Mark: Today on PowerTips Unscripted. We talked to Kathy O’Brien, a retired executive with over 25 years of experience in business growth strategies. We hear every mother’s advantage often referred to the J curve, which, if you can picture a lowercase j, essentially means that when you apply change principles to your business, the effect can initially worsen your status before skyrocketing your success.

Mark: Kathy breaks this process down into four stages forming, storming, norming, and performing. If you want to build and grow your company, you’re not going to want to miss this.

Mark: Number. 60% of the time, it works. Every time.

Kathy: What are you people? You’re all on top.

Victoria: Hi, I’m Victoria Downing and welcome to PowerTips Unscripted where we talk about tips, tactics and techniques to help you build a strong, profitable remodeling company. And I’m here with my co-host, Mark Harari. Tadeo, how are you doing over there?

Mark: Mark? I’m well. And yourself?

Victoria: Good. You know, you and I have had so many discussions about how challenging managing is, right?

Mark: I am. I’m very bad at it.

Victoria: I think I’m pretty bad at it, too. And that’s why we’re always learning. And we’re. I was reading and we’re listening to stuff and trying our best to figure it out. So, you know, one of our roundtable members was really lucky to find this particular business consultant to help him with his company, and it’s paying off in spades.

Victoria: Yeah, well.

Mark: Better lucky than good.

Victoria: Yes. So shall we dive in?

Mark: We shall.

Victoria: All right. Kathy O’Brien was the founding CEO of the Saint Louis Alzheimer’s Association for over 25 years, and for several years after that, served as senior vice president of the national office in Chicago. She received numerous awards and recognitions for her work. Kathy initially got involved with Stone as a client, and she was just really impressed with Marc’s passion and commitment to quality work.

Victoria: So she has since been working directly with Mark to help him develop systems and processes, determine annual goals and individual employee performance indicators. She helped him hire to get the right people on the bus, and she’s been a big assist in managing fast growth over the last four years. Welcome to our podcast, Kathy.

Kathy: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. And I’ve been very impressed with Remodelers, advantage.

Victoria: Well, thank you very much. It was great having you at the jumpstart. You know, I think that our members who find people like you, whether they’re general managers, whether they’re mentors, or whether they’re like you, a former client, I really lucky when they can bring that expertise into their small business.

Kathy: Lots of gray hairs and bumps and bruises. But Victoria.

Victoria: Well it’s great. So I want to talk a little bit about the positive growth and in, in difficult situations and being a leader, a strong leader in a challenging time. So Mark referred to the four stages, of, of change the force stages of development. And could you explain them and how they apply to the remodeling industry?

Kathy: Well, this theory was introduced in the 1960s, and it’s actually a very principled tenant of organizational development and, positive growth. And also for personal development. So the four stages are forming Stormin Norman and performing. And you will go through these stages, whether it’s in a personal relationship or in a business relationship or a client relationship that you may have, or on the job site.

Victoria: So explain each one of those. What are those words mean?

Kathy: Forming is when you get are getting to know the person or the organization, what the situation is on the job site. So it may be like, an orientation process where the person that’s all the people are, you know, kind of polite and are behaving kind of independently and kind of getting to know one another and just kind of starting to get to know what might be some of the gold.

Victoria: Now, is that the.

Kathy: Case actually, gradually, as the group continues to form or the relationship continues to build, they’ll gain trust with one another and start to voice their opinions. And that’s when you start to have the stage of storming. And storming is really when there’s a conflict or a differences of opinion on how to do something, and people will disagree on how a task should be done or how they want to approach something.

Kathy: So it starts to get very uncomfortable when conflict at that point in time, and eventually people will. So differences may resolve. and I emphasize may and cooperation emerges. And then there’s common goals and directions. And we call that stage norming. And then the final stage is when people are performing, working to provide and working toward a common goal, a common level of success.

Kathy: and they’re very involved in looking forward and to the growth of the organization or the business.

Victoria: So these that these stages, apply to any sort of business?

Kathy: Yes, yes. Now, let me just give you a couple of metaphors that will probably relate to both of you and to your listeners. think of a dating relationship that you might have. It’s a good metaphor where you’re getting to know the person, and then as you get to know the person, some conflict or differences of opinion may develop.

Kathy: There’s a little storming period. Sometimes of that time you will part one another and then the relationship will end. If not, you’ll resolve to work together to try to get through those differences. And that would be your norming stage. And then once you’ve worked through the differences and you have your common goals, then you’re working toward performing. And that can be translated to, for example, on a job site, in the remodeling industry, when you’re getting to know the client and what the client may desire, in the work order or in the remodel, and then establishing how that’s going to get done, and then looking with the different people that are on the

Kathy: job, going through the stages of developing that, process.

Victoria: So besides the specific job related stages, what about the company as a whole? You’ve been working with Mark now for about four years. What are how can you give us some examples of how you saw these stages manifest themselves through the growth of his organization?

Kathy: Yes. one of the, the basic ways that you will see this is actually as you bring on new employees as you continue to grow and you may be adding additional carpenters, laborers, vendors, clients, whatever, you’re going to naturally go through these stages. So just take an employee, for example. You have go through that process where the person is just getting to know the company.

Kathy: So it’s kind of that they like stage of the honeymoon. And then once they get a little bit more comfortable, they’ll start to express their opinions. And then later on you’ll start to see that person begin to perform at a level that would be satisfactory to you or the company. And many times what we find or what we have found with five stone.

Kathy: And the other experiences that I’ve had, in my career is that this process is continuous and ongoing. So every time you introduce a new person to the company, add a new employee, as you would in a very fast growth stage, you’ll see people revert back to that storming stage or revert back to that forming stage.

Victoria: So let’s do one of these stages last longer than the others.

Kathy: It really depends on what the situation is. Victoria many times the stages may overlap. sometimes you can get caught in one stage. A lot of companies and people will get caught in the storming stage where there’s a lot of differences and they’re not very comfortable in resolving conflict. And I know that you are a big proponent of Disc, and that’s where the Disc tool can be very handy, because you can begin to understand, how different people relate to a situation or different people see a situation.

Kathy: And I’ll just give you one very concrete example that we had. We hired our lead carpenter project, production manager, if you will, and he took over the job site and was working with one of our very trusted long term subcontractors. And this particular man, I have great respect for him. He’s very direct. This needs to get done.

Kathy: Just needs to get done. Go do it this way. And that was really a huge difference for how he had been, the relationship he had had previously with five stone, and with other people in the company. So there was a definitely a storming period. the subcontractor actually walked off the job, called his superiors and said, this isn’t going to work.

Kathy: And so then, you know, it got resolved. then our CEO went back to the to our employee, our lead carpenter and said, look, this isn’t how we’re going to handle our substances now. We’re going to work with this. but it was a very clear example of storming. And we’ve used that example in our staff meetings to kind of illustrate to people how that can happen.

Kathy: Just by differences of personality style and differences of how people approach a job.

Mark: Kathy, the storming stage is is essentially the the bottom part of the J and RJ curve where where things kind of look like they’re going downhill right?

Kathy: Exactly. Yes. Exactly. As you start to go downhill and you kind bottom, the bottom and what you think is the bottom, and then you begin to ascend into the norming and then performing.

Mark: Right.

Kathy: So how this will happen every time you develop or introduce a new process improvement or a new system into your company, you’ll see that the J curve will go through just as it does with financials. You’ll see that in lots of different, process improvement.

Mark: Right. So, so and one of the biggest things our newest roundtables, members, have to overcome is, is that storming period. Because they come in, they’re looking to to improve. They know they have problems and they join us and they join the roundtables community. And then it seems like they go to their meeting and they get all this feedback, and everything seems to start getting worse.

Mark: And and how do you whether it’s this J curve or a storming phase, do you other than personal fortitude, do you have anything that you can help people to get through that phase? It’s the most difficult as far as I’m concerned.

Kathy: there’s no question that the storming stage is difficult and it’s very uncomfortable. And I think one of the things that we’ve tried to emphasize is it’s normal. And if you can normalize this as the process of developing a relationship or, you know, having a new process or a new improvement or, you know, the J curve, that that’s just the normal part of growth.

Kathy: So I think helping people normalize it and see that as you’re going to go through a downturn before you start to head up in a positive direction.

Victoria: Are there other like really practical things like holding specific types of meetings or setting certain goals or anything like that that would help you move from that forming to, to get to the norming and performing well.

Kathy: Victoria, I don’t think there’s any question about that. The leadership, particularly the CEO of the company, has enormous role and influence on the process, whether it’s having weekly meetings or monthly meetings, how he or she, helps kind of determine the goals and the mission of the organization. The core values that set the stage for how people are going to deal with challenging times and the difficult times, i.e. the storming times.

Kathy: And so setting that culture up, it’s okay to disagree. People can do things differently, and we’ll work through this and resolve. It helps people feel more comfortable and normalize the situation so that they can move forward in a positive way.

Victoria: So if you’re in some of the things you were helping Mark with, we mentioned earlier, are determining annual goals and individual employee performance indicators, I would think that that would be a major key element in getting through the storming and holding new people accountable to their agreed upon role and deliverables and so on. Is that true?

Kathy: yes. And it actually, I mean, it clearly it starts with the CEO and the other leaders in the company of making sure that everybody is clear about what the goals are, what the timeline is, what the deliverables are, and then translating those into, well, what does that mean to me when I’m off on the job site? and that’s one thing that we’ve tried to work very clearly with and closely with is to say, take those what may be lofty goals to someone like, oh yeah, right, we’re going to move forward.

Kathy: you know, whatever it might be, dollar figure. And then how it actually what it means day to day on the job site for the carpenter, the labor whoever, whoever it may be.

Victoria: Now, I know you really are relatively new to the remodeling industry, even though you’ve got many, many years of organizational development under your belt. Is there anything that you think is probably pretty common? a common flaw in the, in the the tools that a small business owner Remodeler has at their disposal. I mean, where do you think that a lot of these folks probably should be focusing their energy to move through these stages and get to what I’m assuming is the most desirable performing?

Kathy: Well, I think not getting stuck in that storming stage. And to understand that it’s a normal stage of organizational growth. and working with people and that you will revert back to that stage, as you develop a new process or a new improvement, or a new financial system, introduce a new sub or a new vendor.

Kathy: you know, every time you meet a new client to have a new project, you’re going to go through those stages. And so it’s very important that people just understand, take a step back and not become emotionally involved in that and say, all right, this is just part of getting through the positive growth stages.

Mark: I’m curious, Kathy, how do.

Victoria: You.

Mark: How do you avoid getting into a situation where you’re telling yourself a story, though, because there’s there’s the storming stage and things are going bad, but at some point they need to start getting better. So how do you know when you know what we’re still thinking? Like how that that balance, I think, is the thing that scares most.

Mark: It’s well, okay, this is normal. But when does it stop being normal?

Kathy: I think it stops being normal when you are not able to move forward. And when those differences continue over and over and over again, and then at some point you may have to like, let’s say as an employee and you have a problematic employee, you may have to part company with that person. or if that person is not able to perform or you’re not able to agree on that, it’s time to say, all right, this isn’t working.

Kathy: and sometimes it’s a matter of getting everybody around the table and say, all right, what do we need to do to get this resolved? in a positive direction, allowing people to have that kind of conflict and to recognize that that’s different.

Mark: So it seems like there’s a combination of a little bit of gut and, outside support on this. Like, you shouldn’t be alone on an island on this. You should have outside opinions and that type of thing.

Kathy: I think there’s no doubt that in growing an organization, it’s really about the people that are around the table. So I think it starts with, if you have the right people on the bus, so to speak, using it, and, and, and making sure that those people and whoever is the leader of those people are on the same page and going in the same direction.

Kathy:

Victoria: What do you do if you find yourself in an organization where conflict, well, being verbally encouraged doesn’t really happen?

Kathy: Well, I think many times that we’ll start with the CEO and start with the whoever is the leader of that particular project, of allowing it to happen or to allowing that conflict is normal. and conflict can occur. And then we’re going to going to get through this.

Victoria: So if the conflict I mean, so here’s an example. Let’s say you’re in a meeting and somebody gets brought up, you’re in a meeting with five other people. It’s your leadership team. Something gets brought up by one of the employees. It sounds like it might be an okay idea, but you’re not necessarily totally brought in. But you want to give them a chance to show their stuff so you don’t speak up and then nobody else speaks up.

Victoria: And then afterwards you hear, oh, well, I didn’t like that idea anyway.

Kathy: Well, I think maybe it’s time for a little bit of a culture change. I think it’s very important that people have the opportunity to have really honest dialog with one another. And I think removing the personality piece of it and the emotional piece of it to say, but, you know, and but talking about it more from a third party perspective, a little bit distance from it, can help people with those different stages or different options.

Kathy: on the table, I think it’s important for people to understand there’s more than one way to more than one option, how to resolve a different.

Victoria: If there was a CEO that wanted to improve his or her leadership slash development slash, managerial skills, what do you think would be one of the most valuable things that person could do?

Kathy: I think having conversations with other leaders that they respect to networking with you as you have with the round table, remodelers advantage, having the opportunity to learn from others. I think one of the key, hallmarks of a good leader is being a good learner. and learning from others, talking with others, I think others how they’ve gone gotten through different stages, for example, and what would might be the key ingredient that they may need at a particular growth step.

Victoria: Okay. All right. Great. Thank you.

Kathy: That makes sense. Yeah.

Mark: Kathy, I’m pretty sure the up until this point the show has been forming, but we’re about to get into the storming phase. Are you ready? Are you ready for the lightning round?

Kathy: I don’t know if I am. I’m not.

Mark: And now here’s the remodelers advantage. Lightning round.

Kathy: It’s a dry.

Mark: Okay. All right. We’re going to put 60s on the clock. Here we go. What’s your favorite business book and why?

Kathy: I think I would say three of them, actually, if that’s all right. I like some habits of effective people. Stephen Covey, a Tom Collins good is great. And one that really has resonated with me. Phillip, not probably very well known is, leadership challenges, how to get, extraordinary things out of ordinary people.

Mark: So now that you’re retired, what are you doing with all your free time?

Kathy: other than volunteering and mentoring with, supporting with, Mark and Firestone? I like where I’m. I’m in a couple of book clubs. I do a lot of hobbies, and I have a place at Lake Okoboji that I, wander off to every summer for many, many wonderful day.

Mark: What are you not very good at?

Kathy: anything technical and anything on the computer.

Mark: Your room, your desk or your car? Which would you clean first?

Kathy: my room. Definitely.

Mark: What’s your favorite game show?

Kathy: I’m not sure if I have a favorite game show. What I do best here is, puzzle and stuff like that, so that might be done.

Mark: So what’s your favorite movie of all time?

Kathy: I think unbroken, because of the resilience of The Shawshank.

Victoria: Well, Kathy, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. You know, we, rarely have that sort of experience available to us as a small business owner. So Mark’s a lucky dog to have you to be able to bounce ideas off of. And I’m sure that the the massive amount of experience you’ve had over all those years has been a tremendous help to him while he’s in this growth stage.

Victoria: So that’s awesome. Now, I want you to share with that our listening audience your five words of wisdom and why they resonate with you.

Kathy: I think the importance of the CEO.

Victoria: Okay. And why is that?

Kathy: the CEO sets the tone for the culture and the mission and core values.

Victoria: Okay. All right. Great. So that then drives everything else, right?

Kathy: Absolutely. Everything falls behind the mission core values. And, the stated goal.

Mark: All right.

Victoria: Great. Good stuff. Thank you so much, Kathy. We very much appreciate it.

Mark: Thanks, Kathy.

Kathy: Well, I hope it was I hope it met your expectations.

Victoria: Certainly. Yes. It’s very good. It was great. Yeah. Thank you. You know, I think that the more that our members and other small business owners out there realize that these are stages to expect them and that they are normal would be a big help.

Mark: Storming stage is the the freak out stage, right? It’s like, okay, you know what? We’ve been doing it this way forever. But everybody’s telling us to change and you change and suddenly this is falling off. This is getting worse. The sales are dropping. Or the lead stop coming in or what? Or what have you. And it’s perfectly natural.

Mark: And the other thing to remember is this isn’t just like as far as it goes to with our community. It’s not just when you first join. This can happen ten years after you’ve joined the community, because ten years from joining somebody is going to give you some input and you’re going to go and implement it. And then suddenly, here’s that storming phase, that bottom dip in the J and it’s perfectly natural.

Mark: I’m going to start to freak out. I’m going to panic is, oh, I don’t know if this was the right choice. I don’t know if we should have done this. We should have just stayed the way it was. It’s it’s so hard. That’s the hardest part, I think, for any growth plan is getting through the storming phase.

Victoria: But yet we have seen it happen so many times and we can see that when people push through that, whether it’s adding a new sales person or a sales team or releasing the production management role from the, you know, movie from the owner.

Mark: We’ve experienced it. Yeah, we just went through a storming phase last year, 2019. We had to make some changes. We had we just we hit a wall in capacity and how things were happening. We had this shift. Yeah. And it was painful.

Victoria: It was painful and it hit us and every angle.

Mark: It was hard. I mean, it’s a culture process. I know the whole thing. But, you know, I think we you come out of the other side of it better.

Victoria: And we knew that it was going to happen and we expected it, but it wasn’t easy.

Mark: But just knowing it doesn’t help, right?

Victoria: No it doesn’t.

Mark: You can tell me all day it’s going to get worse, but it’s not going to feel good while I’m going through it.

Victoria: So a lot of these business owners have choices. They can stay where they are with them. You know, the medium level of performance, right? Or they can challenge themselves, go through a period of real discomfort, but then emerge so much stronger on the other side.

Mark: Absolutely. It’s totally worth it. And we speak from experience. We know the pain it feels because we had to go through it and you know, and we’ll have to go through it again as well. You if you’re listening out there and your intention is to grow. So I think it was a powerful episode. It was a great message.

Mark: And it’s something that I think takes more than just 20 minutes of listening to a podcast to get around. You just got to really, really commit to it. But what comes out of the back end on it is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Victoria: Are you going to put some of these books, the links to the books on the show notes?

Mark: Of course. I think we usually do. If we don’t, I’ll have to go back to a lot of them.

Victoria: But I think you probably do do. All right. Great. So I want to get that leadership challenges book. I think I actually might have it on my bookshelf.

Mark: Yeah, dear I think after we’re done here, let’s go and take a look. There you go. I’ll check it out. Yeah, that was good. All right. Well, hey, thank you, Kathy, so much for taking the time out of your busy retirement and talking to us. And, we want to thank you, as always, for listening week in and week out.

Mark: I am Mark Harari.

Victoria: And I’m Victoria Downing. See you next week.