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(upbeat instrumental music) (energetic instrumental music) (energetic instrumental music continues) - Welcome to "Business Forward."

I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Lee Hoffman, who is the Director of Cultural Partnership at Ledgestone company and Cole Stalter, who is the Culture Partner at Ledgestone.

Welcome, Lee.

Welcome, Cole.

- Thank you, Matt.

- [Lee] Good to be here.

- So we're gonna start off with both of you.

I always like to kind of know some background and how you really got to this point of what you're doing right now so let's start with you.

Are you from around here, Lee?

- I grew up in a small town east of here a couple hours.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And I grew up on the farm milking cows.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And then University of Illinois.

We kind of have a similar thing there.

And ended up going to New Orleans and was a teacher with Teach For America for two years down there.

And then roundabout, went to Indianapolis for a while and then landed back here in Central Illinois in education and then spent 13 years as a principal at multiple schools until moving here to Ledgestone.

- [Matt] Okay, great.

How about you?

- Yeah, so I grew up Dunlap, Illinois K-12, graduated there, went to ICC to start 'cause I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life kind of thing, but decided I wanted to be an educator so I transferred from ICC to Bradley.

And upon graduating at Bradley, I got a very lucky opportunity through Teach For America like Lee.

But instead of sending me to New Orleans, they sent me to Hawaii and so I lived there for three years.

And from there- - [Matt] Hawaii.

- Hawaii.

- [Matt] Okay.

- Yeah.

- [Matt] I'd like to be there right now.

- (laughs) Hey, let me know.

I'll be your personal tour guide.

- [Matt] (laughs) Okay.

- Yeah, so I spent three years there teaching and from Hawaii entered in a program, Fulbright Scholars program, they sent me to Malaysia.

And so what I recognize with my five years as being an educator is having taught in diverse settings, seeing different cultures, seeing different powers as a result of that, how they influence people.

And it got me excited coming to Ledgestone to think about culture in a different way.

- Yeah, and you know, I wasn't gonna hit on this, but you both said Teach For America.

Why don't you explain what that is, because there are some, you learn a lot of leadership principles in that setting.

Why don't you tell our audience what that is?

- Yeah, so Teach For America is a national non-profit organization that focuses on improving educational equity across the United States.

And what their premise is, is they take recent graduates from college and they'll bring them in from all over the country and then disperse them in schools that need more attention, the underserved schools.

- [Matt] I like it.

- And so, Lee, I'm sure you have more to say to that.

- [Matt] Yeah, and Lee, you were part of that, too.

I didn't know you were both part of that.

- Yeah.

- [Matt] Yeah.

- So one of the things, some of the people that go in to Teach For America are actual educators.

Myself, I had an industrial design major.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And so they accepted me, placed me in New Orleans and so I went through five weeks in the summer in between graduating college and school starting basically learning how to be a teacher.

So it's like a five, six week crash course on lesson planning and that.

And then they say, "Here's a fifth grade class in New Orleans, kinda good luck."

And the thought process is they're taking kind of college graduates that, you know, with high achieving, want to do something positive for at least a two-year commitment.

- I like it.

I like it.

So let's get into what you're doing now.

One of my personal favorite authors of all time is John Maxwell.

- Oh, yeah.

- And I've met him a few times and read all of his books.

And you know, he's written 100 books on caring for others in leadership.

It's that true term, servant leadership.

- [Lee] Right.

- And so he says, "Everything you do rises and falls on leadership."

What does that quote mean to you?

- That's a great quote.

It's a quote I use often as well.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And I think what it's, what John's trying to get at is the fact that leadership is what happens just without us even thinking, right?

Leadership is like an energy.

Like, you know, if you think energy, you can't ever get rid of it.

You can transfer it, but you can't get rid of it.

So every organization has a leadership power there, and that's either strategically utilized by the leader and the leadership team or a vacuum is created and the individuals end up figuring out who's in charge here.

And so when I think he's saying, "Everything rises and falls on leadership," nothing happens without leadership.

And it either is done in this servant way where you have a leader and a leadership team that are leading for the right reasons, or you have the other thing where you have a leadership vacuum or toxic leadership and so then you end up having pockets of basically chaos starting where people trying to lead themselves because they can't trust the people in front of them.

So if you want something to get done, you need good leadership to do it because leaders set the tone of every organization.

Even countries, right?

Leaders take on, I think, the personality, the persona of the leader, and that trickles down.

It's just kinda, it's one of those kind of natural laws, I think.

- Yeah.

You know, I look at it as, when you think about it, I always think of leadership in terms of business and then secondly, I oddly just think of sports.

So I think of managers and little league and all these different things.

But if you think about it, every situation, Cole, that we're put in, there has to be either some sort of leadership or lack of leadership, or, I don't even know what the term is, but there is some part of leadership touching everything that we do, is that right?

- Absolutely, yeah.

I mean, leadership, basically, when you look at leadership, what it involves is people, right?

So leadership is entirely 100% human.

And Simon Sinek actually has a pretty interesting quote, and it applies to leadership, that when 100% of your employees are human and leadership involves 100% of working with those employees, so if you don't understand people, if you don't understand humans, then leadership is gonna be really difficult to interact with.

- Yeah, and you guys both have a fun job because you get to study just so many different types of leaders.

And there's so many different business leaders out there, and I know we've had discussions, you read a lot of books and there's the Maxwells and the Sineks and Lencioni and all these great, great names.

And then, you know, but if you take it down to the level of our community, then you start plugging those names in and you see, Lee, you see leaders and then you see lack of leadership in everything.

- [Lee] Yeah.

- And I think that's what, going into 2023, why I wanted you guys on this show is we all, a lot of people that watch this show are small business owners, and we get a lot of CEOs and a lot of people that, we talk about leadership a lot, and we've had a lot of leaders on this show, but sometimes, you know, you kind of go into that mindset of, when you're in this space, and tell me if I'm wrong or right, you also notice where there's a huge gap or a lack of leadership.

- Absolutely.

- So really that's what you go into and try to fix, so to speak.

- Right.

Realizing if everything does rise and fall on leadership, and there are certain, every organization has a leader.

Now, whether or not they're effective or not effective is the other thing, and we come in on the Ledgestone team with this INSITE team and look at, what is your leadership structure?

What is your culture?

And how do we drive better outcomes for businesses?

And ultimately for, like what Cole was saying, people, right?

100% of the people in a business are human, right, that have these feelings, that have these emotions, that come to work usually wanting to do good.

And sometimes leaders get in their way, truthfully, if you wanna be blunt about it.

- That's a good way of putting it.

You know, Cole, I was thinking of something and I wrote it down and you know, I get sick of talking about COVID.

I think I've said it in my last four or five shows.

You know, I don't even wanna talk about it anymore.

But I always bring it up because I talk about the change in business.

You know, change is inevitable.

You know, it happens.

But COVID really just changed it for everybody period and nobody had a choice in how it was changing.

They had a choice of how it could move forward or you could stay stagnant or potentially even go belly.

But there was that thing that we haven't seen in a long time and it was COVID, and you sit there, but then I like this part, business is inevitable.

Change in business is inevitable, but growth is optional.

- Right, absolutely.

And what that makes me think of is that antithetical statement of like, the only constant is change, right?

So change is gonna happen all the time.

And in fact, one of the possibilities of change is growth.

So let's take a plant for example, right?

When you're trying to grow a plant or you're working with a plant, right, it is going to change.

It has three options, let's say.

One, it's gonna die.

Two, it's gonna stay relatively the same.

Three, it's gonna grow and it's gonna flourish.

Now, the difference between change and growth is that change is just gonna happen, but growth requires an awareness and requires a strategic condition in order for it to be cultivating.

- [Matt] That's a good way of putting it.

- Right, so like with a plant, very simply, the conditions for that is, how much water are you giving it?

How much sunlight does it need?

Are you pruning it when it's necessary?

All the things like that.

So growth requires a very intentional strategy where change is just always happening.

Now, if you want that change to be growth, then you need to be strategic.

- Hmm, you know, we had on this show a couple times, Larry Weinzimmer, and Larry is a professor at Bradley, a multiple author of multiple books.

And when I had him on a few months back, he talked about exactly what you're talking about.

But then he threw in a word that really came out of COVID that he really loves.

And he's sticking to this word as you look at business moving forward and it's resilience.

You know, that's a strong word, if you think about it because growth, inevitable change, whatever it may look like, resilience is part of that, isn't it?

- Mm-hmm, it is, yeah.

You don't grow if you don't have a level of resilience in you because take even a plant.

Go with Cole's analogy, you know, growth happens usually under stress of some level.

You need sunlight and you need rain, you need the storms.

That's when growth happens.

- [Matt] Yeah.

- When everything is perfect, like there's studies that if you create the perfect conditions for trees, they just fall over 'cause it's actually the storms and the winds that actually make the roots grow deep.

That's how change happens.

And the same thing happens in organizations.

If everything was perfect, then we wouldn't know if we need leadership or not.

Leadership's actually there for the storms.

- Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

I never really thought of that.

So, you know, I just love having people like you both in our community.

I mean, you're positive, you're role models.

You both embrace it, which I like that.

You know, when you think about it, you're going into different businesses.

And I've really never seen you guys out and about in a bad mood, and I think that's part of the positivity of going in and making change because you're happy about what you do.

And if you're a client and you're going in there, you can't go in with a chip on your shoulder.

You've gotta go in there, hold their hand and make change, right?

- Yeah.

It is, you need to have an optimism and... - [Matt] Yes.

- You know, if you ask my kids, my kids would probably tell you I'm in a bad mood sometimes.

- I think my kids say that a lot.

And it makes you think though, doesn't it?

- Yeah, yeah, but think about it.

I mean, we all, as leaders, you know, I was a leader, you were a leader, you know, for a number of years.

It's exhausting, it's overwhelming.

At least for me, there was always this constant like, I could be better, right?

Yeah, these things are happening well, but I should be doing this.

Why am I not getting results here?

And one of the things we do at Ledgestone, these partnerships we create when we come in and help leaders and leadership teams get better is basically say, "We wanna walk you through that because we know how tiring it can be."

How just the daily stresses that all leaders face, especially COVID, talk about that again, what that caused you almost need someone to come alongside you and be your encourager and also truthfully be your accountability.

Make sure like, hey, are we improving on these measures?

What are we gonna go after?

And that's how I think we can help is just have that optimism, have that positivity, and say, "Change can happen."

- One last, one question for you before I go back to Cole.

You said you were a leader, you know, I'm a leader or I was a leader.

Do we ever stop leading?

- (laughs) You know- - [Matt] Because we're dads, too.

- Right, we are dads.

We just...

I was just talking in the office today that, you know, obviously influence allows you to lead and authority allows you to lead.

- [Matt] Okay.

- And sometimes we're given authority, right?

And sometimes our influence is what leads.

Now, when you have someone who is given authority and they have influence, those are the great ones, right?

So you're right, we never, no matter what your title is or where you're at or you move out of this organization, everybody's a leader.

- [Matt] Authority, let's just clear this up, though.

Authority is just giving a title.

- Correct.

- Influence is a presence.

- [Lee] Absolutely.

- Okay.

- And influence is earned, authority is given.

- [Matt] Oh, that's a great way of putting it.

- Yeah.

- Cole, when I think of just business in general, you know, like if you go out and do a survey, you could just survey 20 businesses and they'll say, all the feedback comes back, there's a communication issue.

Well, do people even know what communication is, first of all?

And then isn't communication the most important part about leadership anyway?

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I love when that response comes back.

I love hearing, "Oh we have a communication problem" over and over and over again.

Because I think communication, when it comes to leadership specifically, is very misunderstood, right?

To say we have a communication problem really isn't highlighting specifically where the problem is, right?

So Lee and I talk all the time, and you know, communication is happening constantly, constantly, you know, so to say we have a communication problem really isn't doing us or the leaders any favor in addressing issues.

- [Matt] Right, right.

- So we see communication, and again, because leadership is social, communication is more experiential than transactional.

- [Matt] Okay.

- So communication, what it really is, is the sending of a message through a channel, right?

So if we worked with a client and they said, "Oh, we have a communication problem."

I would say, "That's not necessarily the case because yes, communication's happening, but what is most important is what is being said and how is it being said?

Is it addressing the needs of a company?

Is it addressing the needs of an employee?"

So for example, if there's a communication problem, I'm wondering, okay, is there a lack of communication of value?

Is there a lack of communication of connection?

Is there a lack of communication of safety?

Are you communicating those messages to your employees?

And if you aren't, then they're gonna say, "We have a communication problem."

- Hmm, yeah, and if you think about it, too, that goes back to an organization's mission, vision, and then the values.

- [Cole] Right.

- The values are key here.

All right, so this leads into INSITE.

What is INSITE?

Why don't you just explain what INSITE is.

- Yeah, INSITE is a tool that we use, an assessment where we come in and take a business and we ask the people, what are the concerns, right?

Whether it's communication, security, connection, purpose.

Basically it's a survey.

We don't like to say survey 'cause that feels like, oh, anyone can make a survey.

We put quite a bit of research into our questions that we ask that give us feedback and data so that we can say, hey, company A versus company B, these people have a connection opportunity.

These people have a trust opportunity.

These people have an empowerment opportunity.

Once we get that data, and our data team, we have data analysis on that that we can compare that and see, what are the strengths, opportunities for a team.

Cole and I come in on the consulting side, essentially is what we do is we say, "Okay, leader knows they need to change."

Like we said before, leadership's overwhelming that day-to-day task.

We provide that accountability, that encouragement, that assistant, that also just, we think about culture and leadership all the time.

As a leader you're thinking about making money and you're thinking about, you know, timelines and all that.

And we come in on the backside and say, "How do we address these things?"

And some of it, kinda bifurcated here.

The first one is, there's an educational component.

Let's say it is communication or connection or trust.

We will come in and actually train leaders and mid-level leaders on okay, what's going on with trust?

How's trust different than distrust?

Where's that in the brain?

How's it psychologically impacting us?

What can we actually do, habits that we can do to build that?

So that's part of it.

Part of it's an educational component.

And I derive a lot of that from my, you know, I got a dissertation in leadership and I try to take a clinical approach to how can we quickly and effectively help leaders learn the material they need to?

But if we stop there, that would only be half, half the equation, I think.

The other half is, everything rises and falls on leadership, right?

- [Matt] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- If the leadership team isn't cohesive, if there's not great trust there, if there's not good conflict, right?

Conflict's actually a positive.

You have to have it if you're gonna make good decisions and commitment and accountability.

If that leadership team isn't operating in a real strong, cohesive way, this training, this educational component is probably gonna fall flat.

So what we do is we come in and walk with leadership teams for a year at least and say, "Okay, on a monthly, bimonthly basis, what information can we help you understand about culture?

And then how do we help you lead that and drive that in your organization?"

- You know, so what this does, too, and you tell me if I'm right or wrong, basically, Cole, is, you're going in and helping a business not just with leadership and culture, but also finding their pain points.

- [Cole] Mm-hmm.

- And so you can go in and identify morale issues at a certain level or you could find out that the turnover's so high that people are working one and and a half FTEs compared to what they're hired for at one, is that correct?

- [Cole] Correct, yeah.

- Yeah, and what's great about INSITE, the digital assessment piece is it gives us a snapshot.

I've spent a number of years doing consulting and just going in and helping with businesses.

And before coming to INSITE, what I'd do is I would just ask the leaders, "Hey, what do we need to work on?

Obviously there's a pain point that you're coming and seeking out my consulting services for."

And we would try to address that.

What I think sets INSITE apart is we actually ask the people, and that gives us at least a data point to start and say, "Hey, the leadership team thinks this is the problem, but wait a second, people said this was also a problem that we weren't even thinking about."

And then working with the leadership team and we say, "Here's what you're anecdotally thinking is happening.

Here's some quantitative assessment of that.

Where are the things that we should definitely dive into and what are the things we need to look more into?"

So I think we have a more strategic kind of first step in helping businesses improve as opposed to just coming in and doing what we think is the problem.

- Yeah, and you know, as a long-time CEO, I'd sit there and think, Cole, that I knew or had a pulse, so to speak, of all of the issues, right?

And if you think about it, that's really just a ignorant and arrogant thought because really you don't.

You're not on the front line 24/7.

And the front line's what drives the business.

So, you know, I go back to thinking, if I had to put a percentage on it, you know, maybe I'm making this up, but maybe I was right 60% of the time or 70% of the time.

You guys can go in there and help identify that other 30 to 40%.

And what I like about what you're doing is it sounds like it's more like a partnership.

Like you're going in holding my hand and saying, "Hey, let's go down this road together.

Let's talk about leadership, but let's really change that culture."

Is that a good way of thinking about it?

- Oh, absolutely.

Partnership is a huge concept that we try to live out when we work with our clients stating, "You're not here alone in this.

Like, change is absolutely hard and we don't want you to be alone, right?

We want to be your sounding board.

We want to help you advise.

We wanna walk alongside with you."

And that partnership component provides one thing specifically, which is accountability.

- [Matt] Okay.

- We're gonna push you, but also at the same time we're gonna hold you accountable, right?

Think of how many times, you know, we're told we need to be healthier, we need to be healthier, we need to go lose weight, we need to do better here.

And oftentimes we know that, but we still don't find ourselves at the gym.

We still don't find ourselves controlling our diet well, right?

We struggle with that individually.

It's human nature.

It's just tough.

But when you have someone coming alongside you, pushing you, getting you up at 5:00 AM, you know, holding you accountable to what you said you wanted to do, it makes a a big difference, and that's partnership.

- That's pretty cool.

So Lee, you hear numbers all the time.

It takes X amount of years to change culture.

And are those numbers true?

I mean, what do you see?

- You hear three to five years.

- [Matt] Yeah, yeah.

- That's what you hear a lot to totally change culture.

And thinking back on my leadership experiences, I would say that's pretty accurate.

If we wanna, say, completely change culture 'cause if we say the definition of culture are the norms and behaviors of an organization, an organization, like Cole said, is made up of the people, you don't just change people's behaviors by telling them, "Hey, do different," right?

- [Matt] Right.

- You have to start embedding those into how you operate, creating habits, getting the right people on the bus.

So to do that does take three to five years.

Now, here's what's exciting.

You know, Cole and I have been working here at Ledgestone, you know, five, six months now.

And we've been working with clients that long, and just this month we've had two different clients already saying, "We're sensing a change."

Now, have we completely changed their culture?

- [Matt] Right.

- No, absolutely.

But the little things we're doing, the little habits we're trying to help them create, that accountability, that encouragement, and helping them see things different with our data, they're feeling it, right?

They're feeling, you know what?

This is better.

People feel more secure, more connected, they feel more empowered, right?

And ultimately we do that not just to make people feel good.

The research is just black and white that when people are more engaged, you have better outcomes, business outcomes, right?

- [Matt] Yeah.

- You have less turnover, lower retention, higher profitability.

So it is kind of the smart thing and it's the right thing to do to try to improve your culture for employees because it also benefits the business.

- Yeah, yeah, and when you go into businesses, too, you're sitting there and you can identify pretty quickly if somebody is truly empathetic.

- [Lee] Yeah.

- Or faking it or, you know, as a leader, because that really drives that morale piece that is so key to what you both are talking about.

- Yeah, we were just talking about that this week.

That's what we'd call integrity-based trust, right?

- [Matt] Integrity-based trust.

- So people have integrity when they can trust your motive, your motivation.

- [Matt] Yeah.

- And your transparence with that motivation, right?

'Cause anyone can come and be like, "Oh, I'm here for you."

But then like, oh, let me watch you for a while and like, no, you're not really here for me.

You say it with your words.

So our motive has to be right.

And then we have to be transparent with those actions.

And when we do that consistently over time, leaders build trust and employees say, "You know what?

You have my back.

I'm gonna work hard for you.

I'm gonna give you that discretionary effort.

I'm gonna be loyal.

I'm not gonna go find a new job for an extra 300 bucks a year because I trust you."

- Yeah, and if you think about it, that trust is what really drives any motivation whatsoever that you want from employees.

Well, I mean, this discussion could go on, and I love talking about this.

I like this conversation.

I want to have you guys back after probably the first or second quarter of '23 'cause I wanna talk about this more.

So Lee Hoffman, Cole Stalter, thank you for coming on the show.

We're proud to have you in this awesome community.

I'm Matt George, and this is another episode of "Business Forward."

(energetic instrumental music) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music continues) (energetic instrumental music softens) - Thank you for tuning in to "Business Forward," brought to you by PNC.