Live from Cleveland, Ohio, it's C-level game plans with host Norman Hood. Hey, Shay Lynch, welcome to the show. Brilliant. Great to be here, Norman. Thanks for the invite. You're welcome. Hey, we're gonna jump in. We're gonna stop talk today about improving organizational design and leadership, and I know you have a very comprehensive program for that. So let's just jump in. First of all, I know sometimes people struggle when they're getting started with any program. Can you tell me a situation of someone you've worked with and what their first struggle was with your program? The first struggle, Norman, when I work with clients is to actually get them moving, right? And I'll give an example. So when I, the first thing I do with a new client, and this is a client I worked with quite recently, that's a distribution company here that delivered to retail stores around the country, and I'm based in Ireland. My goal is to get them understanding where they are. They always want to go to the vision, right? The really fancy, nice, like exciting stuff, but they forget about the stuff on the ground. So what I like to do is I don't tell them we can't do that, Norman. What I say to them is that, look, let's have a look of how you're doing today. Let's look at what's working well. Let's look at what's not working so well that we need to improve and then what's not so good at all, what's terrible, and I always say the film, the good, the bad and the ugly, right? Because then when I start demonstrating with them, working with them, they see it. I'm not telling them. And that's the most important thing because then we come to the same conclusion. OK, we need to make improvements before we go to the fancy shiny new objects stuff, right? And for this particular client, for example, they want, they brought me in to do build a strategy blueprint for them to move into the UK market, which was 10 times the size of the Irish market, which sounds fantastic and exciting. But if they have internal problems, right, and then when they move and scale and they scale their business, they'll scale their problems too. And sometimes they may get away with that in a smaller level, but once it becomes a critical mass, it can be quite destructive for the business. And my goal is to make that them see that for themselves. So you mentioned finding what's working well. Let's just stay with the same clients. So what was the first thing that they could identify that was working well? They're great at exhausting a marketplace, right? They're really good at getting into different places and they've really good, they had really good engaged sales engine in the business and I don't mean that manipulative, like very customer experience, customer centered focus where they work really well with their clients. They were really good people and people bought from them because they liked them and trusted them. That's probably the best thing they did well and even the culture of the business was very good too, Norman. They're probably the two key things in that business. OK. So when you got when you were finished, engagement finished, everybody's happy, what would you say was the main result they got and why was, why did that matter to them in the long run? Well, why it mattered, Norman, is because I needed to create a blueprint for them that was scalable, right? So the biggest result that we got was to build the blueprint of how it exists today. And I have this saying, and you would have seen this, Norman, in some of the work I've done. I have a six pillar system that I help clients with, and one of them is scaling engine. Like it's called the system, S Y S T E M, and each letter is a pillar. The second S is scaling engine, and the final M is maximize. They're not sequential and every company is different how they go through those different pillars. So it's very unique, but I always say, before you scale, you must maximize, maximize before you multiply, right? Because otherwise you'll multiply the good stuff and the bad stuff, right? So what I wanted to do was to build with them, not just me on my own, a blueprint that was scalable. So we spent more time than they initially thought we would, and they've actually put out their program by about 6 months, but it was 6 months' worth it because now with confidence they could say we can scale because they believed they saw everything. Underground they had no major problems because we eliminated them through the course of the 6 months. They were efficient and effective. OK, so I like the fact that your system is not static. It can change. It's not always in the same order. It depends on the client. So what happens when someone comes into a process that's not like what you're describing, where it's basically a fixed system where everybody's treated the same. 123, right in a line. What happens when somebody uses that type of a default system instead of what you're doing? Lapping Norman, they'll hit a roadblock very quickly, as you're great to call that out because nothing is static in this world. There's no one size fits all, and you always have to iterate. I always say, and I've been saying this long before COVID, that the only constant in business is change, right? You need to embrace change. That means by definition you cannot be static. And the world is sped up so much. If you're not moving forward now, improving and iterating your business model, your customer experience, and your marketplace, you're actually moving backwards. And so it's important for them to make sure that they understand that they need to change. They can't, and like the way I'm thinking of your question, like in the old days where the consultants would build the five year plants. And then they go, Here's we spent 6 months putting this amazing report together. Here you go, and goodbye. Adios. We're done. And then the companies have this tunnel vision. They go on and just this is what the report says. So we're going to do it. We're going to do it. And then all of a sudden they're keeping their heads down and I call it the ostrich syndrome where they just pop up to make sure everything's OK every now and again. And if it's not, guess what, they put their heads in the sand again and just keep doing that. And all of a sudden they missed all this amazing data and the signals externally, and they haven't done anything about it. So everything should be iterated often, and I always like to say 90 day plans because it's enough time to get. So much work done and get people motivated and it's a good point to then just step back and go, is the plan still, is the vision still what we want? Cause guess what? You've learned a lot on those 3 months. Your idea of the vision will evolve and it should not stay the same. So, your idea of your vision should not stay static either, because the more you do, the more you learn, and then the more you should apply and act on. What you learn, not just keep going straight because that's what the plan said. OK, so we're living in a world of AI. Everybody knows it has some benefits. It has some downfalls. If someone were to just Instead of hiring you, let's say they just go to chat GPT and they say, this is what I wanna do. I want to overcome the same struggle. What type of pattern are you gonna see from that versus someone who's actually does this day in and day out? There's, there's a few things, Norman, right? First of all, like people who put their face in a chatbot that has been trained by everything on the internet, and I will use the film again, the good, the bad and the ugly. Just because the chatbot or chatty beauty, which everyone use, says this is what you should do. If you just follow that blindly, do you think the chatchi BD is going to care if you fail? No. And the other thing it can't do, it can't give you any sort of level of reasoning. It can apply logics. It's a large language model. It's not a reasoning model, right? So it can't reason. It cannot take data. It cannot speculate. It cannot be creative, and it cannot be a sound like an effective sounding board that you can use. With someone like an advisor or someone like me, because a lot of work I do now, Norman, like Chat GBT helps them. Don't get me wrong, it can help them. We talked about the blueprint before. It can help you build those blueprints very quickly. If you give it a set instruction, it can do that. Very well, but it still takes a review process to see is that accurate? Is this is exactly how we do it? And then you build your process map, because I always say if you can't map it on a process, you don't know what you're doing. And, and that's chat GBD can't do that stuff. You can create the helicopter view and you can give it, you can do so much yourself, or you have to do so with yourself before you let any type of AI get involved because it'll only do the stuff on the ground. If you really want to improve, Norman, and you know it yourself, you've worked, I'm sure with business consultants and mentors over the years. Like the best times, the best outputs of those are when you've had a really good conversation and that mentor is asking you very challenging and thoughtful questions so you can come to conclusions yourselves, right? Because it's about bringing, and the biggest danger I have with clients, Norman, and by the way, that's one of them, people putting too much faith in the wrong place. Because it's convenient. Leaders are so busy. Leaders have emotions. Leaders have biases. They also have egos, right? I have to help them cut through all of that to help them see the real truth, not just the perception, because I always say, no matter what's going on, if you're in an emotional mindset, you're in this mode where you just see the illusion of truth. A good example of that, Norman, when I go and ask clients, so what's your biggest problem? They go into solution mode. Oh, we need more people. We don't have enough capacity. And I thought, have you done any problem solving? No. OK, we're good. We're good for now. Let's focus on the problems. And that's exactly going back to the client. I told you, they're the same lines of questions I asked. Have you done problem solving? No. So we went and did a lens on all the problems they have, and we solved so many. Not only do we solve them, the people learned more about their problems. And they, because they created the new version, they owned it. Makes sense. So you mentioned a system acronym. So how did you come up with that? Would you believe Norman, it's a really good question. It took years and, as I have a nine-step roadmap, a helicopter view above all that, and I have the system based inside of that. Where it came up, Norman, there's a few reasons. I'm an engineer by trade, like manufacturing engineer, so I'm very process driven and systems thinking orientated. I'm also a lean 6 Sigma master black belt. So the way you can only improve what you measure, you can only measure what you've developed as your current best method of how you should do things. When you have a defined process, you can measure it and you can prove. You can find failure modes along that process. It wasn't step one, it was step 2. And then what do we need? How do we fix step two? You fix it. You can fix those lowest points of resistance or highest points of resistance, right? Your bottlenecks. And when you have something. That you've defined, you can measure and improve. If you just go by flying by the seat of their pants pants, and I say that because I see a lot of companies do it and sometimes you will, they'll do OK, that's fine. They're not the type of clients I want to work with. I want to work with clients that can systematically see how to improve things. So that's where the system came from. And then there's 6 pillars, as I said, it's like the pillars in their business that they need to improve. And as I said, sequence matters. And to give an example, the scaling, the first S is strategy. You don't do anything about understanding the strategy. You cannot be tactical on the ground. You cannot think just because I did X last year, I can do 10% more this year by putting 10% more in. You have to be creative and innovative, how you get that 10%. And you can't just assume what you did last year is gonna give you the same results this year, because guess what? Things change, right? So the strategy is very important. The white pillar is you as a leader. And I always say, Norman, my goal is to help you become the leader the business needs, not stay as the leader you are, right? Because guess what, if you want the business to improve, that's completely centered around your Opportunity, your ambitions and your potential, or limitations are where you don't want to improve anymore. Companies fail at the point where leaders don't want to grow, right? So if you want the business to grow, leaders must grow. OK, good. 3 more questions. We're gonna focus on another client, and I want you to take in your mind to come up with one client in the last year that you believe you've had the greatest impact on. And in what conditions. And that engagement made it possible to get that result. Yeah. Really good question. And leveraging just what I just talked about the U pillar. I've learned over the years, Norman, if I want a business improved, the first thing I need to do is work with the leader. When I know the leader is open to evolving and improving and developing themselves, then I can use them and work with them to build a really performing business. There's a client I have in the west of Ireland in their real estate business, and I've been working with her for a number of years. And people have their own journeys, Norman. I know how to push people and I know when to. Like, where my boundaries are with that, because I don't want to push them too far. I learned there are limits. So, when I do that current assessment in the beginning of a business, I'm also assessing the leader's potential and ability to move and their capacity for growth. And I wanna bring them just over. I want to create a sense of urgency with them, not emergency. So this particular leader, I was bringing her on the journey and it was a little bit slow. So I've been working a few years. The first year was a little bit slow. Now, she made a phone call to me. It must have been about 7 months ago, Norman, and she goes, I'm ready. Now. I get it. It was like just a penny dropped. And from there, we've been working on building that blueprint I mentioned in the previous. She realized, now, before I grow, I need to stabilize. And there was a few things that happened around the same time. One of our closest team members resigned, right? And that I think was the trigger. So she cannot. And again, going back to the only constant in business to change, she cannot just assume things will always be the way. She cannot stay safe in a bubble and just tick over. In order to protect their business going forward, she needs to grow, but only when the business is ready to grow. So, we've been working on a maximized strategy for the last 6 months, and now we're in a, in the scaling mode. OK, awesome. So you're obviously measuring something. In this case, it sounds like you're measuring change. How do that and how do you use it to guide your decisions? Oh, where do I start with that one, Norman? There's the qualitative side and the quantitative side. And when it comes to change, the people are very much a part of that journey too. And I always say to my leaders, my, my direct clients that if you want your business to win, your teams must win too. So, what I work very closely with and going back to building those blueprints, Norman, and getting them involved. Every day I'm working with them, doing these like process mapping sessions. I'm learning to see who's with me and who's not. Every day I'm taking data points, and then when I see things, I'll have a conversation with the leader to figure out, is this person just having a bad day or do I need to work with these people a bit. And therefore, when I work with them, does the leader need to work? So, it's very adaptive on the people side of things because people, while change is important. Everybody in this world that I know of, including me, Norman, as much as I'm a change agent, we don't like change. We're programmed not in our brains not to like change because our brains like to do things efficiently and effective and it likes to go from your manual mode to automatic mode. And I always give the example, did you learn to drive a car in an automatic? No, I'd use a stick shift. Stick shift, you know how clunky that was, Norman, and it was horrible. I was a stick shift too, but once you did it, you wondered, how was it so hard? And then not only when it became so comfortable, I guarantee you you've had days where you've driven home from work or whatever and you ask yourself the question, I don't remember that journey. What did I do? Because it comes so automatic. Our brains love that automatic mode. When you're doing everything for a long time. It gets used to it. It's easy, it's frictionless. So when you put change into that equation, people resist. So my goal is to get those resistance points up in the air to the surface as soon as possible. And a lot of, you mentioned AI and a lot of people are concerned about AI. Am I going to lose my job? Also, I've been doing, I've been using this archaic system for 20 years now. I have to use this really fancy, complicated probably system and they get fear of using a new system, right? There's so many reasons why they don't. So I track this very closely and I bring them on a change journey and the best way to do that, Norman is include them from the very beginning, right? So that's how I track and adapt in real time. And then obviously on the vision and the leadership side, there's hard data we can get as well. What's the market saying? And then as I said, this is why the 90 days is very powerful because you're never gonna go too far. Uh, of course, if you're only doing 90 days, as I said, if you had those 5 year plans, you're 12 months into designing a new interface for something and all of a sudden you realize a competitors after coming out with something that's the full package and it's just completely offset what you've done for 12 months. So the goal is to track in 3 month periods, both the people side of things, the vision, the leadership, and then realize where do we need to course correct, right? And we create those qualitative and quantitative measures along the journey. So we predict, so what does success look like in 3 months' time? And what are we measuring? Now what are the specific measures within each category are we looking at? And it's never 100%, but the goal is to get it started, Norman. And then once we get it started, we can improve those metrics every 3 months, right, little by little. It's iterative. So with this real estate person you've worked with, first we talked a little bit about conditions, metrics, how do you track progress. Obviously if those all are fulfilled, you're gonna get a result, but do you have to put a constraint on that sometimes with people when they come in and they ask about what the result is? How do you, what's the constraint that you've put that assures that they actually do get the result? There's a few ways and Norman, what I like, I'm a very human orientated person and other people centered, so. I create contracts based on the person I'm dealing with, so I don't, again, I don't have one size fits all. If I know that I need to, if I know it's a certain type of persona I'm dealing with. There's like the card and the stick approach where I will say, I may, for example, work with a client. I have a feeling one of the risks I'm identifying through my discovery process is that you're so busy and people are going to get lost in their day to day stuff and they're going to have no time. But if you really want change, let me know because I'll help you. If they're not going to change, I won't. So that's a question. That's a qualification question. If they come back, and then I'll say, what are you willing to do about that to make sure. And then I'll lead them into a direction where you can have a choice. You pay for me upfront every month, right? That means you've paid for my services, whether your team do the work or not. That gives them a bit of a carrot then to get their team motivated and get them to have an active sponsorship in the role. That's one way. The other thing, Norman, to make sure I bring them along that journey, I create the mechanism for success. So I'll build the structure so I can do so much. I'm an advisor. I'm not going to go in and do it for them. Like I can, but then when I go, Norman, guess what? Everything goes with me. So I want to transfer knowledge. So I'll build a project team, right, in the beginning, and have the right personas and the right skill sets there, and they'll all have an accountability assigned to them in it. And they'll all be given X amount of time. So, they have to report on that in their week to week status reports with their leaders. So I'm bringing it into their day to day operation. Now it's only 2 to 3 hours a week, right? So it's not overarching or overwhelming. The other thing, Norman, like for success, I mentioned about the 3 months. In order, if I want to predict success, I'm not gonna go off and then just do my own thing with their teams for 3 months and leave the leader just going, oh yeah, everything's great. I'll meet with them, whether they like it or not, I'm going to meet with them every week. That's a non-negotiable for me. So we're always aligned what I'm doing and what they want to do because I have lots of questions. I'll need a lot of answers. I'll need guidance there. I'll present options and scenarios to them, Norm. But they need to come back to me and pick something because I'm, I will, what I'll take responsibility for is how I go about things and creating the ingredients and the recipe for success. But they have to do the mixing. Their team have to do the work and the, and one of the challenges I find with leaders is they want to just go, OK, Shay, you go off and do that now. And leave it there. That's not how I work. They need to be active, and they need to be seen as active because people want strong leaders in today's world. Otherwise, if they don't, guess what? They'll leave and go somewhere else. Perfect. Great interview. I know you have a book in the works, so hopefully you can come back and we'll talk about that sometime. Great, I look forward to Norman, and it's always great to chat. Thanks for the opportunity and have a great day. Take care.