On today’s show, we discuss what your company should be doing in the wake of a layoff.

Miriam Meima has been a Coach & Facilitator for over twenty years.  She has closely studied the overlap between business and psychology in effort to learn how to support her clients in finding simple ways to be authentic and effective simultaneously.  Miriam has coached founders/executives and supported leadership development strategies at Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hims & Hers, Glassdoor, Glossier and 100s of start-ups of all sizes across industries and regions.  

She has worked closely with the thought leaders studying the link between culture and bottom-line success.  Miriam has a unique ability to understand an entire system and how to most effectively influence change, taking into consideration the infinite complexity of the individual, company and current market conditions. She is well known for her success with cultural change and often speaks on the topic of “How to Preserve your Culture While You Scale.” 

Miriam’s credentials include an MA in Organizational & Management Development, a BA in Business & Psychology. She is a Master Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation, a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Coaching and a member of Forbes Coaches Council.  Her work exists in the sweet spot blending left-brain research and right-brain creativity.  

After growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan (United States), and living in Spain, Colorado and Hawaii, Miriam now lives in New York City with her husband.  Miriam believes she is doing the work she was born to do and greets each new day with a sense of optimism.  

Key Takeaways:

Advice for those in companies that are having to lay off and experiencing fear:

• Manage yourself first. Notice how you’re feeling and create a path to get back to bringing your best self.
• Don’t make any major life decisions for a bit.
• Focus on what you can control.
  • Solidify your value in the organization. Demonstrate your impact. Touch base with stakeholders to build bridges. Evaluate how you can improve.
  • Think about your next step if you do need another opportunity and connect with people that could help. Build the skills you will need if you decide to make a change.

As a manager, how do you help those on your team after a layoff?

• Normalize the change
• Be empathetic
• Provide short term wins
• Be more present and personable

As a leader, what if you see that your managers don’t have the skills to manage through a layoff? How should you prepare?

• Lean into the relationship the managers have with the organization. Their relationship with direct reports is an extension of that. Give managers a safe space to express their own negative feelings so they don’t express them to their direct reports.
• Be proactive and have a playbook to give them. Give them the information that they need to be able to move forward.

Symptoms of problems after a layoff:

• Pace of communication. If the pace slows, it’s possible your team is feeling insecure or overwhelmed and disengaging.
  • For these people, it’s great to rally the team and encourage them in the mission ahead.
• Stress level. Short bursts of high stress are expected, but there should be an end in sight. We don’t want to burn out the people we are retaining.
  • For these people, it’s great to have a conversation about priorities. Understand what the top ones are and be willing to let go of some of the lower ones without fear.

If the company does need to be leaner, how do you lead employees in the “less is more” mantra?

• Focus to find ways to work smarter, not harder.
• Have a brainstorming session on creative ways to change.
  • For optimization: Start – Stop – Continue exercise.
  • For innovation: Yes And exercise.

Top 3 Takeaways:

• Manage yourself first – take care of yourself.
• Be aware of the impact you’re having on others.
• Smile. Some of the most seasoned leaders can move through difficult problems with a smile, and that is accessible to more of us.

Connect with Miriam Meima:

Website: https://www.leaderswhosmile.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miriam-meima/

On today’s show, we discuss why leaders are not making an impact in their organizations.

James Saliba is a certified coach, trainer, and public speaker with a BA, MBA, and over thirty years of experience in the leadership world.

His career began as a software engineer before being promoted to management in the IT industry, where he eventually became the VP of a $4 billion tech company. He worked tirelessly to gain the knowledge and experience to become a leader employees wanted to follow. He has been in the trenches and has conquered most challenges leaders face throughout their careers.

Jim adopted a growth mindset and created an atmosphere where employees were encouraged to experiment and were rewarded for their hard work. Mistakes were not seen as failures but rather as learning opportunities to make changes and improve. He has leveraged his years of experience and experimentation to develop the successful Triple E structure to help his clients get unstuck so they can progress to the next level of leadership.

Key Takeaways:

Symptoms of a gap between leadership and employees.

People are promoted because of their technical expertise, but they don’t have leadership skills, and they aren’t being trained in that area.

What do companies experience when this happens?

Top leaders will find themselves having to manage their managers much more to get what they need, rather than being able to focus on the growth and health of the organization. Because management doesn’t like to be micro-managed, turnover increases.

What are the skillsets needed for leadership?

Vision and Strategy – Can I build a vision for my team/department? What do I want this to look like one year from now?

Execution and Production – How well am I executing, and am I producing?

People and Processes – Can I make a change in my department, or is the corporate culture fighting me in this?

Executive Presence – Can I communicate well,  carry myself well, listen well to understand what’s going on, and can I put that information into action?

What should companies do to address this situation?

Coaching / Mentoring tends to be better than Leadership Training so that the employees have a chance to learn something, try it out, and then get feedback and further guidance. Sometimes companies have a hard time justifying the cost of this type of training, but it brings a good ROI in the long run in productivity and creativity.

What would you tell the individual that doesn’t feel like the company is investing in them?

Great advice from Brian Tracy – Invest 3% of your salary into yourself and your growth.

How can you get the most out of training?

Be intentional about practicing what you learn as soon as possible. You can also find great training as free content on podcasts or social media platforms. Investing 3% of your time is a great strategy as well.

Is there a limit to how much a leader can learn? Is there a ceiling?

There are always new things to learn, and if we aren’t continuing to learn, people will pass us by.

4 Fears of Leadership

• Fear of being incompetent
• Fear of appearing foolish
• Fear of failure
• Fear of being vulnerable

How can we move past the fear?

• Identify the fear.
• Ask yourself- What is the worst thing that could happen?
• Put things in place to deal with the worst thing.
• Then take the risk.

How do I plan my growth? Ask yourself –

• Where am I now – strengths, weaknesses, values?
• How do I currently engage the world or my personal environment?
• Where do I want to be a year from now?
• How can I get where I want to go?
• How am I doing? Evaluate your progress frequently.

3 Top Things to Focus on:

• Self-awareness – Being able to look at what’s going on in you and around you to understand what things you need to tackle.
• Self-development – We are constantly learning and changing the environment around us.
• Support – Don’t do it alone.

Connect with James Saliba:

Website: https://jamessaliba.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamessaliba/

Jim’s book: The Six-Step Leadership Challenge

On today’s show, we discuss what the steps are to building and retaining a solid team.

Mark Oristano has led a life a lot of sports fans would envy spending 30 years in the NFL broadcasting games for the Dallas Cowboys and Houston Oilers. Plus a good portion of that time was spent working several jobs in the front office of one of America’s most famous and successful teams, the original Dallas Cowboys.

Mark worked under legendary Cowboy president and GM Tex Schramm learning his management style – a style that kept employees engaged and working for the team for decades. Tex also created a front office system that was the envy of the pro sports world.

Key Takeaways:

What was the measure of success for your team?

Success on the field was winning the Super Bowl. Success off the field was helping the team win the Super Bowl.

During the season, everything was run by checklists and procedures set in place. During the off-season, all of the checklists and procedures were re-evaluated to see if they should change or improve based on how the season went.

How do we keep great people?

• Hire the best people you can find. They will cost you more up front, but it’s worth it.
• Train them your way. Explain why you do things the way you do them to gain adoption.
• Let them do their jobs. Don’t micro-manage.
• Implement the Golden Rule – treat your employees the way you want to be treated.

How do you find the right talent that is a good fit for your organization? You want people who:

• Understand the basics
• Are eager to learn more
• Have a desire to be a part of the team

How do you set up a new hire for success?

• Give employees permission to not know the answer, but be able to find it and bring it to you.
• Convey to employees that they all have a role to play. If they take care of the little things, the project will work. Everyone’s contribution matters.

3 Top Takeaways:

• Decrease turnover. It costs 1/3 of the departing employee’s salary to replace them.
• Be certain that you are receptive to your employees’ ideas, problems, and thoughts.
• It’s not about you. It’s about the team.

Connect with Mark Oristano:

Website: https://www.leadwithprinciple.com/

Mark’s course: https://www.leadwithprinciple.com/courses/lead-with-principle

On today’s show, we discuss how to optimize operations within your organization.

Tommy Yionoulis has been in the restaurant industry for nearly his entire adult life. He has a BSBA from University of Denver’s Hotel Restaurant school in addition to an MBA. This former stand-up comic turned SaaS founder, has extensive experience helping businesses become more efficient and profitable through process, accountability, and data.  He’s currently the Managing Director of OpsAnalitica, an Operations Analytics platform that focuses on managing and measuring daily team activities for large multi-unit businesses.  Tommy believes that the next big technological disruptor event for many businesses is going to be implementing Operations Management software to shape the future of work and beat our competitors through better, more consistent daily operations.

Key Takeaways:

Why do we need to optimize our operations?

We are not suffering from a lack of knowledge, but too much information and too many things to track. The human brain can only keep a few things in mind at a time. Leaders have already identified the things that they know they should do to stay on top of things, but they cannot translate that knowledge into consistent action at the location level. Often, an employee missing one step in the middle of a multi-step process will cause the process to fail.

What are the symptoms that indicate a problem? What is the trigger point?

Unfortunately, without implementing operations management software, an organization may not realize they have a problem. KPI indicators will lag. For instance, by the time the sales numbers indicate a problem, the business has been suffering for a while, and it may take years to win customers back.

How does the solution get you more instantaneous feedback? What is being measured and how does an organization know what action to take?

At the location level – It takes the guesswork out of running the business by scheduling a series of tasks and checklists.

At the upper level – It allows teams to be more effective and efficient. Corporate brings on people to manage multiple locations. The solution allows these managers to watch what’s happening in real-time. When there are issues, the solution alerts the managers.

How do you avoid “death by checklist”?

Checklists often need to be done at busy times, so they need to be focused and smart. Real-time collaboration can allow several people to check things together and be more efficient. Randomization helps ensure good coverage over a series of things that need to be checked as well.

How can a business promote adoption of the system?

Adoption is dependent upon the priority structure of the business. Part of the systems can be time-based to ensure things are done at the optimum time and promote accountability. Process and systems-driven businesses are the ones that succeed.

What are some of the key things a business should think about when wanting to optimize its operations?

• Get started soon. Let the data influence you over time to make it better. Don’t wait to figure it all out.
• Keep the process simple and track everything.

Top Takeaways:

• Operations management is the next technological battlefield that we will all be in. In the multi-location business of the future, you’ll be collecting data from 5 places:
  • POS
  • Internet – social media
  • Checklist platform
  • Robots
  • Sensors
• The key will be to bring all of that information together and turn it into real-time actions that solve the problems that are affecting the customers. Jump in on an ops program to get the data and take it seriously.

Connect with Tommy Yionoulis

Website: https://opsanalitica.com/

On today’s show, we discuss how culture impacts the health of your organization and what you can do about it.

Sophie Theen, an award-winning people management expert and author of The Soul of Startups: The Untold Stories of How Founders Affect Culture (Wiley: August 2022), helps business leaders reimagine the role of talent management in the financial services industry. With a deep understanding of how founders can affect culture, Sophie has profiled both successful and unsuccessful founders to offer insight on how a company’s cultural paradigm shifts as it grows from a startup to a scale-up to an enterprise. She is a recognized mental health first aider and delivers engaging and insightful presentations on creating an immersive recruitment and onboarding experience, diversity and inclusion, and getting executive and investor buy-in for HR initiatives.

Key Takeaways:

Founders have an impact on shaping the culture of the company throughout the life of the company, but especially in the beginning stages. They should be intentional and ask themselves:

• What is the company that I want to build?
• What type of culture do I want – How do I want my people to look, feel, and emote within the business?

Then, every action a founder takes needs to help usher people toward that direction.

Founders lacking certain soft skills in areas they want to create are smart to hire people with those skills to help create the culture they desire.

Culture change management – To change a failing culture, identify:

• What are the known behaviors?
• What are the YES behaviors?
• What change has impacted other people?
• What new changes do we expect to see in the future?
• How do we implement transition – through tools, changing the way we work, or collecting more feedback.

How do you approach change regarding behaviors in your culture?

• What are the goals we are trying to achieve?
• What are our limitations?
• What are the behaviors hindering our progress?

What should a founder put in place as the company scales to keep the culture on the right track?

• Start by having self-awareness and understanding your own weaknesses.
• Make sure you have hired others that have the ability to be strong in those areas.
• Empower others to help shape the culture as you desire.

Recommendations for HR people

• Don’t try to tackle it all on your own.
• Work together with the CEO and the founders.
• Communicate to leaders to help them understand how a culture change will improve the company.
  • Fewer people problems to manage.
  • Ability to deliver better products to our customers.
  • A healthier working environment that is easier to scale.

3 Top Takeaways:

• Culture continues to evolve. It doesn’t stop at any point in time.
• It is a collaboration with every single person in the business. Everyone matters.
• Leaders – don’t try to do it alone.

Connect with Sophie:

Website: https://www.sophietheen.com/

Book: The Soul of Startups

On today’s show, we discuss how stress is potentially costing your organization millions of dollars.

Ed Beltran is a contributor for Forbes and Fast Company where he writes about employee reboarding, the relationship between stress and performance, and how the Metaverse will shape business. He brings 20 years of expertise in finance and operations and has been a leader at Fierce since 2017, a leading communications firm that has worked with 300 of the fortune 500 companies.

He holds two Bachelor of Science degrees from Arizona State University in Accounting and Computer Information Systems, and an MBA from the University of Michigan. He has held an active CPA license since 2004 and holds certificates in Entrepreneurship from Wharton and Harvard. Prior to joining Fierce, Ed was Head of Finance with large multinational organizations such as Agilent Technologies, Avnet Inc., PricewaterhouseCoopers, Arthur Andersen as well as advising and supporting start-ups and early-stage companies.

Ed is an avid road bike cyclist clocking 120+ miles a week year-round helping his mental, physical, and spiritual balance as he puts it. He is passionate about helping those who don’t have the privilege, background, or resources to be fully prepared to engage in effective conversations at different levels in life (College, Professional, Personal, Parenthood).

Key Takeaways:

Stress statistics from the workplace:

• $300 billion is lost annually due to stress
• 81% of workers acknowledge that stress affects their work negatively
• 48% of all workers report crying at work due to stress

If someone says something offensive to you, you have three options.

• You can walk away upset – This harbors stress, and you will have a biological response.
• You can tell coworkers about it – This amplifies toxicity in the workplace.
• You can engage the person in conversation – This typically will clear up a misunderstanding.

How can you identify the source of the stress?

• There are apps that will integrate with wearables and attach context to the biometrics through GPS data and calendar data and give the user meaningful information to identify when they experience stress the most.

How can a person combat the physical stress that comes with having multiple problems to solve throughout the day?

• Self-awareness – Understand that this is a source of physical stress for your body.
• Mindfulness – Set the expectation for yourself that this is your job and is what you are paid to do. Shift your mindset to prepare for it in a positive way.

In a Harvard Business Review study, respondents answered this question – What is your biggest drain on resilience at work? These are the tangible interactions people are having that create stress and impact their resilience. Having skills to deal with each of these situations will increase resiliency and improve productivity.

• Stressor – Dealing with difficult relationships or politics in the workplace.
  • Skill – Knowing how to give proper feedback in a tactful and non-confrontational way.
• Stressor – When the volume or pace of work stretches me to my limits.
  • Skill – Culture is defined by interactions every day. Leadership can encourage employees to share when the workload is stretching them so that options for delegating or prioritizing can be discussed. Leaders can also be intentional about balancing transactional conversations with personal conversation so that employees feel valued.
• Stressor – When I feel I’m being criticized personally.
  • Skill – Knowing when to confront and how to hold people accountable while maintaining a team mentality.

Top Takeaway:

Every day you wake up with things on your mind that you need to address. These are your top stressors. Tackle them right away with tried and true skills to decrease your stress level.

Connect with Edward Beltran:

Website: https://fierceinc.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardjbeltrancpa/

On today’s show, we discuss how to develop an organizational strategy for user-centric innovations.

Prior to founding UXReactor, Satyam Kantamneni led various in-house design organizations such as Citrix and PayPal. He is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School. While at Harvard, Satyam realized that most businesses aren’t leveraging the full power of User Experience (UX) Design as an engine for strategic growth. So, he resolved to change that. Through UXReactor, Satyam demonstrated that UX can and should drive enterprise-wide innovation and business outcomes. UXReactor has enabled its clients-partners to generate hundreds of millions in additional revenue from user-cen- tered innovation. Satyam is passionate about user-centered innovation and he is authoring a book titled User Experience Playbook: A Practical to Fuel Business Growth, which will be released in April 2022.

Key Takeaways:

4 questions to ask anyone in the organization to see if you are user-centric:

• Who are your top users?
• What are their top pain points and needs?
• What are YOU doing about it?
• What is the measure of success?

Successful organizations have the:

• Right people
• Following the right processes
• With the right mindset
• In the right environment

Getting feedback from users requires the right people. Researching is not just talking to users. There are three types of research:

• Formative research – Understanding what the pain points are that are not being articulated.
• Validation research – Making sure what we have built is validated with users in a consistent manner.
• Sensorial research – Constantly tracking the satisfaction level of the users.

How do you cross the gap between what the user thinks they want and what they really need?

• Focus on the users’ behavior vs what they are saying.
• Observe them. Spend time with them, and propose something really useful for them.
• Create a way to experiment and validate your solution.

How to balance innovation and stability

• Run experiments from a user-centric perspective.
• Vigorously act on the results in a way that is measurable.

Should you ever focus on your competition, rather than your user?

Know your competition, but focus on how what they are doing relates to what your users care about.

Top Takeaways:

• A user-centric innovation or mindset is a success formula. Keep leveraging it and activate around it.
• Focus on having the right people following the right processes with the right mindset in the right environment.
• Experiment with this in an effective and deliberate manner or you may end up just reacting to the competition.

Connect with Satyam Kantamneni:

Website: https://uxreactor.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kantamneni/

Email: satyam@uxreactor.com

Book: User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth

On today’s show, we discuss how to have an effective revenue strategy.

Falkon CEO and Co-founder Mona Akmal is a product and engineering veteran who builds resourceful, kind, and output-driven teams that create and scale success-enabling products. With a passion for crafting elegant solutions to technically difficult problems, she has grown teams, businesses, and many products at Microsoft, Amperity, Code.org, and Zulily.

The impact of Mona’s work includes ramping from $0 to $11M in ARR and 15 household brands as happy customers at Amperity; from 10M to 100M students learning computer science on the Code.org platform; and from 1M to 1B docs in the cloud with OneDrive and Office.

Key Takeaways:

• Engineering and Business intersect by focusing on
  • efficiency
  • balancing the entire equation with analytical thinking
  • processing many variables to optimize an engine/business
• Challenges facing organizations in the Go To Market space
  • Siloed points of view. Various departments focused only on their departmental issues, and not net revenue retention.
  • Teams focused on execution and not thinking long-term.
  • Misunderstanding of the purpose of culture and operating principles.
• Indicators of a silo problem
  • Ask different teams why they are not performing and they blame each other.
  • Conflict between senior leadership.
• How to fix the problem
  • Executive leadership members are the neutral parties and need to do a good job of having a great data strategy, so there is a system of truth.
  • Have shared objectives.
  • Bottoms up feedback. Have conversations with average employees to gain non-digital data – very valuable perspectives. This will help gain a more full picture of the truth.
• Recommendations for key metrics to focus on
  • Input metrics – who you are targeting, how you are targeting them.
  • Marketing activities and ROI on campaigns and channels.
  • Sales development activities – conversion numbers.
  • Employee productivity – cost vs output.
• Recommendations for accurate and effective data
  • Data has to be directionally accurate. Focus on the trends, not the details.
  • Invest in operations – marketing and revenue.
  • Make employees’ lives easier by investing in the tools that will help them be productive.
• AI trends within GTM
  • Conversational intelligence and coaching driven by AI.
  • Data governance – anomaly detection and data cleaning driven by AI.
  • AI GTM intelligence tools that will look at massive amounts of activity data and pinpoint the key things to focus on to maximize your revenue engine.

Top Takeaways:

• Reflect on whether your objectives and key results as a senior leader are representative of a silo or not. Make sure you are also focused on revenue.
• Invest in a good data strategy and spend 50% of your time focusing on the future.

Connect with Mona Akmal:

Website: http://falkon.ai

LinkedIn Falkon: https://www.linkedin.com/company/falkonai/

LinkedIn Mona: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-akmal/

The expert guest was booked via The Expert Bookers, www.expertbookers.com. 

On today’s show, we discuss the new era of work and how companies can navigate it to stay relevant.

Emma Giles is one of the founders of SoWork, a product that helps digital-first teams do great work, no matter when they work or where they work from.

Emma leads product and spends her time working directly with SoWork customers who are leaders of organizations trying to navigate the digital-first work shift. This gives her a unique perspective on how the landscape of work is evolving, what leaders and their teams are struggling with, and how to solve the most pressing challenges with technology.

In her past life, she was a crisis counselor and a scientist. She dropped out of a PhD from Harvard/MIT in computational neuroscience to build a business, spent a year at Khan Academy creating free medical content for medical students, and scaled data initiatives for the WHO. Today, running a digital company allows her to live on Vancouver Island, where she spends her personal time hiking and running ultramarathon.

Key Takeaways:

• The concept of remote work isn’t new, but the pandemic has catapulted these trends. Companies are trying to decide where on the spectrum they will land between all remote or all on site.

• Performance of a business depends on people to come together in ways that are productive and high-functioning to drive great results. Teams need to be able to come together to be a unit that is greater than the sum of its parts. Team members as individuals need to feel seen, heard, and valued to perform at their best.

• New tools are becoming available to help build spontaneity in digital teams, allowing people to be in common spaces digitally. As companies realize that many of their pain points are related to connection and collaboration techniques, these tools will become more in demand.

• Teammates with at least 5-7 strong connections within the company are more likely to stay with the company. A strong connection is one where a person feels like they can be themselves with another person. These connections take cultivation to form and then touch points to maintain.

• Because people are different, leaders should cultivate an environment for people to get what they need, but not feel forced to behave a certain way. Meet people where they are with technology and make sure they are able to use the technology in a way that keeps the benefit of their flexibility.

• Adoption is often the biggest hurdle when implementing virtual team tools. Behavior changes require understanding, time, effort, realization for why it works, and then fitting it into people’s workflows. Less is more. Teamwork blocks are a great way to start. Select a unit of time where everyone comes together and works from the virtual office. They can see how it feels and build from there.

Top Takeaways:

• Every team is completely different.
• People’s need to feel like they can be themselves, be human, and connect in realistic ways is paramount.
• Everything in the business stems from the individual’s needs being met. This empowers them to connect in teams and create great results that affect the bottom line of the business.

Connect with Emma Giles:

Website: https://sowork.com/