Episode 399: Leading Through Resistance: Building Adaptive Cultures in Sales

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:42:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m Brynne Tillman and I am excited to introduce you to today’s guest, Eric Kebschull. Eric is a company culture strategist, adaptive leadership consultant, and the co-founder and CEO of Well-Led Strategies. He has dedicated his career to helping organizations tackle complex challenges, implement meaningful change, and build resilience for an uncertain future.

00:01:11:19 – (Brynne Tillman): With extensive experience in leadership development and organizational adoption, Eric brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. His certifications include Energy Leadership Index, Master Practitioner, and Certified Professional Coach. Underscore his commitment to fostering effective leadership. Let’s dive in and explore how leadership can cultivate adaptive cultures and enhance our organizational effectiveness. My tongue is a little broken today. But my excitement isn’t. Eric, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. 

00:01:59:05 – (Eric Kebschull): Thank you so much for having me, Brynne. I’m looking forward to a great conversation and talking to you today. And now the audience. 

00:01:59:09 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh. Me too. And I’ve been looking forward to this interview for some time. But before we dive into your genius and magic, we ask all of our guests one question, which is, what does making sales social mean to you?

00:02:15:02 – (Eric Kebschull): To me, sales being social is the process of having a human conversation, a human interaction, and a human connection. Social source or sales to me is how do you humanize the process? How do you make it so that you are building genuine connection, genuine feelings of positivity and genuine feelings of inquisitiveness? Things that make you feel like human and not transactional and turning that into a problem solving yet collaborative environment versus a transactional environment.

00:02:48:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I could not agree more. I absolutely love the humanization of all of the sets of sales and and problem solving in the business world, so I love that. So, you know, I am so curious about your journey into leadership consultant. What inspired you to focus on company culture and adaptive leadership, especially in sales environments? 

00:03:12:02 – (Eric Kebschull): Okay, so it started out prior working in the corporate environment and realizing there is a gap there between what people think it’s going to be and what they say it’s going to be, and the current reality, the gap is not saying not doing what you say you’re going to do.

00:03:29:01 – (Eric Kebschull): You may have a company culture that has a vision, statement and values listed on the wall, but they don’t really act on them. They’re just writing on the wall or on a piece of paper, or on a company website and working for a couple different companies for different visions. Some of them did a better job than others. Don’t get me wrong, the last company I was at was very good with their company culture, but there were things.

00:03:54:01 – (Eric Kebschull): And when an organization gets really large that make it difficult. For me it was how do I cultivate a better company culture for people like me and those who are different in experience, but still struggle with enjoying their life every single day at work? You shouldn’t have to be an entrepreneur or at a, you know, unicorn company in order to really enjoy where you work every single day.

00:04:15:01 – (Eric Kebschull): That gap should be narrowed and that’s why I believe what I do, which is to help other companies, especially smaller companies, scale. And as they scale, get to a point where they’re able to, build a culture that is worthwhile. So that way they can say we’re an Apple or Google where, know, Tesla where, whatever you want to be that you say these great cultures that maybe exist. How can we create that with other organizations. 

00:04:42:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that, and, you know, I don’t think small companies can scale easily without really defining a healthy culture, because it’s really hard to attract top talent today and retain it. If you don’t have one. So I think what you’re doing is really critically important for small businesses to be able to scale. So I love that.

00:05:07:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Share with me some common leadership challenges that you’re seeing, especially in sales team leadership. And how do they differ from a traditional management style?

00:05:27:01 – (Eric Kebschull): Yeah, sure. So, you know, with sales, it’s there’s always a bottom line of some kind. It’s like any other business, you have to be able to make money in order to be able to survive.

00:05:31:01 – (Eric Kebschull):  And in sales that is more apparent than anything else. So you’re not there to lose money, you’re there to bring in money. So I think you still have the same challenges with any other business. And sales. It’s just that that target of what you need to do is very pressing. It’s very stressful, and ultimately it can dilute the rest of what you need to do to be successful. So I look at it from three points vision and alignment in terms of leadership challenges and sales versus management. Leaders must inspire and align the team around a shared vision and navigating market shifts and new strategies. That’s where that adaptive leadership stuff comes in, is you’re being able to adapt to those market shifts and new strategies in order to get there.

00:06:07:01 – (Eric Kebschull): So sometimes it’s not always about the bottom line. It’s how can we collaborate to get there. Motivating through change. Change is tough and change usually involves loss loss or comfort loss. Maybe revenue at a time, maybe loss of, you know, your ability to make and bring in your system that you built. So adaptive challenges arise when leaders must adapt and build a shift, such as a subscription based sales model might be something you have to adapt to. And maybe it’s taking a cultural transformation of its eye for an eye for an eye. But you have to,

00:06:39:01 – (Eric Kebschull): you know, not be so competitive. And how do you actually work as a team to meet the goals together? Maybe that’s not for everybody, but if that takes away from the I’m taking your lead and you’re taking my lead, versus how do we collaboratively build up our numbers for our team.

00:06:53:01 – (Eric Kebschull): That would be an interesting example of what kind of challenges and shifting the culture of your sales environment. 

00:07:01:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that perspective. I am a huge collaborator. And one of the things in my little company that we make sure is that everybody benefits from every sale,

right? Like there’s that, when we’re looking at our progress, we want everyone to be excited.

00:07:21:01 – (Brynne Tillman): We don’t want anyone to feel jealousy. We to. And when we all benefit from the growth of the company, it’s a different environment. It’s that people have ownership of what they’re doing because they know that what they’re doing is leading to the success of the company that ultimately feeds their family. a little more expensive. Food next month. 

00:07:46:01 – (Eric Kebschull): Exactly. Real quick. I mean, when you have individual ownership, that’s great in terms of talent development. But as far as even a small company to a large company, if you can keep the culture of we win when you win and you win when we win, then you’re able to have a bigger picture and kind of create that equity, in the company to some extent, in terms of, ownership of the success of your peers as well as everybody else.

00:08:11:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that approach, and I think I naturally do that even though I’m in sales and I should be competitive.

00:08:18:01 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, I’m only really competitive with myself, with everyone else. I really want to, you know, I’m the. I’m still the nurturing mom, right? I want everyone to be happy and everyone to be successful. And so, 

00:08:32:01 – (Eric Kebschull): that’s not a bad thing, though. I mean, at the end of the day, how do you all get across the finish line together? That should be the most important thing for a company, especially when starting out. Otherwise it makes it that much more difficult to be successful.

00:08:46:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I really really love this perspective. I’m going to go rogue on a question.

00:08:50:01 – (Brynne Tillman): What do you do when you’re building this culture inside of a company and there’s resistance? how do you handle that?

00:08:59:01 – (Eric Kebschull): Resistance is probably going to happen more often than not, because people it’s understanding why there’s resistance. You know, in the sense of like organizational behavior and psychology, you can get to the individual resistance. But why is there a cultural resistance and identifying those to kind of angles, like maybe even three individual team, full department or full organization approaching resistance is understanding what is it that’s making them immune to want to change?

00:09:27:01 – (Eric Kebschull): What are the losses that they’re potentially taking as a result of your change and understanding what they value and maybe who they’re loyal to? The loyalties matter as well. And so if they’re crucial to your success and making this change, you want to not necessarily plow down from the top and say, you’re coming along with me or you’re gone.

00:09:46:01 – (Eric Kebschull): You got to be able to understand what their resistance is and what they stand to lose that immunity to that ability to change might be something deeply rooted in fear. That’s where the psychology piece comes in. It might be a fear of comfort. It might be a fear of not being able to perform like they used to. It might be something even deeper seated than that.

00:10:04:01 – (Eric Kebschull): And that goes to a full on organizational level. So how do you make that shift? Is making time. Making time to have those iterative process is a little bit of trial and error. But working through that, maybe through coaching or workshop, just taking the challenges as they are rather than a full linear process to me is creating the psychological safety and space to help grow, that ability to change, not necessarily just plowing through.

00:10:33:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So, so curious, when you are working with a company, are you working one on one with these leaders on how to work individually with the resistance or how you’re like, tell me a little bit, I am fascinated. So what is that look like inside one of your clients? Just a little bit. 

00:10:56:05 – (Eric Kebschull): Yeah, yeah. No, for perspective, it could be the individual leaders that are pinpointed.

00:10:59:01 – (Eric Kebschull): So when we do a diagnostic of the culture challenges, we’re seeing where the resistance to changes that might be based on identifying silos and bottlenecks in the organization, a lot of it is going to be interviews and surveys with key players in the organization that have built resistance in the past. Normally, you’re not coming to me if you’ve tried the change and it’s worked right, you’re not necessarily always coming to me.

00:11:21:01 – (Eric Kebschull): If you are preemptively trying to help change, you’re normally coming to me because there’s resistance or my organization. So my wife and I work together. Just as an aside, this is about understanding what individuals need to be work together. Maybe through coaching. Maybe it’s a team that needs to go through more of an intensive workshop where we’re able to, kind of provoke those feelings and differences of maybe not being able to say the hard thing, people who are,

00:11:46:01 – (Eric Kebschull): you know, resistant to having to say hard things and being able to build up,

00:11:50:01 – (Eric Kebschull): consensus and are just allergic to conflict.

00:11:54:01 – (Eric Kebschull): Those are things we have to build together. So it’s not just on the individual leader side. It could be the whole team, but it’s just depends on what modality makes sense. Sometimes the individual development needs a leader to have their whole team tell them what are they most need to work on, what are their strengths. Other times it’s let’s bring everybody together and have some hard truths and reality and work through again that immunity to change as well.

00:12:16:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah.

00:12:17:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m so rogue on this, but you just have my wheels turning, so I’m going to keep going in like myself. These questions. How is I changing the culture inside of organizations? And because that’s a huge change,

00:12:32:01 – (Brynne Tillman): some organizations are doing it. Some are saying, no, you can’t use it at all. Some are saying you’re using this wrong.

00:12:39:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. So and I don’t even just mean like the LMS and AI, but the AI inside of all the tools in sales and marketing,

00:12:50:03 – (Brynne Tillman): how do you manage or help them manage that change, especially when there’s a whole spectrum of how of the salespeople that want to use it, don’t use it, refuse to use it, are scared of it.

00:13:05:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Like, this is such a huge challenge that I am seeing across all organizations. So I’m. Yeah, I’m curious.

00:13:15:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Again, this is my own selfish question. I feel like you’re here to help me understand things. 

00:13:22:07 – (Eric Kebschull): Yeah. No, but. 

00:13:25:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. How is AI that change, that major change that is actually shifting culture?

00:13:31:07 – (Eric Kebschull): It’s a great question. And this is just from my perspective, from seeing different companies that I either work with or had more conversations with, those who are struggling to implement new AI.

00:13:42:07 – (Eric Kebschull): It’s about setting expectations for AI, and it’s also about addressing those human fears as well. As far as is my job going to get replaced? Am I making what is this learning curve? Is this going to make my job easier or harder, and am I working myself out of a job? I think those are very real fears to acknowledge, but not necessarily real in the sense of there has to be a human being behind some of this.

00:14:02:07 – (Eric Kebschull): So I think that’s part of it. I think another part of it is how can this make my life easier? Sometimes it’s just inquisitive as I was like, how do I make my life easier? For me personally, I use AI all the time. I’m in a very human business, but being able to provide analytics to what’s going on without having to rely on a data analyst or somebody who’s in a more technical field, makes my life so much easier and at a much lower cost.

00:14:28:07 – (Eric Kebschull): When you spend X number of dollars per month for a subscription for whatever AI service you know you’re using. So I think the understanding is, is what fears are there? How can this actually help me? Are two big ones.

00:14:39:07 – (Eric Kebschull): That would be my perspective is that in order to implement AI, it’s not. Here’s what you need to do.

00:14:44:07 – (Eric Kebschull): You figure it out. I think that people need to take the time and understand change is an iterative process. It’s not a linear process when it comes to people’s beliefs, values and behaviors. And AI is a big one because there is a very real and potential fear that jobs could be lost because of it. And so you want to be able to still adapt to it and understand how can I upskill myself to still be valuable in a company where a lot of these things that were once done by process flow are now automated?

00:15:12:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Great perspective, I love that. And, you know,

00:15:15:03 – (Brynne Tillman): when the internet came out, when email came at everyone, there was always a fear in the new, in the new, in the new. Right? 

00:15:22:01 – (Eric Kebschull): Right. 

00:15:22:06 – (Brynne Tillman): And we can’t even imagine not doing business.

00:15:27:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Or we can’t imagine doing business without email. 

00:15:31:41 – (Eric Kebschull): Right, 

00:15:32:05 – (Brynne Tillman): right. But when I started in sales, we didn’t have email.

00:15:36:05 – (Brynne Tillman): We did business 

00:15:32:01 – (Eric Kebschull): right. 

00:15:38:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Email did not work the salespeople out of a job, but it really helped them scale their communication. So I think if you can look, in my opinion, if you can look at AI from how do we use this to scale access. Right.

00:15:54:01 – (Brynne Tillman): But leadership is struggling right now because AI is shifting culture.

00:16:01:01 – (Eric Kebschull): Absolutely it is. And to me it’s understanding at this pivotal point between and this is just my again my opinion, but is it improving the quality of life of everybody, which I think it can and it will or is it adding here is the work that’s being done automated? Now here is more work for you to do. I think that there’s something there to that to understand that, you know, I might be the be all end all of, you know, adding additional work like it will actually increase your proficiency and your productivity, but it might even give you a higher quality of life and work life balance, where all you’re doing is the human factor

00:16:36:01 – (Eric Kebschull): of it. Your best skill is yourself. Your best skill is your conversation and building relationships with people. If you don’t have to do all that process flow the old school paperwork, the mailers, the, you know, the robo calls and you have a filtration system to get you to warm up that lead before you have that conversation and build that relationship.

00:16:53:01 – (Eric Kebschull): That’s great, because at the end of the day, when people want to buy from somebody as much as the Amazons of the world have kind of changed things. AI is changing things, but it doesn’t change. Do I trust the person or the company that is providing me this product or the service, especially in the service industry, you got to have a good product and a service, of course, but you also have to have a good human being on the other end to build that relationship. And I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. 

00:17:21:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that and I’m going to just kind of. Yes. And although the Amazons of the world have changed things, I would say the biggest influencers, on TikTok, on X, on YouTube,

00:17:39:01 – (Brynne Tillman): have built a whole world around, helping you humanizing the Amazon experience, right? 

00:17:49:01 – (Eric Kebschull): Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Good. 

00:17:51:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. I’m so even though Amazon is a click to order what to order is still influenced by people. 

00:17:59:01 – (Eric Kebschull):  That’s a great point. And that’s something I didn’t consider in the moment. But you’re absolutely right. It’s just a medium. It’s the shopping space. What’s on that product. Most of those people are not Amazon owned products anyways, so you know, you’re being able to create a small business marketplace where you would never be able to do so before.

00:18:15:01 – (Eric Kebschull): And these influencers and the ability to create a one on one connection, even though it may not be that close, it can be when you have that relationship and say, oh, just my books on the website, but it’s also on Amazon makes accessibility that much easier. So it’s a great point. 

00:18:33:01 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, it’s so for me, the influencers are, prompt building, ChatGPT type folks that talk about because I’m obsessed with AI and prompting and all that fun stuff.

00:18:44:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. So the but it’s funny because I feel like I know these folks, I listen to them for hours a week. I, I have more,

00:18:54:01 – (Brynne Tillman): engagement with some of these folks than I do my own children because they’re adults, by the way. Not like they’re, you know. 

00:19:04:01 – (Eric Kebschull): No, I like

00:19:04:01 – (Brynne Tillman): so it I’m still looking for the YouTube videos to humanize the AI.

00:19:16:01 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s that’s where. So I, I this is just a fun conversation. I hope you don’t mind. We went in 

00:19:20:01 – (Eric Kebschull): I don’t mind at all. And to your point, I think, how do you take that from the B2C side to the B2B side, not just creating content, which I think is very important to humanize AI in our content, but then also walking into an organization, a nonprofit or a company, maybe even the government.

00:19:33:01 – (Eric Kebschull): You know, that’d be amazing if that worked, how do you be able to create that efficiency and be able to say, hey, this is about creating a better quality of life for you? You know, I can build an organism. You know, I’m building my own organization using prompts from AI. It makes my life that much easier. But I’m also not working as much like I don’t have to put in 12 hour days if I don’t want to, I can put in a solid eight hour day and get a 12 hour day out of it or more because of the ability to have an additional mind at the end of the day, are you trusting it?

00:20:03:01 – (Eric Kebschull): You know, with your life? Probably not a good idea, but are you trusting the ability to have a prompt to deliver a insights or a base or a skeleton, or even more, and then you have to put your own touches on that, that I don’t think is changing for a while. 

00:20:19:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it so. So what I’m hearing is

00:20:23:01 – (Brynne Tillman): the culture that you’re helping these companies achieve while they’re looking to scale

00:20:30:01 – (Brynne Tillman): so it’s not just about how we treat folks, although that’s very, very important.

00:20:36:06 – (Eric Kebschull): Absolutely.

00:20:37:01 – (Brynne Tillman): right. But it’s also how we’re enabling them to do their job more efficiently. Am I hearing that 

00:20:50:06 – (Eric Kebschull): you’re not wrong? At the end of the day, when you talk to some business owners who are not necessarily totally bought into the culture, they’re looking for proficiencies and, productivity metrics, but they also have some understanding through trial and error of their own that there’s a problem underneath that’s making implementing a new CRM very difficult.

00:21:09:06 – (Eric Kebschull): They know that the CRM can improve people’s lives, but if people are bought into it, it’s not improving anybody’s lives. So there’s an understanding that the cultural thing is not this soft and fluffy. We have to hold each other in order to be happy. It’s also understanding that this is a really complex thing that you have to work through, which is, you know, people’s thoughts and feelings.

00:21:28:06 – (Eric Kebschull): Because when we’re angry as men, we tend to be more angry and a little bit more aggressive about things when we’re upset and stressed. And, and maybe that’s true for women, too, but I guess the other part of it is, is some people are more calm, some people are more, I’m going to step off and not say anything and then be miserable about it later, or I’m going to be miserable in the moment to make you miserable about it.

00:21:52:06 – (Eric Kebschull): To that’s, you know, gender aside, that’s exactly what I think happens. How do we process that? Plus, you know, critical reasoning and thinking a little bit of IO. Org psychology and industrial psychology and understanding relationships, to be able to implement these changes. So it’s really about understanding people better in order to make this change go through, but also understanding, again, it’s not linear.

00:22:15:03 – (Eric Kebschull): It’s about an iterative process and giving yourself the time to make these changes worthwhile.

00:22:20:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love I could literally talk to you for hours and hours on this. I think this is absolutely,

00:22:26:01 – (Brynne Tillman): an under leveraged,

00:22:29:01 – (Brynne Tillman): skill or under developed skill in a lot of leaders. That is absolutely essential for navigating change, for navigating growth, for navigating, new product launch.

00:22:50:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So, you know, absolutely see, you know, I’m so process driven and a lot of our clients are process driven, but process is only going to be successful by the people that are running those processes. So yeah. Go ahead please. 

00:23:09:03 – (Eric Kebschull): No, to your point, there are some things that have to be linear and have to be structured.

00:23:12:03 – (Eric Kebschull): You do have to have an accountability structure in an organization in order to get things done. You have to have a linear process to some extent in order to see the progress go forward. But when it comes to people, people are not that linear and not always that structured. Sometimes the decision making needs to be a little flatter.

00:23:28:03 – (Eric Kebschull): How do you create an innovative environment with only one person driving everything?

00:23:32:03 – (Eric Kebschull): That would be amazing if they’re a unicorn, but I guarantee people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk had brilliant minds behind them and had to have a flat decision making circle where they were able to, you know, shoot down ideas, talk about ideas, work iteratively to see where it goes and where it doesn’t go.

00:23:50:03 – (Eric Kebschull): In order to get there all I’m suggesting is that change takes time. It’s more like a maze than it is a linear line, and that you have the ability to do so, not just qualitative work, which a lot of it is, but there are things that you can quantitatively measure about culture too. And that’s what, you know, our processes that well, let and I’m sure others do it as well.

00:24:11:03 – (Eric Kebschull): But my vision is how do you take something that in adaptive leadership is rooted at the Harvard Kennedy School, which is tends to be more in the nonprofit and the and the public space and still be able to help businesses with this very human need, while still appealing to the quantitative needs of measuring data in progress, not just on your, you know, ROI of, you know, sales and reducing attrition rates and product delivery times.

00:24:37:03 – (Eric Kebschull): But let’s measure culture as well.

00:24:40:03 – (Eric Kebschull): So that to me matters the most is how can we create those work environments where people are happy to come to work today? You know, they because there’s a respect for people part of it. But they also feel like they have that buy in. We were talking a little bit about that before, right?

00:24:55:03 – (Eric Kebschull): Is how do you give people a chance of equity in the company mentally when you can? Maybe you do, but you know, physically, but mentally you feel like you are a part of something greater than yourself. I need more companies. 

00:25:08:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So so by encouraging innovative thinking. They’re getting more buy in to their job and their contribution to the success of the company.

00:25:23:03 – (Eric Kebschull): What, what, what company doesn’t want more innovative thinking in the modern day world. Like we went from being physical and had to work with our hands and our bodies in order to work. The industrial age came along. You still had to do that, but you had to use your brain more by the mid 20th century. It’s all about what your intelligence is.

00:25:40:03 – (Eric Kebschull): Now. AI is taking a lot of that intelligence parts into the technical components. There’s still the adaptive parts, the human parts, the complex challenges that you need, emotional intelligence along with the ability to adapt and change. So I don’t see that going away anytime soon. Number one, I think that’s going to stay forever. And number two,

00:25:58:03 – (Eric Kebschull): increases innovation by by design because you’re able to to take in others opinions and take on conflicting points of view and work through what would seem to be, you know, tough challenges and then turn that into the result of, hey, we’re able to get through this, we can get through anything.

00:26:14:03 – (Eric Kebschull): It builds camaraderie, too. 

00:26:17:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So so when you work with your clients, do you help them tap into the genius of the talent that they’re under, leveraging 

00:26:24:03 – (Eric Kebschull): absolutely. It’s part of the process as well. I mean, good coaching in general. A good coach through ICF standards is not saying anybody’s broken. It’s leveraging the strengths that you currently have. Now.

00:26:33:03 – (Eric Kebschull): Sometimes you have to hire for what strengths are needed. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you need to bring in the right people on the bus, and some people will naturally attrition their way out of the bus. Or if they’re belligerent, then okay, maybe they have to go. But the point is, is you can leverage your strengths and rebuild teams and use, you know, utilize people in a better way because you hired them for some reason, whether you know it or not, utilize them at their best strengths rather than their maybe mid points or weaknesses that make them not as efficient and not as fun.

00:27:02:03 – (Eric Kebschull): To work with and they’re not happy to work with. They’re not having fun either, and they’re not necessarily feeling as productive. So I think it’s a two way street. And yes, utilizing people for their strengths and helping identify those strengths is a really big thing. But to me, it’s a better understanding of, okay, they need somebody for this thing here and they have a constituency.

00:27:22:03 – (Eric Kebschull): You already know what those strengths are because you’re respecting and understanding. They have informal authority. In other words, they may not necessarily have the job title too. Just because you can’t just say the CEO drives everything and people listen to it, but understanding what they have to contribute into the conversation is respecting the strengths of their,

00:27:39:03 – (Eric Kebschull): their trust, admiration and credibility with others.

00:27:42:03 – (Eric Kebschull): That alone is very important. But still, I agree, you have to leverage your team at the best of what their abilities are in order to get, happier, more productive employees and a happier, more productive company.

00:27:55:01 – (Brynne Tillman): All right. So now, I’m a business leader, and I’m listening to this and I’m resonating with some of these challenges and gaps inside of my organization.

00:28:06:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Why would I reach out to you?

00:28:08:03 – (Eric Kebschull): You are reaching out to me because you are trying to implement something change wise, or you want to highlight what you’re doing very well and do it even better. Either you’re struggling with change and it’s not what you’ve tried has not worked. We worked with has not worked in terms of another consultant or another agency or whatnot, or, you know, we were the best or we are becoming the best.

00:28:29:03 – (Eric Kebschull): We want to be the absolute best at what we do and understanding a better measure of culture. We work with you. We’re not huge like McKinsey. We don’t have, you know, thousands of arm’s consultants. And we’re not necessarily linearly process driven. If you want somebody else for that, that’s fine. But what we do is understand what the root cause of the challenge is inside people.

00:28:50:03 – (Eric Kebschull): We take the time to do that, and we invest in a collaborative partnership process to do that. And we walk you through the implementation phase. So we’ll co-create what those solutions are, make recommendations, but we’re there with you the whole step of the way so that one year from now, six months, even, maybe you can see those results, because we’ll be able to measure them through different tools and assessments to be able to see individual change, team change, department change and so on.

00:29:15:03 – (Eric Kebschull): Organizational culture change. So that way you’re not only feeling the results, but you can measure that too. And then by the time we’re done, hopefully you’ll never need us again because you’re able to build resiliency, adapt of capacity, not just calling us if you need help. We’re happy to help you, but I would love to be able to walk away from a client and have us get fired for it.

00:29:35:03 – (Eric Kebschull): I think that’s what a good therapist does. I think that’s what a good consultant should do, and a good coach should do is to fire you for I don’t need you anymore. I got this 

00:29:46:05 – (Brynne Tillman): so that we we call it working ourselves out of a client. 

00:29:49:03 – (Eric Kebschull): Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I like that even better. How do you work yourself out of a client of a client is you take the training wheels off, and then they’re able to ride the bike on their own.

00:29:58:08 – (Eric Kebschull): That’s so rewarding. 

00:30:01:05 – (Brynne Tillman): I like the day your kid graduates college. It’s like, okay, I got they got it. 

00:30:06:08 – (Eric Kebschull): Now you get maybe a little empty nest syndrome because you like I like helping that so much, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stay in touch. And hopefully when you do a good enough job, you’ve earned that referral for somebody else.

00:30:15:08 – (Eric Kebschull): And there’s another thing that’s so much more rewarding than anything else is that 

00:30:20:05 – (Brynne Tillman): so Eric? I cannot tell you how much we have gotten so far over time. I have enjoyed this so, so much. I know when we started, I’m like, we go 20 20 minutes, we’re like almost at 40 and I could go another hour, but maybe we’ll do this in another.

00:30:38:08 – (Eric Kebschull): Absolutely.

00:30:40:05 – (Brynne Tillman): I am so fascinated by the structure that you’ve put around culture. So I just thank you. You know, I hear you hear culture everywhere. This is the first conversation I’ve had or even listen to where you can at there’s at it’s tangible the the driving, the culture is not just this pie in the sky 

00:31:11:08 – (Eric Kebschull): platitudes. Right.

00:31:12:08 – (Eric Kebschull): It’s not. It can be structured now. There may be multiple approaches to that. And great. I’m glad that there is structure to it. But when we’re thinking of it and creating this from bits and pieces of others tools, assessments and frameworks, we’re understanding that there is a structure to what is typically very qualitative and that quality, that qualitative mess, can still be structured and still a quantitative data that I think is most important for businesses to understand that language, for people to feel like there’s a process and it’s not just platitudes and feel goodness and hugs and kisses.

00:31:42:08 – (Eric Kebschull): Yeah, there’s some of that because you need to be held in order to be able to create psychological safety to some extent. But there is a linear there is a structured process in what is naturally iterative. That’s what makes people feel like they’re making progress in some way. 

00:32:00:05 – (Brynne Tillman): I have so enjoyed this so much. So I always have the last question, which is what question did I not ask you that I should have?

00:32:06:05 – (Brynne Tillman): So is there anything that you’d like to share? Yeah.

00:32:12:08 – (Eric Kebschull): I think one of the things when it came to your topic, about sales and teams is, you know, addressing the competition and collaboration issue on teams. I am not in sales, so I can’t tell people how they run their business. And that’s not what I’m trying to do.

00:32:27:08 – (Eric Kebschull): But I would like to see sales departments be more successful in the collaboration space than the competition space, where, you know, you still are trying to make your goals and meet them. But what would the experiment look like if you were to add more collaboration to the sales teams and departments to be able to move across the finish line together, and how much more a quality of life at work would that bring, and how much more profit could that potentially bring?

00:32:57:08 – (Eric Kebschull): I’d love to see that actually happen, and I’d love to be a part of that with a company, if that makes sense. But again, we will see. But that would be something I would, I would, I would know redefining success, removing and reframing psychological barriers, building collaboration norms and really incorporate systems thinking. That’s part of our, you know, quantitative part is help them see the bigger picture.

00:33:18:08 – (Eric Kebschull): How does under, you know, internal competition undermine overall success? And then using things like what is a reinforcement loop, for example, of being able to build and go, in a collaborative environment. So you’re not just, yeah, hungry dogs feeding off of each other’s plates to get the last, close. But the close continues to individual performance and a team incentive performance is 

00:33:45:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Brilliant. Eric, this is been my favorite hour of the week. 40. Whatever. Favorite. I loved this conversation so much. So I thank you so much for bringing it.

00:33:58:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Where can folks find you? How do they get in touch with you? 

00:34:01:08 – (Eric Kebschull): Would love to hear from you. You can find us at Wellled strategies.com. Well lead strategies.com. You can find well LED just well space LED on LinkedIn.

00:34:14:08 – (Eric Kebschull): You can find myself Eric show on LinkedIn as well. And my wife Karen Leaney.

00:34:19:08 – (Eric Kebschull): But she is more of the visionary part of the equation. And I am the one that’s kind of running well, that strategy. So come to me. 

00:34:29:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Wonderful. Thank you so much for such brilliant insights today. And to all of our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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