Creating a More Agile Company with Jaime Taets 

Mike: Jamie Tates is the CEO and founder of Keystone Group International, a driving force in leadership development, organizational strategy, and change management. Beyond her role at Keystone, she extends her influence as the host of The View From The Top podcast and the author of three best-selling books: You Are Here, The Culture Climb, and Surviving Greatness.

She’s been named to Inc. Magazine’s 200 top female founders list, a 100 women to know in America, and Twin Cities Business Notable Female Entrepreneurs. Her company has been named to the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies in the Midwest. Wow. Uh, Jamie, welcome to the show

Jaime: I now I know why I’m tired most days

Mike: That’s that’s lot of stuff Jamie from all of that amazing experience, what do you believe is the most important characteristic of a great leadership team?

Jaime: So trust, which means, right, there’s a lot in there. I think a team that trusts each other to challenge, but outside of a characteristic, what first came to mind when you said that is what we would call an executive operating model. And just to explain this a little bit is right now, and I told you this was my soapbox for today, so forgive me, but so many companies right now, executives, CEOs are saying, “Oh, something…

Our strategy’s not right,” or, “The market’s just bad.” And when we dig in, we’re like, “Your executive team, your leadership team doesn’t have an operating model on how they work together.” That’s what’s actually missing. It’s not a bad strategy. Yes, the market is, kinda all over the place, but there’s a lot of companies winning in your industry, whatever your industry is right now.

And I just think a lot of executives and leaders are doing the best they can in a very uncertain, volatile

market, and they’re not realizing that their executive operating model is not where it needs to be for the business to navigate and be agile

Mike: Okay, so let’s dive into that. So when you say you can’t, I can’t leave it at that, right? That’s beautiful. So when you say executive operating model, what is it, what does that mean? And then we’ll figure out if there’s some parts of that we wanna dig even deeper into. But what does that mean?

Jaime: it means how we operate as a team, how we make decisions in uncertain times or with not all… Having all the right information, clear accountabilities and capabilities on where we’re going. This uncertain market and just the global risk and leaders have not had to lead, most leaders have not had to lead in this type of environment before since they’ve become leaders.

And what we’re realizing is that the teams are just kinda carrying forward the way we’ve always done it, and we’re trying to fix the leaders when really we need to fix how the leaders are driving results or how they’re operating together, and nobody’s really focusing on that executive alignment, that leadership alignment.

We’re trying to solve it leader by leader and not creating that operating framework for them, how they’re going to work together in that company

Mike: So, so in, in trying to think about that framework, so if somebody’s saying, “Hey,I might have a framework. I’m not sure if I have an, I might have an, my operating model is chaos.” is that a good operating model? Or, or the leadership team get… Yeah, the leadership team gets together, you know, once a year to figure out what we didn’t do last year.

Is that an operating model? So are there specific, kind of pieces of the operating model, and is there one piece of it in particular where you find leadership teams are falling down?

Jaime: I– so yes, to answer your question, the biggest areas that we see, I mean, we’re in this every day, right? We talk about it as a team, is decision rights, decision speed. every leader listening can think of an example of when we’ve come to a decision, and then next week we talk about the same decision again, right?

and it’s that ability to make decisions and actually stick to those decisions and follow through on them, and making sure we’re getting the clarity in the room. Are we asking the right questions? Are we driving to, is everybody on board with this? So many of us are working so… And I’m the same, right?

We– In my organization, we’re working so fast. We’re trying to overcome, what’s hitting us from the left and right. Are we slowing down to say, “Are we all on board with this?” Like truly on board. Do we all have clarity around what this decision means? Are we making those trade-offs? Are we saying no to things?

so when we talk about enterprise, you can have an executive operating model. it’s do we have all of those things in place? Think about it like guardrails, right? We’re driving along a cliff. Is there a guardrail that’s gonna stop us from driving off that cliff, or is it not built for where we’re driving right now?

And I think most organizations are operating without kind of that executive alignment and operating model that they need for today’s business climate. And I don’t blame the leaders. Leaders still have work to do, but they’re in an environment that isn’t allowing them to make decisions at the pace that we need to make decisions, and it’s hurting our businesses.

Mike: So you, and I love you said decisions you make and then you make them again next week. I had a client that called those zombie decisions. we think we killed it, but it came back and we’ve gotta make the decision all over again. So you talked about decision rights, decision speed, and then we talked about kinda clarity of those decisions.

So, and follow through. What… So, so let’s continue to dig in. I lo- I love where we’re going with this. So when you say decision rights, what does that mean?

Jaime: Who owns the decision? The leadership team can’t own a decision. We can be part of making the decision, but accountability would tell us someone has to own it, meaning it’s in some part of the organization at some level is the right… Sometimes it’s the CEO, right, has to own that decision. It’s a big enough decision.

It’s enterprise-wide. but sometimes they, most of the time, they don’t need to be the one owning it. They need to weigh in. We need to have that, trusted conversation. But are we clear when we leave the room who owns the decision? So that next week, or the meeting after the meeting, which I’m sure you’ve never heard of before, where a couple of people disagree, they just don’t say it in the meeting, and then they have a meeting after the meeting, and I’m supposed to own the decision, and now nobody trusts me to actually act on that decision, ’cause now we’ve come full circle again.

It’s a cultural nightmare for executive leaders to not… I mean, they’re essentially telling each other, “We don’t trust you.”

Mike: And does that, to, to figure out the decision right, just to make this real, does that mean if we’re sitting in a leadership team meeting and all of a sudden something comes up, we’ve gotta figure out, whether, whether we’re gonna go live, with this new product or not, or are we gonna go enter this brand new market, or pick a decision. is the suggestion that when we re- “Hey, we’ve got a decision to make,” is it literally the leadership team says, “Okay, who around this table is accountable for this decision?” Or has that kind of happened before where you… I know with my clients, I work on something called the functional accountability chart.

who is the one person accountable for sales, for marketing, for technology, for R&D, et cetera. Is it, like, how do you decide as a leadership team, or does it happen in a moment, who owns the decision?

Jaime: I think that’s the first question is because… And I’m not trying to say every decision is super clear, right? It’s just one line. It might be two departments, two divisions need to come together. But starting with that question to say, “We clearly have a problem or a decision that we need to make here. Who are the ultimate decision-makers on this?

As a team, it’s not all of us. So as a team, let’s start with that before we dig in.” ‘Cause what happens is we dig into the emotional parts of the decision, and then everybody… that’s decision by consensus. Then everybody’s got emotion around it, but everyone’s not really the decision-maker. So if you start with who is the decision-maker, now let’s talk about who’s impacted, who needs to be…

Right? What are all the things that could go wrong? What are the things we’ll have to say no to if we make this decision? That’s more valuable for your leadership team to be spending time on than debating who should get to make this decision. And we spend way too much time debating that when if the functional accountability chart is right, if it’s my decision to make, I still am not gonna do it in a vacuum.

But it tells you a lot about the trust of the organization if nobody wants me to be able to make it even though it’s my area. So that tells you there’s an underlying root cause that we’re just ignoring. The fact that we don’t trust that person to make that decision, even with our input, most leadership teams are operating with handcuffs, right?

We’re trying to do the right thing. We think it’s our area, and then we’re breaking down trust every time we have to make a hard decision

Mike: Yeah, and part of that when you don’t have that trust is the CEO becomes the bottleneck because now everybody’s ultimately looking for the CEO to make the final decision on everything, and that’s not a scalable model, right?

Jaime: And we get the CEO coming to us saying, “I’m tired of having to be the one that makes all these decisions. Why can my team not operate better?” Decision authority, decision speed, right? We go right back to you haven’t set the framework up. You don’t have the model in place for them to know how to do this.

They’re just doing their work

Mike: and then it becomes easier i- if we’re around the table, Jamie, you and I are on the leadership team and, you are, you’re accountable for a certain decision, it makes it easy. You talk about the framework is who’s accountable, but there’s also a framework around what do we actually need to decide, and are we gonna decide that today, or are we just gathering information today?

Do… You know? that kinda gets us into, so we’ve got decision rights.

Talk about decision speed. What does that mean, and how do we figure out how fast or slow we need to go in making a decision?

Jaime: I mean, that’s really, it is. It’s the fast and final or slow and revisited, right? There’s kind of two decision speeds on either end of the spectrum. And again, not every decision, I’m not trying to say, you should be making major business impact decisions in 10 minutes in a meeting. It’s just more of the clarity around how we’re gonna make the decision, and that’s the conversation we usually don’t have.

We just dive into all of the feelings about one side or the other, right? we polarize it immediately, which is just what typically happens, and then we don’t get anywhere because we’re just spinning on the emotion of the decision, where if you have the right framework in place, it’s, “Here are the questions we should be asking,” right?

what impacts is this decision gonna have one way or the other? What will we have to say no to if we say yes to this decision? What stakeholders are impacted by this decision, right? So I can run through a million, but that to me is the operating model on, “Hey, guys, it’s not me against you, right?

In making this decision, it’s as a team, do we… Are we asking, going through kind of the decision tree and asking the right questions so that we are all confident in the decision we’re making?” That is the gap in most organizations. I really mean it. I, we’re a leadership development firm and a strategy firm, and I would love to sell everybody on thousands and thousands of hours of leadership development.

But developing your leaders without frameworks that teach them in the moment, right, how to work together and make decisions is… You’re not gonna get the bang for your buck if you don’t have the models built into the business

Mike: So let’s step back from the decision-making piece, and we may decide to dive back in. We’ll reserve the right to do that. But step back for a second.

I know what you talk about a lot, what’s important is this idea of strategic agility. What does an agile team, and part of it is probably the right decision-making, but what does an agile team actually look like?

Jaime: It, there’s a, there’s… So we have 10 to 12, I think 12 different kind of capabilities of an agile team. We actually have a really great strategic agility assessment, 20 question that’s free out on our website, I can provide you. but just some of the common things is their ability to make decisions timely.

and timely is up to, to what that means, but to adjust to market conditions and say, “Hey, should we be making different decisions based on the intel, the information that we have or we don’t have?” strategically agile organizations are able to beat the competition to the response to market conditions.

It doesn’t mean they avoid them. It doesn’t mean they’re better, at certainty. It means they can make a decision, and they know all the things they need to pull in to make a decision faster than the competition can. another one that’s really important is innovation. And innovation is a buzzword, but we talk about innovation not from the buzzword type, but really do we have an innovative mindset in our organization to continuously improve?

Or are we like, “Hey, this has worked for a really long time. Why are we trying to change it now?” It’s a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Most organizations don’t, if you really dug in, don’t have an innovative mindset. They have a lot of people that are just wanna protect what’s always worked, and they don’t really wanna step out and take a risk anywhere, and it’s holding organizations back from growing

Mike: How is,

Jaime: Mm-hmm.

Mike: and I wanna go through more of these capabilities o- of a agile organization, but just taking those last two is beating the competition to the response and innovation.

How have you seen AI

impact the need to do that, the ability to do that? How is– ‘Cause it’s just, it just seems like things are moving so fast, and as I say that, I know that things are only gonna keep moving faster and faster, and they’re never gon- So this is as slow as it’s ever gonna move, and it’s pretty damn fast.

So how has AI impacted companies’ ability to, beat their competition, companies’ ability to innovate?

Jaime: I don’t think it’s impacted them enough. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna be a contrarian here. There’s a lot of hype around AI. If you look below the hype, the news feeds, right, and everything, the adoption rate of true AI versus automation, if you’re just automating tasks, that’s a little different. True AI being used to, uh, let me put it in a way, profitably grow a business, there are very few.

I was just on… Actually, I have another one to- tomorrow. I’m on, this kind of group that’s going through and being led by someone who started a company three years ago, 400,000 in revenue, was four million last year, and she’ll be 15 million this year. She has 20 employees and 100 AI employees I just

Mike: What does that mean, 100 AI employees?

Jaime: Exactly. So this is what she’s teaching us, is every employee has four to five AI employees that they’ve trained to do different aspects of their job, and they are responsible for those employees to train them, to make sure they stay up to speed, to continue, right, to manage and monitor their results, but it’s allowing that employee to do more because they have AI employees.

now I’m saying this, and there’s some people that just heard that and went, “You’re insane.” She’s doing it. I’ve seen… She has an org structure, and the AI employees have names. Now, they’re AI, so she still values humans. What I will tell you is her business is going to start competing with companies four to five times her size, and they’re not gonna see her coming.

This is what’s happening, and so when you say AI, I… 90% of our clients at the, $100 million and above business level aren’t really doing anything but using ChatGPT as Google, and maybe some of their designers and marketing people are using it a little bit more. They are not using it the way these smaller, more agile companies are, and these companies are coming from nowhere.

They didn’t exist three years ago. I mean, you probably realize we’re on track for the first billion-dollar valuation company with one employee, one human employee. Most Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, Fortune 2000, they’re like, “Whatever. That’s not gonna happen.” And then all of a sudden there’s a whole new competitive set that came out of nowhere, and they didn’t even see in their rearview mirror.

This is what we’re preparing our clients for, and it’s not too late.

Mike: yeah, I want everybody to hear this, and I wanna … ‘Cause I’m with you 1000%. And by the way, you get– do you ever listen to, uh, I’m gonna give a shout-out to another podcast. Have you listened to “Moonshots”?

Jaime: No

Mike: it’s Moo- it’s with Peter Diamandis, who’s, a

Jaime: Oh, yeah. I’ve met Peter. Yeah, I– Yeah. he’s the biohacker guy, like the…

Mike: that’s part of what he does, but “Moonshots,” everybody, go listen to that.

You, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta set aside about two hours twice a week if you wanna listen to all their stuff. But they’re saying exactly, be- there will be multi-billion dollar companies with one employee. And here’s what all this means, whether you buy into this or not, or the idea of AI employees, and I’m with you.

So many people are deploying agents, and I’m doing some of the same things. I’m doing so much more than I ever could have done

myself, uh, which by the way means I’m freakishly busy, but I’m also able to add tons more value. So, so it’s not about not being busy. I’m crazy busy, but here’s what I want people to hear, whether you buy into this idea or not. If you don’t get on the bandwagon and innovate using AI in a major way and drive true value, if you’re standing still, your competition, including companies that may be way smaller than you right now, they will blow you by. It’s not as if you could say, “Well, I don’t necessarily wanna grow that fast. I don’t have to do that.”

you’re gonna shrink to very little and may not have a business if you are not jumping on and understanding and some enthusiasm around using this for what it’s worth, not just to be more efficient, not just to go do research quicker, but how are you using it to add crazy more value to your clients, to your vendors, to your team members?

Jaime: Right. and you talk about doing research. I mean, that is a big part, right? Of what AI can do, and it’s in the strategic agility, it’s market trend analysis is one of the things we ask. How good is your leadership team? Not just your CEO, ’cause oftentimes CEO or there’ll be a member of the leadership team that’s good at really understanding the market dynamics.

not just what you read, but like kinda digging into the data, and I can say with almost 100% of CEOs are like, “Well, no, my entire leadership team is not good at this.” That’s where AI can come in, and you don’t have to be an expert. But you need to know what’s moving before everyone else knows what’s moving.

what are those leading indicators in the data? AI can pull all of that. I mean, even, I mean, agents that you wake up in the morning and you’ve got all that data from the past 24 hours in your inbox. They’ve ran and gathered it all. That’s what this one, this, she’s talking about, is those types of things that make you faster on a day-to-day basis.

That’s what’s gonna, I think it’s gonna increase your profitability, ’cause you’re gonna be able to do more with less, and you’re gonna be able to move faster

Mike: Yeah. And that, that moving faster is more important than it’s ever been, and will continue to be more important. So back to these characteristics of a, of an agile company. We talked about timely decisions. We talked about beating the competition to, to response. We talked about innovation. What- let’s talk about a few more.

What else is important?

Jaime: Risk. Risk tolerance. Part of being agile is having an agreed upon risk tolerance in the business, and every business is different. So you can’t all have… Even your competition has a different risk tolerance than you. A founder-led business versus a PE-backed business is gonna have a different risk tolerance.

But knowing what it is, the number of leadership teams when I bring up, and I speak about this a lot, right? To CEO, round tables. When I bring up the word risk, very rarely is that a word that comes up regularly in their leadership team, and that’s concerning to me because it’s seen as a negative, and I see it as a proactive, positive thing.

When we make this decision, what risks are we naturally introducing or mitigating, right? One or the other, but you’re… It’s always something, and I don’t think we have a healthy enough relationship with risk as leaders. It’s not a bad thing. It’s information, and most of us are going to get passed by competition if our risk tolerance is not set at the appropriate level.

Mike: And tell me if you agree with where I’m taking this. When I look at this and also bring together what we just talked about ar- around decision-making and innovation and using AI is, to me, as the velocity of what we do just keeps getting, keeps increasing, to me, if we are not willing to take risks, I think we’re dead in the water.

To me, when you talk about, uh, 20 years ago, it may have been okay to kinda just, from year to year do business the way we did last year, we’re gonna make some improvements. Things were changing then too, but not so fast. But these days it seems to me like we have got to make fast decisions, fail fast, learn from it, make another decision.

there will probably be a lot of failures, but as long as we’re failing fast and learning from it, I don’t know if there’s another alternative these days to say, “Well, no, we can’t take risk. We can’t fail.” Well, then you’re not gonna try new things and I think you’re really handicapping yourself as a company

Jaime: and we see this, right? and you probably do too, in traditional industries. Like we love, we do a lot of work in construction and manufacturing, very traditional industries that are like kinda, can kinda be sleepy, s- right? Sometimes resting on their laurels. they’re smart and they’re good at what they do, but I just look around and go, “They don’t even see these other things coming,” because they don’t have an operating framework in the business that brings risk to the forefront.

They just assume, “We’re gonna take as minimal risk as possible.” They might still be saying they’re taking risk, they’re just not managing it, and there’s a difference between taking it and talking about it. So most of the leaders are not talking about when we make this decision, we are inherently taking risk.

What are we going to do to mitigate that risk? Not eliminate it. every day we get in our car and drive, it’s a risk. Most people don’t think about it that way, but it is. We’re accepting the risk, and we do things to mitigate anything happening. Most organizations do not think about risk in that same way, and they’re, it’s just not part of the nomenclature of their leadership team, and I think it needs to be

Mike: Where else do we need to be agile?

Jaime: We need to be more agile in our talent development . So this is– this could be a soapbox. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna try to not get way off on my soapbox here. we talk a lot about thinking differently about the capabilities of the future and not just the org chart, right? The hierarchical view of the org chart.

We’re seeing organizations that are having to do three-year capability mapping, and AI is a big piece of this, but there’s also other factors at play when you look at the next generation of employees, right? The ones coming out of college now. They have a different skill set. Yes, we can stereotype them.

I have four Gen Z kids, so I have a PhD in Gen Z that I did not ask for. but they have capabilities that we are not maximizing, and I just see profitability, right, when we’re not maximizing the capabilities they bring because it doesn’t fit into a traditional org structure. And so when we think about talent development, I’ll give you an example that we hear all the time from some old people like us, right?

These Gen Zs, they’re bored, and they want a promotion six months into, getting the job. And okay, that’s what they’re saying. So, so I, around my dining room table, have these conversations with Gen Z kids, and I say, “What is actually happening when you say that? What do you really mean?” And they mean they’re bored.

Bored out of their minds because science has proven their brains have actually been altered by technology. So go out and do the research. Science has proven the synapses, they’re– they have more processing power, most of them, in their brains than we do because technology has evolved their brains. They can adapt faster, flip between screens, do work in a different way, and they get into traditional businesses where some of us aren’t even using technology the way we should have been ten years ago, right?

Manufacturing plants that are still using Excel spreadsheets, right, to run their company, and these technologically advanced humans are coming in and going, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I’m gonna take ten steps back and start using Excel spreadsheets when I’ve, in college, have used more advanced technology than what some of these companies have.

We don’t know how to develop these leaders, and we certainly don’t know how to maximize their potential, uh, for profitable growth in our businesses.

Mike: So what should we be doing with those folks?

Jaime: We should be creating lateral career development paths. And what I mean by that is giving them challenges in different parts of the organization, at least the high potential ones, right? Not everyone, but the high pos at that level to keep them at our business and to benefit our business the most. the traditional career ladder, right, that goes like this, the career ladder should look like this for this next generation.

There should be lateral moves for them to get a more well-rounded view of the business, sit in that seat for a year, 18 months, and then move them to another part of the business. Keep them… It doesn’t mean more money, because a lot of that could be lateral moves. And when I talk to my four, they’re like, “That’s what we want.”

But in the nomenclature, all we know is to say we want a promotion because we don’t wanna be bored. So that whole lateral is the new up is kind of a different way that I think business leaders need to be thinking about this next generation and how can you utilize their strengths.

Mike: I wanna keep us going on the talent development piece of this ’cause so near and dear to my heart. It’s so much of what I focus on.

When we, Jamie, initially talked when we decided to do the podcast and we were kinda getting to know each other, you talked about, uh, leadership activation and the idea of, you know, of how great leaders, how we need to build the skills of great leaders.

Talk a little bit more about what that needs and how we ought to be building our own skills or helping leaders build the skills they need two and three years from now.

Jaime: Yeah. And it’s about activating some of the skills they already have, but creating an environment. So again, back to an operating model, right? A model that sits around the leader that creates some accountability, some natural accountability for them to actually activate the skills. So here’s a perfect example.

Fora long time, at least here in our market, crucial conversations or having difficult conversations was a big training. There must’ve been a new person in town, and they were promoting it everywhere. So a bunch of our clients sent leaders to this crucial conversations course. So what do you think happens if you send a leader in March to a crucial conversations when- and then your performance reviews happen in November or December?

what happens with everything they learned in that class?

Mike: I think it, it depends if it’s being modeled by folks above them, but they,

Jaime: Or if there’s any

Mike: they- typically they learn a lot in the class and then they go back to work and they, six months later they forget everything they learned

Jaime: 100%. So it’s the muscle memory I go back to. So the leadership development programs of the past give us knowledge, give us skills, but they don’t activate the skills. So we assume the company’s gonna activate them, right? I send you to a conference and spend thousands and thousands of dollars, and you come back.

How often do I say, “What did you learn? What do we need to incorporate here? How are you gonna keep learning this?” Right? We’re just like, “Great, Bob’s back from his, boondoggle at the, that fancy conference in Vegas.” We don’t do anything with it. And so then eventually we’re like, “Well, leadership development, we tried that.”

Right? “We don’t need to send our leaders to more development.” It’s because it doesn’t have an activation component. So to any leader listening that has a development program, is thinking about creating one, do not hire a partner, build it yourself, unless there are activation components. Activation components can look like true role play with the leader when you come back.

It can look like cohorts, right? We… All of our leadership development programs have cohorts that we don’t facilitate, we allow them to self-facilitate, but we give them the structure for the cohort. So we say, “Between training one and training two, you’re gonna meet three times as a cohort, a smaller group, and talk about how you’re using these skills and hold each other accountable and help each other learn.”

Right? Most leadership development programs are just give you the knowledge and then walk away, and that, I agree with leaders, that doesn’t have a return on investment. And one thing that’s re- that really usually resonates for leaders is I have a really great friend of mine who is a tight end, Super Bowl champion tight end.

and he’s now crossed over, works in corporate, does some work with us, and he talks about the parallels between the football field or, their kind of the whole system around a Super Bowl champion team, and the boardroom. And he said, “If you think about it, in football, in the NFL, we practice 98% of the time to perform for 2% of the time.”

In the corporate environment, leaders perform for 98% of the time, and they get 2%, if they’re lucky, to practice. Think about that for a minute. We’re trying to win Super Bowls, and we’re putting all the emphasis on practice. Corporate, we don’t do that. We do that… don’t do that in our organizations. We throw a leader who’s never been a leader before into the deep end with little to no training and just hope they can be a good leader.

We’re setting them up for failure, and then the leaders are not happy, the employees that report to them are not happy, and the organization’s not growing

Mike: here’s the other thing I’ve seen that I’d love your thoughts on is folks sending folks to training, leadership development. and let’s assume it’s a great core. I’m not talking about the crappy ones. Send them off to leadership development. They’re learning some great stuff. They’re role-playing.

They’re doing all this stuff. and God, back about 20 years ago, most, a lot of what I did was leadership development, and I would go work with, “Oh, you gotta work with our middle managers. They need to be better leaders,” right? You know where I’m going. And then I work with the middle managers, and I help them, and I’m coaching them, and they’re, they’re smart people and they’ve got great potential.

But then they go back to work, and they got a whole bunch of leaders that are not modeling what they just learned because those senior leaders have never really learned how to be great leaders. They’re too busy, quote unquote, “getting stuff done” to effectively coach their people or have the right one-on-one conversations or model how to have a difficult conversation.

So people get this amazing leadership development, but then they go back to work. It’s not modeled. It’s not rewarded. They’re not held accountable for it. And at some point, all that stuff gets stale, and it, the return on investment never happens

Jaime: And your best performers at that middle management level don’t actually stay to make it to the next level, which is a very expensive issue as well Right

Mike: best people. If they don’t grow with you, they’re gonna grow with somebody else, right?

Jaime: Absolutely. Absolutely. So a- again, this isn’t all kinda doom and gloom, but it is w- I do believe we’re at a little bit of a reckoning. Uh, uh, the younger generations in the workforce coming into the workforce do not have the same patience for poor leadership. I speak on college campuses, right? And I have brilliant, top of the top in the business school people that come up to me after I speak and say “I’m terrified to go out into the working world.”

And I’m… I, like every company should want one of these people, right? These are the… And they’re like, “All I hear about is crappy leaders and people that don’t care about their people, that don’t wanna develop their people and don’t…” my kids are not excited to start working. They should be, right?

They should be. In today’s day, they should be excited about bringing their skillset to the working world, and they’re not. They’re terrified of it, and that is going to cost all of our businesses more than any other issue that we’re dealing with right now in terms of performance and profitability

Mike: Yeah, and it’s all too easy for a leader to say, you know, “These kids today that, Bob, they want this and they don’t wanna do

and they don’t wanna work hard, and they…” But these are, as you said, not only really talented folks, it’s like you have no choice.

these are the folk- you better figure out a way to work with them

Jaime: it’s not… to look at it like a competition, like we’re right and they’re wrong, is… So I’ll give you a perfect example.

So we do, these kind of organizational health assessments, and we’re working with a national engineering firm. And so we do a survey, and then we dig into the survey, and we do focus groups with different cross-sections of the organization to really dig in and say, “The survey’s just a data point.

what’s actually going on? What can we start to fix? what are the root causes?” And we had a 26-year-old engineer that came to one of my facilitators and on a break and said, “Can I get your advice on something?” He said, “I’m new to the group. I’m low man on the totem pole, and we have this regulatory reporting that we have to do every week that takes six hours.

I get it. They gave it to me. I get why.” He said, “Except I figured out how to automate it, and I- I’m getting it done in 30 minutes, and I don’t know how to tell anybody.” And so some leaders would hear that and think he doesn’t wanna tell anybody ’cause he doesn’t want more work ’cause he’s lazy. What’s actually happening is he doesn’t have enough psychological safety with his boss ’cause he knows his boss is gonna say, “There’s no way it’s right.

There’s no way you can automate that in 30 minutes ’cause we’ve done it for six hours. It’s taken six hours for a decade. There’s no way you can do that.” And what’s happening in that organization is missed profitability moments. Because what they should do with that young engineer, understanding he has a superpower, is send him to every corner of the organization and say, “Go make them more efficient, and go make them more efficient.”

That engineer will never leave ’cause he’s living into his superpowers every day, and the company will be more profitable. Isn’t that what we want? But we, as leaders, are not doing that in most organizations. We’re not understanding the superpowers. We’re just looking at them as weird animals at the zoo that we have to deal with, and that is the biggest gap.

If we don’t start to understand the superpowers of this next generation, we will be the reason our organizations don’t grow profitably

Mike: I love that. I love that. And we wonder why, Gallup comes out every year with a new horrible employee engagement score. It’s do we really need to see those scores again this year? yes, they’re bad every year, and every year it’s I do not have a best friend at work.

Exactly.

Exactly. But, uh, yeah, so, so important. S

o, so much good stuff, and I’m sure we didn’t get through half of those different characteristics of, uh, of an agile company, but, tell me a little bit more about what Keystone Group International does and the types of clients you work with.

Jaime: Yeah. We, in a nutshell, we help execute on your strategy. We help you create the environment where you can execute on the your chosen strategy. Now, we need to make sure the strategy’s the right strategy. Where should we be playing? How do we win and not just compete? And then we help you, your team translate that into execution, putting the right operating models, putting the right things in place to ensure you can, as much as possible, right, maximize that strategic plan that you have.

That’s where most organizations fall short. They don’t know how to translate it through the organization, and they don’t actually know how to put the guardrails in place to allow the execution to happen at the pace it needs to happen. So that’s where we come in. There’s a lot of different pieces to that.

I really mean I’ll provide the strategic agility assessment if you wanna put that in the show notes, ’cause it’s free for someone to just go… If nothing else, take it yourself, take it with your leadership team, and have a totally different conversation than you would have without doing it. I

Mike: Is there, we’ll put it in the show notes, but is there a website for that you wanna give out right now and then we’ll put it in the show notes too?

Jaime: no, because it’s like behind the scenes on our website. We usually just give it to clients.

So I’ll get you… Yeah, so we don’t link it directly off our website. It’s kind of a behind the scenes thing. but we should be at this point because it’s such a valuable conversation with organizations on how do we overcome this slow to respond, right, inefficient approach that we’re trying to take in a really uncertain market

Mike: Beautiful. And your work with clients, is it more project work or do you do kind of ongoing work with clients kind of quarter after quarter?

Jaime: Most work starts as project work because we wanna understand them, they wanna understand us. We wanna make sure, right, that we’re clear on the value on both sides. and then it typically turns into some kind of a regular cadence, whether retainer or kinda quarterly cadence with them. But,the big thing with us is, we’re always gonna be a boutique firm, so not everyone’s a client for us, right?

They have to be ready to grow, at the precipice growing really quickly, where the wheels are getting wobbly, and we’re able to kinda come in and help. but they also have to be willing to change. So if you’re not, uh, here’s what I’d just keep doing what you’re doing, and I will hope that it’s gonna work for you.

If you are, let’s have a conversation

Mike: That’s my favorite question when people, “I’m doing this.” I’m like, “Well, how’s that working for you?” And if it’s working great, keep doing it. But if it’s not , you know,you may wanna think about doing something different. H

ey, before, before we wrap this thing up, you mentioned to me that you just climbed Kilimanjaro,

Jaime: Well, it’s been three years.

Mike: Oh, three years. Oh, I thought it was… Well, all right. So that’s still… Hey, uh, I’m

Jaime: How long do I get to claim

Mike: I’ve barely, I’m barely walking up a big hill. So, but what drove you to do that, and what was that like? I gotta ask you before we wrap up

Jaime: So yeah, no, this is, it’s a good story. I’ll try to keep it short. So I would love to tell you that it’s this like beautiful like Hallmark movie story, but the reason I ended up climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was because I had the worst year of my entire career as a leader in 2022. I made some pretty big mistakes in the business, hired the wrong people.

and I got to fall of 2022, and I was like, “I need to change. I– the business needs to change, but I have to change first as a founder and as a leader.” And so I went to my bucket list and said, “What’s the thing that scares me the most on this list?” And it was Kilimanjaro. And so without telling anyone, including my spouse, I signed up to travel for two weeks by myself to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and then I told everybody after I’d already signed up and paid for it.

So it’s not a beautiful story, but it is a beautiful story on what I learned about myself and what I learned about the world. I actually have a keynote where I specifically talk about the climb to success and what the les- what the mountain taught me about leadership. but it wasn’t this beautiful Hallmark story getting there.

Mike: what was, without doing the whole keynote, what although that could be fun too, what was,if you could grab, one lesson from that, that you learned, what would that one lesson be that you’d wanna impart to our listeners?

Jaime: so I, I have a quote that I use at the keynote that kind of came to me on the climb, but we all climb mountains. I use the mountain analogy. Whether it’s Kilimanjaro or it’s major things happening in our business, right? or a health issue in our lives. The mountains we climb, it’s all about our perspective on them.

So I always say, “You don’t climb a mountain, mountain, whatever that is, for the world to see you. You climb a mountain so you can see yourself and the world differently.” And I think if more leaders realize the challenges we’re going through are there so we can see ourselves and the world around us in a new light, I think we’d think…

we’d recategorize the challenges that are in front of us. Most of us aren’t healthy enough to do that, and that’s the… That I’m still on that, kind of journey, is how do I maintain my health, my mental health, my decision health, right? That capability so that I can continue to climb the mountain, ’cause my team needs me to do that

Mike: Beautiful. Beautiful kind of last message for us.

Where should people go if they wanna find out more about Keystone Group International or more about

you?

Jaime: yeah. I’m really active on LinkedIn. Jamie Taets and I am really intentional about the content I put out, that I try to put out this type of content, things we’re talking about here, not just the noise of, regular leadership stuff. I try to kinda bring a different voice. Keystone Group Int’l, short for international, has got all of our information.

In fact, the blog around this topic I was just talking about decision speed and ability to make decisions, is out there. again, we’re very intentional about the content that we put out to help put words to some of the things that leaders are dealing with

Mike: Well, I always say if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. all the stuff we talked about today, becoming a more agile organization, decision rights, decision speed, uh, so important. So Jamie, thanks for helping us get there today

Jaime: Thanks for having me

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