Why Great Leadership Needs Better Systems

In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel Lolacher talks with Karl Staib, founder of Systematic Leader, about why leadership needs more than good intentions. They explore how better systems shape habits, improve communication, strengthen accountability, and create healthier workplace cultures.

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Karl Staib, and here is why he is. He's a founder and owner of Systematic Leader helping organizations improve workflow that drives effectiveness and tailoring their solutions to scale their business. This involves things like his Magnetic Systems method, which spoilers we're probably gonna get into a little bit today.

He's also the host of the system, the Systematic Leader podcast, which I. Proudly say I've been a guest on, he's the author of Bring Gratitude, feel Joyful Again with bite-sized mindset practices. And he's been featured in Forbes, NPR Zen Habits and worked with some pretty great companies like Phillips Global Southwest Research Institute and Pioneer Nation.

And he is here. Hello, Karl.

Karl Staib: Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Russel Lolacher: Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. Yeah, methods, frameworks, processes as a leader, we kind of have to, I, I don't know if we embrace them as much as we think we should or do, but we're gonna get into all that. Karl, all the fun of that. But before we get into any of that, I have to ask the question I ask all of my guests, sir, which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?

Karl Staib: Oh man. I've had so many of both, but the one that sticks out to me is the one that I came right outta college. And I worked for this. Just can I, can I say a-hole on here? Is that, is that okay of a

Russel Lolacher: Assholes fine you. If you prefer to say asshole, that'd be great.

Karl Staib: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. He was a huge asshole. He did not listen, he did not care about feedback.

He did not have one iota of for people. Who were younger than him and he was, I don't know, in his late forties at the time. And so it was rough. I started outta college. I was the marketing coordinator and one of the tasks was, Hey, we're thinking about sponsoring this hockey team. Find out about it, find out about, you know, what they offer from jerseys to all these different things.

And, so I found all this stuff out, you know, like different types and what we could do and you know, how this could all work. And he asked me, he is well, what are the different sizes? And he was a, a larger guy and I was like, I don't know I can find out. And he looked at me and he said, I could have a monkey do a better job than this. And I was just, I was. Just, I mean, I'm 22 years old, completely just disheartened I, from that point on, I think that was, I don't know, maybe six weeks in and I just gave up and I ended up working there for over a year. And it was, it was a terrible experience, one that I learned from and one that really helped shape.

Me as a leader. So there's a lot of gratitude in that, but also a lot of pain and but I was able to work through it, so that's good.

Russel Lolacher: It's, I mean, no matter how many times I asked this. It always seems to be in those formative years for a lot of people who are getting those first time leaders, those people that have that hire young people, basically because they can Lord, power over them a little bit more. They don't get as much pushback because when you're in your late teens, early twenties.

You don't know what you don't know. You are not as confident, you don't have wealth of experience, so of course you're easier to be bullied. How many restaurant stories have I heard? How many, you know, that just sort of that first, but it's so formative because I mean, I'm guessing that was a few years ago, Karl, and it's still like the top of mind thing that popped into your brain.

Karl Staib: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's terrible. You know, it's, it's a terrible way to run a company. It's a terrible way to treat other people. But the people that I have worked for, the people that have treated me well, that supported me cared about what I thought you know, encouraged me, it made that that much better.

So, you know, kind of the Star Wars analogy, the light and darkness inside of all of us. I think he had a lot of anger inside of him, A lot of resentment. You know, and like Yoda said, you know, darkness pain leads to dark anger. Anger leads the pain, and then pain leads to the dark side. I totally butchered it, but you get the point.

And and it's true, you know, and I think that to me has helped me become more empathetic. I've forgiven him. I have no. Ounce of anger towards the man. In fact, it's, you know, it probably helped me in a lot of ways.

Russel Lolacher: I love. I'm like, there's no anger. There's no animosity, but the drop of a hat, I'm gonna compare him to a sth Lord. I'm like, nicely played. Nicely played. I hear your nerd and I get it, but let's. Let, let's move on from that. Let's move on from that and thank you for sharing that story. I really appreciate it.

It, it's, it's one of those things that we still have to come to grips with and I think gratitude is a really great way to come to terms with it. But unfortunately we don't have the emotional tools till we kind of later in life to even be able to handle some of those traumas that we've had earlier in some of our professional careers.

We're gonna talk about systems today. We're gonna talk about systems that we can design to action people want to use. But before we get into that, I kind of like to dial it back a bit and define what the hell we're even talking about. So, Karl, from your perspective, since this is your bread and butter, this is, this is the world you live in, how do you even define what a system is?

Karl Staib: Systems are the steps you put in place for the things that you care about and that you wanna support. So if you care about. Exercise, you are going to find ways to make time for it. If you care about money, you are gonna study. Other, you know, Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger or whatever it is, you're gonna find that time.

And so what you're doing is you're making sure that you're doing the things that support your goals, your values, and the more that you do that, be it as a leader, be it as an individual contributor. The more you get to where you want to go. Now, not all of us are good at those things, and so that's where really having somebody, you know, help you.

Right? If you're young and you're in college and you come out and you don't know how to process email, you don't know how to use AI in, in the workplace, you know, you might know how to use it for. Writing a paper. We don't know the intricacies of how to apply something like that in the in your current role.

And so all these things are systems that we build up, especially the formative years of working is that, you know, you know, 20 to 30 we are doing these things and we're building these habits. And then as leaders, usually probably in our thirties. And beyond, depending on, you know, the type of person or the role that you, that you crave or go after.

And so what you're doing then is you are setting up these habits and you're supporting them with the things that you do. So for example, I'm a, my, one of my core values is gratitude. I truly believe if you show appreciation for others, they're gonna understand, you know, what matters to you. And you know how that, that work that they do is really important.

And the more that you do that, the more that you show that, the more that they feed off of that. And the more that that, you know, you're showing them that you. Really appreciate the work that they do. And if you can do that regularly and consistently, they're gonna, they're gonna work harder for you.

They're gonna do better work for you. They're gonna be more open to your ideas, and hopefully you're open to their ideas, right? And so that to me is really the importance of building systems that support everything that you want to accomplish.

Russel Lolacher: You bounced between the word habits and systems a little bit when you were talking there. Are we talking about the same thing? Because I'm, I'm, when I think a system or a framework, I'm thinking of a checklist for lack of a better term or a, a rule of thumb of things that we need to follow, but habits, I don't necessarily always look at it that way.

How do you connect the two?

Karl Staib: So the habits are the things that you have done repeatedly, the systems that you've put in place over time, and then it just becomes a regular thing that you do. So, for example, you might put a system in place to check in with your employees, right? You might say every week I'm gonna check in and find out what's going on.

It might be a one-on-one, it might be a Slack message. Everybody's different. Everybody has a different system. And the idea then is you are showing them that you care about their work, you care about them. And what you're then doing is you're building that habit. And over time that becomes how you communicate with your team.

So these become ha these systems become habits over time. And the more that you do them, the more that you get that feedback of this is working like. Some bosses love one-on-ones and some bosses hate them, and it often is those early few years that they've put something in place, or maybe they had a boss, they did one-on-ones with them, and it was awful.

It was awkward. The guy didn't really listen. You just did it because he was supposed to do it. And so what ends up happening then is you have that. Memory. You then say, well, I'm not gonna do it that way. I'm gonna build my system this way. I'm gonna build it so we don't have to sit there in this awkward conversation.

I'm gonna do it where it's async and we just send emails back and forth, whatever it is. That's the system you built to build that habit.

Russel Lolacher: What are some of the bigger mistakes that us as leaders are making when we're trying to design a system going, you know what? I've got a new employee. I'm gonna meet with them every Tuesday. What are we doing? In our thought processes or our approaches when we're trying to get the teams obviously to buy into this, or even ourselves to buy into this, what are we doing wrong that makes them not adoptable?

Karl Staib: Oh, great question. I think it comes down to values. So I had this framework I like to call it vision. So the idea is, you know, values and then you have. You have to be able to integrate those values into the you gotta identify, sorry. You gotta identify those under identify where those things are falling apart so you can fix them and then figure out how to support.

Those areas, then you gotta iterate, right? 'cause if you have these things, you have this value, you're trying to create a system around it, it's not quite working. You need to improve it. And then you gotta put it into operations. So you, and this is that, so many tiny habits tiny experiments, a lot of people talk about these things.

But as a leader, you've gotta be able to try these things. And then you have to be nimble and say, okay, if we try these things. Now after six months, I don't want this to be the end all, be all. This is how we do things. Then you constantly have a way to review and improve that system as a whole. And that to me is what great design is when you design a system.

So it's values, identify, support, iterative, operational, and nimble.

Russel Lolacher: Of course you have a process to implement processes. I like it. Why wouldn't you? That makes a lot of sense. When I was introducing you, we were talking, or I mentioned this magnetic approach to magnetic method. What, how would you define magnetic when it comes to any process like that? Attraction I'm, I'm assuming, is the approach to a process.

So how do you, how do you, yeah, how do you explain that?

Karl Staib: Yeah, so I think we are all drawn to things that make sense to us. So if I tell you that on Fridays I, Russel, I want you to send me a report. What you're working on, what's working well for you, what's not, and what are you trying to, what are you trying to improve upon? What is a tiny experiment you have put in place to improve in this area?

And I want this report every Friday. Now if I have a, if my values are, you know, I'm consistent and I. I take this information and I learn what's going on with you, and I use it in a way that helps me coach you, use it in a way that helps me improve your career, helps me improve our goals as a company, then it all makes sense.

But a lot of times what happens is those things fall flat and you fall flat because the value that you have of consistency. Is not necessarily high up on your list because you know, you're a bit of an artist, you're a bit of a, you know, rogue type of boss and you like shooting from the hip. Nothing wrong with that, but this is the key self-awareness.

When you understand that and you understand what you're trying to accomplish, you can then create systems to support you. So if you do shooting from a hip a little bit, you have to be self-aware about that. And then you also have to have team members that are willing to push back against you. So you then have to create a culture of.

Wait, I'm gonna try stuff. This is good because it's, you we're going to, you know, do all these different little tiny experiments and some of them are gonna work really well. And when you're really upfront and honest about this with the people that you lead, it makes it so much easier for them to come back to you and say.

Karl, what are you, what are you doing? Like why do you wanna try, you know, pay a Mr. Beast $1 million. You know, our whole marketing budget is $1 million. That doesn't make any sense. Now the idea, the concept might be good, but instead of Mr. Beast, you might have to go down a few rungs and you might pay somebody $50,000 to do what you wanna do as a tiny experiment.

So now that's only one 20th of your marketing budget. And what that does then is that pushback allows them to say, wait. Why are you trying to do this? And then you can have that dialogue and then you're more likely to come to a consensus easier.

Russel Lolacher: Is that how, you know, maybe a framework or a method isn't working? Is it the pushback? Is it the, because I think curiosity is supposed to be a really good thing. Curiosity is very much a, a tenant of leadership, even when it's coming. From those you're working with. So how do you know the method is maybe, and I'm gonna use my magnetic, you know, lean in that a little bit.

It's repelling more than maybe attracting.

Karl Staib: Ooh. Yes. Okay. So I think back to your point of, of really creating something, a system that people are drawn to now. If I shoot from the hip, I tell everybody, but please give me pushback. I really wanna understand your point of view. What are you seeing and why? But then when you give me that pushback, and all I do is say, no, that's dumb, right?

And I shoot it down eventually, my. My explanation or, or me sh saying this value of, you know, I care about feedback. I understand that I like to shoot from the hip, but I want you to push back against me, and then I don't actually follow through on that. That's why values is so important because you actually then have to really understand that greater whole.

So then if that person says, okay, yes, I, I, I think this is a dumb idea, and you say, okay, I understand, but why? Talk to me. Let me understand where you're coming from. What happens then is that person is like, oh, he is actually listening to me. So you're reinforcing, and this is the magnetic part. You're reinforcing the positive behavior that you're looking for through you, those values.

This is not easy, right? Because a lot of us, we get to a certain position, you know, we always the older adage of, we get promoted to the, to the place where we're incompetent

Russel Lolacher: Yeah, we rise to the level of our incompetence, I think is

Karl Staib: We rise to the level of incompetent, right? And and the idea then is you have to then be willing to lean on other people even more.

And that's what good leadership really is, is leaning on other people even more. By doing that, you're creating consistency. You're building a system that allows people to feel comfortable pushing back against you. And when that happens, you're getting probably, you know, the old adage of, you know, one mind is great, but 10 minds is better.

But yes, at some point you have to make a decision. The idea is getting all of this feedback, distilling it, really understanding the larger goal and then acting on it. And that's the type of system that people are drawn to because there's consistency, there's clear outcomes, there's a clear message of how this will work, and they want to, they wanna stay on board with that.

Like I, I, I've worked with a client and he is all about money and that's okay, but. He doesn't include that in his core values. And so there's a, there's a disconnect between what he's saying he values and then what ends up ends up happening. And there's nothing wrong with that because the, the company he brought, he took over was failing and he needed the company to really focus on money.

So then the idea is. Start to shift those core values. 'cause if those old core values weren't working, you then have to shift them to help align with where you're going in this current environment.

Russel Lolacher: I love how much you're focusing on. There's a lot of, lot of. Principles to, to my podcast around when it comes to good leadership, self-awareness, situational awareness and communication. And you're hitting on all of them. And I really wanna dive into the leadership part of it, of the, the designer. I mean, even if you're bringing in an existing system, there needs to be some work, I believe, as the leader that even.

You have to understand yourself well, you have to be able to connect with others. You, I mean, but again, that's all self work of, of, to be able to introduce these things, which you're touching on quite a bit. So I guess that raises the question for me is, as a leader, I bring my own biases. I bring my own thoughts and what I think works best.

How do I check that at the door when I'm designing a system? That I want others to use when I'm thinking here going, well, I know it works for me, so why isn't it working for you? Because I either, I designed it at my last company I worked at, it worked great for them. I don't understand why you guys don't get it.

So what do we do and how can we approach that to, to sort of mitigate it?

Karl Staib: Yeah, and I, I that phrase checking it at the door, right? It's almost like checking your ego at the door. And, and I think that's a very important point. Now, I will say ego has been vilified. You know, Ryan holiday's book, ego is the Enemy. I disagree with that. I think if you are out in the workforce and you're doing things, you need to have ego.

Otherwise, if you're completely like it. It really doesn't matter. Whatever you do is gonna be cool. You know, in the grand scheme of things we're on this earth, you know, humans have only been on this earth for, you know, what is it like the sticker width? If you go from the Empire State Building all the way to the top, and you place a sticker on top of the little thing, that's how long humans have been here.

But in the smaller micro part of a life, you know. 80 years or even a career, you know, 40, 50 years could be longer. The, the older we get it does matter. And we have certain ways things should be done. And this is hard because we can't just be like you can come into work whenever, and you, you know, oh, you're late on that project.

There has to be some rules and standards that apply. And and part of that comes from, you know, the ego of knowing that you've done great work in the past. Now it's not about letting that ego take over. And so I like to think of that, you know, ego and, and you know, I've done a lot of you know, listening to spiritual teachers.

It's like that voice in your head, right? And some people, you know, the angel and the devil, right? Everybody has different perceptions. But basically that, that voice in her head that tells us, you know what? You know, this is important. Now, the key part here is not to let the ego dictate. It's to listen, to understand. You have. Great thoughts. They have great thoughts and it's trying to combine and fuse them together. And you're trying to really listen and do it from a place of value, of values versus ego. So like this, that example of the guy one of my clients, he is all about the money. And that's important as a business, you have to make money, right?

So if you're like, Hey, whatever, you know, we lost a client it does matter. And you then have to say, okay, this broke. And you know, why did it break? And we need to be able to fix it. And this is the hard part, I think for a lot of leaders, is consequences if something. Excuse me. If something doesn't happen the way that you want it to happen, there has to be consequences.

It might just be we're gonna sit down and we're gonna figure this out together, and we're gonna figure out what really happened and not point figure fingers, but say, we're gonna learn from this. We're gonna grow from this, and we're not gonna make this same mistake again. If we do make the same mistake again, then we have to have some consequences.

We have to say, you know what? this really for you? Is this role really for you? And it might not be, it might fit somewhere else in the company or they might need to leave. But then the idea is people understand if they don't perform and they don't do these things that are necessary, then they're gonna lose that job.

Or then they're gonna, you know, be, you know, go be sent to another department where they might thrive. Who knows? But then the idea then is, okay, you check that ego at the door. And you're still there. You're, you're going back to the door and being like, okay, yeah, you know, Tom made a great point, but I don't really agree with Mary.

And you say, okay, what can we do? What is the, the consensus? And I like to talk about agreeing and committing eventually, you can't agree to disagree, right? If everybody agrees to disagree, you're not gonna be able to make that. Decision and then move forward with confidence. And I think that's why ego's important because you have to have that confidence of okay, I don't know, I have 62% of the information, I just made that number up.

But I'm just saying, you don't have a hundred, no one ever has a hundred percent, you know, if you make a business decision and you're like, we're gonna do this type of ad, or we're gonna do you were gonna invest in this person over this other person. Don't know. I mean, hiring is basically a coin flip.

You know, like sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And so you have to then say, okay, but what did we learn from this? And how can we build a system to improve upon it next time? You know, an onboarding system or a hiring system. At first, companies have no idea exactly what they're looking for, but as they become.

More consistent with the type of products they're delivering or the services they're delivering. It does get easier to hire people because you understand the culture better. You know, now you have, you went from five people to 10 people, and you're starting to see how, how, what works well, what doesn't, and then you say, okay, we're looking for this type of person.

But in that first five people, you're like, let's just, that, that looks good. Let's try this person, you know? But over time. You then are asking better questions, and that's a system when you ask better questions, you're improving that system to find somebody that fits better with your company.

Russel Lolacher: I, I, I hear you on, thanks for that. I hear you on the consequences piece, but I think what might need to be hammered home a bit more too, and I, I dunno if you agree with this or not, is the accountability piece. Because we could introduce a system all we like, and if it doesn't work for our team as the leader, that's more on us than it is on them, right?

We can be bringing in a system, but we need to tweak and adjust based on the diversity, based on the mindsets of our team to understand. So I, 'cause in the world of leadership, I think we prioritize responsibility and deliverables far more than actual leadership was that accountability, which comes from the consequences right.

To your point. But I, I, the buck stops with you as the leader or you're not the leader and you're just pointing fingers at other people.

Karl Staib: Yep.

Russel Lolacher: So I wanna, I wanna, oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Karl Staib: No, I was gonna, I, I agree with you. 'cause I think accountability and consequences almost go hand in hand. Accountability usually comes first, right? Because you're, you're saying, Hey, Tom, you didn't meet this goal. Okay, that's I, I wanna understand what's going on. Am I not supporting you in the way that I could?

And that's that being accountable internally for your own actions. And so I think. But this is the important part about systems is not saying, okay, we're gonna now start treating clients like this. This is the system. And I'm, I'm not saying you, when they onboard, you definitely need a system, but at some point, some of those systems aren't going to fit well for some people's personalities.

The key part is for them to be able to have the confidence and to be able to have the trust that they can improve the system for their own work style and allowing them to document it. This is so important, and I wish more people did this in the workplace, allowing people to document the things that are working well and not, because then you can see what's.

The person is doing, sometimes they make as a, a system improvement that is so much superior to anything you've ever designed or created. And then you realize, oh, more people should be doing this. And not that you have to dictate, everybody needs to do it this way, but you can then teach and becomes a, a culture of teaching and sharing versus competing against each other.

Russel Lolacher: I, I love the idea of, as a leader, that we're not just creating a system and going, okay, go figure it out. But we're actually sitting there watching monitoring, taking into account listening so that we can be spending that time to tweak the system. Almost like a research project, almost like we're out in the wild watching it, you know, watching it as it grows.

And we're gorilla is in the mist kind of stuff, right. We're we're watching. We're watching and seeing how it works and how it doesn't work. Are there questions personally that we should be asking ourselves as leaders, sort of as check-ins when we're rolling out new systems that we're like, you know, I, I, I love the reflection piece, but I'm curious if there's more we could be doing.

Karl Staib: Ah, yeah. So I'm a big fan of journaling. And like I said what's working well and what's not is a very simple retrospective that I think more people should implement inside of a company. But you're right, it doesn't have to be. Just so kind of black and white. There's nuances to it all.

You know, there's okay another thing that I think can work really well is what do I really need to do next? Because I don't think we talk about priorities enough in the workplace either. Often we're, we're going and we're ba we're juggling, you know, six different things and sometimes we drop something, but that.

Thing that you dropped and now you're focusing on this other area, that other thing should be, have, should have been picked back up because that was the top priority for the organization. And it can come from, it doesn't have to be, you know, just business related. It can, it can be you know, just you know, part of the government work too.

Or it can be, you know. Nonprofits, but the idea is you, this person really understands what's more, what's most important and what's driving the value. And that to me is having those type of conversations and understanding like, okay, what's your thought process? That's com. I love the idea of curiosity.

'cause if you come back to that and say, Hey Tom, you know, like I saw that you started working on these things and ah, you know. I like that. I think that's important. But how can you, you, you drop this other thing and how come you didn't, you know, pick it back up and you're understanding the, the thought process they're doing, the decision making that they made, and then you can help them.

'cause that's the key part is you don't wanna just get angry at 'em because Mo, and this is where I think just the very small mindset shift of positive intent. Tom probably was trying his best. He did not know that this thing was this important, and that's why communication often falls flat. And that to me is such a big part of system is having that communication system that works constantly talking about priorities.

I like to tell leaders telling stories. Is one of the best ways to really drive point home. If I just tell you again and again, Russel you know, we have to focus on, you know, you know, driving value for our customers, focus on driving value for customers. It's so nebulous that you almost.

Don't know how to handle that. But if you say hey, you know, Jack recently did this great thing. Like he went out of his way. We had this, you know, client and, you know, next county over. He went and he checked on, on the job site, and he looked at every single thing that was going on and he realized there was a mistake.

So he brought it to the attention of the client and he was like, oh, thank you so much. You know, no one has ever done anything like that, you know? And that's the type of thing that. If you tell that story, it's much more likely that you're going to get the other people being like, oh, like Tom went, oh, he did that.

Okay, like you are driving, you're showing the values of what you care about through storytelling, and now they're more likely to try to do similar things.

Russel Lolacher: I wanna, we're morphing a bit more into how we're engaging with teams, and I want to sort of stick on that a bit because we have to introduce these systems, these frameworks into these, into what the groups that we're responsible for. When do you start noticing. That a system's working or not working?

Like what is the, what are those first signals? Green flags, beige flags, red flags where you're going, Hmm, I don't know if this is gonna work, or, you know what, it's doing exactly what I wanna do. Is there a first indications we should be paying attention to?

Karl Staib: Yeah. I, I love this topic 'cause I I love the idea of leading indicators and lagging in indicators. So leading indicators are all the things that you have control over, right? And so it's usually OKRs I, I like, and KPIs. So KPI is, you know, on the backend, like anything you can measure. Are we creating enough widgets?

Are we, you know, doing, are we meeting our sales goals or whatever it is, right? And then the OKRs are, the leading indicators, are the things, the inputs, the things that you are, the systems you put in place to get the, the hopefully meet the KPIs on the backend. And I think. Often we, we, we start with the KPIs well, this is broken and we gotta, we gotta fix this.

And it's, you know, almost like we're, we start spinning our wheels instead of thinking, okay, well what have we done to get these results? And what are the systems that we have in place? So, and this is a, a very simple but hard to do because this. Is something that a lot of people we get caught up in, in focusing on other things.

But if you go back to leading indicators and okay, we're not getting enough sales. So what are we doing? And, you know, what is the, what is the client relationship that we're doing? What is that step by step process? And when you. Systematically map that out. You start to see where the friction points happen and you, and if you have a larger team, you can see some people do things well in certain areas and some people don't.

And so when you look at how all these things fit together and you start to say, oh, okay, we're really good at starting these conversations, but we're terrible at follow up. You know, some people follow up every two, three weeks. We need to push this up, we need to do a better job of following up. And same thing with you know, client or customer experience, right?

Like they're onboarded and it's almost okay, let's go get more customers now. And it's, you really forget all the systems that have been put in place years ago of helping them onboard and helping them understand how to use the product or whatever it is. Has not really been updated. Or has not been improved.

And like you start to see, oh, like referrals have dropped. Well, you know, that's a KPI, but the leading indicator is, well, are we creating a great experience that allows the customer to actually want to refer us?

Russel Lolacher: It's so important not just to focus on the delivery. Delivery's important. Absolutely. But it's the journey to the delivery that gets that and sometimes gets lost because, and I often talk about it's people over process. Not to say that process is important, but there are people that are doing the thing that need to be prioritized or the thing isn't gonna work.

So I love that you're combining the two to both be important because one can't be a priority over the other. 'cause you still always need to deliver. But you also want a healthy organization of people that are sticking around, staying encouraged, encouraged to work, motivated. So I love that you're connecting the dots on that.

But change happens and change seems to be happening all the time, and you create a system now. That may not work through COVID, that may not work through AI or dramatic technical change. So how are you building or how do you build resistance resilience even within your team to be able to navigate a system through that?

Karl Staib: Oh, great question. I think it's really important to talk about kaizen and not just from a manufacturing perspective. Kaizen is the concept of constant improvement. I think Peter Drucker brought it over to Japan 'cause no one really cared about what he was talking about here in the United States.

So he is oh, I'll go to Japan and see what they think. And they loved it. And so Toyota picked this. Baton up and ran with it. So the key part of all this is we are creative creatures. We need to be able to do things and then see things on the back end. You know, we talk about leading indicators and lagging indicators.

Well, a simple thing is if you allow somebody to make an adjustment and it goes well, and you praise them, they're gonna be like, oh. I need to make more adjustments. You know, now some adjustments won't work. And this is the key part. Back to that, you know, the type of boss you want to be. And you know, this to me is why I think all leaders should write down their core values.

If that should be one of the key takeaways I think is from this interview is, as a leader, write down your core values, share those core values. Make sure when you're building systems, they're designed around your core values, so you're living them and breathing them and showing people them. Okay. But the idea here is to really understand what people, what motivates people.

And to me it's a big part of, that's creativity. We, if we are, if we get into a rot or we do things the way we've always done them, we get bored, we get complacent. So. For me, I, I find doing little team workshops, like I had a client and what we did is we, I think he, it was about 15, 16 people and what we did, we put in a quarterly process where we do workshops with different people and from different departments, and we do that every quarter.

And then we would have them say, okay, what are you working on? You know, where are your. Where's the friction areas, what's going on? And one of the things that came out of that was they found out that marketing was like trying to you know, send out emails. They had all these things and they was so manual, but the guy from it was like, oh, I would automate that.

And he's and this is what I would do. And they're like. Holy shit. That saved us like, you know, I think it was like eight hours a week or even more than that. I can't it was it 12 hours. But it was because you're getting this creativity and you're getting these things, these perspectives from different people in the organization and you're creating relationships.

So now it's gonna be easier to go to each other and say, Hey. I'm working on this what would you do here? You know, and you're there to support each other. And so what's funny is they started doing it every month after that because every quarter wasn't fast enough. And that's the key part of Kaizen is iterating and finding these things and trying these tiny experiments like, okay, let's try automating one part of this marketing loop.

You know, 'cause at first they didn't wanna say, okay, yes, sweep it across all the things that we do. You know, that didn't make sense. So it was like tiny little experiment. They send out emails, okay, let's automate it, you know? And then they started using AI to help generate some of the content. And then there was an approval process and then before it went out, it was much more automated and saved them a ton of time and they're getting a better response from their customers. And so it's things like that, that if you allow people to work with each other this is to me is why, you know, as solo entrepreneurs, we need other people. We either need to hire them to help us as like employees or hire coaches.

'cause when you do, you're getting that other perspective. You're finding different. Ways of coming up with solutions that your brain just can't. And that's the thing. It takes a village, right? And we need to encourage leaders to do more of that stuff.

Russel Lolacher: You, you, you segued really well into the, the village's comment. 'cause I wanna pull back quite a bit to the larger of an organization because as much as I talk about, people say we have a culture, I'm like, no, you don't. You have 17,000 cultures. There's an organization has a lot of subcultures, but I'm kind of thinking the same way when it comes to systems.

So organizations may have a couple systems, but every, it seems every. Team has their own systems because every leader's different. Quality wise, experience wise. So when you look at an organization coming from a systems expertise, should it be that way? Because you've been talking about consistency a lot, but we're looking at an organization that may have, well, that business unit does it that way, that business unit does that way, but the whole organization does it this way, and they could be bumping up against each other.

They may not work so well against each other. What is the ideal situation in an organization as a whole?

Karl Staib: Mm. Yeah. You are never gonna reduce it's, there's no coming. It'll be frictionless. It will, communication problems will exist today, and they will exist 500 years from now. It is the nature of humans. We say something and we think we're saying it a certain way, but the person on the other end has a ton of their own, you know, history and their own, you know, a boss that, you know, said things a certain way and triggers them, and then they're like, ah.

Why did he say it like that? So the idea is as much as possible to create those communication systems that allow people to share ideas and open up and see things from different perspectives. And the key part to me coming back to values is really staying core to the values that you've developed as a team and as an organization.

And I truly believe. You know, director and their team of six people should have different values. 'cause they're supporting a different part of the company than, you know, somebody in it or maybe somebody in marketing or whatever it is. And so if you have those different type of values, then it still needs to align.

This is the key part, is you can't just be like, well we, we will do whatever we wanna do. And there's probably a lot of teams like that and maybe they get stuff done. But it often creates a lot of conflict. So it has to be in line you know, it's always a sports analogy, right? If you have a football team, but they're bought in and they believe in the mission, and they believe in the head coach, and they believe in each other, they're.

They're so much more likely to win, and they're so much more likely to accomplish what they wanna accomplish because they're trying to work together to do it. And I think that's what it's about. It's not just what needs to be done this way. It needs, you need to figure out how to communicate. The why behind what you're doing.

So if I'm a director and I'm looking at, and I'm saying, this is the way we should do it, and this is why. Now the other person on the other side or the other silo the other you know, team that's maybe in it might be like, okay, I hear you. But we can't spend this amount of money to upgrade the infrastructure to be able to do that.

So. You know, what else can we do? And so you're having this dialogue versus, you know, that ego coming in and be like, well, we need to have it done this way. And that's very common that, you know, kind of a top down approach. But if you, if it's more collaborative, if it's true to your values, some people, they want that top down approach.

And, you know, there's a lot of leaders out there that are very very smart, very high functioning. And they get stuff done. But. It's harder to get that stuff done consistently if there's just one person making all those decisions. So you have to be able to figure out how to collaborate together, build a system around that, and can do it consistently.

So I, I recently did a workshop for a company. It was a bunch of executives and we basically talked about the communication systems internally and we found all these different friction points. And then there was a share out. What you could see is everybody's oh, I didn't realize that was happening.

It brought awareness to these things. When you bring all these executives together, there's a common goal of yes, we need to create a better experience for our customers. Okay, we can't do all these things that are broken, but what's the top priority? What's the one that's gonna give us the best bang for our buck?

Russel Lolacher: Is. Is it a matter of, I'm hearing you talk about values. I'm hearing you talking about priorities. Is that sort of the path to standardization while being open to flexibility when it comes to systems? Is that what I'm hearing?

Karl Staib: Yes, there and I, I don't. I don't think, and this, this is the hard part, I think for people is saying, standard standardization is the end all, be all right. Yes. There needs to be standards there, and this comes back almost to accountability as well, right? If we, if I'm sending out emails and there's this typos all over it, that's not to the level of what should be done.

Within the company, right? There needs to be standards for that. But if I'm sending emails that are very brief and they're filled with bullet points versus long paragraphs, and maybe most people write paragraphs inside the company, but my email's easier to. Digest, it's really understanding the greater goal that you're trying to accomplish and saying, if we get to point B, if we are able to do these things, make this sales quota you know, meet this deadline, whatever it is, if we do it and we do it in a way that works well, then we should celebrate that.

And that's a key part of all this is. Celebrating the things that are working well. 'cause then people are like, oh, that was done differently. We're celebrating that as long as we meet these goals, which is, you know, hey, one of our core values is excellence in our, and we believe if we're set a goal, we should be able to meet it.

So you can come back to that conversation with these people and say, okay, you have all these typos. Our core value is excellence. That's the standard that we expect. If you don't meet that standard, then we're gonna have to figure something else out. You know? Can you meet that standard now? The difference then is back to your point, is you can't micromanage that.

That email needs to be in this template. It needs to be three paragraphs and needs like, then it gets too much, and so this is that flexibility and creativity of getting to point B and allowing people to do that in their way and allowing them to feel comfortable doing it that way.

Russel Lolacher: I like to wrap up conversations with a focus of next steps. So somebody listening's like systems I need systems may or I need to even reevaluate the systems I have right now. 'cause we, we already have a lot of systems that we may not even call systems, right? We, as to your point, we might call them habit.

If I'm listening to this and I want to take that first step tomorrow to be better in system introduction system design, what would be the first thing you would recommend people do? You've already talked about writing down the values and intention. I'm just curious if there is, is a step beyond that starting tomorrow, first thing in the morning.

Karl Staib: Yeah, so I like asking people where are they seeing the most friction in their operations? And usually it's many places. But the idea is then to really find out, okay, if, where are you seeing the most friction and what is that drive? How is that driving value or not? Or you know. Eliminating value. And so what you do then is you map out that system.

You basically create a journey map of that. So let's say referrals are going down, customer ha happiness is going down. So what you do is you map out, you, you draw a map, you know, bubbles or however you want to do it, or sticky notes, and you look at each step of the process for that customer. And then you say, okay, where are we falling flat?

And then this is the key part of all this is you can't fix the whole thing all at once. It's about tiny experiments. It's about picking one sliver of an area and saying, okay, this is where we're getting the most complaints and this, so what we're gonna do, we're gonna do a little workshop. We're gonna come together as a team.

We're gonna find out how we can improve this area. What we're gonna do is we're gonna do a 90 day experiment. And this experiment will allow us to test the idea. And it depends on how fast you can create a change on the website and probably get feedback within two weeks, right? Or less than that, depending on the traffic that you have.

But the idea is to look at that customer experience, find that sliver. And also, and this comes back to values. Are we doing this aligned with our values? Because if not, if we're like, it's about kindness and all we're doing is we're then trying to drive more sales and we're just pushing customers to refer us, well, that's not kindness.

That's just us trying to get our bottom lineup. So what's a better way to do this? So we're doing it in a way that's staying true to our. Organization's values versus, okay, we have this goal, we need to accomplish this goal, and we'll do whatever it costs to make that. That's when everything for me starts falling apart.

If you're building systems in that way, but that comes back to, you know, you know, I'll, I'll reiterate, find that little thing, map it all out, find that little thing and create a tiny experiment over. One month, 90 days, whatever it is. So you have that chance to get that feedback and then iterate from there.

Russel Lolacher: That is Karl Staib. He's the founder and owner of Systematic Leader, which is a consultancy itself, but also a podcast you should actually check out. He is the founder of Magnetic Sys of the Magnetic Systems Method. I have to put a, the in front of it, makes it, gives it some weight. He's also the author of Bring Gratitude Field, Joyful Again with Bite-Sized Mindset Practices.

Thank you so much for being here, Karl.

Karl Staib: Oh, thank you. I had a blast.