– Welcome everybody to today’s “Building My Legacy” podcast. I have with me today, Jonathan Raymond, he is CEO of Refound, which is a consulting company that works with leadership training and consulting. And he also has a book which he has called, “Good Authority” How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For. You have a lot of experience in terms of working with businesses, getting a high-performance, but looking at people, having those transparent, honest conversations to really increase their ability to perform. So tell us, how did you get into this? What motivated you, where did you get started and how did you get into this?

– First, thanks for having me on the show, Lois. I appreciate it. I started out my career really on the kind of business side of things. I had gone to law school and then I went down and kind of the business development track. I decided that I didn’t wanna be a lawyer in a big firm for a bunch of reasons, most of which I was really unhappy. And I left and I moved into the world of technology and I was working in business development, and I found that world fascinating, but also unfulfilling in the personal and spiritual dimensions of my life. And so while I was continuing to work in business development and some businesses that I joined, others that I had founded, I started a deep exploration of meditation and yoga and somatic psychotherapy and really trying to understand myself better. And it was through that process where I felt like I had kind of two selves. I had my professional self and I had my personal self, and I was passionate about both of those things, but I couldn’t figure out how to bring both of those worlds together. And it became really important for me to do that because the tension between those two, who I felt like I was becoming in my personal life and my heart of hearts and things that really mattered to me and my values were getting further and further apart from the businesses that I was a part of and the people that I was being asked to support and to put up there as leaders. And so it was in that sort of cristal ball where I decided to leave the work that I was doing. It was the CEO of a business. And I had a very deep dispute with the chairman of the board about our direction and our values. And I decided to create my own business which is now Refound, to bring those two worlds together. How do we grow businesses? How do we build high-performing cultures? How do we reach ambitious objectives, and do that in a way that is deeply human. Not surface level marketing, you know, sort of green washing like, “Oh, we’re a people first business.” But actually do that in a way where human beings are brought along for the journey and they get to become better of themselves as part of the journey of becoming a better, more profitable, more sustainable business. So that’s how I got into it. You know, I love working with people. I love working with CEOs and presidents who face these unbelievable challenges, right. Of trying to reach these goals, trying to do it in a human way, you know, in an incredibly chaotic world. So I feel very privileged to work with the people that I do and get to be part of those conversations.

– So how do you begin that conversation? How does the CEO come to you? Because especially right now, we’re hearing that people are really running very fast to try and catch up on lost revenue. And so how are you going about having these conversations?

– Historically, it’s been a word of mouth type of thing is that, you know people have said, “Hey, you know, you should call Jonathan.” And of course I have a team, an amazing team of people who do a lot of things better than I do, but it’ll usually start with a CEO, you know sends me an email through our website. It’s pretty simple, Jonathan@refound.com. They’ll send me an email and say, “Hey, you know, I heard you talk on this podcast.” Or, “You know, a friend of mine said we should talk.” And the first thing that I try to do is really understand the nature of the world that they’re in. You know, one of our core values is meeting people where they are. And having been a CEO multiple times and as a CEO today, it’s very easy to talk about leadership development and management training and all this kind of culture stuff in an abstract way. And that’s not helpful for a CEO because that doesn’t make sense, you know, to the revenue goals, profitability goals, timeline goals that they have. So I really try to understand the world that they’re looking at. And I feel like it’s my job to start to weave a story to say, “Okay, well let’s talk about how that might be connected to the behavior of your leaders, to your behavior, to some of the dynamics in the culture.” And you know, what I’ve found is, if I’m really present and really engaged and I ask the right questions, it’s not that difficult conversation to have. There’s an art to it, for sure, but I find like with CEOs and like most people in life, if you meet them where they are, you’re much more likely to have a collaborative and productive conversation than coming in and saying, “We’ve got this solution for you.” You know, I think that ship has sailed. So I ask a lot of questions and I try to add value right away. I try to say, Hey, well, you know… You know my sort of personal commitment is anytime I’m on the phone with somebody, whether they’re a CEO or someone on my team is I don’t ever want them to leave that conversation without something to think about, right. Not necessarily something to do, but something to think about. So that’s how I approach it.

– So what I’m hearing you say, Jonathan, is really from the CEO’s when they call, if they’ve got a board of directors, they’ve got to be responsible for growth strategies, they’ve gotta be responsible for the bottom, bottom, bottom line for the, what’s happening to the shareholders wealth, right? And so you meet them where they are, when they’re in that fast game of needing to move quickly, having the time to have that discussion about what’s happening within their organization is quite an interrupt that you are creating within their minds, right?

– I haven’t found that to be the case, but I may be fortunate. I mean, I think sort of, you know we’ve worked really hard to create credibility as a brand and with the book, and you know, people, you know they’re coming to us. You know, we’re not knocking down doors and saying, “Hey, you really need to have this conversation with us.” They’re coming to us and they’re saying, “Hey, I think I might need to have this conversation with you.” And so, you know, that’s the nature of our business. I mean, we’re not a huge business. You know, we’re working with, you know, 10 or 12 companies at a time. So we’ve been in that position of people coming to us and you know, and we’ll wait until they’re ready, right. I had a CEO that I was talking with the other day and we started, we had a half an hour conversation. He said, “This is super interesting. I really want to do this, but like can we do this in January? “Yeah, sure. Call me when you’re ready. Like, I’ll be here. We’re not going anywhere.” Right. We’re busy, we got plenty to do. It’s gotta happen at a time that makes sense. And you know, typically, what happens is if you give people permission to do it later, they’ll call you back sooner. And so, you know, I got an email back from this person, you know three weeks later, a month later saying, “Hey, you know, by the way, I’m seeing some of the issues that we talked about on the phone, you know can we have another conversation?”

– Well, let’s talk about those issues. What are the things that CEOs are feeling and seeing that make them pick up the phone and call you, Jonathan?

– We could probably cut in a few different ways, but I would say the primary motivation for people calling Refound and calling me is, I don’t know how to get my leaders to look around corners with the precision and with the urgency that I do. And so, like, I know they’re working hard. I know they’re good people, they have expertise in their domain, but they’re too much in the weeds day to day. They’re too much handholding their teams, they’re too in it. And I don’t have, these are my words, they don’t necessarily articulate it exactly in this way, but I feel like I don’t have a group of leaders that are really thinking about the future of this business, the future of this enterprise with precision, with the urgency and with the level of context that I need them to. And I’m frustrated, what do I do? And that’s usually where those kinds of conversations starts in one form or another. And then the sequella to that is we’ve grown a lot. We have all of these managers who’ve come in. They’re smart people. They’re good people. They’re talented, whatever, but I just, I don’t know. So a lot of times people will say things like, “I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I know we’re not optimized as a business. Like we have a lot of people, we have a lot of overhead. People who are working hard, I get that, but I don’t see. It feels like we’re starting to slow down. It feels like we’re starting to get bogged down in too much process and too much pass the buck and too many, you know, all the classic things that happen in an organization as it grows, because we spend much more time thinking about sales, the next sale then the next conversation, right. And so, as a result, we bring in a lot of sales, we’re lucky, but we didn’t invest in the conversations.” And so those two things start to create a lot of friction.

– So what keeps them really from moving ahead. They see what the need is, what keeps them from being able to do something about that? You would think that smart people can have these conversations, right?

– Yeah, yep. My experience has been there are two types of leaders, there are two types of CEOs. There’s the CEO who is the person who says, “Hey, I get that this project of up leveling our leadership capabilities and changing our culture and changing the way we think about accountability and actually like doing some of the behaviors that we talk about, our values. I get that I have the biggest influence on whether or not that project succeeds. And so I’m here, I’m in, I’m gonna lean in. I’m gonna be going to those sessions just like everybody else and I need a coach just like everybody else.” There’s that type of CEO. And then the other type of CEO, which is interesting, is the type of CEO who will say that, but not mean it. So they both types of CEOs will say that, and it’s hard to tell at the beginning which ones mean it and which ones don’t. ‘Cause CEOs we’re good salespeople, right? We’re good at telling a story, we’re good at having… And we’ve got a lot of power. So we’re good at causing people to believe us in what we say. And the proof is in the pudding whether they actually do that. And I’ve had CEOs of very large companies go both ways, right? I’ve had a CEO of a Fortune 100 company, and I said to him, I said, “Look, here’s what I want you to do,” this was pre COVID. “We’re gonna run these events and we’re gonna bring 25 of your leaders.” There were 400 leaders in this program. “We’re gonna bring 25 of your leaders together, you know, for this kickoff event and we’re gonna run it 16 times, and I want you to come on every one of those times.” He said, “Great. Put it on my calendar. I’m there.” And he did it every single one without fail. He showed up every single time, start at the front of the room and said, “Hey everybody, here’s why this matters. Here’s here’s my contribution. Here’s what I know I need to do differently. Please lean in, please. I know it’s uncomfortable. I know you’ve got a million things going on. This is really important. If we don’t get this right, nothing else matters.” You know, that was a client of mine. I’ve heard that with other clients, you know, clients of other people where CEOs will say, “Look, it’s gotta be me. If I’m not gonna invest in this, let’s not waste our time and our money, you know hiring Refound or some other, you know consultancy to come and help us. It’s a waste of time.” Cause the first thing everybody will say is, “Well, that’s nice. You know why isn’t he doing it?” Sometimes she, but why isn’t he doing it?

– So it’s really ownership, right? And I think part of what you’re doing from what I’m hearing you say, Jonathan is that you’re getting people to buy into the fact that they are owners of the results.

– Yes.

– That’s a mind shift.

– Well, it is a mind shift, but I hold clients accountable. Like life this too short, I don’t want to mess around with that other type of stuff. It’s like, there are too many good CEOs, good-hearted CEOs who with a little bit of guidance and some good conversations, can pivot, are capable of doing the right things. So the ones who wanna sell me a bill of goods and tell me it’s everybody else, like I don’t have time for that. So we’ll have those conversations and we’ll get there but I hold people accountable, right. And you know, if clients don’t do their part of the work, then we fire them. I sat down with a Silicon Valley CEO, you know, a couple of years ago, and it was a time when we needed business. And we weren’t in a great run. And this guy was like, you know, he thought he was Beyonce, basically. And I’m just like, “Look, you know, I don’t think we’re the right fit. Like I need much more humility from you than you are.” And you know, he was a nice guy. He was smart. He may have even been brilliant in his industry, but that’s not gonna work. You find somebody else, find somebody else.

– Being smart sometimes where it’s our own worst enemy, right?

– It is. It is indeed.

– We think we have all the answers and we don’t.

– Yeah, and it’s ironic because like, you know we work with a lot of engineering-heavy organizations, highly technical, you know that’s the way of the world these days. And I find it it’s ironic to me that people who are incredibly smart and gifted in a particular technical area, it could engineering, could be law, it could be finance, marketing, whatever that it’s hard for me to compute. Like why is it so hard to say, “You know what, I’m really good at that and I really suck at this other thing.” Like why is that so hard? I don’t understand it. I don’t get it. Like, you’re great at this thing, isn’t it okay that you suck at this other thing? We can help you but we can’t help you until you admit that you suck at it.

– Right. That I think it’s because of the way we’re socialized through our education process, and, and you know it’s also what happens in the corporate world. You think that if you’ve got a weakness it gives people a reason to let you go. And so there’s a lot of fear that operates under that truth, that truthfulness that you really need.

– There’s a guy who, a writer who wrote a great piece I’m a surfer, and he wrote a great piece about surfing. And one of the things that he loves about it is that he’s bad at it. And that’s one of the things that I love about it, ’cause I’m not good at it. I’m okay, right. I’m like, I wouldn’t say I’m bad at it, but I’m not good at it, right. But I love it ’cause I go out there in the morning and I’m humbled by the ocean every single time, right. Even I think I caught a great wave. The next wave knocks me on my head and I’m held under water and I think I’m going to die for three seconds, right? It’s like, you know, I wish in schools we’d graded kids on their ability to be bad at things and not only on their ability to be good at things.

– Or their ability to self-appraise and say, “This is where my strength is. And I’ll use that strength to help me with this other piece.”

– That too.

– Right, where do you see business heading with what you see happening? I’m hearing you say that there’s a trajectory with CEOs that are like this in two different paths, right? So where do you see business heading and the future really in terms of how we’re gonna see growth and how we’re gonna see businesses operating?

– Well, I’ll start by saying my bias is definitely North American bias. The vast majority of our clients are here in North America, some internationally, but you know, most of what I’m gonna say is from that perspective. I think we’re gonna see a lot more employee activism and demand that the company lives by a set of values that employees align with. And, you know, I think you saw recently, you know Biden administration came out and said, “Hey, we’re gonna increase the tax on corporations. You’ve got to pay your fair share.” And I wasn’t there in the room, but I’m sure the powers that be at Amazon said, “Hey, what do we want to say about this? Do we wanna be on the side of corporations who are saying, yes we need to pay our fair share or do we want to not be that?” And I’m sure that the voices that they were hearing in their ears was largely their employees. Their high-paid, talented and low-paid people who are like, “I wanna work someplace that cares about the world. I wanna work someplace that cares about the planet.” And that’s what’s happening is people are increasingly unwilling to tolerate a disconnect between the company that they work for and what they wanna see out in the world. And then we only we’re at the beginning of that with respect to, you know, LGBTQ+ issues, all the stuff around people of color or women of color in technology in particular is an issue we’ve been talking a lot about recently at Refound. Climate change, you know societal appealing, all of those things, social justice you know, and it doesn’t mean, you know people like to paint this role to really binary. We’re gonna look back at this time 20 years from now and be like, “Of course, yeah, of course, like that’s of course what was gonna happen?” Who thought that that wasn’t what was going to happen? They are nuts, but you know, that’s where the world is.

– Our time is almost up, Jonathan. It goes very, very fast. You’ve got so much to offer. What have we eft out that people should think about, that we’ve missed?

– There’s a tool that we teach, which is very impactful for our clients, which I wanna share with your audience which is called the Accountability Dial. And a lot of what we’ve been talking about is our ability to have conversations, our ability to be vulnerable, our ability to be transparent in the right ways, to have the right boundaries at work. And I found personally that I needed a tool and I couldn’t find one that spoke to me. So we created the Accountability Dial as a way to start and manage difficult conversations. So you can locate, where am I? Am I at the beginning? Am I at the middle? I’m at the end? It’s a five step process for how to start and manage all sorts of workplace conversations. And it’s a really powerful tool that I hope people will check out.

– Would you mind just briefly explaining each of those parts to the audience? That would be fabulous.

– Absolutely. So the five stages are the mention, the invitation, the conversation, the boundary, and the limit. The mentioned is that first, you know, “Hey, I noticed such and such, I didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t want to make a grand theory of the universe out of it, but I noticed this, you know can you tell me more about it?” I don’t need a solution right now, I’m asking a question. The genuine question, that’s the mention. The invitation is when we see that thing happen a couple of times, and it’s not resolved. “Hey, I noticed we talked about this in the hallway or on Zoom the other day. I’ve actually noticed a couple other things that I think are related. It seems like it’s a bit of a pattern. I’d love for you to reflect on that. And, you know, can we talk about that this afternoon or in our next one-on-one? Second stage of the conversation. The third stage is that conversation which will often happen inside of a one-on-one which we’re talking about the impact. “Hey, so we’ve been talking about this pattern. One of the ways that helps us to get a hold and to make change is to see the impact that it’s having.” Like who cares? So what? So this is happening, who cares? So the is a conversation and why does it matter? What’s the impact it’s having on the team? What’s the impact that it’s having on our goals? What’s the impact it’s having on you, et cetera, et cetera. The fourth stage is the boundary where we agree, and this is not a performance improvement plan. We’re not going to HR. Most managers are way too quick, they abdicate their responsibility as people leaders to HR way too quickly in the dynamic. The boundary is simply that. It’s like, “Hey, we’ve been talking about this. And we’re at a point now where it needs to change in a demonstrable way, or it needs to change more quickly.” Let’s say it’s changing a little bit, but it’s not changing fast enough. “Let’s agree on a boundary.” What ne what does change look like, by when, and how will we measure it, and what will happen when we reach that? So it’s a conversation, all of these five stages. And then the last of those conversations is the limit where as a coach, or as a manager, or, you know anyone can use this, is there comes a point in a conversation or a set of conversations where you feel like you’ve done everything you can. Where you’ve made the mention, you’ve had the invitation, you’ve held the conversation, you’ve set boundaries, and for whatever reason, the person or the people that you’re talking with either can’t or won’t make the change that you need them to make. And then you can say, “Hey, I don’t know what else to do. Like, I feel like I’ve tried to have these conversations. We’ve made some progress, it seems, but it’s one step forward, one step back, and we’re just out of time, we need to make a change. And I don’t exactly know what that change is.” It’s not always firing somebody, sometimes that’s the case. Sometimes you have to let somebody go. Depends on the team, depends on the time, but those are the five stages. And you can use that same rubric for peer-to-peer conversations, for managing up. We’ll be releasing an E-book later this year of how to use the Accountability Dial for receiving feedback and on the difficult end of a tough conversation. So that’s that tool, and folks can also find it at, we put it up at refound.com/buildingmylegacy. There’s a video course on the Accountability Dial which folks can take their, our one-on-one meeting guide which is also related and some other ways to all the work.

– So that’s fabulous. And we will put that information in the show notes with the podcast so people can get hold of it. And we will put also information about your book there, but I think whatever tools we can share with people it is so valuable because people I think want to do better. They just don’t know how, often.

– That’s right.

– And so information is really lovely if you’re willing to share it. So look for it in the show notes, everybody. So Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us in “Building My Legacy” podcast today. And for those of you who are listening, thank you and be sure to visit our website at www.build2omorrow.com. And that’s what the number two, and our social media sites as well. Thanks so much. Thanks, Jonathan.

– My pleasure. Thanks for having me out.