WARP Speed Leadership

How to get your organisation aligned, plus working senior leaders with Sandra Davey

September 15, 2024 • Richard Parton

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In this episode we're talking to Sandra Davey, an incredible product manager who has also served as a senior leader and board member at some of Australia’s most influential organisations. 

Sandy shared some great insights about working work with and influencing senior leaders — including what they are looking for from you, how to communicate effectively, and more broadly how to help senior leaders create alignment and clarity across the organisation. 

Links and further reading: 

Richard:

Hi, and welcome to warp speed leadership, a podcast about everything you need to know to get great outcomes for your business and your people in this warp speed age of AI and beyond. I'm your host, Richard Parton coming to you from Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. And in today's show, we're going to be talking to Sandra Davey, who, in addition to being a wildly successful product manager has also served as a senior leader and board member at some of Australia's most influential organizations. I wanted to ask Sandy about her experiences of working at that level. And she also shared some great insights about what you need to know as someone who perhaps needs to work with, or maybe influence people at senior leadership level and what they're looking for from you, and she shared some great insights for how to communicate effectively and how to help senior leaders create alignment and clarity First up though, we're going to start by wrapping up some of the latest news and highlights that leaders need to know from the world of work business and a AI. This year's world happiness report from the UN has highlighted some interesting lessons for leaders trying to understand current workplace dynamics, a number of richer countries, including the USA have continued to fall in the overall rankings. Despite further gains in both wealth and health. The U S and Germany have fallen to 23 and 24 in the rankings with Australia, where I'm coming to you from, being relatively stable at number 10. This echoes findings in many other workplace studies that pay alone is a poor predictor of workplace satisfaction. And instead the report identifies factors, including the quality of close relationships, sense of fairness and autonomy as being much more predictive. Staying in the U S Gallup's annual workplace engagement survey found that us engagement has hit an 11 year low. The study found that this was often linked with rising workloads and to employees feeling disconnected from their organization's mission and purpose. I study from Microsoft has also linked rising workloads with many employees using AI in their workplace without disclosing it. Participant cited. Fear of being told not to use AI as a primary reason for not disclosing. This underlines, the importance for leaders to not only use AI themselves, but also share guidelines and information about how to get the best value from AI pitfalls and ethical use, and ideally get people sharing that use cases. And finally recent months, we've seen a flurry of new AI models from the major players with a couple of key themes emerging. At the time of recording, OpenAI has just released its new oh one models, which appear to present a step change in reasoning. So it will be interesting to see if and how the other players are able to respond. All of the top model providers have also now released smaller, faster, lower cost versions of their flagship models and tropics Claude 3.5 sonnet model in particular, it was performing at levels equivalent to or above chat TBT prior to the release of the oh one models. And until just days ago, looked to have edged ahead on reasoning tasks. With the exclusion of the O one models open source has for the first time, all but leveled the playing field with the other leading providers. Open source models, such as Metters, latest addition to its Lama. 3.1 suite. Are often more appealing, faster and malleable for developers and for enterprise versus the closed models from open AI, Google, and anthropic. Opening night is also now slowly rolling out the real-time voice capabilities of it's GBT four O model. Not to be out done. Google is also starting to roll out the equivalent. Gemini live offering. All of these trends are providing new ways that users and particularly businesses can interact with large language models and provide greater abilities for models to carry out tasks and in what is fast becoming the theme for 2024. As the AI hype dies down, we're seeing more and more tangible, real world use cases. So now to help us digest and explore all of that and more I'm joined by my cohost Nikki Tugano, CEO, and founder. I've seen culture. Hey Nikki, how are you going?

Nikki:

Hey, I'm doing good. I'm really interested in the engagement trend going down but also I'm curious to dive into a little bit more the the World Happiness Report and what that's teaching us about work. And if there's any like connection between the two, I think that would be really interesting.

Richard:

Oh, yeah, totally. Let's let's dive into the Gallup report. First up some really interesting findings in there. They had younger employees under 35 as one of the key groups who are most likely to be less engaged employees could do their jobs remotely, but work exclusively on site. So that's, that seems like that's very much a response reaction to the fact that they're feeling like they're not being. enabled by their workplaces and employees who exclusively work from home who, who are down five points. So yeah what are you making of those themes? There's some pretty interesting stuff happening there.

Nikki:

Yeah. Yeah. Engagement hitting like an all time low an 11 year low anyway is disappointing, but when actually looking at those those categories that are experiencing the lowest employee engagement, it doesn't surprise me as much And in particular, I'd say this about the younger employees and those under 35, I think, as we know Gen Zs and some of the younger Millennials and I certainly put myself in that bucket where we're much more motivated and engaged working in culture where we feel really connected to the purpose and vision and mission. And and I think, over time and certainly over the last 11 years where we've seen this decline, obviously, there's been a greater proportion of that younger generation making up a bigger proportion of the workforce. And so they're having a lot more weight. And influence in the overarching like aggregate trend, which I think is, natural. And so what that suggests to me is that organizations really need to be adapting to the changing dynamic and profile or demographic profile of their workforces.

Richard:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, it's it's an interesting dynamic that, the, profile of the folk who are in those leadership positions makes it almost by definition, just a little bit harder for them to engage with that different orientation to workplace. So I think I can understand why some leaders that not. Not necessarily naturally leaning into that. Which is probably what's creating that, that, that impact. I noticed also in the Gallup reporting recently they were looking at remote working and of the people who were working predominantly remotely, there seemed to be a greater disconnection from organizational purpose. And I can see how that would contribute as well. So you've got this multiple level thing of the demographic of the workplace changing and that driving engagement in a particular direction, but then also the way that people are working, making it harder for them to connect. And I'm just going to connect that onto one of the other things I thought was super interesting about this particular report was they also were talking about some of the organizations who were performing really well and. In those top performing organizations, they had an average of 70 percent engaged employees. ratio of 14 engaged to every actively disengaged employee, which is more than seven times the US average. So it's clear that there are certain organizations that are able to do it well. And when I think back then to those factors around demographic shift around how we're working. It seems to me like those are things that are very surmountable. You, if you actually think about. How am I going to make sure that I am engaging the different demographics? How am I going to make sure that I'm structuring work in a way that enables people to connect to purpose and to goals and that kind of thing? I absolutely feel like those are things that you can do. But they require a bit of a different way of looking at them, right?

Nikki:

Yeah, I would absolutely say so. I think a lot of the existing infrastructure to incentivize employees is governed still historically by you know, thinking of work as an exchange of labor for pay. And it's so not that anymore, right? Now work means so much more to us. It gives us a source of connection, of purpose, of autonomy, of, an ability to really play to our strengths and pursue our ambitions and all of that. And if organizations aren't really enhancing that in employee's experience, then You know it's I would think anyway, like it would eventuate into engagement dropping as the greater proportion of these younger generations are now taking up, more majority majority of the working population. And I think it's cool, like with those organizations that are bucking the downward trend what they've said at Gallup in this article is is those organizations that have created Hybrid working environment that fits their cultures. And I think it's a really great point that highlights the need for leaders to be intentional about giving an equitable experience to employees, whether they are working remotely or going into the office or in a hybrid manner.

Richard:

Yeah, absolutely. And that differentiation between. Giving everybody the same is not the same as giving everybody that sort of equitable experience. And you have to paint with broad brushstrokes here, but, if you have some younger folk in your team, maybe you're thinking about The way that you're connecting the team up a little bit differently, my experience with teams with a sort of a younger demographic is that actually deliberately using social aspects of work life is, super important. Making sure that you do have that Slack channel, that's buzzing the whole time, making sure that you're having those regular check ins, it's not that those are. like a way for us to socialize per se, it's actually that working in that social manner is much more a part of that way of working. But then, if you're working with a, a different set of people, you're needing to adapt it each way. I'm wanting to connect or go back to a thing you said a moment ago, which got me really interested. You were saying that perhaps there might be a link between this stuff that we're seeing from Gallup on workplace engagement. And one of the other things that's been really, that was really interesting recently, which was the world happiness report.

Nikki:

Yeah it speaks to actually just your last comment on the importance of that social connection and building that into the employee experience. And in looking at. The world happiness report they've identified a number of driving factors that contribute to happiness. And so according to their report, the biggest contributor of happiness making up 49 percent is social support. And what that says to me is that there's a real, Direct link and or at least alignment in the role of social connection or social support in the workplace as it relates to not just happiness, but also employee engagement.

Richard:

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a, there's an awesome breakdown of that report that you put me on to from Josh Burson that I'm going to, I'm going to put a link to in the show notes. And yeah, 49 percent down to social support of the other really big chunks, 14 percent down to freedom to make life choices and then wealth, a key driver, perception of corruption, and then generosity and what What Josh Burson has drawn out from that is, how does that relate to workplaces? And so of course, he's got relationships matter at the top. I think his next point also is really interesting. Trust in leadership. So trust in leadership, it relates to the sense that things are being done fairly. Is that what you're, you would take from that?

Nikki:

Yeah I would say so. But but also that there, trusted in terms of making the right decisions for not just the business, but also, but for the employees as well. And I see that it's actually connected to the third point here around pay and equity must be balanced with performance.

Richard:

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's this sense that things have to be run in a way which makes sense, that is value aligned. So if we feel that we can understand that, I'm being paid fair amount, in relation to the market. So what is this sort of. skill set worth. You don't, you just don't want to be, having somebody in a position where they feel that I'm being taken advantage of here. You want to be able to take that off the table, One of the things that I guess I'll comment on as well is that it's super interesting that that there was this drop in the U. S. in particular. I think you might have been the one that pointed this out to me. So we're noticing this drop in engagement in U. S. workplaces and at the same time noticing a the ranking of the U. S. in terms of its And as much as I personally I feel that when you look at these international rankings and how the rankings are done, there's a lot of validity in the way that information is collected. You have these massive data sets and the. Scores that come back super consistent. So they very much speak to the, what we're measuring is something meaningful. I think that comparing between countries can be a little challenging because different countries have different norms, expectations, they use language around happiness differently, but I think it is meaningful if there is a a significant drop here. And actually over the last 15 years, apparently the US rating has dropped by almost 8% pretty large. If you look at the other rankings, they did not generally move around that much. There's definitely something going on there. And It probably does relate to not only stuff that's going on in the workplace, but also a lot of these other things. So the political stuff that's going on, obviously there are things around the division that, that often gets talked about in US society. And it's really interesting, I think, how. That tells a story of what being in a leadership position actually encompasses. Now, it's no longer, at one point, let's say Rewind, maybe 30, 40 years people would have struggled to differentiate between management and leadership. Whereas, forward wind to now, and not only do most people Have a little bit of a sense of one of, one of those things is more process driven and the other one is more of a interpersonal an aspirational thing. I think it's, we moved onto a, into a different realm where actually as a leader, you bringing together so many different things. And I feel like That sort of is borne out very much by all of the different elements that are playing out with both those engagement schools and the US happiness ranking weirdly. Cool. So that brings us to the end of our Wrap up of the news. Thanks very much, Nikki. I'm now going to hand on to the interview that I did with Sandy. Speak to you next time. So joining us now is Sandra Davey. She is not only one of Australia's leading product evangelists, but there's also gained a reputation as a transformational board member. She was board chair for choice, which is Australia's leading consumer advocacy group. She is currently serving on the boards of screen rights and dot auDA, which is the governing body for australia.edu domain and which she was actually a founding director of.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

hi Sandy. I'd love to, first of all, just get an intro from you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Oh, thanks Richard. I suppose I could kick off by saying my background is in and modern ways of working. And I came at this accidentally. I think many people I know have had accidental careers. And I accidentally bumped in to the thing called the internet in 1989. And I've accidentally discovered that over the last 20, 30 years, I was, doing what we now call product management. So I grew up as a product manager and over the last two decades I have broadened out and I suppose you could call me a broad ranging specialist generalist. And I don't mean the generalist in the term we used to refer to it, where you would skirt across a lot of topics, but very lightly. But It's one of these kind of new generalists where we actually go deep enough into a topic that Possibly just to be dangerous, or at least, in some, I like to think that I know it well enough. But I skirt across multiple ones of them for all sorts of reasons apart from the fact that I probably have suffered over my life from cancer. I can't stop at just one thing. I also think when you work in product particularly when you work in product in a small organization, and I've worked with tech for 30 years, you skirt across and touch every part of the organization. So I know lots of people. It's about sales and how they work. I know what drives marketing. I know how to think about operations. I know what's important to customer service. I know how the finance and strategy folk work. This generalized approach I've had to my career. Plus, I'm interested in a multitude of topics. Plus, I did humanities as an undergraduate degree. And for God's sakes we know that as the dinner degree, right? It makes a terribly interesting conversation, but it means I've drawn on lots of broad frameworks and tools. And I draw upon anything that I've gone deep on in any part of my career from understanding social sciences and social science research methods and taking a dive into philosophy or feminism and then discovering lean and then going deep on agile and all with this kind of overarching desire. to find, to identify and, help organizations change the way they work. And I suppose one last comment, people who are listening might think why do we want to change the way organizations do the work that they want to do? And my reaction to that is, Because I've seen what happens when people get sucked into systems that are toxic, that they get sucked into systems that don't work. The second part of that is because we have worked in tech for so many decades, we understand how complex and uncertain and volatile the world is. And we know how complex it is. complex software is, and we know from that, that the patents that I grew up with, the, in organizations, you, Top down, silo driven, command control project initiative led where we wanted to maximize the utilization of an individual human. Those mental models and those methodologies worked really well. For when the world was operating in comp in complicated ways. But we know with everything that I just said about tech how much more complex the market is and how much more complicated complex tech is. And so those patterns of how we organize ourselves, how we think about structure, how we think about team design, how we think about the processes, how we think about How power is distributed inside of an organization that has created this unbelievable deep seated desire in me to look for different ways of working. If I could just make one final point the first 15 years of my career, even though I was working in product and tech, I worked in the nonprofit activist sector. And I grew up with the internet, and so from the get go, this distributed discursive way that power was operating. The fact that nobody owns the internet, that it wasn't a top down mechanism like the telecommunications or the broadcast infrastructure combined with that working in the nonprofit community and the social services sector, everything that I was taught as a teenager into my early twenties was ground up consensus. driven decision making that the best ideas would percolate and indeed needed to percolate from all parts of the organization because we were essentially funding funded on a smell of an oily rack. So we couldn't just wait for one great idea from the top. They had to come from everywhere. So I think with all of that mushed together, I'm just on this rampage to find and help companies shift towards what I think are much healthier patterns, which not only are healthier for the humans, but are also, I produce much better business outcomes.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah. Yeah. I love, I really love that sort of passion that just every encounter that you and I've ever had, that's really come through. One of the things I'm wondering about you've been in quite a lot of different roles and, you've been at senior levels and board levels across quite a number of different organizations. I think. I wonder if somebody's coming into leadership perhaps for the first time or has, been in a management position just for a few years. They might hear all of that and think, wow. Okay. So that's great for Sandy'cause she's got all of that knowledge. How important do you think it is now to be so broad? And if you think it's important, where, what would you say to somebody who's You know, in that sort of earlier part of their leadership career in terms of how, where to broaden out. Oh, yeah.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

great question. I've got a few instant reactions. One is to all the listeners out there. I'm let's just be clear. I'm 56. So I'm Gen X. You are probably Gen Y, young Gen Y and I want to give you faith and hope that the Boomers are going to retire. Because as much as I love them and bring incredible wisdom, and even certain Gen Xs, the world is so fundamentally different. And Gen Y and Gen Z think differently. and act differently. Plus they are growing up and from the get go their tools and approaches to life are different. So they demand, they're demanding difference, right? And I think the lovely thing about Gen X for me is now that I get to be in the boardroom and I get to be inside of organizations and I get to be at team level when I'm coaching or consulting, I can see it from all perspectives. And Gen X is with a quintessential, We can understand through the lens of and see boomers and we can understand, especially because we've grown up in tech as well too, right? That the patterns that younger generations are desirous of indeed will come through. So I just wanted to say that at the outset, don't give up hope. The being at that sort of early team lead or early leadership part of your career Again, at the outset, I'll say I got sacked a couple of times. We're talking 20 years ago, right? I'm not a, I'm not a professor in how to manage up and down. But what I can say, to kick us off is, um, You will have patterns and ways of working that hopefully are more modern and particularly if you're working in tech and you would have grown up with, say, agile, whereas boomers are still trying to figure out how the verb of that works, that word works, let alone the mindset. And so it, it is a trend. It is a transitionary age. Time for all of us. I would like to say that it's almost impossible. I've discovered to change everything all at once. We can't do all the things and I've tried change and new ways of working and doing new things from a kind of bottom ground up go and find a little micro cell of your organization and you can loosen them up and you can do some awesome things to really get flow. Working and increase not only productivity, but also the humans and the people in your team, their happiness. But I'm also really well aware that systemic long term sustainable change is impossible without leadership and impossible without endorsement and active, not just theoretical endorsement with a bit of budget, but really active, collaborative involvement. So top down, bottom up, sidewards in, diagonal, try something small to get going. What do you think, Richard?

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Totally. I think I've because I've worked in, in, in transformation for most of my career in one, one form or another starting with what you've got. Yeah. And making little incremental changes and just making sure you've got the learning cycle built in, is absolutely there. Actually, the reason that I come to that with great conviction is that I started off in a bunch of Massive waterfall change programs and just, I just had this sort of sense of this is not working. This is like making everybody's life hell. Even like I was working on this big transformation around. It was working with patients with long term conditions, and we had some great outcomes that we're driving at. around improving patient outcomes, extending life, adding quality to life, all that kind of thing. Everybody was really on board, but the experience of working in this program was horrific and it, and for ages I couldn't work out why, and it was very much because of some of the older ways of working that were not great for actually, fostering learning and adaptation. One of the things that I Really curious about is so whenever whenever whenever we've spoken I've marveled at the the insights that you're able to bring from a cross organization type perspective. So let's say if you're in a senior leadership position or perhaps one of the board roles that you are in or I've been involved in. Where do you start in terms of trying to get an organization operating, in, in what you would regard as the right way? What are the things that you are first looking at? Yeah what are the important elements that you would start thinking about first?

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

The one that comes straight to mind because I just see it so often and I've seen it at all levels. And for the sake of today's conversation, I'm just going to talk about an organization of three layers. You might be in a really big organization, so you can multiply this out, but most of the companies I work with Yeah, 30 to 500 staff. So hopefully not more than about three We're not going to talk about layer one, the team layer today, but I'm going to talk about layer or level two, which is a coordination layer. And then layer three, which is the executive leadership team. And then, of course, the board sits across that a consistent problem. that I see at almost every layer, but has the worst effect on the team level, which is where I think some of your listeners in your first team leadership role or middle layer leadership role is, and we've all heard this, and it's particularly so in the, since COVID. Teams are exhausted. They are burnt out. They have 96, 000 Things to do that. It is not clear what the priorities are. There is a mess in the backlogs and the roadmaps. And one of the key challenges coming where that comes from, I really genuinely believe has to start at the top, and it generally manifests in lack of clarity in the strategy and More importantly, you can have a overarching three to five year strategic plan, and hopefully it's got a beautiful narrative in it, and it's over the horizon, and the mission and purpose are clear, and so you've got some kind of let's call it the binding narrative. Contract that connects you into the organization and thinks, Hey, yeah I'm on a mission with them. I know where they want to go in five And hopefully a leadership team every year comes up with some kind of demonstrable actionable metrics or goals. We know that a lot of us are using OKRs, like maybe KPIs or smart goals, whatever you've got. The lack of clarity in those, I see a consistent level and I'm making generalizations, so I need to be careful here. I've seen some really good ones, seeing companies that are very clear, not only their strategic plan, but they're very clear in their yearly OKRs or their strategic bets. But even still, the some of the best of them, the metrics at that level, and even the goals at that level, if they're not clearly articulated, and they're not clearly measurable that creates a downstream risk.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

yes.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

cause it, what we then see at the team level, right? Is I don't know how to prioritize. Like I don't know how to connect. I can't see the connection from my, with my team's work back up to this overarching mission. And that then. It creates just disempowered, disconnected people thinking, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, supposed to be doing and is what I'm doing meaningful? Is it driving to some kind of business or customer outcome? So I think the strategy. Execution in the form of clarity at the top demonstrable goals and metrics that can cascade in a way that the rest of us can then pick up in whether it's our road map goals or whether it's our backlogs and create that line of sight and that traceability back up to the business. I think that's one of the biggest problems I see it at board level. When I'm put my director hat on and thinking, very strategically, I'm not in operational detail. So I want to be, what are we tracking to and what is the plan? I don't want the tactical detail of the plan. I want to know the overarching high level goals and the metrics and how we're progressing towards those of what the blockers are or what the risks are for the business down, down at the team level, I'm like, can I just have some demonstrable that my team can then tie or create their own goals and then tie that work back up. So yeah, I think that's a I'm surprised that we're, people still don't know how to do that properly. It's hard, I get, it is hard,

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

it can be done, right? Because we've all seen it done well.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And when you're saying demonstrable clarity, you're meaning as in, it's very clear if I've done this or not, I can actually demonstrate that it's done. That's what you're getting at, right?

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

yeah, because I love I think about metrics in two ways. And I've spent a lot of time on one board helping to create this split. There are what I would call health metrics. These are a set of metrics that we just know that the business is taking over and each company will have a different set of metrics and they typically answered with yes, no's. Another example will be service level agreements. We have an uptime of nine nine point nine nine Etc, etc. I often see those types of metrics get buried into a more strategic approach Which is the OKR framework. So you've got these health metrics, which is that the business as usual Keeping the lights on. Here's all the things that help us understand that the business is ticking along and it could be even basic financial metrics as well. Maybe it's turnover or revenue or EBITDA. Then there is the strategic ones. Every year we will make some bets. We're ticking along, doing our BAU, our continuous improvement activities, but we want to make a series of strategic bets or whatever you call them. And it's those ones that I want to see. I prefer to see both as a board director, but as also someone when I'm working with teams, how do we create work that can demonstrate that we're tracking towards these metrics? I don't want to say yes, no, I've done it. I want to be able to say, yes, I've moved needles. And I can, even though traceability sometimes can be hard, to find ways to attribute what I'm doing to the movement of those quanta, preferably quantitative metrics. Yeah.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah. Trying to make those connections really clear and from a team perspective that gives so much more clarity as to why should I be working on this? And what does good look like? I want to be able to deliver something of value and having that is really helps. So from the. Let's say from the leader perspective, let's say at a team level, that sort of the third level of the three you're talking about there,

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Level one.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

ah, sorry, the level one

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

around.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

so of the level one, at the level one, the, one of the key things that they're trying to do if they're perhaps trying to facilitate the other way around is, okay, I'm looking, I'm talking to my leadership, I'm getting, Unclear picture, an unclear picture of what it is that I'm trying to aim towards. So actually you can reverse engineer that to some extent, right? So you're going, okay let's nail this down a bit and let's try to define what are those. demonstrable outcomes and then how, what would it look like for me to work towards those? What else would you say to that, that, manager who's trying to figure out, Oh gosh, I think that I'm supposed to be going over here, is this the right direction?

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

it's a great question. And so if there's not enough clarity from above, let's say there's, seven strategic bets

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

some really big ones grow revenue X to Y I have seen teams and not just teams I've worked with, but a lot of us try and reverse engineer up. How do we connect? How do we try and take what we're doing and abstract it up layers and give it a go? It's better to give it a go, I think, and to produce something which you can then show a layer above you. This is the work I've done. This is, I believe, the way we're connecting back, rolling back up firstly. Secondly, picking one or two of them. So I have a client a senior product leader that I'm coaching and she, in fact, has just done this job and We spent, she spent some time looking at the company wide level objectives and really pouring through them and using her instinct, her understanding of a number of things. And this is actually a good insight for team leaders. When I coach product people And I think this applies to anyone in the business. You need to know just enough about your industry. You need to know about the market you're operating in the business model. For example, you need to know your product or services suite. And the fourth one is you need to know yourself, which I'll come back to because right now I'm talking about if you know those things, you can take a look at those company objectives and you can take a stab. If there's seven of them, pick two, pick three, don't pick seven, pick the ones where you think Your, the work that your group does has the best chance of moving the needle on those and then try and reverse engineer and abstract it back up. It's better to have a go at that and to share the rationale with your manager about why you've done or how you've done that and why you picked the ones that you did. I think that at least going to the layer above you with something

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

is a better starting point than asking, if they, if you can't see, if they haven't done the work and you, maybe you've asked them to do the work and the work's still not there, then you're going to have to reverse engineer it, do it yourself. So I would have tried it that way. Have you tried that? Richard.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Absolutely. With varying success.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yes.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

But absolutely. It is, I think that often people are critical of gosh, I'm, we're all struggling here because the, the folk at the that next level up they just haven't given us the clarity that we want. And I think actually. Often when you go have the conversations with that next level up, they have a similar issue of kind of, I don't know, I've got all this ambiguity that I'm trying to deal with. And I think the guy that taking that perspective of, I'm going to create some clarity here in the space that I've got. This is how we're gonna create some clarity. I it's so often appreciated. And

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

I think so too. I think your insight there is really sound because the layer above may indeed be feeling like yourself and to come to them with nothing is even more overwhelming, right? So to at least come with something, because I find when you've got something when you're in a group of people, sometimes if they start from scratch, depending on what the circumstances are, but sometimes starting from scratch is fantastic. Sometimes the only way to get going is to tear apart something that's been created. So as long as you're comfortable that the work you might produce can get teared apart And I think that's good too, because you've got the person above you, or diagonally sidewards, you've got them thinking. And that is, indeed, is going to start creating at least some more clarity and insight between you two.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah. Absolutely. So we've, we better wrap up there. Thanks so much for sharing all those insights. So generously I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a little question without notice. Let's say somebody's super interested in some of the things we were just talking about. Where would they go to, to find out a bit more, is there a book, website, resource?

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Oh my God, that's a great question. I tell you what I'm currently and remember listeners I've got ADHD and I'm a journalist I get very excited by things. Having said that I am framework agnostic and I think over, You will develop a really broad toolkit and that's fantastic. I am currently completely in love with Henrik Nyberg's flight levels. And this kind of relates to this strategy to activation strategy execution conversation we've had today. It relates to prioritization. It relates to creating clarity in the form of goals and metrics. And firstly Nyberg's just a genius. Secondly, who doesn't love anyone from that Nordic part of the world? Thirdly, his book's got bloody pitches in it, which is, how good is that? And fourthly, it's simple enough to get started. And it just, it gave me it I find it useful. One of the reasons I find it useful is I've used it with a few clients now, and it's really simple language. Sometimes I haven't used all of the flight levels language, cause that's the problem with a new And he, Enric would say it's not a framework, but people start saying, Oh, flight levels is a framework or a methodology. I try to use language that my company understands. So if your company understands the word goals instead of objectives, then don't go using objectives, just use the word goals. And so some of the flight levels language I might.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

the concept behind about level one, level two, level three, and what lens that they should be operating at is just profoundly simple. And I've just loving it sick. That's one thing. And I'll give you one podcast. There's a company in the US called the ready. And they're what we do in Organa. But they're, the Americans just do everything so much bigger. And they're a bunch of people who are on their way to smashing out old ways of working and old paradigms. But they've got lots of really practical tools and templates and Podcast you can listen to and that stuff's their stuff. Super cool as well. So yeah, flight levels. I'm just loving it. Sick and I suppose I'll share one that this is probably completely off

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

thank God for COVID because I don't know if Miro would

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yeah. my life has completely changed. I don't, we all got forced growing up in these textual environments and Miro, to visualize complexity is so much easier and so much, you can have much more powerful conversations. Yeah, they're the three things that,

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Fantastic.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

light me

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

I really, I wholeheartedly agree with all of those. And do you know that, that thing around the pandemic. Beginning of the pandemic, I was in an organization. We were actually, it was an organization I'd co founded and we were doing a lot of training delivery. And we had a rule of, we are not doing any remote training. And then the pandemic arrived and we were like, oh, okay either we go out of business or we do remote training. And so Miro in particular was the absolute savior and I ended up absolutely loving it and thinking. Do you know what? I think I could actually do, there's some stuff that I can do this way that is better than, the classroom based stuff we're doing. So totally fell in love with it.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

I completely agree. And that is where we met. If you remember, you and I met inside of a Miro board on a zoom call.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

Yes.

sandy_1_05-09-2024_142724:

And I was deeply impressed with this beautiful piece of work that you've done in Miro. So you're probably the one that started me off. So thank you. Thank you.

richard-parton_1_05-09-2024_142724:

That's great. so much.

Richard:

that sadly brings us to the end of another show. Thank you very much to you also for listening. If you found the show useful, please like subscribe, leave us a review and share us with your network. Also check out the show notes for how to get in touch, join our community, or take part in our monthly live recordings. My name is Richard Parton. I'm an organizational coach and consultant over the years have helped hundreds of leaders and businesses create high performing thriving teams, which is what the show is all about. So finally, we are looking for senior leaders with stories to share about their experiences. Tackling the big challenges of leadership today. So if that's you or someone, you know, we'd love to hear from you. Our contact details are in the show notes below. Thanks again. Until next time.