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ken wagner episode: You could take a great performer and put him in a bad system and this system is always gonna win. Is there anything that people kind of misunderstand when they start working with you? Then the third part of the meeting was about safety and nobody wrote anything down. If it's not written down, it's less likely to get done. But it also tells me something about their manager. So joining me today is Ken Wagner, the managing director at Daylight Advisory. Ken, thank you for joining us today. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite. So tell me what kind of got you started? You w were at the hospital and then you transitioned into consulting. so what's the story? Yeah, so well I've been interestingly, I've never had a real job. I've been a consultant since nineteen ninety-two. worked for four consulting companies in that time. and so I've been able to see a lot. I've been able to travel a lot and I've learned a lot. I started my early career working in human services, working with kids and adults with developmental disabilities, children with behavioral challenges at school, parent training and working in a psychiatric hospital and I transition that to to a sole focus on business and working with leaders in all different industries. Hmm. And in in terms of the gap that Nowadays you're solving for leadership teams. Yeah. What do you think is the the biggest struggle when it comes to these leadership teams? Whether it's maybe scattered alignment? Yeah, it's it's a it's a great question and and difficult one to answer. I do a lot of work in high hazard industries and so our focus is often on safety leadership. so helping leaders create a a safe workplace and all the things that go into that. this day and age, most people are working a lot of hours, have a lot of work a big workload. And so part of what we're trying to do is help leaders focus their attention on the things that matter and use their time in the most efficient, most effective way. So we'll organize around whatever the key metrics are, whether it's production or quality or customer service. but a lot of the work is trying to help leaders have have greater influence over others with less effort and less time commitment, essentially. Is there anything that people misunderstand when they start working with you? Yeah, absolutely. I I think it's I I think there's a misunderstanding of people in general and and what drives human behavior. So essentially, you know, why do people do what they do and why do people make the choices they make? The fact is most people come to work with the intention of doing a good job. They're trying to do what's right for the company, what's right for their coworkers, what's right for themselves. and often the workplace itself is a barrier. and so I think the the most common misconception is that there are good people and not good people, or hard workers and not hard workers, or people with with intrinsic motivation and those without
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when in reality it it it has much more to do with the workplace itself and the conditions that we create within that workplace. and so you know you could take a great performer and put them in a bad system and the system is always gonna win. and so we need to create a great system, a great workplace, the right processes, and the right employee experience that'll translate into customer experience. In terms of what you do now, which is intentional leadership. Yes. what would be your advice to people that have never heard about it? Yeah, so so much. So My advice is I first and foremost is you can't do everything. most of the leaders I work with are are very successful. They're hardworking people that have a long history of doing a lot of things. and so you know, the most effective leaders ultimately Pay attention to the things that matter most, the critical few things. They manage at the right level, and they don't do a lot of skip level management and try to affect everybody. and they spend their time on the most effective ways to influence others rather than going around and nagging and reminding and more training. They spend their time on follow up. and follow through and feedback and positive reinforcement. and those things tend to have much more impact when you're trying to influence other people. earlier you you said that you specialize in creating systems in in these companies. So system is a big word and I think a lot of people think of a different kind of view that you have around it. So can you kind of walk me through the first steps when you walk into a like a new organization? How do you go about spotting the patterns because as we were s talking earlier you work with decently sized companies where it must be relatively hard to get a grasp of how the leadership team works and all what are all the structures and so on. So do you go and look at interviews or do you watch meetings? What's kind of your way? Yeah, you've got it. all of that. And so when we talk about systems, we talk about all the things that affect people performance. So all the things that are ha that have influence on on the choices people make. And there's those things at a company level, there's those things at a at a site level, and there's indiv those things at an individual level. So our first step in in every one of our projects. is what we call discovery and diagnostics, where we go on site if possible and we will sit in on meetings, we will shadow leaders as they go about their day, as they make their rounds. We will interview people at every level in different functions. We'll have focus groups at the frontline level as well. We've created our it proprietary culture maturity index that is anchored in behavioral science and that has behavioral anchors at at at a number of different categories. And so we'll use that as as one way to give some objective feedback. And and so we'll compile our observations, we'll we'll make some recommendations during that same visit
based on why we think people are doing what they're doing and where we think the opportunities are. And then the next step we'll design a a a leadership alignment roadmap where we're gonna identify the critical few things we need people to do at every level to affect. key metrics for the organization and that'll be the a guiding framework for the work that we're gonna do for the next nine to twelve months. I think everyone usually has a idea of what's kind of the the bottleneck or what's holding them back. But have you find out that a lot of the times the the things that they mention early on are completely different to reality and what you then observe? Maybe not completely different, but certainly there's there's different factors that people don't recognize. can I share an example? I I was conducting a a discovery process in a in a manufacturing plant. and our focus was safety leadership. Right. And so the idea was that everybody in the company is committed to safety, but performance was not very good. And so I was sitting in on a pre shift meeting run by a manager and three supervisors. And I I'm watching the meeting. And the first part of the meeting, they talked about production. And what I noticed is the supervisors wrote down a whole bunch of things to do. And then the second part of the meeting was about quality, and the supervisors wrote down a few things. And then the third part of the meeting was about safety, and nobody wrote anything down. And if you've worked in a manufacturing plant, that a supervisor's job is like working in a pinball machine. I wrote an article calling it a pinball machine a a few years ago because they bounce around from solving problems all day long. And so what it tells me is once they walk out of that room, if it's not written down, it's less likely to get done. That's the first thing. But it also tells me something about their manager. So when their manager goes out later in the afternoon and makes rounds and checks in with people, what is he likely to ask about? Given that example, put you on the spot. What would you do? Or what what have you done? Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And he's gonna ask questions about Production. That's what he's gonna ask about first. He's gonna ask about quality second, and he's gonna ask about safety if he has time. And I know that based on their behavior, meaning what's important to my boss is important to me. And if their boss was asking about it, it would be one of the first things that they did. So part of my discovery is to go out with that manager later in the afternoon. and watch what he asks about, what he pays attention to, what he's interested in. So the change in that situation are not dramatic, small changes that will make a big impact. Supervisors need to can write down a couple key things that they do that makes it a safer workplace every day. And our manager has to make sure that that is in the forefront of their conversation. That he shows that it's important. And if we do that, you'll get much more engagement in in the safety processes. Does that make sense? Okay. It does. So you find opportunities and ways to improve the system. Now let me ask you this. How do you make sure that these people actually follow the rules? As you were saying, they they have some kind of behavioral pattern that they're following that rewards them as of now. How do you reprogram that to the new Yeah that's i i again that you're getting at the heart of of behavior change. You don't change behavior through training. you change behavior through repetition and of application. So in our work we'll do some training often But the majority of our work is in coaching. We'll come back to every site and work with the leaders that go through our training and we'll do that usually a couple weeks after the workshop and then a few weeks after that and then every month for a period of of nine or or twelve months and we'll work with individual leaders on what they're trying to do and how they're trying to influence others. We'll work with individual teams, especially the leadership team, on how they're working together and how they're leading. and so that is the majority of our work is in on site one on one or small group coaching where we're helping people apply the technology that we teach. With some of our clients that are working remotely now, we're doing that through webinars and we're doing that through remote coaching and just as we're doing now through Teams and Zoom. And so we're doing more and more of that. so not necessarily having to travel and be on site, but absolutely having to sit in on meetings and to troubleshoot with individual leaders. and helping them resolve issues of their current situation. As you are working across the whole world, so specs a vast spectrum of different cultures, I wonder how does that impact the leadership teams and the way that they that they operate and work? Have you found out that, for example, a company from America is operating differently and has, you know, different cultural standards? than a company from Germany as you were saying it earlier to me. W without a doubt. So n not only do are there cultural differences from society, there's cultural differences based on industry. There's also cultural differences based on sites within industry. And that is really the reason we do the discovery in the beginning. I am always weary of An off-the-shelf solution, a one size fits all, especially for multinational organizations, a company that rolls out a program that just sort of is the same everywhere. Our work is not about a program. We're teaching core skills that people are going to use in this job and their next job and their next job and in their home life. And so what I would suggest is that. While the destination is similar for many of the organizations we work with, the path to get there is different. There's different maturity levels in different parts of the world. There's
different maturity levels in different industries. And so we take people where they are and we help them move forward. We we move forward in small steps, helping them be successful. And figuring out what the next steps are as we go. And that looks different again, not only in in different parts of the world, but in different sites in the same parts of the world. And certainly across industries, there's there's differences we see as well. One of the kind of things that I'm still wondering about is what could we give to our listeners that would be practical and implementable as advice that they can use today? Because I I always like to make these episodes practical. So if you could kind of boil down the intentional leadership and behavior of science piece together, what would be your you know few pieces of advice that you could share? I I think I would share a few things. The first i is to look at every position in an organization and think about what are the most important things for somebody to do in that position? Independent of the per particular person in that role, what are the most important things to do in that position? And that's what we want to focus on is the critical few things that matter most. Th the the other couple things that I that I want leaders to think about is spend more time following up with people and more time providing feedback and positive reinforcement and less time telling and lecturing and reminding and arm twisting and explaining. So ask people to do something, follow up. And then the third thing I would I would suggest is one of the things that sets apart great coaches from those who want to be great is their ratio of questions to statements. So the most effective coaches, most effective leaders, ask a lot of questions. And so in that follow up process, I'm suggesting that we're asking people when you try the behaviors that I've asked you to do. How did they work? What what happened? What impact or benefits did you see? And so the more we can ask questions that help people describe their experience, the more likely we are to get people to repeat the things that matter when we're not there. So focus on the critical few things that matter most. Spend more time on follow up and spend a chunk of that follow up asking good questions about people's experience. Do those three things. you'll have a dramatic impact on the people that you're responsible for. Ken, if people would like to reach out and get in touch, what's kind of the the best place for people to follow you? Absolutely. So a couple places on our website, daylightadvisory dot com. there's an inquiry. You can send me a message through that and it'll come come to me and our team. We also have a LinkedIn page, so Daylight Advisory. I have a personal LinkedIn page, Ken Wagner. I think it's Ken Wagner DA, Daylight Advisory. But the easiest thing is to search for Daylight Advisory on LinkedIn or on the internet and send us a message. We'd love to hear from you. Love to bounce ideas around. And we have a phenomenal team that loves to travel and has experience all over the world and in all different industries. Amazing. So links are down below. You heard it guys. Ken, thank you for coming on. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.