The show’s guest in this episode is Lori Michele Leavitt, “The Pivot Catalyst.” Lori and her books guide leaders in generating a ripple of positive influence throughout their organizations, to strengthen alignment and catalyze momentum.

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Helping Managers to Lead Better with Lori Michele Leavitt

Hello, it’s so nice to be here with you today. I’m Melanie Parish, I’m your host for the experimental leader podcast. And I’ve been working in my business lately, sort of, if I think about the metaphor of rolling up my sleeves, and, you know, sort of getting into it. We’ve been, we’ve been working on doing something new and marketing. And and I notice for myself as a leader, how hard it is to do data collection, it’s like, how do we know if something’s working or not? And then we worry that something might not be working. So then we start to want to try a whole bunch of other things, which only muddies our data? And so how do we stay steady, and when is it time to start to try to improve our outcome, rather than just collecting good clean data, like if we let our things run out, then we can actually get kind of clean data. So it’s just really interesting to think about all of that. And it, it just reminds me how important it is to have short timeframe experiments. When we actually, what I noticed, as I’m talking about this is our experiment got a little too complicated. We had too many variables, we had too many things going on. And it made the data collection difficult.

So just a little reminder that if you’re trying an experiment, marketing, or otherwise, make it tiny, try to prototype try to do it in a day, if you can, and collect data or a week at the most, anything bigger than that starts to get too complex. And it starts to be really hard to let your experiment fail. And when I say fail, I mean, to collect the data to the point that you, you do a safe to fail experiments. So you try something long enough to go, oh, that didn’t work. So then you can take that off the table in the future. Because if you start to muddy your data, then you don’t know what worked and what didn’t, if you save your experiment, by adding in a bunch of other things, then you haven’t actually done a clean experiment, super interesting. And my brain sort of spinning about the whole thing as I do it. So if you can keep your cost low, then you can do multiple experiments over time. And you can try to do sort of single channel, short experience experiments a day a week, try to stay away from anything longer than a week, because it just gets too expensive to fail, expensive and time or people or whatever it is. So think small. And if you can’t do it in that probably you’re trying to do too much to learn, and it’s not safe to fail.

Well, I am super excited about our guest today. I am very excited to have Lori Michele Leavitt as my guest. She has written a book called the pivot catalyst. And her books guide leaders in generating a ripple of positive influence throughout their organizations, and to strengthen align alignment and catalyze momentum.

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Welcome, Lori.

Hi. It’s good to be here.

Well, it is great to have you here. And we are also doing book club. And I know we assigned to the task of of talking about chapter chapter five and the experimental leader. And I’d love to hear what you thought about that. And then we’re gonna get to your books in just a minute…

I would love to talk about that. And also about how you started this webinar, the points that you made about discovery, because it’s it’s really important. The section of the book that the chapter you had me look at was on tools, and you talk about kata. And as I was reading this, I saw a lot of relevance alignment with what I write about, which is orchestrating momentum. And I typically write for business leaders. So the first book is the pivot orchestrating extraordinary business momentum. However, for any of those listening, that are not leading an organization, you are also the CEO of your life, and it applies. It’s just that the stories of the case studies and the samples I give are going to be about business. So momentum is super important. And one of the things that you wrote in your book if I just couldn’t read it says, originally, I just explained what kata was. And it said originally indicated, choreographed pattern or? Well, it was originally described as choreographed pattern of movements by an individual or a pair. In martial arts, and, and you know, that’s very similar to what we do with both Alignment and momentum. Alignment is not a straight when I’m talking about alignment, it’s not a straight line. When I talk about orchestration, it’s not a command, here’s Here I am, here’s a and go to be. It’s it’s a, it’s a direction. And it’s what you’re wanting to do as a leader is to create a poll so that others are inspired. So there are a lot of things that you as leader need to do within that orchestration, communication, which is why I wrote my second book, pivot to clarity, and checking the context and so many things that you need to do to keep things aligned. And in momentum, which really seems to fit really well with kata, I also liked the point about daily practice, because you don’t keep momentum unless you have some things that you do, and you check in on every day, a rhythm of sorts.

That’s, that’s amazing. And we do actually have a Kata card that we give people that has five questions on it that you can, that you can go through. And I might just read a little bit from the book. The experiment kata pronounced, pronounced Kata is an essential tool for teaching your team members how to experiment, and for engaging them in experimentation over the long term in a systematic way. By now, you should be conducting your own experiments. If we were coaching, I would be curious about what you’ve learned so far. And how experimenting is shifting your thinking, you may be starting to see how experimenting can inform and shape your leadership. And you may be taking on more of a coaching role with the people you’re leading, you simply cannot have enough effect on your own. So engaging your team with experimenting is the way that you expand your reach and inspire them to improve everything around them. The next step is to is asking them to start experimenting to which will feed which will feel new and clunky to them at first. If you send an email to melanie@experimental leader.com, I will happily send you a printable credit card so that you can start to use these questions in your work, as well. And Lori, thank you so much for talking about my book, I want to I want to dive into what you’re working on in your life and your work right now. How are you experimenting in your life and work right now?

Yes, so and the topic of this I saw in your design was something that I really care about, and I am an experimenting with, which is how do we help managers lead better. So I am just launching a software called align momentum, it’s a little bit different. It’s not about the six alignment, key indicators per se, but it is a critical part of Alignment and momentum in an organization, which is what is something I feel is missing. We are asking managers that means at every level, the person at the top is managing anybody who is influencing others in their career. And the work that they do is, in these terms, managing and needs to also be leading. We are asking managers to lead better, and yet we’re only giving them tools to manage work better. You don’t you don’t manage people, you manage work. And you lead people. So we’re missing the parts about getting the the meaningful the discovery lead feedback of what is it really like to work there are people working together? You know, feedback from them, not just in a one on one where it’s all rocked with the fear of what you’re going to say and you’re the boss and all that you know, a de identified true assessment caring about what is the culture like and are we are we growing? are we aligned are we gaining momentum? And so I tweaked performance management because I’m a performance management, expert, strategy, measurement, all of those things that I know we do really well. And yet what is missing is that leadership so I weak performance management to, to shift it to performance momentum, what would you need in these roles that are influencing others to truly keep momentum and alignment going in the organization. So the Tweak is, for example, in strategy, rather than just having people sitting in a room and saying what strategy is and telling people what it is, then it kind of stops there. And then it starts, it goes right into projects, initiatives, managing work, but instead include them in, in the All right, here’s where we’re going. Here’s well, how we think we would measure progress, which fits into the five questions from your book. This is how we think we would measure progress. Now you tell us how you fit in what your team what would make most sense for your team to measure progress toward these. And you know, to stay away from that, that really detailed measurement at this point. So that people are always thinking of what’s next. And not just what they did yesterday, or whatever hammer is going to be on their head if they don’t, if they don’t do exactly what’s on this list to do.

You need to understand that when you're communicating, you need to communicate more often. You need to communicate in different ways. Share on X

What do you think are some of the things that keep people from having momentum, what gets in their way?

Fear is a big one. On my site, the landing page for the second book, pivot to clarity, I give away chapter seven, which is on hope and fear. Because I think it’s so important for us to understand for ourselves, and for us to understand and others. Because when we give, let’s say words are explaining our or expressing our vision, or maybe it’s even just a vision for an initiative, whatever we’re expressing it, and there’s some hope involved, we’re trying to express it in a way to inspire hope opens the door. But then what I mean, when you’re communicating, everyone has all these fears that are blocking your message, the way you intend it to be heard, blocks it from how it’s heard. So you need to understand that when you’re communicating, you need to communicate more often you need to communicate in different ways you need to communicate in two ways. And that chapter will I think, really kickstart you and being more aware, when fear is blocking your communication? If you have a misunderstanding, look first to see what fears are in the way.

I agree with that. I think often fear is what drives our our challenges in the workplace. Who should be seeking you out? When should someone be looking for your, your books, your work you? Who’s Who’s the person that needs you?

Diverse people working in the office

Yeah, I’m noticing so many positions out there, I just looked to see what organizations are wanting. And so many are looking for organizational effectiveness, organizational change. And usually when they’re, when they’re wanting that role, they’re aware that something could be better. But they don’t necessarily know what it is to get their arms around it. And that is where I fit I they’re in a more coaching and consulting role, though and not as a, you know, as an employee, it’s difficult as an employee to really get done some of the things that I’m talking about it takes, it takes someone who could come in and be a completely safe place. And to be the person who has no fear of saying what needs to be said in a meeting, when you’re dealing with change. And so that’s when I’m called in. Usually they’re saying, hey, fix it. But then we realize that it’s really it’s something that they’re needing they when I say they, it’s the leadership team, they’re needing to address over time. And I’m modeling the way and giving them the tools to do so over time.

And, Lori, where can people find you?

My website is the pivotcatalyst.com. I’m also on Instagram at Pivot Catalyst. No, the there. And I mentioned my book, Pivot To Clarity. You can also see everything on that website.

Thank you so much for being on my show today. It’s been a pleasure.

My pleasure.

Yeah, thank you.

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It was great to be here today with Lori Michele Leavitt. And to talk about leadership. It’s it was really fun to talk about how managers can lead better I am left thinking about we manage work, and we lead people. I think that’s such a powerful statement. I also think it’s really important for us to continue to think about what we measure in the work that we do, how we plan the work that we do and how we collect data to see what results we’re having as we do that work. I hope that you have an amazing week. Go experiment!

Important Links: 

Lori Michele Leavitt

 

Lori Michele Leavitt, “The Pivot Catalyst”, has coached, consulted, and trained hundreds of leaders around the world to achieve their objectives and generate momentum.

She speaks globally on catalyzing momentum, leading, pivoting, and workplace culture change.

Lori is founder and president of Abrige Corp., which offers the Aligned Momentum (A.M.)® leadership operating system to help managers lead better. She also leads the global 10x!® business & leadership peer groups.

Lori’s books are part of the “Orchestrating Extraordinary Momentum” (The Pivot) Series. Lori and her books guide leaders in generating a ripple of positive influence through their organizations, and beyond.

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