How to Get Buy In with Jeffrey Deckman

Leadfoot This is George G. And the time is right welcome today’s guest strong and powerful. Jeffrey Dettman. Jeffrey, are you ready to do this? I am. Alright, let’s go. Jeffrey is a consultant. He is a speaker strategist. He’s an award winning author conscious leadership and mindsets. He’s working to accelerate positive transformation of leadership teams. Jeffrey, I’m excited to have you on tell us a little about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do.

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Well, I’m newly married.

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I got married in February to the woman that I guess the the best was saved for last. So yeah, I’m sick. I just turned 66 on Sunday. And man, I met the woman of my dreams. And life is great. So I’m a father and my grandfather, I live in Nashville, I moved here in in January. And what I do for a living is my, my real passion is I love to work with small to medium sized entrepreneurs, early stage middle stage, just really anybody that’s either looking to start building their dream or building their dream a bit bigger. I’ve had a lot of experience in that space, I bootstrapped two companies, the first one got up to four and a half million dollars in seven years and crashed an hour I was 30 years old, with a wife and a daughter and a son on the way in a new house. And my company went under and I stood there at an auction now auction my car, their auctions, buy furniture in my office, and I didn’t have personal bankruptcy, but so on so that I had a decision, you know, get a job. And I was well known in my industry, I could have done that or start a new company and I just had this, or this sense that I wasn’t done yet. It didn’t make any sense to my mind. But in my heart, I was just like, I’m not done yet. And it came down to, I couldn’t figure out which which way to go. And I realized, you know, if I got a job, I’ll never start another business, because I’ll look for the security of the family and the college,

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and all that type of stuff. And then, but I thought, you know, if I start a company, if that fails, I can always get the job. It’s gonna hurt if I lose another one. And I had $17,000 I had tucked away. So I decided to roll the dice and bet on myself again. And it was the best decision I ever made. I might put that company that almost one under about three or four times in the first nine years. But I ended up getting that up and going. We’re in the technology space. And I sold it a week before its 21st birthday to my management team. And just last week, I went back to Rhode Island, which is where I built that and I went back and I visited all my, my, my my ex partners, and the company is still doing well. Everybody’s doing great. And I really proud that what I did, has been in business since 1987. So but just about 34 years. And

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you know, entrepreneurship matters. Not only does it give me the freedom to determine how I spend my time, but there are a lot of people who started careers, they’re built careers, bought homes, got married, raise kids bought cars, all because we created that entity, we created that company and retreated. Well, we had a good culture, and that company has served scores of people. And and it’s, yeah, it was really cool. So 17 years ago, I decided to leave that company. I built it to the degree I thought I could. And I really wanted to go out and start serving other people who are going through my journey and help them to get through it easier than I did maybe a little bit quicker than I did with a lot less stress, anxiety and uncertainty. So

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I admire entrepreneurs, I love their spirit. And we don’t get nearly enough support. You know, there are those who go out and get 520 $5 million to start a company and they’re fine. That’s just not my space.

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So that’s what I do. And that’s why I do it. I coach I consult I roll up my sleeves and help people figure out what’s going on in organization. And I teach what I know. I’m not the type of consultant where I see the issue go away write a report and give it to you and hope you do well. That is so boring to me. I love to build things and I love to work with people who are exciting, committed folks. So that’s what I’ve been doing for 17 years and it’s

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best decision I ever made. I’m so glad I didn’t take that job back in 1987. No kidding, right?

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I think that that’s awesome. And congratulations on, on lots of change on moving to Nashville on on getting married and certainly turning in a year older is is is is an accomplishment in and of itself. How do you think about about change and uncertainty today? Do you? Do you have anxiety and fear still? Or have you conquered that? Is that possible?

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You know, I think anybody who says they’ve conquered fear, all they’ve done is they’ve numbed themselves, they’ve killed off a part of themselves. So I’m not interested in conquering fear, I’m interested in domesticating it and getting it to work for me. And, you know, I don’t want fear is like a big plow horse, you know, I mean, it can just take off and tear up your fields. But if you if you learn how to deal with it, it’ll plow your fields. And so no, I still get fear. And I get uncertainty, and I get, you know, really in in some challenging spaces. But, you know, we were talking a little bit offline. And I said that, you know, to me, entrepreneurialism is one of the greatest spiritual journeys one can ever take, because of the, it’s a journey of self awareness, challenge, and accomplishment. So

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what I do is I, I really focus on helping people to, I’ve got a process I work with, and it’s a process that helps people go through transformation. And organizations right now, because of all the changes that are happening. We can’t just go in and tweak around the edges of our organizations, we were, we’re in a post industrial age, command and control top down leadership models, and mindsets and methods just don’t work anymore. So for the last 17 years, three of which I was in a think tank partner in a think tank, I’ve been looking at what are the new models that we need to employ and deploy, so that we can shift from that command and control over to this new way, what is the new way, and what is a new way that will allow you to loosen up without losing accountability. So my process when when I look at transformation, there’s three things that are required to to achieve transformation, a new mindset, a new, in other words, you know, a new way of seeing yourself in the world and new things that you want to accomplish.

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new models, which are new ways of processes you put in place that reflect the mindset, and then new methods. And these are things that you do on a day to day basis that work within the new model and manifest the mindset.

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To me change is not enough today, because change to me is making adjustments to an existing model. And because we’re in this new information age, which is so vastly different than the industrial age, everything is networked. Hardly anything is siloed.

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The level of consciousness of the worker and the individual themselves is much higher than it used to be people don’t want to be told what to do without having some input that really shatters your old leadership, mindset and models. So we have to come up with leadership models that focus on communication, collaboration and facilitation. That’s the new mindset of the of the modern leader. And we need to view our organizations not as org charts, or charts are okay, but that’s just like a skin on an organization. Organizations are a tribe of tribes. Human beings are tribes. From the time we’ve been able to stand up, right, we have formed tribes, and those tribes use communication, collaboration and cooperation in order to evolve and look at what we’ve evolved to over 50,000 years. So what’s happened is the old mechanized the Industrial Age way of thinking about organization and made everything a machine, if you look at an org chart looks like Henry Ford’s assembly line. And people are in silos, but that’s not how people naturally communicate. So the most important thing we have in our industry in our businesses today is not financial capital. It’s our human capital.

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If you human capital, money doesn’t make money. People do. Money doesn’t lose money people do. So what I learned is because I’ve never had enough financial capital to fund what I wanted to do, but I always had human capital around me and I really learned to maximize that because if you if you do a good job with maximizing your human capital, and you know what you’re doing for a living to financial capital is going to show up.

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Financial capital is a lagging indicator of human capital. So all

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The work that I do is designed to help people to get out of that org chart top down and command and control, which only gives people there’s only three out of every 10 people in organizations that are engaged in the work. That’s a Gallup study every year, it shows the same stats. That’s ridiculous. You know, imagine a baseball manager that could only get three people out on the field, lose every game, you need to get fired. But it’s been like that for so long that we accept it, we think it’s good numbers, if we can get four to play. Well, those numbers are so low, because that model doesn’t work. It’s an unnatural model. So what I do is I teach people how to view their organizations as tribes, how to understand tribal dynamics, build turn teams and knowledge networks, and have healthy cultures that everybody can come in and work with. And this not the Google culture of, you know, Pinball players and rec rooms, necessarily, and everybody hugging each other. You know, I mean, this is about a healthy culture that fits within the organization itself, and whatever feels right for them, and love it.

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And I, I think I remember the first time I read about that statistic about how too few, so few of us are engaged and many are disengaged in our work. And this idea that three out of 10 are engaged is pretty preposterous and, and awful.

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In an ideal world, we would start a company using these principles, the been talking about a mindset, new models and new methods. But that’s tricky. And then it’s hard to steer a battleship, I can’t all of a sudden go into Ford Motor Company, and do this easily. What what is that sweet spot? Where where is it? When is it?

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You know, you can do it, you can do it at any? I’ve found you can do it at any stage.

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The question is how far on this edge of the command and control lockdown scale are you because here you have anarchy. And here you have a dictatorship, right? And we’re looking for that we’re looking for that spot where people are empowered. You know, what made this country great as it created a culture and a constitution that empowered people, and boom, look, look what happened right and 300 years, we we covered more ground and we didn’t 50,000 years before.

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So that’s you take those same principles, and you put them into into a country and you have to accompany. So what that means is you have to empower people, you have to create leadership structures that support that, but you also have to have accountability. A culture without consequences is chaos, is absolutely chaos. So, you know, some people are not wanting to have any consequences, because of everything’s getting so woke in the world. And, you know, everybody needs to go on their same journey, but that journey is going to take you off a cliff, it’s not going to help you build your business. So and people want structure, and they want rule of law, so to speak within organizations, because you get some bad players and people are having bad days, and they create a toxic environment. And the good people really want to do good work. So it’s up to us to make sure that we keep that clean. And honestly consequences is punishments, I see them as is lessons. And their lessons at the individual needs to learn so they can keep getting a paycheck.

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And we can you know, they can become a contributing part of our organization. Because one of the other statistics that Gallup shows is even though 70% are not engaged 70% want to be engaged.

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And when I saw that, I was like, well, so what’s the problem 100% management once I’m engaged, 70% of the people want to be engaged, and we only have 30% that are engaged. So that tells me the model is wrong. It’s unnatural. And history tells me the model is wrong. So that’s what I’ve done over the last 17 years is really researched, innovated, and

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have been practicing this new model that I found incredibly effective. In fact, I’m right in the middle of doing a 12 week certification program. And I call it the M three process for Leadership and Organizational Transformation. And what we do is we take people through 12 weeks and they learn

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the new leadership mindset. We spend 12 weeks on that and we spend three weeks around new organizational designs and development that you can tweak, you can merge over into um, you don’t have to throw everything out and because you know we have these people have to redesign a plane while it’s in flight.

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So we have to make these these changes within the structure they’re in and so it takes some time it takes commitment, but you’d be surprised I’ve been surprised how much progress we can make in two to three months. Literally.

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I work with companies all

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all the time. And this process works. In fact, I won the bronze medal of Innovator of the Year from the International Business Awards around this particular model. So it’s gotten third party validation. And plus, I’ve been in it working. And it’s really amazing. I’m in a couple of companies right now. And I love seeing and they love having an app and the whole organization starts to shift. Yeah, I think that’s really exciting.

Unknown Speaker 15:28
I, you said a lot of things that I think are really important. Probably the number one is that you got 70% of people who are not engaged. But most of those people want to be engaged, we want to do good work, we want to feel like we’re a part of something and doing something that’s important, I don’t want to just zone out at my cubicle.

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And I was curious about how long this process will take because we have finite resources of time, attention and money. So two to three months to, to have an impact and to move some of those 70% to from disengaged to engaged. That’s that’s a worthwhile investment. Well, yeah, and you know, what happens is people are sitting there, and they might be kind of in that E or a space, you know, they show up, and here we go are grinding, but if you can get the management team to really embrace this thinking, which, as long as they’re not like total control freaks.

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You know, because management’s exhausted by this too, because they have to do all the thinking they have to do all the work. They’re wrestling with the people instead of you know, having people work with them, because they make their decisions. And then they tell the people and people are like, what, now what am I changing. So I tell people, you have to get by, I tell leaders, if you have to get buy in from your team, you brought them into the discussion too late.

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Like bring people in, if you’re gonna do something that affects their job, bring them into it, and say, hey, look, this is what I’m thinking about this is why and engage them in a conversation because they’re absolutely going to have things they can contribute. And you will get co designers and a shift will happen more quickly. Because otherwise you spend a month planning, you spend a month telling them and you spend a month wrestling with them trying to get them to do what’s in their best interests in your mind. And you could collapse that literally, at least in half, by bringing them in. And then on the other side, if they helped build it, they’re going to look to protect it. So management becomes easier.

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And it amazes me how well this stuff works. Because it’s just natural to us.

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We want to do good work, we want to be good environments, we want to be competitive, we want to feel successful.

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So let’s take advantage of that and just build some systems and models that take advantage of that engine, it’s sitting there just wanting to to blow out of the driveway. So that’s what I do. And it works. And it’s a lot of fun. People like it right off the bat. And then he started cooperating. But the thing is, if you’re going to go in that direction, you have to commit

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because their view, get them all excited. And then you decide you want to go back to command and control, you will have made things worse because you gave them hope and took it away. And now they’re going to resent you. So but if you want it you can do it. And it takes a while some people get on early, some people get on late, some people don’t get on. So they move up or move. You know, they get to work for somebody else. I love it. I love it. Jeffrey, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage? How can they take advantage of, of of this process? Well, I’ve got a ton of information on my website. I like to I’ve done a lot of blogs, blog articles, white papers, I have a lot of videos on a YouTube channel, you can access from my website, which is at Jeffrey dettman.com.

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And you can email me Jeffrey, Jeffrey duchman.com and SJ EFFREY. I like to teach as much as I can. So I’ve written a lot. And if you want to go in and really get a sense for what this model looks like, and its new way of thinking, there’s a lot of information my website, it’s all free, just go in and take it. And if you want to know more about this class, I’ll be doing another one probably starting at the end of February. We keep it limited eight to 10 people because I want to tutor as I go through, but it’s a it’s really powerful. And it’ll it’ll take years off your transformation journey.

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If you enjoyed as much as I did so Jeff for your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to Jeffrey dettman.com. It’s je FF R EY the EC que ma n.com and check out all the great resources, read some of the blogs and white papers check out his YouTube channel and shoot him an email at Jeffrey at Jeffrey dettman.com. Thanks good Jeffrey. All right. Thank you. And until next time, remember

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or do your part by doing your best