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1% Better Jaime Taets – Quick Links

Learn more about Keystone Group International
Read Jaime’s full Speaker Bio
Learn more about Jaime’s book The Culture Climb
Connect with Jaime Taets on LinkedIn
Connect with Craig Thielen on LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

• Personal Growth through Challenges: Jaime embarked on a transformative journey by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro after experiencing a challenging year in her career. This experience taught her the importance of pushing oneself out of comfort zones to gain clarity and perspective.
• Building Positive Company Culture: In her book The Culture Climb, Taets explores the concept of positive company culture. She defines it as a place where people go home every day feeling better or more important than before. She emphasizes that culture is not just a program or solution to be implemented but requires ongoing effort and intentionality from leaders to foster trust and growth within the organization.
• Transformation Builds Trust: Trust and culture are built not during the easy times but through transformative experiences. Jaime highlighted that she developed more trust with strangers during her mountain climb than with colleagues she had worked with for many years.
• Reflective Learning: Growth occurs not only during experiences but also through reflection. Leaders should take time to reflect on their actions and projects to learn and improve continuously.
• Adapting to Change: Leaders need to embrace curiosity and continuously adapt to the changing landscape, such as incorporating AI into organizational culture – This fosters innovation and growth rather then fear or resistance. It’s essential to periodically reassess goals and ensure alignment with the evolving environment.

1% Better Jaime Taets – Transcript

[00:00:06.730] – Craig
Hi, I’m Craig Thielen and this is the 1% Better Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Jaime Taets, the Chief Vision Officer and Founder of Keystone Group International. Jaime, welcome to 1% Better.

[00:00:18.200] – Jaime
Thanks for having me, Craig.

[00:00:19.630] – Craig
Yeah, this will be fun. So as a former Trissential alumni, this will be great for us to catch up. It’s been about ten years, I think, since you worked with us and there’s been a lot changed with you and your life and a lot recently as well, so that’s going to be fun. Also, you just came out with another book, The Culture Climb, so we’ll talk about that as well.

[00:00:39.290] – Jaime
Looking forward to it.

[00:00:40.380] – Craig
Yeah. So, well, let’s start with one of your peak moments, maybe your climb to Mount Kilimanjaro, I think it’s pivotal moment in your life and so let’s start there. What sparked it and just tell us about this experience. It sounds amazing.

[00:00:55.990] – Jaime
Yeah. So it’s been almost a year, January of 2023 is when I went up the mountain. So what sparked it is an interesting story – 2022 was the hardest year for me as a leader in my entire career. And when I tell people that the business was growing, my family’s great. It wasn’t anything to do with anybody outside of me. It was decisions I made, some mistakes I made, some bad hires that I made that taught me really big lessons, but it was exhausting. And after getting through Covid owning a business, that the most stressful point it was 2022 was the most stressful point for me. And I got to about September and I just said, something has to change. Like, I don’t want 2023 to be like this. I’ve got to change, right, and evolve. And so I did my research and booked a trip, really without telling anybody. So I found a guide group. I booked a two-week trip solo to Tanzania because I’m like, I need to do something that’s going to kind of shake it up. That’s going to really help give me a different perspective. And 19,000+ feet will do that.

[00:02:02.090] – Craig
Yeah, that’s a lot. So had you ever done anything like that? I mean, have you been someone who’s done a lot of exploration, hiking? Anything close?

[00:02:11.740] – Jaime
I love to hike. so I would say 14,000 feet is probably the highest that I’d been up to that point, which is still high. It’s high, but not on a regular basis. But most trips that we go on with the kids, we’re doing some kind of hiking, but not something this extreme, right. Was a big adjustment for me – Seven days on a mountain in a tent with no running water. I’m not a camper, so that was a big adjustment and pushed me outside of my comfort zone, which, when you look at the scheme of leadership and getting better, that is what it takes sometimes, right? You got to do things that are uncomfortable instead of things that are comfortable. So I think that was probably one of the hardest things for me, is just being cold, right. Being on the rocks, right? Sleeping on the ground for seven days and then having to put that level of kind of physical endurance into every day. It teaches you a lot about who you are and how resilient you actually are when you put yourself in those situations.

[00:03:04.850] – Craig
So what did you pick that. I mean, was it you needed something to just shake everything up? Something that maybe you didn’t know that you could do, something big. You needed something like that mentally. And you just felt like, hey, why not? This Is it… any other inspiration or it just came to you?

[00:03:24.500] – Jaime
It kind of came to me. It’s been something I’ve been thinking about, but I had kind of pushed aside because it just felt so big. And it was just one of those things where if I’m going to do something, I don’t want it to be like this easy. I could have gone to Sedona on a trip and just meditated. It was like I needed something that was not going to be easy. And so once I started researching, I think it all came together that I could be safe, right? That there are guide groups that make sure your health and all of that. Once that was out of the way, it was like, okay, let’s see what I can do. And went into it very realistic because a good percentage of people don’t make it to the top because of the elevation. And there’s…

[00:04:04.900] – Craig
Even with the guides and even they just say, this is too much for me, and I’m out.

[00:04:09.520] – Jaime
The night, our summit night, which is the hardest night, you go up 5000 feet in seven hours in the dark, and it’s the worst part of the whole trip. I mean, there’s ultramarathoners that don’t make it to the top. So there comes a point where your endurance and your Athleticism actually don’t matter anymore. Your body’s ability to process oxygen.

[00:04:29.760] – Craig
Is it the mental toughness or is it that mental fortitude?

[00:04:33.750] – Jaime
There were people in my group that were super fit and felt horrible at the top. And there were people who, myself would say, they’re fit, but they’re not like mega athletic. They were fine at the top. There’s a lot of different aspects that you have to train for, but the mental piece they do say is one of the biggest pieces. Our guide, I’ll never forget, and I probably thought about it, he said it 100 times on the summit night, was he said, for the next seven hours, you are going to every minute be trading short term pain for long term pride.

[00:05:05.240] – Craig
Wow.

[00:05:05.680] – Jaime
And you just constantly, every step have to think about that.

[00:05:09.190] – Craig
The short-term pain, is it the muscles hurt because you’re going up? Or is it because you can’t breathe? Or is it because you’re cold? Or is it everything?

[00:05:17.160] – Jaime
It’s everything. So we were probably zero degrees, but with the wind, 40 miles an hour winds, so it was actually below zero wind Chill for seven hours whipping you in the face. Because you’re on the face of a mountain, there’s nothing protecting you, in the dark, right. Going steep, steep, steep. So your heart rate is up, your glucose is weird. And at that elevation, what most people, because most people, especially in the United States, have been to 14,000 feet if they’re hikers, right. They’ve been to the Rocky Mountains. And I always just say, we want a mile above any place you’ve been, right. In the United States, it’s really extreme. And most people don’t realize what it does to your body in terms of things you cannot control. Right. I mean, your digestive system, your heart rate, your brain fog, because you’re just not getting enough oxygen. And so there’s just things you have to push through. That doesn’t mean you’re sick or you’re going to die or get right. It’s just like they’re really uncomfortable and you have to be able to push through them.

[00:06:13.620] – Craig
So what did you learn from that about yourself? And then how did you take those learnings and… it’s one thing to have an experience and then go, that was amazing, and feel accomplished and learn a lot, but it’s another thing to then integrate it into your life so that it changes something a week later, a month later, a year later, that it permanently changes who you are. Talk about that a little bit.

[00:06:41.870] – Jaime
Yeah. So one of the first things that I learned, and it was really in the first couple of days, so I went by myself. So a group of strangers from all over the world, I think only one other couple was even from the United States. So it was amazing because these were people who were very global in their thinking. And I think sometimes in the Midwest, I like to think I’m global. I do a lot of global travel, right? I’ve worked for a global company. I think we get a little comfortable in our bubble. And so just seeing these people, even the first couple of days, and hearing their stories from all over the world and the things they’ve done, like, some of them had done base camp Everest. Right. Some of them had never done stuff like that, but they had traveled to 30+ countries and just learning from them and really realizing that I wasn’t surrounding myself day to day with necessarily the right people. And that’s no disrespect to anybody I’m around.

[00:07:34.000] – Craig
No, I get it.

[00:07:35.320] – Jaime
But I would say most people in my network would say, wow, she’s accomplished, and she’s very much a global thinker. And then I got in this group of people, and I was like, I’m really not. I learned so much from them and their perspective, so I think that was a big piece of it for me. And so now I seek that out more. I’m still very connected to the people I went up the mountain with. And again, they’re all over the world and every time zone, so I’m staying connected to them and learning from them. I think the other thing I learned, and this was actually on the summit night when the sun finally broke through. Because, again, you start at midnight, and the reason you start at midnight is because you want to be at the top of Kilimanjaro when the sun rises.

[00:08:10.390] – Craig
Yeah. During the peak, the warm part, right?

[00:08:13.230] – Jaime
Well, spiritual. Right. Because when you’re at 19,000 feet, the sun is rising at the curvature of the earth. So you’re seeing. Right, the sun really rise from almost all around you, and it’s just a unique experience.

[00:08:26.130] – Craig
Very unique.

[00:08:27.230] – Jaime
And I remember the moment where I was so miserable, I really didn’t know if I was going to make it to the top. It was a moment by moment, like, can I do this one more step? And the moment the sun actually came over the horizon, and it was just the whole sky kind of lit up in my brain fog. I had this moment of clarity where I just thought, this is the life I am working towards, where I can do things like this. And I was so grateful in that moment, even though I was miserable from my body standpoint…

[00:08:54.270] – Craig
Spiritually, like, you just felt, like, this energy or this vision or this power that was bigger than you, right.

[00:09:02.380] – Jaime
Yes. But I had realized there’s no way I could have taken a two-week trip and done this without building a life that allowed me to do that. And so it was this gratitude for my team, and they were keeping it all together. My family, husband and my family, who couldn’t communicate with me for seven days because there’s no cell service. Right?

[00:09:20.370] – Craig
Sure.

[00:09:21.410] – Jaime
Keeping it together at home. And I realized that I had designed a life that would allow me to do things like this. And so I needed, first off, to continue to find things like this to do, but just that gratitude for I did that. And now I get to kind of have these experiences that a lot of people don’t have. And I think so many of us just, we make a living and we survive life, and we are on autopilot. And the idea that I was able to design a life that I actually was proud of and could do things, I think that is the 1% better. How are we designing our life instead of letting life kind of happen to us was a big realization for me.

[00:10:01.310] – Craig
How did you take that? So go back to why you did the trip. How did it help you sort of overcome, hey, I’m stressed. I’m having a tough go at it. And some of the decision making, or just the overall, how did it help with that? And then how do you keep that moment where you have that gratefulness, where it gives you inspiration, like a month later, six months later, a year later, how do you keep that and integrate that into. Or is it just, you can’t lose it.

[00:10:33.230] – Jaime
Some of the big moments are really hard to lose. I think about them on a daily, weekly basis. Some of them just really is like that moment. And I wouldn’t say I’m doing it perfectly, but what I did do is I journaled every day, which I’m not a big journaler. I just am not. I journaled morning, midday, if I had the energy, and then at night, before, I went to bed in the tent every night. And I was really good about that. And then I turned those journals into a ten-part blog series when I came back planning on it. But my team, you need to share these because they’re really impactful. So that’s out on our website. But I actually go back and read those sometimes. I read my own words because they’re just good reminders of, like, I’ve got this right, or I really need to push and challenge myself again because I practice what I preach. But really, one interesting thing that this whole year has been, if I had a theme for this year, it sounds severe, but the purging would be the word that I would use. And I’m very honest about it. I came back and reevaluated pretty much every relationship in my life. And a lot of them survived. Right? They’re really great. And I haven’t been outwardly like, hey, I’m purging you for…

[00:11:42.110] – Craig
No, of course not.

[00:11:43.490] – Jaime
Because it’s not bad people. It’s just I’ve been kind of spending less time with people who maybe aren’t thinking as big as I’m thinking. And that’s not disrespectful to them. It’s just I need to be with different people and in different rooms. I need to be listening to different things. Right? The noise I’m putting in, I’m very conscious of it now.

[00:12:04.820] – Craig
And you got that perspective during that experience saying, listen, I’ve really got to hone in my focus. It came to you and all the other stuff in life, the noise, maybe the people that aren’t giving you positive energy aren’t adding to you or where you want to go. That was just clear to you in that moment, right?

[00:12:27.390] – Jaime
And it’s become clearer, right? So it’s almost like I established a different filter for who gets my time, who gets my energy. And so even new people that are coming in right to my circle, it’s like, I don’t know. I’m going to see how much energy, right. I feel like they deserve. And it’s very selfish, but it’s this clarity of, like, I only have so much to give. And if I’m giving it to people who, number one, don’t appreciate it or don’t deserve it, no mal intent, they just may not deserve all of the time that I’m spending with them.

[00:12:57.820] – Craig
We all have limited time, right? If you think about it, the most valuable asset we all have in our entire life is our own time, right? And so we only get so many seconds on this planet. And every one of those seconds, we get to choose. I mean, most of us do. And so that is incredibly valuable. Like you said, sometimes we just go through life, we’re busy, and we don’t even think about it. We’re spending time with people that don’t give us energy or drain us or don’t add value, but we’re giving that away. We own our own time.

[00:13:29.800] – Jaime
And I think we’re giving that power of that away, too. I think a lot of us should… We “should” ourselves. Like, I really should go do that thing with my family, or I really should see that friend. But what if that’s not what fills your bucket, right? I think we do a lot of things because we feel like we have to. And, I mean, this is even extended into our client base. Right. I’m an entrepreneur. We need revenue to grow and to pay everybody. And we’ve purged some clients because I’m like, I just don’t think they’re getting the value, and I don’t think they’re adding energy to what we’re trying to do.

[00:14:01.330] – Craig
Yeah. And that’s a tough thing to do. So that’s awesome. It’s really quite, not ironic, but quite telling. Like, when you’re up at that point on earth, it’s one of the very few places on earth you’re that far up. And of course, you can see forever. So physically you have this clarity. Physically you have what’s important. We’re small people on this big planet, and you have this sort of view and vision physically, but it emanates within you almost spiritually or mentally, for sure. Like, hey, what am I here doing? What is important? It’s interesting how that physical turns into mental and spiritual about clarity and focus, how they’re interconnected that way.

[00:14:47.440] – Jaime
You know what else was really interesting in doing it is I didn’t talk about it a lot before I went. I did a big post, like literally at the airport as my husband took a picture with me with all my gear, and it had a huge response. But when I came back, I wasn’t expecting to not want to talk about it for a while. And what I realized is in moment, that I didn’t climb the mountain so everyone else could see me so I could do social posts.

[00:15:13.160] – Craig
Right. It’s not an Instagram moment.

[00:15:15.490] – Jaime
No. But I think a lot of people do things that are kind of for that. What I realized is I climbed the mountain so I could see the world differently instead of the world seeing me differently, that it was really a private thing. And now I’m ready to talk about it. Now I’m developing a keynote about it because I think there’s lessons there that I can… But it’s been almost a year, and I’m just finally ready, right. To really talk about it at a broader level. And it just made me realize that so much of what we do and we spend our energy on, and it’s not, again, because we’re shallow or something like that, it’s because it’s a great Instagram post or it’s going to make us exciting. Most of the most impactful things in my life now are things that I don’t put on Instagram or on Facebook or. I think a lot of us, social media has done that to some of us. It’s like maybe made us think the things that are important aren’t really the most important things. And it’s putting that false sense of importance on things look fancy.

[00:16:10.630] – Craig
One of your big takeaways was the interaction with the other people on the team and the global part. But it’s fascinating to me because I do a lot of traveling globally, and a lot of people ask me about that and all these countries. And the reason that I get so much from it, I think, is not because I just want to see the sites and the old buildings and the history. That’s super interesting. But it’s mostly because I learn so much from the people and the culture and the perspectives. It’s like every time I go to a new country, it’s like a PhD in learning that you just absorb, even the food. And again, we’ll talk about culture. But that’s really interesting that you got that. I don’t know if you expected it. You got that on a mountain, right. It’s really interesting.

[00:17:02.980] – Jaime
But it’s continued, right. You do the global trip or you do these experiences, and a lot of your realizations can come six months later. Right. When you’re looking at a news story differently, because you’re like, I’ve been in that country, or I’ve experienced that culture. And I think it softens the edges of our judgment when we have these more global experiences.

[00:17:22.330] – Craig
For sure. A little fun fact. Then we can switch gears. I could talk about the mountain thing forever, but I want to get into culture. Speaking of that. So we’re part of a company that’s global. It’s in 35 countries. And when I was doing some work with a lot of the countries, we use this book called The Culture Map. I don’t know if I’m sure you’re familiar with it. It’s actually someone who, from the twin cities who wrote it. And it’s really a great book, but it’s country culture. It’s like, how are Scandinavians different from the English, different from the French? And it’s really interesting to see that play out. Like, we were meeting with a group of people from 15 countries, and I could just see it play out, but we don’t always think about it. So sometimes just thinking about that, literally today, we rolled out a training and an application, a technology that helps us use and understand these cultural behavior and traits so that we can communicate better because we’re all on calls and we do communicate differently in the United States versus India versus France or what have you.

And so that’s really interesting that we’re now taking it to technology, and we’re starting to say, how do we do this better? So I thought that was good timing for our conversation. So let’s talk about culture. So you just wrote a book and launched the book The Culture Climb. I think culture is a fascinating word, and it’s a fascinating topic. Almost everybody… It’s one of these words that almost everyone… Oh, I know what culture is. Right. But then if you ask ten people or 20 people, you will literally get ten definitions or 20 definitions. We’re all talking about something kind of the same, but something very different in many ways. So I’m curious, just define culture as you define culture, and then we’ll talk more about that.

[00:19:10.660] – Jaime
So there’s two levels of definition that we use, and this is a question that we get, and you’re spot on. Everybody just has an interpretation of how they talk about it. We define culture simply as the way you think, the way you act, and the way you interact every day as a company, as a community group. Right? A team, whatever it is, think, act, and interact. And that is, again, the way we talk about it, is it’s not the CEO or the head person that defines what the culture is, because you and I, the way we think, act, and interact, actually defines the culture we live in every day, regardless of, at the top, what they think the culture is. And that’s the struggle with most companies, is as leaders, we think we can control and declare the culture, when really the culture is how the team treats each other in the really small things and in the big things. Right. It plays out on so many different levels, and it really is a feeling which makes it complicated for some people, right. To walk towards, because it either feels one way or it doesn’t, and it’s hard to figure out how to impact it.

The second definition. So that’s just kind of culture in general. We get asked a lot. Well, when you declare a positive culture, what does that mean? And we’re all about simplicity, so we don’t want to theoreticize this. We don’t want it to feel academic. You can find a lot of books on that. We want it to feel kind of real and something you can think about day to day. So we define a positive culture as simply a place where people go home every day better than when they came in. And that can be the smallest thing. Somebody asked me how I was doing on a call.

[00:20:46.990] – Craig
Sounds like 1% Better culture, right?

[00:20:49.260] – Jaime
It’s exactly what it is, right? So let’s not overcomplicate it. But what happens, right, when I’m speaking to a room full of executives, is I say, can you actually say that you have a culture where people go home every day better than when they came in? And unfortunately, and not because mal intent, right? We’re creating cultures where people, they’re meeting to death, right? We’re creating environments where there’s low accountability and probably some politics being played, which is exhausting to most people. And instead, we might bring them in actually high energy with ideas and deplete them all day long, unknowingly, and I say, not in joking, send them home to their liquor cabinets and to their families with nothing left to give. My goal is to flip that and start having leaders really think about, and companies think about, how can we just 1% change how people are leaving our organizations every day? And is their bucket full or is their bucket empty?

[00:21:48.030] – Craig
So let’s talk about that. So I think culture, again, is one of those things that has been used by corporate America. It’s not something new. It’s been around and really pretty mainstream for the last ten or 15 years, where you have to be kind of under a rock not to know. This is incredibly important. It’s in some ways more important than strategy. It is the foundation of a company. Are people going to people are our biggest asset. And so a lot of companies have used it as a program or it’s a solution. And so what do they do? They create it. They may even hire someone and they put it up on the wall. They might even put it on their website and they talk about it. And then it’s kind of like, okay, we did that. Now we got culture, check… Let’s move on and get all of our goals and metrics accomplished.

And so we find a lot of cases when we go in and work with clients and me specifically, usually it’s around something “transformational.” Right? Like, we want to go from here. And the first two things that I look for is two things, strategic alignment. Where do you want to go? Like, is it clear? Does everyone understand it? Do we know what good looks like? And then how do we want to get there, which is culture? And do we have something to anchor? And what usually find is that a stated culture or what they think their culture is, is very different when they hold up the mirror and say, how do people actually think? How do people actually act and how do they interact is very different. So you have a sort of a gap there. And so practically speaking, how do you close that gap and how do you start to sort of shift it so that it’s in alignment? Right. And so that you can make it better and better. And some people have even said, oh, culture takes ten years to change and things like that. But how do you practically sort of address that?

[00:23:33.540] – Jaime
Yeah, well, culture does take a long time. We say three to five years, depending. But it’s because you’re shifting behaviors. So it can change and be impacted pretty quickly based on how our leaders are modeling it. So that’s one myth you can get the lift quickly, but it’s a constant thing you have to be thinking about. But there’s a couple of myths that I want to talk about in kind of the question you’re asking. The first one is that culture can be solved by putting a culture committee or a fun committee. We hear this all the time. We’re going to put that committee together. Go just figure out how to more fun in our environment and in the book and in our models, we have a full model, and we’re one of the few that actually has a model how you can assess your culture.

But fun is one of 20 factors of culture. And so I give the example of if we’re a really fun team because there are organizations that just have a fun environment… But if we do team barbecues and team outings and we’re fun, but there’s no accountability, day in and day out and more stuff just gets piled on my plate as a high achiever, I’m not going to stay because we’re fun. I’m not going to fully engage because we’re fun. Same thing with there’s a lot of organizations that do a lot of investment in their people development and all that. It’s amazing. That’s one factor of 20 if you invest in me. But I don’t have a great leader that’s been taught how to be a leader, and I don’t really trust them. No amount of investment that you’re going to make is going to help the culture. So reason I share this is it’s the myth that we can do one or two things over here and it’s going to impact our culture. Where really, if we have things that are red, right. If we’re heat mapping this whole model, they’re detracting from the things we’re really good at. It’s actually pulling down some of the things we might be good at. So we have to figure out how to raise up the foundation of those things we’re not good at.

When we get the question a lot, too, and I think it’s kind of what you’re leading to is how do we incorporate culture into our strategic plan or our strategic initiatives? And we say is there can be culture initiatives and your strategic plan. There can be things you’re going to do to help really get a pulse and understand your culture. But really, where culture makes a difference is when you assess the risks and the change that a transformation is going to impart on the organization, and you’re proactive about managing it. So that’s how your culture grows, because I think transformation is actually where your culture and trust can be built the most. It’s not in the fun things that you’re doing. It’s in the hard things. I climbed a mountain with ten other people that were complete strangers to me, and in about 48 hours, I had more trust in them and they had more trust in me than I’ve had with people I’ve worked for ten years with.

[00:26:22.750] – Craig
Isn’t that something?

[00:26:24.090] – Jaime
It’s the circumstance that you’re putting into place with a solid, healthy foundation that can build trust during change. So I think it’s the perspective we look at culture from more than it is what we actually do.

[00:26:37.840] – Craig
Yeah. What I’m hearing, though, kind of in between the sentences. I mean, yes, we need to have a good, thoughtful process. There’s no silver bullets. There’s no question about that. But is that this constant? Again, not to overuse our 1% Better, but culture can’t be something we do once a year, or we put it up on the wall every three years and say, is it good? Is it not good? Let’s bring in a consultant. Let’s tell it’s literally every day, every week, everything that you do, it’s either aligned or not aligned to our culture. Right. The change efforts are great opportunities because you’re changing a lot of things, and it’s going to test our culture. Right. So that’s kind of what you’re saying is you can never put it away. You have to live it and breathe it every day. Right?

[00:27:22.500] – Jaime
And it’s a great time of year. Right. If you’re creating your strategic plan, go through each strategic initiative and say, how will this impact our culture? Not will it. It will. Right? How will it? And what do we need to do? It might be we need to communicate better. Right. We need a change plan, and we need to have some empathy for the change this is going to impart on the organization. It’s more about asking the right questions for each of your strategic initiatives and being proactive and conscious and intentional about how it’s going to impact your culture. Because if we’re going to do something really transformative, if we come to our people and say, listen, we know this is going to have an impact. There’s going to be short term pain for long term pride. Here are the things we’re going to do to make sure this doesn’t have a negative impact on our culture. Think about the amount of trust you immediately get from me as an employee. Just the fact that you’re thinking about that and you’re conscious of the change that it’s going to have on the organization. It’s simple, yet complicated at the same time. I think that’s the really hard part. It takes intentionality.

[00:28:27.630] – Craig
Right. And that takes time. Right. Because I think people, if we say something and then we do something different two months later, what have you, then people don’t have that trust. And so it takes repetition seven times, seven ways, and it takes that. Oh, we are serious about this. It is important to us. And that takes time, right?

[00:28:46.540] – Jaime
Right, it does.

[00:28:48.470] – Craig
So, want to talk about going back to the experience you had. And one of the things that we talk a lot about on this podcast is personal and professional improvement. And we talk about learning really doesn’t exist in a comfort zone. Right. Like learning exists when you’re out of your comfort zone. And that’s talked about a fair amount. You clearly took an extreme case. You got out of your comfort zone. How do you bring that mindset? Because I see that every single day, whether it be with CEOs, actually, I think it’s probably more prevalent with leaders and people that are in large positions because they were successful for a reason. 20, 25, 30 years of doing things a certain way, a certain persona, and they have a certain kind of rut in a mindset that’s given them some success. How do you bring that… we got to get out of our comfort zone. It’s easy to say. It’s hard to do. How do you practically get that mindset into people without short of, let’s all go to Mount Kilimanjaro.

[00:29:51.700] – Jaime
Right. That is an extreme right version of this. So I’ll share an example. I did a talk. It was actually for a women’s technology, huge women’s technology conference. And after I got done with my talk and was sharing some of this, a woman raised her hand and she said, I just had a realization. And she’s in tech but I don’t know what the company does. And she said, we work a lot with people with disabilities. And she said, I’d never put myself in rooms to actually understand people with disabilities and how much better I would be at my job if I just put myself in some of those rooms to truly understand who I’m serving. Right. And it was this realization of, I don’t have to climb a mountain, I need to get out of the rooms I’ve always been in that just feel like. Right, it’s just muscle memory. And put myself in a room that feels a little uncomfortable. Same thing with diversity, right? CEOs who are saying, like, I need to understand how we think about diversity, how we can get better. Then put yourself in different rooms. That’s how you learn about diversity. And you’re right, it’s going to be uncomfortable the first couple of times because you might be the only person that looks like you and thinks like you and has the background like you in that room. So do it anyway.

There are so many examples in our lives of where we just do a lot of the same things and we hang out with a lot of the same people, and we surround ourselves with a lot of the same thinking. And there are simple ways without climbing a mountain that you can think differently. The other thing we do a lot of leadership development. We have amazing programs. But what we talk about is if you’re in an all day training class with us, we’re going to plant some seeds, we’re going to help you think differently as a leader. But that’s not actually where the growth comes from. It’s not going to happen in the room.

[00:31:29.540] – Craig
Right.

[00:31:30.300] – Jaime
The growth happens when we reflect on what we’ve done. When you get done with a huge transformation project and the leaders stop and take a day to say, what did we learn about ourselves? What did we learn about the company? What would we do differently? It’s a post mortem. How many of us don’t do that in a lot of our learning? Right? My journaling was my reflection, and it’s where all of my learning came from. The seven days on the mountain were a blur. The only reason I remember any of it is because I wrote it down and I looked at it.

[00:32:01.640] – Craig
That’s how you integrated that so that you could reuse it and you could benefit from it because it’s too much. We’re working all day long in companies. It’s too much information until you have that mechanism. Journaling is a great mechanism, right? Actually capture the thought of the moment so you can reflect. And you even said it like, it took you a year to fully kind of comprehend what you just went through so that you could talk about. Yeah, it’s a great point.

[00:32:27.840] – Jaime
How many of us as leaders, finish a project? Right. We’re like, okay, off our list. That was amazing. We did that, and it’s right on to the next thing.

[00:32:35.170] – Craig
Yeah, well, it’s what we do. And in business, it’s interesting. If you look at professional sports or you look at artists, they practice 95% of the time, 98% of the time, and they perform… we see them on Sundays or whenever. That’s just a small fraction. All the other time is them practicing, training. And in business, we’re the opposite. Like, we’re always just doing, performing. We take very little time to actually improve and learn and reflect. Do you find yourself reminding, suggesting, coaching, like, literally every day to leaders? Get out of your comfort zone. Find ways to do that. Is that kind of the technique?

[00:33:20.630] – Jaime
Yeah, I do. In some of it, it’s small things, right. It can be engage with a different level of the organization or a different part of the organization. Right. Find out more about them. It’s really the curiosity of, like, get curious about things you don’t know, because as leaders, the moment we think we’ve got it all figured out, because we’ve been doing it for 25 years, we’re doomed for sure. Look at the world we are working in right now. The world is evolving faster than we can evolve as humans.

[00:33:47.250] – Craig
Yeah, that’s a great segue. One question I wanted to ask you, given your perspective, and again, you’ve worked in sort of large corporations, I think, early in your career, and then you did a lot of work with small, mid-sized companies, and now you’re probably a combination of both. And there’s learnings, we can learn from each other. The small companies go fast, make decisions. Trial and error. Big companies make big decisions, and it takes time.

But here’s the question that is on everybody’s mind, is the world is changing. It’s hard to even comprehend how fast the world is changing right now. Of course, we have agile ways of working that shifted how people physically do work, how we manage work, how we lead work, how we do servant leadership versus command and control. Then Covid came, and all of a sudden, we work physically different, together and apart. And we have global resources, usually in a lot of organizations. And we’ve got mixed mode now. We’re in a world of generative AI, which literally, we can create things. The only limitation is our imagination. It’s no longer money, it’s no longer resources, it’s no longer even experience. We can create almost anything. And I don’t know that we’ve been caught up with how fast things are changing from… what does it mean to our strategy, what does it mean to our culture, what does it mean to me as a leader? So I wanted to just get your thoughts on that whole topic and how do we get our heads around how fast things are changing.

[00:35:15.150] – Jaime
This is the big one. We actually are doing an event we just finalized, we do these of a quarterly culture panel events in May is going to be AI and Culture… How to manage your culture so that it’s not a culture of fear, but it’s really a fear, or it’s a culture of evolution. And how do we embrace some of this? This is the next thing because I think a lot of leaders are having a lot of heartburn and a lot of sleepless nights about how we manage through this. I hate to simplify everything down. It’s just the way my brain works is I think we have to start asking ourselves different questions than we used to ask ourselves. Whatever the topic is, right. You rattle off a lot of different things that we’re dealing with. The pace of change is not going to slow down. How are we asking the right questions instead of feeling like we have to have the right answer? Because I don’t know that anybody knows some of these right answers right now. And if we get hung up in, we have to know the right answer before we can move forward… There are going to be companies and departments and divisions that are paralyzed. And that is the energy piece that will affect your culture. Because the moment our teams feel paralyzed, it’s fear. We don’t do good thinking. We’re thinking just today, tomorrow, we’re not thinking strategically anymore. We’re seeing that in a lot of companies. We’ve been in survival mode for three years, just get through, right, the crisis and what do we need to do and how do we solve for this? It’s like our brains have atrophied for strategic thinking. And I think it’s time to come up for air and just say, what’s the right next answer, what’s the right next question? And then just take another step. It’s the same thing. I’ve never thought about it this way, but it’s the same as climbing the mountain. I don’t need to worry about how I’m going to feel at the top.

[00:36:53.300] – Craig
It’s exactly the same. I mean, think about it if you thought about, I’m four hours away, this is like “hell on earth”, I can’t make it, you would have probably turned around and said, I’m out. All you did to make it was focus on the next step, the next step, the next step. But also, you can’t just be blind and just fall off the side of the mountain. You had to have a vision. You had to have a plan. You had to have some guardrails, you had to have some trust. But it’s exactly a great analogy. It’s identical, isn’t it?

[00:37:23.140] – Jaime
And the exhaustion comes from not from knowing where we’re going. That’s where the strategic vision, and that’ll change, too. It’s from the all day feeling like we’re not there yet. Well, no, because we haven’t built the muscle that we need to get to that yet. We haven’t learned what we need to learn to get to that vision, and we’ve got to celebrate in increments. We’ve got to celebrate every step because our teams need it. They need that energy from us and they need to feel the wins day in and day out, week in and week out, instead of just, we’re not winning until we conquer that big mountain. That’s not how human energy works.

[00:37:56.710] – Craig
Interesting. What about, I mean, you mentioned a little bit about doing retrospective, so along the way you have a goal and a vision and then we’re taking steps. But also we need to at some point take a stop and a break and say, let’s reflect what’s working, what’s not working, what can we learn from this? And then take the next little step. So any sort of practical advice other than the retrospectives and building that in that, you’d say, hey, let’s build in this continuous improvement mindset because we’re just on a journey and we don’t know what it’s going to look like a year from now or six months, but we can learn from what we just did.

[00:38:32.600] – Jaime
So we talk a lot about, as a business, having a plan is not having a strategy. And I think there’s a lot of businesses that get caught up in because we kind of know what our goals are, which we totally agree those are needed. That’s not a strategy necessarily. So it’s building in a framework in your organization where every three years it’s that deeper dive of what is this mountain look like? Right. What’s AI going to do? And then every year really diving in and saying, is that still the mountain we want to be climbing. Are we even on the right mountain anymore? Even though two and a half years ago we decided that was the Mountain, I think so many businesses kind of get stuck in that because at one point that made sense and we’re not refreshing it. And then based on that annual strategic refresh, now we create our plan that we know is tied to whatever has changed around us. Right. The landscape has changed. As you climb the mountain, the trail you thought you were going to be on now has rocks in front of it. You may have to take a different route up the mountain. There’s something that we’ve learned. I think a lot of businesses just get so laser focused and put blinders on that we’re not kind of paying attention to what’s shifting inside our organization, the culture and what’s shifting outside. And we’re not taking that reflection time as an executive team, as a divisional team, whatever it is, to do that kind of work. We’re just running as fast as we can in a direction that. What if it’s not the right direction anymore?

[00:40:01.480] – Craig
So really, let’s reflect at all levels. Let’s reflect on strategy. Let’s reflect on culture. Let’s reflect on this project or program. Let’s reflect on a successor. It’s at all levels, right?

[00:40:13.240] – Jaime
It is, and it’s hard. It’s go slow to go fast. You have to down to do the reflection to learn.

[00:40:19.080] – Craig
Okay, quick question and then the final question on 1%. You’re a fellow podcaster and you’ve been doing it for a while. I know. I’m curious. What have you learned from doing podcasts and interviewing people of many different sort of backgrounds?

[00:40:33.920] – Jaime
Yeah. Well, I’ve been doing it for six and a half years, which is crazy, but it’s completely selfish. I just interview people that I’m like, I want to learn from this person. Right. I want to hear their journey. I’ve learned that… it’s great, everyone else gets to hear it, but it’s really about my own curiosity, and it’s even part of how I get 1% Better, which I know. Right. That’s a question you’re going to ask is my own podcast helps me do that.

[00:41:00.080] – Craig
Yeah.

[00:41:00.690] – Jaime
It’s shifting my perspective.

[00:41:02.120] – Craig
Isn’t that something? I had no idea. It’s kind of like you didn’t know what you were going to learn from the mountain. The podcast we started because we wanted to give back, and we’ve been in business for 20 years, and we wanted, like, there’s some great stories people need to hear these stories and learn from them. And I literally learned so much from every conversation. It’s crazy, and I hope many other people do it as well, but it’s kind of mind blowing. But it doesn’t have to be a podcast. It can just literally be a conversation with somebody and say, let’s talk. And we could be like an offline podcast. I would highly recommend everyone do that. Get out of your comfort zone.

All right, last question here is… we’ve been in business for a long time, you and I, and you learn so much when you reflect back. What have I learned over the last 10, 20, 30 years? So if you had to kind of summarize, and by the way, I love when you simplify things. I think that’s super profound. Einstein said, you don’t really understand something unless you can simplify it. So keep doing that. Of course there’s depth to it, but that’s a great talent you have. But what would you say, know, maybe your younger self or what would you say, know, high school kids or your grandkids say, here’s what I’ve learned from life. I want to pass this on and maybe it can help you accelerate and get to places beyond where I even got to. What would you say?

[00:42:22.300] – Jaime
Oh, my gosh. Well, I’ve literally written books on this. So there’s like, picking your favorite kid to pick your favorite advice. I have two things. The first one is get curious and not surface level, like get curious. I realized now, looking back in my corporate days even… everything that drove me was curiosity. So I just wanted to understand why or why would we do that? Or how is that going to impact this? So just ask more questions than you do talk. So I think as leaders, our job now is to just… I mean, I just got out of two days of annual planning from my own team in our retreat. And my whole job for two days was just to ask questions. I hired them. They’re the ones that are smart on all of this, and I just need to constantly be curious about what’s next and what about this? I think it’s that curiosity is the first one and the second one is, I wish my younger self, I wish I had understood the power of purpose you’re now seeing, I’m watching a documentary about the blue zones, right, which is these centurions…

[00:43:26.270] – Craig
Awesome. Yeah. I just came from one this year in Costa Rica. It’s amazing.

[00:43:30.680] – Jaime
And the power of. Yes, it’s food, right? And it’s health and movement and all that. But there’s a really significant piece. In Japan, they would call it ikigai, which is a sense of purpose. At a hundred, these people still till the garden every day, right? Walk to the store. They have purpose in what they need to do, even if it wasn’t what they did 30 years before. And I think a lot of us, specifically Americans, we’ve either never developed a sense of purpose or we’ve lost it. And I think getting back to that is where our actual real health as leaders, right, our energy comes from, is what is your purpose? You can live it out at a company, but if you don’t know what it is and you’ve lost it for your family, for your team, for yourself, and I think it’s a constant finding, you’re never there. You’re kind of working towards it. But I just think societally, a lot of us have lost our sense of purpose.

[00:44:26.570] – Craig
Well, those are pretty simple, yet profound pieces of advice, so wish we could talk more, but that was great. Thank you so much, Jaime.

[00:44:35.170] – Jaime
Thank you for allowing me to share.