Shandel Sutherland 00:05
Welcome to lead for clarity where we help you, your team and your organization get to their next level with clarity and focus. My name is Shandel Sutherland, and I am here with my ever so lovely co host, Melanie, Montgomery and Melanie, what is one thing you're grateful for today?
Melanie Montgomery 00:25
My family
Shandel Sutherland 00:28
So good. Me too. Me too. And I love the weather. I just have to say sorry, if you're up in Washington, not it's good. But I'm just saying. It's pretty nice.
Melanie Montgomery 00:37
I do miss the sunshine. But I'm glad you love the fall.
Shandel Sutherland 00:40
Thank you so much. Well, today, we're going to continue on in our conversation on the process. And Melanie, maybe you could just catch us up a little bit on what we mean by the business process and how we use it here at Shandel Group.
Melanie Montgomery 00:56
Yeah, definitely. So we have this business process. It's a cycle that we take all of our teams through, and really is how we go through growth, we can choose to go through a healthy cycle and tackle these stages in a healthy and productive way. Or we can end up off ramping into the cycle of misery. And so we want to help everyone to stay in that healthy cycle. And when we get over into that unhealthy cycle of misery, how to get back the first podcast of the season, we talked through all of the stages in depth. So definitely encourage you to listen to that one. So you can know all of them. But today we're going to talk through purposefully Connect, which is one of my favorite stages, because it's really about learning and growing and finding new information and really connecting with things that will help your growth as well as people, your team, your organization and really just leaning into those new tools.
Shandel Sutherland 01:53
So good. It's my favorite too, I must admit. And it's where as a team, as a company, as a firm, we spend most of our time in connect. And I think it's such a beautiful time, because when people come to us, like we said in our pain episode that they're being referred to as usually because there's a pain point. And we have helped other people and other companies and other teams through that. And so this is kind of the Shandel Group magic, if you will, of where we bring people in. And just for review for people who have not been listening to us, we are in each one of these stages, which again, today we're talking about, purposely connect, there is an action to take. And so we kind of break that down into an acronym of ACT, that first action we want you to be taking and purposely connecting is aligning everyone. So align, align, align, and the first step in any kind of alignment, whether it's just you and your spouse, whether it's your team, your company, or maybe just you really is aligning everyone to the purpose, mission and values of the company. Where are we going? Why are we even here? And how are we going to behave? And I feel like that is a really huge opportunity. So there's a bunch of things we do and align. But once we've done that alignment, then we go into the C, which is communicate and man, every company needs to improve and communication, including our own, you know, like, we are masters in teaching communication, but we have to continually have that discipline ourselves and doing that develop that communication skill, put the tools in, I don't think we are ever going to stop needing to communication. And Melanie, you had a very interesting conversation with one of our clients that wanted to run like an employee survey, the board wanted to make sure they run a survey and why don't you give a little perspective on what what you told them based on communication.
Melanie Montgomery 03:56
In surveys, typically, communication is rated really poorly across all organizations. When you do employee surveys, it's important to know that sometimes you can be doing really well and think you're doing well and some employees are just not going to see it. And so when those communication scores come out, it's important to look at what your baseline was and how you're growing versus just looking at the score because I can't remember exact number but most companies on their employee surveys, they're told that there is not great communication. That's one of the big things that's always noted. Even if you're working on it. Even if you're trying really hard and doing all the things people just don't feel like they're communicated to enough.
Shandel Sutherland 04:39
Yeah. And so you can't do it enough. Like, you know, we talked about the chief executive officer needs to be the chief communicator, repeat yourself over and over again. Because once you are weary of hearing your own self speak, you're probably getting close, you know and really until people are sick of you and kind of making fun of you in the hall, you probably got to keep communicating. And so how do we do that? With individuals? How do we help everyone learn their communication skills? Okay, sorry, went a little off on that, because that's my sweet spot. And I love it.
Shandel Sutherland 05:14
The T in act is trust, oh, boy, who you're never going to get anywhere in our process without beautiful trust, then without always growing it and repairing it and creating it, then we say about trust, it's either growing or eroding. And erosion is very quiet, you don't know it's happening, you assume it isn't happening. And growth takes a lot of work. So you definitely know if you're working on trust or not, we believe in this act in this purposely connect you've got to align, keep aligning, align, keep aligned, you gotta communicate, keep communicating. And if you don't communicate well, then there's no way that you can do the T, which is really trust and have in developing that trust and keep it going. So Melanie, what do you have to add to that act acronym that we have in this purposely connect stage.
Melanie Montgomery 06:09
Yeah I'd love to dig in a little bit to the communicate component, because I think that's really, like you said, our sweet spot, not just communicating a lot and over communicating, but also figuring out how do you better communicate with your team and with others, one of the things that we have is one of our foundational tools is really understanding our disc, behavioral style and motivations. When we dig into those, we can really understand how we're similar and different from others, and how we may be trying to communicate in ways that work for us that are really off putting to others. And so digging into those things can be super insightful, where you not just communicate more, but you communicate more effectively as well.
Shandel Sutherland 06:48
That's so good. And I think it's fascinating that as leaders that start up in there, like the first one to kind of start their company get going, if they don't have this kind of training, their point pain point in growth is when they start bringing a bunch of other people in that they are no longer managing. And once that's happening, it can be really frustrating because they should not be surrounded by people like them, they should be have variety around them. And you got to really learn and we love our tools, the depth, the behavior, or what we call the clarity report with the motivators is that man, if we can help people understand that it absolutely catapults them into their next level. And that's what gets us excited.
Melanie Montgomery 06:48
Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of clients typically come to us with frustration and communication, maybe they're not having healthy conflict, maybe they're butting heads a lot. And so we have that tool to be able to really help teams to help foster that communication, where they're able to have hard conversations, they're able to talk through the tough issues. They're able to voice their concerns and really bring diverse issues and perspectives to a conversation. Because when we can do that, we come to the best outcome. And we're able to really grow if we have a team that doesn't communicate, and I'm not comfortable telling you that I disagree. And I'm just going to be okay. Okay, yeah, let's do that. And then we're not going to be going in the best direction. And those different perspectives really help us come to the best conclusion. And we have to have that in communication.
Shandel Sutherland 07:36
Yeah. And that really hits on the cycle of misery, which is kind of just appease the leader, let the leader just say, Yes, ma'am, yes, sir. And go along with it, that never serves an organization well, and it really does lead the misery. And so again, when we keep our values at the center of that, and then we're acting, we're aligning, we're communicating, we're trusting and we're really connecting people back to those values, back to that purpose back to that vision. That's where we're going to just be zooming through this cycle for the next stage of growth. And so some of the tools that we use in this time, you know, we started with our clarity plus report, which is really about emotional intelligence and self awareness and knowing yourself and knowing others and like you said, Melanie, the way that you feel comfortable communicating, is that gonna work for this for this person, for this situation. And that is so key. And we add to that, Patrick Lencioni, the table groups are working in genius, like, oh my gosh, we love using those tools together so much because you have to understand now that I know your communication style. How do you enjoy doing your work or what's going to frustrate you or what are you competent in that you're going to hate after a while if I can really understand that about my team and myself that is going to help many people avoid burnout. And I'm really loving those two things. So one of those things was Scott and I, my husband, is I am total extrovert. He's an introvert Ling. You know that by being like that for like two seconds, right, Melanie?
Shandel Sutherland 10:13
Oh, you don't know is that Scott is actually a mid line in his influencing. So he likes to talk to people. So if you hang out with him, you would think he is actually the most more talkative person. But a lot of that is his wandering from the working genius. He's asking good questions. So for me, I am not going to be in that space, because I'm wanting to share my ideas. So if someone says, oh, I have $100, I have 100 ideas of how they should spend it, you know, now whether they want those ideas or not, I don't know. So just understanding that about myself. If I build these tools, starting with my driving forces, which is my motivator, I understand my Discord, I understand that extraversion, I understand my people orientation, I add on the fact that I have a zillion ideas. And then my Enneagram tells me and all I want to do is help people that is going to clear up a lot of things.
Shandel Sutherland 11:13
It's so important to know what your working genius is coupled with, again, those other scores because like for Scott, he's a wonder person and asking all these questions, maybe an idea person? Well, what we don't have is what our admin Erica has. So she is the tenacity of she is able to get enable us to get stuff done. And Melanie, both you and I hate T, we don't like it. And so we would be frustrated with each other if we didn't know that. And like with Scott, Scott and I are both frustrated by the taste of the frustration works out in relationships like this, I don't like to finish it, it's frustrating for me to have to call on you know, I have to call Epson right now for something and Well, he certainly is doesn't want to do it, you know, that's not his thing. So then I'm frustrated that I have to work in my frustration, and I'm frustrated him that I have to do his frustrations too. And once we figured this out, we hired Erica. Erica, you've just got to help us and she loves it. That's her wheelhouse. But like you said Melanie, before another podcast, we got to teach people in their tone. I wanted to train Erika on my way, which is just do it, try it out, see if it works or not. And that is not the way that she likes to learn. So I had to change my style to get her on board last year. And now I don't even think of I don't even know what she's doing half the time. That is the glorious part. But in the front end, I had to take a little bit more energy. So I could communicate in her style. Now my life is a dream.
Melanie Montgomery 12:52
Yes. And when we can figure out how to better communicate to others and adapt our style, we're able to create the magic, we're able to have good relationships are able to work together really well. But if we don't do that, and a lot of times we don't because we don't know each other style. It's a long process of trial and error to try to figure it out and figuring out what did I do that didn't work? Or what did I do that did work. This really gives us a shortcut to just be able to know, okay, this is what you want and need for me. And here's how I can give it to you.
Shandel Sutherland 13:24
Yeah, and realizing, for me, I have learned not to offer my gifts. You know, I do have an idea for everybody, which kind of comes out like I have an opinion about everything, right. And I have learned that not everyone wants my great ideas for their life. And that's where coaching actually came in. When I became a coach, like coaching school, they said, you know, not everybody is coachable. And you basically need to ask permission before you start coaching people. And I went, Oh, like my whole life started making sense. Because what I realized in this sense, not everybody wants to live by their values. Not everyone wants to purposely connect. And so honestly, our tools don't all work for everybody. Well, that's good to know. So that when we are going for it in life, and we're trying to get people in this purposeful connection, we got to know that they want it.
Melanie Montgomery 14:19
Yeah, exactly. And some people like to process information differently. And so when we're giving them all these ideas, and they're really helpful, that might be overloading to them. And so we have to really figure out like what is helpful because if I go and approach someone with my style, and it's not what they need and want, it's going to lead to frustration, even if they want to hear what I have to say and I want to share if we're not communicating well, no matter what the content is or where we're trying to go. We're still gonna get that conflict.
Shandel Sutherland 14:49
Yeah, so good. And speaking of conflict, that is a big one in this purposely connect stage. We have got to learn conflict resolution skills and how to manage it. You know get in front of it and be able to utilize it. And that is a lot about that developing trust so that when we have conflict, we are managing it. Well. It's a lot about that emotional intelligence that we're working on. So that we have what I call your personal bank with people is full, so that when you do have conflict, you're able to, to have great conversations and know how to go about doing it. So I appreciate that. And this stage, as well as something we're working on.
Melanie Montgomery 15:29
Yeah, I love emotional intelligence. And I love helping people to understand what it actually means that it's a physiological response, that it's how we respond to what our bodies are doing and our brains are doing, we can really start to harness those things to have healthy communication instead of letting our brain take over and have us say things that we're gonna regret later, and not understand why. It's definitely one of my favorite things to teach teams. One thing that I really love about this stage is that we focus a lot on mindset shifts, and understanding how our brains are working and how they're processing information, how maybe we aren't looking at things from all aspects, but we're looking at from our perspective and not asking good questions to figure out what did this person really mean? Or those different type of questions. So here, we lean into our story, really understanding that framework of my brain is going to process information in a story and I'm going to make up a lot of things, then I'm going to believe to be true. And I have to ask questions, and I have to really dig in, because otherwise, I'm going to be interpreting a lot of things wrong. And then I'm going to base my decisions on that story.
Melanie Montgomery 16:40
And my other personal favorite is personal accountability, which really is digging into what can I do differently, and really taking ourselves and holding ourselves accountable to all of the things in our lives and not being complainers and not being frustrated and not trying to blame but really just leaning into what can I do to make a difference. And those mindset shifts are so powerful, because they get us to view the world differently in a way where we can make huge impact. Beautifully said, and we have this great video on our website, which I'll link so that you all can take a look at that and really understand that framework, because it is so powerful. And just that framework can really change people's lives.
Shandel Sutherland 17:22
Yeah, Scott, and I use it all the time to in our marriage, like we're constantly going, or even when we're having conflict with someone like, oh, we go home, I wonder what their story is, what's their story. And even just having that mindset that someone has something different is so powerful. Another thing I love in this stage, is the ideal team player, humble, hungry, honest and smart, and just really thinking about how are we going to hire people align them to our core values. I just think that's key, and then always working on our own personal self deception. I think all leaders need to really work on that area, including me at all times, like where is my mindset? I don't think we got all the tools here. But I hope we whetted everyone's appetite to want to learn more about how to take their team to their next level. Like that's what we're so passionate about.
Melanie Montgomery 18:17
And I think that maybe we can go into another podcast to talk more in depth about some of these tools, because there is a lot to learn from each one. And we definitely don't have time today to dig into all of them. But if you are facing a struggle and you've identified your pain point, let us know and tell us what you're facing. Maybe we can give you some tools that will really help you in that growth.
Shandel Sutherland 18:40
Whoo I love that and maybe that's where we can ask more questions. What did we just touch on listeners that you want to hear more of because we are really passionate about getting you through your own process and getting you to your next level with that I think we just landed the plane before we landed the plane huh. We can be found at Shandelgroup.com and we love you listeners like this is why we do it and we want to know how to help you. So email us, text us, grab us on social media and as always be the best you can be.
