Summary:

In this episode of the HR Impact show, Dr. Jim interviews Ingrid Wallace, a C-suite coach and transformational leader. They discuss the flaws in traditional organizational structures and the need for leaders to empower their frontline employees. Ingrid shares her experiences working with companies like Walt Disney and McDonald's, where frontline employees were treated as customers and empowered to make decisions. She emphasizes the importance of leaders admitting what they don't know and focusing on the growth of their people. The conversation highlights the need for a shift in mindset and organizational structure to create high-performing teams.

Key Takeaways:

• Traditional organizational structures are flawed and don't meet the needs of the modern workforce.
• Frontline employees should be treated as customers and empowered to make decisions.
• Leaders should admit what they don't know and focus on the growth of their people.
• High-performing teams require a shift in mindset and organizational structure.

Chapters:

0:03:27 How Walt Disney treated their frontline employees like customers

0:06:17 McDonald's focus on treating customers well and consistency

0:10:09 Leaders' job is to make the organization look good

[0:11:48] Dysfunctional leaders stifle team members and lose talent.

[0:17:21] Frontline employees need clear understanding of company's purpose.

[0:22:20] Disconnect exists between senior leaders and line level leaders' development.

[0:26:53] Leaders need to be obsessed with the growth of their people.

[0:29:16] Leaders need to prioritize the growth of their people.

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Ingrid Wallace: linkedin.com/in/ingrid-wallace-9985503

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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Don't meet the needs of the modern workforce. Know your role and staying in your lane can lead to a stifling environment that doesn't foster collaboration. That's the argument that Ingrid Wallace makes. So what's Ingrid's story? There's a lot here, so buckle up. Ingrid's been a c-suite coach.

She's a professional speaker. She's a transformational leader. She's helped leaders grow in emotional intelligence, executive presence, and she's served a number of Fortune 100 clients throughout the us, Canada, Germany, and the uk. She's the creator and developer of leadership dynamics and innovative and highly acclaimed HRD program designed to resolve.

Ingrid, welcome to the show.

Ingrid Wallace: Thank you so much, Dr. Jim. Great to be here.

Dr. Jim: I'm pumped to have this conversation with you because I think you bring a pretty unique lens to the conversation and particularly your experience in organizational turnarounds as well as executive coaching. I think both of those taken together are gonna have a lot of, runway when it comes to building elite teams and what you've learned from it. Share a little bit with the listeners on some of the things that I left out of your background and bio that you feel are going to be important for them to know and understand about you.

And that's going to inform our conversation that we're going to have today.

I was the first person ever to have sold and taught programs in the Walt Disney Company from the outside in their history. I was the first person to, as a consultant to Ford Chrysler and General Motors at the same time. They usually compete with each other, don't like to share consultants, but I was the first person ever to have done that.

And as I have gone through organizations and watch them grow and watch them function it's amazing how the similarities and the flaws are so similar. It's just amazing to see that they don't function very well because they don't trust their people very much.

Dr. Jim: You've already said something there that I want to latch into and that's that's this idea of regardless of how different the organizations are, how big or small they are, there's a lot of things that are similar.

Ingrid Wallace: Yeah, when I went to work with Walt Disney, I was very excited about that, by the way, because I'm a two year old at heart.

And I went in there and they asked me, the first thing they asked me to do was critique their orientation program and conduct some training sessions for managers. And I did that in five divisions for them. And the thing that struck me was that they were treating their Employees, the frontline employees like customers.

And I thought that was really interesting. They provided them with whatever they needed to make sure that the customers were satisfied and thus creating very high performance teams. People don't go to Walt Disney and they hear about team members all the time, but they don't realize it's a high performance team, which is really fascinating.

And it fascinated me so much. I started to delve into it and try to figure out what made it work.

They could number one, answer a simple question or number two, make a simple decision. And that was fascinating for me. they showed that the employee was the most important part of the organization. Which is, quite the converse in most organizations, they don't feel that way.

Dr. Jim: I want to dig into that area just a little bit more. When you say, these are large organizations, they empowered employees at the front lines to either answer a simple question or make a decision. aNd in a broader sense, they treated their frontline employees as customers.

Tell us a little bit more about how that actually showed up in practice. How was that embedded in the onboarding process? How does that show up?

Ingrid Wallace: Something as simple as during orientation one of the things they'd say is, when you were coming to your workplace every day, you will greet your teammate.

So the actual customer would know, how to feel, how they would make the actual customer feel. And I thought that was incredible. I'd never seen anything like it.

Dr. Jim: It's interesting you mentioned something so small as that, and it reminds me of the onboarding process that I went through early in my career when I was at enterprise.

One of the core principles at enterprise was you choose your attitude. And that was a frame of reference that showed up in, in a lot of different ways and how you treated your customers and, they were consistently priding themselves as an organization that led with customer service first.

So I think I think I see some parallels there. That's some really good good context. You mentioned that McDonald's was slightly, it was similar, but different. What was unique about the McDonald's experience that that you can share with us today?

It made, it makes the customer feel smart. If you can make your customer feel smart, they will come back. When you go to a restaurant and somebody tells you the food is wonderful and you say it was terrible, and they say, if you'd only been there on Wednesday. But it's the consistency that is created in these organizations and in the way that customers are treated.

And one of the things that I learned at Walt Disney and I've used for years afterwards is that I call it an upside down pyramid. That the people who are serving the customer are at the top, but the line is at the top and the bottom of the pyramid or the top of the pyramid is at the bottom, the CEOs at the bottom and the frontline employees are at the top because those people are so important because they have the information that the customers give them about what they want.

Dr. Jim: So we're going to dig into that concept in a little bit. You've been in this space and the organizational development space.

You've been in executive coaching and leadership development for a while. When you look at all the different experiences that you've had throughout your career, What's the achievement that you're most proud of?

Ingrid Wallace: THe thing I'm most proud of Jim is being able to take what I've learned and help it create better organizations, help it create better leaders.

I see it all the time. I have leaders that I spend time with and they come back and tell me things like, I took myself out of 200 meetings last year after I'm coaching, they say things like I have a person who, I thought was impossible to keep and the CEO tells me, I don't know what happened to that individual, but now they are a functioning part of the team and it's just things that I've learned.

I get to sound really smart because I get to deal with very smart people. And I learn as I go.

Ingrid Wallace: The leader had a global team and that global team was very high functioning. They all had PhDs. They were from Stanford and IIT and Yale and, Caltech and places like that. It was a scientific organization performing a very basic function. But they needed, it involves chemicals and they're being organic about everything.

And so that leader. I think it was a little intimidated by all of the knowledge in that team, but that leader spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what they knew. wHen you come back from a, when you come back from a seminar, tell me, share with me what you heard, share with me what you learned.

And that leader wanted to learn what they'd learned. And I asked him at one point, I said, aren't you the executive vice president? And he said, yes. So then why do you feel you have to know what they know? Why is that? And he said I don't know. I said you don't need to know what they know.

Dr. Jim: You asked the question, why do you feel you need to know what they know? You just need to be able to. No, what they do, why is that distinction important when we're thinking about leadership effectiveness in general,

Ingrid Wallace: I think there are concerned with whether or not they are imposters in that role, who knows more than they do, and it doesn't matter.

You want people who know more than you do. Ideally, you want people that are smarter than you and have to make that okay. And unfortunately, it's not okay with many leaders. It really isn't. So my job as a coach is to help, individuals understand that it is okay to have someone smarter working for you, because they make you look good.

Dr. Jim: Yeah, that's a good distinction. And I think the other aspect of what you're talking about that I think is important to mention is that leaders are responsible for clearing the way for their people to actually execute at a high level. So if you're too worried about you looking good you're losing the fundamental purpose of your job.

In that role as a leader is to get the most out of the team that you have. The other thing that I'm curious to get your input on, and, we touched on one aspect of it just just a second ago. And we're talking about what is the fundamental responsibility of a leader? But the other thing that I'm curious about is when you're thinking about. The myths that exist about leadership about HR.

What's the myth that you wish would just go away?

And you don't need to know everything. If you have people that, smart people that work for you, you don't need to know everything. It would be amazed at the number of leaders that don't do well because they're hung up on that.

Dr. Jim: You make a really good point about whenever there is dysfunction within a team, it's usually driven from a leader lacking some knowledge or lacking lacking information about something that's going on within their organization or some competence in some areas that they don't have.

If that's left unchecked, what are some of the things that can happen? that senior leaders and executives need to watch out for.

Ingrid Wallace: I have several examples that are very similar with leaders that I've coached, executives that I've coached at a very high level. Many times, they stifle the best members of the team.

And I find that very frustrating, very frightening, so most of the time I find myself, in an organization. And if I run across some dysfunctional teams. This is the reason. So how do I coach them to remain in there? Because one of my philosophies is everyone knows what kind of job you do.

When I have classes and I'm teaching executives, I'll tell them, I'll say, who does a good job, I'll have them mention, and they'll tell me this person does a good job. Why did they do a good job? They will tell me that. And that's great. And when I go through a list of all of the people who have done great jobs and why I turn around and I say, you know what, I could just as easily have asked you who does a bad job.

Dr. Jim: That's a good illustration that you're bringing out. The other thing that I'm curious about when you look at leaders, quote unquote, behaving badly, I've never had a problem saying that I don't know something. There's a lot of stuff that I don't know. whAt do you think gets in the way of a lot of these leaders when it comes to not being able to say that they don't know something?

Ingrid Wallace: That comes from the expectation that, the boss concept. Who's supposed to know everything, be able to do everything, be in charge and control of everything. But that does not work in this day and age. This workforce won't stand for it. This workforce comes most times with a great deal of knowledge and they don't need a boss.

Dr. Jim: So that gives us a great lead in to what I opened the show with and your point about the modern workforce doesn't need a boss, they need a leader.

One of the things that I mentioned early on in the conversation was that our understanding of what it takes to be a high performance organization to be a highly effective organization is fundamentally broken. We've created organizations that are layered, that have work styles that are archaic.

How does that tie into the game changing realization that you had that's necessary for building high performance teams?

Ingrid Wallace: First of all, you're hiring people who are highly skilled and highly knowledgeable and they're experts.

They know how they're going to be evaluated, and they go about doing it. But, too many times, we do not have the follow through. We tell people what to do, and we don't have a system to evaluate them in such a way that it grows them instead of stifles them. So I think that's really important.

Dr. Jim: So one of the things that you had mentioned earlier on is that the way a lot of organizations look at how the work is done, how teams are managed. They're set up the wrong way and you describe it from the perspective of an upside down pyramid. Tell us a little bit more about how that ties into your follow up and empowerment model of of how an organization should be structured.

Who are telling that business what they want and need. And that person is able to convey that information to the top, which is at the bottom of the pyramid, I might add to the CEO who has all of the resources. So the resources can then be sent. To the frontline so they can do what what that customer needs to do, needs to have done, I should say.

And it's, really been effective with a lot of organizations with whom I have worked because it's a different way of thinking. It's a paradigm shift. And I've had people say, but my boss, I'm my boss is my customer. I said, no. You are the boss's customer because you need a customer as anyone who needs from you a product a service information, authority, or resources in order to give the ultimate customer what they want, you need from that boss information, authority, or resources.

sO consequently you're the customer and it goes, it goes laterally, it goes down, it goes up, it goes in all different directions.

And one of the common problems that exists within a lot of organizations is that the closer you get to the front line, the more disconnected those front line employees are from the broader purpose of what the company is trying to do. Is there a connection there ?

Ingrid Wallace: First of all. I've drafted mission statements for many organizations, including divisions of places like McDonald's and University of Chicago, a lot of different places. And the mission is who you are, what you do in the spirit of what you do it. And the frontline people need to understand that, but nobody's communicating it to them.

Nobody's telling them why they're doing what they're doing. Nobody's telling them what the philosophy of the company is. I worked with enterprise, as you well know, as a consultant for 17 years, I trained 11, 000 leaders and enterprise and coached many of them. And everybody knew what that mission was.

But you have to believe that they can. That's what a high performing team is about. You have to believe in that team. You know what they're capable of. You have discussed, what they're able to do and how you'll evaluate them and then let them go do it.

Dr. Jim: That makes sense.

I think one of the things that's challenging, especially in large organizations, is that you have so many layers of. Leadership between the front line and everywhere in between that messages get muddled and unclear. So how do you solve for that in a large organization ? How do you bridge that gap where you don't lose it in translation from the top down?

So all of a sudden there was a plethora of movies coming out of Disney, just a ton of them. And what they did was they made smaller studios. It was Buena Vista Studios, there was Walt Disney Pictures, there was, and they've since bought things like Pixar. And there were smaller organizations with fewer layers.

So the individuals on the front lines could get information from the people that were dealing with the customers and get that information to the people with resources very quickly because there were very few layers. In most organizations, people on the front line have the information, but it gets, shunned away.

So I've seen divisions and organizations. Some divisions do it brilliantly and others don't have a clue, so it just depends on the leader.

Dr. Jim: When you're looking at effectively getting those resources where they belong, what are some of the things that you've seen leaders do really well that helps that occur?

Ingrid Wallace: They start they have effective meetings. They can, I, they help team members identify You know what their limits are how they are going to approach customers, people know what they're going to do and how they're going to do it. I Have a delegation tool that I use and it tells people, if I have these, if I have something on the list of things I need to do, what is the authority I have to do it?

And 90 days at level number two, they are growing. They are buying more time for you as a leader. They know how they're going to be evaluated. You can say in 60 days. You were and for this skill level or for this part of your job, you're at level number three. Now you're at level number two, that meets requirements that exceeds requirements.

People know how they're going to be evaluated, and they can constantly make a decision about their own career and their own job.

Dr. Jim: So it sounds like by rethinking how we structure organizations. There's some really tangible benefits that leaders can get. We often hear senior and executive leaders complain about how they're constantly in firefighting mode.

But then when it comes to investment in developing those line level leaders. You hear crickets, why does that disconnect exist and what can be done at an organizational level to solve that? Because it seems that the payoff would be pretty big and pretty impactful. And yet you have organization after organization that refuse to invest at that level.

Ingrid Wallace: If you invest in your senior leaders and give them a better picture as to what an organization could be, should they choose to change. And choose to put their emphasis on development and developing their folks. I think we'd be better off. The organizations that need it won't get it.

The ones who really need it, don't want to hear it, but the best organizations are always looking for opportunities to grow their people.

Dr. Jim: We've talked a little bit about, how organizational structure and leadership needs to be reimagined, or at least thought about differently. And we talked a little bit about what that involves, I think the thing that's going to be really useful to understand is how do you get started in shifting this way of thinking and how leadership needs to show up and really empowering the frontline?

Ingrid Wallace: When I talk to leaders about it they look at me very skeptically, but then they say, how do we do that?

I've, I performed. I've done what I was supposed to do. I've done what I was asked, and I said why are you, what are you asking them? I'm asking them to bring me up in the organization to give me a promotion. And I said what about the people who work for you?

And they said my people are good. They're fine. I said understand this. People at the top of the organization are not going to pull you up. People who work for you are going to push you up. They're going to push you up. If you are doing what you need to do as a leader, these folks that are on the front lines, that are doing everything you need for them to do, if they're doing it, people are going to notice.

I'm not looking for somebody, who keeps asking me to promote them. I'm looking for somebody who has demonstrated to me that the folks working for them are growing and they are being promoted and they're bringing value to this organization. And if somebody can prove to me they're doing that, I'll promote them.

Dr. Jim: I like what you mentioned about your people will push you up to that next level. And at the risk of oversimplifying it, what are the things that you should be doing as a leader to make sure that your people are positioned to push you up?

Ingrid Wallace: First of all you need to understand what it is they do, they should know how they're going to be evaluated. I can say that over and over again, I'm a performance management person, I really am. And I have one person who said to me I have a person who went out who works for me, who went out and gave a talk, to a global team.

That's your real job. Developing people is your job. Tom Peters has a new book called extreme humanism. And he says that leadership is achieved by an excessive, I believe he says an obsessive focus with the growth of the people you're leading. sO if people are obsessed with the growth of those folks, they're not going to have any problems.

You know what areas they need to grow? What is it? Do they need training? Do they need information? Do they need space to prove themselves? What is it that they need? More listening on the parts of leaders, will give them the answers.

What are some of the things that you would advise them to pay particular attention to as they're trying to build an organization that is more focused on the front line versus the C suite?

Ingrid Wallace: I think that number one, listen, know what your folks can do, know what their talents are, know what they're bringing to the party.

Not only do you have to know what it is, you have to be able to coordinate it with others, on the team. What makes an organization really powerful on the front line, I was working with AT& T one year and one person would turn to the other person and say, I have somebody here who needs an aging specialist, and that would be you.

And leaders need to know how to make that happen between their team members.

Dr. Jim: If people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to find you?

Ingrid Wallace: You can always find me on LinkedIn. yOu can find me at IngridWallacePresents. That's www. IngridWallacePresents. com

Dr. Jim: I appreciate you hanging out with us, Ingrid. When I think about All the different things that we covered, there's a couple of things that stand out that I think are particularly important.

When it comes to executing this well, one, I think if we're looking at shifting mindsets and shifting shifting the way that we look at this type of leadership. It starts with leaders being able to be comfortable with saying that they don't know. There is a myth or at least a belief that leaders slash bosses are supposed to be experts across any number of different things.

But the other thing that you mentioned, and it happened pretty late in the conversation, is The concept of obsession. So if you're obsessed with being an effective leader, if you're obsessed with building a high performance team, that requires you to focus on the growth of your people versus the growth of your title, because if you're focused only on the growth of your title.

You're not focusing in the right area and it's going to lead you down a path where you're not getting the results that you want. And it's likely because you're not really putting first things first in terms of your prioritization.