This is the transcript full of insights and stories! It is Part Two of a Four Part Series of Conversations between two self-described Champions of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic). If you’d prefer to listen to the audio podcast you will find the 15-minute sound-bites OR the full 55-minute audio episode via these links:
Susan Dunlop: Welcome back to part two of our podcast miniseries, Transformative Leadership with TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic). I’m your host, Susan, and today we’re diving into the Power of TED* in Action: Stories of Transformation. I’m thrilled to have Sheri Lawrence with me again. In this episode, we’ll explore how 3VQ and TED* principles have been practically applied in Sheri’s work, transforming leadership and team dynamics.
We’ll discuss specific examples of TED* in action and its impact on organizational culture. Perhaps one outcome will be that these insights inspire change in your own professional journey. Let’s get started.
Welcome Sheri.
Sheri Lawrence: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Susan Dunlop: It’s good to have you back.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, it’s good to be back. I’m excited to keep talking about this.
Susan Dunlop: You’ve definitely opened up my thinking in between part one and part two. Today I think it will be lovely to hear the stories of transformation.
Sheri Lawrence: It’s kind of fun going back through this because while I have a good feeling of how much we’ve transformed, revisiting it reminds me really how the transformation happened and I can’t imagine us working now without having TED* and 3VQ so ingrained in our culture.
Susan Dunlop: It’s almost like doing one of those award submissions, isn’t it? That you’re having to go back through and say, what have we done well? What did we change?
Sheri Lawrence: Yes, absolutely. .
Susan Dunlop: Sheri, in our last conversation we tread gently around your early journey and your integration of TED* at Studio Movie Grill. However, we didn’t dig into the overarching or underlying challenges faced by teams before TED* was introduced. I’ve pulled up the case study, which I love, and I read in there that there’d been a 30 percent year-over-year growth rate and the company was experiencing some inevitable friction between new voices coming in and the external experience. Your VP of operations Brian Hood had shared that we realized our growth was creating the conditions for drama and we needed a compass to help navigate the waters of this change. So could we focus on that first, a specific example where TED* made a significant difference in your team’s dynamics?
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. 30 percent growth rate was enormous. And as you mentioned in the case study, we had new people coming in, and new ideas, but we grew so fast that we got behind if you will. And being able to manage processes and people taking on additional workloads simply because we were growing so fast that we were all running a hundred miles an hour and didn’t take the time to just stop and revisit periodically: where are we, what do we need to do?
In early 2019, we had grown so much, had so many new leaders out in the field and at our home office, and we were having a real issue with communication. It wasn’t getting filtered all the way through. And we had different people sending different messages or putting their spin on messages, which happens, right?
If you’re not aligned, that’s going to happen. So the great thing was we were able to use TED* and 3VQ. We brought everybody into the home office and we spent a day walking through what the key issues were, using the Five-Step Action Plan that 3VQ has, which is just such an amazing tool. It seems so simple, but it’s so amazing, and we were able to address the issues.
One of the big things that I love about TED* and 3VQ is that you don’t sit there and waste time complaining. We learned to not focus on the problem, right? But focus on the outcome. So we started with what is our outcome? What do we want out of this? And what do we want to be able to see, to improve these issues that we’re having?
When you’re all aligned on an outcome, you’re not talking about this doesn’t work or that doesn’t work, or, we don’t get this information timely, so then we’re sending it down to our team members late and it creates this bottleneck. We’re not talking about those things. They may be issues. They’re a part of what’s going on, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
What we’re talking about is what we want to see and how we get there. And so it allowed the whole team to have that one-day workshop to talk about those things from a positive standpoint. What do we keep, start, change?
We were able to align on a communication method that worked for everybody and that would get everybody what they needed. It would get us to our desired outcome. It was just an amazing example because we decided to integrate 3VQ and TED*. It took an issue that had been causing a lot of problems within our organization and within a day we were able to map out that plan.
Everybody left with their baby steps of what they were going to do. We left with check-in dates to make sure that we were doing it. And it really did show, not only the impact that drama can make in an organization, how it can slow you down, how you can lose productivity, and all of those things, but it also showed us, in focusing on the solution that a huge team can put a plan together pretty quickly and really shift and have a positive outcome.
Susan Dunlop: That’s the thing. When you’re talking about fast growth that can really impact the focus because it’s almost like sound bites, like we did on the first episode, you’re just taking small snippets of it, but you’re not hearing the full picture. How powerful to bring in that five-step action planning process with such an amazing team. The other part was what you want to stop doing. So it’s been captured. You’ve captured it, but you’re still focusing on what supports where you’re headed and seeing the amazing things that you’ve got in place that you have already got to work with and then you’re going to look at what inhibits it.
I think that’s the beauty of that, isn’t it? You capture it all, but you still take the steps forward.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, and you’re exactly right. When you look at the stop part, another great thing about that action plan is when you have a group of people in a room, so to speak, talking about, we want a better solution.
We’re going to stop. We’re going to keep. Everybody has a different perspective. And so you may have somebody that says we want to stop this, but somebody else says, Oh no, we can’t stop that, because that’s integral. And so you have these conversations without drama about what’s going to help us get to the desired outcome that we want.
So, therefore, number one, you can move forward much faster because you are not wasting all of that time, the energy, on the negative side of looking at the problem, but you’re also showing such respect to each other and you’re learning how to work better together.
Susan Dunlop: Somewhere through today, we’ll talk about the outcome that you did receive through bringing TED* and 3VQ to your work. But even if you look at the return on investment for having all those managers come to one place and spending only that much time together. They all walked away with baby steps that were forward-focused, and outcomes-focused. The ROI from that day itself would have been something worth tracking.
Sheri Lawrence: Absolutely. I do wish sometimes that ROI with people engagement was a little easier to track. You can do it, but there is something to be said for everyone being aligned. And we talk about assuming the best, right? The foundation of 3VQ is what are you focusing on and not focusing on anything negative, right? And everybody being aligned, that in itself is important to move forward.
Susan Dunlop: So touching on that, that will lead us to the next space. What were the key challenges? How did applying TED* principles help to transform those types of dynamics?
Sheri Lawrence: With the fast growth there were so many different little pockets of things that were happening and one of the things that we noticed was the silo effect.
In some organizations, silos are created because they don’t want to work with each other. Because let’s say, for instance, you got a bucket of money to spend between departments, right? And sometimes the silos are created because they want to get their bucket of money first.
Lots of different things can happen with silos. In our situation, the silos were that we were just moving so fast. Everybody was doing the best they could at handling their responsibilities. And yeah, it takes time to check in with people, right? It takes time for each department. And sometimes you think I’ve just, I’ve got a deadline. We’ve got to go. So we’re just going to move forward.
It wasn’t horrible, but when you’re not communicating and you’re not aligning with each other it can create some real issues. You’re talking about building buildings and construction, and if you’re not aligned in all the different departments, there were times when one group was further ahead on opening a new location than the other departments.
And, we spent money we shouldn’t have, we spent time we shouldn’t have, that was the big thing. Having this framework in our company allowed us to take that moment and stop and say, wait, we know how to get everybody back on track.
Susan Dunlop: You’re making me see what other people might look at from the outside: we’re not talking about a magic wand. The issues don’t go away, but it gives you something that you can hold onto. Take those steps forward like your poles as you’re walking up a mountain that you think okay I’ve got something just to pull us all back in together, and to make those next steps happen. While you’re putting spot fires out, I suppose at the same time.
Sheri Lawrence: Absolutely. I love the way you put that and the other thing that I have found through the years that we’ve used this: It also gives you a framework to address things that are going on from a respectful, non-emotional way.
You were an entrepreneur. A lot of people listening can relate to the arguments in the conference room, right? Some are healthy, some are not so healthy, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. If we’re spending all of our time talking and not listening to each other, this framework allows everybody to come together, knowing that everybody is respected, and we’re all agreeing on where we want to end up. The focus is how we get where we’re going, not who said this, who did that etc.
Susan Dunlop: Some of the tools that are within the work that we deliver are about listening at a deeper level and that’s not something many of us have got skills in. So that’s amazing if you’ve been able to bring that to your team. For them, even in their home lives when they go home from work, to be able to practice that at a better level. That they’re not listening just to be able to make the next statement.
I’ve been in many meetings like that and they are, as we’ve said last week, exhausting and I think that pause, taking that moment to pause, when someone has spoken and take a moment before you think what you’re going to say. That is a lovely gift of this as well.
Sheri Lawrence: It is and when we teach this to our people, one of the things that we tell them if they haven’t heard of TED* or 3VQ before, especially TED*, when we talk about those pauses, we tell them that when you go home, practice this and see what your kids, your partner, your friends, whatever, how do they react to you actually pausing, making sure that you heard them properly, and then speaking.
We’re not used to that, especially in the business world, right? It’s just bam. Let’s talk to each other. It’s amazing what will happen with people, even if they’re people that are at odds with each other. As we talked about last week with the gentlemen, once you stop and you offer each other respect, you could have totally two different ideas, but as long as you’re coming at it from a source of respect for each other and a desired outcome that is aligned, it takes a lot of that emotion away.
Susan Dunlop: I love how this work begins with the FISBE, where your FOCUS, your INNER STATE and your BEHAVIOUR is. I remember Donna in the initial training gave an example of the problem can be something as simple as your partner will say something and straight away as soon as those words are coming out of that person’s mouth, you’re triggered and you stop listening and you’re like, I’m not listening to you anymore because you’re really annoying me…
You know, your head is saying, even the fact that you’re talking, you’re breathing even! So you go into this cycle of drama and it’s not productive in the end.
To me, I can feel when I’m being listened to.
Sheri Lawrence: Yes. It’s a lovely feeling. You’re exactly right. It is. People can feel it. And when people aren’t used to being in an environment like that, they sometimes don’t know how to handle it.
A lot of times we’re not taught this. If we can imagine building within an organization, this practice of listening to each other to the point that now we don’t have surprises with each other here, right? Because we know that we’re going to listen to what each other said. We’re going to respect each other.
It’s such a great place to work. You feel it when you walk in.
Susan Dunlop: Do you ever have someone in your organization that when someone is annoying them or has annoyed them in the past, and that person is walking towards them, that they automatically shut down and don’t want to hear what that person is saying?
Because I feel like that used to be something I saw happen between people in my organization or in the people we served. Is that something you still come across or have come across and have seen change?
Sheri Lawrence: It’s something that I have come across. We’ll see it here in the office, sometimes now. Where we see it a lot more is in our theaters because we have so many more employees and so many young people that haven’t gone through all of this training.
But I love that you asked that question because as I’m thinking about it, we would have people that would just avoid each other. And we don’t have that now. If somebody’s struggling, they will come to one of the leaders. And they’ll say, can I talk to you for a minute? I’m really having trouble figuring out how to handle this.
Susan Dunlop: So having the leadership people be in that coach role or be a mentor so that someone feels safe that they can try and nut that out a little bit so that they can become more proactive in how they manage it would be ideal.
Sheri Lawrence: You just made me think of something when you asked me that question. I think that’s another reason, when we talk about, it’s got to start at the top down, right?
If the leadership doesn’t learn it and practice it, other people are going to go, yeah, whatever. But that’s another reason for the leadership to really work at it and practice it because then they can help all of our employees when they’re struggling with something because it’s not like all of a sudden now everything’s perfect and we don’t have any problems.
Susan Dunlop: No.
Sheri Lawrence: We just have a better way of working through them and the leaders should be able to help their employees be able to get through that and be that coach.
Susan Dunlop: I think that’s shared beautifully in David’s second book, The 3 Vital Questions: Transforming Workplace Drama. There’s that example of the fellow at work and he’s talking to that senior person over coffee, just helping him try to see it and see his own manager in a different light. It’s a really good example.
So we discussed in part one, how your new managers greatly appreciated the offering of training. That was something they’d not experienced elsewhere or before. This work has some really beautiful frameworks like the Seven Guiding Principles and the Seven Commitments for Collaboration.
Your new managers received all of those to work with for themselves and with their team. Could we reflect on that a little? Could you share an instance where you saw a notable change in a manager’s leadership style as a result of their personal transformation through TED* or talk a little bit over the principles?
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, how about both?
Susan Dunlop: Okay, we can do both. Why do one?
Sheri Lawrence: That’s right. One of the things that I love is that we, like most organizations, have our mission and vision, everybody has a little bit different. We have guiding principles and things like that. But I think after maybe it was the second or third year that we really started integrating this, we updated our values and principles with some of the language here because we felt like it was so important. The great thing now is that not only do they learn it when we go through these, but it’s also a part of our principles that we do business with. They see it in every orientation. Every employee sees it.
I think it was another step for us to say that we are committed to our organization operating this way. That’s been really exciting for me because to know that our company committed that much to it, we added it into what our company stands for.
Susan Dunlop: To me, when I pull up the guiding principles when we’re running training, I’ll get the people on the screen just to sit with them for a moment and to really feel into their heart which one is standing out to them at this moment and then we open up the conversation.
So as an organization, you can even use these principles as tools for conversation starters, which I think is a lovely thing.
Have you got the guiding principles around you somewhere there?
Sheri Lawrence: I do. I do. Absolutely.
Susan Dunlop: Okay, cool. What would be, if we could both do this maybe, what would be a guiding principle that’s standing out to you in just this week in your work, your life?
Sheri Lawrence: It’s hard because I love them all, but I would have to say this week, number two: what we focus on has a great deal to do with what shows up in our lives. And a conscious focus creates conscious work and living.
We use that one a lot. The first question is what are you focusing on? There’s so much coming at all of us every day, our phones, our computers, people walking in, just inundated constantly, but we also work really hard with our team members to have a great balanced life.
Sometimes, we’ll just ask, What are you focusing on, is this time that you need to be getting home and being with your family… oh, you’re answering emails from home at nine o’clock at night. What are you focusing on?
And sometimes, you have to do that, but it really is proven you get what you focus on.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah, it does. It’s what shows up in your life. I agree with that one.
Sheri Lawrence: What about you?
Susan Dunlop: I’m going to say. I feel like number seven, so I’m going to go to the bottom of the list. And that is: we create by working with the tension that exists between the outcomes we want and current conditions, taking incremental steps in alignment with personal and organizational vision, mission, and purpose.
Sheri Lawrence: I love that one.
Susan Dunlop: I feel like that speaks to me this week. I think the word tension and knowing that we’re in that space between what we said we do want and what can we do? Pull back from that and decide, are we not going to try to get there, or are we going to just say what is important? I know it’s hard but just think about what’s the step I can take towards it today.
That’s speaking to me in relation to two of the visions I’m working on for my business. And I’ve just got to keep on taking that moment of pause, not react and come up with another great idea, something new. I’m going to do something fantastic and fresh. I think, no, just stick with it. Where you’re going, stick with what you said was important at the beginning of the year.
So I’m trying to come back around to that at the moment. I think that one speaks to me.
Sheri Lawrence: I love that. And that tension, so many of us want to run from that tension or push through that tension, right? Sometimes it’s I don’t want to feel this way. I can feel that tension happening, so I don’t want to feel this way. So what can I do not to feel this way?
But what I’ve learned is that’s when I grow the most. When I allow myself, like you said, take that pause and sit in that tension and ask: Why am I feeling this tension? Where’s it coming from? What do I need to learn from this? It’s so funny that the thing that we want to avoid so many times, that feeling of tension is the thing that helps us grow or take that next step in the right direction.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah. And I think you’ve just got to give yourself the grace to brainstorm, whether that’s by yourself or to write it out of your head onto paper, just to say what is it? What is this feeling? Why am I struggling with this right now? I’ve definitely felt probably even since our last conversation, I’ve had more of that feeling of hold on, you’ve got this. You are a creator, shoulders back, own it, and now look at it differently. I can feel that difference in this past week just by talking more about TED*. It’s pretty amazing.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, it really is. I’m going to jump to the other question that you had, we have so many stories from our people especially our new managers that, just go through this.
It’s about how it transforms them, how they change the way they lead.
Some of the ones that are the most impactful to me are the stories of their personal life because I love the fact that this work allows us to work on ourselves across professional and personal. And when we have a manager that will say, wow, this has really helped me have better conversations with my daughter, my son, my spouse. I realized that I was creating drama, but I thought it was my spouse.
One of those that just still gets me is one of our managers telling me that his, I think his daughter was 11 or 12. She was having a lot of problems in school and she was getting bullied and she didn’t want to go to school. He taught her some of the things from TED*.
He taught her to see the bullies not as bad, but to look at them from the creator standpoint, from The Empowerment Dynamic and see that hurting people typically hurt others. So they’re probably hurting. There’s probably something going on with them and that’s causing them to be that way.
The pause, he taught her the pause.
Over the next few weeks, he would call me and tell me how much better things are that she’s being able to have empathy, and certainly they were going to the school and talking to them and all of that. But what I told him is you’ve given your daughter such an amazing gift at the age of 11 or 12 to be able to see things from The Empowerment Dynamic to be able to see bullies from a standpoint that way. Imagine what she’s going to be like at 15, 16, 18, 20. And so those, of course, are so impactful.
One of the things I love about this is that it’s so multifaceted because it does cross professional and personal. We learn that we have the power to choose. We also have the power to choose how much we learn and what we learn.
And so when we start a new class we have a conversation with this class. We say, we’re going to put this learning in front of you and we have adopted it into our organization. It’s part of our culture, but you have the choice. You can learn and you can practice it and you can take it and integrate it into your life, or you can choose not to. It is simply your choice. And what I’ve been told is that it helps everybody take a step back and say, Oh, wait a minute. So if I’m successful at integrating this into my life, it’s on me. That’s right. It’s my choice.
Susan Dunlop: The father you were just talking about, he gave that child that choice as well.
We talk about this. It’s something that is an inside-out job. It’s only something that you can do for yourself and we get to model it. She’s how young she was, 10 or 11, and she’s going to get to model that now. I’ve spoken to quite a few of the peer trainers in the community and we would love to bring this to schools so that it becomes the way things are, not the other way things are for us to communicate.
 If the kids can be doing this and practising it together in a school environment, that’s just going to ripple out back out to their families and make that generational shift. I wonder at the potential of that for the future of those families. It’d be amazing.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, it is. I always go back to what I told David and Donna years ago. I was like, I don’t know how a hundred-and-something-page book can do so much, but it really does.
You mentioned the ripple effect. If each of our people here that go through this, pays it forward to one other person and then that person pays it forward to just one other person it can have this huge ripple effect.
I still get phone calls or texts from people who went through this six, seven, or eight years ago have moved on, they have, a different career. And they’re still using it, and they’re still sharing it.
Susan Dunlop: There are the spaces in time too, in between, where you might start to hear yourself shifting back into your old ways and that’s okay.
When I give out the e-course that we deliver, people have lifetime access to that. So you get to apply a different scenario each time you do it, or you can listen to the book for three hours, basically in a commute you possibly could do that within a couple of days, but it’s enough just to bring you back to be kind to yourself.
So it’s okay. To say to yourself I’ve fallen back into a different way right now, then maybe to sit with that for a moment, to ask, why am I being like that? What’s happening for me right now? But you can also, again, make that choice to not stay that way. You get to come back and go, I’m going to practice again because all it does is take more and more practice. That’s okay.
Sheri Lawrence: You’re so right. And I’m glad you said that because this is not an I read the book once, I go through the class, the ecourse and okay, now life is better. We have to choose to continually practice it. Just like anything. If you want to be great at golf, you have to practice golf. If you want to be great at any other thing, cooking, whatever it is, you can’t just do it a couple of times and, Oh, I’m great at this now. I never have to learn again.
We all have to practice what we want to be really good at. And there are days that I catch myself and I’m like, why am I in the drama triangle? What’s going on? But the great thing is number one, you’re aware of it. You realize you’re there and number two, after you practice this for so long, you learn how to quickly move yourself out of that and learn, like you said, what’s going on.
Susan Dunlop: Instead of casting around to see who you’re going to blame. It’s like you’ve got your little butterfly net and you’re going, I’m going to blame you. Oh, hold on! How about we look at me for a minute? That’s right. Let’s take the butterfly net and drop it on your own head! Captured.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah.
Susan Dunlop: We’re going to move on now to cultural integration and unexpected outcomes.
So last week we explored the challenges of integrating the new concepts into the workplace culture. And one example you gave me was you and the head of marketing needing to get along. And you proactively sought out a way to find a common language and integrate TED* into your conversations.
Can you share a story about how TED* was woven into the fabric of your organization? Did it lead to any surprising positive outcomes?
Sheri Lawrence: There were a lot of, I think, surprising outcomes that we hadn’t thought about. You just mentioned it. One of them was the common language. We didn’t realize how important that was.
A lot of industries have their little acronyms, right? So somebody comes in to work for us. They’re going to get this whole list of acronyms so that they can understand what we’re saying. That’s one thing, right? But when we talk about the common language of how do we talk to each other? How do we handle difficult conversations? How do we handle it when two parties or three parties or whatever don’t align on something? Especially if they’re very passionate and the conversation starts getting heated and it can go on and on. The common language is great because we all know what each other is talking about.
We know if you say drama triangle, we know what the drama triangle is.
But one of the big things that I didn’t expect that was really wonderful is that it shortens the time that we take to tell each other how we feel. And what I mean by that is, if we’re, let’s say I’m disagreeing with somebody, their perspective is one, mine is different.
If they say to me, Sheri, I really feel like you’re persecuting me right now, which we don’t choose to use the language like that, but if it’s one one-on-one and we trust each other, it will automatically stop me in my tracks in a good way. I don’t have to ask them what they mean because I understand what they’re telling me.
They’re telling me at that moment, they feel like am not seeing them as somebody that’s capable as somebody that I respect. I’m not listening to them, whatever it is based on the conversation. So it deescalates very quickly, the emotion, but it also saves time because I don’t have to say what do you mean by that. Explain that to me. And then we go back and forth with the common language. We automatically know, Oh, and I catch myself. Oh, I am so sorry.
Susan Dunlop: Wow. Okay. Can we pause on this one? I like this one.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah.
Susan Dunlop: So you’re persecuting me right now. They’re not calling you a persecutor because that’s weaponizing it, saying you’re such a persecutor. You wouldn’t say that. So saying that the way they did it compared to saying, I feel persecuted by you right now. That’s a different thing as well, isn’t it?
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah. Or you could say what I’m hearing from you right now is making me feel a little persecuted.
Susan Dunlop: When we talk about practice. Practices even in the way we deliver a statement like that.
Sheri Lawrence: Yes.
Susan Dunlop: We have to get used to being able to say something we’re not used to saying because I know if I said that to someone, say my family of origin, that wouldn’t go down too well. From history that could be something really hard for you to say. So it does take that bravery, doesn’t it to step into this type of language, I think.
Sheri Lawrence: It does. Now, there are some things around that, right? Like number one, if the other person doesn’t know that language or hasn’t gone through it. You would never say to them, that you’re being a persecutor or your language is coming from a persecutor because then they’re not going to understand what you’re trying to say. You’re not telling them that they’re a bad person. You’re saying, this is how I’m hearing this.
So you have to certainly be cautious how you use that, but it’s been integrated in our company so long and we’ve been able to practice it, that we can have those conversations without emotion.
I myself am a big challenger and I’m a natural challenger. In the past, I didn’t challenge very well. Through this, I have learned that we need challengers in the world, but there’s a way to challenge that helps people be better, and gives people courage, as opposed to challenging sometimes can do the opposite.
The common language, once it’s integrated. can be amazing for being able to have especially difficult conversations.
But even if let’s say the person that I was having a conversation with wasn’t at that level, we could speak to that still and say, can you clarify what you mean? Cause I’m not sure that I’m taking it in the right way.
Susan Dunlop: Beautiful. I think this is important. We know from last week’s episode how passionate you are about integrating this into your personal life and work and that it takes a long time. You’ve committed to it long-term.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah.
Susan Dunlop: I think that’s the key to it, isn’t it? It’s not like a quick fix. I do know when I was first learning it we had a kerfuffle come up amongst our family and I said, you’re being such a victim. Whoops. Did not go down well and I felt dreadful straight away. I was like, Oh, I should not have said that. Â I apologized, but definitely, you can be careful and kind in how you deliver this.
It’s a lovely thing, what you were just saying, you’ve opened up to how you can say, hold on. I would like to understand that a little bit better so that you can just take that moment of reprieve to say, let’s just talk backwards and forwards on this for a moment and move forward versus clashing and going, you’re so rude. She’s always rude to me.
Sheri Lawrence: That’s right.
The long-term impact I believe is huge for any organization, but I also want to be clear that there are some amazing short-term impacts.
Susan Dunlop: Yes.
As soon as people learn about the drama triangle and the empowerment dynamic they start thinking about things that have happened, conversations they’ve had or things that have happened to them. They, most of us, at that point, realize, Oh, wow. I think I was a victim, and so it has an amazing impact early on for us, the way we see things and think about it. And as long as we keep it in front of us, and something happens, we can refer back to it and go, Oh. You know what? I don’t think I was seeing this person the way I should have been. To learn.
There’s a really good impact early on, but then the more it builds and the more it builds, you can see this, as you said, this ripple. Through an organization or a group of people it is amazing to watch how when they come together, how they treat each other and focus on outcomes instead of problems.
And the other thing about problems and outcomes is, problems, we usually come up with a short-term fix, right? Especially in organizations, because we’re just trying to hurry to fix something. This isn’t working, so let’s fix it. What can we do? Okay. Over time, when you integrate this into an organization, and you start looking at solutions instead of problems, you fix it, and it’s fixed. You don’t have to revisit it over and over again. And that in itself has a huge ROI.
Ah, for sure. Anyone that I’ve run this program with, even direct coaching with, say a mother of a family where she’s struggling with the dynamics of her growing children, I always send them out a reflection exercise within an hour after the coaching, and she’s gosh, yes, I could already feel that I’m going to approach that differently tonight.
So it’s just having that moment to be able to stop and understand as you’re only just starting to learn this. Whatever you’re doing, you’re not going to fail. It’s a beautiful practice to bring into your life. Very quickly. It changes how you see things.
Sheri Lawrence: Yes.
Susan Dunlop: Where are we going to go next? Oh, how about we talk about the overall performance of your organization? I haven’t asked you that. I love the overall performance. What happened? What happened with your case study?
Sheri Lawrence: Oh my gosh. Our performance went up. Of course, employee engagement went up. There were so many things that improved that it was amazing to me to be able to retain our management through shutting down because of COVID and then going through bankruptcy because of all the things that all of us are familiar with, what you know what happened with COVID, to be able to retain our key management team and many of our people because of the culture.
The retention of our people was culture. It wasn’t that we were paying more than anybody because we were all struggling, but it was the culture and the love of working together.
Susan Dunlop: How amazing then that you actually came across this work before that came and hit your organization. Wow.
So that leads me to breakthrough moments then. In part one, we touched on some challenges that people faced with TED*. I read in the case study that you and Brian were drawn to the organizational application of 3VQ and the connection with the more individual focus on TED*.
Sheri Lawrence: Yes.
Susan Dunlop: That you understood how you could change mindsets individually, but not organisation-wide. You realised that the company didn’t have a collective desired outcome. And that changed when the company’s general managers took the deep dive workshop.
I’ve seen that also in the other case studies that the CEOs have seen that as well. So that collective desired outcome seems to be a big piece here. How did that shift your or their perspective and affect their contribution to the team and the organization’s outcomes?
I hate to keep saying the same thing, but I really do think that for organizations it’s about alignment. Alignment is huge. If everyone’s aligned, and going in the same direction, that doesn’t mean things are perfect. That doesn’t mean people don’t come in some days having a bad day. But you all know where you’re going.
We used to equate it to you can go from Dallas to LA and you can fly nonstop. If everybody knows that we’re going from Dallas to LA and we’re flying nonstop, we’re all aligned, we might be on different planes, but we know the path that we’re going.
If we’re driving, that gives us several more options because we can take different roads. Some people are going to get there sooner. Some people are going to get there later, but we still know where we’re all going. So we all might choose how we get there, but we’re all going from the same point, Dallas to the destination LA.
Without this work, it was like we were leaving Dallas, but everybody was going in different directions. They were going to different cities. They were going to different places because they were focused on what they thought was best. Everybody had their own desired outcome. Everybody said, Oh, for my department, this is…, or for my store, this is what I want.
And so when you have that many people not aligned, but you have the same business, you’re not going to be as successful as you could be. And you’re going to run into roadblocks and you’re going to have issues.
So one of the big things I do believe that came out of this is just this understanding of the importance of a desired outcome. And that we don’t all have to agree on how we’re going to get there. We need to talk that through.
But if we’re aligned on the path that we’re going, then we’re going to be a lot more successful. And when things do go wrong, because they do, we have a healthy way to have a conversation and get back on track very quickly.
Listening to you, I’m picturing the journey. Thinking now of that graphic that we have in our training that’s to do with, if you’re living the problem, drama focused way, versus if you’re focused on the outcome and you’re taking the baby steps action, that, that journey would be like many little mountains that you’re trying to drive over and up and down and up and down and it takes you so much longer, so much more energy to get to where you want to go.
Whereas if you’re focused on a collective desire to achieve an outcome, yes, you might take a few little zigzaggy side stops and you might go a little bit backwards to find the fuel station, but you still keep on going towards where you wanted to go. So that journey has an always increasing movement forward, it might be slower than you think, but it’s always going to where we all said we want it to be.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah. And remember, you said this last time we talked about how exhausting it is, right? When there’s all this drama and you’re doing all of this and when your team is exhausted, they’re not as productive as they could be or should be because they’re exhausted.
Susan Dunlop: The word at the moment is burnout. So obviously that is also you contributing to your people’s burnout. None of us need that. We’ve all had enough stuff that’s been traumatic over the last few years since COVID times.
So I’m just going to end there, but can we just recount one instance where someone in particular who initially struggled had a breakthrough moment? Is there any beautiful breakthrough moment?
Sheri Lawrence: Yes, the one that I have in mind, we had one of our managers running one of our locations and he had been with us for quite a while and always found a reason or excuse not to go through the learning. Every single time. And some of our team had just said, you know what, he’s not going to do it. Just let it go. It’s okay. Because we never want to force somebody to go through learning.
So the next class came up and I thought, you know what, I know this is good, he’s got to go through this because he was a true persecutor without intent. He had no intent, but some people just didn’t want to work with him and it was getting harder and harder. So I took a trip and sat down with him and talked to him and I said, I’ve been chasing you a long time to go through this. And I’m promising you, I promise you if you go through it, if you get halfway through. and you see no value in it, then drop out. Just give me a few weeks. And he said, okay.
It was two weeks in. I could see the light bulbs go off because of course, we were doing it via Zoom. Now that we do everything zoom. He stayed in the whole class and he told me that his wife was blown away, that he actually went through it, and how much he had changed.
Susan Dunlop: Oh, goosebumps.
Sheri Lawrence: And the complaints working with him started going away.
Susan Dunlop: Oh, incredible. Yeah. You said something last week about that conversation starter that you had with that marketing manager. It only takes weeks. It does. To make that shift is only in those first few weeks.
There was a CEO who was at the 3VQ Trainer Summit and he said the same thing. He said it was a bit woo woo, what’s this nonsense, he didn’t like it, but when he could see that the shift from drama to empowerment was there in the middle of that training and what that was going to do for him, it just grabbed him.
He’s now fed that down through his very large company. It was incredible! So there are little stories that are very big stories in the end.
Sheri Lawrence: They really are. And all the stories that we have reinforce it for me, that spreading the word and getting this out to other organizations to let them know that at least try it, right? Pick up the book or call one of our coaches or do something because it really does make a difference. It’s not the world changer that you do at one time like we said, and that’s it. It’s something that can easily be integrated and can make such a big difference. From an organizational standpoint, from the executive team, it also shows the employees how much you care about them because you’re doing this for them.
Susan Dunlop: Exactly. And as you said about the book, I was going to mention the same thing. I always talk to the people that I’m coaching or guiding through it, read The Power of TED*. Just read that. Don’t read both books. Read that one. And then we get together and we work through the ecourse together, whether that’s one on one or with a group or the champions like yourself, a few key people. Take it slowly, and then you move on to the next book, and then you can do the next course.
So there is a lovely rhythm you can create that’s cost-effective as well. You start to see the change immediately, just even reading the book, I think people get it and can see the benefit of it.
Sheri Lawrence: Yeah, totally agree.
Susan Dunlop: It is time to wrap up part two. I love that these conversations are the first thing in my day, and my day is more energized and inspired just because of these chats with you, Sheri.
So thank you so much for being here, for being you, and for committing to this four-part series.
Sheri Lawrence: Thank you, and I love what you do. And let’s just keep chatting together.
Susan Dunlop: We can do that. So next week, we’re going to move on to overcoming challenges and expanding horizons. I’ll look forward to continuing that conversation next week. That will be episode 75.
Listeners, was there one key takeaway you jotted down from this conversation today? If you have any questions from today’s episode, please send them to me via email at [email protected]. You can also message me on LinkedIn or Instagram. On Instagram, I’m leadbelievecreate.
So thank you for being here with us. Trust that you are blessed even when you forget that you are blessed. Take care of yourself. I look forward to being back soon. Bye for now.
To find out more about bringing the Power of TED* and the 3 Vital Questions into your life and workplace, contact Susan for a conversation and to discuss the options available.