them to get to know each other, not just as colleagues, but as people, so that they would feel comfortable reaching out to one another with questions or ideas or suggestions or things like that. It has exceeded expectations beyond. I mean, so incredible. And I really credit the plant managers who are participating in this program for that. They just dove in and trusted and have a level of generosity with one another that's rather extraordinary. They're even traveling and visiting each other's plants. You might think that I don't want someone coming over to my plant just pointing out all the things that are wrong or stuff like that. They're like, come on over, show me what I'm not seeing. That's the attitude among all these folks. Very collaborative. So how they are helping each other in several ways. One, If I have challenges at my plant that I want to talk with, with another plant manager who knows exactly what it's like to sit in my chair, I get a chance to get that. If we are all working on something like an annual plan of some sort, and every one of us is challenged by corporate to do that, how do we help each other make the best plans possible? Because someone may be really, have a great strength in finance, someone else is more on safety, someone else is more on certain operational aspects of the business. So they help each other in terms of writing those plans and doing that. The other time we spend together is the company has some core values that, again, you want to make this or make these plants feel like they're part of one company and that there's something that connects them. So the values become an important part of that. So we engage in conversations about how do we promote this particular value at our plant. What does that look like? And they get ideas from one another and they develop some real norms around those things. So, and now we're starting actually to bring content elements to it as well. Things where they feel like, hey, we would love to have extra help here or extra input there, whatever. Well, let's talk about creating a little bit of an annual curriculum, if you will. Like every other meeting, we'll bring like a new subject to the table. So it's evolving, it's growing, and it's exciting to watch again. And I credit them for this, how just incredibly generous and wonderful they are with each other. And we have a lot of fun, and they've gotten to know each other really well. And when we— well, you know well from using the Circles platform that when you press down the C key, you can have all the confetti arise and all that kind of stuff. And we have celebrations. And it could be anything from something good at the plant to someone who just got engaged to someone who just I just had a grandkid, whatever. But those are the kinds of things that really bring these people together. So it's really been fun.

Yeah, just like a regular peer group, right? The traditional kind.

There you go. Yeah, very much so.

So in the couple minutes that we have and before we wrap up, I just want to also ask you, are there dos and don'ts, like maybe the top 3 or so for dos and don'ts you would suggest when someone is considering that they really would love to do this? Okay, so other than, right, they probably should read your book. That's a given. Um, and, but what would you kind of say? Well, in this scenario, because if you're doing groups inside organizations, maybe these are a couple of differences, or these are the things to watch out for, or make sure you always do XYZ. What would you say?

You know, I think a good place to start for a lot of companies, because I don't know too many companies where their learning and development program is actually firing on all cylinders to the degree that they feel like for the investment, they're really getting all the value from it. And so, and so one of the things may be, let's put together kind of a learning group, if you will, right? So let's say it could be within a department if you wanted to set it up that way. It could be cross-functional, whatever it may happen to be. But let's say that we're participating in a learning development program, but now we're going to use this group as a mechanism to say, to do two things. What did we learn? Share experiences, grapple with the ideas and all that, because we know that if you read something once, you're likely to remember 28% of it actually for about 24 to 48 hours, and then it plummets from there. If you read it twice, it goes to 46%. If you actually are grappling with the concepts and sharing ideas and all that, that number moves closer to 70%. So if we can get people together to now up their learning from that 24% or 28% to nearly 70%, and now we can all agree what's the one or two things that if we worked together and made sure we actually applied that to our work, that it could make a big difference for us, right? And you start seeing those, and those wins are easy to identify, they're easy to measure, and it might be a nice way to see how effective it be when you bring people together in a way that's very non-threatening. It's very, we're just figuring out what do we want to do together because we just spent a whole lot of time learning, you know, whether it's microlearning or you do a big employee development day or something like that. These all too often become just these events in our lives and then they're just a thing of, I mean, 2 months later and no one's talking about it anymore. You know, this is a way to actually really squeeze every ounce of value out of that investment. Yeah. So I think that's kind of what would be a good start for a lot of companies to think about it like that. And then I think you can start progressing to, hey, we can bring people together and start breaking down some silos here or get an effort behind a strategic initiative that could help us, or, you know, or we make it truly part of our DEI efforts, right?

And the whole DNA of the company.

Because the inclusion part of it is what matters. Absolutely.

So there's so much more to talk about and not enough time. So I think that this is a good start to have everyone sort of open their minds as to the possibilities of just another type of group that they can do. And it's also another way to continue Obviously also a relationship maybe with existing clients that you have and grow and help them inside the company just as if they were participating in one of the normal traditional groups. So, Leo, thank you so much again for being here and sharing this concept. I know it'll be valuable to the audience and our listeners. And how can they reach you? So a couple of things. Would you give out one, how they can reach you, your website? And your book as well, and also that you have a lot of resources on your site too. So I want to make sure the audience knows that that's there for them. So will you give them that info?

I certainly will. So they can go to leobottari.com, L-E-O-B-O-T-T-A-R-Y.com, connect with me on LinkedIn. But as you mentioned, you can certainly go on the website. You can learn all about the workshops. If you go to a tab there called CEO World Plus, there's literally like I don't know, there's 120 CEO World articles alone, not to mention other podcasts and videos and just a host of free material for anyone who wants to learn more about this subject. So I'd certainly invite you to come do that. And of course, it's easy to schedule an appointment with me as well if you just want to learn more and just chat about this whole category.

Great.

That'd be it. Yeah, you bet.

Well, Leo, thank you. So everyone, again, that's Leo Battari. What a great, great concept. And I really want to get that out there. And again, thanks again, Leo, for joining us. And to everyone out there, thanks for joining again. We're here every Tuesday and we look forward to seeing you next week. Have a great week and go make it happen.

Hey, moderators of groups, thank you so much for listening to today's podcast. To get access to today's show notes and exclusive content resources, visit TinaCornerStolz.com/podcast or LXcounsel.com, where you can also become part of an exclusive online community, attend our academy, or get free resources, templates, checklists, and more. And you can even contact me there as well. So if this episode resonated with you and you know someone who can also benefit from listening, please share with them by taking a screenshot and even posting on your social media. I also love reviews and appreciate hearing from each of you, those actually doing this wonderful work. Please tune in next week for another episode of Mastermind Mastery, and I'll close by sharing something my mentor did after every learning moment. He shared a shiny pebble from his pocket with anyone he passed knowledge to and ask them to forward that pebble knowledge on. So now I encourage you to go pass on a pebble, the takeaways you learned today, to either your existing groups or fellow peers. Now go make it a great one.