Leading At The Next Level LIVE_ Are You Fixing the Wrong Pillar_
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Wes Dove: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Leading at the Next Level podcast with Dove Development and Consulting, the show built to provide ongoing support for your leadership journey. I'm Wes Dove. I'm here with my best friend, my partner in business and in life, Cindy Dove. I'm excited about that, and I'll turn it over to her momentarily.
I'm gonna say, if you're watching this from inside our Leading at the Next Level community, you get access to the video, so you get to see my anim- animation, you get to see any of the dumb stuff that I'm gonna do on screen. But we're also, in this particular case, like we've done recently a few times, pushing this out to our Facebook and our LinkedIn business pages, and that's gonna be for a limited time.
It's very, very intentional. So if you're catching it there, make sure you get access to the community so you don't miss out on what comes next. So today, Cindy and I are gonna talk about a simple question, but it's also a very expensive one. It's around the idea that we've been digging into recently surrounding our people optimization system and the pillars within it.
Are you [00:01:00] fixing the wrong pillar? Because, gosh, what we've seen over and over and over isn't that organizations aren't trying. They're often working really hard, but they're working on the wrong things. They're addressing the wrong things first, and that's what we built the people optimization system assessment to build or to really identify so they can find the right pillar and work on the right things.
Now, before I turn it on over to Cindy, I wanna make a special invitation before we really dive into the rest of the content, and that invitation is to join us in our Advantage Launch team. Cindy and I have nine books that are scheduled to release over the next, we've been saying 18 months, but at this point, it's really about 14 or 15 months.
And that all starts on November 19th. W- you'll be able to join the launch team at any point in time, but prior to November 19th is the only opportunity that you're gonna have to be one of the founding members of that launch team, and there's gonna be b- some really cool stuff, and we've got a special celebration scheduled that evening of November 19th.
Cindy, take it [00:02:00] away
Cindy Dove: So if you're just joining us, this is the fifth episode in our series on the People Optimization System. We started with the POS letter, walked through the six implementation guides, covered the assessments, and last week, we talked about what to do once you have your result using the values pillar as the example.
Today, we're going to step back up a level, and before you ever get to a stage or a chapter, there's a more basic question, and it's this: Is this even the right pillar to be working on? So that's the question that saves organizations the most time and the most money.
Wes Dove: So here's a pattern that Cindy and I have watched play out more times than we can count.
Turnover goes up, so the organization launches an engagement survey. The engagement score comes back, it's soft, so they bring in a leadership program, and the leadership program goes fine, but nothing much changes. So somebody suggests, "Gosh, the values need to be refreshed." And a year later, they've done four genuinely good things, and they're in [00:03:00] roughly the same place that they were when they started, and everybody's tired, everybody's frustrated.
That's not a failure of commitment. The folks cared. It's failure of sequence. The most expensive fix in any organization is the one that's aimed at the wrong pillar
Cindy Dove: And the people optimization system looks at an organization through five pillars. Direction is whether people understand where the organization is headed and can act on it in their daily work.
Values is whether the stated values guide decisions when they cost something. And leadership is whether leadership is held by a few people or if it's built as an organizational capability. Growth is whether capacity grows on purpose or only when somebody leaves. And experience is what it's like to work in and to buy from the organization.
Running through all five is communication. It's not a sixth pillar, it's the mechanism of every pillar. It's the mechanism that every pillar depends [00:04:00] on to get from what they intend to what happens.
Wes Dove: Now, pillars don't stay in their own lane. Here's, here's the thing, and here's what matters about the overall structure.
Those pillars, they're not independent. A weak one doesn't stay politely where it's at. It spills over. Unclear direction makes growth feel really aimless and useless because people don't know what they're growing toward. Values that aren't enforced, they wear down the experience for the employees first, then the customers.
And thin leadership makes every other pillar depend on whoever happens to be holding things together this particular year. So the symptom that you notice first is very often not where the problem actually lives. It's just where the pain shows up. Now, I can speak to that because in years, in 15 years of doing accident investigations, incident investigations, when I had a role with safety responsibility, we would so frequently dig into those incidents, and we would look at [00:05:00] what went on, and we would see all these different things, and people would inherently say, "Well, we need a sticker, or we need a sign that says, 'Don't stick your hand or you're gonna get cut.'"
~Well, ~duh, nobody didn't-- nobody wanted to get cut to begin with. And we needed to really dig a little bit deeper, and that was, we did things like a fishbone and a five why and all these different root cause analysis ideas to really dig into what's the real issue. And hey, that's the same thing we're dealing with here.
Let's dig in to make sure we're addressing the right thing, and that's the work that we put in behind the scenes. So the POS assessment, the People Optimization System assessment, helps you identify the starting point, and then we've built the individual pillar assessments to really dig into is that really the thing and where are you within that specific pillar.
And it's not just, hey, let's check the pulse and do it. We're gonna dig in and make sure that whatever we identify, we talk through and then, and figure out is that really the problem that needs solving, or is it just what we think for right [00:06:00] now?
Cindy Dove: Let's take turnover, because every organization deals with it.
It feels like an experience problem, and sometimes it is. People leave because the day-to-day is hard to live with for a variety of reasons. It's, it's what they're experiencing. But people also leave because they can't see where the organization is going, and we hear that often. That's direction. They leave because the values on the wall and the values being lived out in the organization don't match.
That's values. They leave because their supervisor was promoted into leadership, but never prepared for it. That's leadership. And they leave because nobody ever developed them, so the only way up is out, and that's the growth pillar. Same symptom, five different root causes, five different fixes. Pick the wrong one though, and you can spend a year solving a problem that you don't have.
Wes Dove: I've been involved in dozens, maybe even hundreds of exit interviews over the years. A matter of fact, my [00:07:00] last 18 months in manufacturing, I filled 225 positions, and we didn't have but about a 10 person overall head- change in headcount. And in doing that, I learned that in those exit interviews, we often hear what's the easiest answer, and we often hear it communicated in different ways.
And Cindy and I often talk when we're working through the disc model of human behavior and why people do what they do, we talk about how two different people, Cindy is a high CSD blend, or a very, very high C in that blend, and me as a very, very high in my DIC, pun intended, blend, that we're gonna... We often might do the same thing or say the same words, but we do it for very, very different reasons.
So we've got to really understand and what, what's the driver behind all that. And that's where the different assessments, the different tools help us identify what the real problem is. If somebody in an exr- exit interview says, "Well, gosh, I'm just working too much overtime," ~well, ~that might be the issue, but it mightn't be, because it's not been something that they understand the real impact that they're [00:08:00] having while they're working that overtime.
If they say, "My supervisor was mean," maybe it's because it was a supervisor that held them accountable. Could be any one of those things
Cindy Dove: And once you know the pillar, each one moves through the same five stages from a void at the beginning to a pillar that's truly in motion at the end. In direction, for example, that runs from direction void to stated direction, dir- to direction avoidance, direction disconnect, and finally direction in motion.
And here's the part people notice. You're placed at the highest stage where every earlier stage is also solid. So we never average anything. A late-stage strength can't paper over an early-stage gap. An organization with an inspiring vision deck but no shared understanding of it o- on the front line doesn't get credit for the deck, and that's on purpose.
Most organizations are tempted to build on top of a crack because the upper floors are the part that everybody sees. The stages are there to keep it, [00:09:00] us honest about the foundation
Wes Dove: I've often heard supervisors say, "Hey, don't just stand there, do something." And Cindy and I teach in the-- when, when we talk about John Maxwell's Law of Reflection, sometimes you might wanna think before-- you might wanna stand there a little bit before you do something.
Make sure you're doing the right thing. Cindy tells me often, it doesn't matter how fast I'm going if I'm going in the wrong direction. And that's why we built the POS assessment, the People Optimization System Assessment, to help identify which pillar do we need to really address. The whole point of the system is the real- the reality is we can't work on everything at one time.
Nobody's got capacity for that. We've always talked about we wanna make sure the organizations we're working with can get a measurable return on the time, the energy, the, the, the, the resources they're investing into what they're doing with us, so they can see it. They've got a real payback. And the reality is, that's how we can make sure whatever we put attention on gets real measurable [00:10:00] return.
The point's to find that pillar that's costing you the most right now, work through it properly, and then go to the next one, the one that needs the most attention. That's exactly what that free People Optimization System Assessment is built for. Now, I'm gonna segue just a little bit and say, over the last year, we've been working on iterations of that.
What you see today is not the idea that we started with, and we've been very intentional about making sure that it grows. The one that we've got out there as the starting point now, it only takes about four minutes. It's designed to be fast. It's designed to rank all five pillars, lowest to highest, and recogn- recommends where you start along with reasoning.
It might not necessarily be on the one you ranked lowest on. It might be the one that you ranked in the middle, but it's your best opportunity g- to get the me- the most immediate return. From there, each pillar, we have a deeper assessment that really helps you identify which of the five stages you're in within that pillar, and it tells you [00:11:00] at which pil- which chapter of that pillar's implementation guide where you should start.
If you've already got stage one well in hand, you don't need to spend time on that. Let's start at stage two or stage three, whichever one it is. And that's what we walked through in the ideas of values in the last episode we did. The first job is to make sure we aim. Then the deeper diagnosis comes next
Cindy Dove: So we wanna leave you with three questions to take back to your team.
First, list the last three significant things your organization launched to fix a people problem. What pillar was each one actually aimed at? Second, did anyone confirm that pillar was the root cause before the time and money were spent, or was it just the most visible symptom at the time? And third, if you could only work on one pillar for the next 12 months, which one would you choose today, and how confident are you in that answer?
If you're not very confident, that's exactly what the assessment is for.
Wes Dove: Now, [00:12:00] we've done a couple different things, and we're building a new one out as we have this conversation, as we record this session for you, and we've built dashboards. So if you're working with us directly, not... We can't do it for everyone, but if it's an on-site engagement, we're gonna build a dashboard for your organization so you can not only capture where everybody feels like you're at right now with that people optimization s- system assessment, the general one, where you're at in each of the individual stages as you take those assessments, and we're gonna help you build in the lagging indicators, the things that you already track in your profit and loss statement, in your bottom line, the things that you look at routinely, as well as what are the leading indicators that have a direct impact on those things.
So you can track when we did this, this is the return we've got. There's one other thing that we're working on right now as we speak, and that is an overall review for your leaders. We've done and we've used 360 [00:13:00] assessments for a number of leaders over the years, and it's a powerful tool if you have the right things to measure.
In this case, we're, we're building a 360 assessment around each of the five pillars And communication is a mechanism that can tie directly back in with that overall dashboard that your organization's using, and you can take it all upfront to figure out where you're at as a leader, and you can have steps in the process at three, six, nine ye-- three, six months, whatever that might be, maybe a year out, to see how have we made these changes.
So we've got a clear plan at a leadership level, how are we moving the needle to make sure that not only are we doing the things to build the processes within the organization, what are we doing individually to be able to build that? We've got one more thing, and I'll let Cindy share a few things with you before we wrap it up, because there's some fairly interesting things that we're digging into here.
Actually, I'm not gonna turn it over to Cindy yet. I'm looking back at the notes, and that's why we have bullet points to work through from this, so I don't just [00:14:00] throw things at her that's crazy. What I'll ask you to do, if you've not taken it yet, go to posframework.com and take that quick four-minute free People Optimization System assessment.
Again, it takes about four minutes. It's twenty-five questions, and it's designed to give you a snapshot of which pillar would you get the most value from. Then at that point, you can dig into all the implementation guides. They're live, all six of them on Amazon. We're, as we speak, recording the digital lessons that are gonna be in the, the optimization implementation process.
We'll have them built out over the next several months, so every single pillar, plus communication, has a full implementation digital resource that follows. If you want a monthly snapshot for how all this process works, sign up for the POS letter, the letter that's built to keep your organization from being a POS.
It's at the bottom of the page on the posframework.com page. The caveat that I wanna always share, if you need continuing education credit, [00:15:00] send us an email at dove hy... at, at admin@dove-development.net, and we can tie you into our Leading at the Next Level full program. This podcast has been in place for a couple years.
The program has been in place for nearly a decade, now has more than two hundred lessons approved for credit through the Society for Human Resource Management and Human Resource Certification Institute. The next level leadership access is the one that you'll want, because that's where there's the behavior-based assessments and the continuing education credit that's, that's built into that.
You get a fourteen-day trial to kick the tires. You can get the credit within that, and after the fourteen-day period, it starts the payment processing. Cindy, what would you like to add before we wind down?
Cindy Dove: I'll give the name again, People Optimization System. The site is posframework.com. Go there, take the POS assessment- ~Mm~
and we'll look forward to seeing you back here.
Wes Dove: Yep. Guys, the last thing I'll share is the next episode we're gonna [00:16:00] do is really taking that idea of the Leading At The Next Level program and building it into both the leadership optimization and growth optimization in something brand new, some custom growth and custom leadership paths that we're rolling out with some organizations that we can take the reviews that you're already doing and customize a strategic plan to help your team grow so you've got a process in place to make sure that you're truly optimizing and you're building the process organization-wide.
Again, if you've got a need for the credits, reach out at admin@dove-development.net and we'll get you access for a trial, and we'll go from there. We'll see you soon. God bless.
