Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Welcome everyone. Today we’re meeting with a man who spans the distance across academia and industry, helping teams perform. their best.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): A professor at Idaho State University and expert workplace consultant. Let’s welcome Rob Leon. Thanks for joining us today.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): I’m excited to be here with you, too.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Dr. Rob Leon is a transformational leader in workplace culture, leadership innovation, and performance excellence. With over 20 years of groundbreaking work, he’s more than a professor or consultant. He’s visionary in reshaping how organizations thrive and how leaders inspire. As co-founder of Black River Performance Management and a dynamic professor at ID Idaho State University, Rob merges cutting edge research with actionable game changing strategies that deliver extraordinary results. Rob Leon is also the architect of workplaces that empower, inspire, and drive unparalleled achievement.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Super cool and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I love how you guys have a husband and wife team. That’s what we have as well. So, we can totally relate to that. but we’d love to hear how you balance consulting with academia.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Yeah. …

 

Rob Lion (Guest): great question. So, it’s become actually quite easy in the sense of what I talk about with my students is a nice reflection of what we’re doing with organizations, And so there’s this and it goes vice versa both ways, So we stick close to theory, best practices in the classroom and helping them embrace and understand those things. So my students I have a graduate program and an undergraduate program I teach in and they’re all seasoned professionals looking to do some sort of advancement into more of a leadership type of role.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And so what’s really fun about it is that we’ll use the research and the textbook stuff, but we’re always coming back to how that actually translates to practice in their world.  And so I kind of hold their feet to the fire in the sense of we’re going to use methods and models that are informed by research and so that they’re not cutting corners and just kind of going with their gut or going with what they think is the solution to be very disciplined in the process and then by the end I hope that they experience and recognize really how that made a shift in terms of how they started the problem process and then get

 

Rob Lion (Guest): to the end. So for example, every project in my classes is based on real world experiences. It’s either something I’m bringing in and they’re running with or in a number of the classes they get to choose their topic. They vet it with me and it’s a real live topic going on in their organization or with their own clients. And so then we really go through the process. I’m proud to say that we’re a kind of context agnostic to say the least. that it doesn’t matter because our students come from nonprofits, higher education, you name it. But what we’re doing is we’re really drilling down on those models and those frameworks and having them use them in their context so it means the most to them.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And what is really neat getting back to your question is that this is not too different from what we do with our clients. So instead of using academic models that are appearing in journals and textbooks, we’ve actually taken the science and built them out in a way that we think are much more palatable to industry and so that we could help them demystify and simplify this leadership process.  And so every once in a while towards the end of the semester, let’s just say my motivation class that’s going to start next semester, we’ll go through the science. We’ll go through the frameworks that are out there. And then at the end, as we’re wrapping up the semester, I share my pieces of what we’ve built for our clients. so that it presents that same information in a much more visually pleasing way as well as actionable. Right?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): So often these academic papers aren’t really published with action in mind. they’re to inform it eventually, but the publishing standards require really basic black and white not real consumer friendly graphics. And so we try to take it that one step further and do that with our clients. And then the crossover is really nice. and then the benefit is that the students also get to hear firsthand what’s going on in the industry in the world that I live in,…

 

Rob Lion (Guest): the world I work in and sometimes job opportunities are coming out of this for them or special projects or new connections for them. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): love that.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Honestly, I feel like both worlds can dramatically benefit each other where there’s scholarly research happening to really drill down to principles in the workplace that are affecting profits and behaviors.  But then on the application side in industry, helping people actually improve their businesses and make things better for people, I think is really cool. So before we jump into this next question, I just have to shout out for everyone out there. Rob is up in Pocutello, so if anybody’s been up there, it’s a super fun area.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We were just talking before the call about Simplot and running and being able to get out in the mountains. If you’ve ever been up in that area, it’s a beautiful area and yeah, we’re just a little bit a couple hours south of Rob. So, it’s kind of fun to connect on being up in the Mountain West. But we’re this next question, Rob. So, we want to dive into the performance workplace topic.  What have you seen as the biggest contributor to poor performance in the workplace?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Thank you.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Gosh, there’s two different aspects to that that I’d like to approach. One is just this general concept that we’re pushing leaders out. We’re promoting we’re hiring people into leadership roles and the organizations are not preparing them with any frameworks or…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Awesome.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): methodologies to be leaders, And we’ve all seen this.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): We’ve seen people they’re an expert at their craft, whether it’s building widgets, selling, what have you, and they seem like for whatever reason, a good natural promotion to go into that leadership role. And as we know, it’s interesting, there’s kind of this paradoxical view that we prepare people to go through college or higher education or some sort of level of education apprenticeship to learn their craft but we don’t have that same sort of standard when it comes to promoting them into leadership roles right and so I think one of the biggest performance related issues is we just don’t know what we don’t know and that’s not because anyone’s bad or negative

 

Rob Lion (Guest): We’re all human, so we all have our ups and our downs, and we all have our moments, right? But when we’re working with clients, we’re just seeing so many people with good hearts wanting to do better, but not necessarily knowing where to start, And what we know is if we look at the research as it relates to teaching or as it relates to leading, we often build our practices off of what we’ve experienced in the past, right or wrong, good or better, Good or and so I think that’s one of the biggest limiting factors that relates to performance is that we don’t know. And that goes just down to us even just as a regular line employee doing their job. If people don’t give us feedback, how do we make improvements? Right? So that’s the one factor.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): The other factor to this in my opinion is and we’re going to talk about the framework in a moment and this plays right into that is there’s a certain level of attribution error that occurs in with many people and what I’m referring to here is that people attribute behavior in others to things that are not necessarily accurate or true. Right? when I talk about motivation with clients, or we’ll do seminars or whatever, we talk about what motivates you and they’re often coming up with these really beautiful things like, making a difference in people’s lives, having something to show at the end of the day, like these real true intrinsic concepts, And then I’ll take a pause and I’ll say, “So, What about your employees? What motivates them?”

 

Rob Lion (Guest): and this disconnect that occurs with many people and they go from these very honorable very beautiful concepts of intrinsic motivation to they’re motivated by pay or the benefits or time off or the rewards. and that’s what an attribution error is, right? It’s this concept that I’m not necessarily correctly attributing an outcome to the source or the variable.  And so I think that’s one of the biggest challenges we face. And we all do this at time, we assume other people might be lazy or not motivated, but we don’t necessarily truly understand at a deep enough le level of what’s contributing to those things, And so I would put those two things together, So overall lack of understanding of some sort of leadership practice framework, And there’s no shortage out there. So you can see how this could be overwhelming, right?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): But if everyone in your office read a different book, that wouldn’t really help either because they’d all be subscribing to different approaches, So, we need to get people centralized and unified in an approach and buy into it and move forward.  And then as we work through this, the goal is to raise self-awareness and some levels of education so those attribution errors start to minimize so that they can begin to better and more successfully diagnose what are those contributing factors that are leading to those performance deficiencies.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So, it seems like it comes on both ends where you have the leader who maybe they’ve got the vision…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): because they have more of that connection to higher up, but it’s probably two things. It’s probably they’re not communicating or teaching that to their team or they don’t know what actually motivates their team, right?  They’re not having those communications that are two-way.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Yeah. Yeah.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And if you don’t even know how to approach that, how do you figure it if you never saw someone ride a bike and you were raised in a cave and you never saw a bicycle and someone gave you a bicycle, how you wouldn’t necessarily know how to put it to use, you might sit on it upside down.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): So, it’s this concept that we don’t know. and right to your point, there’s so many different variables at so many different levels and some of them are even unique to the individual and even unique to the individual by the moment if we start talking about emotions and how those factor into situations. So, yeah. Right on.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think you want to share that with us?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Yeah. So, we built this peak performance model and the idea here and so for the listeners that aren’t able to see the image, and we’ll post the link to the web page where the image is found, but also the video cast of this will have it on screen because Matt and Christa just shared it. It’s a pyramid and if you think about it, there’s a pyramid like a cake, right? Three layers to the cake.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): The base level to The middle level relates to the system and leadership. And then the top level is culture. And so basically what we’ve done is we’ve created this framework where we want to help people better understand why people are missing the performance marks.  And oftentimes what we see is that people once again like I said they misattribute what’s contributing to the performance issue. And so they’ll often say that someone doesn’t have the motivation to do the job well or someone doesn’t have the knowledge or the capabilities to do the job So if you take our base level of our pyramid cake, we have three factors in there and those are individual factors.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Those are knowledge, capacity, and motivation. And so what we do is we essentially test out whether or not they are proficient in those areas as it relates to the deficiency, right? And so, like I said, people often say, they just don’t know how to do the job. Here’s the challenge. When we reviewed a resume for this job, So, position descriptions have minimum qualifications.  They have experiences required right let’s take someone like a marketing person they have software requirements even right for experiences so it’s not to say that they’re more advanced in the position they have to have a higher level of knowledge but basically as we approach this for the most part knowledge isn’t a viable factor for why performance is missing because if we’ve done what we’ve supposed to do in screening them we’ve

 

Rob Lion (Guest): already determined that they have at least the starting point of knowledge for them to do that job successfully. And the idea here is that we’re trying to use a visual tool to help them troubleshoot which of these perhaps seven items are influencing this performance deficiency. And most of the time if we’re onboarding proper people properly, we are bringing them up to speed quickly so that they’re competent and that they have the knowledge for the job.  So, right off the bat, we take knowledge off the table, and that’s a big shift for people because they’re like, I thought he didn’t know how to do the job or she didn’t know how to do the job. We’ve already determined that they are actually capable of doing the job. They have the knowledge base. So, let’s go over to the capacity piece. Do they have the capabilities to do the job? Right? One of my favorite examples must be being able to lift 50 pounds, right?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): like that’s baked into so many job descriptions of this physical capability, and we determine this once again on the front end. Do they have the capability to do the job? And we’ve typically determined that. If something’s changed since they’ve been employed where they need new knowledge, then we need to be helping them with new knowledge and new capabilities. But for the most part, those two check out really quick.  The third item on the individual level is motivation. And I do spend 16 weeks talking about motivation with my students. So there’s a lot to unpack there. But this is how I approach this really quickly. I believe day one people are motivated to do the work. They’re motivated to do a good job. And they want to do a good job for a few different reasons. One, they want to feel proud of what they’ve done and they’ve accomplished, right?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): They also have a little bit of social desire there that they want their family or friends or people important in their life to know that they’ve done a good job or they’re doing a good job. So they are still motivated. And the third factor is that they want to impress or make sure that they’re hiring a person like their supervisor. So if Matt hired me, I really have a lot of social internal pressure that I want to do a good job.  So Matt is pleased with this decision and that he keeps me on board. So there’s a lot going in there. So what we do is often we’ll troubleshoot each of these with clients to help them work through it. But generally speaking what we’re seeing there most performance deficiencies are not tied to the person level that they’re actually tied to that middle level of that cake, the middle of our pyramid. and those are the system and organizational factors.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And our three system factors that we’ve identified Do they have the right tools to do the job correctly? Do they have the correct information to do the job correctly? And accountability. Are they receiving the right type of accountability measures, feedback, things like that to help them make corrective action? And this is where we really see things start to fall apart in organizations.  This is usually where the deficiencies are. This comes right back to our kickoff conversation about leaders and what leaders are missing in terms of behaviors, practices or skills that are contributing to performance issues in the workplace. Let’s start with accountability right off the bat. This is the biggest factor I see in organizations that I work with and I don’t work with.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): accountability is huge that people are not good at having difficult conversations. Would you agree? It sucks, right? It’s tough. you don’t want and all for honorable reasons, you’re trying to maintain the relationship. You don’t want them to think less of all these different things. And then sometimes your ego sneaks in there saying, “Whoa, I don’t want to.” the ego gets in the way in the sense of I don’t want to meddle with this or I don’t want them to think less of me so we have to manage that differently but my point is that is one of the biggest factors and that’s what we see time and time again in organizations is that the leaders are not holding people adequately accountable and not having routine levels of feedback. So when we work with our clients we really promote regular one-on-one sessions as frequently as we can.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): We try to protect the time so that the person that’s the report gets time to drive that meeting in terms of things they want to talk about and then also we also structure feedback that goes both ways and we call them drips.  So the regular drips of feedback from the supervisor to the report and then every time we have a one-on-one, the report has an opportunity to provide the supervisor feedback, which as we know doesn’t always work well because of power issues, but we work through that through some different ways, So accountability is typically the biggest issue that’s leading to poor performance in my opinion based on what we’re seeing

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And it’s factoring in huge right now in this return to work framework. And that’s a conversation for another day, but it’s one of the things that historically has complicated us so that we’re at this problem now with this return to work and it’s going to continue to complicate things. So the other two factors at the leader level, information and a very basic example for tools.  Let’s just say we have a seamstress operation that we’re making quilts, and so we want to make sure that our employees have all the right tools to make the quilts. So we bought scissors, we have textiles, we have all these different things, what we find out is that two people on our team of 20 are not hitting the performance quotas. And if you’re not good at having accountability conversations, you’re going to miss out some information here.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): But what we often see in organizations is that we have this all or none approach, 80% of our team on point, is doing the right job, 20%’s missing out, And so, if we don’t have these conversations and investigate into this, we’ll never know what’s really contributing to this,  How many times have we seen that organizations for even say 20% issues say what let’s have a meeting and let’s retrain all of you in this stuff so that you all are on the same page and understand how to do this correctly. This is throwing good money at bad solutions. Retraining when there’s no need to retrain. Instead we have a conversation and figure out what’s going on.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): If we would have slowed down and had a conversation with those people that were not meeting the quota, what we might learn is that our supply of scissors were all right-handed scissors and they were lefties. And the reason why they’re slower is because the tool does not fit the task for them. And so tools are a broad word. We get into design.  and we’ve done some kitchen design stuff with respect to staff and ergonomics and flow and things like that to really work through these challenges. So the last factor at that leader system level is information and that basically refers to do I know what I’m supposed to be doing, So is the leader providing information? Is the organization providing information to the person that defines the scope of their job? Right?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And I remember when I started consulting many years ago, we were still working with organizations that didn’t have formal job descriptions, so there’s no wonder people didn’t necessarily know the ins and the outs of their roles or what the expectations look like or what the targets look like, right? So, as we think about all these things, we’re whittling out and ruling out, does the employee have the knowledge to do the job Yep, they do. Do they have the capacity?  Yep, they do. Do they have the motivation? That’s a long conversation in a different model, but yes, let’s make that assumption. They have that. So, do they have the tools? They have the tools. Or maybe they don’t have the tools. Maybe we’re not preventatively maintaining our stuff well enough that our tools are breaking down, right? There’s all these different things that are unique to each industry.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Do they have the information to do their job correctly, consistently? And you’d be surprised that people don’t, right? and sometimes we’re guilty of wishing people would just read our mind as opposed to being clear and explicit with things, but if we don’t know, we don’t know. So if we’ve never really thought about that, how would we change our behavior? And then the last item there is accountability, So are we holding people accountable consistently?  Because what we do know is that if I don’t hold people accountable, let’s just say I bring all the staff in for a meeting and there’s one person that’s routinely late to work. And I say just a reminder to everyone, work starts at 9:30. Have you ever been in one of those meetings? I’m sure you have because I think we’ve all been in those meetings, right? Poor tactic. We’re trying to address everybody.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And so what happens is the person that needs to have that honest conversation is probably sitting there going, “I wonder who that poor loser is that can’t,” you know what I mean? they’re not getting the message because no one stopped to pause and have that conversation with them to say, “Look, this is a problem. We need to change this behavior or is there something I need to know about what’s going on in your life so we at least understand what’s going on?” So anyways, those are those six factors, organization and individual.  Then the top of our pyramid which is actually a mountain is culture. So think snow cap right? And what happens with snow caps? They melt. And so the culture trickles down into all these other aspects and culture will buy us grace and help us come through difficult situations or culture will just amplify and make things worse. Right?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): So if you have a supportive culture, if I’m Christa’s supervisor and she knows I have her back when I have that accountability conversation, it’s going to sting. It always does, but she’s like, what, I really trust and value Rob’s honesty and feedback and I want to do better. So, I know we have that. And so that’s what culture does. It protects you. It’s kind of the grease to the gears of the organization.  But if you don’t have that respect, right, if you don’t have psychological safety, if you don’t have good relations, it just makes all of those things that much more difficult. And then when we think about accountability conversations, culture always makes accountability, positive ideal culture in the right direction always makes accountability conversations or any difficult conversation that much easier. And so that’s why we’re working with all of our clients on culture.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): They get integration with the peak performance model. They get integration with a bunch of our different models to turn to as tools to help troubleshoot what they’re seeing and what’s contributing to that. Because if you’ve ever done a consultation where you do a needs analysis, investigation or deep dive, what you learn quickly is that often the people that hire you to do that are not seeing what’s really contributing to this, right? They’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.  They don’t necessarily know what’s going down under the surface of the water because they’re just too close to it.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And so that’s where we try to bring these tools in to help them be a little bit more disciplined just as we do it in the classroom troubleshooting and working through these things to start to identify what the contributing factors are. Thanks.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): There’s a lot to gain from this model, Rob. And a couple thoughts that I’ve had that lower level of in talking about the individual knowledge, capacity, motivation, that’s what the company is receiving from that person they’re hiring. And you’re looking at an employer relationship. So, there’s those two core parties involved. Right? This year, they talk about their employer value proposition, what they’re going to give that individual in exchange for the value that the employee brings to the table to help the company move forward. But the employer is not typically contractually obligated to provide tools or information or accountability.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): talking about that second tier. However, if they’re not leveraging the investment in the talent from that individual. And so what that does is it ends in dissatisfaction for the individual where now they’re exiting the company or…

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Yep.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): they’re quite quitting and they’re not producing that high level of value that the company hoped to receive from that hired team member and the employer is left to go find another person all over again.  And so there’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of cost with not having tools, information, and accountability systems in place to foster that positive performance. And I think you definitely hit it on the head the way that people interact, those social norms within an organization, it trickles down to the way that teams look at is this tool broken? Can we make it better? Is there a better way to disseminate information?

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): do we like the accountability models? There’s more openness when there’s a positive culture in everyone working together to move things forward but those are just a few thoughts I think it’s a great way to look at …

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): how performance management can be moved forward both at the individual conversation level and the team level as you talked about

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Thanks. I appreciate it.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): It’s not a fail safe or it doesn’t capture everything, But it does give us a starting point in terms of how we are going to work through these issues. And then especially from a coaching advising role when I’m working with leaders, it gives me language to go back to in terms of let’s talk about knowledge. You think it’s knowledge. I’m curious. Tell me what you think and how that factors in and so it helps us be on the same page which I think most organizations are missing…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Excellent. Yeah.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): because there’s not a common language necessarily.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): there’s not an understanding about personality and dynamics and communication preferences and that’s why when we work with groups we start with those things so that people have some foundational pieces to build on and then it helps strengthen their capacity in terms of knowing others and connecting with others so that we eventually do these great things with the culture that we aspire to do because we all want to work in great environments even the most crummy leaders want to work in great environments  It’s just we’re different and how we see the world’s different and stressors coming down on us whether it’s home or work and any mix of that just complicates the work process right

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): No, no, it definitely does.  And it can be very complex, but it doesn’t have to be if we’re willing to have those open conversations and just figure out what needs to be improved and move forward together. So, as we kind of wrap up here, what would you recommend for someone listening? You’ve got a people leader. Where do they get started?  Maybe they feel a little bit scattered with evaluating their current landscape for performance management. Where do you start?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): for this framework, start using any tools to better understand your people, So, it comes back to connections with your people. Once again, that cultural grease that’s going to improve the quality of those interactions with people, So, whether you’re using assessments like disk, driving forces, MBTI, Hogan tools, you name it, talent smart, all these different tools out there, There’s so many great tools. pick something, integrate it into your system, and use it as a framework and then you get to these other things later like the pieces on motivation, the pieces on performance, the pieces on engagement, the pieces on strategy, on succession that we offer. We got to start at a foundational level. and I think that’s where a lot of books just kind of get it wrong.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): And it’s not that the books get it wrong, it’s just people are looking to books for a solution, and they don’t start early enough in the story as to how we got to that point. And so I think do your work, ask questions, connect with people that are minded, prioritize culture, right? So when we work with people, what’s really beautiful is that when we have leaders investing in culture, the team starts to lean in. Sometimes they exit the organization because they don’t believe in the culture, which is not a bad thing. We’re getting rid of the people that are not fitting our norms and our expectations. And then when we go to hire, now we’re hiring through a lens of culture and we’re onboarding through a lens of culture, which I know most organizations don’t do well at all. It’s a huge development area, but that’s how we start to position these people to move in the right direction together as a team.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think that makes perfect sense and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): there’s so many amazing tools out there and…

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): you just need to find which one works for the size of your organization and the way that you do things. so everyone check out Black River Consulting, follow Rob Leon on LinkedIn and feel free to message him or us and provide feedback on this episode and a review as well would be great.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): No,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So anyways, thank you so much Rob Leon. We appreciate you being on our episode today and we’ll include in the show notes as well for this episode. Any final notes as we close up here, Rob?

 

Rob Lion (Guest): just as Christa mentioned, reach out on LinkedIn. I love to have conversations. All these podcasts that I’ve started to do are coming out and this one today is on peak performance. I have motivation.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): So, even to your point, Matt, how do you get started? Just find some of the recordings, right? So, as you mentioned, last name is Leon, but it’s spelled like lion, l i n. So, it might be hard to find me on LinkedIn. So, Rob Rio N on LinkedIn. And then our company, Black River Performance Management website is Black River, the letter P for performance, the letter M for management.com. And man, I hope we kind of all are drinking the same Kool-Aid, right? We totally believe in culture and we want to invite more people into this conversation. So don’t hesitate to reach out and ask questions and get to know us because we love sharing.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): listening today. We’ll see you guys.

 

Rob Lion (Guest): Thanks for the opportunity. See you.