In this transformative episode, Jim Frawley, Founder of Bellwether, shares how he helps both individuals and organizations build resiliency, adapt to change and thrive in rapidly shifting contexts.
You will learn:
– How do you prepare for change when you don’t know what’s coming
– Why your org chart won’t last 5 years
– How to make time for you and your team to be more strategic
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach and I’m here with yet another high demand coach. And that is Jim Frawley. Jim is the founder of Bellwether and executive development community dedicated to helping both individuals and organizations build resiliency, adapt to change and thrive in rapidly shifting context. And we need you now more than ever, my goodness, Jim provides a range of services, including keynote speaking executive and business coaching and workshop development facilitation. And he is the host of the bellwether hub podcast, building a library of resources, both for teams and individuals to continually develop themselves. Well, Jim, I’m so excited to have you here. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. So first off, welcome to the show. And I’d love to get started just with your story. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing before coaching, how you got into coaching and why.
Jim Frawley
Yeah, sure. Scott, thank you so much for having me. So I guess if I go way back, my career started in radio, and it didn’t pay any bills. So I left it went into corporate training was the only job I could find my sister was able to get a for me, didn’t really have much of a track and it got me stuck in Omaha, Nebraska. And to get out of Omaha, Nebraska, the only job I could get to get me back to the east coast was in the financial industry. And that’s where I spent most of my career was doing public relations, executive communications for the financial industry. The challenge with that was that it was right smack in the middle of the financial crisis. So it was like the worst possible job the worst possible time. But I learned so much from really, really good executives about how to handle pressure, how do you communicate under pressure? How do you understand your audiences. And I consider that period of time, one of the most defining in my career, just from what I was able to learn. And that turned into about a 10 to 15 year career, 15 year career in finance. But it never really jazzed me all that much finance wasn’t really my world that I wanted to be in. And I heard about coaching. And I went to a coach and I said, you know, what do I want to do? I put together all these business plans. And Columbia University as a coaching program, I saw it, it clicked, I said, Let’s do it quit the next day, and put up the shingle. So that it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow fantastic. So you know, going through it right. And I’m sure a lot of those lessons have really influenced your coaching in a pretty dramatic way. So kind of in light of that, what would you say is the most important work that you’re doing for your clients right now?
Jim Frawley
The work now the really exciting work I’m doing is I like to call it how do you prepare for change when you don’t know what change is coming? And so that when you look at it through that lens, this scale of work is pretty wild, when we talk about getting someone ready to get into the C suite. So the individual executives, how are you preparing for yourself and understanding your audiences? And what’s your business strategy? How do you put together a plan, a five year plan when it’s going to be relevant in a year and a half anyway, you know, that kind of work is really, really fun. But then also on the corporate side, when we’re working with executive teams, on what’s the real people’s strategy, right? How do you prepare your people for change when they don’t know what change is coming? Because they feel it? And they know it, they’re looking at the layoffs, they’re looking at the competitors, and all the work that they’re doing, they’re looking at, you know, the news and the stock market and everything else. And, you know, their ultimate question always is, what about me? And and so how do we rethink people’s strategy? Get them ready, get the organization and the people really in sync? To say, Look, we recognize this as your career and you have a world and you have a life? And we also have a business? And let’s just talk about this logically? And how do we benefit each other? And what do you need from us? And what do we need from you? And there are a lot of assumptions that organizations have in terms of people and talent, that are really outdated, probably by like, 4050 years still, that we need to just kind of rip the band aid and say, what are we really thinking about our people? And how do we think about them in a better way?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, well, well, what would you say are one or two of those assumptions? Just to intro what what you mean by that?
Jim Frawley
One, the way that we structure our organization is the big one. I mean, let’s just go big, right? When we take a look at hierarchies in an organization, the future of work isn’t going to look that way, the future of work, I think, is going to really change around to significant accountability on the individual, we’re going to see a lot of libraries within organizations to say, you know, what, we need these skill sets, let’s just move people around based on project and initiative and this initiative shutting down and we’re gonna have to be incredibly flexible, and how do we piece these together, the bureaucracy is going to have to go away, which is gonna be very difficult for the large organizations, but midsize and small will be able to adapt if they do the work now, we’re gonna raise our expectations of our workers, give them the agency to do the work. And you could probably do with maybe half the people that you have. So there’s this real big, kind of, we don’t need the amount of people that we used to have, they can potentially work wherever they want. We do need to bring them into the office sometimes. But let’s talk about the business and what the business actually needs.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. That is so so good. I couldn’t agree with you more. One of the, the hallmarks of you will have an organization that we would say is in predictable success, right? Achieving the ability to adapt to change, but the resiliency and the consistency to not be just blown around by it is a high degree of individual ownership and self accountability, right? That’s the language we use. We’re going to have the exact same thing that you’re going after. I was just talking with someone yesterday. And there’s this false dichotomy and I think most people’s minds, you can either be the small, nimble business, or you can be a big bureaucratic monolith. Right? And that, like, there’s nothing in between. But I mean, you know, and from your, your skill set that it’s kind of that in between space of saying, Hey, we’re not gonna do the bureaucratic thing. We’re gonna do this at scale, but we’re gonna stay nimble in the process. How do you how do you help people navigate that tension?
Jim Frawley
Yeah, and it’s, you know, when I, one of my big things I like to say is macro change requires a focus on the micro individual. So if you’re changing your industry, your organization, whatever it might be, you have to start with each individual person, which makes it incredibly difficult why most change management programs fail, is they’re telling you they’re thrusting change upon people and saying, deal with it, rather than having it flip the script a little bit and saying, you know, you have the agency to do this. I was very guilty of this. When I was in corporate, I was very much a passive observer. I wasn’t, you know, taking control, I wasn’t creating work, I was just doing what I could, I was incredibly stressed out, or I thought I was stressed out. But it’s because I was, you know, not really doing what I wanted to do. And I wasn’t doing the right type of work. And I was overworked. And I was exhausted and stressed and all that. So I wasn’t necessarily a good executive, we have to teach people how to be good executives, we have to teach people. And it’s so it’s just overdone. But we do have to almost teach entrepreneurs or residents, I didn’t learn about accountability, and really learn about accountability until I started my business. And that forced me to learn it. And so how do we teach people these new types of skill sets? How to have a difficult conversation, how to properly set expectations? How do you have a belief system? How do you bring your belief system into work these things that we really don’t want to dance around? But we have to, if we want to get people to be able to elevate up to the level that we know that they can elevate it?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah I think one of the things that was kind of unique or remarkable about what I saw, just as I was doing some research on you, before the show was how much you and it’s even in your bio, just how much you have a focus on both the organization and the individual. What I found most folks in the industry will, they’ll kind of work in both spaces, but they have a very strong bias one way or the other. Either I’m a career coach, right, or a personal brand consultant, or, you know, a leadership coach, you know, and I’m focused on the individual and everything’s about the individual, or you’ve got the kind of organizational design architectures, scalability all about the organization. And, you know, we kind of make half hearted is, is fair, but not full attempts to really bring those two worlds together. And it seems like that’s the centerpiece of what you do. You know, how do you do that?
Jim Frawley
100%. And the way I like to put it, I liked the way that you framed it, because I don’t see anybody else doing it, you’ve got the logic of a business, versus the emotions of an individual. And how do you pair those two, when they have to come in and comes from understanding and comes from ripping apart assumptions. It comes from rethinking expectations on what my role is versus what the role is going to be that the organization needs. And a lot of the times when we’re working and we go into work, or we take a new job, as we assume it’s 40 hours sitting at a desk in a cube doing this and pushing paper and, you know, things like AI are going to fundamentally change it. My argument when I was in corporate all the time, you know, I had a boss who said you have to stay in that seat until 6:30am. Okay, right. I don’t really right, I could get this work done in 20 hours, right? So what’s the value of your employee? What’s the value of work? It’s not necessarily I’m paying them for 40 hours, you’re paying them for value to the business? And how do you rethink your people strategy around that, it’s very difficult with the amount of employees a lot of these organizations have, which is why many of them are paring it back. And this is just the start of what we’re seeing now. And, you know, early 2023, with the layoffs and everything, a lot of these jobs aren’t coming back, because they are going to say, look, we could put pinpoint focus on an individual and talk about value. And we can rework this kind of organization to make sure we’re attracting the best people to create the value. And that’s kind of this logic of motion, push poll, people need to understand that there’s a game being played, right? It’s not you know, that your work isn’t your family work? Is it you know, all these things that we’ve been given these lines, and really nice talking points, people are hip to the lines now. And they’re not really jumping into that anymore. So let’s kind of rip the band aid off be a little upfront, and say, This is how it’s actually going to be?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the things that that’s fascinating about this topic in this challenge is that it’s hard for everyone but for very different reasons. Right? You take the large organizations is hard because effecting individual change when you have hundreds and 1000s of employees is that’s a long process, right like that. You just have to be committed to that you’re not going to see a whole lot happen for quite a while. On the other side, you might think okay, small organizations have this massive advantage because, you know, you affect one or one person and that’s one out of five and you’ve you’ve affected 20% of the organization and I would probably argue of the two they do have an advantage but when you get into the small organizations and you look at the realities on the ground, they are Doing nine people’s work, eat. And so like they’re just running around like chickens with their heads cut off. And so the challenge that you have in small businesses like we just don’t have the capacity to sit down and focus on this. So if we kind of split those apart for a second, and let the little guy first and then we’ll talk about some of the the, how you affect this change in a larger corporate environment, but for that, you know, young entrepreneurial organization who, who has just been has really struggled finding people for the last couple of years, they’ve really struggled competing, especially on wages. And they’re hearing this and saying, Yes, we do need to stay nimble, we do need to be able to adapt, we do need to be able to change, what would be some of the advice you would give them on how to start taking steps forward?
Jim Frawley
Yeah, when you take a small organization, especially one that grows quickly, where the has grown over the years, a lot of the old processes just kind of stick around. And there’s a lot of stuff that just we do this, because that’s the way it’s done. And you know, we just have to do it this way. And if we want to elevate the organization to another level, it’s time to almost throw out the script and start a new. Now it’s not recreating a full business plan and going bananas, right. It’s a number of strategy sessions, we could put this together, what do we really need to do? Have we lost our you know, have we identified our true identity? Have we lost our true identity? How has market dynamics, how have market dynamics changed the way that we’re looking at things. And when you have in a conversation with all of your people, I will guarantee you, they’re doing the work of nine people, they could shed half of those tasks. So Morrow, as a business, right. And these are the conversations we’re having is like, we saw it when everybody started working from home. And we started seeing how engaged people really were. They’re saying, from a productivity perspective, we could lose half to three quarters of our workforce and still be fine ownership knows this leadership knows this. Now, it’s a very difficult pill to swallow. It’s a little too blunt to kind of say, Hey, we’re tossing out 75% of the workforce. But that nuggets kind of stuck in the brain. And now how do we evolve the business to say, all right, maybe we can do the same amount of work with 25% of the people. But we still have human beings, right? And we’ve got different profiles of workplaces that really care about their employees, they really do in this era, how do we take maybe 25%? Maybe we start a new business within it? And how do we kind of set that up? And kind of separate that? And how do we how do we navigate this? And that’s a lot of the bigger discussion of what’s our identity going to be as an organization? What do we really need to do? And then how do we leverage things like AI and the new technology to really explode that on a much bigger level?
Scott Ritzheimer
And for those listening, it might feel like there’s some hyperbole or exaggeration in there. But I mean, time and time again, you go in and you just do an audit of what in the world are we doing as an organization, and top to bottom, the lowest I’ve seen was 40% was, you know, needed to change. But you know, more often than not 5060 70%. So like, this isn’t just stuff that like we’re saying on a podcast to sound cool, but it’s like, like, these are real numbers that that folks are really dealing with. So for the small organization, yes, I love that. It’s like, look at what can you stop doing? Because it’s way more than you think? What have you drug along for years now, even though you’re a relatively young organization, get rid of that, and you’ll find some breathing room to make some some meaningful change. Alright, so for those larger organizations, again, it’s a slightly different challenge, because you’re trying to do this individually at scale. What are some of the first steps for for a leadership team to embark on this journey?
Jim Frawley
Well, I would say similar to the to the small organizations, you have to figure out identity, that’s, I mean, still, first one, what are we going to be and as you become this massive organization, there’s still you’re going to be evolving, no matter how big you’re going, I mean, take a look at Google right? Now they’re scrambling, and they’re revisiting their identity and who they thought they were and who they have to be and everything else. But from there, you then have to take a look at scope and take a look at the scope of the organization. And where does that fit into your identity. And then it’s not going to be you know, this grand scale, kind of rip the band aid, it’s too big. But you start selecting key components to be the example for the organization as a model and you test this lack of bureaucracy, different type of working, how do you measure accountability? How are we giving feedback? And how do we track all of this, so that we can give the model to the other segment segments of the organization and make it work? So we can copy in many of the really, really large organizations, they’re doing this, but they’re doing it in like seven different places, and which is fine, but they’re gonna have to take best practices out of all these and do that and see what’s really working what’s not, but it’s like a 10 to 15 year process. It’s significant. It’s going to be big.
Scott Ritzheimer
So it’s fascinating. Again, in our world, we kind of organized this the world of business into different stages, right? So you have the early startup, you have that fun growth stage, you’ve got whitewater was we’re under processed overgrowth, you know, it’s just hypergrowth and not enough structure internally. But what folks don’t realize is how difficult it is to Stay out of the what we call the fifth stage of Treadmill. And treadmill is where we start to get a little arthritic, a little form over function a little too much process. It’s where the threat of being big starts to become, you know, a challenge as opposed to an asset. And, and you keep coming back to this point, which is so important for folks to hear in there. And that it has to come back to identity to vision to that, why, like, why are we doing what we’re doing, because other than that, like, you can put tactics in place, but you end up just repeating the same process, right. And if you take another 1015 years, the end up in the exact same spot, a lot of feelings are hurt, a lot of energy spent, and it’s not there. So when you’re helping folks really dial in on this identity issue. You know, what, first one, do you get pushback on? They’re like, we don’t have time for this? Or are you finding that that’s received well?
Jim Frawley
You know, it’s one of those things that it sounds like it’s something we should do. But when you’re actually going through the process, they say, We don’t have time for this. It’s like, when you say you need to take a nap. Right? Because you’re so overly exhausted, you say, but I have too much work to get done. But the NAPS actually going to do you been a benefit? Because you can get more work done later. So yes, you get a lot of you get a lot of pushback, a lot of them saying why do I have to go all the way back, I don’t have time for this, we’re talking about a 10 to 15 year process, to be honest, market dynamics may not allow for a 10 to 15 year process. So that’s another big element that’s going on with the way things are changing. So incredibly quickly. Some people aren’t ready to take a step back and say, you know, they’re also afraid of what’s going to open it up, right? And what does this mean for our business? And does this actually change it? So I get a lot of pushback for that. But it’s a fundamental first step, to making sure that you’re making the right next steps. Because if you’re not, if you don’t have the identity secure, then then you’re just going to be spinning wheels, any kind of change, without intentionality, is just spinning wheels is not gonna work.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true. So true. Alright. So here’s a question. I love to ask all of my guests. And it’s this, what’s the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? You know, what’s that one thing that you wish everybody listening today knew?
Jim Frawley
My, I’ll give you two quotes. These are my two favorite quotes from when I became an entrepreneur. And these are the ones that helped me the most. And so I would say, you guys were, were so distracted by change. And I guess this is more for the individuals. First quote is from John Jacques Rousseau, how can anyone be satisfied in life if they’re not satisfied with the one person that can never be separated from, and that is everything, no matter what change is happening comes down to you as an individual. And so you have to figure out you, when you talk about ethical philosophy, and helping other people and all that stuff, we help other people to help ourselves, we can help other people, you can’t be successful until you figure yourself out. That’s one. And then the other one is, no matter what you’re doing as these change, and as you are, maybe you have a business, you’re trying to sell your business, or maybe you are trying to pitch something internally. And I think I saw it on Reddit or something. You can have the greatest peach tree in Georgia. Some people don’t want peaches. And that’s okay. Right? And suddenly, you’re like, oh, okay, it’s like a bad breakup where like, oh, maybe they just didn’t want my peaches, that’s fine. Okay. And you kind of go and change the way I sell the business, change the way I approach selling the business, where you’re matching to what people actually need, and a really, really good time. That’s when we’re talking about corporate and individual. That’s it right. This corporate may have the greatest peaches. I may not be in the mood for peaches this week. It’s not the right place for me.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah wow, yeah, it was just so much we could jump into on that. For the sake of time, so yes, I’m in Atlanta. So you’re speaking my language. Oh, there you go. Perfect. I live in Peachtree Corners, which, so yeah, I’m right there with you right there with you. All right. But I do want to shift gears a little bit here. And this is a question I’m really eager to hear. You know how you’re approaching it. And that is, take off your consultant hat, your you know, Coach hat, if you will put on your CEO hat and talk to us a little bit about what the next stage of growth looks like for you. Right? So we’re in these uncertain times, you’re helping clients in this really special way. What do you think is the next stage of growth for you and your business? And what are some of the challenges you’ll have to overcome to get there?
Jim Frawley
Yeah, the thing that’s, I’m laser focused on right now is that everybody is petrified. And they need a guru. But everybody wants to be a guru, they need a guru that they can actually trust. And so how do you build something, and it’s why I got into coaching. I didn’t like the coaching product that was out there because there’s no accountability on coaches. And so that’s what I’m focused on now is building up a brand that people can actually trust as they’re navigating this type of change. From a business perspective. I am loading up on AI focused tools that my clients can use. I’ve already white labeled a public speaking, and AI public speaking coach, which is phenomenal. It’s called usually all my clients just get it, I give it to them free of charge. There’s gonna be other ones. We have to think about how coaching is going to evolve, right? We’re only two Two years away from Ai coaches in general. So the coaching industry is going to completely evolve. And so what does that look like? And how do you create something uniquely human? So that when people go, they can use the AI coach, they should use it if that’s helpful for them, but when they need that human, how do they find the one person they could trust? And that’s what I’m looking to build over the next couple years.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, well, remarkable, truly remarkable. Well, Jim, thanks so much for your time. It’s just an absolute delight having you on the show. We could probably talk for a few hours but I do my best to keep this short for our listeners because we value your your time and attention if you’re listening today, just above and beyond. And so I just want to say to all you listening, thank you so much for your time and attention means the world to us. I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Jim Frawley
Jim is the Founder of Bellwether, an executive development community, dedicated to helping both individuals and organizations build resiliency, adapt to change and thrive in rapidly shifting contexts. Jim provides a range of services, including Keynote Speaking, Executive and Business Coaching and Workshop development and facilitation. He is the Host of the Bellwether Hub Podcast, building a library of resources for teams and individuals to continually develop themselves.
Want to learn more about Jim’s work at Bellwether? Check out his website at https://www.bellwetherhub.com
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