Scaling With People
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Scaling With People
Empowering Business Growth: Chris Seifert on Decision-Making Mastery, Overcoming Micromanagement, and Team Empowerment Strategies
Unlock the secrets of effective decision-making with insights from Chris Seifert, founder of Enabling Empowerment, as he joins me, Gwinniver Curry, to share his expertise on transforming business growth strategies. Discover how to break the cycle of micromanagement that often stems from necessity, not choice. Drawing on the wisdom from Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow," we explore the subconscious nature of decisions and the critical need for organizations to invest in decision-making skills beyond mere execution. This is your chance to learn how to elevate your team's performance and drive your organization to new heights.
Our conversation also sheds light on the power of empowerment and how it can counteract the pitfalls of micromanagement, such as employees' constant need for approval and lack of ownership. By establishing a common foundation and recognizing diverse perspectives, we present practical strategies and compelling anecdotes on fostering a culture that encourages proactive decision-making. Through patience and persistence, you can nurture empowered teams that contribute significantly to business growth. Don't miss this engaging discussion that promises to equip leaders with the tools to enhance decision-making and empower their organizations.
Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm Gwinniver Curry, your host and founder and CEO to Guide to HR, and today I have Chris Seifert here with me and we're going to be talking about whether or not you're making good decisions and are you actually implementing that as part of your strategy to grow your business. Super excited about this topic because I make decisions all the time as well. Chris, welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, thanks for having me. So, as you mentioned, I'm also a founder, like many of your listeners, a founder of Enabling Empowerment and author of a book by the same title that was recently published, and I've got about 25, a little over 25 years of professional experience in manufacturing and operating environments. I spent about eight years on active duty in the US Navy in the submarine force.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for your service.
Speaker 2:Oh, appreciate that, Thank you. And then transition out of that and spent about another eight years in operational roles Many of those three different plant manager roles and manufacturing plants and then I was also a vice president of operations of a large renewable energy manufacturer With that company. I joined them when they were about 350 people and about 350 million in revenue. We grew that to about 1.3 billion in revenue and from four plants to 10 plants. So a lot of experience growing and scaling a new company there. And then about another third of my career eight years or so in consulting, helping organizations implement management systems and operational discipline, do culture transformation. So anyway, a little over, you know, over the course of my career I've.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things that I've seen that organizations struggle with is micromanagement. Right, I've seen a lot of leaders that struggle with that and in many cases it's not intentional, right. It's not something they're doing knowingly or willingly or wanting to do, and I think that that's often a myth, right, when I see a lot of people talk about micromanagers, they think it's because this person's a narcissist or a control freak or just doesn't trust people, for whatever reason and thinks they're smarter. But really what I've found is that most of the time when micromanagement is happening, it's happening because it had to.
Speaker 2:There was some situation, some crisis, the performance was so bad that the leader had to step in and start micromanaging, but then what happens is they can't get out of it. It starts what I call this doom loop of cycle, that then they can't figure out how to get out of it, and so it's something I've seen. Many leaders that worked for me struggled. I've taken over plants that were run by micromanagers where the team just refused to make a decision without coming to me first. Right, and I couldn't stand it, and so so I have a lot of passion about that, because I know how it feels to be stuck in that situation. It's horrible, and you know just that's what I help leaders try and get out of that loop.
Speaker 2:Or avoid, preferably avoid getting in it in the first place.
Speaker 1:Exactly, I always tell back in the day. When I have people reporting me, I always tell them if you make me a micromanager, that's not going to be a good situation for either of us.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right, that's right. It's not pleasant yeah.
Speaker 1:No, I don't want to be it. You don't want me to be it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so opening up, talking about good making decision skills and as founders, we know every day we're making billions of decisions and you know you have some founders out there that have made their personal life less decision-making so that their decision-making capabilities are all about the businesses such as, like you only wear white shirts and that's all that's in your laundry, because you don't want to have to think about what you're wearing, right, yeah, so tell me, like as a founder and as people that you're helping with their businesses, how do you identify what good is in regards to decision making, other than a business is flourishing or not? And you know how do you. How do you help your customers course correct as they start to kind of go off track of a good decision?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, so a couple of comments there. So, first off, I mean one of the things I like to keep things really simple, right, at the end of the day, the performance of a team is a function of the quality of their decisions and their ability to execute those decisions. So, are you making good decisions about what to do, about what customer to serve, what to sell them, how to make it? Are you making the right decisions and are you executing them well? And I found over my career that organizations spend a tremendous amount of energy training people on the execution portion of it, right, or putting systems in place and procedures and processes and all kinds of stuff, but they don't invest, they don't very few invest in actually improving their decision-making skills and capabilities. Right, they may invest in data and infrastructure to have the data, but how to make decisions you know how they, as an organization and individuals, make decisions. They don't invest in that. Right, and that's shocking to me, because so much of your performance is dependent on how good you are making decisions.
Speaker 2:And you know, I a book that was very influential to me, you know, if I had to, like, give you, like, the list of books that have changed my life. Right, like I mean, I read it and I did not see the world the same way. Right, the Bible would be on there, but Thinking Fast and Slow? By Daniel Kahn, nobel Prize for economics. Right, because he basically proved that the underlying theme of economics is that we're all rational decision makers and he basically proved that's not really true.
Speaker 2:Right, the way our brains work. We make a lot of decisions unconsciously. Right, and he describes it as we have, our system, one that's making decisions for us constantly, with very little effort and energy, using correlation and heuristics and framework, you know, just mental models that we have in our heads. Right, analytical cause effect thinking process. That can't be on all the time because, to your point, it takes energy.
Speaker 2:Right, and a lot of people who are founders, who are doing accounting and marketing and sales and operations and all that stuff, like you're just exhausted from decisions all day, which leads to even more you're, you know, wanting to rely on system one and making those kinds of errors. So I think you know what I, what I teach in the book is is understanding that, um, there are. You need to be able to recognize when you're making a decision that is, is of, of, of significant risk or consequence or likely to be influenced by. You know your decision traps um and then use a framework and have a disciplined approach to make those decisions right, so that they're right more often than not.
Speaker 2:And so that's what I kind of outlined in the book as a process to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you had talked about how it's interesting that we focus so much on growing and mentoring and coaching and guiding people on how to execute things, but not on how to make decisions, how to make good decisions, how to understand the business.
Speaker 1:What is the business looking for, what is the outcome we're trying to get to and what do we need to do to get there? Yeah, for what's the outcome we're trying to get to and what do we need to do to get there? And I find that a lot of times too, as businesses grow and they scale and they bring on all levels of individuals, of experience, that then it also becomes well, why didn't they know that this was a top client or customer? Well, did they have the information? Did you empower them to know that? And then I think it goes on to your piece of like did you also teach them how to like recognize that the decision that they're going to make between spending time with client one versus client two actually has an impact to your revenue, to your bottom line, and that you need to be making the right decision. And I love that. Like you're right, like when you said that my I was like aha, yeah, you're right, we don't talk about decision-making as a skill.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, and how do we think through these things and how do we prioritize them and how do we view, view, risk, right, you know, look a great, a great, that risk is a great example. So we all have different tolerances for risk, right, you know. And if I was to say to you, you know, hey, if I gave you a 50-50 chance of winning, you know, $500 or losing $300, would you take that chance right Now, most people will be like, heck, yeah, I'm going to take that chance. Right, I mean, if I do that enough times, I'm going to come out ahead. Right, well, I mean, if I only have $200 in my bank account, I might not take that risk. Right, because if I lose I'm bankrupt.
Speaker 2:Right, and so where I'm starting from matters, right, well, so what are you going to do in a company when we're all starting from different places and we need to evaluate whether something's a good decision or not, right, so we need to be talking about how do we, how do we evaluate risk as a, as a team, cause I want, we want everybody to be true, you know treating it the same way. Right, like, we should be willing. Either we're all willing to make that bet or we're not willing to make that bet, right, but we can't be bringing our own personal risk levels to work with us, right, we got to understand the company.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that's so true. So what are you seeing as being a good way? For? You know, listeners are like, yeah, I really should implement this and get my employees start to thinking about this. What is like one or two steps that our listeners should be taking to get this started within their own business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean again, I don't have a lot of great resources to point you to other than mine, which is why I started making them, because I didn't feel like this was a topic that was being addressed, right, I mean again, I just you know, like I said, you know, when I look at leadership development programs, you know for a lot of my clients, right, I can't, I I see how to. You know conflict resolution and and how to give people performance reviews, and you know how to manage time cards and things like that, I don't see how to make decisions. But yet as a person progresses in a, in a the business, you know, in leadership roles, they're going to get increasingly higher levels of decision-making responsibility Right, and they're going to become need to be making more and more business critical decisions which, when you think about, like in a lot of organizations, you know engineers, right, like I mean, you didn't get trained how to make a business decision in engineering school, right? Or marketing or or whatever those things were, and so you know. But here we are, we're, you know it's the old right. What's the principle of promoting people to their level of incompetence? Right? So we need to include that in the training.
Speaker 2:So, look, I think I mean there's a bunch of resource like simple, if you want to. Hey, what's a simple? What do you mean by decision-making framework? Right? If you go to my website, wwwenablingempowermentcom, you can download a template like one page. This is a decision-making framework. You can certainly, you know, buy the book, you know it's on Amazon, read through it and then now what I do is I come in and I have developed a workshop where I take first off ground everybody on why decision-making is important, and then I take them through. I have the team give me a decision that they're working on, right, that they've that they've been struggling with, and we go through the seven steps of decision-making framework, illustrate, using exercises to illustrate decision traps like the framing trap, right? So this is a great example. If I ask you, do you know how to pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Do you pronounce it Louisville or Louisville, do you know?
Speaker 1:I think it's I haven't actually said it that I don't know, Louisville, I think I'll go with that one.
Speaker 2:It's actually he actually pronounced it Frankfurt. Okay, because Frankfurt's the capital of Kentucky.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, I filled my geography lesson.
Speaker 2:Look every time, every time it happens, every single time, right, I do that question to people who live in Kentucky. Okay, and they will. And they and you know what they'll say, though they'll say, well, it's neither right. And they will, and you know what they'll say. They'll say, well, it's neither right. And at first I'm like, okay, good, you know your capital right. And they'll go it's pronounced Lul, right, like you know some third option. I'm like, no, it's not, it's Frank, but what happened there? Right?
Speaker 2:The point here is the way I frame a question to you, or problem, or an opportunity matters a lot in how you answer and your ability to solve that problem right. And so, as a leader, I need to understand that when I'm making a decision, I need to understand how has this problem been framed at me? Is it framed in the ideal way for me to solve it right or to, you know, make a decision? So, you know, in the workshop we'll use, you know, examples like that, when I just gave you, to illustrate those decision traps and then talk about what are the specific things that I need to do to make sure I'm not, you know, falling into that trap or putting other people in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. And I think also too, like my takeaway on like one of the first steps is creating that foundation of making sure you're all starting at the same place, because we all come in from different perspectives. We have different personal experiences, different professional experiences, we've learned how to engage and interact and process data differently. So, starting from like, let's just say this is the beginning, the baseline of the problem. Let's actually talk about it now from that Like we're all on the same page now, which I think is really challenging, because half the time you don't really realize you're not on the same page, you don't realize that you're coming at it from a completely different perspective and to have to like start from scratch or like kind of clear out all that baggage good and bad that you bring into your job so that you can be kind of in that same space, it's challenging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so flipping over a little bit, I know that enabling empowerment empowerment, I love that word. I think it's really important because I think empowerment is what you need throughout your whole business to be able to scale, and certainly decision-making is one of them. And you really talked about micromanagement. I joke that if one of my employees made me do that, it would not be good for anybody, right. So, but going into micromanagement and the fact that we still see so many people in that space and getting stuck, like you said, tell me a little bit about, like, what are the signs that a founder should be looking for in regards to? Okay, there I think my manager, my leader, is getting into this stage and I got to help them not get there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, so here, yes, absolutely. So here's several, several things, and there's a couple of like when I'm sitting in meetings and like when I'm like hanging out right, like things I'm listening for Right, and I and I really let's turn it away a little bit not called micromanagement, but let's call it codependent decision making. It's leader, we want you to make the decision right. And so the things I hear are, first off, employees asking leaders what they want them to do right. I mean literally like I've sat in offices and you know, sat at the plant manager's office and watched a stream of employees come up to the door and say, hey, the wedgie turner broke. What do you want me to do about it? Right? And I'm like I'm my guy, you know. So for me, that's one like I'm almost allergic to hearing that Right, when I hear what do you want me to do, I stop and I go Whoa, wait a minute, it's not about what I want to do. What I want to do doesn't have anything to do with it. What's the right thing for the business to do, right? And so that's one that I've just become sensitive to and would say be sensitive to. And another one is I'm just doing. I was just doing what I was told, right.
Speaker 2:So when I hear employees say I'm just doing what I was told, what that tells me is they take no ownership in the decision making process, right they? That is somebody else for them to do. They just do what they're told. That's not what we want either, right? So that's either micromanagement has created that or you know they're going to cause the leader to become a micromanager by doing that, right? So those are just two. Actually, I've got on the website a little 10 questions, right. You can ask yourself like hey, do I see these behaviors? And I think actually in the link to the post show landing page here for this there's a link to the same thing with 10 questions on. These are things, behaviors to look for that indicate you might have that going on.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's great, that's very helpful. And a lot of times, like, I have heard that like, what do you want me to do about it? And one of the things that I coach managers and leaders is turning that around. Well, what do you think you should do? Right, like yeah, exactly. Like give them, give them that empowerment to make that decision.
Speaker 1:And yeah, it's kind of. It's kind of the same thing. It's like you know, you're training. Unfortunately, sometimes we become the parents in business, which is unfortunate, but it's true, and there are times when you're just going to have to parent the shit out of your people, unfortunately, and this is the great example of that, and that's just like you know. I'm not going to tie your shoe for the rest of your life. You need to figure it out.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, what I say is yeah. What I say is, when they say what do you want me to do, I say well, what I want you to do is make a recommendation. That's what I want you to do. What do you recommend we do Right Now. The challenge and the challenge, though, is when you have a severe micromanagement culture, like the first time you do that like I mean first time, I did that in a plan. I took over the shift leader. He asked hey, this thing broke. What do you want me to do? I said well, I'd like you to make me a recommendation, and he just looked at me like what?
Speaker 1:Like I mean.
Speaker 2:He literally was like I don't understand, what do you mean? And I'm like, no, what do you, you know? And we ended up having to spend an hour like talking through the problem and analyzing it and getting through all it and at the end the funny thing was, at the end, after all, the analysis here was this solution that clearly was the best. And he looked at me and said, so, what do you want me to do? And I was like holy cow, I mean, you know? And anyway, we finally got through it. But that was the epiphany for me that I was like look man, I don't want to. I have five. I had 500 employees in that plant. I cannot do that 500 times. It's not going to work. I've got to have a scalable strategy for getting these helping them make better decisions Right and so yeah you're a hundred percent right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then flip it. You finally have flipped that script. They are not coming to you with something being broken. They know how to figure out how to what they need to do. They've done it. They fixed it. You're back up and producing again and your employee is happier. You have a more satisfied employee, someone who feels like they're solving a problem, they're part of the solution of you know getting the company to its goals and they're engaged because now they know they have this empowerment to like make these decisions, which is just going to help every employee around them feel the same energy. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean ultimately they if somebody is making a recommendation, right. So when you flip it to them and say what I want you to do is make a recommendation, and then you force them to do that, two things happen right. Number one they now have ownership in this decision. Right, I mean, they are invested in this decision working. They can no longer say I'm just doing what I was told. Right, they helped with this, so they feel invested in making it successful. The second thing is, yeah, they feel like they have the ability to impact the outcome of the business. Right, and there's no worse feeling than being caught in an organization that you feel like is failing and feeling like you can't do anything about it. Right, and there's nothing worse. There's no worse feeling than being caught in an organization that you feel like is failing and feeling like you can't do anything about it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:I mean that's the worst. Right Like that's when people are just give up. Right, they're like I can't do anything here and they quit, so so yeah, that's helping them have that feel like they can influence the outcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And then helping, helping them. What I've seen, too, is like thinking that the next step, which is helping it, tie back to. Well, do did you realize that?
Speaker 1:because you were able to fix that machine, you know, in exponential time, it didn't take you talking to me and then you going and doing it and coming back and telling me like we've, we shaved off 30 minutes or even an hour, yeah, and that allowed us to produce X amount more, which allowed us to get to this revenue, which is helping us get to our goal. I think a lot of times I see managers forget to like connect it right. I've even caught myself doing that, where I forget to connect it and help them understand the power that they have in their role and that there's a reason why we have five people, 500 people, 5,000 people. It's not because we want to have a high number of people. It's because each person has an actual impact to the outcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and look even more importantly, just for your own as the leader, for your own sanity, right? I mean, when I took over that plant, right, like literally. I mean my wife was like Chris, if the phone's going to ring all night like this, will you please just go sleep on the couch, right? Cause that's how bad it was. I mean it was all night every night like we couldn't do, like I had to be called three times a night to, to, to, to help make a decision, right. But once I told him, I said, once I taught them the framework that I used, and I said, when you call me, I want you to walk through the framework that I want you to walk through how you got to the decision with me, right?
Speaker 2:Well, after a few times, I mean, yeah, they started getting competent at it. And then I was able to start saying would you stop calling me, because the last three times you've called me to make a recommendation, I've said I've agreed with you right off, so we don't need to do this anymore. Why are you calling me? Still, right. And then I could finally sleep through the night and my wife wasn't in anymore right.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, that is insane. I can't even imagine. Yeah, and you're right, it's like again, any kind of people behavior change. You're trying to change even in yourself. Give yourself grace and empathy, because it's not a flip of the switch. It is a time it does take time multiple times, whether it's within a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Sometimes it's not a flip of the switch. It is a time it does take time multiple times, whether it's within a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Sometimes it's going to be half a year to a year, depending on the situation. But just give you and your people grace of getting through that and the learning curve on it Because, yeah, it's a shock to the system. Now you're being told to bring something forward when the whole time you've been pushed down and said just do what I tell you to do, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this has been an interesting conversation. As we wrap up, is there any last tips or tricks or tools or thoughts you'd like to share with the audience before we sign off?
Speaker 2:I would just say, if you're, if you, you know decision-making hasn't been something that is on your top of mind of, like how, how am I making sure that my team is like, how are we better at making decisions in our competitors? Right, Cause if, at the end of the day, if we're not better at making decisions in our competitors, they're going to out-compete us. And if that's not something that you're thinking about, then you know it should be right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Final thing I would leave you with.
Speaker 1:Great question for people to mull over, and with that we will end the podcast. Thank you so much, chris, for joining me today and for the listeners. I hope you got a couple tidbits out, like I did, and we will see you on the next podcast. Have a good one, everyone. Bye. Thanks for watching.
