The first time manager. Pt. 4

Welcome to Leadership Sovereignty. I'm your host Terry Baylor along with Ralph Owens. Today we'll answer questions. Are there levels to the leadership journey and does it end? Why understanding the business goals and objectives helps to articulate how you matter to the company, how the power of metrics tell your story, and how does what I do make the company money.

Enjoy the show. So one of my of my one of my son's coaches so I was talking with him the other day and I told him, I said, man, I reference you all the time. I mean, I could be in a business meeting, I could be talking with some kids out at the field And I use your saying all the times, there's levels to this stuff. So he's talking about the game that he's coaching but the reality is, again, remember we talked about this, a truth is something that is true can cross any domain.

That's right.

So there's levels to this thing that is true across multiple domains. As we dig into this leadership, because we're still on our journey guys. Don't lose sight of that, we're still on our journey. Ralph and I, we talk quite a bit and he'll be like, man, I got this. I gotta share this with you.

And so, and I'll hear something and I'll call him, man, I'm gonna text you this, you gotta check it out. So we are I think Ralph you said this maybe a few episodes back, there is no end to it.

Oh, never. Never, it's just like you just said, it's exactly what you just said, it's levels to it. And it's levels that you will never see until you get to the next one. So here's one that we'll leave with you. So as a leader, you really need to understand what the business goals and objectives are of your organization.

Now, before today and even before hearing this, you may have never even thought about it. A lot of times as individual contributors we get focused on what it is we need to do to hit our numbers. So that we can get our raises and hopefully bonuses things of that nature. So we focus on those things, those markers, and then we try to achieve or exceed them. But as a manager, when you become in leadership, you basically take on the voice of the company.

Right? So when you're talking to your directs, they're basically hearing a representation of the company itself. So you need to understand where your company's going. Right? I have a cousin and she was asking me about possible career opportunities for herself at her current company.

She didn't wanna go anywhere. She was just thinking about we were just brainstorming. And I and I told her, was like, hey, you need to understand what are the strategic objectives of your company. Okay? How does that map all the way back down to you and what it is that you do?

And you have to be able to clearly articulate the value that you contribute to your company's success in alignment with those strategic, values or those strategic plans. If you don't understand what those are, then you're basically in the system and you don't know how you matter. You have to be able to map that all the way back to yourself. So if I had to just give a very generic, example, okay, we wanna sell more eggs than anybody else. Okay.

And let's just say your role as a manager is to feed the chickens, right, to feed the hens or whatever. You need to be able to articulate how through feeding the chickens on time and giving them a healthy diet causes them to produce more eggs which leads to our company objective of being able to sell more eggs than our competitors. You need to know exactly where you fit in that value chain and how you, give value to the organization and be able to articulate it in the words that your management uses, not words that we make up ourselves. I see you got some thoughts, go ahead.

Yeah, do. And you know what? And I know you're gonna jump all over this and after you articulate that, hit them with a graph.

That's right. Data baby, data. Hit them,

look, look, over the last twelve months, these six chickens here.

That's right.

They've been sitting

in the work. That's right. Now

I'm working on these other six because I've changed their diet and now I see that they're starting to produce at a high level.

You

got to have some metrics to support what it is you're saying because that picture, Ralph, said something else. You said something else. And I think it's gonna correlate to this, which is that deck will speak for you in rooms that you're not in.

Oh man. Oh man. Yes, yes and yes. We've we've both said this many times. You cannot manage what you do not measure.

Right? You'd be surprised at how much people function based on emotion. Right? And which is subjective depending on who you're talking to. When you are managing something, you need to be able to say, okay, let's go back to the chickens.

I don't know how we got the chickens, but let's go back to chickens. Are the key performance indicators that you are doing a good job at feeding these chickens? Maybe it's how many times a day they're eating, how fast they're growing, right, the type, the quality of the egg that they actually produce. Whatever that discipline is for you, you need to understand intimately what those key performance indicators are and be able to translate that and articulate that in a graph or a presentation or something, a document, an artifact that proves the value that you've created to the organization. Why is that important?

To Terry's point, when you do this enough, number one, you start to show other business leaders the value that you trans that you give to the organization. Number two, other people take those documents and they talk about the value that you give to the organization. And that's the part that Terry's talking about where someone to get in a room that you can't get in and they may try to say something about questionable about your value. But someone else who's been receiving your metrics or your data will say no no no no no let me bring this up. No they have achieved this and they have achieved that.

That data, that objective data that shows and proves your results will speak more for you than you can in a room that you can't get in.

So Ralph, I just wanna tie onto that. One of the brilliant things that you did that I just thought, man, that really changed the game is you started tying that operational data back to money. Oh man, was just brilliant. And it's not just that these systems are doing A, B and C, but these systems are doing A, B and C, which is driving the bottom line.

I see.

Right? And we could see direct correlations to months that were higher yielding, right? When operations were humming and running versus those months where, okay, yeah, weren't running as smoothly as they should have been. We saw the direct correlation to the financial outcome.

So I

think that is again, that's another level to that. Right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. 100%. You have to understand no matter how big or how small your company is, they are in business for one reason to make money. Now they may have core values, things of that nature but if they do not produce revenue they cannot continue to stay open. Right?

So you have to understand that. So now you have to ask yourself the question, how does what I do every day help the company make money? It's gonna be that's a different answer for everybody. Right? So for Terry and I, we were in the IT department and we kept systems up and running.

Right? Because when they went down, guess what? We couldn't make money. So when they were up, then we had the calculation to show because of this uptime, we were able to enable the business to make this money. But a lot of IT guys never drew the correlation.

And honestly, man, I didn't draw the correlation in the beginning. What I wanted to do in the beginning was to just put the metrics out there because we had these talking heads in the organization who always like to cast these different types of opinions about what we do and what we don't do, all based on emotion and based on subjectiveness. Right? So we figured out, hey, if we start doing these metrics that show facts, 100% uptime. You can't deny that.

Don't care

what you think about me. I don't care what you wanna say. You can't say had 100% uptime, this and that. No, either did or they didn't. Right?

So because we knew our discipline so well, we were able to come together and put together metrics that show the key performance indicators of what we do and be very transparent. The times that we didn't have 100% uptime, we owned it. And that's another, nugget to catch. If you have an area where you have responsibility and you have an outage or you have something, you need to be the first one to get in front of it and to own the messaging. Because if you allow somebody else to own the messaging they will turn it around into something that you don't want it to be.

So full transparency. Right? We would present our numbers on a monthly basis. And what it started to do is, interestingly enough, it started to build a brand for us. And these guys always keep everything Who are these guys?

That's right. You know what, really honestly Terry, it wasn't until then that some of those other higher ranking officials in our organization really started talking to us. Right? This is like, okay, well, are these guys? Again, those messages started to speak in other rooms that we couldn't be in.

And then I remember one day looking at a report and it was, what did they call it? It was basically financial summary. So it was the financial, it was the balance sheet, income statement, things of that nature. And I remember talking to the controller at the time saying, hey, you think it's possible I can somehow tie the infrastructure uptime to the revenue that was created? Because if it goes down, we can't create revenue.

He said, absolutely you can. And he started showing me some things. And then to Terry's point, that's when we started to put these numbers together to say, because of this x and y, you were able to get z. Which built a whole another level of value to the organization. And then articulating that back into our strategic plan to do this and to do that, started to show the level of awareness that we had on how the business runs instead of just what we do.

That opens doors because people start to notice you to say, okay man, they really understand how the business runs. And I suggest to everybody, spend some time getting in other groups to understand what they do so that number one, you figure out how you can help them. And then number two, you figure out how what they do produces revenue for the organization. Then you will see some insights. I heard somebody told me today, and I love I love what he said.

He said that, strategic plans are great, but, they be they no. He said strategic plans are good, but they become great when you add good technology to them. Right? So you use technology to enable the business. But how are you going to enable the business if you don't know exactly what it is that they want?

You have to spend time with them. Right?

Totally, totally on point. Totally, totally on point. Thank you for being with us today on Leadership Sovereignty. Stay connected with us on X formerly known as Twitter, and on Instagram by searching for Leadership Sovereignty. And just like this podcast, let's all collectively grow as we go.

God bless.