Camille: Good morning, George.
George: Good morning, Camille. How was your week?
George: I know you conducted a retreat this week, but you don't do that every week. Other weeks you do another stuff. Like how does this differ? How do you work these out?
Camille: Yeah. This is a very different thing. I only do it a few times a year. Sometimes I do like a one day event or retreat for folks. For this particular client it's usually a two or three day where they go offsite and facilitate the retreat. Doesn't happen very often, which is good because it requires lots of prep and energy and I definitely, the day after was like, who gonna take a little time off now.
Camille: But yes, that's what I was doing this week. I was off running a retreat. It was a three day leadership retreat. The group ranged from, 20 to 25 people or so. Whoa. Yeah, it's pretty big. But it didn't feel that.
Camille: Usually I would say parrot down, and we've talked about this with this group, we need to have a smaller group. So when I go do something like this, the type of retreat that I was doing, it's definitely gets harder the more people you have in the room cuz there's more voices to manage. But you're also trying to hear all the voices.
Camille: But in this case because I've been working with them for a while and I know so many of them and they have been gelling pretty well as a team, it actually was not. That hard to do. So one of my things that I discovered thinking was coming front of mind was like the size of the group.
Camille: While we try to control that in terms of what's gonna make this the meeting, you do have to think about the dynamics of the team itself and how well do you know them and all of that. And there's a lot of other factors than a number. Cause people are always like, well, how many people is the number?
Camille: Depends.
George: Yeah,
George: I was gonna ask you exactly about this. I would say that one of the things that I like, background annoying for me at my job is sometimes I'll get invited to a thing like this. It's meant for leadership at some level of leadership. And you know, every once in a while there'll be a thing where there's like 150 leaders company wide and a 20,000 person company. So relatively small for that group, but it's too big to be personalized.
George: The problem I have is when it's maybe 15 people in our organization, I'm on the bubble, like I'm out. And I know I would benefit from being there and I would probably have something contribute, but I don't blame them for limiting the audience because otherwise it's too unwieldy.
George: How do you figure out how to manage which people should be there versus shouldn't be there and like for the next layer down that's not invited, how do you deal with them?
Camille: We had exactly that problem for this retreat.
INTRO
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Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille: I guess I wanna back up because okay.
Camille: We dove into, how was the retreat this week? Cause it's like you and me talking. Yeah. Which is good. So let's do that and the audience can listen in on what we normally talk about.
Camille: But I do wanna say for the listeners, I really was thinking about coming up of this retreat because this is one of my bigger clients and I'm typically talking to smaller businesses on this podcast.
Camille: Yeah.
Camille: But also we have talked about that, At some level, business is business. So big or small, the same essential principles and challenges mostly still apply. And so I was thinking about coming off this retreat, like what are some good takeaways I'd wanna bring back to my audience? So I do have that.
Camille: But I think great for the purposes of getting to those takeaways, this is a perfect question cuz it is one of the core challenges that I have whenever I'm thinking about doing these things. And small business owners might not run into this as much if they don't have a very big business or a very big team.
Camille: But it doesn't take much of a team for a business owner to already be questioning, well, is it worth it to have these people in the room? Yeah. I might only have two people, but is that gonna slow me down even if it's these two people? Or should I burden those people with what I think is my work to do by bringing them into this?
Camille: So I talked about the workshop that I did, one of my small business owners she only has a team of maybe four or five people, and she brought two of them into it, which was brilliant because they got to collaborate and it was great. So that was a great example of her making a choice of who to bring in and how it would be valuable.
Camille: But back to your question about, how do you make that decision for these bigger events? It really does start with what's the objective? Like what do we want to achieve? What outcome are we looking for out of this event? And I do find that a lot of times people put these retreats together or these events and they're like, oh, we should do a retreat on that.
Camille: And the whole thing gets designed without thought to what is the outcome we want from it. And so a bunch of stuff gets jammed in. You've probably been to one of these. Yes. A bunch of stuff gets jammed in because people wanna be heard. Hey, I wanna present about my X, Y, Z project.
Camille: Yes. Or they were a little bit maybe lazy and putting together their own meeting, and then they see, oh, all the people I need to talk to are here, so maybe I can like get my to-do on my list Done by talking about it here.
George: So this, I'm getting triggered.
Camille: People start to pile on. So when I do this, there is a call for topics like, what would you guys like to talk about? It's like, we do want to know what they're thinking, but then we also have to put in there, remember what the objective is of this meeting. So now it's, does your topic fit with our objective and mm-hmm. So this group, we've been getting better at that over time.
Camille: Instead of having a bunch of stuff piled on, we've been getting better at, what do we really need to do here and talk about. So we had spent the last couple of months in lots and lots of zoom sessions, putting together their strategic plan for 2023.
Camille: Okay. And this meeting was to really finalize that these are their top initiatives. They all agree these are our top strategic initiatives. And granted, we're a little late in the process. We should have done this sooner in the year. So they started this process late this year. They recognize like, yeah, we really need to do this and we know we're a little late on this, but let's do it.
Camille: So we were establishing, yes, we agree these are the initiatives, and now we're going to set them up for action. So how do we turn this work into actionable work in the organization. As opposed to, and my beautiful PowerPoint that says, here are my top initiatives is done.
Camille: And I checked the box of, I did my strategic planning work. Yeah. So that was the whole point of that. So when we knew that was the objective, And because we had done all of this pre-work coming into it, we made sure that the pre-work set us up for a good retreat. So I knew like, we need to get to X point in order for this thing to go well.
Camille: So we did all that pre-work. And then because we knew the objective, it became really clear who needed to be in the room. And so while this is typically considered their executive leadership team retreat, yeah, that got expanded to a lot of other leaders who really needed to be there because their contributions to these initiatives was so significant.
Camille: Hmm. So we did have a, a bigger group than normal, and then we expanded that group even on one of the days when we were taking a deep dive to include some other subject matter experts from other departments in case we needed their input. and anything, that we were missing anything on the initiatives.
Camille: That was how we decided how to manage that. That's ultimately what you wanna do is make sure that every person in the room really is serving a purpose and that they know what that is. Yeah. And also that they know how you are expecting them to contribute. Are you on the sidelines?
Camille: You're here to listen and add in? Are you actually doing activities and collaborating with the group? How are they supposed to show up? We could have done that a little bit better for the people that showed up who weren't used to this meeting. But we were able to include them in the conversations and it went well.
Camille: It didn't slow us down. The big fear is that the more people you put in the room, the more voices there are to hear, the longer it's going to take, and you won't have time. So we also built the retreat knowing that that could happen. And made sure we had some time for we, we had a, we don't typically have a lot of wiggle room.
Camille: We allotted enough time for each of these knowing that there could be some long conversations. But we also knew each topic would get cut off at a certain point in time, regardless of how far it got. So that initiative owner could end up with some more homework than some others, depending on how well the conversation went.
Camille: Yeah. Okay. Did that really answer your question?
George: Yeah, absolutely it answers it really well there. I guess one follow up I would have is, okay, so I, I get it. You had had a very clear idea about how to decide on the core group that needs to be there. In this particular retreat, there were some other people who were not core, but you invited in for one session cuz they had key information.
George: That's great. I get that too. Still there's gonna be a group of people who. Maybe leaders but not the absolute senior leadership or they're involved but not enough to be worth the trade off of making in the room versus slowing things down. It would slow things down too much.
George: So you decided to leave this group out, but they're important. How do you deal with them after the workshop? Get them the information they need to know or something so they can lead the rest.
Catch Ball
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Camille: Yes. Some of that we actually did before the workshop, so, huh. Have you ever heard this term catch ball?
George: Catch ball? Yeah,
George: I don't think so. No.
Camille: It's a lean term, so it's used a lot in a strategy deployment concepts when \ you're doing a lean strategic plan. Okay? And what it is, it's a process of when you're coming up with your strategic plan, you do this process called catch ball, so top leaders are coming up with their plans and then the ideas, you're supposed to then toss the ball to your team, and then your team tosses the ball back.
Camille: And the ball is the ideas. So you go to your teams and you say, here's the ideas we have on the strategic plan. What questions do you have, but also add to it. So you would improve on the strategic plan by getting their input. And so you do this catch ball process down through the layers of the organization.
Camille: So this was the pre-work we did. So they came up with their initiatives. And then we had these catch ball conversations where we were already getting input from other layers of leadership in the organization in terms of what are we missing in these initiatives? Does this feel like the thing to you?
Camille: Those kinds of things.
George: That's brilliant. May I react to that. Mm-hmm. My reaction is incredible frustration actually, because I can think of some meetings that I have not been a part of in the past year and a half regarding reorg stuff that I personally think I have a say in, I think I contribute to, but I'm not in those meetings.
George: But I have had very little idea what the agenda is for those meetings. If the leader had called on another group of us and said, Hey, we're gonna meet. You're not in the meeting, but here's the agenda that we're gonna talk about basically, except for secret stuff. And would you like to add to that?
George: I would've felt so much more included, even though not in the meeting. It would be great knowing what are these people meeting about? I don't have to hear about the meeting. I know, oh, this is what they're gonna talk about. That would lower tension for me. Also, I'd be able to tell my team.
George: That would be fantastic, but my current leadership doesn't really do that. And so the secret meetings stay much more mysterious than they really need to be. And they also gain the bad interest that they don't need to have. I mean, they're, they're important, but not that exciting.
George: Usually this is damn. Yeah. That's awesome.
Camille: Yeah, because the other things, what you do is awesome. Why thank you. Well, the other thing that happens when you have these conversations, you have these leadership, I'm doing air quotes and being snarky. Your leadership meeting, like you're not leading anybody when you have a conversation at the leadership level that doesn't have input from the people that you're supposed to lead.
Camille: What are you actually doing? Yeah. You're all in this echo chamber of all of your, VP level ideas, and you think you're all the smartest people in the room, but you're missing all. We, we got so many great ideas by going down to these other levels.
Camille: So here's the reason organizations don't do it. Okay. It's time consuming. Yeah. I had countless hours of meetings where we facilitated a conversation with a leader and their team walking through all the initiatives. Yeah. And getting their input, and in some cases developing then their own goals. They wanted for, they're like, well, that means what we should work on is this, this, and this.
Camille: Which was, yeah. Also, the point was then what would you and your department wanna work on in support of this? Yeah. But these are the priorities this year and it really helped them line up. So different departments aren't working on different things. It's that idea. We all wanna be rowing in the same direction?
Camille: Yes. So that's really helpful. This is my third or fourth time I've done a retreat with them, okay? Mm-hmm. . And this time what was really obvious was how often their frontline employees were brought up and they even called it out as, Hey, we wanna do more of this.
Camille: We wanna get them more involved in this. We brought them up a lot in this conversation, and I know it's because their voice of them was in these initiative. Okay. We didn't go all the way to the frontline, but we'd gotten close enough that we were getting that voice . We were getting their manager who's like, yeah, I know what my team's up against.
Camille: As opposed to, you know, the VP who doesn't know what's going on at the frontline. So that really made a big difference in terms of how we were talking about the work which is huge. If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have that voice, we wouldn't have that connection. And one of the things that they had in their employee engagement survey was a lack of vision for the organization was one of their negatives on their employee engagement survey.
Camille: And so immediately they're like, well, we're solving that problem now because we're making the strategic visionso clear .Because we talked about it with everybody. Yeah. And we also gave them, even though we didn't go all the, I didn't participate in the conversation all the way to the frontline.
Camille: We gave each of the leaders then the, here's what you need to have your next level conversation and share it back up. So it is intended to go all the way to the frontline and catch ball all the way back up. But yeah, it's really about making people feel like they belong, but also it's so much more than now I have included it. It's not a communication. It's not let me tell you what's happening.
Camille: Cuz some people are like, well, can't I do that in one big town hall? No, you can't do catch ball in a town hall. That's not town halls are different. Town halls are, here's all the information that I want to convey to the organization and they're very important for leaders to do, but it's very different from the let's play catch ball.
Camille: Let me throw an idea to you and have you throw it back to. That's different. Yeah. It's also a messy process. So one leader had said to me when we were talking about doing it with him, he is like, well, you know, my team might get a little chippy and has some things to say and I don't know if you guys really want that.
Camille: Do you really want that level? I'm like, no, that's exactly why I wanna talk to your team. Yeah. I want to hear if they have resistance to any of this, or if they disagree with any of it . I wanna know and they didn't. They had some really great things to say, like they were mostly reinforcing, but it a, it's about time way.
Camille: That we work on some of this stuff. Yeah. Okay. So even the, knowing that some of the leaders were a little bit resistant to, oh, I don't know if I wanna open that can of worms and have to manage that conversation. That's also. A lot of times why you bring somebody like me and who can manage that conversation as opposed to Yeah.
Camille: The leader's gonna hear a lot of the same complaining and not really sure what to do with it. I can do something different with it because I'm not emotionally connected to all of that.
Camille: Yeah. So that's the beauty of catch ball. Think about it in terms of strategies when we talk about catch ball, but doing it for any given meeting, you're gonna how brilliant would that be? Yeah. Every meeting would be better. Okay.
George: Oh, absolutely.
Camille: And even though it would take a little bit of extra time, I think the payoff would be well worth it.
George: Me too. Yes, because if you don't, like I said, people who hear about these meetings are not in it oftentimes get uneasy about it for no real good reason that they knew it was actually going on, but they're not informed.
George: So there's all this. I don't know what to call. Well, unease that happens and then on the back end you have to spend more time communicating all this context. That would've been faster if you had done it upfront. it saves time And heartburn.
Camille: Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the retreat we go around and ask each leader to share what's the messaging they're taking back to their team of okay, the work they accomplished in the retreat.
Camille: And we're making sure that we're aligned, but also people are getting good ideas like, oh, that was a good one. I'm gonna, I'm gonna share that with my team too. . So it's a little bit of a sharing your ideas exercise, but it makes them deliberately think about it. And what's great in doing that is we were able to hear there was a lot of common messaging, but as I was listening to it, I was realizing, oh, because of all the pre-work we did, all of their teams, it, none of this is gonna feel uncomfortable or surprising or awkward to them.
Camille: They're gonna be like, oh yeah, that's great, because they already knew what they were gonna do going into. Yeah, so they're aware of these topics, they're aware of this process. It won't be like, well, now we got handed a bunch of goals we gotta work on - woe is us. You know, it's, it's not gonna be that.
Camille: It's gonna be like, okay, so here's the work we did, here's what we specifically decided we're doing next. Out of all that great work we did with you before. It's gonna be easier for them to deliver the message of here's, because the message coming out of this retreat, We have a long list of strategic initiatives and we have a lot of work to do this year, but we're all in.
Camille: So somebody on the frontline could be like, I don't, I can't do all of that. Or it's mostly gonna be like middle management that's gonna get hit hard by a strategic initiative. So they'll be able to feel more supported in that process than if it was dumped on them.
George: So, If you don't mind my asking, what were your takeaways from this?
Camille: My takeaways were really around the first big one was the idea of collaborating and engaging with employees result in a far better strategy for this organization than they'd had in the past. So this was the first time we'd done the process.
Camille: In the past they had typically had a strategic planning template that they gave to their leaders and said, fill this out and Uhhuh tell us what you're gonna do in these key areas. Okay. so, it was a very not collaborative, leaders tell us what you're gonna do so we can like, hold you accountable to something.
Camille: That process, Okay for them at the stage they were in, in terms of maturity as an organization, but they really had come through working on some of the basics. You know, it was like we have to, close some gaps in. We have to take care of safety and compliance and customer service and all the basic stuff is all they were really looking at, how are we gonna get all of this stuff stabilized? Okay.
Camille: And finances was the big thing they had to stabilize. So they had been working on that. But it didn't ever result in, these big collaborative breakthrough as I talk about the breakthrough versus stability goals.
Camille: These breakthrough goals that were gonna really level them up. And last year was the first year they really had an opportunity to engage fully in some breakthrough ideas. So partway through the year they started really developing these and having these breakthrough ideas they were gonna work on.
Camille: So that's why this year it made sense. I'm like, well, your framework doesn't have a place for those now. Because it only has a place for the basics. It only had a place, the way that they had their templates design. It really only had a place for your basic safety and compliance and all that stuff, and revenue and customer service.
Camille: Okay, so they have like five or six of those. And so this really opened them up to, oh, now we have a, we have a way to think about this from a bigger perspective. And so this process of doing it more collaboratively and getting people engaged in it, they acknowledged at the end of this, well, this was a far better way for us to develop the strategy with, again, that secondary benefit for them was the employees are gonna get so much clarity in the vision of the organization and feel like they're part of it.
Camille: And that being one of low marks on their employee engagement survey meant it was really meant something to them. But I think a lot of organizations struggle with this, even the small ones. You could have a handful of people and they're still like, I don't, I'm not really sure what the vision of my bus, you know, my, my boss is, yeah.
Camille: And it can even be worse at the small business level because small business owners can be easily distracted. Like, you know what, I have this idea for this, and I, and you can visibly see it when you're a small business, ? Like, why is my boss going off and working on that idea? Are we this now? Are we gonna do that now?
Camille: So they can actually visibly see that much clearer than, you know, in a big company. The big boss can be off working on some cool new strategy and nobody would know about it, ? For a long time until they talk. So I think it's even more important to have that alignment around the vision and the direction of the organization in small businesses because it's so much easier to see it if there is misalignment.
Camille: Okay. So that was one of my bigger takeaways from the retreat.
George: We talked about some of this in the past five minutes too, and it really fleshed that out about the employees gaining clarity. By engaging them better. That makes a lot of sense to me. What else? Yeah,
Camille: so another one was, and I was really thinking about the belief shifts and I made me want to,
George: yeah, those are rock solid.
George: They are unchangeable and there's eight of them and that's it.
Camille: This is it. Nobody needs anything else. That's a perfect science. I was thinking about the belief shifts and how the word shift is so important to me. We're shifting in that direction, but they're not absolutes. It gets back to what I've said before where sometimes we want things to be black and white.
Camille: The main belief shift in this retreat actually was process over outcomes. That was our entire mantra. The whole three days. Cuz we had defined our outcomes. We have our initiatives, we know what we wanna get to, okay? But now we have to shift our focus to the process to get there. Which meant what are the specific projects we're gonna do to make these initiatives.
Camille: Cause these initiatives most of them were over a couple of years. Okay. Not a single year. They're multi-year initiatives to really do what they're trying to do. So there's a few projects in there. So they had to get specific about and what's the process to get there?
Camille: How am I gonna do that? So even though we were focused on. There were a lot of other belief shifts that came up as we were talking through, huh? This work that I realized. Yeah. There's a time when the belief shift that we're trying to shift away from, sometimes it's necessary. So for example planning it over winging it.
Camille: Yeah. You can't literally plan everything. No, and you should not plan everything. Sometimes going with your gut and weighing it works and is really effective and it is one of the challenges I sometimes have when I'm trying to help people make this shift towards even when we were shifting towards the processes that we wanted to follow and how we wanted to do it, I would get some pushback from like, yeah, but what we did was we had this amazing year last year, and everything that we did was great and so shouldn't we look at how we did that.
Camille: I was like, well, you did that with a lot of chaos, a lot of winging it, and frankly, you made a lot of sacrifices. Is that sustainable? It made things work last, but this company in particular their leader acknowledged that they made some very specific sacrifices that he does not want to repeat. Really. But he had to because he said, we had to have the financial turnaround last year that we made, this was the only way I could see to do it, and it absolutely had to happen last year or we wouldn't exist anymore.
Camille: Wow. So sometimes you see companies make these choices because they get themselves in this trap where this is our only way out, and at the end of the day we talk about what you want versus what the business needs. Yeah. What he wants for the business is, this beautiful vision of employee engagement and happy employees and all of this stuff.
Camille: And that's a great way of running his business. I mean, he's got a much broader and more clever vision than that. But, you know, he has a happy company vision. But what happened last year was they really drove people hard to get the results they needed, and they had a lot of turnover. Ah, I see. Some of it was good for them, but not all of it.
Camille: Yeah. And ultimately the level of turnover always creates tension for whoever's left. It's putting more work on them. It's the stress of why are so many people leaving? Should I now be thinking about leaving? But I like it here, what do I do? It affects the culture in a negative way, even when you don't intend for, even if those were the people to leave.
Camille: A lot of people leaving can feel really stressful. And so that was very hard on the organization and he could see it. He had very specific feedback that he'd received where he knew, yeah, I didn't intend for any of that to happen, and I don't want it to keep happening, but I don't know that I could have done anything different last year in order for us to actually get this financial turnaround. We had to push on these spaces to make this happen.
Camille: So that's really a story of while what he did wasn't sustainable, the belief shifts exist in a place of, if you want a sustainable company, you have to shift everything towards these. This direction of building a strong foundation, focusing on planning and over winging it.
Camille: Really thinking about making trade-offs over full on sacrifices. Mm-hmm. Those are the things that you have to shift towards to have sustainability, but they're not absolute. Sometimes you're gonna do a quick fix, sometimes you're gonna wing it. Sometimes you're gonna you make some sacrifices because otherwise the business is literally going to go under.
Camille: You're trying to avoid that by shifting in this other direction, but you can't always, because business is business and it has its very specific needs, and it only exists to make money, and if it's not making money, then it's not a viable business, and that's the number one thing.
George: I am gonna come back and ask questions about this.
George: That sits well with me, but I want to take a devil's advocate position. So I'm a person, I'm running my small business and I'm in this mindset of I'm, everything in my business is an emergency needs to happen right now.
George: I don't have time to stand back and plan things. Going with my gut has worked for me for a while and I feels like it's beyond manageability. But I don't see a way through.
George: How do I shift my mindset so I'm mostly in a belief shift and not back on my old behaviors? And when do I know to give myself permission, when it's okay to say, okay, break the belief shift now. But how do I get to that place where I know the difference?
Camille: This is a tough one because the way that you work as a, well, for anybody. Anybody working. Whether you're running a business, you're a leader in a company, or you're you know, a frontline employee, it's really easy to get caught up in that.
Camille: My busyness and my chaos that I work within yeah, equals I am working hard and therefore am success. Yeah. Because our culture equates hard work, working a lot of hours is what I mean. Mm-hmm. , the work itself doesn't have to be hard, but I sat at my desk for 12 hours today. Yes. And that means I am a successful human being.
Camille: So there is a mindset even around that fundamentally that you have to acknowledge like, okay, I am already dealing with a culture that expects me. So, especially as a business owner, expects that I must have to work 24 7 to make that business survive. Yeah. So that's one thing is to recognize that is how the world expects this to work. And you get caught up in that.
Camille: So then you have to realize, and this is most of when clients come to me, they come to me at a point of this is what I'm doing and I know it's not sustainable, but I dunno how to get out. Hmm. Like I am working in chaos. I am working in my business and not on my business.
Camille: I have this long-term plan I wanna do, but I'm never gonna get there if I keep doing what I'm doing. It's Groundhog Day every day. Okay. And I'm churning. Yeah. And I'm super busy and on the outside I look like a successful business owner because the financials look good and I'm busy all the time.
Camille: But internally, I am totally not happy. Because I don't have time to do the stuff I actually want to do. Yeah. This happens to leaders. This happens to regular employees. It happens to all of us. We get so caught up in the doing that we don't take time to reflect. We've talked about that a lot, and we don't take time to make a shift.
Camille: So the first thing I think people have to do in order to take on any of this belief shift business in your business or in your job, is you have to acknowledge that I am going to have to make a choice to do one thing different now, eventually many things, but start with like, I need to do one thing differently.
Camille: Okay? I cannot keep doing what I'm doing. And recognize that how I'm working in my business is now a habit of how I do it. How I respond to emails, how I respond to clients, how I manage the business. It's become habitual over years. This is how I do it.
Camille: And you're gonna have to break some of those habits. Yes. And we know how hard that is. We should probably do a whole episode on habits, because it's really hard to break out of that because it starts with, you know, it's your mindset and then the actions that you're putting to that. So I guess I would say acknowledging that it's not an easy, magical thing to do, but it does require you to choose.
Camille: You have to choose to change something. And I think that starts with like pick a belief shift that resonates with you and start focusing on that. So maybe your first focus is , I'm gonna start focusing on planning it over winging it. And that doesn't mean I have to start with a big, giant annual strategic plan for my business.
Camille: I can start. Planning my day instead of letting my day have control over me, as in I wake up and see what's on my calendar, and then I go through my day with whatever's on my calendar. I wake up and plan out what I want to do this week and make that fit first. Yeah. And actually an example of this came up in the retreat.
Camille: We'll talk about this at some point too. There's a set of nine leadership behaviors that we focus on with them. And one of those leadership behaviors is embrace the standardization. And so one of their jobs in the last retreat was to come up with one thing they could do as a leader to improve on how they embrace the concept of standardization.
Camille: Okay. And one of the themes that came up for them was they wanted to be better at the standard for themselves personally as a leader of spending time Monday morning, making their plan for the week. Wow. Cool. Yeah. Very simple. ? Very simple. But really effective because what? Yeah, so this particular leader said I wanted to do it because I wanted to be able to be more supportive to my other people.
Camille: So whether it was your team or vendors or other people they work with. So instead of making last minute changes in his calendar, He would plan his week, he'd plan out who he wanted to talk to. If he needed to change a meeting, he'd do it then instead of five minutes before the meeting that he was about to be double booked on, because that's how he was doing it before.
Camille: It was like, oh shoot, I gotta change this thing on them today. He was using actually one of their other core Principles, which is respect for people. So he was combining I'm gonna use standardization to demonstrate respect for people by being more thoughtful and planning my week on Monday.
Camille: And then being thoughtful about how that all plays out. So it allowed him to plan for time with his one-on-ones or plan for, you know, whatever he needed to do.
Camille: So something like that. Is this, this like small shift that you can make in starting to get more in this direction of, I'm starting to shift my beliefs towards a more sustainable way to run my business than the way that I'm running it.
Camille: And that would actually be a great place to start. If you don't do Monday morning planning of your week, start doing that.
George: What I'm hearing from this, if I really oversimplify it, if you're not thinking according to the belief shifts, you're ragged mode. Start with one.
George: Start simply get in the mode of shifting how you think, shifting your mindset. Do that for a while. Once you do that, it's gonna be more natural and easier to think process over outcomes or planning it over winging it. It's not gonna happen all at once. It's not gonna happen all of them. But you will get there and after you used to thinking that way, you'll probably naturally have a better idea of like, okay, it's okay for me to think sacrifice versus trade off.
Camille: Yeah. I think there's a saying we used to have, which was to you've gotta act your way into a new way of thinking. Ah-huh. Yeah. We often think that we've gotta have the mindset to do the thing, but what actually changes your brain is the activity. Yeah. Fake it till you make it.
Camille: Yeah. In a way. So yes, that's also why I say micro moves, like do a small thing. Yeah. Because that small activity can have really big implications in terms of how you start to rewire your brain. And when you start to do the small thing and you start to see, okay, this is working, it makes you wanna do a little bit more and a little bit more, and there'll be a snowball.
Camille: Mm-hmm. it won't be like, you know, people might be listening thinking, oh my gosh, that's gonna take forever. I don't have time to wait for all these little micro moves to add up to something. You start small, but at some point there'll be a massive shift. You'll be ready for the bigger move.
Camille: Yeah. You'll be ready to take on a bigger shift in your beliefs and you'll be ready to change your actions in a bigger way. But when you start out, you gotta start out small. Understanding that behavior change is really at the core of what we're talking about, and that's not an easy thing to do.
George: I don't really want to get into a whole discussion about the human potential movement, parts of which I really like, parts of which I don't like, but Tony Robbins, one thing I like about him when I heard him talk is that he'll usually start new people out with like very small scale, very small things. Like for today, do one simple thing, incredibly simple. Maybe focus on, we'll do five things in a week, if you keep doing this something small in 30 days. Then look back. You'll see you're changing. That's this.
Camille: Yes. I will note that I really don't wanna have any affiliation with Tony Robbins at all for my own personal reasons, but yeah.
Camille: Yes. That one thing is okay.
George: That thinking, starting very small, can have yes effects and faster than you think.
Camille: Yes faster than you think. Do not ever underestimate the power of that micro move. Yeah. It is so, so powerful. And whenever I get people to truly get down to micro, yeah. Most people even struggle with that.
Camille: I'm like, no, that's too big. Get smaller and they're like smaller . What? I'm not even doing anything. Exactly. But you are of You are. Yeah. It's so easy. How could you not? And yet you're doing it. Because then you're gonna add on and add on. So, yeah. Yes. It's such an important way to start through this work.
Camille: So I think even if you're really struggling with making that shift from the crazy, chaotic business that you're in, and you want to focus more on working on the business and you're trying to get the freedom that you went into this whole thing for, and you lost it.
Camille: Like most business owners, their number one thing is like, I want freedom. That's why I'm doing. But I don't have freedom. Turns out I do have a boss, and the boss is my business. Hmm.
George: Okay. So Belief Shifts are good. They're solid, but they're not absolute. That's a takeaway. Anything else did you get from this?
Camille: Yeah. So my last thing about this was really around the idea of how much, and I know this, but it's a way that I go into planning this work when I do it.
Camille: Okay. But it's this idea that it's much easier to develop yourself. So it's much easier to develop yourself or for me to develop leaders or business owners. And teach them new principles when we're doing actual work versus I'm teaching a concept. And that's where the difference from I'm teaching lots of concepts in this podcast.
Camille: Yeah. But the real way that people will see change happen is by doing. So even in the retreat, I realized, oh, I have my own little retreat belief shift that I always focus on, which is activity over powerpoint. So one of my biggest like proudest moments of this retreat was literally all of day two in this retreat, zero PowerPoint.
Camille: Really? We didn't use it at all. There were a couple other presenters in there, so I didn't do the entire thing. There were some few things that happened on the first day and on the last day. But I was, I don't know. 70, 80% of the retreat was me, something like that. And I made a total of less than 10 slides.
Camille: That's all I made.
George: Wow. That's impressive. Were they like six point slides with a lot of texts?
Camille: Not at all. I even hesitated to do that. I was making notes and I was like, ah, I should probably make a slide of this cuz they're gonna wanna see it. And so I'm always making my notes first and then deciding what's the most important thing for them to visually actually see versus paying attention to my words or us talking it through.
Camille: This one was very activity based, so we did have some stuff on the screen, but it was actually a roadmap we were developing together and that's all we did on day two, was work that roadmap together. What goes here, what's next? What are you gonna start with, who's gotta be involved? And we were building that out so they could get a sense of what all the work looked like and whether that was gonna be sustainable or not. It's cool.
Camille: Yeah, so definitely this idea of doing the work and being willing to try as a way to learn. I think that's very hard. We wanna go to class and have the answers and not get embarrassed and do all of the stuff . And the best thing that any leader business owner can do is to fumble your way through some stuff.
Camille: That is a faster way to learning than trying to get it all figured out before you try. You're gonna learn so much faster by doing it. I'll have people who are gonna start a new business and they're trying to figure out how it all works. The first thing I tell them to do is start so primarily service-based businesses.
Camille: Okay. I will tell them go start seeing clients. I don't care if it's for free, do it because you're gonna learn so much about your process and what your business needs and how it all works. By doing it, then by thinking about it, you have to start doing that as soon as you possibly can.
George: Sounds scary. Sounds really useful.
Camille: Yeah, it is scary. Again, though, because we live in this silly society of We're not supposed to make mistakes, I guess. Yeah, we're not really good at celebrating failure as a learning opportunity. In my mind, I think you're only failing if you did not learn.
Camille: So if you screwed something up and you have no learning from it, and you think well, That was what it was and you walk away from it. Yeah. Then it was actually a failure, but if you failed at something and then learned, then it wasn't a failure because it actually did advance you forward, not in the way you expected.
George: That makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, that's great takeaways. Thanks. So what can our audience do with them?
Camille: The audience can really take these three takeaways and apply them themselves by collaborating with their team. Or if you don't have a team, finding some fellow entrepreneurs that you can collaborate with. So this is where there's lots of different shapes and sizes of groups for small business owners to come together.
Camille: Whether it's in-person networking online member groups master big masterminds. There's a lot of different ways that business owners can do that. And I think everybody should find a home. Okay.
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Camille: I have a membership for small business owners that we meet every week and it's literally, they're like, if we didn't have this I don't think I'd still be starting my business.
Camille: Because they would lose momentum and also lose sight of like, what am I supposed to do next? Because nobody's telling you. Yeah. So you need to find this community where you can talk things through and keep that momentum going.
Camille: The second one I would say is don't beat yourself up if you fail at any of these belief shifts.
Camille: Ah, yeah, great. Like sometimes you're gonna wing it, and that doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad thing. Know that you can't stay. You've got a trend towards the plan versus the winging it. You've gotta trend towards building systems over the chaos you're living in, but it's never gonna be perfect.
Camille: And sometimes, you know, chaos wins. And even in this retreat, one of our big themes is when we wanna reduce the chaos in the churn in the organization cuz that churn to be more frenetic the lower down in the organization it goes.
Camille: Yeah. And so their job was to deal with the chaos in that room. Like these initiatives still are very chaotic and not clear exactly what we're gonna do. We need to work through this chaos and the conversation needs to happen here so we can get clarity that we take out of this room. Yeah. So chaos does have a place.
Camille: You have chaos in creativity. Or maybe you wanna think of, chaos does, it doesn't have to have to be the word chaos, but it could be this ambiguity, ? Yeah. That you're dealing with. Mm-hmm. uncertainty. , general messiness or uncertainty, like those things do have a place, especially in the creative process, or should we do this or do that, we're uncertain.
Camille: But your job is to churn through it and come out with some clarity. But you always start with some messiness and some chaos. Yeah. Having it have a place,
George: actually the, even the act of calling it something different in this case I think is more like trade out versus sacrifice.
George: Like if I call something chaotic, man, that's got such strong connotations. It's scary, it's hard to deal with. But if I say, Hey, we've got a lot of uncertainty, a lot of unpredictability, that's not a scary, at least not to me. Yeah. And I feel like I have more control. And it's a thing. It doesn't have emotion to it.
George: It's a thing you gotta deal with. Everything has uncertainty. Fine. Yeah. Yeah.
Camille: Yeah. And any one of those words might more clearly define one situation versus another. Mostly, I think about the process of coming up with your strategic plans. It can be messy for a while.
Camille: That's how I think of it. Messy, like this is all messy until we figure out how to, sort it. So it's like I walked into my closet and it's a complete nightmare and everything's messy and everywhere and I gotta start sorting it out. But you start with a mess.
Camille: It's not like you can't overcome it. It is what it is. And you're a process as a business leader is, I need to store it out. Yeah. Because you're really heading towards clarity. One of those three high performance principles, clarity ,systems, and mindset clarity is that thing you're really starting with.
Camille: And with them, we were focused on clarity and then trying to create the systems to deploy all of that. Hmm. Cool.
Camille: So the last thing I would say that people can do is learn by doing. So somebody like a coach can help guide you through this, but you can also do this on your own, which is don't be afraid to try something.
Camille: Don't. Be afraid to fail at something because that failure, again, as long as you had some reflection in learning about it, that's great, but most of the stuff you don't know how to do in your business, it's very hard in business to screw something up so badly you can't fix it. Everything can be fixed and sorted.
Camille: You can make mistakes and the most thing that they're gonna cost you is time. Yeah. But they're not un undoable. They don't forever, hurt your business. At least not at the level of experimentation that I would expect you would do. If you're talking about a big strategic risk, that could be different.
Camille: If it's a big financial, you wanna do some more due diligence. But at this level of I need to learn more about how to run my business better, you can't really fail at trying strategic planning, for example. Yeah, like you've never done it before or trying to a better way of organizing your business or a better way of handling your finances or, you know, whatever. You're trying to get more sustainability around you.
Camille: Try stuff and see what works and what doesn't.
George: Okay. Cool.
George: Overall good week. Did everybody feel good about it?
Camille: Yeah, Usually when I do these with them, in particular , I try to keep the agenda very fluid so I have an agenda of what I wanna get through. I always start with an objective, though. It starts with what's the objective, what's the outcome we want, and then there's an agenda that I hope will get us there.
Camille: And then I'm usually by half day of day one changing that. Which is another reason why I don't create a lot of PowerPoint, cuz I want flexibility because I'll hear where they're at and I might hear something that, oh, you know what, we actually need to focus on this, not on that topic. And so I make adments throughout.
Camille: This time because we'd done so much pre-work coming into it, we pretty much stayed on the agenda the entire time, and I think that was great for them because they felt like, okay, I knew what to expect and we stuck to it. But also it was so activity focused. They came away with a sense of actually accomplishing stuff instead of sitting at a retreat for three days and listening to a bunch of information.
Camille: Yeah, and maybe getting like a couple hours of work done. Like we worked on these all the time, and we set it up so that if a particular topic wasn't relevant to them, they could hang out and be listening. But it was like, you're welcome to do email and be on your laptop if this isn't your topic.
Camille: So we knew who in the room needed to be focused on the topic and who could hang out. And that completely worked for people because they felt like, oh, I didn't feel like I had awesome to be excluded, and if I heard something I could chime in, but I could also do some work on my laptop while I was listening to that topic.
George: Oh, that's beautiful. That is really cool. Yeah. There's something else that occurred to me as you're saying this, I'm thinking these probably most of these people are leaders. Probably most of 'em are not lazy. They're probably all hard workers and they enjoy work. And so I can imagine myself going into a long meeting and several days long, and I dread it because we're gonna be broadcasted too, and it's not gonna be that working.
George: But if I have a chance to go into something like this and there's big chunks where we're actually working, that's what I do. I can imagine all these leaders being super engaged because instead of thinking or whenever they're actually doing something, I bet they're totally engaged. Must be a lot of fun, really exciting for them.
Camille: I hope it was, you hear the feedback that you get when you're in the room and then who knows what they're talking about me when I'm not in the room, but they keep having me back, so I must be doing something well.
Camille: But I think in general, whenever I have an opportunity to shift a leadership team, Out of their own heads of their traditional way of thinking about how they wanna talk about their work, for them it's shifting out of their, you know, their big picture mindset.
Camille: And into an actual plan, but not getting too far into the weeds, cuz it's really easy for them to get into the details. So keeping them at the level was really important.
Camille: And then the version of this for a small business owner is what you were talking about before, which is, oh, I'm always working in this chaotic mode and I've gotta shift up a level up to a strategic way of thinking.
Camille: Whatever direction you're trying to make that shift in, to get to that sweet spot of I'm balancing the strategic, working on the business work with the actual delivery that my business has to do to make money. Yeah. Finding that sweet spot for everybody is always some little shift you have to make.
Camille: And it really comes down to, for me, again, you gotta take action. And it can be small, but with these guys, it was very much about, we have to do the actual work here. I'm not gonna tell you what to go do, but we're gonna do it together now and come up with what's next. So they all had assignments to go do.
Camille: They did them and then they had to report out on them so they had in the moment. How far did you get? What are you doing next? Et cetera. And having that built in I think is really important. So doing the action, but also having that accountability, somebody who's gonna acknowledge like great job is important.
Camille: Another I thought that I realized came up was I was doing the retreat, was I thought, you know, even though I'm my own boss, I still need a boss. And no business owner wants to admit this. But we do, because who's praising me? Who's giving me my good, review or who's telling you what my priorities are, holding me account?
Camille: A good boss is doing that. They're helping you develop. They're helping you recognize where you're winning and where you've got, gaps where you can make improvement. They're helping you establish your goals, all of this stuff. Yeah. When you're your own boss, you're supposed to do that for yourself.
Camille: And that is not realistic. You can only do so much of that for yourself. So every small business owner you need to go find who can play that role that a boss would normally have, which is at the end of the day ultimately why my job even exists as a coach. That's what I do. I fill in that gap of every small business owner actually needs a boss for some of the things that they can't do for themselves.
Camille: And I think everyone should figure out how to close that gap, cuz it is oftentimes why they end up in this super chaotic business that we were talking about.
George: I see. That's fascinating.
Camille: That's my bonus takeaway. Bonus takeaway. That's a great takeaway. even bosses need bosses.
Camille: Anything else, George? Nope. Nothing else from me. Get all your curiosities about the retreat.
George: Yeah, I learned a lot. This is great. I'm glad it went well.
Camille: Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad it went well too. We'll see if I get to go back in May then, I'll know I did a good job.
George: Yeah. , I'm guessing. Yes.
Camille: I hope so.
Camille: Well thank you everybody for listening in and we do really want to hear from you. So please leave us a voice message, go to the belief shift.com and leave us a message.
Camille: Also, go to Apple Podcast, leave us a review because that will help more people find us.
Camille: Mm-hmm. . And follow us on Instagram if you're so inclined . Absolutely. And this year we gotta start talking about this more on LinkedIn. So for those of you who are over there, we'll start having a little presence on LinkedIn here soon, and we'll keep you posted on that.
Camille: Gonna ramp that up this year. So I know a lot of people are there and I haven't been hanging out over there, so I gotta, gotta get my act together and start hanging out more in LinkedIn. We'll do that in February. My own podcast can hold me accountable.
Camille: That sounds great. All right. Thanks, George. Thank you. See you.
Camille: Thanks everybody. See you next week.
