Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.162)
If you're a business owner struggling to develop your team members into leaders and retain your best talent, then our guest, Julie Kratz, is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Julie is a master at facilitating experiences so everyone on your team feels seen, heard, and a part of something. Julie, thank you so much for jumping on with me today. So excited to have you here.
Julie (00:24.6)
Yeah, same. I'm excited for the conversation.
Adam O'Leary (00:27.692)
Absolutely. So Julie, I've heard you discuss how coaching transformed your early career by turning confusion into clarity. So why is coaching such a powerful tool for empowering employees and driving business success?
Julie (00:43.406)
Yeah, yeah, I spent 12 years in corporate America and I didn't have any formal coaching training, but I was doing it informally. And so when I launched my own business over 10 years ago now, I pursued a master coaching certification and it was wild how it just transformed how I approach conversations it was less about.
having all the answers and more about helping people self-discover their own answers to their own problems or the what's next moments in their careers. And so I have found coaching to be an incredibly impactful tool, not just for me, but for my clients as well. So I do a lot of workshops on coaching skills and it kind of runs counter intuitive to what I think leaders think that it's.
about me, my vision, and getting everyone excited about that, which is also important, but a lot of it is getting buy-in from the team so that they understand how their role maps to that vision, and more importantly, how we get input from people that are on the front lines doing the work rather than kind of from up here thinking about the next bold idea. And so it's really fun to see the power of belonging and inclusion when it happens on a team. It's just...
one of the most sustainable competitive advantages in business today.
Adam O'Leary (02:04.777)
Absolutely. No, I couldn't agree with you more and how would you encourage a business leader whether it be a CEO a vice president a manager to be able to empower their team members?
Julie (02:19.48)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's really about finding out what motivates people. And you can see this from a young age as a parent of wildly different children. One approach does not work for the same kid as it does others, and the same shows up in business. What motivates one employee might be very different than what motivates another employee. And while there's no like magic wand or secret to finding out the unlocking the motivation of a team member,
It really goes in having these ongoing conversations, checking in with people on what matters to them, what brings meaning and purpose in their lives and in their work and helping people understand how their role on the team isn't, you know, make the new widget or the next innovation. but it's really how they understand like the meaning and purpose behind that. And once people connect meaning and purpose to their role, to their work.
They're going to be far more motivated to do their most quality work, more quantity. It really unlocks the potential inside someone.
Adam O'Leary (03:28.789)
So let's say if I'm a founder and I have say a small team of five people, because I feel like after five people would become, it's difficult for anybody to manage over five people, but let's just imagine this role. So I have five people that I'm managing. What would be like a simple win, I guess you could say, that a founder, a manager, or anybody on the team can implement or ask to their team members in order to try to figure out what their motivation is?
you
Julie (03:58.481)
Yeah, that's so powerful. And I agree with you. Once you get past five people, you know, it probably makes sense to have other leaders. It's really difficult to manage that many different types of people in that many types of roles. So I think it comes to asking a few, a few of my favorite coaching questions are what does success look like for you here?
what are your career aspirations? What are your values? something I'm really passionate about right now is helping people understand what their personal values are and how that might relate to the core values of an organization. And there's hundreds of different values that people could potentially have. So for me in those conversations, my, I've gotten really clear on my values around justice and fairness. And once I know that, and if I had a manager and they
that, really helping people understand and find motivation through those values and the work that you do. So the work I do is very clearly about to fairness and justice, but for founders that could be something very different about integrity, know, trust, innovation, you know, there's lots of different values that I think when you have these coaching conversations and you understand people's personal values.
and how they relate to the organization's core values that can be really, really powerful.
Adam O'Leary (05:26.477)
Absolutely. And how do you keep it going? Let's say if I found somebody's motivation, okay, and am I supposed to check in once a month, once an hour? How often are we checking it? Yeah, exactly.
Julie (05:37.265)
Yeah, and it's not like this like theoretical conversation like how did your values show up for you today? mean, I think that's a good reflection point for people to have because once we get misaligned with our values, burnout, know, struggle, attrition, that's when it starts to happen. And so checking in as a leader I think is really important. There's a variety of ways to do that.
I always had a weekly one-on-one with my employees and it was usually 20, 30 minutes. And just not just like the basics of like, Hey, what does your work week look like? What are your priorities? What's in your way? You know, how can I help? How can I support you? think those are important questions to check in with people on. but one, again, another powerful question I love to ask people is what does support look like for you in this moment? If there is misalignment or if you're sensing some burnout.
rather than guess or what we most often do is apply the golden rule which we learned when we were little bitty. If you remember I remember in fifth grade it was this big banner on my teacher's wall that said treat other people how you want to be treated. The flaw with that is not everyone wants to be treated like we want to be treated. You what motivates you Adam is different than what motivates me and so treat people how they want to be treated. We call that the platinum rule and I think if leaders guide the conversation that way and provide support that
the team member needs, not guessing or presupposing our own support mechanisms on someone. We can really flex and I know that sounds like a lot of work for leaders like wait I have to show up differently for different people. No, you want to stay authentic to you. But support might mean yeah checking in daily or a status report at the end of the week or
measuring goals on an ongoing basis, but having some mechanism for accountability so that it's not when things go completely awry that we're doing the check-in because that's not going to feel good. That's probably going be a really hard conversation. It's these little pivot points, these little moments that matter that people tell us. And I teach at university now and read a lot of academic articles and
Julie (07:56.817)
One of the things that I found really important and it's been a big aha for me in a class I'm teaching on decision making is that when people feel cared for and they feel like you care about them as a human being, not just as a worker bee, they're going to do a lot better work for you. And it sounds so simple, right? But I think sometimes we forget about that level of care that's needed for someone to feel cared for and they're going to stick around longer. They're going to do better work.
They're going to hopefully advance in the organization and so providing that support and asking what support looks like is so important.
Adam O'Leary (08:36.844)
I love that. And is there any ways that you've because okay, here's what I'm thinking. I'm just trying to get into the mind of other founders. Okay. And, and, and I think to them, this might sound great. Okay. Then theory, but a lot of the times you're juggling 400 things at the same time. There's about four fires going on. The company's about to explode. AWS just crashed and you have 400,000 support tickets. it's
Julie (09:04.207)
room.
Adam O'Leary (09:04.946)
It's great, I think, people are thinking that it's great in theory, but how do you actually put this into practice? What is a way that maybe before they jump on with a team member, they're doing their weekly calls or their weekly check-ins, is there anything that you would recommend for a founder to do, even if it's just for five minutes prior to that call?
Julie (09:28.76)
yeah, and you're right. mean, there's crises everywhere. There's lots of polarization right now. There's a lot of explosion with AI and technological innovation and failures like you mentioned. and so just in that moment, I think.
One, you can be proactive with it. So there's a proactive approach and a reactive approach. I don't know about you, but I like to play offense. I don't love playing defense. And so I think if you are playing offense and being proactive with your team, when a crisis happens, you're hopefully going to be more prepared. Maybe you've even anticipated like what the communication structure is like, who's on what, like what are the priorities. That would be ideal.
And so having one of the tools I really love that Adam Grant, organizational psychologist calls a pre-mortem. Before something fails, we've already kind of come up with a game plan. And so what he offers is say you're going into like a new product launch, you're about to launch, you ask questions like, what could go wrong? know, six months from now when we're looking back, what will be our missteps? What will have been our mistakes?
How do we anticipate those? How will we know when they're happening? And what are some strategies we're gonna use in those moments when things go awry? So you essentially already have a playbook when something goes awry because it, like you said, is inevitable. It's gonna happen. Conflict is inevitable. So I kinda like that proactive approach, but if you haven't done the proactive approach and you find yourself in the throes of an outage, stock out, a shortage of supplies or vendors, you know.
In that moment, I think our tendency is to just dive in and do all the work, right? Respond to as many emails as we can, give as many fires put out. And as a founder, I get it. I feel that angst myself in my small business. But what I found is that the team wants to help. The team wants to participate in that. You don't have to take on the load, the burden all on your own. And that's what they're there for. And so...
Julie (11:33.509)
having a quick rally to get everyone together. Like you said, a five minute, a 10 minute, like what key decisions do we need to make? What are the key priorities so that we all know what success looks like with those priorities and who's on what? And here's one really powerful question I'd love to ask, really at the end of any meeting we should be asking this, but especially in times of crisis, what did we decide to do? And I know that sounds super simple.
But I've been a part of meetings that end very abruptly or people have to jump onto the next call or something happens and they have to jump out. And if people don't have clarity on what exactly we decided to do today, you're gonna have another meeting that feels like a groundhog day where it's like, we already had this meeting. Like, why didn't people do what they were supposed to do? I'm gonna be frustrated and emotional, bring some negative emotional energy to that conversation that could have been prevented.
with a very quick synopsis. And I liken it to the exit row of the airplane when you fly. What does the flight attendant always ask you? Do you commit to helping people in the event of an emergency? Same goes for our meetings at the end of a meeting. Getting everyone to commit, getting everyone to shake their head, throw up a thumb emoji on a virtual meeting. We're all committed to doing these three things. And when you have that clarity,
you have commitment, and then you can hold people accountable to that commitment. But without clarity and commitment, it's nearly impossible to hold people accountable for something they didn't agree to do. So being really crystal clear with that kind of direction. And hopefully that's a two-way or multi-way conversation. It's not a top-down, you need to do this. There's some opportunity for people to weigh in so that they can buy in and be more committed to that decision as well.
Adam O'Leary (13:32.633)
Absolutely. This actually reminds me back. There was a company I was working with and I'm actually really glad I brought you on because it's making me like even remember how these problems happen. So there was a company I was working with many years ago and there was this big event happening, lots and lots of people coming in. There was literally tons and tons of people. There was like a launch and I remember that
right before the floodgates opened of all these customers coming in. was like, I mean, everything's breaking during a launch. Everything is going wrong at all given moments. Everything's going wrong. You're getting a thousand messages. And I remember like there was a problem going on in the backend of the software and the developer just disappeared for like two hours because he wanted to go out for lunch at like.
the peak time, like at the prime time when we needed them. now, yeah, but now that I'm thinking back to it, it's did that person feel like they were like they were that their values were being matched? Did they feel motivated? And I mean, the answer in that situation is absolutely not. That person doesn't feel motivated if they're leaving at prime time because I got to go get a sandwich. But it's fascinating that we're talking about this because to me it is
Julie (14:27.63)
What are you doing?
Adam O'Leary (14:52.716)
it is critical to make sure that every team member is heard and that everything is planned correctly because just think about how much more motivated your team members are going to be when things do hit the fan or during a big event, how important that is. And I guess from your side, if you can kind of share with the audience, how do you measure this success? So how can you look at, how do you gauge, I guess you could say the KPIs of
Julie (15:20.847)
Thanks
Adam O'Leary (15:20.928)
these employees happiness or their workload? Is there a way that you can actually put this to a fixed number?
Julie (15:29.04)
Yeah, there's a few different ways to quantify it. There's the old school employee engagement survey, now a lot of companies are doing poll surveys where you ask a standard basket of questions that are highly correlated with engagement and happiness and motivation. And I think that's a helpful approach, but it's also a very reactive approach. And people aren't always honest on anonymous surveys, especially on small teams if anonymity can't be protected. It's like, well, if I say this, they're going to
know it was one of us and creates a little angst so people aren't always honest. One of the other approaches I like are listening sessions and any leader can do this just go on a listening tour and it can be really informal. When I was a leader I worked second shift in a warehouse and I was the manager for the whole shift and so once a night I just closed my laptop and walked the warehouse floor you know half an hour that could be less.
depends on what you think is necessary. But I just walked the shop floor and I would check in with people and I call these leadership drive-bys just to say, hey, how's it going? How's your family? How's your, one of your hobbies? Like show that you know something about them as a human being. And in those conversations, I would get these amazing ideas from employees that they had all along, but they didn't think anyone was listening or they didn't have a mechanism to share that. And so.
Those informal touch points, I think, go a long way. You can also do more formalized listening sessions. So a lot of times I get brought in to facilitate those with my clients. And we kind of agree to a facilitation guide. And in a virtual setting, I'll use some polling anonymously so people can share their feedback without knowing it's attributed to them. Wonderful tools like AI can summarize these things now and kind of come up with some key themes.
that's more of a qualitative approach, more, that's a formal and qualitative approach. When you talk about what the drive buys is more of an informal qualitative approach. But I think, Adam, if you have a few key metrics that you're measuring on your team and they're not just profit, they're not just short-term like financial business goals. Those are important, right? We've got to pay the bills. We've got to stay in business. But if you also have some proactive measures of engagement.
Julie (17:54.233)
And one of them that we've talked about here is, I find meaning and purpose in my work? Is my work aligned with my values? If you can put some metrics to that and have that on a scorecard along with business metrics, I think that's a really nice match of like, here's what business needs, financial metrics, but we also need the human metrics as well. And so.
I think just asking the question goes a long way. Of course, people want to feel like you did something with the feedback and that you're actively taking that feedback because people aren't going to share if they don't feel like you're doing anything with it. But measuring it matters and showing that shows a lot that you care enough to measure something and ask about it.
Adam O'Leary (18:40.285)
Absolutely and what sort of results have you seen from companies that have actually implemented this and where should people go to learn more about you?
Julie (18:50.008)
yeah. So what I usually do if we do kind of some assessment to figure out kind of the pulse of the organization, how people are feeling about some of these key methods, metrics of success, is we'll often build kind of a strategy from that. And usually that's the leadership team or could be a founder at a smaller organization, but say, okay, now that we know this, what are we going to do with it? And I'm not talking about a 20 page, you know, huge manifesto.
It's one page of here's some key themes, here's some things we need to work on, and here's what it looks like from an action standpoint, and here's how we're going to check in over time. And so where I see a lot of strategic work go wrong, it's like words on a paper that I'll ask people about, they're like, yeah, let me go look that up. It's like if you have to look it up, then you probably aren't doing it. So making it really crystal clear, really, really simple.
These are the things that matter and we're going to keep that in front of people in every way that we communicate. So if you're doing town halls or team meetings, of course that, Slack channels, team channels, wherever you virtually communicate. I worked for larger organizations that had an infographic on the company intranet that showed some of these metrics over time. Old school, back in the early 2000s, we had a whiteboard that had these metrics on them.
So some way to make it visual keep it in front of people where they're at so it's not just this like one and done check the box activity it lives and breathes through the organization and there's this constant feedback loop and I know that sounds like a lot of work for leaders I know it felt like a lot of work for me like another thing I have to keep track of but people are already thinking these things just because you ask doesn't
changed the fact that they were already thinking, believing, feeling these things. So eliciting that ask and making people feel validated and heard is really important and then making it super simple and actionable on the back end.
Adam O'Leary (21:02.557)
I love that. And is there a website that people can go visit you at?
Julie (21:06.018)
yeah, so nextpivotpoint.com is where you can find a ton of free resources. I have a free training video on some of these techniques. I've got tons of blogs. I write for Forbes as well, so I have a weekly column where I bring in experts to talk about the latest trends, research, actionable ideas, as well as a podcast focused on the subject as well. So that's called Allyship in Action.
Adam O'Leary (21:33.356)
That's awesome. Julie, thank you so much for joining me today. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for listening in, and I will see you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
Julie (21:36.26)
Thanks Adam.
