Jaclyn Strominger welcomes Mickey Anderson to the Unstoppable Success podcast, where they dive into the crucial role of people in organizational success. Miki emphasizes that while technology and processes are important, it’s the clarity of intent and cultural standards that truly make a difference. She shares insights on how leaders can cultivate measurable alignment and foster environments where teams can thrive, underscoring that motivation alone doesn’t guarantee results. Together, they explore the need for a strong foundation of clear values and behaviors to ensure that everyone in the organization is aligned and empowered. Tune in to discover how to turn culture into your competitive advantage and achieve unstoppable success! Jaclyn Strominger welcomes listeners to another inspiring episode of the Unstoppable Success Podcast, where she is joined by Mickey Anderson, a dynamic leader in organizational culture and executive alignment. Mickeyi shares her journey from running marketing agencies to establishing her consulting firm, Loyalty Ops. Her work focuses on helping organizations transform their culture into a competitive advantage by aligning teams around clear intents and cultural standards. Through engaging anecdotes and insightful commentary, they explore the importance of understanding people in the workplace, emphasizing that technology alone cannot solve organizational challenges. Mickey illustrates the concept of 'clear intent'—four essential questions every team member should know—and how this clarity can drive performance and accountability. The discussion shifts to the role of AI in today’s businesses, highlighting its potential and pitfalls. Mickey stresses that while AI is a powerful tool, it requires human insight and alignment to be effective. The episode concludes with practical advice for leaders on fostering a culture that embraces both technology and the human element, ensuring that their organizations can achieve unstoppable success.

Takeaways:

1. Motivation may fade, but consistency and a strong work ethic are key to lasting success.
2. Understanding your organization's culture and values is essential for effective decision-making and alignment.
3. AI tools can amplify efforts, but human input and clarity are crucial for successful implementation.
4. Leaders must first focus on self-awareness before leading their teams and organizations effectively.
5. Cultural standards should translate core values into actionable behaviors for everyone in the organization.
6. Transformational growth happens when organizations prioritize people before processes and technology.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. loyaltyops.com
2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/heymickeyanderson/

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Loyalty Ops
2. ChatGPT
3. Claude
4. Anthropic

www.leaptoyoursuccess.com

Well, hello everybody, and welcome to another amazing episode of Unstoppable Success podcast. I'm your host, Jaclyn Strominger.

And on this podcast we hear from amazing leaders, human people who have great stories of success and love to share that with all of you so that you can also have unstoppable success. And today I have an amazing guest, Michaela (Mickey) Anderson . And let me tell you a little bit about her because she's really phenomenal.

Uh, so first of all, her work centers on helping executives team executive teams install and structure. Install structure that turns culture into competitive advantage. Motivation does not last.

I might totally believe that consistency and actually work ethic actually really matters. But her focus is on cultivating measurable alignment, faster decisions, reliable execution and performance that compounds instead of collapses.

She is the co founder of Loyalty Ops and she Advises founders see CEOs and Executives Executive teams on how to create clarity of intent and culture across their organizations. Build feedback, translate values into operational behavior, ensure brand reputation mirrors operational truth, which is also so important.

Interning execution into. Into strategic differentiator. So welcome to Unstoppable success because all of those things matter so much to success.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, but I feel like we've got so much alignment, right?

Yeah, we do. We have so much alignment. So. All right, so I always love to hear. So, Mickey, like, how did you. How did you get to this unstoppable success for you?

Yeah, I was an operator for a long time, so I ran two separate marketing agencies over the many years, and I was in it. I was one of those leaders who thought dashboards and processes were going to solve all my problems.

But, you know, unfortunately that's, that's not always the case. And after many years within those agencies, I exited those and moved into consulting.

And I moved in to work with a BPO and transformational growth consulting firm where we helped. I ran the B2B division.

So we helped 20 million plus B2B organizations drive transformational growths with strategy, with offshoring teams, with technology. Pretty much, you name it, we did it. And honestly, it was pretty funny because I got in there thinking, oh, more tech. It's going to be amazing.

We're going to install this process. It's going to drive so much growth. And we hit the exact same roadblock with every single client, bar none. And it was people.

You can throw dashboards, you can throw processes, you can have clarity on what it is we're trying to achieve.

But unless everybody understands how we think, how we Behave and how we decide you are going to struggle and all of that information and tech is going to turn into a cost center instead of an efficiency center and you're going to struggle. And so after many years of working through this with organizations, through that consulting firm, I decided to branch off and specialize in this.

And that's where Loyalty Ops was born.

I love it. Okay, so there's a bunch of things that are running through my head. I'm going to, I'm going to share some of these things and we can talk about them.

Number one is obviously AI. Right.

So we talk about AI because you could throw your mission statement and you can throw all that stuff in there so it gets to know you, but it, but it doesn't, it's not a person. So that's kind of like one kind of a thing.

The other part that, that I also want to make sure that we address is, you know, so, so many people are afraid that AI is going to take jobs.

Yep.

So let, I love to talk about those things where you are because like they're going in my brain and I'm like if I don't let them out.

Right now, you know, yeah, AI is the hot topic. And it's not that I'm anti AI. Everyone who me closely knows that I have pretty much every AI tool you could possibly imagine. I'm a techie, I love it.

I have systems, automations, processes, I have a bunch of GPTs like you name it, I'm a huge fan. The problem we get to with AI is it's for the most part people are using ChatGPT.

That's just predictive, it's not a person, it's not going to come up with creative new solutions. It is predicting based off of the information given to it. Right. So that's how it functions. It's just generating responses based off of that.

And I think sometimes, sometimes we forget that and we treat it like it's this all knowing wonderful thing that's always going to be correct and it's going to give us the best guidance and the best insight because it knows the Internet. But we forget the limitations and the risks. And really it's the person who is driving the AI that needs to be aligned, needs to have clarity. Right.

But we forget that and we put kind of AI into this pedestal where yes, it's a fantastic tool. It's an amplifier and a magnifying glass.

But if you're shining that magnifying glass on the wrong things or giving it the wrong information, you're going to get what you put in.

Right?

Right. Garbage in, garbage out.

So for people to really be functioning well with tools like AI, we need to make sure that they know their stuff, that they're set up for success as people so they can leverage those tools. And that's really what it's all about.

So the majority of clients that we work with, we do consulting and facilitation with, they're looking at installing big technology transformational tools like AI within their organizations. But so far it's not worked well for them. They've thrown it in and did departments and they've just not seen the growth that they've been promised.

Right.

And it's because their people don't understand the core of who they are and have the behaviors and the decision making tools that they need to really leverage those tools.

Right.

And it's, and people, I want you to understand this like listeners, number one, it's, you know, as Mickey just said, it's, it's tools and it's what you put in. Like for marketing.

You could ask it to put in a marketing plan and have it spit something out, but you also need to give it and feed what you've done before. Otherwise it doesn't know and you need you, you, it's like it needs to get to know you, your company, your business.

You have to feed it all of that information and you can, but at the end of the day it might put something out, but you have to put the human element behind it too and think like, use your brain, like is that the right process and actually going to share some because I was using Claude the other day and you know, for those of you that don't know what cloud is, Claude is another AI.

It's by anthropic, different than ChatGPT and but I was asking, it was prompting it to like put, I was putting things in there for literally a marketing campaign and I'm like, I wanted to see what it would come out with and then I said, oh, but by the way, I did this, I did this test and these were my results. And then it obviously spit something else out because obviously it had more information.

You, you cannot just think it's like gold and because you have to also look at it and be like, oh well now take your marketing knowledge and apply it to what it spit out and see. Does that make sense? Measure, monitor and adjust.

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the mistakes that a lot of us make with AI too is we give it decision making power.

Tell me what to do create the plan and ultimately the tool's never going to be able to do the best job possible. It just isn't, it's not set up for that. But what you can do is use it to validate.

You can use it to provide pro and con lists, you can use it to research and provide you more information so that you can make the decision. But you don't want to give AI the decision making power and take that away from you because it's going to miss out on so much.

The other thing that we see a lot is a lot of Companies will throw ChatGPT or Claude or any of those tools within their organization. So everyone has their own GPTs and their own components. But what ends up happening is key person risk.

Everyone has their own process, their own GPT and they're all doing different things, getting different results. And you'll see we'll have one person feeding a GPT within an organization prompts and getting a response.

We'll try and turn that into a process that they can leverage and it is just not consistent. And so again these are great tools but we have to understand the function within your organization, the limitations.

So if you are going to have a bunch of people leveraging tools, they all need to be aligned, they all need to be able to know how to make good decisions, how to critically think, how to leverage and understand the tool to the best of their abilities so that you're not back in the same place as you are where one person has the ultimate decision making power and is your go to and they're the key performer and you can't scale that. And that's what happens when we amp simplify that person with AI, they just get faster. No one else can keep up, no one else can replicate.

That process becomes siloed even further and it's even more complex for other people to follow it. And so now you've got a completely unscalable process and you're keepers independent. That's a huge risk for an organization.

So we need to break that down and set our people up for success across the board so that they can use those tools. But we're not just amplifying those key top performers and pushing them away. Right.

And so we, you know, key thing obviously people, it's, it's we are a people world and a people business and a people, right? So you know, as you were sharing, you know, people are, you know, people are the ones that need to make the decisions and lead.

And so how, you know, when you made that Shift yourself from that company to here. Like, you know, how are you helping companies understand.

People? Yeah. Yeah. Well, first and foremost, they have to understand themselves. Right?

So I think one of the things we do, and leaders make this mistake pretty often managers do as well. It's, I'm going to focus on everyone else and not on myself.

And I'm going to have a little self awareness, little emotional intelligence, and like, it's not me, it's all them. Right. We tend to do that. And ultimately leadership starts with self leadership. Right. Accountability starts with self accountability.

And this is what it starts with. So as a leader, but as an organization, you have to understand who you are. And so what we call that is clear intent.

And this is a model that we've kind of stolen or borrowed from the military.

My husband is a retired special Forces assaulter, and so he and I have worked together in this organization, and a lot of it's borrowed from successful philosophies in the military. But clear intent is really simple.

It's the four key statements that every single person in your organization should be able to rattle off with clarity and understanding without any thinking. They should know these like the back of their hand. And it's so simple and it seems so trivial.

But I can tell you 9.9 out of 10 organizations I go to, no one does this or they do it inconsistently. So it's really, really simple. It's who are we, what do we do, why do we do it, and where are we going?

If everyone knows that at the core, like the back of their hand, Now I have guardrails. I have an understanding of what my purpose is, what our organization does, where I fit in this world. That is the absolute stepping stone.

And it needs to be consistent and communicated from the moment you start recruitment all the way through in every single role, from contractor to vendor to the leadership team. So that's step one, clear intent. Step two is what we call cultural standards. So this is how we take that clear intent and turn it into behaviors.

A lot of organizations have core values, right? We love them. Core values are wonderful. They're great.

And we like to think of them as a checklist of, okay, if it's this, if it's this, if it's this, I can make the decision, we're good to go. Nobody uses it that way. It's plastered on a wall somewhere and no one can rattle them off. Right.

I was just gonna say, how many people actually know what the core values are of a. Like, it's. It's insane, right?

It's hysterical because I honestly, I was in an executive team meeting two weeks ago with an organization and the one of the core leaders was talking about how, you know, people need to embody our core values better. And I asked him on the spot, what are your core values as an organization? He couldn't list them.

I was like, well, how do you expect anyone to be able to do this if you don't know them and model them? And so when we take, we have that clear intent now it's about cultural standards. So we take those core values, assuming that you already have them.

If you don't, you need them. Right? How do we turn those into behaviors? What does good look like? What is acting in alignment with this look like?

And then the language we use to communicate it. So a really simple example, and this is called heuristics.

So these are catchphrases or mottos or sayings that are ingrained and you just know what they mean. And one that I love, that's a really simple example of this is slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

So if I were to tell you one of our core values is slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Whatever you're doing in your day to day, if you think of that saying, you know what that means writing an email. Slow is smooth, smoothest fast.

Okay, great. I'm going to take my time, I'm going to be aligned, I'm going to write. It's going to be effective and efficient.

And so what we want to do is look at each one of your core values and then for every role within your organization, understand clearly what the behaviors look like. Not just policies, but behaviors. And then how are we going to communicate this really quickly so everyone can rattle them all?

It's simple, but it takes real commitment and it takes starting with the leadership team. So the way we do this, we work with a leadership team first. That's our phase one of our implementation process.

Get the leaders around, they have to model this for 90 days and hold themselves accountable as a group. But also self accountability. And if they can't do it, it's either too complicated or they're misaligned or there's an issue.

And that's really what it starts off with. How can I model the behaviors, the language and the values and culture of this organization on an ongoing basis? So everyone sees it.

That is, it's so yeah, as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking it is so important, you know, for not just companies, but it's, it's companies it's teams. It's. It's yourself. And, and I will, I'll bring it down to the individual, which is know your. Know your statement for you, like, what are your values?

Because you need to know them as your leader. Right.

Print them out and have them at your desk.

Right.

So this is my personal one.

Right.

And so what I did a long time ago is I set out what are my core values and I, I left them here. So I've got zeal. I have the definition of zeal. Zeal is disciplined. Enthusiasm, energy is infectious. And then I have the heuristics.

These are the language that I use and remind myself of on the day to day to stay aligned. It's guard your vibration. Calm is command. Energy is influence.

I can say those to myself or look at this at any time and know if I'm acting accordingly or not. And so as an individual, you want to have these, but as an organization, we want to have these so everyone knows what good looks like.

Yeah. And you know, one of the things that I always, I say your vibe attracts your tribe. Oh, I say it all the time.

Absolutely.

Like one of my core values. It's like a core thing about me. Like how you act, how your energy is totally attracts your tribe. It's like really important.

And like even what you were just saying, it's like the.

I always saying, you know, you need to go, you need to slow down to go fast, which is like what you just, you know, what you were just saying, it's like, it's like those core things that you need to do but understand, like listeners understand this is really important.

Like, you need to have that to say it to yourself, to know what your values are every single day to yourself so that everybody else knows, knows who they, what they are around you as well. And as you're in your business, you need to know what those are.

And I would say, and I love to hear, you know, at the start of every meeting or at the start of even when you're getting on a call. It could be, you know, here's. Yeah, state your statement. Right. Yeah.

We call it ritualization. So a lot of organizations, and I mean the military is a great example of this. They have rituals on rituals on rituals.

Right.

Like, but they have them and they're purposeful, they're intentional. And those moments that they create cause meaning. Right? They're defining moments. And those rituals usually happen in three types of situations.

And this is how I recommend you look at this in your organization, because just saying it over and over again in a meeting is only going to do so much. People will memorize it, but will they act in accordance? There's a gap there. That's the second step of learning.

So we look at it within your organization, in your day to day, in your employee journey. There are highs, milestones, moments that are really defining. These are promotions, these are open recognition across an organization.

These are winning, right? Then there are lows, there are difficult conversations, performance reviews, holding people accountable.

And then there are transitions, job changes, moving into different departments. Those are your opportunities to remind everyone what you stand for.

Those are your opportunities to model the culture and who you are as an organization and a leader. And the opportunities to communicate clearly those clear, that clear intent, who we are, what we do, why we do it and where we're going.

And so that's a really simple mapping exercise you can do to understand where you can create rituals for your organizations that people really feel connected to and become believers. I like to call it the Disney effect, right? Where you live and breathe the culture of the organization through those moments.

And that's actually, I think that's such a really key thing. And we talked about this like the, you know, pre show.

It's like you, you, you cannot elicit that feeling and emotion from a computer, you know, and you need that for your business because, you know, obviously the outside world gets to see it. So when you see a company model this and take this on, what happens?

Honestly, I mean, it's wild, the transformation that happens. And so we follow this process called the implementation pathway. And it's really the four phases of how an organization feels this.

The first symptoms they feel when this is off are usually at the end. It's usually brand reputation and client experience, right?

I'm getting poor reviews, people are getting inconsistent service, the product isn't delivering xyz, that's where they start to feel it. And so they immediately go there to try and solve it. But the root cause is in the leadership team.

It's setting that clear intent and cultural standards. That's phase one is leadership team. Then we cascade into the organization.

That's where you see teams working more effectively and efficiently, the decisions being made quickly and decisively and aligned. People are owning their mistakes. They're testing new things. They're going above and beyond what is called for in their role.

And then it goes into client. Client delivery becomes consistent. People are getting all star incredible experiences. Products are delivering what they're meant to.

Brand promise is becoming operational reality and then it moves into brand reputation.

This becomes word of mouth, this becomes reviews, this becomes who you stand for, this becomes the messaging that goes out there and it just cascades through.

But most of the time people start in brand reputation, they do it backwards and you have to reverse engineer from the top in order to really feel those full effects.

I love that and I think it's so true. You know, it does all start at the top.

If you want to have that, the success at that client end, it's got to start at the top with the values and that coming through so that your clients feel it. And they're not going to feel it unless it's felt all the way through the train, the chain.

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, that's where people make the biggest mistake is they throw process and technology in to try and solve the problem. Right.

We think, okay, I've got performance issues, I'm just going to throw either more dashboards or more visibility. I'm going to put my finger on we're going to improve this process and we're going to see the result. But that's kind of half baked response to it.

We have to start with people, get them aligned, get them really modeling the culture, the behaviors and turning that culture into your competitive advantage.

Then we need to align process and create that, to hold people accountable, to create communication and feedback loops, those rituals so that your organization really works as a well oiled machine. This is where you can start to put in dashboards, where you can start to improve process and then you'll see the result in performance.

That's when you can start to push people, you can pick up the pace, you can ask, ask unreasonable things of your team, knowing that they will deliver even if they've never done it before. And so it's called the people process performance model.

We need to start with people and work our way through our processes to install and then we'll optimize for performance.

So listeners hope you understand that to have that unstoppable success, you need to bring people through that people process and performance. You really need to be able to do that. That is going to give you unstoppable success in your business and in your life.

So you really need to bring that full force. So speaking of that, so how can our listeners connect with you so they can get more of that people process in progress?

Yeah, absolutely. So the three Ps yes, absolutely.

So you can head to loyaltyops.com and you'll actually find for free the playbooks on how to set your clear intent, how to create your cultural standards as well as a dashboard that you can use to rate yourself if you're trying to plug in technology or become AI enabled to see where you might be missing and having some gaps. So you can grab that all@loyaltyops.com oh that's awesome.

Any place else where people should be able to connect with you?

My I'm active on LinkedIn. I'm. I'm an ex marketer with no socials except LinkedIn. It's my only place.

So you can head to LinkedIn.com and it's HeyMikki Anderson is the backslash. You can find me there. I'm super active.

Oh, that's awesome. Okay listeners, so please do me the favor and please, please, please connect with Mickey on LinkedIn.

I'll put the link to her website in the show notes, but you have just been an absolute amazing guest. This is unstoppable success. I am your host, Jaclyn Strominger.

Please do me the favor listeners, and share this episode with your friends and your colleagues. Because it is so important that we take care of our people and we understand that people drive our success in our business.

So please subscribe and share this episode. And thank you again, Mickey, for being an amazing guest.

Well, thank you so much. It's an absolute pleasure.