March 7, 2025 • 29 mins
Jane Gentry, Futurist, straight talking business strategist and no nonsense growth guru delivers the truth around issues with company culture, leadership and being a slave to technology.
Visit www.janegentry.com to hire Jane's company and initiate corporate cultural change TODAY.
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Visit www.janegentry.com to hire Jane's company and initiate corporate cultural change TODAY.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, welcome back to success made the last time Rick
took any of the shows brought to you by Edward Jones,
along with return valets and our returning guest is Jane Gentry,
and we're gonna have her on at least I think
once a year for the Jane Gentry Update. The first
time I met Jane, I've said this is this lady
(00:31):
is a futurist. She is a business strategist, executive coach,
has so many things going on, created the value blueprint,
and we've got lots of questions to ask Jane today.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Jane, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Thank you for doing this again. I appreciate you. I
love seeing you well.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Why don't you give a billboard about yourself so people
will be able to put this conversation into proper context.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Where would you like me to start? Rick?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I was worn out?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
You know, business experience, Oh, okay, in hometowns as well.
So where are you from originally?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
And now I don't have a hometown. I'm an Air
Force brat, I was teasing you. I've been in Atlanta
for thirty years, so Atlanta is my home as far
as any as far as I can have a home.
So I've had a practice since ninety nine. For the
first I don't know, twenty years or so, I was
consulting in enterprise, and I can pause here if you want,
(01:40):
for you to tell me I don't look that old.
But people don't usually pick up on that. After that, I.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Was gone for someone who's.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I gave you your window, you missed it. After that,
I was recruited to run a couple of mid market companies.
And here's what I realized, Wow, what a lonely freaking job. Lonely,
lonely in that job. But also mid market is so
(02:13):
grossly under resourced. And I don't mean money necessarily. I
mean there are these best practices and access to things
that Coca Cola has at home depot and Mercedes Benz
that mid market just doesn't get access to and or
even sometimes nowhere to go to find those things. And
(02:35):
so I shifted the entire focus of the practice when
I left those those companies to the mid market. And
so today we focus on two We're invited in for
predominantly two problems. One is growth. We're not growing, we
don't know why. But the second one is really the
(02:56):
big one. For us, and that's what we call growing pains.
So if you have a successful company, you will probably
have this scenario multiple times in the life of your company,
where your revenue you outpaced your infrastructure. In other words,
your success is causing you pain because your infrastructure does
not support anymore. So your leadership needs to be different.
(03:20):
The way the way you do cross functional integration needs
to mature, your processes need to mature, the infrastructure of
how you communicate needs to be different, and you have
to figure out how to operationalize your culture. And so
that that's really the place where we play a lot
(03:41):
with these mid market companies today.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
I really appreciate what you just said, and implicit in
that is when you hire people away from Fortune five
hundred companies to operationalize a culture and to bring their
best practices. That doesn't mean that you're going to be
waiving the magic wand and all of a sudden you're
(04:06):
going to get best practices in place.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Comment on that, No.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
You know, Fortune five hundred companies are as dysfunctional as
any company, and so hiring people away from Fortune five
hundred might get you some access to best practices, but
the leadership really has to be ready to change, and
(04:37):
if they're not, there's no point in it. And then
you really have to be able to lead your organization
through change. And here's what I find because this is
you know, obviously, when we go in and talk about
strategies and ways of doing things differently, if you can't
enroll the people in your organization, rick, then there's no
point in any of this because it's the people that
(05:01):
affect the strategy, right. And what I find is that
CEOs are not bad at what I would term change management.
In other words, where are we going, what are the milestones,
how will we know when we're there, how are we
measuring it? Those are things that CEOs are not terrible at.
(05:21):
Where they fall down and where why seventy percent of
change initiatives fail is they're not great at managing people
through the transition. That people kind of get left behind.
That's the thing that causes so much tension in an
organization through a period of change.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Tell me more about the people falling behind in this
fatality rate of seventy percent.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, it's awful. Well, I'll tell you I did a
half a day with a big company about eighteen months ago.
They bought another company and they were integrating those companies
and they called and said, Jane, were this integration's going great?
(06:21):
I said, oh fantastic. Why are we on the phone.
She said, well, our engagement numbers are down and our
productivity numbers are down. I said, okay, and so your
integration's going great. H I said, are you surprised about
the dip in those two numbers? And she said yes,
And I said I'm not because that says you are
(06:42):
not sure buying your people well through the change. And
she said, could you come and talk to our senior
leaders about how to build trust in the organization through change?
And I said not no. The reason is people don't
trust organizations, they trust leaders or not. So if you
(07:04):
were to ask my opinion, which you did not, but
you're going to get it anyway. What should we talk about?
What we should talk about is what is the process
that people go through change? What is it they're really
resisting because they're actually not resisting change, they're resisting loss. Okay,
So help your leaders to understand what is this process
(07:26):
that people are going through? Number one? Number two, as
a leader, how can you effectively shirpa them through that change?
And Number three how do you as a leader need
to show up in periods of change like this? And
so that's what we did because that's the that's the
(07:48):
place where leaders really struggle through periods of change, and
they say people don't ah, people just don't like change.
That's not entirely accurate.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
It isn't accurate, and that is the reason why people
should be contacting your company. I don't care, I don't
care what university you graduated from. When you are in
the midst of rapid change and acceleration within your enterprise,
you have got to surround yourself with a different kind
(08:21):
of troop to support that change. Chances are CEOs and
founders that listen to this show. You don't have all
the strength that you need and all the tools in
your toolbox. So that's why you've got to have help.
And part of the start of this is recognizing that
(08:42):
you've got a gap and that gap needs to be
short up by somebody like change entry.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Well, how here's some here are some symptoms that people
miss right. Leaders sometimes see change as these giants initiatives.
But I'll give you two examples from a client I'm
working with right now. One is they bought a they
bought a smaller company that had an acquisition. She was
(09:13):
on the third visit into that new company and she said, Jane,
the first thing they said to me when I walked
in the door wasn't even high. It was, oh, now
you're taking our tablets from us. And I said, what
do you hear when you walk into the building and
(09:33):
people don't even say hi to you, that's the first
thing they say. And she said, I hear that they
don't do change. Well, I said, that's not what I hear.
I hear that you're not managing the change. Well, let's
talk about how to do that better. The other scenario
would be I have a client where their strategy that
(09:57):
they're trying to implement is not really being effective. Excuse me, Rick,
And I said to the I said to the CEO,
when you built that strategy, you built it with your
leadership team. Who else other than the leadership team in
the organization knows what that strategy is for the year?
(10:24):
And she said nobody. And I said, well, how can
you implement a strategy when the people who really are
affecting that strategy don't have any idea what it is?
I said, this launching your strategy into the organization is
a change initiative and should be treated that way and
communicated that way into the organization and in order to
(10:47):
get enrollment and to be successful. So there are things
that I see as a change initiative that sometimes our
clients don't see immediately as a change initiative.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Yeah, it's so weird.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
It's almost like if you take your your blueprint concept
as an architect and as a futurist, it's almost like
people get together within a company, they draw up the
plans and they forgot to bring in the plumbers and
the electricians.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Talk about how they're supposed to collaborate.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Right right, But you know, in their defense, these folks
are are it can be really in the weeds, Rick,
you know. It's these it's these epics in the life
of your company, These these growing pains that I told
you about that are the sign to a CEO that
(11:43):
you need to start playing a different role in the
company as it grows. And so what we see a
lot of times is that they're aware that things are broken.
Ye they It's kind of it kind of doesn't make sense.
You think to yourself, Wow, we're having all this success
and everything's falling apart. What's going on. But that's a
(12:05):
sign that you are in one of these one of
these periods of growing pains in your company.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Oh you ever hired to come in and tell the
truth to the CEO and tell them where they stand
and where they should go?
Speaker 3 (12:21):
You mean as an individual or as as an individual.
I don't know that anybody hires me for that. That's
what they get. I got to a referral recently from
a colleague, and the client called me and said, I
(12:41):
just want you to know that he told me. If
I don't want to know the truth, don't call Jane.
I'll give you another name. She's just going to tell you.
And that you know. I always say to people, Look,
you don't have to take my counsel. That's what you're
paying for you before, but you don't work for me.
(13:01):
You can take it or leave it.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
The reason why they should listen to you, and it's
not because of Malcolm Gladwell or his researchers that said
ten thousand hours of experience. But you have a practice
just like a doctor or a lawyer, and you've seen hundreds,
if not thousands of cases. Now you recognize patterns The
(13:27):
best futurists I know are the ones that observe and
see patterns, right, and then see how those patterns apply.
You've got a lot of new initiatives going on within
your company.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
I bet you.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
They are a result of your practice of always observing
what is going to create the new growth positions for
these companies?
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Is that right?
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Well, our job is to be ahead of things for
the benefit of our clients, you know. I mean, for example,
they don't have the time to figure out how to
leverage AI in their company right to just dig into
the eight million versions of AI platforms or where it
(14:16):
might add value. And so you know, sometimes we'll have
a client come and say, tell me how to leverage
this AI platform for example, and I'll say, see, we
got to go backwards a little bit and ask yourself,
what is the problem you're trying to solve. Don't start
with the tech, start with the problem. You know, technology
(14:37):
is a great it's a great asset, it's a great
I always say, it's a great slave, it's a terrible master.
Don't let tech be your master. Right, figure out what
the issue is. And there are certain things that I
see where some of those are going to solve problems
for our clients in the mid market around things that
(14:58):
they don't do well, like onboarding, workflow, helping leverage some technology.
So for example, you know, we are often part of
working in a sales organization and they might be implementing
a CRM and they do a day and a half
of how to use the CRM. Everybody's drinking through a
(15:21):
fire hose, and then they throw them into the throw
them into the pond. AI is a great tool to
continue to leverage into your CRM system to help people
to know how to best use that tech. So, you know,
I say all that to say, we always go back
to what's the problem we're trying to solve. Don't let
tech be your master, Let it be your servant.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
That's right, And don't freak out over the fact that
AI is out there and you're not tapping into it.
AI's matt been out there for a long time. It's
almost like it became trendy, and it's not. It's it's
just it's just intelligence layered wisdom. And so anyway, I
(16:06):
totally agree with you that And that's just.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
An example, Rick, And you know, I mean we even
have implemented an AI powered platform in our practice to
help us do the discovery on the front end of
a client engagement, to escalate what's the word I'm looking for,
not escalate, to help us get that information faster so
(16:30):
we can start solving faster. Right. So I said that
all to say it's really our job to be ahead
of things for our clients, and so we are out
there just constantly trying to figure out what's next, what's going.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
To add value you have to in your practice.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Okay, back to take a quick break and I'll throw
the first half of this commercial break to you. Tell
us where people can contact you and get you involved
in their organizations to number one, identify the problems and
how fast can you solve them and help them get
(17:13):
to the on their growth path.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah, Jane at Janegentry dot com is my email and
I'm on LinkedIn Jane M. Gentry, so I'm pretty easy
to find.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
You are.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Indeed, thank you Jane for that, and we will be
right back after this quick message.
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Speaker 1 (18:52):
And we're back with Jane Gentry on success made to Last,
and we were about to talk about speed feat.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Is everything here.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I want to know from you when you walk into
these clients, there must be some pre set timeline in
the minds of the CEO or the leadership groups to say, hey,
we're hiring Jane, we expect change within X amount of time,
and I want you to I want you to comment
(19:23):
on first of all, when they hire you and they
bring you in, have.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
A realistic expectation.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
If it took you fifty years to get to this point,
you're not going to change in fifty minutes.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah. Well, like I said, we we have started to
leverage AI so that we accelerate the learning time. I
think that's one of the things that's frustrating to companies
and CEOs is what they're accustomed to is paying consultants
for three to six months of just figuring out where
(19:56):
the hell the bathroom is, you know, and that's frust
to them. I'd say. The other thing we find that
causes people to not want to work with somebody like
that US is that they're used to consultants coming in
and just giving them a one hundred and fifty page
report and then leaving them to solve the problem. And
(20:17):
that's frustrating. So we don't work that way. We get dirty,
We get in there and execute with our clients. So
I think I don't know, because I don't really pay
attention to what other people do, but I think we're
a little bit different in that sense.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yeah, that's a great unique selling proposition for your company.
Let's talk about succession. I think, in my humble opinion,
that companies are so busy today trying to make their
(20:57):
KPIs their numbers, that they forget about succession and or
it becomes a b priority when it comes to meetings,
and then all of a sudden, someone's sixty five or seventy.
They go, oh, I don't know what we're going to
do with that person? Yeah, yeah, so what when How
(21:17):
can you advise our audience about making succession a part
of the culture and not an emergency crises situation.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yeah, And as an aside, I would say, uh, don't
let all your intellectual capital live in the brains of
people who could get hit by a truck tomorrow. I've
seen that a lot one person knows where all the
you know, all the files are or whatever. But with
regard to succession, and I call it leadership development. Development
(21:52):
is really difficult in the mid market. Part of it,
I think is a misunderstanding by leaders. You know, in
big enterprise organizations they have departments called learning and development.
And I used to always say to clients, there's a
reason it's called learning and development. They're not the same thing.
Learning is, you know, bringing a trainer in to teach something.
(22:16):
That kind of knowledge dissipates within like nine days without
the development piece. The development piece is that it's either
that coaching piece or what we try to get clients
to do in mid market is to understand there are
a lot of ways to develop people that don't involve
(22:36):
spending money. Give them stretch assignments. We have a client
right now and this was his idea, and I said,
that's it's brilliant. So their leadership team has these rocks.
They're an EOS company. They lever Gos and he said,
we've got a lot of rocks, but we're thinking if
we took the next level down of leadership and we
(22:58):
gave them some of the rocks, but paired them with
a senior leader, they would be able to stretch and
learn with while a mentor's working on them and we're
getting some of our strategic initiatives done. That's the way
to develop people in mid market development is, you know,
(23:18):
help them to experience other roles in your organization, give them,
give them memberships to associations in your industry where they
can learn from from other people outside of your organization.
Let them represent you somewhere outside of the organization. You've
got to constantly be thinking about that next level of
(23:40):
leadership and how to develop them. And those who say I,
you know, I spend all this time developing people and
then they leave, too bad? I mean you still really
have to make that a priority in your organization. Constant
development your people. Training's okay, training without the development is useless.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, that point?
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Did that make sense? Rick? I mean did I articulate that?
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Well?
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Of course you did. Of course you did. It makes
it makes a lot of sense. I think it's almost
a higher mindfulness that company owners, founders, leaders have to
have about developing the next generation.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
And this you're comment about, too bad, they're going to leave.
That's the one that hurts.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
It's spanks when someone has invested twenty five fifty hundred
thousand training and then all of a sudden a headhunter
comes in swoops all these great people and then it's
too late, too bad.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Well, let me tell you something. One of my partners
was my boss thirty years ago, and that organization was
very committed to training and development of their people. They
spawned probably a half a dozen other companies in that industry.
So it's not that people left to go somewhere else.
(25:09):
They left and started their own company to compete against
this company. But a couple times the owners invested in
these new companies, and thirty years later they are still
the leader in their industry. Their attitude was these developing
these people and having them go do their own thing
(25:30):
only forces us to be better at what we do.
I mean, no, they had no fear of that. They
didn't hold back from trying to make people great at
their jobs, even though there are probably a half a
dozen other companies in that industry now competing with them
that were their employees. But they were very much a
(25:50):
learning organization, and I think that's important. The other thing
you have to realize is that I'm a gen xer,
but for the general RAI two generations under me that
are in the workforce today, development and career growth are
more important to them than salary. So if you don't
(26:11):
do that in your organization, you're going to lose employees
as well, because that is a key driver for them.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, it's a good point.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
It's almost as if you've got to stay mindful and
you've got to know your employees.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Just a couple more people.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
So a small, a short story. I won't tell you
the company, but I wasn't a very large enterprise company
talking to them about how leadership has changed and command
and control leadership doesn't really work anymore. And I was
telling them of a study of inspirational companies and what
we learned about inspirational leaders that I had a leader
(26:54):
there literally say to me, Jane, their paycheck is their inspiration.
And I said, lots of luck with that strategy, right,
And that's a guy that's going to lose employees. But
what I find on our own podcast, Rick, where we
interview CEOs, many mid market CEOs are very purpose driven
(27:16):
and very very intentional about wanting to develop the people
in their organization. I think sometimes they just don't know
how to make that happen.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Jane, let's wrap up today's session with what's keeping you
up at night? And let's start with what is keeping
up mid market CEOs in the middle of the nine.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Oh, well, the world has changed quite a bit in
the last couple of months. I think they're not you know,
part of it is what's going to happen with the economy.
I do think people are hopeful, though I am, you know,
relative to the things that that we see with them.
(28:08):
But I mean in our business, we're very focused. As
I told you, they want to make sure they're positioned
for growth. They believe that the economy is going to improve,
and they want to make sure they're positioned to benefit
from that. So that's the first thing. And the second
thing is when I have this exponential growth, have I
(28:31):
positioned my organization to be able to handle it? So
I think most CEOs are as hopeful as I am.
There's a study that just came out, I think with
CEO executive and they were a little surprised at the
at the hopefulness of CEOs. I'm not, especially in the
mid market. You know, these guys started as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs
(28:53):
are are by nature hopeful people.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yes, they truly are.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
They are always royal optimists, just like you, Jane Gentry
and listen, we appreciate you being back on our show
and you were welcome back anytime. And folks, as we
always say, we wish you success, but on your own
unique way to significance.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Have a great week,
Hey, welcome back to success made the last time Rick
took any of the shows brought to you by Edward Jones,
along with return valets and our returning guest is Jane Gentry,
and we're gonna have her on at least I think
once a year for the Jane Gentry Update. The first
time I met Jane, I've said this is this lady
(00:31):
is a futurist. She is a business strategist, executive coach,
has so many things going on, created the value blueprint,
and we've got lots of questions to ask Jane today.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Jane, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Thank you for doing this again. I appreciate you. I
love seeing you well.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Why don't you give a billboard about yourself so people
will be able to put this conversation into proper context.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Where would you like me to start? Rick?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I was worn out?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
You know, business experience, Oh, okay, in hometowns as well.
So where are you from originally?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
And now I don't have a hometown. I'm an Air
Force brat, I was teasing you. I've been in Atlanta
for thirty years, so Atlanta is my home as far
as any as far as I can have a home.
So I've had a practice since ninety nine. For the
first I don't know, twenty years or so, I was
consulting in enterprise, and I can pause here if you want,
(01:40):
for you to tell me I don't look that old.
But people don't usually pick up on that. After that, I.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Was gone for someone who's.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I gave you your window, you missed it. After that,
I was recruited to run a couple of mid market companies.
And here's what I realized, Wow, what a lonely freaking job. Lonely,
lonely in that job. But also mid market is so
(02:13):
grossly under resourced. And I don't mean money necessarily. I
mean there are these best practices and access to things
that Coca Cola has at home depot and Mercedes Benz
that mid market just doesn't get access to and or
even sometimes nowhere to go to find those things. And
(02:35):
so I shifted the entire focus of the practice when
I left those those companies to the mid market. And
so today we focus on two We're invited in for
predominantly two problems. One is growth. We're not growing, we
don't know why. But the second one is really the
(02:56):
big one. For us, and that's what we call growing pains.
So if you have a successful company, you will probably
have this scenario multiple times in the life of your company,
where your revenue you outpaced your infrastructure. In other words,
your success is causing you pain because your infrastructure does
not support anymore. So your leadership needs to be different.
(03:20):
The way the way you do cross functional integration needs
to mature, your processes need to mature, the infrastructure of
how you communicate needs to be different, and you have
to figure out how to operationalize your culture. And so
that that's really the place where we play a lot
(03:41):
with these mid market companies today.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
I really appreciate what you just said, and implicit in
that is when you hire people away from Fortune five
hundred companies to operationalize a culture and to bring their
best practices. That doesn't mean that you're going to be
waiving the magic wand and all of a sudden you're
(04:06):
going to get best practices in place.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Comment on that, No.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
You know, Fortune five hundred companies are as dysfunctional as
any company, and so hiring people away from Fortune five
hundred might get you some access to best practices, but
the leadership really has to be ready to change, and
(04:37):
if they're not, there's no point in it. And then
you really have to be able to lead your organization
through change. And here's what I find because this is
you know, obviously, when we go in and talk about
strategies and ways of doing things differently, if you can't
enroll the people in your organization, rick, then there's no
point in any of this because it's the people that
(05:01):
affect the strategy, right. And what I find is that
CEOs are not bad at what I would term change management.
In other words, where are we going, what are the milestones,
how will we know when we're there, how are we
measuring it? Those are things that CEOs are not terrible at.
(05:21):
Where they fall down and where why seventy percent of
change initiatives fail is they're not great at managing people
through the transition. That people kind of get left behind.
That's the thing that causes so much tension in an
organization through a period of change.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Tell me more about the people falling behind in this
fatality rate of seventy percent.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, it's awful. Well, I'll tell you I did a
half a day with a big company about eighteen months ago.
They bought another company and they were integrating those companies
and they called and said, Jane, were this integration's going great?
(06:21):
I said, oh fantastic. Why are we on the phone.
She said, well, our engagement numbers are down and our
productivity numbers are down. I said, okay, and so your
integration's going great. H I said, are you surprised about
the dip in those two numbers? And she said yes,
And I said I'm not because that says you are
(06:42):
not sure buying your people well through the change. And
she said, could you come and talk to our senior
leaders about how to build trust in the organization through change?
And I said not no. The reason is people don't
trust organizations, they trust leaders or not. So if you
(07:04):
were to ask my opinion, which you did not, but
you're going to get it anyway. What should we talk about?
What we should talk about is what is the process
that people go through change? What is it they're really
resisting because they're actually not resisting change, they're resisting loss. Okay,
So help your leaders to understand what is this process
(07:26):
that people are going through? Number one? Number two, as
a leader, how can you effectively shirpa them through that change?
And Number three how do you as a leader need
to show up in periods of change like this? And
so that's what we did because that's the that's the
(07:48):
place where leaders really struggle through periods of change, and
they say people don't ah, people just don't like change.
That's not entirely accurate.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
It isn't accurate, and that is the reason why people
should be contacting your company. I don't care, I don't
care what university you graduated from. When you are in
the midst of rapid change and acceleration within your enterprise,
you have got to surround yourself with a different kind
(08:21):
of troop to support that change. Chances are CEOs and
founders that listen to this show. You don't have all
the strength that you need and all the tools in
your toolbox. So that's why you've got to have help.
And part of the start of this is recognizing that
(08:42):
you've got a gap and that gap needs to be
short up by somebody like change entry.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Well, how here's some here are some symptoms that people
miss right. Leaders sometimes see change as these giants initiatives.
But I'll give you two examples from a client I'm
working with right now. One is they bought a they
bought a smaller company that had an acquisition. She was
(09:13):
on the third visit into that new company and she said, Jane,
the first thing they said to me when I walked
in the door wasn't even high. It was, oh, now
you're taking our tablets from us. And I said, what
do you hear when you walk into the building and
(09:33):
people don't even say hi to you, that's the first
thing they say. And she said, I hear that they
don't do change. Well, I said, that's not what I hear.
I hear that you're not managing the change. Well, let's
talk about how to do that better. The other scenario
would be I have a client where their strategy that
(09:57):
they're trying to implement is not really being effective. Excuse me, Rick,
And I said to the I said to the CEO,
when you built that strategy, you built it with your
leadership team. Who else other than the leadership team in
the organization knows what that strategy is for the year?
(10:24):
And she said nobody. And I said, well, how can
you implement a strategy when the people who really are
affecting that strategy don't have any idea what it is?
I said, this launching your strategy into the organization is
a change initiative and should be treated that way and
communicated that way into the organization and in order to
(10:47):
get enrollment and to be successful. So there are things
that I see as a change initiative that sometimes our
clients don't see immediately as a change initiative.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Yeah, it's so weird.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
It's almost like if you take your your blueprint concept
as an architect and as a futurist, it's almost like
people get together within a company, they draw up the
plans and they forgot to bring in the plumbers and
the electricians.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Talk about how they're supposed to collaborate.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Right right, But you know, in their defense, these folks
are are it can be really in the weeds, Rick,
you know. It's these it's these epics in the life
of your company, These these growing pains that I told
you about that are the sign to a CEO that
(11:43):
you need to start playing a different role in the
company as it grows. And so what we see a
lot of times is that they're aware that things are broken.
Ye they It's kind of it kind of doesn't make sense.
You think to yourself, Wow, we're having all this success
and everything's falling apart. What's going on. But that's a
(12:05):
sign that you are in one of these one of
these periods of growing pains in your company.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Oh you ever hired to come in and tell the
truth to the CEO and tell them where they stand
and where they should go?
Speaker 3 (12:21):
You mean as an individual or as as an individual.
I don't know that anybody hires me for that. That's
what they get. I got to a referral recently from
a colleague, and the client called me and said, I
(12:41):
just want you to know that he told me. If
I don't want to know the truth, don't call Jane.
I'll give you another name. She's just going to tell you.
And that you know. I always say to people, Look,
you don't have to take my counsel. That's what you're
paying for you before, but you don't work for me.
(13:01):
You can take it or leave it.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
The reason why they should listen to you, and it's
not because of Malcolm Gladwell or his researchers that said
ten thousand hours of experience. But you have a practice
just like a doctor or a lawyer, and you've seen hundreds,
if not thousands of cases. Now you recognize patterns The
(13:27):
best futurists I know are the ones that observe and
see patterns, right, and then see how those patterns apply.
You've got a lot of new initiatives going on within
your company.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
I bet you.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
They are a result of your practice of always observing
what is going to create the new growth positions for
these companies?
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Is that right?
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Well, our job is to be ahead of things for
the benefit of our clients, you know. I mean, for example,
they don't have the time to figure out how to
leverage AI in their company right to just dig into
the eight million versions of AI platforms or where it
(14:16):
might add value. And so you know, sometimes we'll have
a client come and say, tell me how to leverage
this AI platform for example, and I'll say, see, we
got to go backwards a little bit and ask yourself,
what is the problem you're trying to solve. Don't start
with the tech, start with the problem. You know, technology
(14:37):
is a great it's a great asset, it's a great
I always say, it's a great slave, it's a terrible master.
Don't let tech be your master. Right, figure out what
the issue is. And there are certain things that I
see where some of those are going to solve problems
for our clients in the mid market around things that
(14:58):
they don't do well, like onboarding, workflow, helping leverage some technology.
So for example, you know, we are often part of
working in a sales organization and they might be implementing
a CRM and they do a day and a half
of how to use the CRM. Everybody's drinking through a
(15:21):
fire hose, and then they throw them into the throw
them into the pond. AI is a great tool to
continue to leverage into your CRM system to help people
to know how to best use that tech. So, you know,
I say all that to say, we always go back
to what's the problem we're trying to solve. Don't let
tech be your master, Let it be your servant.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
That's right, And don't freak out over the fact that
AI is out there and you're not tapping into it.
AI's matt been out there for a long time. It's
almost like it became trendy, and it's not. It's it's
just it's just intelligence layered wisdom. And so anyway, I
(16:06):
totally agree with you that And that's just.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
An example, Rick, And you know, I mean we even
have implemented an AI powered platform in our practice to
help us do the discovery on the front end of
a client engagement, to escalate what's the word I'm looking for,
not escalate, to help us get that information faster so
(16:30):
we can start solving faster. Right. So I said that
all to say it's really our job to be ahead
of things for our clients, and so we are out
there just constantly trying to figure out what's next, what's going.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
To add value you have to in your practice.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Okay, back to take a quick break and I'll throw
the first half of this commercial break to you. Tell
us where people can contact you and get you involved
in their organizations to number one, identify the problems and
how fast can you solve them and help them get
(17:13):
to the on their growth path.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah, Jane at Janegentry dot com is my email and
I'm on LinkedIn Jane M. Gentry, so I'm pretty easy
to find.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
You are.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Indeed, thank you Jane for that, and we will be
right back after this quick message.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
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Speaker 1 (18:52):
And we're back with Jane Gentry on success made to Last,
and we were about to talk about speed feat.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Is everything here.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I want to know from you when you walk into
these clients, there must be some pre set timeline in
the minds of the CEO or the leadership groups to say, hey,
we're hiring Jane, we expect change within X amount of time,
and I want you to I want you to comment
(19:23):
on first of all, when they hire you and they
bring you in, have.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
A realistic expectation.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
If it took you fifty years to get to this point,
you're not going to change in fifty minutes.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah. Well, like I said, we we have started to
leverage AI so that we accelerate the learning time. I
think that's one of the things that's frustrating to companies
and CEOs is what they're accustomed to is paying consultants
for three to six months of just figuring out where
(19:56):
the hell the bathroom is, you know, and that's frust
to them. I'd say. The other thing we find that
causes people to not want to work with somebody like
that US is that they're used to consultants coming in
and just giving them a one hundred and fifty page
report and then leaving them to solve the problem. And
(20:17):
that's frustrating. So we don't work that way. We get dirty,
We get in there and execute with our clients. So
I think I don't know, because I don't really pay
attention to what other people do, but I think we're
a little bit different in that sense.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yeah, that's a great unique selling proposition for your company.
Let's talk about succession. I think, in my humble opinion,
that companies are so busy today trying to make their
(20:57):
KPIs their numbers, that they forget about succession and or
it becomes a b priority when it comes to meetings,
and then all of a sudden, someone's sixty five or seventy.
They go, oh, I don't know what we're going to
do with that person? Yeah, yeah, so what when How
(21:17):
can you advise our audience about making succession a part
of the culture and not an emergency crises situation.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yeah, And as an aside, I would say, uh, don't
let all your intellectual capital live in the brains of
people who could get hit by a truck tomorrow. I've
seen that a lot one person knows where all the
you know, all the files are or whatever. But with
regard to succession, and I call it leadership development. Development
(21:52):
is really difficult in the mid market. Part of it,
I think is a misunderstanding by leaders. You know, in
big enterprise organizations they have departments called learning and development.
And I used to always say to clients, there's a
reason it's called learning and development. They're not the same thing.
Learning is, you know, bringing a trainer in to teach something.
(22:16):
That kind of knowledge dissipates within like nine days without
the development piece. The development piece is that it's either
that coaching piece or what we try to get clients
to do in mid market is to understand there are
a lot of ways to develop people that don't involve
(22:36):
spending money. Give them stretch assignments. We have a client
right now and this was his idea, and I said,
that's it's brilliant. So their leadership team has these rocks.
They're an EOS company. They lever Gos and he said,
we've got a lot of rocks, but we're thinking if
we took the next level down of leadership and we
(22:58):
gave them some of the rocks, but paired them with
a senior leader, they would be able to stretch and
learn with while a mentor's working on them and we're
getting some of our strategic initiatives done. That's the way
to develop people in mid market development is, you know,
(23:18):
help them to experience other roles in your organization, give them,
give them memberships to associations in your industry where they
can learn from from other people outside of your organization.
Let them represent you somewhere outside of the organization. You've
got to constantly be thinking about that next level of
(23:40):
leadership and how to develop them. And those who say I,
you know, I spend all this time developing people and
then they leave, too bad? I mean you still really
have to make that a priority in your organization. Constant
development your people. Training's okay, training without the development is useless.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, that point?
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Did that make sense? Rick? I mean did I articulate that?
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Well?
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Of course you did. Of course you did. It makes
it makes a lot of sense. I think it's almost
a higher mindfulness that company owners, founders, leaders have to
have about developing the next generation.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
And this you're comment about, too bad, they're going to leave.
That's the one that hurts.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
It's spanks when someone has invested twenty five fifty hundred
thousand training and then all of a sudden a headhunter
comes in swoops all these great people and then it's
too late, too bad.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Well, let me tell you something. One of my partners
was my boss thirty years ago, and that organization was
very committed to training and development of their people. They
spawned probably a half a dozen other companies in that industry.
So it's not that people left to go somewhere else.
(25:09):
They left and started their own company to compete against
this company. But a couple times the owners invested in
these new companies, and thirty years later they are still
the leader in their industry. Their attitude was these developing
these people and having them go do their own thing
(25:30):
only forces us to be better at what we do.
I mean, no, they had no fear of that. They
didn't hold back from trying to make people great at
their jobs, even though there are probably a half a
dozen other companies in that industry now competing with them
that were their employees. But they were very much a
(25:50):
learning organization, and I think that's important. The other thing
you have to realize is that I'm a gen xer,
but for the general RAI two generations under me that
are in the workforce today, development and career growth are
more important to them than salary. So if you don't
(26:11):
do that in your organization, you're going to lose employees
as well, because that is a key driver for them.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, it's a good point.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
It's almost as if you've got to stay mindful and
you've got to know your employees.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Just a couple more people.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
So a small, a short story. I won't tell you
the company, but I wasn't a very large enterprise company
talking to them about how leadership has changed and command
and control leadership doesn't really work anymore. And I was
telling them of a study of inspirational companies and what
we learned about inspirational leaders that I had a leader
(26:54):
there literally say to me, Jane, their paycheck is their inspiration.
And I said, lots of luck with that strategy, right,
And that's a guy that's going to lose employees. But
what I find on our own podcast, Rick, where we
interview CEOs, many mid market CEOs are very purpose driven
(27:16):
and very very intentional about wanting to develop the people
in their organization. I think sometimes they just don't know
how to make that happen.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Jane, let's wrap up today's session with what's keeping you
up at night? And let's start with what is keeping
up mid market CEOs in the middle of the nine.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Oh, well, the world has changed quite a bit in
the last couple of months. I think they're not you know,
part of it is what's going to happen with the economy.
I do think people are hopeful, though I am, you know,
relative to the things that that we see with them.
(28:08):
But I mean in our business, we're very focused. As
I told you, they want to make sure they're positioned
for growth. They believe that the economy is going to improve,
and they want to make sure they're positioned to benefit
from that. So that's the first thing. And the second
thing is when I have this exponential growth, have I
(28:31):
positioned my organization to be able to handle it? So
I think most CEOs are as hopeful as I am.
There's a study that just came out, I think with
CEO executive and they were a little surprised at the
at the hopefulness of CEOs. I'm not, especially in the
mid market. You know, these guys started as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs
(28:53):
are are by nature hopeful people.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yes, they truly are.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
They are always royal optimists, just like you, Jane Gentry
and listen, we appreciate you being back on our show
and you were welcome back anytime. And folks, as we
always say, we wish you success, but on your own
unique way to significance.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Have a great week,
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