Karen Kirton
Welcome to Episode 80. And in our last episode, I discussed how business owners right now are quite focused on retaining key employees and also focusing everyone in the business on what they need to do. So it's all about retention and productivity, which leads us into goal setting and accountability. So in the last episode, I gave some top tips for having a culture that embraces accountability. And I thought, well, rather than just listening to me, be great to actually speak to another business owner that has implemented these types of processes. So joining me is lucky grey, who's the co founder and managing director of Yato, which is a team based micro learning platform that embeds and refreshes knowledge. And before starting auto lock, he was the executive producer at Webb, Jim, a digital agency based in Sydney. And lucky he's an avid learner and is currently working towards a certification as an organisational coach. And you may recognise Locky from the podcasts that we've co hosted together over the last few years make it work. And it's great to have you in the hot seat here today.
Lachy Gray
Great to be here.
Karen Kirton
Thanks for joining me. And so in our last episode, I spoke about some key areas of accountability. And they were around clearly defined roles and expectations, providing regular feedback, empowering employees, leading by example, and recognising employees for their achievements and behaviour. Now, we're not going to have time to cover all of these, although I know that you do all of these at Yano, but I'd love for you to share your experience on a couple if that's okay. Starting out with how do you go about role clarity at Yarno?
Lachy Gray
Yeah, I think clarity comes through clear expectations. So one way we do that is with the job scorecard, I guess otherwise known as a job description. So every role has a job scorecard. We review them annually for accuracy. And new Yarnoers was taken through the scorecard early on, again, to make sure that they're accurate, and that they understand and are comfortable with everything in there. And then we
Karen Kirton
offer really opportunities between that and a job description or is it basically the same thing with a different name? Or how do you feel that different?
Lachy Gray
Bots are similar in intent? I think a scorecard I think, has a reference in part to sport. And I think though, as part of high performance, I think sometimes some of our documentation in corporate land can get a bit staid and boring and lack the human side of it. So really, we're all about high performance. And so we'd like that alluding to, to sport with our with our scorecard. And then offering regular opportunities for Jana was to raise questions and or concerns that they may have with anything in their role. So that would be with their team lead in their regular one on one meetings. And that might be that perhaps they feel like they're taking on more responsibility than what is in their scorecard. They might have a question about someone else's scorecard and their responsibilities and how the two interact, they might be looking for more responsibility. So that's really the team leads role there to facilitate those conversations. And then taking a step up again, we think about how do the various roles interact with each other in the business. So for example, in 2022, we created a new role called customer team leads, that's for our customer success team. That was a brand new role to the business. So we hired for that role. And then in the middle of last year, we decided to split that role into two. And that decision was actually led by the team and two of the leaders in the team. I wasn't thinking along those lines at all. They came up with a whole bunch of reasons why they thought it was a better approach. And we decided to to implement it. And I'm glad they did that. It's going really well.
Karen Kirton
And so when you say that they can also give feedback into other people's scorecards, does that mean that they're all available to everybody to look at? And do you use a platform for that? How do you make sure that's quite open? They
Lachy Gray
are available? Yes. So we use Box, which is like similar to Dropbox. Group by team, every team has their scorecards. So yeah, I think that visibility is is really important.
Karen Kirton
And then in terms of that, bringing up ideas like I can imagine a lot of organisation that'd be difficult for people to say, hey, I want you to split the leaders role into two. So So is there a process for that? How does that come about that you get that kind of feedback through.
Lachy Gray
So we have a decision template, we call it. So anyone can fill out the decision template and make a decision, we really encourage people to do that, typically for larger, more impactful decisions. And in that they're really outlining the decision they want to make the why behind it. The alternatives they've considered the who needs to be involved, like what they need to be supported areas of concern where it could go wrong, the assumptions they're making. So it's really trying to get them thinking through and putting all that down. So then we can then it's shared. And we all talk about it, we add our feedback to it. So it's a really collaborative process that we go through on big decisions like this, because I've learned that context is, is critical. And that context is often a casualty, whether that's just a lack of sharing being remote, or you don't have the same opportunities to share context. So this is one way to really do it in a very explicitly.
Karen Kirton
Yeah, and I think that's a good point. Actually, for those that don't know, Jana is a completely remote team, and not just across Australia. So that can add that level of complexity as well, which, I guess also goes to the second thing that was going to ask, which was around feedback. So giving and receiving feedback. I know it's very important to us. So how do you go about embedding that at? Ya know?
Lachy Gray
Yeah, you know, we're learning business. It's what we do. And I think feedback is a critical part of learning. Prior to No, I'd never seen it done well. I was never taught how to do it, I received a lot of very general feedback, great job, or no, you need to do it this way. So I thought there's got to be a better way. When we started, Yano mark, my business partner, and I implemented a feedback framework called courageous feedback. And it's all about identifying the situation, identifying a behaviour that we've observed and some potential impacts of it very factual, trying to remove the emotional, judgmental evaluative aspects of feedback. So we've been doing that for come up to eight years now. So I take all new yarn over through the framework in two sessions. So one is how to give feedback, and other is how to receive feedback. Each month in our weekly team meeting, we spend 30 minutes roleplaying feedback scenarios as a group talking through the behaviours and the impacts of particular scenarios. And we talked through it so it's all online. As you said, we're fully remote. So we do it in zoom, we use an online whiteboarding tool, we talk through a scenario behaviours impacts and so on. And then we roleplay it either in breakout rooms, or as a main group that's requires vulnerability. We're all learning. None of us are experts. But you learn so much, because we all of course, approach it differently. We use different language. And we roleplay positive feedback scenarios and constructive feedback scenarios.
Karen Kirton
That is of doing this, do you still find it useful for you to do every month like I've just funny people listening to this might be thinking, wow, that's a huge commitment. So what do you find that you still get out of it after eight years of doing it monthly?
Lachy Gray
Well, I think how important is feedback to you in general? For me, it's critical. I think feedback is critical to grow. I one of my measures of how we're going as a culture as a business is feedback. And if the frequency of feedback is dropping, I worry. Because I don't think it's true that everyone was doing everything right all the time. So if we're not giving each other feedback, how do we know? And then I'm assuming people are thinking stuff, but they're not sharing it. That's a concern for me. So it also shows our commitment to it. It would be much easier not to invest time in it and just to ask everyone and to say, hey, it's important. Please give feedback. But if we as leaders don't demonstrate it, and if we don't actively encourage it, then I think it has a less less likelihood of actually happening, which I think would be a real shame. Yeah,
Karen Kirton
it would absolutely fall over because generally speaking, and I am generalising, but people don't like giving or receiving feedback. And it is a it's a taught skill to do to do both. There are many people that I've come across that can naturally give and receive feedback on a regular basis effectively.
Lachy Gray
That's, that's true. And I think actually, as was everyone like, my one of my goals with this is that we don't need to call it feedback anymore. It's just how we communicate. Yeah. And actually, one of the biggest benefits is in our personal lives. It's often with the people that we love that we spend the most time with, we have the most complex relationships. They're the ones that are hardest to get feedback, because we can't just distance ourselves from them, or perhaps might be harder to do that. We've actually got to have that tricky combo. And if we're practising it really regularly, just becomes a part of what we do. Yeah.
Karen Kirton
Well, the types of scenarios that you're used to practice, whether they relate to people put them forward, or are they made up, how do you go about that?
Lachy Gray
They're made up? I've learned that yeah, realistic? Well, basing it on things that have happened is easier. And feels like it's going to be more relevant, however, can of worms, if people think that it's about them? Yeah. Yeah. So we learned that fairly early on. So yeah, all the scenarios made up. And this is where, you know, chat GPT. And similar tools are helpful just to work brainstorm scenarios. But I try and make them as I mean, they're still realistic, they have to be realistic to bid to get a really different spread. And some of them are unclear, sometimes this scenario will venture into mental health. And if that's the case, we'll talk about that as a team. And we'll say, Okay, we've identified this, how would we proceed? And we've done Are you okay, training as a team? So we try and be really explicit about that as well. Again, I think if you don't practice a skill, it will decay. Yeah. So we want to be practising all the time.
Karen Kirton
How do you go about asking for feedback?
Lachy Gray
So couple of different ways. We try and be really deliberate about asking for feedback. So being specific. So rather than saying, Have you got any feedback for me? So I'm really working on my listening skills. What's one thing I could do to be a better listener, I've learned that you get much better feedback. By doing that. We do shoutouts. In the team web, we have a platform called small improvements. That is an HR platform, I guess that's hooked into our Slack. So we encourage people to give feedback through it. And then it's all logged there, and it pops through to slack. But the team can also request feedback through there. So that might be after they've run a meeting, I do it after I run a strategy session, I asked everyone for feedback. Or they can do it just to one person, and it can be private. But really, the frequency of it is the key thing for me. And part of that is getting comfortable with asking for feedback. You know, sometimes, maybe we don't want to hear it.
Karen Kirton
I don't actually want the answer. Yeah.
Lachy Gray
And I'm the same, especially for something that I put a lot of time and effort into. I feel it's really good. It can be challenging to hear feedback that someone thinks differently. However, I've learned that the more I do worse than and if our intentions are aligned like that, they want to help. It's the best way to learn because some of the most difficult feedback I've received, it's actually been the most beneficial to me in the long run. Yeah.
Karen Kirton
And if you had just one piece of advice to business owners on how to have a healthy culture today, this is something that's been really important to you and you've had a I'm sure a lot of good experiences and not so good experiences and tried lots of different things over the last eight years that ya know. So what would the one piece of advice for a healthy culture be?
Lachy Gray
Ah, yeah, that's hard. That's hard, Karen. Yeah. I think lead by example. You know, where To shape? Yeah, I think actions are a lot louder than words, especially when it comes to culture. Culture is ultimately, you know, the behaviours that that we accept. And so it's about what we do, and doing it consistently. I think that's really important for me. So if we are trying to implement a change, or we would like our team to give feedback, I will lead that by asking for feedback. To start, I need to demonstrate that. And then I'll give a lot of positive feedback to build the trust. So that if I give someone some critical feedback, I know that it's with good intentions. That's all through leading by example. Yeah.
Karen Kirton
And I know you say consistency, which is super important, but it also sounds like intentionally as well. But it's leading by example, with actually having that intention that if I like you said, if I do this, then when I do need to give critical feedback, it will be taken in the right way. And it's not this chasm of feedback, then all of a sudden, you're not doing that correctly. So yeah, I think that's right,
Lachy Gray
because we know that that our team wants to grow personally and professionally. So we look at feedback through that lens. It's one way of achieving it just as training is there's lots of ways to do it. Rather than just feedback as a separate thing. It's like, oh, here we go feedback. Again, it's like, no, no, it's a way to help all of us grow. And for that to work, we collectively have to invest time and effort into it. Yeah.
Karen Kirton
Well, thank you so much Lachy, I'd love to actually be able to just ask you questions rather than having you ask me a question. That's been nice. But I also, you know, and I've said this before, like, I really love what you're Mark built at Yarno. And I really appreciate that, you know, you're both so genuinely committed to your people and your culture. So thank you for sharing some of those great things that you do today. And for everyone listening, listening. If you receive value from this episode, I'd love it if you leave a rating or review over Apple podcasts or Spotify, so someone else can find the episodes to help with their business episodes released every second Monday, so click the subscribe button and you'll be notified when it's available. And of course, if you're interested in getting your teams across learning in a really simplified way only takes a couple of minutes a day, then check out yarno.com.au Thank you so much for joining me if you have any feedback questions or ideas for future episodes, head on over to amplify hr.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation