238: Turn Agreements to Alignment with Julie Williamson

26
Aug

Julie Williamson, CEO of Karrikins Group, is driven by a passion to turn agreements into alignment in organizations.

We explore Julie’s journey of transforming businesses by aligning leadership actions with strategic goals. She highlights the importance of moving beyond mere agreement to actual implementation and execution. Julie introduces the Karrikins Diamond Triangle framework, which connects the “Why,” the “What,” and the “How.” By focusing on the “How,” she helps leaders make informed decisions that drive meaningful change and avoid the “failure gap,” where good ideas fall short due to lack of action.

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Turn Agreements to Alignment with Julie Williamson

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Julie Williamson, the CEO of the Karrikins Group, a business consulting firm that is catalyzing growth, driving revenue and transforming organizations through aligned leadership action. Julie, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Steve. I’m so glad to be here.

So, this show is really special because I think you’re going to highlight something which is like a white spot or a blind spot or a white area in strategic planning. So, we’re going to get to it in a moment, but let’s start with your personal “Why” and what you are doing to manifest it in your life and in your business.

Yeah, absolutely. I’m obsessed with closing the gap between agreement and alignment. In a strategy language, that might be the space between strategy and execution. How do we not just agree that things are a good idea, but actually move into action and start doing them in a way that creates meaningful change for ourselves, for our organizations, or for our clients?

Okay. So it sounds like this wasn’t the first time that you said these things.

Yeah, I’m very committed to this work, I’ll say that.

Okay, well, it definitely rolled off your tongue. Okay, so the “Why” is to create organizational change, to create the connection between alignment, strategy and alignment?

Well, I think, yeah, also, as I think, Steve, we have this idea called the failure gap and people fall in the failure gap when they agree that something is a good idea, but they don’t then go take action on it. An example I just gave the other day is, I really wanted to learn how to speak Spanish before I went on a trip to Patagonia. I thought that would be nice. I had a whole year to do it. I agreed that it was a great idea. I had a great “Why.” I wanted to be able to talk in the local culture, but I never did it. I never moved into alignment. I never changed my mindset, my habits, my organizational factors, which you might talk about in a business, but my kind of environmental factors personally to make it happen, so I agreed that it was a great idea to learn a new language. But I did not align. I was in the failure gap and I took off for my trip and I used Google Translate the whole time. We all struggle with this idea of agreeing that something is a good idea and moving into action around it. And so why do I do what I do? It’s to help myself, my team, and all of our clients move past the failure gap and get to where they’re activating and aligning to the work that they need to do.

Okay, so that’s a good segue to the third leg of the stool or the side of the pyramid, whatever you want to call it. Well, actually, you call it the Karrikins Diamond Triangle, right? That’s your framework. So how do you connect the “Why” and the what to the third side of the triangle?

Yeah, I love that you’re bringing that up, Steve. I appreciate it. The diamond triangle is our framework for thinking about you need to know what you’re going to do. It’s very important. Strategy work is important. I love doing strategy work. You need to know why you’re doing it, your mission, your vision, your values, whatever that might be. I think for us, what we see with our clients, and, by the way, what I experienced in my own life around trying to learn a new language, is how are you going to do that together as a leadership team? So, the how for us is not about the tactics, like the project plan or the strategy, for example, it’s not the detailed execution, it’s really how are you as a leader going to show up differently, and how are you going to make different decisions and exhibit different behaviors so that you deliver on your what and your why. We believe that in a world obsessed with what and why, how is the missing piece.

Okay, so let’s dig in. How do you do the “How?”

Yeah, it’s a great question. How do you do the “How?” So, in a business setting, we often see the how as being the piece that is defining and getting clear and articulating how should leaders lead together. So, answering that question, how do leaders lead together? And that is an unanswered question in many organizations. So, this isn’t about your leadership competency model or anything that is in your value statement, for example, it’s really truly as a leadership team, how are you leading together? How are you making different decisions when tough moments come up? How are you creating organizational factors that will help people to stay aligned to the strategy or the transformation goals or whatever the ambition is that you’re trying to deliver on? And by putting voice to that and by putting words to that, amazing things can happen. I think the lack of language around it is often what holds people back.

Okay, so there’s a leadership team and they agree that they want to save the world. Their “Why” perhaps and their “What” is maybe to be the biggest company in the space or to come up with this innovative technology to save the world, and then the “How,” so then how do they come together? So, they agree on this thing, but if they don’t change their behavior, if they don’t figure out how to put this into action, suddenly happen. What are the ways of getting that alignment and this change of behavior?

Yeah, let’s start, Steve, with an example that I think you and I can both relate to, right? I’m a small business owner. My business partner and I run Karrikins Group. We’ve got a group of people who work for us. We have to make payroll every couple of weeks and we have to cover our expenses and we want to grow the company successfully, right? And so, you may see that same kind of situation. And so, we might agree that growth is a good idea. Let’s just start there. Something easy, right? Yes, we should be growing. And we might agree that revenue is important, right? But sometimes, we have to make tough decisions, my business partner and I, just between the two of us. Like this is hard just with two people, and much less with a leadership team of nine or 10 people. But we have to make tough decisions about good revenue versus not so good revenue, right? And I’m sure that you and a lot of your listeners probably struggle with this a lot, high margin revenue or low margin revenue. And in those moments, we need to know how we’re as leaders of the company going to make that decision together. Because we can’t just say yes to every revenue opportunity that comes in or we won’t be growing in a healthy way. But it’s really easy when you have that payroll looming over you to say yes to revenue, right? Small business owners run into this all the time. And so how are my business partner and I going to do that? Like what are the guardrails we’re going to establish? Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a big question.

You have to work through that together so that you can be making consistent decisions. Share on X

So, one of the things that we had to tackle was what are our individual mindsets around revenue, right? What do we believe about revenue? Like we might believe that any revenue is good revenue and that could come from our experiences with much larger companies, or we’re informed by, both of us have been in business for over 30 years, so we’re informed by things that happened in our past, right? So those individual mindsets that we’re bringing into that decision-making process, we have to make that visible to each other. And that can be a really hard thing to do. Nobody maybe has ever asked a leader the question of, well, what are your individual mindsets around this? What do you really believe about this? So, when you think about it from a strategy perspective, like think about Six Sigma, for example, right? Like people might say Six Sigma is a good idea, but I’m sure you could think of two, three, maybe a dozen mindsets that you’ve seen leaders bring into the situation, where they all say that Six Sigma is a good idea, but deep down inside, they’re bringing in a mindset, an individual mindset, that is counter, that runs counter to implementing a strong Six Sigma operational excellence kind of environment. Does that ring any bells for you? Can you think of individual mindsets you’ve seen in that space?

Yeah, I mean, obviously we have certain beliefs and we have developed certain theories and opinions over time, and it’s very hard to unlock it or unlodge it without maybe feeling bad about our idea that we nurtured for years. It’s gonna be a tough thing. So is there a process to do that? Is there a way to create the transparency and share and allowing the other person to save face or allowing ourselves to save face? So how does it even work?

Yeah, I think there’s two other components I just want to flag before we get into that deeper process because they all come together. And when we hold them all together, they’re easier to work with. And we all bring our individual mindsets into the space between agreement and alignment. There’s also group dynamics that happen across teams. So especially with groups of nine or 10 strong leaders, where you might have people with responsibilities across regions or across different products or different functional areas, they’re trying to protect their vertical area in the business, right? They’re trying to say, well, I’ve got to make sure that my team has what it needs to be successful. And those group dynamics, the rituals, symbols, discussions, habits that the group as a whole has also influence the decisions that they make. So our individual mindsets intersect with group dynamics, right? And that is super interesting and fascinating. As a social scientist, I’m like, this is really like a little Petri dish for me. And then there’s organizational factors. They might be things like the realities of your global company, and you have to work across time zones. Organizational factors might not be something you can change, but talking about them and making them visible helps you as a leadership team to start to shift your decisions and behaviors. Other organizational factors might be the structure or the compensation model, or the way that people are assigned to projects or resources, Matrix, for example. So all of these things, individual mindsets, group dynamics, and organizational factors, they come together. And we think as leaders, we’re making objective decisions, but really we’re making decisions that are influenced by these three individual mindsets, group dynamics, and organizational factors. And out of that comes our decision to either move into alignment and do things differently or stay in agreement, but continue with business as usual or the status quo.

Yeah, I hear you. So there’s the individual mindsets of the leaders, then there’s the group dynamics, there are different departments of different interests, and then there are organizational factors, there could be environmental factors. So how do you actually negotiate all these different factors and these dynamics and these mindsets? It feels like an overwhelmingly complex process to navigate.

Yeah. It’s a deceptively simple process, I would say, right? And that is to say, you have to be in dialogue with each other. So often leaders say to us, and I hope that you see this in your work as well, they’re like, just give us the answer, right? Just tell us what the answer is, and we’ll go do it. But if you’re not in dialogue about something and having the conversation, then you lose the opportunity to create shared meaning, to really negotiate what you mean when you say, we should do this, or we should act this way, or this is our way of working. So what we do at Karrikins Group is we work very hard to create the space for leadership teams to be in dialogue with each other about how they need to work differently together. And that comes down often to, for things like, for example, the default trade-offs that they might make. So I talked earlier about revenue. So in bigger organizations, and it’s true in small organizations too, like Hurricanes Group, but quarterly numbers are really important, right? How many of your clients live and die by their quarterly numbers?

I hope all of them.

Yeah, plenty, right? And so, there’s a habit that forms with the group and it’s informed by individual mindsets of leaders of I always make my quarterly numbers. Group dynamics, let’s say, I don’t want to be at the bottom of the scoreboard, right? Organizational factors that say your compensation is tied to making your quarterly numbers. And everybody agrees in principle that transformation is important. And so long-term investments matter. But when it comes to deciding, how am I going to make my quarterly numbers? They drop back to business as usual. They do things the way they always have to make the number. And they kick down the road, the long-term investment and transformation. It happens all the time. But having the conversation about what’s driving that decision to drop back to, I know how to make that quarterly number, I’m gonna do it the way I always have. I’m not gonna move to this new transformed environment. That often is blamed on, oh, well, the technology doesn’t do what I need it to do, or I don’t have enough resources to move into that new environment. But in fact, it’s often those individual mindsets and group dynamics that are putting huge pressure on leaders and it’s driving the trade-offs that they’re making between short-term and long-term success.

Okay, that makes sense. And then you also talked about a new language that addresses some of these trade-offs that these leaders will have to make with each other or they have to accept with their decisions. So, what is the new language and how do you create that new language? Is there something that drives this new language?

Yeah, I would say again, for us, that is about spending time in dialogue with each other. One of the most consistent things in the work that we do is at the beginning of the project, we lay out a roadmap. These are the six conversations you need to have, and here’s how we’re going to have them. And two things happen. The CEO or the senior leader, whoever we’re working with says, we don’t have that much time to spend. And, or they say, let’s just do it in a one day offsite. But the one day offsite approach, while it has its time and place, is really ineffective for building a new language. Just like when I was going to Argentina, I couldn’t just spend a weekend learning Spanish. What I needed to do was 30 minutes a day every day for a year. That’s a very effective way to learn a new language. But to try and cram it all into an intense session, the human brain just doesn’t work that way. So we believe, and we’ve had a lot of success with this, that having what we prescribe as these six conversations over a period of three to four months, where you’re working very intentionally together to build the answer to the question of how are we going to lead together? The outcome of that is the team has that shared meaning. They understand their language when they’re asking questions about how are we making this trade-off? So when the quarterly numbers come up and there’s a decision to be made about should we go for the short-term win or the long-term investment, they’ve changed the conversation. And instead of saying, how do we make our numbers at any cost, they’re having an intentional dialogue about, what is the trade-off that we’re making? And when you shift to that, you might still make the same decision at the end of the day, but you’re making it in a different way. And that’s what drives new outcomes.

So how does that technically work? So instead of just a quarterly meeting where the executive team comes together and sets priorities for next quarter, so they would have these six strings of six meetings perhaps. So, what kind of meetings would they be? How would they fit into the regular communication structure of the organization? Is this like a regular meeting, maybe a biweekly strategic meeting? What does it look like? And how many hours? And what’s the agenda?

Yeah, actually, the work that we do, those six meetings that I’m talking about, those are embedded within solutions that we deliver. So it’s more that when they’re done, they have now in their diamond triangle, hopefully they know what they’re doing, they know why they’re doing it. They also know how they’re going to do it together by the end of that effort. So they’ve put language to that. They’ve decided on ways of working together that they can hold themselves accountable to. So they’re starting to make what is often invisible, those individual mindsets, group dynamics, the trade-offs, they’re starting to make those visible in the language that they use and how they lead together. And so those six sessions that normally I’m talking about are very prescribed by us where we start out talking about the outcomes that they’re trying to get to, not building their strategy, that’s their what and that’s a different effort, but what are the outcomes they’re trying to deliver as a team? And then what are the individual mindsets and group dynamics that come into that? And then we do another session on trade-offs and blockers. We do another session on defining ways of working together, and then some ways in which they can hold each other accountable. So, we take them through that process. It’s usually, their sessions are usually about three hours long, somewhere in the range of two to four hours for each session. And then at the end, they have a blueprint for moving forward, knowing how to lead together. Share on X

And then that becomes a permanent blueprint, or it’s something that needs to be reinforced or refreshed from time to time. Don’t people forget the language if they don’t go to Patagonia anymore? Remember Spanish?

I never did learn Spanish, I have to say. But I think it’s such a great question, Steve, because yes, people forget if they’re not attentive to it, but also team members come and go. Also the goals change, right? Your strategy might shift. You might need different ways of working together as a leadership team. Maybe suddenly instead of looking to grow the company, now you’re looking to sell the company. So, you need to lead differently, right? What we’re trying to help leaders learn is a new way of establishing those ways of working. So whatever changes happen, they have the right conversations, they have the language to say, hey, are we making different trade-offs? Hey, in the example that I gave, if we’re looking to sell the company instead of grow it, my individual mindsets around that look like this, right? Here’s what I’m bringing in and I feel like that needs to shift. Where the group dynamics, that the habits that we’re deeply invested in, those have to change. We have to start talking about different things. So we’re trying to teach that in some ways in a very experiential way, that ability to establish how do we need to lead together towards whatever goal it is that we’re working on.

Okay. So bigger company, they have all these different layers. They have the group dynamics. They have the organization factors, mindsets, of course, that’s for everyone. If we are looking at the small to medium-sized business, like 10 to 100 employees, for example, what are some of the tools that can help them step into to become better leaders?

Yeah, we love to see people thinking about, are we in agreement or are we in alignment? And one of the best outcomes that I’ve seen from the work that we’ve done is when leaders send me an email or they send me a text or call me later, like months later, and they say, everybody’s still asking the question, are we agreeing or are we aligned? And when they start to see the difference between that, that’s a way that they can sustain it throughout the organization. And we often do work with the most senior leaders and those leadership teams, but then also really a lot of education more broadly throughout the company about why it’s so important to ask that question. Are we in agreement or are we in alignment? If we’re just agreeing, what’s the work we need to do to get aligned? How do we tackle that? By creating that energy, that dynamic in the organization to ask that question on a regular basis, the work becomes very self-sustaining. We also do some education programs for the bigger audience of employees around what we call the four Cs, which is clarity, connection, commitment, and then last but not least, courage. How do you have the courage to make different decisions? And that four Cs model of aligned leadership really helps people to understand what can they do as individuals in the organization to continue to make sure that they don’t stay stuck in agreement, that they move past the failure gap and into alignment.

So that’s basically the test of alignment, if someone checks all the boxes.

Yeah.

So quick clarity, they understand exactly the same thing by what was being agreed, a connection that they, I guess, have each other’s back. They don’t second guess each other, so they got this connection. They’re committed to the outcome and the courage to tackle any disagreements that still lie behind below the surface.

Yeah. The courage is a big deal when you’re talking about individual mindsets and group dynamics, because like you said at the very beginning of this conversation, they’re not common conversations, individual mindsets and group dynamics. And it does take courage, both as an individual to say, here’s what I’m bringing, and as a colleague to say, what’s happening beneath the surface? Like, what aren’t we talking about? What conversations are we avoiding? And when we think about that space to really step in and say, I’m worried that we’re just agreeing that this is a good idea, but we’re not changing how we lead in ways that will help us to get there. That takes a lot of courage.

Yeah, I love it. Do you have perhaps a downloader tool for our listeners on the four Cs, I think it would be a fascinating exercise for small business owners to try out. Maybe they can reframe the conversation around these four Cs. Is there something that you can recommend that’s a simple way to kind of engage with this idea, this concept?

Yeah, I’ll give two quick plugs. One is that we do an Aligned Leader Program every quarter, or no, we actually do it three times a year now. That’s public, it’s a very accessible price point, and it goes all through the four Cs. So, if you have up and coming leaders or you yourself want to take a look at it, that’s available to folks. And we have some great content online on our website where you can go out and download some worksheets and some other tools that will help you just to understand this content a little bit better.

Okay, so if someone would like to download that content, please share your website address so people can go and find it and maybe they can connect with you personally.

Yeah, absolutely. The website is karrikinsgroup.com and Steve, I’m hoping you can put it also in the show notes but I’ll spell it for folks, K-A-R-R-I-K-I-N-S group, G-R-O-U-P.com. And there’s a whole host of great content out there in terms of worksheets, tools, resources that you can take a look at. And I would love to say hello. You can always reach out at hello@karrikinsgroup.com or reach me directly. And the best way probably is LinkedIn. So, if people wanna connect with me on LinkedIn. And then also our YouTube channel has a lot of great videos and content out there too.

Well, that’s pretty awesome. So, Julie Williamson, CEO of Karrikins Group. So don’t just know your vibe, which is very important. If you know it, I know you’re proud of it, but it’s not enough. You also need to know the “What,” where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there. How do you create this alignment, not just the agreement on your team, particularly keeping in mind the four C’s, that clarity, connection, commitment, and courage among your team members so you can implement those decisions that you have agreed and aligned on, and then check out Julie’s website, karrikinsgroup.com, and her LinkedIn page and YouTube channel as well. The YouTube channels runs under the Karrikins Group name?

Correct, yes.

Okay. Awesome. Julie, thank you very much for sharing your very unique strategy framework, the Karrikins Diamond Triangle. For those who are listening, stay tuned because we come twice a week with very exciting business frameworks such as this one. Thank you, Julie, for coming and thanks for listening.

Thanks, Steve, I appreciate it.

 

 

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