This week’s Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos features Steve Dion, founder and CEO of DION Leadership, dedicated to creating workplaces where the employees start every day excited and end every day accomplished. Throughout today’s episode, Steve shares his knowledge and expertise in helping organizations develop more vital workplaces and cultures by creating and deploying innovative assessment, leadership, and team development programs.

[01:32] Steve’s story – Steve describes his journey and how he came to be in the position he is in today.

[05:33] Impact of COVID – Steve discusses how the world of work is changing due to COVID’s impact over the last two years.

[07:35] The Future - While sharing one of his recent experiences coaching a CEO, Steve explores some areas he finds fascinating regarding the future of work.

[12:14] Advice to CEOs – Steve counsels CEOs on their own need to return to the office. 

[16:04] Better Workforce - Steve outlines what advice he would give leaders on establishing leadership and teamwork to improve the workforce and how people respond to that kind of framework.

[24:23] Steve’s Approach – Steve explains how he serves his clients through his company, Dion Leadership. 

[26:28 Inspiration – Steve shares the thought leaders he admires and the places he seeks inspiration.

Resources:

Connect with Steve:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sdion/

Website: dionleadership.com

Work-life balance: worklifealigned.com

Steve Dion on Leadership, Culture & the Future of Work

[00:00:32] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another week of B customer led. I've got another special guest for you all this week. Steve Dion is founder and CEO of Dion leadership. Now Steve works with a lot of CEOs at, at big complex brands. So is got a lot of really interesting perspective and I love sort of, Dion leadership's focus.

[00:01:10] And that's why I had to have Steve in the show. Steve walk gonna be customer led, so excited to have here.

[00:01:18] Bill Staikos: And it's gonna be a lot of fun. So, the story arc for a, a lot of, what we're gonna talk today, about for our listeners is just leadership development and the impact on that and the future of work.

[00:01:47] I I'd love to hear about how you've kind of, your path and how you've gotten to, to, to where you are today.

[00:02:02] connection with other people and meaning and purpose. I found myself getting into student government and service clubs and just understanding the power of community and, and, and leadership at that point. So naturally when I got into college, it drew me to be a RA, do some other things in student government.

[00:02:40] Like this.is fascinating. That's awesome. why do organizations, how do people and organizations coexist? So that led me to get a degree. A master's degree in HR, cuz that's really, the way organizations kind of put it functionally. And I found myself then working for about 25 years in corporate America, crafting different leadership and OD programs and, and I selected organizations to work for kind of intentionally because of their.

[00:03:20] So many different leaders operating in very different ways. Yeah. And one leader could create a culture that was so different than another culture in the same building, or just down the hall. It always fascinated me about why that was and how could we, do some things differently over the course of, of my career.

[00:03:56] And I thought we had a great business. And at one point I had the opportunity to work with, and America bring five different companies and five different countries together to create. A region and again, about community, about understanding people, purpose, mission, vision, just wanted to get to the point where I could go have a bigger imprint of that.

[00:04:34] And it was really perfect timing, in doing this a couple years ago, because I had envisioned this idea of moving to sort of virtual and digital delivery of tools and resources as before COVID hit. But we were, just on the cusp of that. So that pretty us to today with, our ability to kind of do things virtually in the leadership development space and, looking forward to kind of the next iteration of this.

[00:05:14] given the time that we're in now, Steve, like how is the world of work changing from your perspective? And you get to see a lot of different companies and that might be, E even if you can share, your perspective on like, what's good and what's not so good.

[00:05:31] The universe has, put us into this large scale experiment to test a new talent management operating system. People didn't want it, they didn't ask for it, but we were asked to figure out if we could do things in a new and different way because of, it was required. and for the most part, I think we've proved that test to be viable and employees know it.

[00:06:17] Figure out how to make the best of this, and there have been periods in our industrial evolution where we had practices that we thought were great. And then later we learned there were better ways. I mean, women were embraced in the workforce for a lot of years, we, we produced waste and put into rivers and sewage sewers and said, okay, that's got up.

[00:06:46] Bill Staikos: I wonder like how that's, how you see that the current situation, like where we might be in, let's say five years, like, how is the future of work do you think going to evolve?

[00:07:11] I love that analogy, but why are some maybe getting it and others not? How do you think that's gonna impact where people go or what they do and how they do it?

[00:07:35] In person before and is really struggling with their own personal job satisfaction. I realize why we need to be home right now. I realize this spike and we're we're productive. But it's a huge change effort for leaders of organizations and what it means for them. And it's a huge, a huge shift. So this return to work model, I think there's gonna be a wide array of organizations from CEOs that are change oriented that are global and digital oriented that are jumped right in just from day one and said, we can run a virtual organization and they see all these positives about it, reducing.

[00:08:35] and our employee base, got smaller. Well now with digital, it even quicker access to everything to people, the resources to economy and organizations are gonna be on one side of that or the other, we can recruit employees now from different places. but also that employee can easily go.

[00:09:14] Well, employers never talked about that. people didn't ask us to train on resilience and wellbeing. Well, now employers see it as their responsibility. To provide that for the many hours of time, people are at work and yet people are super burned out right now, Yeah. They are trying to figure out a new and better way.

[00:09:51] we've always wanted respect and meaning and balance and enjoyment and jobs for forever. But, but now people realize that after this proof of concept, they don't have to make that trade off. It's not a good job. And miss my kids, even activities it's it's, I can do both. And there are organizations that will figure out a way.

[00:10:18] Bill Staikos: So, it, it's funny. I was actually so bummed when my kids started going back to school. Cause I'd get to have lunch with them every day. I'm like, when am I gonna have the opportunity to do this ever?

[00:10:46] Right? Absolutely. I'm curious, like if, if you think about, I mean, with the leadership model has fundamentally changed, right? Like you don't have the, sort of the, tell it alls anymore, and now you gotta, you have people who need to be listening, be empathetic, et cetera. What was your advice to that CEO in terms of.

[00:11:17] Steve, if, for listeners who, who may have a boss that's I want everybody back in the office and everyone else around them saying this is nuts. Can't happen. How do you ma like how, how do like team members manage that?

[00:11:39] That's a whole different piece, manufacturing as well. But the support staff folks don't always have to be there. And many leaders are hiding behind. This is, this is my view of this. They're hiding behind this idea that. Equity drives fundamental balance in an organization. And so I can't treat two people unfairly.

[00:12:21] Over that. So to answer your question about my coaching for this, CEO, we spent some time talking about his day and what his day used to look like, where would he walk down the hall? Did he pop into meetings? Did he, overhear interactions that had him feel like the business was.

[00:12:55] He was like, yeah, never thought of that. So I think, figure out ways to use this technology. we only know. Yeah. Like so much of it. And I think we'll be able to integrate screen based systems to, to help and feel better. And then the other part was, think about the business metrics that you're trying to drive and, yes, you need to get your personal satisfaction, Matt, but how do you have a problem, use data to show that and listen to your employees.

[00:13:43] Bill Staikos: Yeah. In, in a, in a past life, a lot of what we were grappling with as a company was this concept of employee choice. And how do you create parameters and guidelines that are broad enough to give employees, empower employees, to make decisions about when they're coming to the office and how they're showing up, et cetera.

[00:14:20] If you give your employees a choice of how they can, how they can do this, that's very different than you dictating. Hey, we're not just doing Mondays or Fridays, whether you like it or not. It's really obvious to say companies need leadership development, pro grams in place kind of more than ever right now.

[00:14:53] Like what, what guidance would you give them in terms of maybe directionally where to start looking?

[00:15:18] So at the senior level, we're seeing organizations request a lot of executive team. Offsite team build kind of a reset button on what does our team look like? We were so sort of triage mode that we've lost some trust and understanding and have more silos built and we need to break those down. we also seeing a huge uptick in leadership development programs.

[00:16:05] We have leadership development or, individual coaching programs where organizations have said, we're taking the 10 people. We don't wanna lose the most. They're already high potential. People probably wouldn't have had a leadership coach before, but we're going to give them a retention package to get through this next year because we know how important it is.

[00:16:43] A second one, or next one is, is yeah, that the direct manager is really the secret weapon in this. In this work, working with the first line person who then works with an employee and, understanding that we need to equip those first line managers with skills to help navigate things that aren't in policy books anymore.

[00:17:26] And they identified that there's a 50% gap between. A manager's view on how they show work life supportive behaviors and what their employees rate them on. If they actually do wow. Support, work, life, family behaviors, and furthermore, then we identified, they identified through all this research, these four specific behaviors.

[00:18:12] So in this case, we're saying that the frontline leader, you connect in a different way than you used to connect. it used to be like, this is your job. This is your work. Do what you need to do? Here's our policy. I'm a good guy. You're a good guy. Go to work. The connection needs to be different.

[00:18:45] And then they never do well. now we need to respond, respond quickly and do something to rethink is about, managers have control. Of rethinking things within their work area. maybe I could have these two people swap this work it's within the policy constructs, but I need to own doing those things.

[00:19:19] And you should be too. So I'm gonna work at night tonight. You guys. Don't look at my emails, see 'em in the morning. Like just be open and model. Yeah. What you expect of other people. So I think if we start doing more of those things, we're gonna have better workforce that

[00:19:33] Like, it sounds easy to put into, into practice, right? I think, do you find that. Do you find the frontline managers are still having a hard time, even with the simplicity of that framework, cuz it's very, very different than, let's just say you've got a team of two or three, you're a relatively new manager a year or two under your belt.

[00:20:11] Essentially. Cause they cause their own leaders didn't follow that. And that they learn from them. So there's this really big relearning thing going on. And how are you finding people respond to that in this environment?

[00:20:36] So it's a big ask of people. So developing them to feel comfortable and it is important, with the work we do in healthcare, we're doing a lot of programs with nurse managers. I mean, trying to imagine right now, working with nurse leaders to help figure out who's got COVID who doesn't, how, how do we fill our already increasing hospital beds and ask you to work more hours?

[00:21:14] Bill Staikos: And I guess, I guess as leaders, more senior leaders, even CEOs need to give their organization. And those first line managers, the space and the time to do that too, which not many companies have. Right. So, that I think

[00:21:33] It there's, no, you can't write it all down in a book that says, this is the order of these things, or click on our company internal portal and it'll give you all the answers. It's it's individualistic and it comes through each. Leader doing good work, understanding the company's mission, understanding the purpose, understanding the customers we serve, whether that's, patients or it's another business that you need to provide parts so they can make a car, whatever that is.

[00:22:20] Bill Staikos: So this is a good segue, Steve, into talking about Dion leadership.

[00:22:37] Steve Dion: approach. Yeah, thanks for asking bill.

[00:23:13] And then we become kind of an adjunct arm to some of these larger, more sophist, candid organizations where they might do some things internally. We do some things, but it's all towards this common end, whether it's coaching. It's team development. It's executive assessment. Sometimes it's now it's organizational development systems kind of working through new, mission, vision, values, culture opportunities.

[00:23:44] Bill Staikos: so Steve, one of the things, that I love about the show is I get to talk to experts like you on a weekly basis. And like, I learn a ton.

[00:24:09] Like, who do you go to like for like, wow, they're, they're doing some really cool stuff in this

[00:24:33] Her two podcasts are great. I, I find the guest that she brings on to be riveting and yeah, so that's a place I go a lot. And I think you could almost go back to some of the earlier her earlier work and it has different meaning even today. Mm, that's

[00:24:55] You

[00:25:13] Going to work. Are they starting excited or are they going, oh my God. Get me through this day. And are they coming home going? I just, I can't wait to get home, get a drink, or are they coming home going? I gotta be present. I can't wait to share all the cool things I did. And I feel like, I'm living out my purpose and that really drives me every day to just think about kind of that commute and all these people out there, struggling with work and how can we make better organizations?

[00:25:58] so I think a lot about that too. I'm not commuting anymore, like, like you're driving to the office, but, it's, I'm still fascinat. When I see people on the street where I'm not shopping, et cetera, Steve, this has been a great, great conversation. I truly appreciate you coming to the show. Where can our listeners find you if they wanna learn more?

[00:26:44] Cool. And I also invite listeners just to email me directly, I'm happy to have a conversation. I'm super passionate about this space. it's steve@dionleadership.com. Give me a holler and I'd be happy to see if I can help you. Awesome,

[00:27:04] All right, everybody. We're another great show. We're out. Talk to you