Skot Waldron:
Hi, welcome to another episode of Unlocked. I am Skot. Today we're going to talk about unlocking the potential of people. Specifically through curiosity, not critique, right? Moving from critique to curiosity. How do we do that? How do we build that into our organizations? How do we build that into us as leaders and just to us as people in general? So I've got Michael McCord on the hall today. Michael is not only a super smart guy that has some brilliant insights about this very topic, but he is also a good friend of mine. We talked about this a couple weeks ago in his kitchen and I was like, "Hmm, that'd be an awesome topic for my audience. You should be on the show." And he said, "Okay, let's do it." So that's what we did. Super, super fun interviewing Michael. And I'm looking forward to sharing that with you.
So first of all, he received his Bachelor of Arts from Mercer University and a Master of Divinity from Emory University. Recently, and I've experienced this over the past several years of seeing him in and out of writing papers constantly. He just received his Doctorate from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, where he studied multi-generational leadership. So we go into that topic a little bit in this interview. So listen for those pieces of insights when we talk about multi-generational leadership. I know a lot of you are dealing with that inside out of your organizations. One way to help with that is moving from critique to curiosity. You're ready? Here we go. Mr. Michael, or should I say, Dr. Michael? Because I love calling you that from across the street.
Michael McCord:
That's right, that's right. Dr. Neighbor, I appreciate that too.
SKOT WALDRON:
Dr. Neighbor. Yes, I got to pick that one up as well.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That's right.
SKOT WALDRON:
So this is fun, Christy, my wife was like, "So is Michael coming over to do this interview? Or are you doing it on Zoom?" I was like, "On Zoom." It's like 50 feet is way too far to walk for this.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That's true. It's true, I wouldn't want to be in the same room.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, definitely.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
We need a road to keep us civil.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yes we do. Yes we do.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
A road and an HOA that's [crosstalk 00:03:17]
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh, yes exactly. In a county line, the county line.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Sure, don't forget the county line.
SKOT WALDRON:
Well, hey, this is really cool. I wanted to, we've had multiple discussions together over the course of us knowing each other. But as we've spoken more, and I guess this was a couple weekends ago we were talking about this idea of critique versus curiosity and asking questions and leading organizations and fundamental issues within organizations and whatnot. So all this stuff came out and I was like, "Oh my gosh, that'd be awesome to talk to you about." You've done a lot of this research and development within organizations. You developed Foundry, which is a newer creative group inside of what you've been doing. And so let's talk about that. Let's talk about why you created Foundry, and the fundamental things that you were addressing as you've evolved into where your current role?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Yeah, so I've spent better part of 22 years working inside the United Methodist church, specifically in the area of higher education ministry. So I work in this weird space between the institutional church, denominationalism, and the institutional educational systems, right? And so these two big institutions, they're historic, they're big parts of our culture in the U.S. and they also have significant challenges facing both of them across the board. Seismic kind of challenges. And so I've spent my career in that area and have discovered along the way that one of the challenges these organizations face is the ability to change. Because they're so large and they're so convoluted and they have so many layers of polity or organizational structure that it's really difficult to change. And the thing too about organizations it's really old institutions is that they just kind of, they got this momentum about them.
And so I went on to study this idea of continuous improvement. This idea, how do you help organizations identify ways to continuously improve what they're doing, in hopes that I could take some of this academic work that I've done and insert it into these world of institutionalism? How do we help institutions develop ways of improving? And interestingly, continuous improvement really comes out of the nursing and the medical field. So how do I help hospitals, another major institution in our country. How do you help hospitals change? And practices within the head of medical field change? And then it seeped over into primary education and secondary education. And so now I'm thinking, how do we move this idea into the world of education and denominationalism. And so over the pandemic we had ... I lead an organization called the Commission on Higher Education, and we support over a 100 ministries across higher education organizations across the country.
And during the pandemic we found ourselves with inability to travel and we had a lot more time to be together. And so a group of us decided we'd launched Foundry Creative. And it's our consulting arm, our creative design firm that helps organizations who are interested in being better and making substantive change there in their life. And using these sort of principles of continuous improvement, user-centered design. How do we help organizations understand who they are, who they want to be, and what things are happening around it? And so one of the phrases that you picked up is this move from critique to curiosity. And that really has been a fundamental piece for us, because I work with a lot of creatives. I myself, I wouldn't say myself as a creative, I'm more of a strategist at practice. But I work with these young adult creatives who take everything and kind of flip it all on their sides and ask questions.
And they're really curious by their very nature. As we go into institutions and any organization too, nonprofits, church organizations, small businesses, those can [inaudible 00:07:42], people are very critical of themselves. You go into any college anywhere in America, and they, the faculty, the staff, the administrators, the trustees are all going to be highly critical at that institution. All of its failings, all of its trappings, all the problems. And what often limits it from being able to make substantive change, is it stays in the form of critique. And what we really want to do is how do we help an organization like that become more curious about what's really happening? And curiosity is sort of like a very close cousin to critique. It has that same, something here is worth understanding better. The difference is, critique often lands with just, this isn't right.
Curiosity is, I like to understand exactly why this is happening. And I'm not quite sure, I don't really like that this is happening, but I like to understand why. And so you start to look at data, you start to ask people who experience that challenge firsthand, what we call end users. And you start flipping it on its side and looking at it. And what we found in these organizations, we worked with some very large organizations who were really skeptical of this approach, who were really skeptical of data. They don't want to know what people are thinking. They don't want to know what they're saying or what they're feeling. But all of a sudden when you start collecting survey data and you're doing focus groups, and you're asking questions and you're meeting with one on one with people who experiencing the problem, all of a sudden, even the leadership began to get more and more curious.
And it's in the middle of that curiosity and that discovery stage that solutions start to pop up, potential solutions that can address the challenges at hand. Where if we only stay at a critique level, if we're only just saying, "This isn't good," then much harder to get to a creative solution, because you're just up against what's wrong. And so I think that's what's really been important for us in our practice.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's brilliant. I mean, the thought of, how long are we just going to focus on that? And in training teams and training leaders, I teach a principal called communication code. And one of those, there's five of them. One of them is critique. So we transmit critique or we receive critique. And that is just part of life. There are about a third to about a half, it's somewhere in there, of the population, that is a very natural communication code for them. They're really good at just offering critique. You come to me, first thing I'm going to do is bust out some critique. Because I'm just really good at it. I'm always trying to help you be better. I want to make everything better. In order to make things better I got to critique. And I just got to sit on it and critique and critique and critique.
But what we find is that when we ask, so a lot of people feel like they're good at it. We say, "Hey, what are you good at?" And they say, "Oh, I'm really great at critique. I'm really great at critique, asking questions. I'm really good at critique." And then when we say, "Okay, what do you want to receive from people? What's the most important communication code you want to receive from people?" And generally in general, it's clarity. It's not critique. A lot of people give critique, do not want critique in return. They want clarity in return, but they don't want it in return. So I think that's an interesting thing to look at too. Is how often do we sit in this bubble of critique like you're saying? And we're really good at from the top of just throwing out why everything's wrong. Why this is wrong, why that person can't do their job right. And why our organization sucks, and why the competition's doing better than us. But we also don't accept the critique back very well, which also causes issues, right?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Absolutely, absolutely. And that's why I think, it's funny. Like I got my car serviced and I know you've experienced this. When you finish getting your car serviced, they're like, "We're going to send you a survey and all fives are the only acceptable response." If you can't put all fives or all 10, whatever their metric is, their scale. They said, "Please call me before you put anything lower than that." And I find it fascinating it's because, they had these internal competitions.
SKOT WALDRON:
Whoa wait. They asked you to call them if you wanted to put lower than five?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Yeah, that's right. So scale of one to five, service five being the best and one being the worst. And they literally said, "Before you put anything lower than a five, you call me, because this is important." And which actually I think is probably maybe one of the more genuine responses than putting all the pressure on me and saying ... I've had some, they'll say, "If you don't put anything, we're going to get in trouble. Or we don't get paid as much, or we won't win this award." Like they put this [inaudible 00:12:43]. What's interesting about that is that we take those social cues. And so we'll get that survey. And the 10% of people who fill out that actual survey are going to that pressure to say, "Okay, well, five is all I can give." And that's fine for winning an award, but you can't get it better.
If you don't get authentic real data that helps you understand the system, there's no way for you to improve it. But I think we've created that, the only right answer in the corporation is, "We are the best." Anything less than that is no good. But it's in the less than that where you really find out what's happening. And that's the clarity that you're looking for.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. Oh, sorry, Michael. I was going to say something on top of that.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Go ahead.
SKOT WALDRON:
On top of that, because I think that I just got done reading Simon Sinek's book about Infinite Mindset, and that principle of we've got to be the best. We got to be number one, we've got to win this quarter. We got to win this week. We got to, the monthly sales or our target, we got to get all these cars off the lot this month, is a very finite mindset. It's, "If I didn't win, I lost." And I've got to be the best, but the thing is, is that you don't win at the game of business. Nobody wins business. Nobody wins the game.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
It's not Monopoly.
SKOT WALDRON:
It's, not. You don't win it. And the thing is they get to this mindset of, "I've got to win, I got to win, I got to win." But what you're talking out is ... And if you don't have all fives, then you lost.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
SKOT WALDRON:
But the thing you're saying is that, and the idea of infinite, the infinite game, the infinite mindset is that, "How can I be better?" Better means continual improvement all the time. Doesn't mean I'm the best. Maybe I am the best or whatever, that doesn't matter, because that's a finite mindset. An infinite mindset means I'm always getting better.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That's right, exactly. And then let's take that same scenario. Let's say that we had a more genuine continuous improvement cycle with this car dealership that I got my car serviced at. And they said, "You know what? We take your feedback really seriously. We want to be better at what we do. We're continuously looking for ways to improve your experience. So if you respond to this and be really honest and truthful with us, it will help us be a better company." What I think will happen is you're going to get more real responses that are better actionable, that are informative, that are clarifying. And you'll also probably get a higher return rate as opposed to just five's the only way you win or lose. And it feels trite. I mean, I feel just like, anytime you fill out a survey after anything, you're just feel like, "Oh gosh, I don't know that they actually do anything with it."
But if you actually see change and you see response, then it really values the consumer. And it gives me all of a sudden, I feel like I bought into, I'm part of this dealership's ethos. Part of their culture. I'm changing their culture. And that puts me in a place of ownership inside of that dealership. And I'm going to have a lot more loyalty to it than if I just have to give all fives.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's interesting. Now I would like to think about too, the motivations behind that person asking that of you. And I know that you kind of alluded to the out a little bit. It's like, "Oh we won't get our bonus this month." Or something will happen some consequence. So their motivations are fear based, right? They're based on fear, manipulation from a boss, from corporate, from the owner of that dealership, whatever, is leading, communicating fear manipulation. If this doesn't happen, there's this consequence. And if we aren't the best, I'm going to critique it and say, "You're doing your job wrong by asking for this in the wrong way." It's when we get to that point of fear-based leadership, it's all everybody else, right? It's I'm not humble, secure, and confident anymore. Now I'm arrogant resistant, and prideful.
Those things put up those walls. And I'm also not going to ask you questions. When you get into the curiosity part, I'm not going to be curious about your solution, because I'm just going to lead from my side of fear manipulation, which means, "Just get this done. I don't really care what you have to say. Just do what I said."
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That's right. And it permeates the entire system. So me as the consumer, as the end user of the experience. I feel like, oh, I only have one response. Which means they don't really care. That's what they're telling me. In essence they're saying, "I don't really care. As long as it's a five, we're not going to do anything with it." The service provider, who's the gateway, who's the other end user, is on the side of the corporate knows this retribution cycle. So, that creates a system where they only can give binary answers. This was good or bad. This was right or wrong. This is the best or the worst. And so they're not operating as a frontline employee with a mindset of curiosity. They're not looking for ways to improve, but the best way to improve the dealership experience is through that person. He lives it, or she lives at every single day.
And she knows what needs to be improved and how we could move cars along faster, how we can help consumers feel more connected. They understand that better than some CEO or some customer service, vice president and some corporate office. But because the system is designed to get a right or wrong answer, there's no open space. There's no curiosity there, there's no searching for a way to continually improve the organization. And so it doesn't, by its nature it doesn't. And so when that person, that's why the turnover rate in those front end users is really high among dealerships. Because I think in a lot of ways, there's no sense of ownership. They're just a front line for complaints, honestly. I mean, you get there because your car is broken and it's either bad news or worse news. It's not like, "Oh actually you just need gas." That's all it was, you know?
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh, look at that. Your tire valve cap came off and we just fixed it.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Listen, we did it for free. It's no big deal. We got it covered.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, that would be nice. That doesn't happen. It's usually, "Oh, we found this problem and that problem and this problem and that problem." How many of us have driven in? Done anything, getting your oil change at Express Lube or whatever. And they come out, the dealership, whatever. And they're like this four page document of tiny eight point type of all the things you've got wrong with your car that you need to fix.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That is exactly, this exact occasion. It was my air conditioner. This is a car with 20-something thousand miles on it. And the air conditioner was out. They had to replace the air condition unit. And then they're like, "Oh, by the way, your rear brakes are gone." I'm like, "It only has 25,000 miles on it. How are the rear brakes?" "Oh, sometimes they just get stuck." And I'm like ...
SKOT WALDRON:
Your breaks have been stuck. Is that why you screech ... Screeching down the street? Was that you?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That was me. Yeah, yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh my gosh. That's crazy.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Goodness.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. So we've totally bashed dealership industry, so cool. That's been great, or talked about how we can improve them. Now, how do we transition this into organizations? So let's talk about your background, coming from where you've come from and why you feel that internal problem solving is so much better than external problem solving? So what's the trend you've seen with organizations, corporations, and then where you feel they need to go?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Well, I mean, I think there's an increased awareness, at least among some of the people that we work with, that things aren't well. And I think the pressure right now is on retaining staff. And so culture has become a really big driving factor for a lot of organizations, institutions, same with colleges, universities, even the churches I work with. Retaining and keeping employees engaged in the work has become increasingly difficult. And so the pressure of the economic system that we're under after COVID and all the upheaval that we've experienced the last couple years. I think that companies are much more aware of the challenges confronting their culture, that's keeping good people there. And money's not enough, it turns out. The McDonald's right by us, I think is paying $15 an hour and they still can't fill positions. Money's not enough. It's about people are looking for culture. They're looking for the belonging. They're looking for connection. They're looking for meaningfulness in their work.
These are a lot of the critiques incidentally, I spent my life working with college age students. And those are critiques they have of millennials and gen Z. So they're too idealistic. They want to work in a place that they actually enjoy.
SKOT WALDRON:
Dang, how dare they, how dare they want that?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
They're entitled. They're just entitled. And so I think there is an increased interest in especial smaller businesses and who are really struggling with this front end, this whole personnel retention and creating culture. I think there is an increased interest in that. How do we do that? And I think most companies stop. Again the critique is, "We don't have a good culture if people aren't staying." But they don't know how to get past that. Because they really don't know how to understand how to get data, how to interpret that data, and how to act on that data. And so what we've worked on is to try to work with organizations to do anonymous data gatherings. So through you can use all kinds of survey tools that you use to get that sort of anonymous. But we found too that you can't just take anonymous data and act on it, because it doesn't make sense to you.
I think one of the really important sort of theoretical frameworks from which we operate is this idea of sense making. What we try to do is help the organization make sense of the data they get. And so if you get just surveyed and you have a lot of Likert scale, one to five scale ratings, and you're like, "Okay, okay, okay. So we have a problem with this." But you don't actually understand it. So then we take it to the level of focus groups. Help us understand with a group of end users, a mixed group of end users. So it could be in the case of the auto industry you could have the service provider, the service provider and the customer, the consumer, and they say, "Okay, it says that we're really low on communication with the person while the car's being worked on. What can we do to address that?"
So first you understand it. What do you mean by that communication? What would you like? What currently exists? And so I think our approach is, so we get this data, then we try to make sense of the data in small groups. And then we use that, and in that experience, we often find solutions emerging. Creative ideas emerge. And more than that, what you create is that culture of curiosity, because now those people who are in that focused group, all of a sudden they're asking questions they never asked before, because they didn't know they could ask them. And then when they go back into their place of work, they're starting to look. They begin looking for ways to improve things.
And because if you ever, if you take a frontline worker and you ask them, "How can we make your life better?How can we improve this system?" And then you actually do something with it, the kind of loyalty that you create, the shift in culture you create when you do that is better than any consultant or any advertising you can do. Because then that's going to feed, that frontline worker is going to feed that same energy and buy-in to the customer who walks in the door, because they feel like they own this place. They listen to me, and you don't even have to pay them any more. You should pay them well.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, right.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
It's not about ... You could pay them $10,000 more and they'll just bump as soon as someone else gives another signing bonus.
SKOT WALDRON:
Right. Right. And that's what I think that is a difference between some of that industrial age thinking versus digital age thinking, and the generations that are happening. So you did a lot of work in that through getting your doctorate and understanding that multi-generational gap. And bring that into this conversation, because I'm interested. What do you think is the ... How does that play out, this world of curiosity versus critique? How does it play out with multi-generations?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Well, that's probably the richest environment in the workplace right now because of the smash of generations. So it's a sort of called, it's under the kind of the bigger guys of generational, what we call generational intelligence. It's understanding and having an understanding of different generations. And nursing industry is particularly robust, because that area tends to have a lot of old timers. People who've been in the profession a long time, nurses tend to stay long in their profession. They love it. They tend to be called to it and they can work into their 70s or more. I know some even in their late 70s, so they could keep practicing their art and their work. But then you also have 20-somethings who are coming on the other end pretty quickly. And then you then of course, you've got the 30, 40, you get the middle aged and you've got the later middle aged.
So you may have four or five generations of nurses all working in one environment together. But the thing is that they are miles apart. I mean, you've got grandmother on one side and you've got just out of college on the other side who may just have an associate's degree. So maybe just two years out of high school. And they're trying to work together as a team. And kind of alluding to some of the conversation you had before, we have this really binary society. We have this very judgemental, right or wrong, good or bad kind of society. And so what we find is that young people will often look at okay boomers and say, "God, they're so trite, they got us into all this. It's their fault that [inaudible 00:27:43]." So just all this massive lumping of blame that we put on the boomers. Some of it rightfully so, I'm not going to argue. All of our generations have our crosses to bear so to speak.
But then at the flip side, those boomers are looking at the millennials and the gen Zs and saying, "Oh, they're so entitled. They want to have weekends off. They value their time with their family. They want to have a job that's meaningful." So everyone's lumping this weight of guilt and brokenness on each other. And so it creates animosity in the workplace. And so the work that I do is around this idea of something we call intergroup contact theory. Where we intentionally put people from different groups into working teams around critical issues facing the organization. So go back to nursing and say, "Infection rates are always a big challenge in the hospital setting. How do you reduce infection rates, crossover and contamination and that sort of stuff." And so if you had a particular issue on one floor around infectious rates are high on this one floor, then you would pull some of your senior nurses, some of your junior nurses and some of the middle nurses. Plus you might also bring in housekeeping services, because they have a whole different perspective. You might bring in some of the physicians, director of nursing.
You put this team together and you give them a critical issue to face. You give them all equal footing. You give them the resources to do it and you let their minds be creative and curious about how to improve infectious rates on the seventh floor. And what we find happens then is, not all only do they come up with really critical solutions, potential solutions to a critical problem. They also begin to build respect for each other. They develop trust, they share each other's stories. They realize that there's more in common between a 70-year-old and a 20-year-old than you even thought there could be, because they're both facing seismic life changes.
And so they build this kind of rapport among each other and they're solving a third problem. It's not that ... We're in a room to solve this generational problem. We're in this room with multiple generations trying to solve a critical problem, and we have the resources and the power to do it. And we come up with solutions that actually might work and we build relationships. So I think that's across all industries, higher education is ripe with the same challenges. Any workplace that has young people coming and you still have retained employees, there's a lot of division between those groups.
SKOT WALDRON:
That just made you sound really smart.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Right? If you throw some theory names out there.
SKOT WALDRON:
You do. We have this theory called that. No, that's really cool. I mean, I love that. To think about, because then the reason why I brought it up now is because I've been speaking a lot with some construction industry leaders inside the organization. Some are billion dollar companies and some are smaller than that. But no matter what, you're finding it very much so in that construction industry, engineering you'll find it a lot too. Manufacturing you'll find it, where you've got these people that have worked their way up through these companies. I went into this one company said, "The average tenure of somebody at our company's 30 years." I was like, "The average is 30 years? That's insane." Well, number one-
MICHAEL MCCORD:
They all started the company 60 years ago.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's right. They all did. They're all still there. But I sit there and go, "Holy Molly, number one. That's pretty amazing retention on your part. You're doing something right. Number two, you got a huge problem." Because you've got all these people that have come through the organization and now they're hiring younger people come out of school, interns that come there that they want to stay, and take on. And then you've got kind of these people that have been there for a few years that are ready to move into more managerial positions. You've got the old timers that have been there forever that love the company, that maybe started the company, they're retiring now. They're just getting ready to move on. They want to pass the reins and know that it's going to be taken care of. So you've got this multi-generational thing and the older generations are coming to me going, "How do we keep them? How do we instill in them a work ethic? How do we instill in them the importance of what it means to do your job and be reliable?"
And you know that, I'm giving you a job, be grateful. In this environment I'm giving you a great job. You have a place at the table. And like you're saying, the priorities may just be different. Maybe they're asking the wrong questions. Maybe those leaders are saying, they're not curious enough because they think, "Well, for me it was all, go to work, clock in, clock out, get a paycheck. I'm good. I'm grateful, that's awesome." But now it's, "Yeah, I kind of don't really like, that's great you're going to pay me that. Oh, you're giving me health insurance? Okay, that's cool too." But what are you doing to actually drive change in our society?
I don't care if I'm making little widgets on a conveyor belt, how is that contributing to a bigger cause that I'm going to feel part of. And I don't know, that's kind of been my observation lately and this isn't ... Well, it is kind of my show so I can talk as much as I want, but I do want to hear about-
MICHAEL MCCORD:
And you can talk whatever you want.
SKOT WALDRON:
I can, I can. But I do want to hear about your thoughts about that?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Well, I think it goes back to, you mentioned Simon Sinek to his early word, The Golden Circle, the how, why and what or the why, how and what? And I think it goes back to that, sort of this like, I actually believe that all humans are really motivated by why people do things and why an organization exists. And we've gotten comfortable with not necessarily understanding or articulating our why. And I think that's what you see a lot of critique of business right now is that they don't know why they exist. And so they have missional diaspora and the organization isn't successful because it's lost its rooting. And I think economically, a generation or so before us, it was about stability. They need a stability and they wanted to move up and provide stability for their family. And these big institutions had pension funds and all this sort of really robust support systems, but almost virtually, all those are gone.
I mean, it's very rare you get a defined benefit pension fund anymore. And so, where that would really create loyalty. If I knew I was going to get this pension, that would create economic loyalty and stability to somebody. But now, because much of that is gone and benefits themselves continue to decrease, the amount the company contributes to your pension fund to your retirement account or the cost of health. So much of that is no longer as incentive buying. And so I think the economics are not nearly as strong as they were. And at the same time you have this awareness, this global awareness, I think that's what's really interesting about millennials is they're the advent of those who knew, who lived off a 24-hour news cycle, who knew what was happening.
Previously we wouldn't have known that there was an earthquake in Haiti and this terrible evacuation in Afghanistan, plus all the other strike that's happening in the world. But these young people, now 40-something, or entering their 40s. They know everything's happening all the time and they have since they were kids. And so there's a lot more awareness of the world and the complexities of it. Global warming and pressure for all this stuff. And so now they're looking for jobs and careers in organizations that align with their value systems. Because they know they're out there, and they've seen it and that's what they want. So it's not just economic stability anymore. It's, "We want to do something that provides meaning and substance for the world, not just for my economic security."
And so I think that's a different value system. And so when you have a senior leader idea, talk about the industries you reached out to. I was talking to a chief of a fire department and he was saying, "This is exactly what we need, because our senior firemen have a really hard time understanding 20-year-olds who are coming in to be firefighters. And they're just missing each other. They're saying often the same kind of things, but they're just saying, they're talking at two different planes and so they're not hearing each other." And so they're losing teamwork and they're not retaining officers and things like that.
And then his best friend runs a company that makes oil and mayonnaise and he'd like, "We have the same problem too on our frontline, we're hiring 18-year-olds to work the factory floor. And then we have our mid-level supervisors and then we have our senior supervisors and none of them are talking to each other, and they don't know how to." So it's fascinating area. And I would say too, it's also important in EDI work. I mean, I think that equity, diversity, inclusion is not just about age diversity, but it's about ethnicity and gender and sexuality and all those things that are pressing in on our work environments. I think that this approach offers an opportunity for people to build respect and trust with each other. And then you can deal with the harder stuff in the work environment.
SKOT WALDRON:
So you're saying at the end of the day what I hear is that our work environment has gotten very simple. I'm just kidding. It has not gotten simple at all. It's very, it's like-
MICHAEL MCCORD:
So simple.
SKOT WALDRON:
So simple.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
So simple.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
If you wait, if you listen to the end of this we're going to give you the simple answer that will fix everything in your work environment. Just wait for it.
SKOT WALDRON:
Everything, everything. That's it, that's it. Actually, I'm going to get to that point right now. So are you ready? Here's the question? How do we be more curious? That sounds kind of like a dumb question, but I don't know, are there certain things that we should recommend in doing that with leadership or organizations within teams, or I mean, how do we do that?
You know, I think I would start with conversations. I think it's a lot, it depends on the scale of the organization. But if I were a leader in an organization that struggles with curiosity, has a lot of challenges, but not quite sure how to get to solutions. Is to start asking some questions of people who are in different levels of the organization, really just open ended, curious questions. Like, "What do you think if we could, we're having trouble retaining customers in this department, what do you think is behind that? What are the things that you see from your vantage point that we could improve that would help customers feel more connected to us?"
And move it away from, so what a lot of people will do is have a board meeting and say, "All right, what's wrong? Why isn't this working?" Which is a very different approach. That's a critical approach. What you're asking is, "What do you think, what do you imagine we could do?" And that switches, just the language you use will switch people's responses. You can be asking almost the very same thing, but you're pushing it towards that more creative imaginative. "What do you think is happening with our customers?" And then they'll start to, and this is key, is come back again because it needs time to work. You need to ask those questions. And then what will happen is, they will start to be curious because Skot asked me, "What do I thinks happening? And I didn't really have a good answer for that. I'm going to start paying attention to these customers that I'm dealing with and the ones that we're losing. I'm going to listen more and I'm going to ask them questions."
This is exactly what happens. And then you come back a few weeks later and say, "I just, I really am. Have you picked up on anything around this idea about our customer retention in that department? It's really making me curious about it." Use the word, and what you will see, I think is the start of changing your ethos and the way you operate as organization. And then that prepares you to do some polling, some surveying of your customers, a three question survey or create a little bit longer survey. And then you can use that to create your focus groups. But I think it has to start with developing at least a group of people who are genuinely curious about making the place better. And start conversations and see what happens.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Doesn't cost you anything to do that, by the way,
SKOT WALDRON:
You know, that's a good point, right? That's good-
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Maybe a little bit of pride.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. That's what I was going to say. It may cost you a little bit of pride, to feel like you need to maybe admit that you don't have all the answers. And I think that that's going to be super valid. And I think that, while this applies to the workforce, I think this applies to marriages and with your kids and with your community and with everything else involved. Is how can we move from critique of, "I know better. Listen to me, I'm in a position of authority," to, "Huh, I wonder why that's happening?. I would love some insight, because I, maybe I don't come from your world." Like generating that conversation, but then also being open to what you get back. Again, we may be really good at critique, maybe we don't receive it very well. Maybe we are the problem in some way, shape or form. And that could be one of the answers and we got to be prepared for that, and humble enough to accept that as a possibility.
That's right. And one thing, just a way of disarming that, that I really appreciate is [inaudible 00:42:47] called the system is perfectly designed to get what it's getting. And so when we approach a system or a challenge in an organization we try to put it towards the system. This system, that we're all part of, Skot, you're part of it. I'm part of it. We're in this system and we're all contributors to this system. And the system is perfectly designed to get what it's getting, which is decreased consumer retention. That's a problem, but it's not you, it's not me, it's not Sue. It's not any one of us, it is the system. And so then we get to put on our curiosity hats and say, "Okay, what about this system is not working well? Is not getting the outcome we desire?"
And I think that has helped some people disarm that critique of themselves and that fear of being too vulnerable. Is okay, "Well, I'm the CEO, I'm the Bishop of this denomination. I'm just part of a system and the system's what's broken. And we're trying to fix the system, not trying to fix me, not trying to fix you. We're just trying to fix system." Now, what we know is, sometimes personnel is part of the system, either rightly or wrongly sized, the right kinds of people in place, the right positions created. That's part of the system, but it's not a critique of, "Why is Skot messing up?" But Skot's part of his system that's not working.
SKOT WALDRON:
I love that thought. I think that's really smart is to take the me and the you out of the equation and neutralize what the thing is, right? Let's bring it back to, it's not a blame game, it's a situation. It's a circumstance that's neutral. Let's call it what it is, "This is broken," and then let's understand what it is from different aspects of the organization, the table. It can come from me, the CEO, "This is what I think it could possibly be," after we all have also heard from other people of gathering.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That's right.
SKOT WALDRON:
Understanding what's going on within the circle. So I think that's super key. I appreciate that, that's awesome. Good insight. So I did learn something from you today. I was wondering, I was like, "That's it."
MICHAEL MCCORD:
I was able to pull something out at the air at the very end.
SKOT WALDRON:
So good, so good. Well, I want to go get tacos.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Let's do it.
SKOT WALDRON:
Let's go get some tacos. If people want to talk to you more, if they want to find out more about Foundry, how they can start solving problems from the inside, as opposed to thinking all their solutions are going to come from external sources, but they really come from the inside and you helping them do that, how do they get in touch with you?
MICHAEL MCCORD:
You can go to our website, foundrycreative.group, and you schedule an appointment with me. I'm happy to reach out to you. And I would love to work with any organization who's interested in making that kind of significant change in their organizations so they can get what they really want out of their system. And they can retain the kind of people they want in their organization. And that's what we're all about.
SKOT WALDRON:
You're a rockstar, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for doing this. I'm glad I finally ... You know, that $5 I gave you last weekend.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That's right. And just remember go to the rating of iTunes or wherever you're listening to this, and five is the only right answer.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yes. You only give me a five because-
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Anything else-
SKOT WALDRON:
That's right. Call me first.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That is a failure.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to get my bonus if that happens.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
That's right.
SKOT WALDRON:
All right. Well played, man. All right, Michael. Thanks man.
MICHAEL MCCORD:
Thanks.
SKOT WALDRON:
The system is designed to get what it's going to get. How is your system designed? How is your organization structured? Is there a sense of psychological safety. Enough to be able to be curious, to be open to be curious, not only for the newcomers at your organization, the employees, but also the leadership. Is there enough safety there for them to feel like they could be vulnerable in that space? And I love the insight of this not being my problem, not being your problem, not pointing fingers either at me or at you. But, "Hey, we've got a systemic problem. And how do we address that through curiosity?" And this is going to be so, so critical. I coach a lot of my personal clients about hold on a second, instead of just playing the blame game all day, why don't you ask a question? Ask questions, seek to be curious, you will get some answers back.
You may not like them all the time. But that's not the point. The point is seeking information and having authentic, real conversations to help elevate all of us, because the only way we're going to be able to unlock our potential as a person or as an organization, as a family unit, as a team, as a community is to have authentic, real conversations. That is the goal, and that's what we're all working towards. So thank you, Michael, for some awesome insights. We just got back from tacos. Those are good too. So good, but it was so fun having you on the call. And I hope that people got something from this that is going to help them in their journey to becoming leaders and organizations and people worth following.
If you want to find out more about me, you can go to skotwaldron.com. You can go to my YouTube channel, like, subscribe, comment, all those things. I would love to have more of you on there. That's how I get feedback. I love it. Bring it on people. Ask me questions, be curious if you want. But also I'm inviting the critique, help me out. I would love to. All right, so you can do that and link up with me in LinkedIn. I would love to continue to build the network there and educate you as much as possible. All right, thanks for being here. See you next time on another episode of Unlocked.
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