Driving Innovation in Customer Success with the 70-20-10 Methodology

What is the 70-20-10 framework and how can business executives leverage it for organizational growth and optimization? Tomer Laks, CEO & Founder of Kapability Group, offers a roadmap for profound organizational transformation in this episode!

Key Highlights:

🔸 Explore how the 70-20-10 framework enhances change management, communication, transparency, and innovation within organizations.

🔸 Discover real-world applications and success stories from industry giants like IBM, Netflix, Google, and Coca-Cola.

🔸 Gain insights into the five critical stages of idea development, from inception to full implementation, fostering continuous improvement.

🔸 Learn practical methods for executives to assess and leverage the potential of this framework within their departments for optimal results.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Tomer Laks is the CEO and Founder of Kapability Group, known for his extensive international experience in leading business operations across multiple sectors. His career includes executive roles at prominent companies globally and a focus on strategic growth and optimization. Laks is recognized for fostering a collaborative corporate culture and achieving exceptional business outcomes.

🔗 Connect with Tomer via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomer-laks-19bb141/

Watch on YouTube!

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Additional Resources:

📑 Read: CS KPIs Every High Touch Saas Company Should Track
https://www.csmpractice.com/4-customer-success-kpis-every-high-touch-saas-company-should-track/

🎥 Watch: Customer Success KPIs That Matter Most
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Y1yjBryiA&list=PLczwK1eIN4nAwMfXlehUwEJmEzs5GG3OZ&index=8

🎥 Watch: Qualities of a Customer Success Leader
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5iSmKEKDbc

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Transcript

00:01 Hey everyone, every e-sips here for CSM practice on today's podcast. I have a special guest, his name is Tomor Lax.
00:10 He has so many experience working with companies, either on mergers and acquisitions, on scaling their operations, optimizing their strategy. And over his vast career, I wish I'm going to unfold for you, because it's pretty amazing.
00:26 He actually developed a framework for any executive that is listening to this podcast. If you follow that strategy, if you follow that framework, you will not only get consistent optimization of your processes, which is what we all tend to fall into, but also create moments in a more consistent manner
00:44 that completely innovate your company drastically, transformationally. And so with that, Tomor, thank you so much for coming to the show today.
00:55 I'd like to introduce everyone to you, and maybe you can share a little bit about today, you're a management consultant.
01:01 You have your own company, capability group. Can you tell us a little bit about your career path? How did you become a strategy management consultant and an expert in this field?
01:13 Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, first of all, for having me. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure. I took kind of a bit of the unbeaten path to get to where I did in my career, started off as an attorney in the States and Chicago, mostly focusing on corporate restructuring in M&A, went into a bit of the family
01:28 office business for a while in terms of investment management, and then spent the majority of my career working with corporations around the world, and helping them build their organization for the future.
01:39 Specifically, how do they prepare their company for a future exit? An exit could be any variety of things. It could be an IPO.
01:46 It could be an acquisition by third party. It could be actually an ESOP, an employee stock option plan, where we prepare the organization to transfer either to the next generation or to the existing employee management team.
01:59 So there's various ways to do that, and then over the years, what I've been able to do is to help companies grow through those different cycles.
02:06 How do we take an organization where they are today and their current life cycle and then help them build a springboard into the next level?
02:12 They is to do that in a very scale, but optimized way. So the growth is through scaling, but it has to be optimized.
02:20 That led me to many years in consulting, also here in Israel, with KPMG for a few years, transitioned into the high tech world.
02:27 I had the pleasure and the great opportunity to work with some of the greatest SaaS companies that were coming out of Israel in the last years, like similar web and clicktail and Glassbox Digital.
02:37 And then that led me to an amazing opportunity to become the VP of capability building for Phil Morris International in Switzerland, where I had the great pleasure to work with an amazing team to build the new transformation of Phil Morris to create a smoke free world.
02:52 Amazing. So so much experience in working with different companies through these transformational changes led you to actually create a strategic framework for our executives in companies that want to make sure that these transformational changes are done in a more consistent manner.
03:11 What is the magic formula, Tomara? One of the things that I found is that change is difficult and change management in organizations is even more difficult.
03:21 And depending on your size, that difficulty becomes even more entrenched depending on the complexities. And over the years, a lot of the consulting work and a lot of the work that I do with companies highlighted that factor.
03:31 And what happened was that I was trying to find a way to create a structure where the change management is done in such a way that it has real buy-in.
03:41 Because one of the real problems with change management is that we don't get the buy-in from the grassroots. And that's critical because at the end of the day, management only has a certain level of visibility.
03:51 And I like to kin that to a basketball. So if you think of a basketball cone, they're standing at the sidelines.
03:56 Their point of view of what is going on in the game is very specific to what they can see. And if they don't communicate with the players on the floor, with their assistant coaches that have their point of view, they might miss a lot of what they need to know.
04:11 The center might be under the boards fighting for the rebound. He's getting elbowed and the referee's not seeing it and he's not communicating that back to the coach.
04:18 The coach can't then voice that to the referee. Oh, keep an eye. My guy's getting beat up under the basket, so you gotta help him out here.
04:24 Same thing with an organization. If we don't have that communication, how do we create that type of structure? So over the years, I've been trying and testing different methodologies, which led me ultimately to find the 70, 20, 10 methodology, which originated in the learning and development work, where
04:39 the idea there was how do we improve learning for people on the job? And the idea there was that we should spend 70% of our time on the job training, coding our skills as we're doing them.
04:51 20% should be social type of learn, and then 10% more of the formalistic type of training, where over the years, that developed also into different methodologies with innovation, like Google taking that and turning into management innovation formulas, saying we're going to spend 70% of our time on core
05:10 capability innovation. What is it that we do today that we can improve? And then they spent 20% of their time on what they called adjacent innovation.
05:19 How do we make that 70% a little bit better? And then ultimately 10% they've focused on transformative innovation. What's going to break the market?
05:27 How can we revolutionize what it is that we do? How can we take what we do today in that 70% and just completely blow it up and break it apart?
05:36 And so that was the evolution of the 70, 20, 10. And as I was getting introduced it over the years and learning how it worked, it dawned on me that I can actually take elements of that and start turning it into an actual management methodology that can help companies, whether it's on a department level
05:53 , whether it's on a corporate level, at any different size, you can scale this up or down, and it started testing this different theory.
06:00 So that's how we got to where we are today, after many, many different tries and different organizations. Here, little pieces there, AB testing a lot, and then ultimately starting to implement that across the board in different organizations and seeing what works and what doesn't and then refining that
06:14 over time. What type of companies have actually known to implement this strategy of this 70, 20, 10. So there are many companies over time that have implemented the 70, 20, 10 innovation manager methodology.
06:27 Do you think of companies like IBM and Netflix and Google and Coca-Cola, for example, Lego is another one that is a key one that I'm sure most of our audience would be familiar with.
06:37 What we've seen is that companies that implement this innovation methodology over the years are five times more likely to attract talent because the talent gets a voice and when talent gets a voice, your company flies.
06:50 We've seen that companies are four times more likely to respond to business change faster when they're agile, when they use this type of innovation methodology.
07:01 So these types of facts and this type of evidentiary prove to me that this innovation management works and so why not take it and then transform it to its next logical step, which is how do we then manage teams on a weekly basis on a daily basis and turn this into a real formula and a framework that
07:20 can actually work. Okay so 70% core initiatives, 20% adjacent initiatives and 10% on transformational projects. Correct. Famine executive, let's say customer success executive.
07:36 How do I take this framework and actually implement it within my department? So there's a couple of things I would suggest that you do kind of write off a bet that are simple to do in terms of implementing the 70-2010.
07:50 So first of all, it's a time management tool. It works on a weekly basis. Part of the envy testing of trying this out, you want to look at it on a weekly basis.
07:57 So the 70-2010 means that you should split your week from a time element into 70-20 and 10, meaning 70 percent of your time you should focus on those core activities, your core business activities.
08:12 You sign the capital on that core activity that's going to deliver against your state of targets and your goals, what you want to do.
08:19 20% of your time of that week should be working on creating or working through new initiatives that are designed to grow and optimize core business activities that's 70 percent.
08:33 For example, like in customer success, we do our initial handover discovery conversation in a certain format. Look at that format, look at that process.
08:44 It's been 20% of your week on that particular item and see how you can improve that process. What are you doing?
08:51 Well, what aren't you doing? Well, as I'm sure most of our listeners are doing as organizations in the customer success world is that they've designed their customer journey because once you've designed your customer journey and if you indicated your specific APIs for every milestone, then you can hone
09:07 in them those milestones on those KPIs and choose which wants to prioritize in your 20% work in terms of improvement.
09:16 Then at the end, you should spend 10% of your work week on transformational projects. I'll tell you what I do.
09:22 I actually have a note in my notebook is actually split into 70-20-10. When I rhyme into some transformational ideas throughout the week, like I'll have a conversation with you, read, make me think of something.
09:33 I'll scratch it down real quick in my 10% section. Then for me, I've carved out over the years Friday warnings as my 10% time.
09:43 Then I spend about 3-4 hours opening up that notebook and looking at all the ideas that I wrote down throughout the week for that 10% a lot of them are garbage.
09:52 They're great ideas when I wrote them down and they end up in the garbage bin. One or two ideas are great.
09:57 Then I spent some time researching them. As you do this week after week, you start to develop obviously an arsenal.
10:03 Of ideas. You start to develop research those further. As part of this methodology, I've actually also designed a framework in the back end of how you can actually take your ideation and bring it to fruition.
10:15 Then through a five-stage approach, you get it implemented in your organization. The entire idea is to say, how do we take the idea from a cooler, from the water cooler discussion, from a coffee break discussion, and implement it in the organization?
10:30 That is where that trick lies. How do you build that process to do that? The 70-20-10 allows you to do that.
10:37 Why? Because when you combine it with the idea that you should be spending your time 20% on doing your 70% core better and 10% on transformational stuff, that allows you to think about innovation.
10:50 One easy trick to do is you actually require every single employee in the organization to present at least one innovative idea per quarter in the 20 or the 10% realm.
11:04 If you have an organization with, let's say, 100 people, that means that you have 400 ideas a year that are supposed to either create new growth engines on the one hand or supposed to help optimize the organization or do both, depending on the idea, new process, a new market, a new service, a new product
11:23 , anything that comes. At the end of the day, who are the most apt people to do the people in your organization at the grassroots, the ones that are actually feeling what I call the grit, the grit in the grind.
11:34 Your customer success people that are in the front lines every day dealing with clients, they know what they need to get it done to bring that top best-than-class service.
11:44 And so if we don't listen to those folks, we're missing the boat. Once you've built that operation, you build that process using the 70-20-10 approach, you start with the weekly timeline.
11:55 And then what happens is, let's say I have a great idea that I want to present to you. I sit with my manager, you eat, and I say, listen, I have a great idea.
12:04 I've filed it through. There's a process that we can talk about of how to do that. And then I present to you.
12:11 And the nice thing about this is that this then becomes a pod approach. With our manager, if we decide that this is the right idea, we turn this into a pod project.
12:22 Meaning that as the originator of this idea, and with my boss, I'm going to bring all the necessary people around the table to bring this idea to fruition.
12:33 Because I need their input. We need to work as a team. So we create a pod that is supposed to own this project beginning to end.
12:43 And so we turn the organization also from a structural standpoint into a pod-operated organization, where we match up the originator of these 20% or the 10% idea, with the right people in the organization to bring that idea to fruition.
12:58 So I can give you an example. If let's say you're doing customer success, the old-fashioned, you're still calling clients up, you're traveling to the clients, but you're finding that it's not going to work for you if you need to scale up.
13:11 And you come up with a brand new idea of how this should be done. How are you going to implement that in your organization?
13:18 If you're a customer success manager, or you're a customer success executive, that is in the organization, but doesn't feel like their voice would be heard if they brought this idea.
13:28 Well, if you build that process correctly, everybody's idea end up floating up. And what happens is that you end up using the best ones.
13:35 I think that's structuring environment to do so is important from an executive standpoint. And I think in the past, you talked about the importance of empowering people to have the structuring place to feel comfortable raising these ideas and then building the structure so that they can follow through
13:52 with them. And some of these elements is, first of all, from a management standpoint, we need to create clear expectations that this is encouraged, maybe provide some recognitions and rewards.
14:04 What are some of the other things that you recommend, including as part of the culture of the organization, to facilitate this?
14:11 I totally agree with you. I think incentivizing that the employees to be as open and transparent is much more than just a cliche or an empty statement.
14:21 I think at the end of the day, where you see a lot of the disconnect between management and staff is in that transparency.
14:29 I can't tell you the number of projects that I've been on that. One of the first things that I hear from staff is they don't listen to us.
14:37 There's a disconnect. We don't understand where this is going. There's a lack of transparency. And especially in customer success, it's such a sensitive area because not everybody is bonding into the cooling that I think both you and I have drunk, which is everybody in the organization, no matter what
14:53 your position and what your role is doing customer success. We're all responsible for it. From the CEO all the way down, everybody in the organization has an ownership stake in customer success because at the end of the day, customer is the one that pays for salaries, helps her grow, and so on and so
15:10 forth. So once we change that mindset and we understand that we're all there to serve the client, we have to ask ourselves, okay, what is that value that we bring?
15:20 How can we reinforce that? And the people closest to realization of that value are ultimately your customer success people because they're the ones, as I said before, with the grit, they're the ones that are engaged on a daily basis with the client, and they know what will work and what won't work over
15:36 time. And so we need to listen to them more. This type of framework that I've designed over the years, what it does is it allows it that to become a structural approach, which is addressed every single day, every single week.
15:49 And not to say that things don't fall between the chairs obviously, they do. It does just normal, but what it does is it allows a much more transparent organization and much more clarity into where we want to go because at the end of the day, what you do is you find very quickly where the disconnect
16:05 is based on the innovative ideas that your staff is bringing because if they're completely missing the mark, it means that they're disconnected with the strategy of the organization.
16:15 They don't have clarity into where the leadership is trying to take the organization. Once we have complete transparency and understanding where leadership wants to go, everybody can then help optimize the organization and create growth engines leading toward that.
16:34 But if there's no transparency there, the organization can't help itself. And so these types of conversations are critical. So if I'm an executive and I have implemented this framework successfully, what kind of quantitative key performance indicator can I provide myself to keep gauge and see is this
16:52 working? So there's a couple things that you want to look at from the very obvious, very simple one, which is a quantitative basis.
16:59 How many people do I have? How many new optimization and growth innovation ideas have we generated this for? As I said, I like to create at least one quarter per employee that doesn't mean that that idea actually ends up getting implemented.
17:13 All it means is that the idea needs to be generated, needs to be presented to that employee's supervisor. And then they have that original exploration discussion to decide whether or not to take it to the next step.
17:27 Now, within my methodology and project-based methodologies that are similar, we use a gate staging approach, which is there's five gates that you need to pass through with that pod that I mentioned in order to have the sign-off to implement the new process and the new product.
17:44 And so you can utilize this for any number of things. One of the interesting ways, one of the things that I would recommend an executive to do is actually to build the pod system not only for your 20% projects and your 10% projects, but in certain cases for your 70%.
18:02 And what I call those are, I call them core pods where you take your sales executive and you take your customer success executive and those individuals form a pod to service the account.
18:16 So depending on your company, whether your SaaS organization, your manufacturer, and depending on various things, that pod would be structured differently.
18:23 But if we take, for example, like a SaaS company, then that pod in the sales structure, in the sales journey would actually help the sales executive, the account executive, through that sales strategy, through that sales journey.
18:38 Meaning that let's say that we decide that the right timing in the sales journey is post-discovered. To form that pod, that AE comes back and says, okay, now I've collected all the data that I need and these are the individuals that I need to help me bring this deal over the line, my customer success
18:57 person, my product person, maybe my R&D person, if I need integration or whatever it might be. And so you form this pod, do a good 15-minute meeting saying, this is the prospect, this is what I may need from you individuals through my sales journey coming up.
19:14 I need your help, customer success individual, to join me on a call to explain the day after and how we will be dealing with the account.
19:20 Product I need you to come into this conversation to help me explain our future roadmap as an example. And so this pod gets formulated at a very specific point in time with an entrepreneur.
19:32 That entrepreneur in the beginning is the AE. And then once that deal is closed, that gets handed over to the CS, and the CS then becomes the entrepreneur.
19:41 And then they own that relationship and they bring in the right people. So you formed the pod just to clarify the success indicators to see how many ideas you're actually getting per quarter or per year versus how many were actually implemented.
19:54 But in order to increase the number of ideas that are implemented or are being weighed in, because I think the last thing we want is to have people ideate and then not taking the next step.
20:05 So maybe you can walk us through. You said there's five gates that any idea that is brought up by anybody in the organization, whether they're CSMs, team leaders, executives have to go through as they go from ideation to actually being implemented.
20:23 Imagine that again that I've come up with an idea for a new process. Our new way of working should be XYZ.
20:28 Then I would sit with you as my supervisor and I would say, listen, we've been doing it this way forever, and I think there's a better way to do it.
20:35 Here's what I suggest. And you would say, that's actually an interesting idea, but we need to get input from everybody else.
20:42 So we formulate the pod, we bring everybody that we need to the table. So gate number one is actually what we call the exploration gate, where I as the originator of the idea would sit with the pod after I presented it to you already.
20:54 And I would present the idea to them. Now I'm a very big stickler to the two page approach, which is the Amazon idea of two pages, no PowerPoint.
21:02 So I'm not a big fan of two PowerPoints. If you can't present an idea in five paragraphs on two pages, you're probably missing the point.
21:08 So you want to make it succinct and clear. And so then I would present during that first stage, I would identify what the problem is that I'm trying to solve.
21:17 I would present what customer insights I brought to reinforce my argument why I think we need to do this new process.
21:25 Now, customer could be any number of things. It could be external customers, but it could be internal customer could be the sales team could be the CS themselves could be product.
21:33 Customer is a very broad term that you need to apply to the solution that you're trying to write. And then also what I would do at that first stage is I would identify the initial jobs that need to be done by the individuals around the table.
21:45 And at that discussion, we as a pod would say, this is a great idea. We can bring our resources from our teams.
21:51 This is how we can do it. Can we move forward? Yes. Great. No. We need to do more work or three.
21:58 We throw it away. That idea. What is gate to about? Is it defining whether or now we're going to do it or is it defining how we're going to do it?
22:07 So once we've identified the jobs that we initial need to do in the exploration phase and we move into the definitional phase, that's where everybody kind of goes away to do their homework.
22:16 So we define what it is that's going to require us to build and then ultimately deliver this idea. What are the challenges?
22:23 Kind of a typical SWAT analysis, if you would honest. What are the strengths of idea? What are the weaknesses of that idea?
22:29 What are some of the threats and the opportunities that this idea creates? And then what is the impact on my ability to deliver?
22:35 What is the budget that I would need for this? What are the human resources that I would need for this?
22:39 So I would define what would require to bring this ultimately to fruition. So would it be true to say that if you completed the fully the requirements document and identified the resources, etc, then you can go through and start gate three or phase three.
22:59 Exactly. So once we've kind of reconvened as a pod and presented back the definition of what it is that we see the work that will be the ultimate outcome which is important to note here which is at the definitional phase here we should have a very clear understanding of what is the desired result at
23:17 the end of the process or at the end of this process whether it's a new process, a new marketing campaign or a new product whatever it might be.
23:23 But here we should have a clearly defined required result. In other words create a project charter. What is the outcome?
23:31 How are you going to do it? With whom are you going to do it? Exactly. And what's going to take to get us there?
23:35 And then once we say okay we're all aligned we're going to move it to the next phase then we go into the testing and learning phase.
23:41 And that testing and learning phase can be very different in terms of time scale depending on what it is that we're doing.
23:46 If it's a new product obviously that might be a much longer period in terms of testing and learning. If it's a marketing campaign and we're doing quick AB testing it's a shorter period of time.
23:57 So keep in mind that the testing and learning phase can stretch or contract depending on what it is that we're doing.
24:04 But here the idea is at the end of the day is to test our idea, learn and iterate and then identify the gaps and the risks from our definition based on the results of the testing.
24:14 And then we say okay we've completed the testing, we've concluded yay, nay or more testing. Let's say we say yay we keep going to the next step.
24:23 The next step is completing that definition, taking the lessons learned from the testing and learning and building the business case.
24:30 Is there the ROI here that we thought originally that's going to be there? Is there going to be truly the benefit to the organization that we wanted to bring?
24:38 Are we going to be able to hit that target? And so we complete that business case to be able to lock it down and from there scope the opportunity and define the action plan which is the critical role.
24:50 Ultimately once we've building a business case we're building the definition of an action plan who does what? Where? An erasing.
24:57 Simple erasing. You're responsible for this, you're responsible for that. We all agree and then we move obviously to the last stage which is implementation.
25:06 Once it's been implemented there actually are three more steps after implementation and those will depend again on what it is that we're doing depending on whether it's a product or a campaign or a process.
25:18 What it is it's the ongoing review. So there's a three step ongoing review once we've implemented something. So step number one is that we want to do a feedback loop.
25:27 How has this worked? Let's say it was a marketing campaign just for a simple example. We want to go back and review it.
25:33 Do a post-mortem see how that worked and get the lessons learned. Then we want to realign making sure that we're still on track.
25:41 Let's say it's a process. We've started a new process. We've implemented it. We've gotten the feedback from everybody that's infected by that process but we found out that we need to do a bit of a realignment happens all the time.
25:53 You never get it right on the first one. So you need to do the realignment and then once you do the realignment you do the re-implement and you implement it again and how often you repeat the ongoing review loop depends on what it is that you're looking at.
26:06 You're probably not going to look at a new process every quarter but you might want to review it once a year.
26:11 Marketing campaign you're going to be reviewing constantly, sometimes hourly, sometimes daily. So that is a very different type of scale in terms of it.
26:20 But when you think about it from a process standpoint it doesn't matter what the timeframe looks like. You mentioned that when you're just putting your idea together you're coming following the Amazon template of two pages.
26:32 I'm personally not familiar with it. If somebody wanted to learn more about it, are there any online resources or can they download that template from somewhere if they wanted to see what this is about?
26:42 This is something that started many many many years ago with Jeff Bezos. He hates PowerPoint presentations which I tend to agree with him on that.
26:48 And so they implemented this idea where if your idea, your innovation cannot be explained in a two-pager, five paragraphs, then you're going to lose the plot.
26:59 It becomes too complex and it's just somebody throwing stuff on PowerPoint. So you want to make sure that you're clear.
27:05 No other to use PowerPoint or not, it doesn't matter. The end of the day, the idea here is that when you're formulating your idea and you want to be able to communicate it back, you should follow a process.
27:18 And that process should culminate at the end with a summary of that idea. How do you deliver and communicate transparently and succinctly your idea?
27:28 There are various ways to do that when I work on my ideation. I mentioned earlier when I sit down and do my 10% and I have an idea that I want to formulate.
27:37 I follow a process for that as well. I do the preparation. I do my research first. So I do a lot of planning.
27:43 I do research. I understand the topic. Then I do what I call a problem finding which is the analysis of the problem itself and the definition of the problem.
27:52 Do I actually know what I'm trying to solve for and for whom? And then you create your ideas. I do these creative sessions and audience interviews and I like to do a lot of back and forth.
28:04 And then I obviously look at all the data that I compile until this point. I analyze it and then I turn this into what I call the selection rounds which is what are the options that I have to solve this problem?
28:14 And which of these options do I think is the appropriate one that I would recommend to you read my boss that we should implement?
28:21 And then the final step would be to sit where they read and say, here you go. I've identified this problem.
28:26 I'm not crazy because I've talked to all these people. They all agree with me that this is an issue that we need to solve, a new process, a new product, whatever it might be.
28:35 Here's my presentation. Right, here's very succinctly. Yes, yes, no, no. Now, little trick to keep in mind, learn this over the years.
28:43 The idea is that you get that you reject. You don't throw them in the trash. You actually throw them in the recycle bin.
28:52 And at the end of the year, you look at all of those ideas again because what tends to happen and from my experience I found is that about 10 to 15% of those ideas were just way ahead of their time.
29:05 The organization wasn't there yet. And the person was. And so we as an organization couldn't see what they saw. So it's always great to go back at the end of the year and look at some of those ideas and then pull the ones that are relevant back out gives you actually more value from those ideas over
29:22 time. Love that. What a great, great tactical advice. You know, you talk about having everybody in the organization submit their ideas.
29:33 You worked with a lot of different companies. If I were to do it in a more structural manner, meaning ideas are not just emailed because I wouldn't necessarily know who to email them.
29:43 These are like a specific email address. Do they upload it into SharePoint? Like what's the best process you've seen in terms of accumulating these ideas in one place in a more framed manner?
29:55 The best way to do this is at the one-on-one meetings. Meaning that when I have my one-on-ones wither with my supervisor or somebody that I'm managing, I actually structure the one-on-one based on time into 70% of the time.
30:08 We're going to have discussion on your core activities. So if your customer success individual and I'm your customer success manager, 70% of our one-on-one conversation is going to be about your day-to-day work.
30:20 You retain the clients, you're able to make them happy, you brought value. 20% of the time we're going to spend and I'm talking about those initiatives that you're working on to improve your 70%.
30:29 So those pods that you're involved with, that's where we're communicating. That's when you would be able to present that idea to me, that two-bager and saying, listen, I have a 20% idea of how to improve what we do better.
30:42 And so if that's where we would have that engage and then 10% of the time we would speak on those transformational projects that you're in.
30:48 How you do that depends on how often you're sitting with your team. But my recommendation is that even if you can't set aside, so to speak 30% of the time in the one-on-one meetings, make sure that you do follow that kind of a structure every month.
31:03 Do that type of a structured meeting every month. And if you can't break it into two, meaning have a separate monthly meeting on the 20th and the 10th.
31:12 What is the best question you have asked during a meeting that provoked an innovative idea from an employee that typically doesn't share innovative ideas?
31:21 It was more of a threat because this individual who was a digital marketing expert and she was amazing. She had been with the organization there for a number of years, three or four years.
31:31 But very quiet, very introverted and kind of gotten forgotten at the site. When I sat down with her for the first time in our one-to-one, I found this unbelievably brilliant, I would actually say, digital marketer with really great experience in her background.
31:49 But she was an introvert and she would never speak up. The interesting thing was that she had so much more knowledge than anybody else around that table by light years.
31:59 And so it wasn't the question. It was more of I threatened her that if she wasn't going to start speaking up, I'm going to start calling on her and meet it.
32:08 And you know, it was more of a kind of jokingly sending. But the question that I asked of her is that at the end of the day, who is the best positioned to solve this problem?
32:19 Is it the manager? Is it the employee? Is it the client? Is it the market? Who is in the best position to solve this problem?
32:27 And most often than not, what you'll find is that the individual sending across from you will tell you, it's that.
32:32 But they just don't have the right tools and processes to be able to bring those solutions. We've all done that.
32:38 We've all kind of laid in bed with our eyes wide open at 3 a.m. Saying, why are we doing this?
32:43 We could be doing this so much better, but nobody listens to me. And so that nobody listens to me is the caveat here.
32:48 This is where we have real careful. If you build the right process and you build it into your one-to-ones and you have the right transformative mentality and transparency, you're going to have individuals that will run to you with these innovative ideas.
33:05 They're not going to wait till your one-on-ones. They're going to schedule that meeting ahead of time. So you want to be able to create that.
33:11 So I wouldn't say it's what's the best question? It's what's the best motivator? What's motivating individuals to not speak up?
33:20 Is it because they're an introvert? Is it because not smacked on the head too many times to only keep quiet over their careers?
33:27 Is it because the culture of the organization isn't there that's not open enough to listen to their stuff? We've all known those bosses that know better than everybody.
33:35 And they're the smartest person in the room. You have to change the culture. And I can see how optimization of processes could be.
33:43 Very natural thing for them. If they're already in the process to suggest some ideas for optimization, I do get some radical ideas.
33:50 That's 10% of ideas that are super innovative. I know Google and other companies sometimes budget a full day just to do whatever project you want to do.
34:00 And it's not even 10% of their time. That's less because it's just one day out of a quarter or every six months.
34:08 That's a fraction of their time. You can build this process around the needs of your organization. What I found with this methodology is that you can scale it up and scale it down based on the size of your organization and what you're trying to achieve.
34:20 You can use it in a certain department, or you can use it throughout the entire organization. You can use it in several departments as a pod or not.
34:28 So you can build this in a dynamic format which allows you to grow it over time as well. So you're a very intellectual person, obviously, and you're always striving to get that 10% for in your own world.
34:41 How do you get inspiration? What is a current book that you're actually reading right now or a podcast that you love listening that constantly creates innovation in your world?
34:50 I'm listening to a wonderful one right now, which is it's called Lost Cultures, Living Legacies. It highlights different types of cultures around the world that have either disappeared or that are very unique in the way that they've developed over time.
35:02 I love traveling with my family over the world. So I love getting tips from these types of podcasts. So, you know, what's my next big thing?
35:09 And so it helps me create that bucket list for our travels. Find new places that we can go and explore.
35:15 Thomas, thank you so much for coming to the show. Then I hope anybody else that's listening to this podcast today, gotten something out of it.
35:23 And if you did, guys, just I'm going to include the link to Tom Ells, LinkedIn profile. So if you have more questions about this or how he works with companies to completely transform the way they do business, please feel free to reach out to him.
35:38 Thank you very much for being here with a pleasure. Absolutely. All right. I'll see you at the next video.