Episode 97 | Get Out of Your Bubble to Work in Your Genius Space with Dr. Margie Oleson

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  00:00

But then I feel like I was living out a cautionary tale, because I really was confused. How do organizations struggle so much, with the organizational dynamics, with the leadership, with the teams, with the behaviors, with the ability to just be open and honest with each other. It seemed to me that the longer I was in organizations, the less and less authentic leaders were able to be.

Voiceover  00:05

Welcome to the “Lead at the Top of Your Game” podcast, where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now, your host, leadership tactics, and organizational development expert, Karan Ferrell-Rhodes.

Karan Rhodes  00:36

Hello, superstars. Welcome to another episode of the lead at the top of your game podcast, we are so honored today to have on today’s show Dr. Margie Oleson, who is the founder and CEO of Olson Consulting, which is a firm that helps senior leadership teams become high performing teams themselves, resulting in the whole company improving their performance. And you all know that is so critical, because sometimes as senior leaders, we don’t take care of ourselves, and we need to in order to be at our best. Now, as a fellow organizational leadership expert, myself, all her work, margie’s work, Dr Margie, I should say her work really resonated with me, and I was super excited to be able to have her on the show. So welcome to the podcast, Marjorie.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  01:25

Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Karan Rhodes  01:27

Oh, I cannot wait to dig in and to some of the observations that you’ve seen. We’ve got to compare notes you and I and hopefully share some tips for our audience members out there. Are you game for that?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  01:40

I am

Karan Rhodes  01:41

Awesome. Well, before we dig into the details, I always love to start on a high note. So for as much as you feel comfortable, would you mind giving us a sneak peek into your life outside of work?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  01:55

Sure. So I’m in Minneapolis, St Paul, in Minnesota, in the US, we are the land of 10,000 Lakes, and so I love being outside, walking around my neighborhood all the lakes that we have. I’m also a mom of three amazing adults and five grandkids, and so I spend my time with friends and family as much as possible. Oh, I think we’re sisters from other mothers. I love to spend time with family too. But did you say five grandkids? Five grandkids, yeah, okay, and yeah. And the other thing is,

Karan Rhodes  02:23

may your fountain of youth. That’s what I’m gonna say that right now. That is fantastic, but no, please share a little bit more.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  02:31

I was just gonna say that in my volunteer life, I tend to do things organizational. So if I try to do something that maybe takes just a little bit of no expertise or no experience, I find myself sort of leaning over toward, well, I can help you with that meeting, or I can help you facilitate that strategic planning session, and that seems to be where my passion is.

Karan Rhodes  02:54

Oh, well, you know what? When you’re working in your passion, sometimes it just doesn’t seem like work. It’s just all about helping and making yourself and others happy as well in the process. So well, wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with us. Margie, so let’s first start out by having you share with our listeners a little bit about your background before you founded Oleson consulting, and then kind of jump into what you’re doing with Oakland consulting today.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  03:24

So I started a long time ago being the youngest child in a family where we moved every year, sometimes a couple of times a year, lots of chaos, lots of new starts and and being the youngest, I was never as good at anybody else at all the things that we needed to do. I was kind of always toddling after everybody, so admiring of them, having skills and being leaders. They were all my leaders. And when I wasn’t going to be a famous singer or actor, or I wasn’t going to be I don’t think, I thought I could be president, but probably governor, when I wasn’t doing those things, I did want to make the world a better place, and I didn’t know what that meant. And then I went off into the world, and started with administrative positions in organizations, moved my way up there, earned a bachelor’s degree, earned a master’s degree, but then I feel like I was living out a cautionary tale, because I really was confused. How do organizations struggle so much, with the organizational dynamics, with the leadership, with the teams, with the behaviors, with the ability to just be open and honest with each other. It seemed to me that the longer I was in organizations, the less and less authentic leaders were able to be. And it inspired me, at least, to try to understand, maybe the equivalent of somebody taking apart a computer and looking inside. I wanted to understand organizations. And that did motivate me to go back to school and do a doctoral program in organization development, because I was hoping to find answers. And sometimes when you look for answers, they’re not there. I actually found some, and that was amazing. And then I was able to apply them in the work that I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, to come up with where I show up and how I show up. I will say the cautionary part of the tale was that I kept being fired or laid off, or I stayed too long in a situation that felt really unhealthy or unproductive, or the human element was missing, and I just kept thinking, I know how to do this. I can be a better team player. I can provide fewer opinions. I can just try to stay in my lane. I can keep my head down. And then other times, well, no, I’m going to lead this, and I’m going to be a leader in every chair. And it just didn’t seem to matter where, how I showed up and the people around me. There was some code that I hadn’t cracked, there was some secret sauce that was missing, and I wanted to understand it. And so when I did my doctoral program, I feel like it was a breath of fresh air, and I was given the structure and the processes to understand how we can help leaders and teams.

Karan Rhodes  06:07

Oh, that is amazing. And if you don’t mind, can you share the general topic of your dissertation?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  06:12

Yes, so teams. So I actually had two topics on deck,

Karan Rhodes  06:16

Really two?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  06:17

And, yep, and one of them, well, I had to choose one, so I narrowed it down to two. But the real I was, it was really hard for me to decide, because one of the topics was, why do organizations hire, maintain and promote bad bosses?

Karan Rhodes  06:33

Ooh, that’s juicy.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  06:35

And I thought, we need to know this. I’m going to spend the next three or four years on that topic, and all I could think of was, is that really how I want to spend the next three or four years? I really it was a it was a moment of my taking care of myself. And I said, You know what? So then the other topic, and this is the one I chose, was we had just finished four years of coursework. So this was, you know, 1012, years ago, so 30 years of really good, solid leadership, organizational, team, theory, practice, settled research. So in that four years, I learned we know what we need to know, and it’s not even a long list. You can have a long list of all these great things that you can go to and start exploring and making happen once you have the fundamentals in place, but the fundamentals tried and true by now. They’re more than 40 years old, and any book somebody’s picking up, if they’re talking about leadership behaviors and expectations and skills and they’re talking about teams, they’re based on these five similar, you know, foundational principles. And I thought, okay, so if we know what we need to know, and we have known now for three decades, what is the disconnect? So I set out to do my research on that disconnect. And the disconnect is the gap between knowing and doing, but also it is that I’ve been now, as I’ve been applying it in organizations the last 10 years, leaders don’t know, and the way that the brain operates. Having a one day off site or having a training that lasts a couple of days, that’s a big investment for a company, but that is not how to learn what I’m talking about. You’re not going to learn leadership in a couple of days even. I’ve even been a part of one year programs. We call them leadership programs, but after a year, I became a great cohort member. I learned a lot about the companies that my colleagues were a part of, or if it was an internal program, which I’ve done that too, I learned a lot about the systems. Learned a lot about the different departments, but we didn’t really have an opportunity to learn how do I lead now, what should I do with myself? And when leaders focus only on themselves, and they don’t have a chance to learn how to lead a group, their main role is to lead a group. So it’s it’s internal, it’s my it’s managing myself as a leader, and it’s how do I lead a group? And I will say what I found in my research, and have experienced before that, and now since then, as leaders, are really not comfortable talking about the reality that they don’t know how to lead. We don’t train leaders in organizations to know what to do internally, to develop and how to lead a group. It’s complicated, except not if you have the foundation in place. It’s very complex unless you have the processes and the structure and the An example is the adage that I’ve heard, that a lot of us have heard, that you can’t change an organization’s culture. Culture takes on a life of its own. It’s hubris. Don’t even bother that is absolutely not true, and it’s a sad thing, because many cultures do need to change, and we do need to update them, and if you just fall back on the position that you can’t really change culture, it’s too hard just do what you can, you’re kind of missing out, and you’re kind of deflecting the opportunity and the responsibility to make things better. And culture is just the mixture of how you’re leading. It’s all the ways that you are leading, and that’s why it’s really important to have it at the top. So quoting, you know, Gina Whitman in traction, As goes the the leadership team, so goes the company. And what I found in my research is a team within an organization can develop to be high performing, to develop leaders among the team for about 12 to 18 months in their own bubble. So you can right now, everyone listening can take the team that you have and become a high performing team without necessarily looking to the rest of the company to do that, but after about 12 to 18 months, yeah, you’re going to be vulnerable to budget. You’re going to change. Your team members are going to change. There is going to be directional change. So what you did to make it doable within your own space is going to need to be farther out. And so when a leadership team does it from the top, first of all, those leaders become much more comfortable. It’s a much better day when you feel like you can really learn how to lead and be open and honest about it. It’s a much better day. And then there’s alignment among all those important departments, rather than these natural boundaries that end up being sort of pastel, throw it over the fence from sales to marketing. Why are we throwing things over the fence? How are we not aligned? How do we not have clarity? How are we not together? And the last thing I’ll say in that research that I kind of gave myself permission to talk about behavior. So if we’re going to do this, and if you really want to do it right, you can’t avoid talking about behavior. It’s all behavior all day long. The leader is behaving all day long. The group is behaving all day even if you’re remote and you don’t have your camera on, behavior is happening. So we want to get underneath and put in those foundational systems that are the order of operations. You don’t have to do 27 things. Do these particular foundational pieces. And then you develop the skills and the habits to talk about behavior openly, to talk about what’s working well and what’s not. And now you can start to tackle those other things that you say are beyond you, like culture, like remote working, like the market, like, you know, coming out of a pandemic. Do we what do we do about this, all of those pieces that you’re trying to do? Yeah, you’re not able to do because you’re not a group. It’s kind of like when we’re at home, we develop into a high performing group, and when we don’t, things don’t go well. It’s no different at work. I don’t leave my humanness at the door. I bring my humanness great because I need all that creativity and the memory and the I have certain skills, and you have other skills, and that is where they’re missing it. And these are all the hundreds and 1000s and millions of beans that they’re not counting because they’re so stuck in the routine. And the last thing I’ll say about that is, if you’re looking for an indicator of where this might show up, it’s meetings. I can fix your meetings in an hour. And when I tell you all the things you want to do to have better meetings, you’ll say, ah, Margie, I know all of that.

Karan Rhodes  13:21

Right?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  13:22

I tried that that didn’t work. Actually, if you don’t like your meetings, if they’re not productive, if you’re not getting what you need, if you have them over and over again to try to get to the same problems, the same fires, the same lack of engagement, lack of clarity, then you haven’t done them. You ended up trying some things that became vulnerable to politics, or FOMO fear of missing out. Or did you notice that there are 40 people in this weekly meeting, and only two people talk the same, two people every week? I did the math on that with one group, $5,000 that one hour costs each week.

Karan Rhodes  13:59

Oh my goodness!

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  13:59

Nobody’s counting those beans, and that’s every week, all year long. So when you start to put those foundational pieces in place, the great thing is these other things start to be it is magic. Magically go better, and pretty soon, now you can rise higher and farther and faster because you’ve put in place the foundation.

Karan Rhodes  14:20

Oh my goodness. Okay, we could stop the podcast right here, and it would be gold, but we’re not going to do that. That was fantastic. Now, I’m curious about your research, and it’s okay if you don’t, if it didn’t, if it didn’t cross over. When we did our research, we found that there was a huge need for individual support within teams, over and above what just a manager can do. Because I kind of, we kind of share the thought that, you know, we’re just not in some people just copy what was done in the past, versus really and truly taking steps for it themselves. But did your research come across any, any data around or any perspectives around how leaders still need their own support structure, because when they hit a major challenge that they’re not sure how to to tackle, and sometimes they’re hesitant about asking others, they kind of spin and they sometimes are slow slower to act when they don’t have a confidant or a support structure or peer group in place that they can run ideas by. Did you have any kind of team dynamics that talked about or thought about the support for individual team members?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  15:36

And what I hear you talking about is this sort of dualistic reality of a leader. Every day, they say, it’s lonely. It’s lonely to be a leader. And we say, Oh, you want to get promoted and be a leader in our culture, that’s the best. That’s what you need to aspire to. So you do whatever you can in whatever structure you have in your organization, to become a leader. And then you get there, and you think, really, is this what is i and of course, people aren’t being open because it’s not okay to admit that. But you don’t even realize that the other leaders in the organization think the same thing you do all the way on up to the top, which is why it’s so important. So in my research, what it showed is that issue and 100,000 other issues are addressed when you first of all have it at the top, and it permeates, and it becomes more natural, and it becomes structured to have highly effective learning, curious if you know, aligned, clear leaders, who then, no matter what the situation is, because it is different, 10 companies, 10 Different situations, same principles that you build on, but then if, but then when you are aligned. So imagine a leadership team with eight different departments, and the CEO, when they stop rowing in different directions, when they are clear what the CEO’s goals are, and then they understand each of their goals relative to the CEO’s goals. And then they turn and then they can speak for each other in an elevator in a 32nd pitch. Oh, here’s what’s marketing, what marketing’s part is, and here’s what’s happening in HR, and here’s what’s so exciting that’s going on in operations. And you can speak to each other. Pretty soon you start to lean in and become a cohesive group. And when you’re a cohesive group, it’s a lot less lonely. Yes, it is not more fun to go to work, and now you can do things like kick butt and do well, if you’ve ever heard about these programs where, let’s say, 35 people become a part of a new fangled, the latest, sexiest transformation, they’re 18 months onto a project, and then they do this big presentation at the end, and it got all these company people coming in on video, coming in, in person, and they’re going to share this great thing they just did for 18 months. And invariably, those people on the stage are crying. And I was thinking, why are they crying? And why are they always crying? Why is every group, after 18 months or two years of this really late nights and terrible pizza eating, and they haven’t seen their families much, and they’re exhausted and they’re exhilarated and they’re crying because they’re about to head back to the old way. So that thing that they accomplish, that that connection, clarity, alignment, togetherness. Let’s you and I work together, and I’ll bring you my skills and I’ll give you my ideas. You have different skills and you have different ideas. We just got bigger. Soon as the two of us started to have imagine, if there’s eight of us, it’s so much bigger, and all the styles get represented because you’re working on that. And pretty soon, it is all of those problems that keep coming up over and over again because you haven’t solved them. You start to solve those because you’re having real conversations. The fires, fires go down, so you have fewer, lot less firefighting because you’re being real and you’re being honest and you’re not silos. I’ve worked with a client recently. I feel like it’s Oz, the Land of Oz, and there are these tiny, little, beautiful silos. As far as the eye can see, everybody is in the teeniest, tiniest little silo. And when a vendor comes in, or a new consultant, you just have to find your silo, because they’re not together. You can imagine how hard that is once you then develop that alignment, that clarity now you’ve got and you fixed your meetings. Now you have time, and you have space, and you have energetic mind space to start to tackle some of the bigger issues. And you may not notice it right away, but you might look back six months later, and just as a metric, hmm, I don’t feel lonely, right? I feel excited. I’m a little frustrated because so and so over here is, you know, always representing their agenda. Yep, they are. That’s what we do as a leadership team, and then we come together. Leadership decides however the decisions are made, and we move forward together. It’s never peaceful or calm, but it’s exhilarating and it’s making the world a better place. There’s no better reason to do it than every single person in your company, whether it’s 20 people or 20,000 or 200,000 their day is made better by how you’re doing at the top, all the people in their personal lives, their community, where they volunteer, all of those people are impacted by what you’re doing at the top and how you and then the beauty of doing it at the top is then each of those leaders turns around and cascades it to their own team, and pretty soon you have fixed meeting all over the place. I love working genius. We do working genius and get that or in order and and then we practice, and I come to meetings, and I observe, and we have real conversations, and leaders begin to model the things that they’re going to ask of their people. I’m going to ask you to do A, B and C. Well, guess what? I’m going to do it first, and then once that all starts, then all of the things that come at you, and they will, they’re never going to stop coming at you. It’s never going to be a peaceful place. But it’s a ride, and it’s a roller coaster ride. That is much better when you’re all in the same car, and you can then figure it out as you go together. It is really hard to so lonely, yes, but also impossible to know everything and be everyone. It’s it. How we got here,

Karan Rhodes  21:19

But we try…we try!

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  21:20

How we got here is because we weren’t admitting that. Number one, you shouldn’t have to. But also, number two, it’s not great when you do. It doesn’t we should be counting those beans. It doesn’t work. Companies are leaving so much money on the table because they just keep at the same things that aren’t working for them instead of interrupting them, taking a step back, pausing, finding some time, some space, getting help, asking for help, being willing to receive help, right? Things can. It takes time to do that, but then things can move very quickly. And most people that I work with would never go back. The people that don’t that this doesn’t work for is they’re not ready. They think I should hand them a box or a training, or can I just do it for them? One CEO, oh, HR is taking care of that. I thought, Oh, poor HR. HR has so much to bring to the table, and they shouldn’t have to be responsible for whether or not the CEO feels comfortable leading and leading their leadership team. And so leaders need to be willing to step up and play with it and try it and learn some things and fail at some things, and practice. And it really does happen then fairly quickly.

Karan Rhodes  22:32

Oh, it sounds like it definitely, but you know, you’ve been talking about the Nirvana, right, where the end result of getting there. But in your opinion, like when you go into consult with organizations, where should they start? Because they’re going to be overwhelmed with all that needs to be done, where do you advise them to or work with them to start?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  22:53

So I launched Tap Team Accelerator, and that is a program that takes the items in order, starting with becoming a cohesive team, and then developing clarity and alignment, and then getting your operations to be today’s operations, not the operations of yesterday, not the operations of people who don’t talk to each other, or people who are comfortable with bad meetings and fighting fighting fires, and then performance which puts it all together. And many times, a leader will bring me in for something else. They’re not willing to come in and have a whole program. They don’t even know that that’s something they need, but they want to fix their meeting. So they’ll bring in, bring me in, and we’ll take care of your meetings. We’ll come in and and I’ll teach organizations how leaders how to over communicate. They don’t love that. They don’t want to over communicate. It’s boring, it’s redundant, it feels awkward. Why doesn’t HR do that? Or why don’t my supervisors do that? Punish on someone else, right? Communicating is a skill that leaders want to develop, because that’s how you keep all the boats rowing in the same direction. You have to, kind of like at home. We have to keep renewing our vows to the things that we said we’re doing, or sometimes a boat rolls off in its own direction because they’re surviving. They’re saying, Okay, this is a mess. You keep telling us we have different goals. I can’t keep up. I can’t lead my people this way. I’m going off over here. No, what we want is clarity and alignment. And so we do work around clarity. I’ll just, I’ll come in and we’ll just do work around clarity. And pretty soon a leader will see. Oh, and they also need a chance to pat themselves on the back and let themselves off the hook for not knowing how to lead. You know, we insist on our lawyers. Not only did they go to law school, they had to pass the bar. And they might even need experience in my in my industry, when we have an HR professional, they have an educated background. When we break in, bring in the the accountant. We need them to be a CPA. We’re not going to turn our taxes over to our golf buddy. We’re not going to put RISK COMPLIANCE and government regulations and people getting sick and let our chemists not be chemists.

Karan Rhodes  24:55

Right.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  24:55

Even our if you go way out into the company, the HVAC person, the facilities person has all kinds of certifications, all kinds of experience, all kinds of ways of showing you what they know, and they can hit the ground running. And then we say, leaders, you’ll be fine. It’s kind of the equivalent of I go through 1213, years of school, from, you know, preschool or kindergarten, all the way to my high school graduation 12th grade, and when they hand me my diploma, they hand me a teaching job. Oh, Margie, you’ve been here the whole time. You know what the classroom looks like. You know how to line up for lunch. You kind of know how to work with different people. No one is ever going to offer me a teaching job. They’re going to expect that I learn a lot of things about behavior and education and have some experience, have some practice, have some mentors, leaders. I think the reason why leaders are left on their own is because their leaders were left on their own, and their leaders, leaders were left on their own, and everyone throws up their hands and says, It’s too much. I can’t spend two years training leaders. Fortunately, you don’t have to. You do want to start somewhere one second,

Karan Rhodes  26:03

Just chime in on that.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  26:05

Yeah,

Karan Rhodes  26:06

I have not seen an evolution of, back to your word of culture. I haven’t seen an evolution where we’ve created the psychological safety for yes leaders, I guess, to have the peace of mind to say that I need help, or, you know, or the new expectations for what is needed in this, you know, this new world of work, we’ve got to create that psychological safety so that they feel empowered and ask the questions, get the help and get the support and collaborate with others to help them be the best that they can be. Do you? Do you think so?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  26:42

It’s good news, bad news. Psychological safety is a direct result of the work that I’m talking about. So when you start to take this time, and when you start to align and are more clear, and when you feel comfortable being a little bit more open, when you have a consultant sitting in your meetings, it’s an interesting moment where I’m watching everything. Then that. But that’s also why it starts at the top, because at the top you might feel more comfortable saying, I’m signing on to the ROI that this brings. I did sign on for this. I just haven’t done it. And I do have these five. I’ve had leaders of companies that are recognizable names tell me that they feel like they’re babysitting or they’re running a preschool group. They come to me and they gossip, they blame they come to me to solve their problems, even though there, it’s a publicly traded company and we read their articles, but they feel like this is not something that I signed, that I thought it was going to be like, and they can’t say it out loud. So when you start at the top and you invest that return on investment is your best ROI for anything you can do is build leaders and have leaders build their teams. Hands down, there’s nothing that comes even close. Your organization is a bunch of groups. And right now, especially coming out of the pandemic, they’re pretty fragmented. They’re pretty disconnected. It’s it’s tough out there. It’s really tough out there. Get back to the basics. Put in these fundamentals. Build a little bit of habits around psychological safety, putting themselves out there, just a little bit. Tap, put their toe in the water. Fix your meetings. If you fix your meetings, you can have better meetings to talk about this stuff. You can have better meetings to save those fighters

Karan Rhodes  28:21

Take some of your own medicine. The antidote to your problem,

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  28:24

absolutely. And the other thing that I will say, we focus a lot on the brain. So the brain is doing 99.99% Same, same. The brain does not want someone to learn leadership who hasn’t. The brain does not want the team to do something different. The brain does not want you to fix your meetings, because the brain’s keeping you alive, and so the brain’s all set up for habits. So I don’t think most my clients don’t realize their leadership day is just a whole bunch of habit, yeah, the way they do their meetings, the way they talk to each other, the way they set their goals, the way they do performance management, the way they don’t talk to people, the way they put up a boundary next to the department over here. Those are all habits the brain loves that you can’t. That’s why you can’t go to a two day training and come out of it a different leader. You can’t even do a two day training or do some sort of a Strengths Finder, or Myers Briggs or working genius. You can’t just do that and then have it stick. It doesn’t work that way. So we build it in and recognize you’re not an ineffective leader. You’re a leader who’s a bundle of habits, and let’s change those habits, and it really actually does improve pretty quickly,

Karan Rhodes  29:28

Exactly. And you know what? This is one of the first questions I ask clients when they bring us in for engagements. I’ll ask because all of that needs to be done right for leadership. But I first asks them, are they happy being a leader? What if they are? What are their motivations if they’re not? What activities are just like quicksand to them? Because many leaders, still to this day and age, have been promoted up through leadership because they were great as individual contributors, or they were convinced to take a leadership role when they were in a stage of life that they may not have wanted one. So we, I try to get behind the thinking, the motivations and the passions, and then use that Intel to start the work on some of the low hanging fruit of, you know, change management. And it’s just like you said, meetings are easy, low hanging fruit, one that you could, you know, tackle, to get a big brand and build on.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  30:25

Do some actually tear up.

Karan Rhodes  30:27

They do.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  30:28

Yes,

Karan Rhodes  30:29

They’re so emotional about it,

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  30:31

They literally move back.

Karan Rhodes  30:33

Yeah,

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  30:34

They’re protecting themselves.

Karan Rhodes  30:35

Yeah,

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  30:36

They think they’re the only one,

Karan Rhodes  30:37

Yeah!

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  30:38

They think they’re the only one that is feeling the way they feel. Most of them feel the way you just described.

Karan Rhodes  30:43

That’s right.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  30:43

And we used to have a little bit of a challenge being able to use the word joy or happiness or whatever it were, thank God for Brene Brown and a whole bunch of other things  Yeah!

Karan Rhodes  30:52

The pandemic. We had language around we now can talk about it openly, and we better because the unemployment rate is amazingly low and the search for talent, talent. You don’t want the talent to be the ones that are willing to be off camera and there’s 40 people in a meeting, and they never say a word.  That’s right.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  31:10

That’s not the talent you want.  You’re fighting for talent. You’re competing for talent. You want the people who want to get in there and have great leaders and great leadership teams and great leaders and teams that they’re on, and they want to be a great leader, and they want to take the time, and they want to learn, and they want to be glad about it. They want their day to feel good and something they can brag about at a barbecue.

Karan Rhodes  31:11

No. That’s right. That’s right. Well, Margie, I cannot believe, uh, almost all of our time is gone. That is just amazing. We were having such a great conversation. Um, but before you go, one of the questions we’d love to ask our guests, which, which, which of the leadership taxes came in our research really resonated for them, and you were so kind to share that leading with strategic decision making really popped for you and for my new listeners out there, leading with strategic decision making is all about making great decisions yourself and or lead in a good decision making process with your teams or collaborators. So curious minds wants to know, Margie, why did this leading with strategic decision making resonate for you?

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  32:13

Well, first of all, the word strategy always pops for me, because everything is about the strategy, first  It is! A lot of the hubris and organizations right now, it’s so stuck, and people are just so following, and their habits are so much in place that people aren’t pausing and saying, Okay, but what is this going to get us to? You would have fixed your meetings by now if you were able to tie outcomes to what’s going on in the meeting. And you’re not getting outcomes out of your meetings, but you’re just kind of flowing along. What’s your strategy for whatever you’re doing is you, are you getting what you need from it? Otherwise it’s not a good use of your time, or anybody else’s, or all the real resources you’re expending. Decision making is the short list of ways that leaders differentiate themselves from everybody else in the company. They’re making decisions, and those decisions are what’s making up your success, your failures, your experimentation, that’s going well or not, your culture, your just, your culture is full of decisions. And do the decisions change? Are the people feeling whiplash? Are you deciding for yourself and managing your career, and are you deciding for your team? And then how are the leadership decisions, the strategic decisions. How are they at the top? Would I at a baby shower? Would I describe the leadership team of my company as being strategic and making strategic decisions? And I’ll know it if I work for the company, if I start to see things be consistent. And no matter what happens in our industry or our market or inside of our company, we always go back to Yeah, but this is who we are, and here’s how we fix problems, and here’s how we grow leaders, and here’s how we stay nimble. All of that is based on strategic decision making.

33:53

It

Karan Rhodes  33:53

It sure is. Wow. What a great explanation. And thank you for sharing with it, because you’re totally right spot on. Well, Margie, we’re gonna have all the information about you and your company in our show notes, but I always like to give guests an opportunity to give airtime to where folks can find you to learn more, to collaborate and potentially work with you to make their senior leaders and even higher performing teams. So where gonna find you. So I’m on LinkedIn every day, Margie, O, L, E, S, O, N, and then you can go to topteamaccelerator, all one word, topteamaccelerator.com, right now today, and just pop in there and do a little leadership quiz, 15 statements that tell you where you’re at with your team and yourself as a leader. And then you’ll just get instant feedback for what you could do about that, right? And and the statements tell you that short list of what to focus on you might feel overwhelmed. No, I have to do 120 things, and I don’t want to do that. No, these 15 statements point to the structure you want to build first, and then you can build on all of that going forward.  Well. listeners, if you don’t go to that website and take that test, boy, are you missing an opportunity, because getting more insights on your own behaviors, personalities and blind spots will be so insightful for you to make course corrections as you move through your career journey. Well, thank you so much, Marjorie for the gift of your time and sharing your perspective on today’s podcast.

Dr. Marjorie Oleson  35:24

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

Karan Rhodes  35:26

Oh, same here. And thank you leaders as well for joining our episode. We know there are a million podcasts or billion or trillion podcasts out there, and your time is very precious, and we appreciate you supporting us. And as you know, we only asked for two things. It’s the one to like and subscribe to the show, and then to share it with just one friend, because by doing so together, we can all lead better at the top of our game. Thank you so much, and see you next week. And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.