The Fortified Life Podcast with Jason Davis - EP 196 | Wendy Cocke | founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions LLC - THE FORTIFIED LIFE PODCAST

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to the Fortified Life Podcast, where we learn how
to develop a dependency on Jesus in the marketplace.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
From the boardroom to the bathroom, God is with you.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Here's our host, author, speaker, teacher, encouragerpreitie coach, and my husband.
It's the man they call mister forty five Jason Davis.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode
of the Fortified Life podcast where we are passionate about
developing a dependency on Jesus and the marketplace. I'm your host,
Jason Davis aka mister fortifive. Every week we have the
opportunity to bring on authors, speakers, coaches, CEOs, leaders of

(00:59):
nonprofits who are also passionate about putting God back in business.
And it's no different this week, ladies and gentlemen. I'm
very excited. I just recently met this individual and I
got to tell you, you know those people who in just
one conversation, it feels like you've known them for a
long time. That's how I feel like I know Wendy.

(01:19):
Let me tell you a little bit about her to
before I bring her on and we get into the conversation.
Wendy Kock is the founder of Engineering Leadership SOLUTIONSC where
she provides management coaching and leadership development. She's a former
chemical engineer by training spent over twenty years leading technical

(01:40):
teams and Fortune five hundred companies prior to joining the
faculty at Georgia Tech. She's led large international projects and
coordinated resources across time, zones, borders, and languages. Folks, There's
a whole lot more on Wendy's resume that I could
get into, but let's bring her on and jump to

(02:01):
this conversation. Wendy, Welcome to the Fortified Life Podcast.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
It is so great to be here. Jason.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Thanks, Wendy. I gotta tell you I was teasing the
audience about this, but Wendy, I really did feel like
that our first conversation, and we have obviously a mutual
friend that introduced us, but I really did feel that.
And I always laugh how the Lord does that is
when someone says, hey, you need to meet them, and
then you do, and then you go back and you're like, man,
it was way better than what why were you holding

(02:29):
back on me? It's like someone I should have known
for ten years already.

Speaker 4 (02:35):
No, it just felt like we'd been friends forever. So
I'm looking forward to today.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Absolutely, Wendy. We know in twenty twenty five you just
didn't wake up doing what you're doing, and you have
a really, really awesome story where you've had some major
God moments. So talk about just your professional background and
then let's say, then we'll get into how God uniquely
positioned you you from it for a career transition, of course.

Speaker 4 (03:04):
So my undergraduate degree, as you said in my intro,
is in chemical engineering, and I did exactly what you
were supposed to do as a chemical engineer. Out of college.
I went and worked in research and development at a
major Fortune one hundred company here in Atlanta, helping to
make new products come to life. I did that for
about a decade, moving up just like you're supposed to,

(03:24):
right jury level, and then slightly more responsibility, and then
maybe a project leader role, then a management role, and
then an opportunity came up for me to move into
our manufacturing and supply chain organization to do what I
had been doing, but on a bigger scale and with
our manufacturing team. I took that opportunity and I moved over,
thinking it was going to be one of those career

(03:45):
development moves. I was going to do it for about
twelve to eighteen months, get a broader experience, and come back.
My plan had been to be a director in the
research and development organization, and I had so much fun
in that group I never left. Another ten years over
in manufacturing and supply chain, leading strategy and portfolio management,

(04:06):
continuous improvement, all the different jobs you can do while
you're in a staff level role supporting manufacturing, and then
moved into our PMO, our project management organization, and was
leading corporate wide projects. And that's when what I was
doing when the world shut down in twenty twenty. When

(04:27):
I got home with everyone else in March of twenty twenty,
I was leading some really big corporate initiatives for a
company that made N ninety five face masks and those
yellow infection control gowns. My husband worked at another Fortune
one hundred company making paper towels and toilet paper, so

(04:47):
we were really busy if you can remember back to
the pandemic. But what was really interesting is that I
was spending as much of my time on zoom calls
with current and former colleague helping them understand how to
lead their teams differently. Then I was working on the
projects that I was assigned to work on because I

(05:09):
had been leading differently at that point for about eight years.
I had gone part time when my oldest who's now
a teenager, was an infant, and I had been helping
people figure out how to work differently so that they
could be successful in all their areas of their life.
So when the world shut down, I had a seven
or eight year head start on most of my peers

(05:31):
on how to about work differently and how to lead differently.
And that is really the beginning of what became my
career pivot.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Wow, Wendy, you said a few things. I'm always amazed
that prior to a career transition, I mean, there's always
this there's always this grouping of skill sets that are
masked and one that I hear through and through amongst
several I read are doing research and then being a

(06:02):
project some project management. Wendy, what would you say to
people out there that saying there, they're working and maybe
they have an idea or a dream about something in
the future. How would you speak to as you are
a living example of somebody who took their skill sets
from their previous profession and brought them into what you're

(06:25):
currently doing. You're able to speak more deeply about that.
So just break that down for a second, because sometimes
people struggle with the Well, I did that for a
lot of years, but I don't know how that's supposed
to help me later in life.

Speaker 4 (06:39):
Yeah. So one of the things that I found out
is unique to me is that not everybody as they
are growing up as a child talks about profit and
loss and shipping delays over dinner. But I was raised
in a family that had a small manufacturing business. You know,
my earliest job was when I was a toddler in
the quality control department, where we would make sure that

(07:00):
the products were right when my parents would be done
at the end of the day. What I didn't know
is that I had this small business mindset built into me.
Almost threw us moses deep my childhood. I never saw
personal and professional as separate, and I always saw the
need to be selling and to understand what your product

(07:21):
was and what your brand was. And so when I
work with people now, one of the things I talk
about is that you are already a small business owner
regardless of where it is that you work. So if
you work for a fortune five hundred company or a
small startup, or you are your own entrepreneur. You already
have a small business and it sells one product, and
that product is you. And if you can think of

(07:41):
yourself as a product, then you can take that R
and D mindset and what are my features and benefits?
What is what I bring to the market. Because we
don't care how the R and D happened on our
favorite products. We just care that the feature is there.
And that's the way you can think about it for yourself.
Doesn't matter help when you got that experience. It doesn't

(08:05):
matter what you were doing when you got that experience.
If you know how to lead a team, that is
a feature. If you have worked across international time zones,
that is a feature. If you've had to bring something
from concept to life, that is a feature. So being
able to figure out how to strip out the part
that is the how you got it and just figure

(08:26):
out what do I have? None of us go and
ask Apple how did the R and D happen for
the new feature on this phone. We're just excited for
the new feature or mad that they took the old
one away, But we don't care about the R and
d part of it. We just want to know what
was the outcome. So thinking of yourself as that product
and what are all of the features and benefits that
I have can really help to turn that dial.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
O ooh, Wendy, as they say in church, that's good
and that'll preach features and benefits that that's a really
good perspective to view one the skill sets that are
amassed in one's career. Wendy, I think that's a perfect
segue because folks, we've talked offline, but it's time for
you all to hear it. So Wendy has this the pandemic,

(09:14):
her and her husband the right in the thick of it,
with the type of work that they do. And then Wendy,
here comes the transition, tell us the story of how
it happened, and folks, you'll see all the different tie
ins as she breaks it down for us.

Speaker 4 (09:28):
Yeah, So, as we were coming into the beginning of
twenty twenty one, we were still at home. You'll remember
at that point we had thought we were going back
to work several times. It all been on the return
to work wagon and then not done it, and then
we were going to go back to the right and
then we had it done it. So we're coming into
the beginning of twenty twenty one, still in this very uneasy,

(09:50):
unsettling state where nobody really knew what was going to
happen next. And I was scrolling on LinkedIn. I realized
that I was reading the exact same three Harvard Business
Review articles over and over it. This was four years ago.
Den was not the social platform that it is. But

(10:11):
everybody kept saying, you have to stay active on LinkedIn
because it's important for your professional development. And I said
to myself, I'm going to stay active on LinkedIn. I'm
going to make it useful to me. So I set
myself a New Year's resolution to once a month create
a piece of content that I would put on LinkedIn
that it would at least entertain my brain and help
me to have a reason to be on LinkedIn. So

(10:34):
those very first few they took me hours. Jason. I
would write it, I would rewrite it, I would send
it to three people to read. I was so scared
to put something out there that was authentic to who
I was, because it just didn't have that confidence yet.
But I started doing it, it got easier and all along.
I'm a big reader of nonfiction. I love business nonfiction.

(10:59):
I love to read some one's business story. I love
podcasts where we talk about people's business stories. I get
so much inspiration from being able to listen or read
what someone else has gone through and figure out what
can I pull from that. And I had been reading
this new book that had just come out. I was
talking to one of my mentors about it. She let
me go on and on about this book and I finished,

(11:23):
and she said, I know the author. Do you want
to meet him? All of a sudden, I turned bright
red because I was like, please, no, please, don't tell him.
What sort of fangirl I was this, introduce me but
play a real cool, play a real cool. Don't tell him.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
So she did.

Speaker 4 (11:42):
She set up a call. Come to find out he
lives right here in the Atlanta community. We have mutual friends.
We have probably been to the same parties at the
same time and had not known each other. Wow in
the same house. And he and I started talking. He said,
why do you want why do you write? What did
you find interesting about my book? I told him. I said,

(12:03):
when I retire, I would really like to own my
own consulting firm. And you know, it would be interesting
to follow what you do because he's about His kids
are about six or seven years ahead of mine, so
he's five to ten years out of where I am.
And he said, why don't you just come work for me?

(12:25):
He said, I have a job. I can't come work
for you. No, no, no, you're part time, right, he said,
I am. At that point, I was working thirty two
hours a week, part time, but enough to obtain the
WT status in my organization. He said, you've got eight
hours to play with. Just come work for me on
eight they won't even know. So let me get back
to you. I sat on it for six months, didn't

(12:48):
get back to him. I just went and went about
my day. I talked to my mom and my husband
and they were like, you should do this, just go
try it. So No, I have a job. I like
it what I'm doing. I'll stick with it that. Besides,
retirement is a long way away. I turned forty during
the pandemic. I was not ready to retire. That was
at the right age to do that. Still had kids

(13:10):
in elementary school. So I did meet him for lunch
about six months later. I was like, you know what,
I thinks I'll take you up on it. Let's have lunch.
So we met for lunch. The end of lunch, I'm
gonna say something. I'm gonna walk away to go to
the bathroom, and when I come back, I just want
you to have marinated on what it is that I
sit okay before. As he got up from the table,
he said, I'm not going to hire you. And as

(13:33):
he walked away, he turned back over his shoulder. He said,
because you don't need my job, you could do it
on your own, and he just kept walking. I didn't
know what to do, Jason. I thought I was at
a job interview. How did I just blow this? And
he came back and he said, so what do you think?
And I said, I don't know what to say. I
don't think I can do this right now. And he said, look,

(13:53):
three things you need to be a successful entry into
a consulting world for these business to business types jobs
you want. Said, you need twenty plus years of experience.
You've already got that. He said. You need to be
a director or hire in a big name company where
people are going to be that's the skills you have.
You have that, he says, And then you need a book.
He says, you can write a book. I just talked

(14:14):
to you for an hour. Do it, And I said,
I'm a chemical engineer. You're either good at math and
science or you're good at English. This is the lie
we tell children from a very early age when we
put them in their classes. Do you like math or
do you like English? That's our lie. And I said,
that's not what I am. And I have a book
about how to write a book from my book coach.

(14:37):
You should read it. I said, okay. And now God
knew I wasn't going to buy that book, and he
knew I wasn't going to buy that book. Two weeks later,
I got a package delivered to my house from Amazon,
and it was that book. That gentleman had mailed me
a copy of the book, knowing that I was not going.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
To buy it.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
It sat on my nightstand. I wasn't ready to read it.
I opened it and it said, if you're not ready
to write a book, I don't read this book. Oh.
I took those words to heard. I closed it and
put it right back down. That book sat until I
had nothing else to read. I could find nothing I
wanted to read for two months. And I'm a pretty
avid reader, and literally on my nightstand it was just

(15:17):
this one book staring me. I would go scroll through
my Amazon list, nothing loved interesting, that one book just
staring at me. So I finally said, author, won't know
if I don't write a book, but I'll just read
it to get it off the night stand. Within six weeks,
I had forty thousand words in a Google document. I

(15:38):
don't know if your readers know this, but that's about
the size of a book.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:42):
I had written a book. Now it was not a book.
It did not have good structure, it had no thesis.
But I had become a writer in those six weeks,
but it still wasn't ready. So this now we're almost
at a year. We're in coming up on New Year's
Eve twenty twenty one, almost a full year since I

(16:02):
had that first introduction made, that first LinkedIn post. I said,
I guess I should send an email to the author
of this how to write a book book and if
any of your listeners want to know how to write
a book. Kathy Faiak. Her book is called On Your
Mark and it is amazing. She specifically coaches people who
want to use a book to build their business she's great.

(16:24):
So I sent her a note. She emailed me back
and we had a meeting. We had a meeting on
the second week of January. On her Tuesday night. We talked.
We talked about what it was that I wanted to write,
and then any good consultant, she gave me the price
and I swallowed real deep and I said, thank you

(16:45):
very much. Linthink. I went downstairs to talk to my
ASB and he said, how did the book coach? Paul though,
and they could take a pretty nice vacation for what
it is that that she's her services and said, besides,
I have a job. And Jason, God said, I have
given you the writing on LinkedIn, I have given you

(17:08):
an author who has shown you what you need to do.
I have had a book delivered to your house, and
I have given you a book coach. The last thing
you have is a job. I got laid off the
next morning. What more excuse did I have? It took
me twelve months. I am real stubborn. But God said,
if you think that the thing you have is a job,
I can make that happen too. Not only did I

(17:30):
get laid off, the next morning, I got a text
from the head of hr UP two hours after I
finished that call with the book coach to set up
that meeting for the next morning. That ultimately would be
the day that should have destroyed my career, but instead
it was that springboard that allowed me to pivot in
a way I had no idea what was ahead of me.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
Wendy. That is, well, there's so much there you mentioned.
I know you said, I'm pretty stubborn, but I just
want to call out the sometimes we don't highlight enough
the grace of God, and especially in the marketplace, Wendy,
because you were getting these little nuggets, these little moments,

(18:14):
and it's and that's just we have a patient and
long suffering God, and he also knows each of his children.
He knows and daughters, and so I just wanted to
point that out for the audiences. Whether you do something
quickly which is ideal, or whether it takes a little bit,
he still placed the nuggets. Because Wendy, what's really cool

(18:38):
about your story. Oh, as humans, we could say all
you gotta do is and then there's no help, no tools,
no resources, Whereas when you look at the heart of
God or havenly Father, so he gave you so LinkedIn
was your practicing ground, which also gave you something to say.

(18:59):
Then you had the introduction to someone who already had
written a book, so you have an example. Then they
had a book about writing a book, a resource. And
then the experiential part, as I call it, you read
it and oh my god, go figure forty thousand words
and then it's like, ah and yet but still it's oh, okay,

(19:21):
so we need the time. Now let's remove So it's
just as am I catching that right?

Speaker 4 (19:30):
And the patient bud that we have because he's like,
gave you every single piece, literally I have to have
you get laid off. Okay, fine, here we go.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
Oh my goodness. So folks that that's not even the
best part. So Wendy, we have set the foundation for
the book you actually that we're going to talk about,
because you have two books. But what we're going to
talk about today and you can briefly mention the other
one too, We're going to talk about making flex work,
designing defining success on your own terms. But you also

(20:05):
have the second book and I think I can even
see it there and the background reimagine your work well,
talk about making flex work in the conversation but give
us some highlights about reimagine your work as well.

Speaker 4 (20:19):
Yeah, so I'll start with reimagine your work and then
I'll move into making flex work and some tools that
your listeners can take away. Imagine your work is actually
what we talked about at the beginning. So this is
built on this small business foundation. How do you manage
your career like it is your business. So we go
through all the different parts of the business and how
to apply them to yourself. Who is on your board

(20:40):
of directors, what is your strategic plan, how are you
investing in your R and D and managing your brand,
all the pieces of what makes a company successful. We
then layer in on how do you do that for
your career because you have way more control over your
career than you probably think you do if you work
for someone else. It's very easy to think that if

(21:01):
you work for someone they have the control and it's not.
They're just your current purchaser. They are the one that
is buying you as a product today. Maybe they're the
purchaser in the future, maybe they're not. Maybe you want
someone else to buy you in the future, and say
you need to figure out how to position yourself so
that you're there for someone to purchase. So that is

(21:22):
what reimagined your work is. That was the second book.
It came out in twenty twenty three, came out about
fifteen months after the first book. And it's because of
this journey, this forty thousand words that I have already
written by the time I met my book coach, but
only took me from the time I met her until August.

(21:42):
So it took me seven months to go from our
first meeting to a best selling book in Making Flex Work,
because I already had all of those words there. Now
I didn't use them all, so I was very easily
able to go to a second book because I had
so many words sitting out still in that Google doc.
It didn't make sense with the first book, and it
was a good starting point for a second. Lots of
people have asked me if there's going to be a third.

(22:04):
The answer is probably yes, But I've had two children
very closely together. If you have book one and Book two,
now I'm going to breathe, raise them for a minute
and decide if I'm going to have a third. So
Making Flex Work was not the book I intended to
write when I met with Kathy Fayak. I thought I
was writing a leadership development book because I wanted to
do leadership development. I wanted to help leaders think about

(22:26):
work differently, which is what I do. But I kept
coming back to all of these words around my non
traditional schedule. Of the forty thousand words, Kathy told me
to go figure out my thesis and pull out everything
that didn't go with it. So, if you're writing a
book on leadership, our time job is not really the

(22:49):
way that most people would write a book on how
to get into leadership. So I sat there for forty
five minutes pulling out everything I had written about time
non traditional, hybrid or flexible work. And I no longer
had a book, but I had pulled out fifteen thousand
words about flexible work. And I went to lunch with

(23:11):
one of my girlfriends, who herself was a vice president
of R and D at another medical device company here
in Atlanta. She said, how was your meeting? She was
very excited, had that book coach meeting ready? I'd had
my first session. I was going to lunch. We were
going to celebrate, and I said, oh, casey, I don't
even have a book anymore. I pulled out fifteen thousand

(23:33):
words on flexible Work. I've paid this lady, and now
I don't even have a book. And she said with
the most loving heart, you idiot, Flexible work is the book.
Don't you know that eventually we are going to all
go back to work and nobody wants to go back
to the old way. We all need help figuring out

(23:55):
how to do that. Please finish that book and deal
with your leadership book later. There's lots of so again
God puts somebody into my life to help me change
the entire direction of what it was I was writing. Wow,
he said, all that you pulled out, that's the book.
That's what we need. And so making flex work takes
all of my engineering and continuous improvement tools that I

(24:17):
had owned over the twenty years of my career and
puts them on you the person as the machine, which
I know, Jason may sound cold to some of your audience.
I'm not trying to say we're machines and that's cold.
But what I am saying is I have tools to
optimize output of machinery. Yeah, why can I not use
those same tools to optimize the output we have so

(24:39):
that we can be where we want to be successful
in all the areas of our lives.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
Yeah, that's good, Wendy. I want to highlight this too,
because it's come up a couple of times, the power
of and you know this, and we probably have another
three hour conversation about because especially you being on the
manufacturing side, and I've experienced on the software development side
with Lean, so that's probably a whole other convo. But

(25:06):
the power of mentorship, and then you'll like this one,
especially with R and D and manufacturing feedback loop. Either,
mentors are a great feedback loop. You said, Oh my goodness,
I got fifteen thousand words so output. Okay, man, I

(25:27):
haven't she said, Wait a minute, hold on, Wendy, time out.
My point is, Wendy, and what I love in your
story and that we all need imagine if you didn't
have all along the way the book coach, the different
friends and business relationships to not help you have that

(25:48):
wake up call where you weren't self aware you needed
someone else to tell you, Wendy, Hello. So I just
wanted to highlight that piece because those are catalysts just
as much much as us getting the download and sitting
down and writing the book or developing the framework or
whatever it is. And so I just I love how

(26:11):
power of mentorship and then feedback loops are all across
your story.

Speaker 4 (26:16):
Oh absolutely, We don't do any of this on our own.
God puts people in place to help us do these things.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
If we just.

Speaker 4 (26:23):
Open our eyes and listen to absolutely, and if I
can give them a tool today, then I can be
that for somebody on your eights.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
Right, Yes, absolutely, And folks, that's what we're going to do.
Let's step through the making flex work, defining success in
your own terms. So, Wendy, I love how you start
the book. Why are you here this? That's just I
love the It's the title of the first chapter, and

(26:51):
so many things I'm sure everybody knows, like Simon Senek
start with why. When I saw that title, I said, Wendy,
that is awesome.

Speaker 4 (27:00):
We all pick up books for a reason. And so
I want I write the way I talk. So if
you don't like the way I talk, you don't want
to read my book. I'll tell you that I write
the way I talk. I write for a busy reader.
I write in a way that has been just defined
by some of my readers as it's like the big
sister whispering in your ear, what it is you need

(27:21):
to hear. The idea of why you're here is we
each come to this book for a reason, and if
you don't know what your reason is, then you're just
going to flip through the pages. But if you know
why you picked up the book isn't because you feel
like you're failing. I did. I went part time in
the first year of my oldest child's life because I

(27:44):
was failing at everything. I felt like I was a
failure as a new mother, I was failing as a spouse,
I was failing as an employee, and I was My friends,
they didn't even make the list. I am one of
those fi. I have re read my expectations for myself
and I couldn't meet them in any part of my life.

(28:04):
Now I have friends that have been very successful in
all the areas of their life. They didn't need to
go part time. I did. I needed to put on
that oxygen mask, and for me, eight hours was so
much more than eight hours. The difference in full time
in thirty two hours is not math, it is psychology,
and so for me, being able to say no to

(28:25):
things was important. I had a coworker that said that
he figured out the price of my guilt was twenty
percent of my salary, and I said, yeah, you're probably right.
Hopefully're right, joining Perdson on my salary at the price
of my guilt. But it allowed me to set boundaries
that I had not been able to successfully set otherwise.

(28:46):
So maybe that's why you're reading. Maybe you're reading the
book because you're a leader and everybody's coming to you
saying I don't want to do the way I used
to do it. Yeah, and you don't have any tools
because you were successful the way you did it. It's
very hard for us to mentor someone to do things
very differently than we have done. So if you are

(29:08):
thirty years into your career and you think we're going
back to a pre pandemic world, you have to understand
that every semester we graduate more and more people who
never worked the old way. There is literally nothing for
them to go back to. They have no memory of

(29:29):
work in the before times. Yeah, so we as leaders
who feel comfortable in the old way, now have more
and more of our employees who don't even know what
that way was. So we're asking them to go to
something that makes absolutely no sense to them, because it

(29:50):
makes us feel more comfortable. Wow, so maybe that's why
you picked up the right But either way, whether it's
because you need it or because your team needs it,
I try to lay out tools that will help you
figure out how to make sure everyone gets what they want.
So I've got a four step method called the Evaluation Method. E, V,

(30:11):
A and L are our four steps. E is every
hour accounts. For those of you who have engineering or
lean background, this is just a current state time study.
For those of you that don't like those words that
just came out of my mouth, don't worry. We're just
gonna journal our time. We can go either way. We
can either do a current state time study or we
can journal our time. It's the same. We're going to

(30:33):
write down what we do for a week, When are
we working, when are we not. We're gonna be really
honest with ourselves. This is not something to turn into
your boss. I'm not keeping a time card, but I
am recording what I'm doing, and not only that is
what am I How am I feeling while I'm doing it?
Am I being productive? Am I being distracted? We're going
to use this now to create data about ourselves because

(30:57):
now we know what it is that we're doing. And
you may find that you're working a lot more than
you thought it may actually find you're working less than
you thought. You may find that you're working less but
scattered across all day. So I ask you to take
that time in that journal and not only look at
the total number of hours, but they span on the clock.
So are you using are you picking up your phone

(31:17):
at six am and using it and putting it down
at eleven thirty? You may have only worked eight hours,
but you did that across fifteen sixteen seventeen hours. Microsoft
just published a study very recently called the Infinite Workday.
They have been monitoring all of us on their Microsoft
three sixty five and they have figured out that we

(31:38):
now never stop working. They have a very interesting study
about the earliest times that we're on and what are
we doing throughout the day, And it just leads into
maybe we aren't working more, we're just working over a
larger span, so we never get the break. We never
feel like we're stopping.

Speaker 3 (31:54):
Got you.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
So that's the E. The A is assessing the expectations,
understanding what are the tasks that are taking your time.
You do not have to pick a perfect week, and
you do not have to start on a Monday. To
look at your time. Start today, start tomorrow morning if
you need a morning start, but just start doing it.
If you go for seven days, you'll get enough of
the variety that it will be fine. But look at

(32:17):
what you're doing and make sure that it's bringing you
value or the company value. And if the work is
not bringing someone value, we should be asking why why
are we doing it? That's another lean principle. Let's not
do non value added work exactly. We're also going to
value optimized work. So we're going to look around at
our people around us and say, is something taking me

(32:40):
a long time that's taking someone else very short time?
Is there a new skill that I need? Is there
a tool that they are using that I am not do?
I simply need to go get a peer mentor and say,
can you help me with this particular task because you
have figured out a way to do it so much
faster than I have. It could be that you have

(33:00):
a particular way and there's a new tool that exists
that you don't know about. That someone fresh out of
school doesn't know. You're Wady, and they found this tool
and so they're able to do it a lot faster.
One of my early days at my corporate job, I
was right out of Georgia Tech, where we had spent
a lot of time learning to use the Microsoft Suite.
Now this is the nineteen hundreds, as my family likes

(33:21):
to remind me, so it's a little bit out of
date from a story standpoint. But we were writing a
lot of technical reports. And these reports would be forty
to fifty pages long, with a lot of charts and
figures and tables inside of it. And the woman across
the hall from me was very near retirement age. She
was excellent at what she did, but she hated writing
reports because they took her so long. And they took

(33:44):
her so long because every time she made a change,
she had to reformat everything. Right out of school, I
knew that there was a way to do auto captions.
Blew her mind right. She was like, what do you
mean every time I moved it? I don't have to
number everything every time I page changes. I don't have
to change all my page numbers. Said, no, the computer

(34:06):
does that for you. She had learned to write reports
when it was tighted she didn't know those features even
existed in the word processing. So don't be afraid to
go ask. You see somebody doing something best or go ask.
And then the last the l is about leveraging small changes.
For those of you that have one of those six
sigma belts, this is the idea of a kaisan, but

(34:28):
it's just experimenting with your time or playing with your time.
You feel like you don't have time to go to
the gym because you're working too much, just try one
day doing it before work. You don't have to ask
a lot of permission if you just do something once.
So you do it once and if you like it,
you say, oh, I would like to do that more.
Now we can have a conversation. Because you now have data,

(34:51):
you can go to your boss and say, okay, so
I tried on Tuesday working out from seven to eight.
Now that means I won't be online until eight thirty.
But that really works for me. Would it be okay
if two days a week I didn't log on until
eight thirty. That's a very different conversation and having one
with your boss that says I'm never getting to the
gym and I'm just really burned out and then staring

(35:13):
at your boss. It's not your boss's job to solve
your problem. It's to facilitate what you need. But you
need to come with the plan. If what you need
is to be able to be at the bus stop
at two o'clock, maybe one day, just don't log on
at two o'clock, or put it in your earbud and
lock to the bus stop. See what happens. If that

(35:35):
works for you, go back and say, hey, so you
know we have that standing meeting from two to two
thirty yesterday, I ended up needed to go to the
bus stop. I took it in my earbud. Was that
a problem or is that something I can do every day?
That's what this idea of leveraging small changes. You got
to where you are today in this work arrangement over
a period of time. It is going to take you

(35:57):
a period of time to get to wherever you want
to go. I can guarantee that it will cause a
performance issue if you rip it off like a band
aid and just do the thing that a few years
ago was all the rage, which was called quiet quitting. Right,
if you don't act like a mature adult, you're going
to be treated not like a mature adult. So collect
your data, do your homework, and then you'll have a

(36:19):
very logic based discussion with your supervisor about what it
means for you to be successful and how the company
doesn't have to trade because if they can get the
job done without you easier, then they can get it
done with you. It's not a position I would want
to be in.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
Folks, if you haven't heard by now, you need to
go out and get a copy of this book. I've
got the letters floating around in my mind. Now, Wendy,
how can people go or where can they go grab
a copy of Making Flex Work.

Speaker 4 (36:52):
Yeah, it is available on Amazon or all those other
places where you get your books. I know it's even
available at some of the used bookstores. And somebody buddy
tell me they had they bought one of my books,
and they did not tell me they bought it at
a used store or maybe off Amazon used. And I said,
if you want me to sign it, And at that
point she got very quiet, and I said, Okay, what's
going on? And she says, it's a used copy and

(37:15):
it's already signed.

Speaker 3 (37:18):
That's good.

Speaker 4 (37:19):
There you go, so you can buy it anywhere you
can get a book. You can also go to my
website which is just making flexwork dot com, or you
can connect with me on LinkedIn and my full name
Wendy Anderson Cock. There are not a lot of us,
so you will find me, and if you want to
send me a message, I'll even sell it to you
that way and sign it and mail it. Well. However

(37:40):
you want to get this book, I am happy to help.
And then, like I said, if you want to connect
on LinkedIn, I try to post about non traditional approaches
to work, both for the individual and for the leader
pretty regularly, and I always love to interact there.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Love it, Love it, folks. You heard directly from the author.
You know where to go get her book. Even you
may run across a sign to use copy so you
never know, you may already have you may find that
you already have her autograph. You just never do. Wendy,
I can't thank you enough for this conversation. We're gonna

(38:17):
have to have a part too, just on reimagine, oh
for sure, and then we can talk about maybe even
a little bit further the next time, even the work
that you do, because the books have basically set up
the type of conversations you're having in the marketplace. So Wendy,
I'm excited and folks, yes, as the podcast hosts, I
can say that a lot of times, there's so many

(38:40):
awesome guests coming through. But I'm going to say, like
the Avengers say, Wendy will return for another episode of
the FOURTI Fied Live. Wendy, is there anything you'd like
to say to the audience? Words of wisdom, parting words
before we go?

Speaker 4 (38:55):
I would just say that you have way more control
than you may think you have. When we can take
what we're doing and break it down logically turn it
into data, we can then make data based decisions, which
is the language of business. So if you're a leader
who's struggling, please connect with me. I come into organizations
and can work with leadership teams and with working teams

(39:17):
to reimagine their work, think about the way that they're
doing work differently. If you're struggling with retention or you're
trying to figure out how to get people to come
back to work, give me a call, send me a message.
We will figure out how to make that the most
effective for you and for your team.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
Awesome, and we'll have all of Wendy's information in the
show notes LinkedIn the books and you'll know exactly how
to reach out to or Wendy. I again, just thank you.
Can't wait till we have a part too, Aba. Thanks
for hanging out with us here on the Fortified Life Podcast. Well, folks,
you know how we end things. Don't compartmentalize your faith

(39:57):
in the marketplace and from the board to the bathroom,
God is with you. We'll see you next time on
the Fortified Life Podcast.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
Thank you for listening to the Fortified Life Podcast.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
You can catch us live on Wednesdays at eight thirty
pm Eastern Times and on demand.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Check out fortifiedlifepodcast.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Dot com for more details. So learn how to live
out your faith in the marketplace. Grab a copy of
Jason Davis's book Fortify Being Rooted in God's Plan for
work in Business, Available on Amazon.

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The Fortified Life Podcast with Jason Davis - EP 196 | Wendy Cocke | founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions LLC

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Fortified Life Podcast with Jason Davis - EP 196 | Wendy Cocke | founder of Engineering Leadership Solutions LLC