Lead In 30 Podcast

Systems vs. Drifting: Stop Dreaming and Start Building Systems

• Russ Hill

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Is your team drifting or in reactionary mode? Do you wish you were scaling faster? In this episode Lone Rock Leadership co-founder Russ Hill dives into the value of systems. He defines the importance of setting identity and vision first and then building out the systems that activate those things in order to drive growth.


• Systems transform dreams and intentions into tangible results
• Growth requires both leadership (vision) and management (systems)
• The four strategic focus areas need one-word descriptions for clarity
• Project Rock Climb represents our growth initiative with specific revenue targets
• Effective growth companies need to make their initiatives exciting and rallying
• Identity determines behavior in both individuals and organizations
• Personal systems examples include daily exercise, spiritual practices, and family activities
• Organizations drift when they lack either clear identity or supporting systems
• Management involves creating frameworks for execution
• Without systems, your strategic priorities remain just hopes and wishes
• Assess where you're drifting to determine if you need identity work or systems work

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Speaker 1:

The value of systems, growth and scale require you to develop systems. I know that word systems is so not sexy, but otherwise you're just reacting. You're drifting systems versus drifting in your organization, on the team you lead, in your personal life. That's what we're digging into in this episode.

Speaker 2:

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill.

Speaker 1:

You cannot be serious.

Speaker 2:

Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

Speaker 1:

So why is this on my mind? Well, I'm actually going to be pretty transparent with you and take you inside some of our internal discussions, some of the stuff that we are running up against as we scale our company, and so we've got this gross growth initiative. Right, the name of our company is lone rock leadership, right, so lone rock leadership. So we have this initiative, this growth initiative called project rock climb, get it, lone rock and project rock climb, yeah. So my kids were asking about the other day because I came away from one of our strategic off-site meetings. I was wearing our t-shirt that we handed out at the, at the uh, at the at the off-site, which had this you know, this rock climber scaling this rock. I thought it was a really cool design and it said project rock climb on the front and then lone rock leadership our company logo on the back. And my one of my kids was like what's rock climb? And I was like lone rock, get it. And he was like yeah, like not impressed at all. I'm like come on, now, that's creative. But in this growth initiative, I'm going to share this experience with you and then we'll dig into why. I think this is super important and, in the process of sharing this with you and being transparent. You're going to get ideas, you're going to think about how you could implement this on your team and your organization, wherever it might be. So we've got these four key areas of growth.

Speaker 1:

So Project Rock Climb has a specific revenue target attached to it, a specific time period, that that this initiative, this project, is underway. Right, you got to make this stuff sexy and exciting, man. Otherwise it's just the day-to-day grind in an organization. Part of your job is to motivate, inspire, rally the troops, give them something to. You've got that long-range target. That's the destination. But, like we gotta have some fun at these different checkpoints, you gotta rally people, rally people. That's our job. So Project Rock Climb is a specific initiative and these can't go on for too long. So this is just through the end of the year for us and we're, you know, a quarter and a half through the year. So this is designed to build some additional energy momentum. We're on track, everything's going great, but we want to just know put some gasoline on the fire.

Speaker 1:

So there are four key areas of strategic focus for us and I'll just give them to you. For us, they're build, publish, pilot, certify. This is on the training side of our, of our company build, publish, pilot, certify. Those are the four strategic areas and if you haven't gotten this from me yet, if you want to be effective in communicating, rallying the troops inside your organization as you're focusing on specific initiatives or specific projects or priorities, you got to get to one word build, publish, pilot, certify. That sums up. Everybody in our firm knows. Okay, those are the four key areas that we have to emphasize on. It's not four sentences long, it's not 20 slides, it's four words and they're all verbs. You get it. We're going to build an organization that talks about content and curriculum and all of these additional resources for the organizations that are clients of ours. We're building things for them right Assets, that that that they can use to develop leaders in their organization that deliver results. So we're building and there's people obviously in our firm that are tied to that and they're the leaders on that, on that strategic priority, others are indirectly supporting it. Got it Then publish.

Speaker 1:

Publish for us is everything from the book. Our next book, which is getting close to the finish line. Publishes about webinars that we do. Publishes about LinkedIn post. Publishes about uh email newsletters. Publishes about um executive summits that we do, where we invite small groups to it, publishes about lots of different things. So you get the idea. Pilot is there's a whole part of that that I'm not going to talk about here because it doesn't really matter and certifies about these internal trainers, hr professionals, l&d professionals inside organizations. They get certified in our content and then they deliver it and and see the impact and it just feet, it just creates tremendous momentum as they get certified. So you get. I'm just giving you the overview so you can kind of see how this works. Hopefully they give you some ideas.

Speaker 1:

What's your strategic priority? What's the focus of the organization over the next six months, over the next next nine or 12 months? Do you have a name for it? Do you have something that you're calling that? Do you have strategic priorities that are exciting and have some energy around them? We've got graphics tied to all of that and one of the things that's not the point of this episode, by the way. I'm going to get to the point in just a second, in fact. Let me just, uh, formally welcome you and welcome into the lead in 30 podcast, in less than 30 minutes, we'll give you a framework of best practice, a model, a story and experience to help you improve strength and upgrade your ability to lead others.

Speaker 1:

Lone rockio is where you can find out more about our firm, both on the executive consulting side and the leadership training off the shelf solutions executive consulting side and the leadership training off the shelf solutions loanrockio. Okay, so why am I? Why am I bringing all that up to talk about um systems? Well, the reason is, as my business partners and I were reviewing growth and we're we just we're just addicted to growth, like it's just like solving a puzzle. So the revenue is exciting, the take home, you know, the lifestyle, all that, yeah, sure that's fun.

Speaker 1:

Building something that's you know got tremendous value and it's it's got a high valuation is is fun impacting clients and building relationships, improving the lives and capabilities and helping, like that's all rewarding and and and so it's the solving of it, right? Isn't that what you love about your business, whatever it is, whether it's nonprofit or for-profit or a huge corporation or a small startup or whatever it is, don't you love the puzzle? Like figuring it out? It engages your brain. You know you could be just waving a flag out on a construction site. You know you could just be like doing flag out on a construction site. You know you could just be like doing something that doesn't require your brain and you would be dying mentally, emotionally, right, ultimately, physically. So we're engaging our brain. There's nothing that's more fun, more, more engaging than engaging your brain, so figuring it out.

Speaker 1:

So we're, as we're, kind of looking at our growth strategy. We're like man, wouldn't it be fun to grow even 10 times this? Like when, when you've tasted growth, you can't. It's an appetite that never goes away. You want more of it. And, by the way, those of you that are in organizations that are barely growing or there is just a tiny bit of scale happening, maybe you've lost the hunger for this. Maybe the organizations lost its fight, lost its ability to innovate and to grow, and you got to get that back inside. Like it's fun to scale, it's fun to to, to get things growing in an aggressive way, try new things, innovate, all that. So, so we're addicted to this growth. So we're looking at this and we're like, okay, what could we do? What could we do to even scale faster or in a more meaningful way?

Speaker 1:

And what we realized is, under these four strategic focus areas, priority areas of build, publish, pilot, certify for us. In some of them we had systems created and we were experiencing growth or we were experiencing progress. In those areas and others the systems weren't as defined. We were kind of making it up as we go along, we were kind of leaning on people to just do stuff, and and what that exposed for me was how, when you don't have the systems, you kind of have just a dream. You have kind of a wish, a hope. Maybe you've got a strategic priority, but you don't have the implementation arm, the way to execute on it. So you keep talking about how we want to grow in that area or we want to whatever. We want to scale, but what it requires is not just the.

Speaker 1:

In fact, I'll put it a different way. I said to my colleagues, the other co-founders of our firm, lone Rock Leadership. I said we're really good at leading our organization, we're not great at managing it, and a lot of you are better at managing than leading right. So it's kind of interesting to think about those two things and those words are very useful. For me.

Speaker 1:

Leading is you've got the vision. You've got the vision you're setting. You're setting priorities. You're you're motivating growth. You're inspiring others. You're you're leaning into the future. You've you've got aggressive growth plans and desires and you're like you. We feel like you're out in front, you're leading us, you're out there, and then those of you that are managing you're more in the present day.

Speaker 1:

We've got, and in terms that I'm using in this podcast are we've got the systems in place to be able to execute that vision. Well, in our case, we got no lack of leadership of vision. Where we struggle is in the execution, in the day-to-day systems of it and and so and it really for us, comes down to bandwidth. And so you know you get these people that you bring on board and that you that join the team and they need access to you, and when they can't get access to you because you got limited bandwidth, it slows the whole machine down, and so you need these systems where people are empowered and they're empowered and they're able to move, and so building those. You might look at that.

Speaker 1:

So a few things I've already outlined in this episode that I have you think about. What's the growth plan? Is it their name for it? Is there something around? Is there a rally? You don't have to have a name for it, but that's kind of cool and sexy and or at least the project or initiative for right now, and you don't want to overdo that. Some organizations some of you are part of organizations that way overdo that and so you got sensitivity to it. I'm not talking to you, I'm talking about the rest of us. So there's some kind of growth should have. And then what? What are the three, four? You can't go more than that man. It can't have, you can't have. Seven strategic growth Like no, it's too much. No one can remember it.

Speaker 1:

And our firm, everybody knows build, publish, pilot, certify Like that's it. That's the growth plan. You don't need to pull out the PowerPoint slide, you don't need the brochure, you don't need the deck, you don't need to search for it. It's just build, publish, pilot, certify. Super easy, memorable, right. Rpm for those of you that have been through lead in 30. Rpm around the growth strategy, not just the TKRs or the team key results. If you have no idea what language I'm speaking, you haven't been through the lead in 30 course. It's what we teach. We're creating clarity. That's what it looks like. It's how you scale, that's how you get people to, to, everybody to, to, to focus on what's most important. So as we looked at it, we realized we have, we don't have systems.

Speaker 1:

Now let me say a little bit more about systems. What the cred do I mean when I talk about systems? It's such a non-sexy, boring word. Systems like? Who wants to create systems? I don't. Some of your engine like engineers, love to create systems. Those of you who are engineers, like you're. Oh yeah, finally he's getting to the good stuff. But what I mean by? Let me give you a few personal examples of systems, and james clear affected me quite a bit in the area of systems.

Speaker 1:

James Clear you're wondering who's James Clear? He's the author of Atomic Habits, the book that I've mentioned periodically. It's. You know there's a list of must read books. That's definitely one of them. And the books. Because he's got a publisher. He had to make it five times thicker than it really needs to be. You read the first three chapters of that book, you're done, you can toss it needs to be. You read the first three chapters of that book, you're done, you can toss it. Okay.

Speaker 1:

So he talks about identity systems. Right, those are the, the key things. So like, for instance, you can, identity applies personally and to teams, collectively. So for in and then so you, you set the identity and then you build the systems. And what j James Clear did kind of his contribution to the marketplace was saying quit focusing so much on goals like your new year's resolutions and these goals, well, those are just like dreams. They've got no systems backing it up and it's not tied to your identity. So if you identify as somebody who's out of shape, you're not going to go to the gym, like maybe you will a few times, but your identity is. Or you identify as a smoker. You think you're going to quit the habit, kick the habit, not a chance. It's in your identity. You can keep going. Okay, I'm going to give up this, but I'm really a smoker. You got to shift your identity.

Speaker 1:

So, for instance, in our firm think about it in a collective way we're a growth company that is very disruptive in the space of learning and development, because learning and development typical HR functions focus on developing managers, soft skills, and they have 4,892 competencies and 2000 courses and a bunch of stuff that's out there and nobody's really like. It's cool stuff and there's value and I'm not demeaning anybody at all, but it's not impacting business results and that's why executives go. What's the ROI on this? And in some of these large companies that some of you work at. We've got this whole team over there and we've allocated a lot of money and we cannot point to a measurable way that it's affecting our business outcomes. We're different. So in our firm we've staked out a position that everything we do, anytime we spend with managers, it has to impact business outcomes when Immediately Not six months, 12 months down the road it's got to impact performance right away.

Speaker 1:

The metrics we use to measure the success of our training programs are the same metrics the senior executives use to evaluate a manager, director or VP. What's the metric results? There is no senior executive in any organization. That goes well. Our coaching competencies are increasing. Therefore, I think this leadership development is effective, not a chance. They're looking at the monthly income, the monthly revenue, the quarterly results. What are they going to talk about on the earnings call? Got to try. So that's our position right.

Speaker 1:

So we identify as a disruptor in the leadership training space and we identify as a growth company that is new and different. We're trying an approach. We're built on an approach that's all science back, that shows how you retain information and you rally people and you do it at scale. That's our identity. So our systems have to back that up. Right, they have to back it up.

Speaker 1:

Now let's go to a personal example. So if I define myself as active, identify as an active person, then I've got systems built that reinforce that. I'll give you. I'll give you a couple of. Let's go through like three or four systems in my personal life. One is my wellness system and it's super simple. I work out for one hour, around one hour. It might be 45 minutes, it might be an hour and a half every day, six days a week. Now there are weeks. Obviously, most weeks I'm traveling one day or I've got something else or a family event or whatever, and so it typically. If you were to look at the last year I, it would be at least five days a week. That would be my average, five days a week. I'm totally happy with that. So I aim for six and I'd say half the month I get six and half the month I get fives, maybe even four, but the six makes up for it. I get to five you with me. So that is a wellness system. What's my system? Working out for one hour every day? It's a system.

Speaker 1:

I have a spiritual system. So for me and my family it's every evening. We spend about five to 10 minutes it's fast reading scriptures. We're religious, we're spiritual, and so we open up the Bible, we open up the book of Mormon, we read a chapter, we read 10 verses. If our eyes are glazed over and the kids are studying for finals or we've got a lot of stuff going on, it might be one verse and 60 seconds, but the system is deployed and then we kneel down and we say a family prayer every night, every night. So scripture study and family prayer, that whole process takes five to 10 minutes max and it has served our family exceptionally well.

Speaker 1:

We take turns Sunday nights, my night to pray, and then Monday nights, my wife's, and we go younger, we go oldest to youngest and, uh, we're just praying for our family members, we're praying for whatever, and so, and then Sundays, part of our system is on. So that's the daily routine and that happens 90% of the time. It's just part of our rhythm and our kids, just like they, they're used to that, they know. Okay, before everybody goes to bed, we do this, we just huddle as a family and again, we're spiritual and so we in the day, focused on that. If you're not spiritual. Don't take anything from that other than it's just a. You could. You could call that a meaningless routine, but it's a system for us. And then part of that system, that spiritual system, is once a week we go to church every Sunday.

Speaker 1:

For me, sunday is a day of rest. When I was a kid, growing up in a house that did this, I had some some hesitation for it. I wasn't sure it was for me. Parts of it bothered me. Church was a lot longer back then, but and now I love it. Now it's just critical. Now I lean into it and it's a day of calibration. For me it's a day of rest, it's a day of reset. So we've got things that we don't. I don't work very often on Sunday. I try to focus on the family. I try to focus on the family. I try to focus on self-improvement, reading a book, spending time out on the back porch in the hammock or whatever else with, with the kids, and, and and. We have family over and whatever else. So that's a system, a spiritual family system, and, and and strategic systems we have in our organization. I'll take this a little bit less personal and make it uh, make it more professional.

Speaker 1:

We have off sites in our company with the folks that are leading different initiatives or, uh, strategic areas for us. Every six weeks Most organizations we work with I talk about this frequently do the off sites once a quarter. That works fantastic for them. We do it every six, sometimes seven, and we find that to be super effective. But we don't have a big office building, we don't have a campus right, everybody works from home and we've got a lot of travel that's going on constantly. So we're all over the place and so we do our our offsites, which are really our onsites, if you will, and we do them at beautiful places and we make them super effective. I talked about that in the last an episode or two ago, about how to make those meetings super effective, to where people are engaged. So that's a system for us.

Speaker 1:

I'll go back personal for just a second. Give you one more example, then I'll talk about some takeaways. So another family system for us to strengthen our family is you can look at the system. There are multiple aspects of it. Regular contact so we're all over the place now as a family, with most of our kids gone, what? Only one remaining at home. And so regular contacts that's texting, that's a family group text. That's phone calls to each other and then every six to eight weeks we see each other um, and so that might be us traveling to our kids, them traveling to us, and then we do quarterly or almost quarterly activities. That's our week at lake powell, that's a trip like we did to hawaii recently. That's these that we went to um university. We rallied around BYU, had an unbelievable basketball season and we had an awesome football and basketball season this year.

Speaker 1:

It was a really good year to be a fan of our school and one of our good friends became the head coach at BYU in the basketball program a neighbor of ours who just moved up to do that, and so we went to. That was a family event going to this game as they were getting ready to go on the NCAA tournament, make some noise and ultimately went to the Sweet 16. So that's, we have systems built around family unity. Okay, so I'm getting you thinking about systems where you don't have systems in place, you're drifting. You have dreams, you have hopes, you have ambition, you have intention, but you're not making progress. It's not part of your identity, it's not really who you're becoming as an individual, as a team, as an organization. So in this episode, the real takeaway I want you to have is to analyze or think about areas where you're realizing now that we're so many months into the year it's almost halfway through the year and areas where you're not moving forward as an organization, a team, an individual, as much as or as fast as you want to. My guess is you've got one of these two areas where you're deficient in leadership, which is means you're not visionary. You haven't really looked out into the future and staked a position and defined where you're headed, and leadership is tied to identity. We haven't really identified who we want to be. Are we a growth company or are we not a growth company? Are we a disruptor or are we the status quo? Are we innovating? What are we? What are we as a team, as a uh, as an organization, as an individual? When there's a lack of identity that's defined and shared and alignment around that, then you're drifting, so you're lacking the leadership on that. Now, some of you, you, you, you don't like the leadership. You've defined all that You've got you, you, you know what the identity of yourself is. I'm going to be active and well and spiritual, whatever it is. Or you've defined the identity of the team or the organization. This is who we are, and I walked you through what that sounded like for our firm to give you an idea. I could go through that with with clients of ours too, from Chick-fil-A to you, um Insigna to Lockheed Martin, to these different you know, I think about Mark, just lots of example, marcos Pizza, I was going to say different examples where the, the you're focusing on the identity. You've got that nailed right or you're fine tuning it. So that's leadership in this area. And then the management is the systems, are the systems that you have to deploy. So if you've defined the identity, yeah, we know who we are Like, we know what we're trying to be. Yeah, we defined the long range target. We know what mountaintop we're trying to scale, but we're just not making progress toward it in the way or at the degree that we want to. Well then it's a management issue and it's a systems issue. I promise you that's what it is. If you're drifting, you either got to work on the identity and that long range target defining the destination, or you got to work on systems and uh, and in fact, we're retooling parts of lead in 30.

Speaker 1:

That because, as we dug into our book and we've got this book coming out, oh my gosh. Because as we dug into our book and we've got this book coming out, oh my gosh. I just love where we're landing on this book. I reread the first couple of chapter. I almost did a podcast episode giving you chapter one. Now that no, no, no, no, no. We're too far away from the launch. I got to wait to do that, but I'm so sticking excited about it.

Speaker 1:

We haven't. We've written some good books. We've haven't written anything this good this is. This is amazing, and uh, and I give a ton of credit to our ghostwriter, who really took our experience, our ideas and and just got it on paper in a way that came to life. This is a guy that writes screenplays in Hollywood and does a lot of different things and he's he's ghostwritten so many, so many books and um and, and I just feel like we hit paydirt with our ideas and experience and then his expertise and wisdom. And so, anyway, in that book, as we talk about movement right, clarity, alignment, movement we're taking the course and we're putting it into this book that you can give to a manager or an executive that just encapsulates everything and goes deep on it and in a way that a 30 day course can.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, in the movement section, what we really uh, uh, have shifted our focus to is and I've talked about this in some podcast episodes If you go back 10, 20 episodes ago, you'll see when we were actually talking to the ghostwriter about it, because it was on my mind this whole idea of discipline, and so that's another way of saying that we lack the systems. We're drifting, we're reacting as an organization under publish. We've got hope, streams and intention under that strategic priority of publish for us, but we don't have enough systems. We've got some. We need 10 X. So that's our focus is building out those systems. And so movement, really, if you think about clarity, alignment, movement, movement is discipline around high leverage activities, so we build systems around that, and there's a lot more that could be said around that.

Speaker 1:

But, um, I've given you a lot a lot to think about. So I want you to think about in your personal life and in your professional responsibilities, where you need some work on identity and defining the destination. Who am I, who do we want to be? And then, if we're drifting and reacting, then where do we need systems and who is going to execute on those? What's it going to require to build those? And because you don't you don't have the bandwidth so many of you to manage those. You need people to execute on those systems, and some people you've got on the team are going to be exceptional at it and some aren't. Don't hesitate to move, because that's the requirement for scale systems. Otherwise you're drifting. That is what we wanted to talk about. That's what's on my mind in this episode of the lead in 30 podcast.

Speaker 2:

Share this episode with a colleague, your team or a friend. Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill.