Doug Gray - Objectives + Key Results (OKR) Leadership

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You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 442-22. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Thank you for listening today. It's always a pleasure to have you with me. My next guest, I'm going to bring him on right away in the interest of time, Doug Gray, PhD and PCC has always focused on outcome-based leader development, and he's worked with over 10,000 leaders in multiple business sectors, schools and colleges, families and nonprofits, and since 1997 as CEO of Action Learning Associates. www. or learning.com. His consultancy guarantees results using the globally validated AdFIT protocol in workshops, assessments, and executive coaching. And Doug's also a consultant with the Family Business Consulting Group, which is a leading business consultancy exclusively devoted to helping family enterprises prosper across generations. He and trains throughout North America and his most recent book is Objectives Plus Key Results, or OR Leadership How to Apply Silicon Valley's Secret Sauce to your career, Team, or Organization. It's his third book written because his clients asked what really works, and Doug and his family live near Nashville, Tennessee. Doug, thanks so much for joining me today and welcome to the show. Thanks to you. Good morning. I, I think I covered a lot of ground on your, your intro there, but if you could please uh tell us a little bit more about you and your background and how you came up with the notion of, uh, uh, OK our leadership. Sure, I'd be happy to. Uh, I've always focused on leadership development and, uh, in my 20s, that meant outward bound and wilderness training, and my 30s, it meant working at prep schools and running a nonprofit in DC. And um sometime in my 30s, when we're living in Washington DC area, I had two partners on a project, and they said, Doug, you're executive coach. I said, really? What's that? And I think ever since I've been trying to answer that question, not only with my clients, but with research. And um and the fact is, there's over 60,000 people who self-declared that they're executive coaches, and there are no protocols. So when one of my clients who's a Fortune 100 healthcare client said, well, we'd love to have uh a number of executive coaches providing services at all of our hospitals throughout the country. Can you provide 50 or 60 coaches a year? I said, absolutely, uh, through one of my affiliates. And then they asked, because they always do, what are your coaching protocols? I sort of stuttered. And I think the reason is, don't typically talk about that. They don't talk about protocols. They don't talk about their theoretical construct, what they believe in, and they don't talk about their process. Well, I do. So outcome-based coaching is a thing. I think we have more clarity about what we're gonna get when we invest in an automobile repair person than we do when we invest in a leadership development consultant. And I think that's criminal. So now you know a little bit more about me, though. I'm opinionated. I Well, you're opinionated and you like to have a curriculum, which I like the sound of that. I think that's one thing you're right. A lot of people say, Well, you're a coach. What's your, what's your method? What's your, you know, if I was taking your course, what's your curriculum? Can I look at it, at least the syllabus in advance and understand what we're going to cover so I can see if it's for me? And I think, you know, for a lot of people these days. Uh, they'll say, well, it's, it's free flowing because you're an individual and where we're gonna go is gonna be driven by you, which is kind of like a more like uh seeing a psychologist, right? Well, I am a business psychologist by training and schooling, and I think that answer is sloppy. I think it's evasive. What if instead, I gave you a list of the top executive coaching outcomes and the top business consulting outcomes, and I asked, what is it, Bill, you want to focus on in the next 3 months? I did this this morning with a client in Montreal. Uh, we've worked together for 6 months. He's done a lot of great work. And I said, uh, well, we're due for an extension. Either we keep going and we redefine what your next outcomes are, or we stop. He wanted to keep going. I said, well, I'm only gonna keep going if you're clear about what your outcomes are. And we define them and we move forward, and I send him another invoice. I think anything else is uh unethical. I don't work like an attorney, I don't go by the hour, and I overwhelm people with all kinds of solutions that are evidence-based. Makes sense? Yeah, it does make sense, and I think that's exactly, especially when you're in the executive coach area as opposed to maybe the, I don't know, the life coach kind of area and the executive coach, these, these are individuals that are used to having objectives and goals, correct? So I mean they want to see, you know, what what am I doing? My time's very valuable. So let's talk about OK. I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, um, you're quite right. I have no idea what a life coach is, by the way. So, OKRs are what we define in business. When I focus on Silicon Valley, for instance, and the biggest migration of assets in human history, it's occurred in the last 50 years. Well, it's no mistake that it's happened in Northern California in one geography and mostly in technology. And that's because all those managers and leaders have adopted one decision-making protocol, one process. That is not as top down as you and I were raised and taught. All of us are familiar with the top-down hierarchical model. But in contrast, OKR is kind of like a snowflake or a spider web map, if you were to use an organizational network map. And what it does is give voice to different people. For instance, if, if you think about the top 10 people you interact with on a daily basis, you could create a chart like a spiderweb, with your name in the middle, and those people around you. And I've found with audiences and with clients. If I ask them to create that organizational network map and list those 6 to 8 people that they would go to for business purposes or if it's a personal organizational map, who would you go to at 3 in the morning if you had an emergency? And in our era of physical isolation, not many people are able to come up with 6 or 8 names. I can, I hope you can, but a lot of folks are struggling with social isolation, which leads to depression and anxiety, more health concerns than And bad living habits and cardiovascular disease. The point is that when we're clear about our objectives in business and um the networks that are gonna help us succeed, we're much more inclined to be successful. So the OKR model was taken off, Millennials love it because they're expected to have a voice and in family business and exit planning conversations, the next generation loves it because they need to know what's next. Point and you know I'm going to ask you like in I know we've always heard in a small business it's, it's lonely at the top, you know, the leader generally has has things that they want to talk about that they don't want to share with their spouse. They don't want to share with their management team. They don't want to share with others. And so things like peer groups have become very, very popular where they can freely and confidentially discuss their issues with other owners who might be, you know, understanding and helpful with that information. But especially in family businesses, you add that different dimension of Now it, I think it boils down to the trust that you have in the future generation maybe to lead them and you have the knowledge like I heard from one young future family leader. He says the problem I'm having is all of these people here, they saw me in diapers and now I'm going to be their leader. And I thought that was an impactful statement. How do, how in family businesses, first of all, family business leaders are driving our economy. Talk about that and also how this especially affects family leaders and their their future ownership model. Oh, it's critical. Uh, so you probably know statistically that over 60% of our economy is driven by family-owned businesses, and these could be mega businesses. Like Cargill and uh Ford, and, and they're not always majority ownership that are still family members, but they're quite often families that are driven by values like honesty or integrity. Uh, we're gonna take care of the folks in our community, our town, and they succeed over generations in part because those values drive a long-term strategy, so they'll invest in the next generation. And often they're poorly advised. 60% of job creation occurs in family owned businesses, and it could be a mom and pop, and it used to be a farm, and now it's a cleaning company in your local town. Family owned businesses abound in every culture, every climate, every corner of every business sector you can imagine. So I'll give you uh a resource that might be very helpful for, for many folks. Uh, the website is the word the FBCG.com, which is hard to say over the radio, but the Family Business Consulting Group.com is the premier provider of Family Business Consulting globally, tremendous group, great reputation, lots of free content, webinars, books. In a select group of brilliant people, there's 25 of us. And I'm honored to be part of this group because of the scale, the families I work with are, are always struggling with the question that you just posed. How do I develop next generation leaders? I've never met a family business owner who says, I don't think about succession planning. They lose sleep thinking about succession planning, and many of them will go to the affiliate groups you mentioned. Um, for some social support. Like vestige or um some other C12 is a Christian-based group. For EO is a big partner, by the way, with the family business consultant group. And, and I think we all need those social networks. They provide a sense of identity and reinforcement, but they don't provide the individual confidential trust and expertise that the folks on the FPCG group can can provide. So when people prepare for exit planning, You may know that um the FPCG has partnered for years with the Exit Planning Institute. Uh, one of our colleagues provides certification training for that group, EPI. And uh anyone that I've ever met who has a privately owned business or a closely held business, struggles with the point I just made. Who's gonna succeed us and how are they going to succeed us? But you can't do that internal talent assessment to determine who. You need an external consultant to help you with that. And then the how is educational, frankly, it's a skill development thing over time. So, um, Maybe I'll give you another resource, so, um, I'm in the process of launching a new product. It's a membership network that'll be hosted next week on Family Business collaboration.com. And the reason is owners and managers and advisers don't really know who to turn to for evidence-based content. So my partner in Texas and I have validated that curated a bunch of content, and um And I'm excited about it. I think there's an educational opportunity here that many people would appreciate. Did that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, it was very good, very good, and I was going to, you know, comment on one of the things that you said about the family business. Not the reason they stay awake at night is often because they're wondering, after all is said and done, are we going to have a happy Thanksgiving. Yes. That's right, and that's a critical concern. Yeah, it's family. It's family. It's it's the most important thing of all. And so it basically it colors a lot of decisions, and I can't tell you how many business owners that I've talked to who've said, I think I want my son or daughter to take over the business, but I'm, I don't know if I'm making a mistake that's going to hurt all of my workers and their families, and I really need someone like you said from the outside to evaluate whether this individual I'm choosing. Has, you know, measures up and is going to show up as an owner or if it's going to destroy everything and we're going to have horrible thanksgivings from now on. Common story that fear is what catalyzes a lot of folks to call people like myself or the Family Business Consulting Group network and ask who have you got? Who's in my backyard? Uh, another resource is the Family Firm Institute.org, and it has a directory of consultants, maybe in somebody's backyard. And there's free information. Uh, I'll give you the Family Business Network. As a resource that folks can search and find a local chapter. I'm uh Recently speaking to uh the biggest chapter in the world is in India, and they've asked me to speak next week. Uh, at 5 in the morning our time in Central. Yeah, on this topic of OK our leadership as the secret sauce for family-owned businesses. They're desperate for these models, I think, um, and I know that they work. So I think, um, There's this old notion that we're not able to access information online and that's definitely been um I don't know what's the right verb here. Cas discarded. We can get more information digitally than ever in human history, and most of us are learning and training and teaching using one language, English. To any corner of the of the of the world. I think we're at a marvelous place to think about how to influence transformational leadership. Everywhere. So here we go. Excellent, excellent. And you know, written into your book, and I don't want you to give it away, but you just mentioned it again. The book is called Objectives Plus Key Results or OK our Leadership How to Apply Silicon Valley's Secret Sauce to your career, team, or Organization. Tell us a little bit about the secret sauce because I want our listeners to go get the book and find out the full details. Thanks, yeah. Uh, I think we're always attracted to that secret sauce. What is it in Coca-Cola? Well, you can, you can distill it down, you can determine what it is chemically, but the secret sauce is the thing which enables you and your organization, your team to succeed. And teams forever have always had measures, milestones, scoreboards, cards that they use to track their performance. But we tend to think that uh generation one or the boss or the manager has the answers, and we're learning that that's simply not the case. Customers have the answers. And when we turn to our customers for market validation and customer feedback, Um, it upends the traditional model of business development and it enables us to do two things, to be agile and to collaborate. And throughout history, those are the two. Variables that business psychologists like me know will lead to Uh, marvelous opportunities ahead. So here we are sitting in a pandemic. And I'm sitting in Nashville and you're sitting in California perhaps, and we're having a conversation that anyone anywhere might be able to hear anytime because it's a permanent digital record. I mean That means that anyone at any time can access this, listen to it, implement a portion of it. You could go to OKR Leadership.com. You can download the first chapter of the book there for free, or you can buy it, audio or Digital or paper copies anywhere. OK, our leadership is an easily searchable term. But more importantly, I think leaders need to practice leadership. So, this is not a rhetorical question. Why is it that attorneys get to practice law and, and doctors get to practice medicine, and why don't we give permission for leaders to practice leadership? I think we're missing out. What if we, well, that's assume that's great that we just need to practice leadership, right? Yeah, so, OK, is that process for leaders and managers to practice what matters. I think that if that's not the title of a previous book, that's the next one coming up. It sounds like that's terrific. Let me ask you, we only have a couple of minutes left. How can leaders practice something you call the hero model during a global pandemic? It's probably a longer conversation. Uh, the short answer is, uh, do some Google research on a thing called psychological capital. SICAP is An enduring, um, thing that nerds know about, psychologists know about, business leaders do not. And it, it stands for HR and O stands for four dimensions. In psychology, it's called the second order effect. So they They help each other, and the impact of hope and efficacy, which are the first two, is greater than hope by itself or efficacy by itself. So the H stands for hope, which is defined as the will and the way to respond to this pandemic in a, in a significant manner. E is efficacy, our capacity to do our jobs. It's just a nerdy psychological term for that. R is resilience, which we all are learning about in the popular press, but we know through history means our capacity to respond to a stressor and return to our previous state or a better state. Classic example is when people go to war or active duty and come back, not with PTSD but with the opposite side of the bell curve with post-group euphoria. They describe it as the best years of their lives. So resiliency is a thing, it can be taught and measured and developed. And the last HERO is optimism, which is a choice, a generalized positive effect. If you choose to believe that we can. Do better than you will. Well, CICAP can be measured, those four dimensions. And it can be tracked and can be changed over time, and I'm able to teach people how to increase it and then how to respond in their team or their organization. Does that make sense? It makes sense and you're right, we're going to have to talk about that in another episode of because that is a great topic to leave at today. And Doug, it's really been a pleasure to have you on. I want to let our listeners know, as you mentioned, that you can get a free download of Chapter One from objective objectives plus keys results, OK, our leadership, how to apply Silicon Valley's secret sauce to your career, team or organization. Version 2019 and you can get that at okrleadership.com and you know check out what else is there. There's plenty of other stuff there and Doug's offering a free digital training course and access to most of his calendar for a complimentary meeting is there at action-learning.com as well. So it's definitely a pleasure to talk with you and hear about. A family businesses, the psychological side of things, OK, our leadership, we covered a lot of ground, Doug. I really appreciate you coming on and I hope you'll join me again sometime in the very near future for another interview. Well, the pleasure is mine. Uh, let's hope that people practice leadership, right? Absolutely practice leadership. I like that there's a good way to go out. Thanks so much. My pleasure to help. All the best, Bill. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. You know that feeling when you're about to score 30% off, but they want your number? Oh, give them your line to number instead. It's a second line on your phone, perfect for nabbing promo codes without inviting spam to your party. Sign up for every discount under the sun. Then block the junk texts that follow. You get all the perks, but none of the spammy baggage. More codes, less chaos. 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