(upbeat music)- Hey folks, welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm your host Daniel Stewart, along with my brother Peter Stewart, and we're excited because what we're gonna be diving into today is all about how does a leader measure success? We all wanna be successful, but what in the heck does it look like? How do we get there? And we are joined by an expert in the area, Lorraine Armijos. Lorraine, welcome to the Leadership Growth Podcast.- Thank you, Daniel and Peter. Thank you so much for having me today.- Fantastic, I'm so glad you can join us. So folks, Lorraine, Executive Coach and Business Consultant with 20 plus years of experience helping organizations align purpose, operations and people. As the founder of LAR Insights, she empowers leaders to build energized, high-impact cultures where both people and business thrive. And I love the combination of both, the business and the people side,'cause sometimes we can overly focus on one or the other, but it's that marriage and how you negotiate both. So Lorraine, let's start off with a general question for you. What led you to be interested in trying to figure out how do you measure success, especially for leaders?- Yeah, so early on in my career, I started learning and using Lean. And Lean was developed by Toyota. And it's all about creating value for the customer by improving processes, making things more efficient and by using the people, right? And so when you think about, how you said earlier, there's people, there's a business, And Lean is all about people, processes, and continuous improvement. And when I started working with Lean, measuring was so important because how can we change things or improve things if we don't know what to measure? And so depending on what we choose to measure, that really shapes what we pay attention to. So that is focus on something. And then what we pay attention to is how people are gonna shape their behaviors. So that is really, really important for me when I work with my clients is how are they measuring success and so that is the first question that I always ask anyone is how do you measure success? And sometimes I get great answers and sometimes I get blank stares. And so that's usually where I start is how do you measure your success?- And it's a great question. And it sounds like you've asked that a few times. You've gotten a few different responses. And I appreciate that the mindset as I interact with individuals who have that expertise in Lean, you know, they've got their black belt, you know, they've run that, that, you know, operational efficiency mindset of, it's just a different way to look at a process, to really refine it and break it down. So let's back up even further as we say this term success. What does success mean? I mean, I know that's the broader topic, but what are components of success? Is it just ROI? Is it just that we've accomplished the result? Is it like, how do we even begin breaking down what success can look like?- Yeah, so I get two different answers when I, well, three. One is, the first one is a blank stare when I ask how do you measure success. One is also, I just get revenue, right? I'm making money. And then the other one is a laundry list of things. And the right answer is kind of in the middle, right? Because revenue, it is, of course, it's important. You have to measure that. And yes, it will tell you your success'cause if you're growing your revenue, right, you're being successful, you're doing something right. But what happens is that sometimes people don't know what they're doing and teams are not aligned. Everyone is doing something different. And so, by really seeing the bigger picture of what contributes, for example, revenue, or what are the problems that we're trying to solve, now you start really understanding a little bit more on your organization. So I usually start, you know, people like, let's say revenue, then my next question would be, you know, let's look at a little bit broader, such as your employees, right? They are so important because they're giving you the service or they're creating that product. How are they doing? How are they feeling? Right. Your customers, what are they saying? What ideas do they have? Do they like the service or product? Then you have quality. How's the quality? Same thing, service or product, and then you have the financial health of your organization. So that's kind of where I usually start to really start seeing the full picture when I usually just get revenue as a success, measurement of success.- Let's play on that. Let's go to the scenario that somebody looks at you with a blank stare, or with like frustration in their eyes. You know what I mean? And because most people are like, well, duh, sure, we should figure out what success looks like. How to get there often has led people with through very frustrating experiences and/or it's an overwhelming experience. Well, what's the first go-to place to help somebody with that stare of what do we do next? Because at least in our experience, we often see people either go one to two extremes. One, they're like, we need to keep it so simple that it might not inform them of very much. Or they get into 35 or 50 measures, and the dashboard is massive. And then it's like diving in and arguing about numbers. What do you advise? Where do you start in this process? Yeah, so usually whenever people don't know, there's this blank stare, the next question is, well, how do you know your business can keep growing, right?'Cause that's what people want, is they wanna keep growing. It's like, so how do you know you're growing? And of course, the first thing is revenue, making money. And so then I do guide them through employee engagement, customer experience, quality in finance. So that's kind of the beginning of it. The other piece of it is the health of the company with, I say, trust, learning, and collaboration. Trust is kind of in the employee metric, right? There's psychological safety, are employees engaged enough to make their own changes? With learning is how are you developing your team? Right, you have to grow, you need to develop your team. Is your team also improving their processes? Is your team problem solving? And then the last one, which is collaboration, is are you all working in silos or are you literally collaborating with each other to be able to improve the organization together? And so one is about the numbers and the other one is more about observing. I have my own assessment that I work with, with the businesses, I go see, I ask, I talk to different people in the organization to have that understanding. So I see it as both, both areas to have a better picture of how that business is doing and how they will be doing in the future, right? Because even though, even let's say they're growing, are they gonna be able to sustain that growth? So it's also thinking long-term versus just the short term.- This is fascinating where this is heading. So let's play on that blank stare response and what you've now just guided them through. So as I'm hearing this, you're describing these four key areas. We have to pay attention to our customers, we have to pay attention to service, quality, the financial side, and then on the company, we have to make sure we have trust, that there's learning, there's collaboration. That's a lot to manage. So as a leader who's hearing this, well, what can I actually put a number to? Like, how do I actually measure this stuff? Because a lot of it is hard to actually measure. Some is very easy. I mean, the financial reports, that's all numbers, that makes it nice and easy to see, we think. I mean, there's a lot of depth and nuance to those. So how do we get that broader picture to even try and measure some of these more intangible assets?- Yes, and so that is, right, the employee, you have the employee survey, the customer, you have a customer survey, right? Quality, you will determine what is good quality of your product or your service looks like. Now, the other piece, the first thing, well, I have my own assessment, which makes it easier for me to really show the client on how they're doing. But one of the things that I tell them before I even go there is I want you to go and see. Go and see how are they doing?'Cause what happens is leaders get really busy and they end up being in front of a computer the whole day. Maybe they have meetings, but they don't go and see. And going and see is physically going to see where the work happens, going to see how that service is delivered, how that product is made, How are the meetings going? Not being part of the meeting, but observing the meetings. And so now when you go and see, now you start having a better idea of those intangibles, how they're doing. So that is very key for me when I worked with leaders is that it is important to go and see.- That reminds me of one of the favorite leadership gems I'll often hear my dad say, and it's in our 52 Leadership Gems book. that says a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.- I love that.- As we go, like you're saying, it's go and see, it's get out from behind it, swim in their tank is another way to put it. Spend a little time seeing the world through their eyes.- And then in Lean, you usually will hear big ears and little mouth, right? meaning go ahead, go listen, go observe, right, big eyes, but just be quiet.(laughs)'Cause you need to go and learn versus start telling people how to do things.'Cause guess what? The people who are working in the front lines, they are the experts. And the higher you are, the less expert you are on what's happening in the front lines. But I love that, what your dad said. And that's great, thank you for sharing that. I like where you're going with this. You're kind of laying out kind of a sequence of helping a leader work through this. And so much of it is making sure a leader is aware of the details, not necessarily diving in themselves per se to do the work, but understanding. So then walk us through the delicate balance between identifying numbers and then also having a gut feel because there are some aspects that you need a combination of both in some ways. Talk to us in terms of how do you balance that where you wanna put numbers as much as possible, but there's also a story behind it and a feel in some ways, a narrative. How do you balance that as you kind of help leaders manage and determine success?- Yeah, so I think it goes back to what you said earlier, right? There is this, when things are not working, there is this need of what else can we measure, right? What are all the things that we can do to measure and more data is not success, it's collecting the right data. And so it's really understanding what is that problem that you are trying to solve. How are you gonna measure that? And then in an organization, there's so many levels in the organization, right? And so it's not only what are you trying to solve at the top, but then how do you measure in each level of the organization? Because the sphere of control is very different at every level of the organization. Therefore, the metrics need to be different. And so that's, then we go to the alignment piece. And I don't think I'm really answering that gut question, part of your question. And that is because I would say that it is really important to start with what problem you're trying to solve, right? And from there on, start creating that alignment through each layer. And if things are not working, then understand why is it not working? Are we measuring the right thing? Do we need to shift to something else versus continue to add?- What I like is the alignment piece here, because too often say a senior leadership team might create a dashboard, but the point is to make sure that that's cascaded and connected through the rest of the organization. And that can also help start telling a clear narrative that people are aligned throughout because they're measuring similar or at least aligned items. So this deployment is key as well. Give us a sense, what's a good way of being able to make sure that strategy alignment happens throughout the organization? because that in and of itself is quite a task and involves a lot of change management, a lot of work. Give us a sense of the importance of that and how do you initiate? How do you accomplish that deployment and alignment?- Yeah, so one of the things I always say is the top is setting the goals, right? So, and then as a leader, when I work with my leaders is you tell, your tier down, right, and you're level down in the organization, like, "This is my goal. This is what I am trying to achieve. What can you," this is very simplified, right,"but what can you do to help achieve my goal?" Right? Because they are the experts in their department, their departments, their service lines, whichever it is. And so go from there and let them do that digging.'Cause what usually happens is leaders go, okay, I am, this is my goal, increase customer retention. I want you to increase customer retention. And then everyone is increasing customer retention, but no one knows how they're increasing this customer retention. But if they start at the top, take a pause, say, hey, this is my goal. What can you do? What is within your sphere of control to now help improve the customer retention. Now you start asking the questions that will then start aligning that strategy piece that you're talking about.- Yeah, in this process of really trying to clarify what that goal is, what success looks like, how you help. In some ways you're answering the question I was going to start to ask anyway, when you said that to make sure you're not just collecting more data, but you're collecting the right data. And so as we take this, kind of extrapolate on this thought a little bit further, as you're asking that question of what can you do to help accomplish my goal or accomplish this vision, how does that then translate into gathering the right data?- Yeah, so I'm gonna give you an example that I usually share with the leaders. It is let's say you are trying to lose weight. Okay, and I'm your health coach and I'm like,"Yay, we're going to lose weight together." And I'm like, "Okay, here are the things that you need to improve. You need to... And here are the things that you need to measure to make sure that we're improving. I want you to collect your weight, calories in, calories out. How much are you working out every day? How much water intake, sleep hours, the size of your waist? Okay, great. I'll see you in two weeks and tell me how you're doing." and you walk away and I walk away. You're gonna be confused. You're not gonna know where to start, right? And so what I want leaders to do is to take a step back and say, okay, this may be all the things that we need to collect, right? This will tell us how do we measure success. But let's really understand what's happening here. You are working out already, right? Your sleep hours, let's hold on for that. But the calories right now, we really don't know where we are with calories. And last time we checked, we weren't doing well. So I want you to focus and measure your weight because that's what we want to improve. And let's focus on calories, calorie intake, and let's take it from there. And so now you have where to start focusing'cause what happens is when you have this whole laundry list Now also people are wasting time trying to prioritize. And you don't want to do that. And so I always say, let's have three to five important focus metrics that you are gonna work on. You can have your laundry list if you want to, but the reality is that you cannot focus on everything. And you're just gonna have a group of employees that everyone is just doing their own thing because they cannot focus either. So focus three to five that you really are gonna work on and start there.- Well, you're also highlighting some of the pitfalls that leaders can fall into. One of them is let's have lots and lots of metrics and let's get lots of data. And the other is a question about data integrity or data access. And so talk to us in terms of how does a leader overcome, manage through the sense that I cannot trust the data or we don't have a system to be able to even keep track of all of this data. It's too much, it's too overwhelming because what we find often— I was just working with a leadership team just a few weeks back and trying to help create some sort of dashboard for the team. And the challenge for them is they do not have years of data to then leverage, nor do they have a system that's built in right now. So the challenge is they can't build a dashboard for a while because they don't have a way to access. How do you help leaders not let those completely stop the effort because they can still make some progress? What are your thoughts around some of that? It's exactly-- like you said, they can still make some progress. There's always going to be something. There's always going to be the data is not right or someone's not going to trust the data. Something will always come up. But what can you do today? So if you don't have data from the last five years, then let's start today. what is your goal? Is your goal 90% of X? Then let's start working towards that. Let's see what we have in the first week. And if we're meeting, let's wait for the next month, this 30 days, if we're meeting it, great. If not, let's start making some improvements. Because there's, like I said, and this is one thing that I always tell the leaders, there's always going to be something and you cannot stop progress. And because there's always going to be something, you cannot have a laundry list of metrics because you also have to create that capacity, even though it's probably really, really tiny of those fires that will be coming up that inevitably always do. So you cannot focus on everything and three to five is usually, I feel like that's the sweet spot.- Yeah. You're helping to break this down and just provide that good reminder for leaders of how easily we can overestimate the capacity of our teams. One, to read our minds, to understand exactly what we think, but also their ability to prioritize and to get done all these things we're throwing at them. As you were sharing your example, I was reminded of an image I'll often show up on a PowerPoint slide with a group as we're talking about change. And I say, "Okay, pull out a blank piece of paper. I'm gonna teach you how to draw an owl, you know, a bird there. And so step one is they draw a little oval for a body and an oval for a head. And then I show them the second and it's like, great, draw the rest of the owl. You know, and it's just like, here you go. We gave you that first little step and now just finish it all on your own. And I think we can fall into that trap sometimes as leaders where we're not laying out those clear steps. We're clearly prioritizing what's happening. And in many ways, it's layering. We have success in all caps, success with a capital S, and success lowercase. What do those incremental successes look like? So how do you lead them along so that they're also not getting too overwhelmed by the KPIs, the dashboards, the performance reports, like all those things that they may have at their disposal? And this right here, kind of to take it back, is just a reminder that time is a limited resource, and so is attention, right? And so really making it clear for the team allows teams to be aligned and allows everyone to make better decisions, right? From the top all the way to the bottom, it allows everyone to make the right decisions. And I do wanna go back just very briefly to one thing that you asked Daniel about not having the data, right? Sometimes they don't have the data and sometimes there's nothing that you can do at that moment but sometimes you can, and some of your listeners may start throwing something at whatever device they're listening to on, But sometimes you may have to collect it manually. And that is a huge pushback that I get. But I always say, you don't have to collect it manually forever. Collect it long enough to learn whatever it is that you're trying to learn. Okay, so do it for two weeks. What are you learning? And then determine what your next steps are. So that's the other piece that people can do is collect it manually. No one has time for it. No one wants to do it. I know that. But sometimes you have to do it to be able to make better decisions and to solve the right problems.- So let me ask you a hard question, Lorraine. Are there some things that can't be measured? Are there some things that we look at like trust or the overall employee experience or the collaboration that sometimes we might have a mindset of, that is too squishy, or it's too soft, or it's inherently not measurable. How do you respond to that kind of a way of thinking? And is that a helpful way of thinking, or is it not? What would you say to that?- I would say not, delete this question. I'm just kidding.(laughing)- That is a great question and it is a very hard question because there are things, right? So I talk about trust and I talk about psychological safety and it is hard to measure. And there are times that we cannot measure it and we need to move on, okay? And so I don't also don't wanna spend a lot of time, right, trying to find this way of measuring and now everyone is spending time, and spinning their wheels and it's not the right way of measuring it. So there are times that yes, absolutely there's no way. Well, I don't wanna say absolutely no way'cause probably somebody somewhere may have a way, but it may not be in that moment. And so I usually tend to move on. But at the same time, I don't want that to be the quick, excuse, oh, we cannot measure it, let's move on. I think it is important to, even though it's squishy, to spend some time with the team talking about it and seeing is there a way that we can identify how we're doing in this squishy trust psychological safety area. And you know what, now that we have also, I now wanna throw AI here, right? Let's also use it to see, Is there, are there other ways that we as a collective group may not be thinking and how can we leverage AI to give us some of those ideas?- Yeah, and really that's where you look at where AI just accelerates. I mean, that's one of the reasons why AI was designed. It's large data and analysis, massive data sets that they can examine and find trends in. And as we get in the social sciences, you get in the assessment of these ambiguous constructs that come about. It's all about the definitional operationalization you have to then say, okay, what are the potential behaviors that connect to these more ambiguous latent constructs that we're trying to identify? And that's where we can start to break down. So yeah, when you throw data in AI, man, you can get those themes and say, well, for us, we're defining psychological safety with these three behaviors. Those we can measure a little bit better and break it down a little further, but it does, it takes a little trial and error, it takes a little effort and I love the optimism that you bring of, sometimes you gotta do it manually and that's the reality. There's not an easy answer, but we're talking about success here and when is success ever easy, you know?- Yes, yes, exactly.- I think you're bringing up really, really good points here Okay, so Lorraine, Lightning Round.(upbeat music)- Here's the question for you. What's the one thing a leader should keep in mind to help him or her measure their success? What would you recommend?- For them to be able to measure their success would be, and I talked about it earlier, taking a look at the whole picture, right? At least starting with employees, customers, quality, and financials. I would say, start there and then just go from there and always think about what is within your control. At every level of the organization, you will have a different level of control. And so make sure that you are focusing on that because otherwise it'll just be frustrating for you.- Yeah, well said. Lorraine, thank you for the insights today. This has been a fantastic conversation, all focused around providing tools and insights to help all of us as leaders be able to measure our success and be able to continue to develop ourselves as leaders into the future. Listeners, thanks for joining us. And please like and subscribe, listen to other episodes and pay attention as to when they drop as they come twice a month in the future. Please email us any suggestions or questions at podcast@stewartleadership.com. We'd love to hear from you. All the best, take care everyone, bye. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague, or better yet, leave a review to help other listeners find our show. And remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more great content, or to learn more about how Stewart Leadership can help you grow your ability to lead effectively, please visit stewartleadership.com.