Leading Through Inflection Points: Turning Challenges Into Growth

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have author and owner of Inflection Point Nexus Advisors, Matt Ley. Welcome.

Matt D Ley: Hey. Thanks, Lee. Excited to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn about your practice. Tell us about your firm, how you serve in folks.

Matt D Ley: Um, yeah. So it’s kind of baked into the name of Inflection Point and Nexus as sort of two pieces. Inflection Point. Basically the what got you here isn’t going to get you there. That’s a space we operate in really well. Kind of coming in and saying not just like, how can we glue together a bunch of disparate pieces of what’s worked in the past, but what are we learning, uh, from the growth. Maybe it’s a merger. Acquisition. Maybe it’s a leadership change. So you’re at that Inflection point. What can you carry forward and what do you kind of have to build around that? So we help pull out those pieces. And the Nexus is a lot of my background is in operations and supply chain. So that operational excellence piece, but also my work has been most recently in the culture side. So that organizational health. So it’s bringing in the operational excellence and the organizational health and where those two meet. That’s really where we see the sweet spot, especially at those Inflection Points.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Matt D Ley: It’s called a circuitous journey of exploration. I I’ve just been in a bunch of different fields. Like I guess I’d be self-described as a, a lover of people and chaser of shiny things. So I was a software engineer and then I was a, I went to seminary. I was a Lutheran pastor for a while, worked in the nonprofit space and social justice work. Lutheran Disaster Response ended up back in corporate. Just because I was curious how corporate America worked, my only understanding of it up to that point was the movie Office Space and found that I just I really loved being in the high pace environments with lots of moving pieces. So I ended up mostly in supply chain, worked my way up through that over about a decade and then went out on my own wanting to see how other organizations do this, got certified as a coach along the way, so I could have more intentional conversations with leaders in their work and ended up writing the book just because I’ve been having so many conversations around the same topics, I figured this would be an easy entry point for people that were interested in the things I was talking about. And so that kind of brings us to where we’re at today.

Lee Kantor: So now in your work kind of navigating through the variety of places you landed, what’s kind of the thread that ties them all together. Like, where do you see kind of you are the right answer for a lot of these things.

Matt D Ley: Yeah, I think it’s the when leaders are starting to say like, this isn’t fun anymore. Like there was a point where it was fun and it’s not anymore because the foundation of all of my work is really around two pieces. The first I call fulfillment ROI, which is to say, fulfillment is a very unique journey for each person. The mechanics behind the scenes are pretty consistent. It’s the energy we invest in things and the value they produce for us. So if we’re starting to find ourselves burnt out or really using terms like unfulfilled, or this is getting heavy, it’s because it’s either taking too much energy compared to what it was doing in the past, or we’ve lost the mark. We the value isn’t there for us for some reason. So it’s really just those two pieces. How do we reduce the energy, which is kind of like what operational excellence is there to do? And how do we increase the value proposition, which is what organizational health and culture design is there to operate. And then as to how do we go about doing this? Uh, concept that I call the four C’s, which I basically say people need to feel like they’re cared for. They need clarity, they need consistency, and they need to be communicated with. And so we build those systems. So the feeling that someone has is like, this just isn’t fun anymore. It’s starting to feel heavy. Those are the tools that I pretty much use everywhere I go. And fairly agnostic, though I love the more complicated the system, the more I’m excited about it because that’s my favorite playground.

Lee Kantor: Now how? I don’t want to say important, but maybe how, how, how, like at the center of things. You mentioned seminary in the middle of the kind of the briefing of your background. So how central is kind of those universal principles of seminary in the work that you do? Are those kind of, uh, a North Star.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. Great question. Uh, I’d say summarize it kind of in a quote from Saint Francis of Assisi that says, preach the gospel. Always use words when necessary. Which is to say that it is foundational to me as to why I do this work and how I approach it. Uh, it’s not necessarily a requirement that I’m working with a faith based or mission based organization to do that, because it’s my disposition that it’s in all entities and all organizations. If we’re dealing with humans, we’re dealing with that aspect. And so that’s just the perspective that drives how I show up, not necessarily where I show up.

Lee Kantor: Right? I clearly understood that. And in the way that you described yourself, but I was just trying to like, what kind of universal principles were you kind of leaning into when you developed this kind of philosophy of management?

Matt D Ley: Yeah. Thanks for the redirect. It’s that from my in my language. Like all people are created in the image of God. Um, a more secular way of saying that is, I think all people are awesome. Uh, and it’s that we tend to be awesome in particular contexts more so than others. Helping people understand that and where they align best. Um, so where their giftedness is meant to fit into the whole, uh, sometimes we tend to confuse, uh, where we find joy from where we have, uh, capabilities. And sometimes we need to step away from that excellence, uh, to achieve that genius. Um, kind of like a gay Hendricks book, uh, the big leap concept. And so helping people understand those pieces, but just starting from the fundamental recognition that we all have awesomeness inherent with us, in us, and we want to bring that into the world. So helping people unlock that is what really gets me excited.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you left the seminary and started beginning kind of, uh, kind of your working life is that were you you have that in the back of your head of, okay, that’s my true north. You know, I’ll use the secular term. People are awesome. Um, how is that showing up at my work? Or do people believe they’re awesome? Or is the management thinking they’re awesome? Like there’s obviously some friction there. Um, how were you able to kind of take that friction and go, okay, there’s opportunity here. Now let’s try to fix this because this is what I believe, and I think that we’d all be better off if, if we were kind of on the same page when it comes to this, like, can you talk about that when that was happening? Because I’m sure that was, I don’t want to say a punch in the face, but it was something that, you know, was evident, I’m sure.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. Uh, two, two stories about like my first corporate job. Uh, one, My whole reason for taking it out of that, working in the nonprofit kind of religious space was my dad’s a pastor, my mom’s a social worker. I have no idea. Like I mentioned, yeah, office space literally was my only understanding of corporate America. And I was thinking to myself, if I ever end up back in the pulpit, the majority of the people in the pews are going to come from this environment. I don’t know anything about it. So it was almost more of like a sociological, um, experiment to be like, I want to know more about this space. What I found out when I got into it was that I kind of have a passion for it and a mind for it, like an organizational design, people dynamics make sense. And I love working in that space. So I was just digging in for like the first three months and take an extra work home, just working on projects, making like things happen. And then I kind of like raised my head and looked around. I was like, I think I’m the only person here who’s laughing and smiling. Like people just look tired and burnt out. And so I got really curious, like what’s going on? And it was hitting some of those edges of there. There are sometimes systems that are set up to create friction versus flow in the way that we experience that awesomeness in the work that we do. And I think all work has the opportunity to call that out of us. Um, but it’s also being called out of us by the way, that we’ve designed the organizations. And so that’s where I really started to dig in to say that it’s less a motivation of the people and more a structure of the systems in which they operate that’s causing the issues. Um, and so that’s where I spent a lot of my time at the beginning digging into it.

Lee Kantor: So now can you share maybe some of those first, um, encounters of the friction and your belief that, hey, we can fix this, this is a change that can be done that’ll be beneficial for everyone. Um, let me get my hands, you know, roll up my sleeves and get my hands on this issue. And then you getting kind of that, you know, the positive impact that you were trying to make. Can you talk about kind of those early wins that really kind of solidified the belief that you’re on the right track and that some of the maybe evidence that, hey, this can work, this can really organizations like this can be open to this and they can benefit from it.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. So one of the first projects I took on, as I mentioned, some of those, I have a software engineering background, so I can kind of like read code C systems. And, uh, we had a report that was being manually created by one of our admins on the team that had been created originally by a macro that macros are very powerful, but they’re also super fragile. And it broke because someone shifted the columns and. But the report was what everyone else was relying on. And so they were taking information out of the system, moving it into an Excel spreadsheet by hand. And that’s what everyone was leveraging off of. And I was like, this is like, we’re taking literally information from the system and putting it into a different format. And then people are uploading information from that back into the system and found out it was taking about 20 hours of her week to do that. So it was just like, well, this doesn’t make sense. So we actually went in, in probably about two hours, redesigned the, uh, report so that it would come out of the system again as just a push of a button. I thought that was it. I thought like, perfect, we’ve solved the problem. The piece was people had become so reliant on that tool that it took about another two months of comparison of what we were getting from the system to what they had produced manually before people would buy into it. And so it was kind of a a recognition that the problem isn’t necessarily the systems, it’s the human interactions and the trust. And that, uh, was both kind of a, like you said, kind of somewhat of a punch in the mouth right up front.

Matt D Ley: It’s like, well, of course this is going to work. This is systems thinking. This is makes sense to me. It should make sense to everybody else. And recognizing that the way we understand information and change, um, needs to make sense to everyone in the language that they understand. And I didn’t have the language at the time, but I now believe that change management is a misnomer. We need to stop calling it. We’re not managing change. We’re managing alignment because the whole point of the change is because we see something that’s going to create more value for all the stakeholders, or ideally the most value for the most stakeholders. And we need to be able to describe that reality. And then the change is the obvious outcome of the desire to be aligned to that new reality. And so this report, saving someone 20 hours, getting them more accurate data that they could manipulate easier, um, should have made sense to everyone up front. I just wasn’t articulating it correctly. And so I was trying to push through change because I understood, but I wasn’t actually managing the alignment. Um, so that shift from change to alignment, I think is, uh, it took me a couple of years to actually recognize what that was at being in that space. But that was, that was probably the biggest upfront aha moment of how do we do this? Because it’s not just systems change, it’s people implementing the new thing that actually creates the change.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you think that that’s just an inherently human kind of issue in terms of it makes sense? Like if you do like you fix something that it was kind of, I don’t, you know, it’s almost a math problem. You just said, do it this way and it’ll be better. But the human behavior component of it, which is a lot less mathy and more messy, um, kind of gets in the way a lot of times. And you might have a certain system or process that makes sense on a whiteboard, but it doesn’t make sense, you know, in a human’s hands. Um, and I think a lot of times organizations don’t want to deal with the messiness of human behavior and they just want to implement some automated solution and not really value how the human feels, which is again, messy and not hard, not easy to quantify. Um, and they like things that have numbers and that can be quantified. And a lot of humanity is, doesn’t include numbers and easy to quantify things.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. Uh, yeah. One of the phrases I share a lot is the hard part is the human part doesn’t matter what the problem is. It’s why I say like the simplest piece, and this is kind of from the Lean Six Sigma background. It’s like, just go to Gemba, like go where the work is being done. Um, whenever I’m engaging in a project, uh, I’m say 95 to 100% of the time, I’m hired by the executive portion of the organization that is starting to feel the pain often enough that like, there’s a problem here, someone needs to go fix it. Um, and that’s great if, unless I don’t have access to the people who are actually doing the work, if I can’t go to Gemba to talk to the people that are doing what’s actually causing the friction, because a lot of times where pain manifests, where it shows up isn’t necessarily where pain originates. And tracking that down is the difference between like short term symptom solutions versus actual root cause analysis. And a lot of times the root cause analysis is looking at The humanistic side of things like where have we created tail wagging the dog solutions because we had one crazy issue, and now we have an entire department that’s dedicated to double checking someone else’s work so no one feels like this is valuable.

Matt D Ley: So any change isn’t going to be accepted because it’s already in a space that the value proposition back to the fulfillment ROI, if you’re putting in even a little bit less work, but the value isn’t there, uh, it’s, it’s not going to feel fulfilling. And so if we can’t help people manage that fulfillment ROI concept, which is what’s always in the back of my mind when I’m dealing with people, um, we’re not going to be able to sustain the change even if we implement it, because I think progress versus activity is really boiled down to a three part, um, process. It’s, you need to first orient get to that why, which is kind of what I mentioned earlier is like helping people understand why we’re making this change. Then you have to have a clearly defined action. The last piece of sustaining momentum. And if you can’t get people to feel fulfilled about the work, it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain that over a period of time, which is what’s going to actually lead to a change versus just another blip in the history of the corporation.

Lee Kantor: So now when you’re kind of bridging this humanity with, you know, quantifiable results is that are the, is management open to that? Or do they prefer the quantifiable, quantifiable results part? And how the sausage gets made is less of a priority for them?

Matt D Ley: Yeah. And that’s kind of knowing your audience at what level? Um, because again, it’s what, why are we doing this? And the rationale for the frontline worker, the individual contributor can be very different from the executive who’s responsible for the P and L that should have if we’re doing this correctly and the change is creating better opportunities. This should have some bottom line impacts, whether it’s purely financial, its retention, its overall efficiency. It reduces cost, which then should, you know, still impact the financials. So I always like to be clear on upfront, like, what is the metric that you’re looking to shift with this? Because people like to feel successful. And that’s really part of the sustainability. But it’s hard to feel successful if you don’t one have a definition of what success looks like. And two, a measurement for it. So that other piece is what is your baseline today? So what do you want to shift and where are you today? Where would you like to be? And then we can connect the dots. And one of my conversations tends to be around like, what’s the lag of this? So if we implement this more humanistic side of things around process, around building culture, how long is it going to be before we start to see impacts? And, uh, that’s usually. I can’t answer that question right now. I need to get into the weeds. But that’s one of the things I want to bring to the table is so that people can manage expectations. Um, but yeah, there should be some metric of success that we actually are driving towards. Uh, typically it comes down to financials because that is the lingua franca of pretty much any organization.

Lee Kantor: And, and it also comes down to their patience because like you can say, um, we want to have a more healthy culture, but you can’t implement that this week. Like, um, that’s built on, you know, a period of time and behavior.

Matt D Ley: Mhm. Absolutely. And, and that’s one of the things that’s a, um, I kind of got, uh. To start figuring out as I got into consulting that sometimes consultants are just hired to, I guess one of two things either be the scapegoat so that we tried something and it didn’t work. It’s the consultant’s fault. Uh, and figuring out how to learn early on, whether that’s where the client is trying to go, because then they’re really not trying to implement the change and taking it seriously. Or the other is we’ve been saying this internally, but for some reason, the organization just needs to hear the same message externally. Because I tell a client on the first call is, I’m just pretty sure that about 95 to 100% of your solutions already exist within your organization. You don’t have the feedback loops built to capture them. That’s what’s going on. Or else you’re just not listening to those voices. But I’m probably going to just share back to you what someone in your organization has already said, because it’s already there. It’s just the structure hasn’t, um, figured out currently how to gather that feedback because a lot of times the people doing the work are already the experts. They have ideas. They just don’t know necessarily how to articulate it in the language of that next level of the organization.

Lee Kantor: And there’s usually a gap between, you know, uh, there’s a trust gap and there’s a, um, a belief gap that the, that the organization really has my best interest at heart. And why should I bother sharing this idea? It’s obvious to me. I see it every day. These people are getting paid more. They should know this. That’s that’s a them problem, not a me problem.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. Uh.

Lee Kantor: You’ve never run into that.

Matt D Ley: Oh, geez. Uh, yes. And pretty much every, every, every client. Um, yeah. Because that’s, that’s part of what shows up. And that’s, I mean, I don’t get called into organizations because things are going great. Uh, no one says, hey, Matt, come in here and just look at what we’re doing. And I just learn from us because it’s all awesome. Um, something’s not working. And so there is almost always like that trust issue is starting to fracture if it’s not already broken. And that’s that’s one of the big things you got to fix. And that’s like the four C’s. I talked about that first one that people need to feel like they’re cared for. Um, and if that is not there, it starts to erode that trust. And without trust, culture is just not going to have any foundation on which to build.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, where does clarity and communication fit into all your C’s?

Matt D Ley: Um, so basically it’s, I think of it through the lens of, uh, energy management, which is back to that fulfillment ROI. Um, care helps to increase the value clarity. If you give people an understanding of what they’re doing, it means that they can just invest their energy in doing the thing. And it doesn’t mean they have to wonder like, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing it the right way? So it reduces the energy profile of the activity. Consistency is the I can focus on what I’m doing and don’t have to keep lifting up my head to wonder, is someone going to come around the hall and give me a totally different task, and I’m going to be pulled off of this so they can stay focused on the work. So you start to cut out those contexts, which drains on energy. Also, from a management perspective, talking about the, you know, Doctor Jekyll, Mr. or Mrs. Hyde scenario, if you’re not consistent in the way you show up and your leadership or your management, that means people have to be kind of unsure until you walk through the door.

Matt D Ley: And I think it follows kind of like the Pareto principle. If you show up inconsistently 20% of the time, people start to be sort of prepared for that less favorable version of you all the time. And so it’s a lot of energy wasted to show up. If you’re not consistent in the way that you operate. And then communication is just the intention perception gap. If there’s a lot of space in between what you intend and what people actually perceive, that starts to create a lot of friction. And also when you don’t give people information, I think it’s human nature to fill negative space with negative concepts because they tend to be safer. So I’m going to protect me because I don’t know what’s going on. So I’m going to take the worst possible conservative view of what’s happening so that I don’t get hurt in this situation. So communication helps to reduce that energy load as well. And potentially the way you communicate can increase that value proposition. So overall they’re all just helping tweak that fulfillment ROI formula.

Lee Kantor: And, and it’s one of those things where you have a situation where the management and the frontline people are not giving each other the benefit of the doubt. They’re assuming that there’s some, some friction when they’re each group is trying the best they can. And there’s just a disconnect. And, and a lot of it at the heart of it is that either an unhealthy culture or lack of trust because they each side doesn’t believe that they’re really working in concert with the other.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. And that’s, that’s where that trust breaks down. Um, and that’s honestly when I’m working with different groups, that’s one of the things I like to bring together is go through those four C’s. And I’m a big fan of, um, the, uh, blanking on the name of the, uh, change management model, uh, where it’s looking for bright spots and not necessarily gaps. And so it’s like, well, what’s, what’s been working in this care and this clarity and this consistency communication and how can we build around that? So we start from a positive, right? Um, um.

Lee Kantor: Right. There’s a book I just read. It’s called gap and gain. And it’s like most humans look backwards at the gaps instead of looking in a more forward way at all the gains that have occurred. Um, and, and so it’s one of those things where if everybody could just start kind of leaning into the positive and celebrating the positive, I think the, the, the negative just kind of dissipates over time. And that’s what a healthy culture is.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. Uh, it’s funny. It reminds me of I was having a conversation with my 11 year old daughter after a volleyball tournament, and she was getting frustrated because this is her first year playing, and they probably have more losses than wins. And I say that that’s not the metric you should be focusing on at this point. Like just what are what are the biggest mistakes? Like, what are the things that you can control that you could practice that are skills? Like if you can reduce the number of mistakes and make that the focus over time, like that starts to lead to the wins. And so it’s also saying, what are we doing well? And how do we build around that to move forward? So if we start looking at the behaviors versus necessarily the outcomes, the behaviors actually end up leading to the outcomes. But when we’re focused on the outcomes, we tend to like, as you said, we notice all the gaps and we forget about all the gains. And if we could just keep growing the gains, all of a sudden we actually have less gaps if no gaps at all, and we’re where we want to be.

Lee Kantor: Now, how does kind of the, the pain, um, show up for your clients? Like what is happening in the organization right before they contact you and your team?

Matt D Ley: Uh, yeah, surprisingly, one of the biggest ones is I get hired by a lot of financial departments, CFOs, directors of, um, like a P or a HR because they can’t close the books. And that’s where the organization’s starting to feel the pain because there’s either a struggle with the, um, process, the way things are showing up that way or parts of the organization teams are sharing information. Uh, and so that’s one of the biggest pain points. So I tend to get called in, at that level. And then probably secondarily, it’s an operations space that’s growing really rapidly. And so there’s a lot of, um, we have people here who knew how to do it, but they can’t train everyone else. And so how do we articulate the process so that other people can be consistent in the work that they’re doing. So kind of helping, you know, I do a lot of process documentation work because that’s kind of one of the other outside of finance, the language of like how things get done. Um, because I think if you want to fall asleep, read someone else’s process documentation, if you want the most interesting reading in the world, read the process documentation for a job or task you’re assigned but don’t know how to do. Um, so it’s just contextual as to how valuable process documentation is, uh, and helping create that and give people that clarity, I think is one of the biggest things that I kind of get called in to do now.

Lee Kantor: Do you have any advice for organizations that are trying to do that kind of process documentation. Are there some pieces of advice you can share? Maybe some do’s and don’ts or must must do’s and must not do’s?

Matt D Ley: Um, yeah. First it’s like, who’s the process documentation written for? Um, it’s not written for the experts. It’s not written for the person’s like, I know how to do this job. Think of what would happen if that person took two weeks vacation. Uh, and so it’s like the process should be able to allow the person to carry out the task without another human’s interaction. Like that’s ideal level of process documentation. And so Poland people that, uh, are inquisitive, ask questions are comfortable asking that, that don’t do the job and see if they can get through the process with just the documentation, the videos, whatever it is that you’ve created for them. And then the second piece is it doesn’t, this isn’t have to be super fancy, like a word document, any word processor, any Excel spreadsheet, if you want to lay things out, just start with something and get a couple of things working. And that’s you don’t need to build a whole system. Let’s start with something small. Bring someone from the outside who can kind of ask questions along the way. And that allows you to get to the right level of detail to get the the process documentation created.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. So just be directionally correct and then just get it documented and then just start making it better.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good.

Lee Kantor: Now what is there a story you can share that maybe illustrates what it’s like to work with you and the impact that it can make? Don’t name the name of the organization, but maybe share the challenge that came to you with and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Matt D Ley: Uh, yeah. So I had a client that pulled me in. They had a pretty ambitious goal to double in size, and they were already in the half $1 billion and wanted to be like $1 billion company. And they’re like, we’re just struggling that we can’t get above that level. And one of the things was they were one of those organizations that they couldn’t close the books. And so I got called in from the finance department to be like, can you just help us understand what’s going on here? Because they’re like, it’s a systems thing. We must not be getting the information correctly. The data is not clean. So let’s just clean this up and we’ll be good to go. Came in and it was supposed to be like a three month project, turned it in to be about a little over a year and found out that just talking with people in the different departments is that one, they didn’t have a, a process culture. So they didn’t talk about process documentation like consistency. It was all in the heads of, uh, yeah, who had done it before. And so it became very much a power dynamic as to hoard information, not share information. And there were a couple of different departments where department heads didn’t get along, and that permeated into the way those teams interacted with each other. And so the human side of things became the biggest piece that we had to unravel. And so that’s what we took apart for the, the year long project was like, how do we work together? And this process documentation is going to be a sort of a secondary outcome of that, because the other part is back to trust people.

Matt D Ley: Understanding that sharing information is actually a valuable piece because it’s, I call them golden handcuffs. If you’re the only person who can do anything that seems like job security. It also means you can’t go anywhere. You are handcuffed to that role because no one else can do it. You can’t take a vacation. You can’t take a day off because people are going to blow up your phone because no one else knows how to do what you’re doing. So I wanted to free them and then trust the culture and the organization that that wasn’t going to be a cool. We have your information now. We’re going to jettison you. So back to that care and value. But walking them through that, um, after the year, like they ran forward with, uh, you know, the process documentation, but it was more so that the people were just enjoying coming to work, working with each other. We do hard things together versus like, this is a slugfest and I have to spend half of my energy fighting the other team. I was like, we need to align our energy to move forward. So like, what’s the shared goal we’re moving towards? And yeah, they ended up hitting their financial goal, I think two and a half years after that. Um, so it was a lag of a few years, but by fixing the human side, the interaction piece, like I got called in to fix a system and a process. We worked on the human side of things. Not only did it fix the system in the process, but it helped them to transition into the space they needed to, um, to do the financial growth as well.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there, um, a sweet spot in terms of industry or company size that you work with, or is this kind of. I would imagine it’s industry agnostic, but I don’t know if you just kind of tend to work in a certain industry.

Matt D Ley: Uh, no, my clients that’s been pretty industry agnostic. And I mean, I’ve worked with small companies, 5 to 10 employees up to, you know, multiple thousands and dispersed globally. Um, I think my sweet spot is sort of when you’re at those particular Inflection Points of growth. Um, I would say when you’re moving in the mid 20s, uh, of an employee headcount, so it’s less dollars because that’s not the driver, it’s the, uh, network effect of human interaction. Because I think when you’re stepping from the mid 20s into like the low 30s, you’re starting to actually need to implement management. And that is the thing that can make or break an organization is distinguishing leadership management and individual contribution. And then the second tier is sort of when you start stepping past like 150 to 200 because now you’re hitting the community, um, sort of barrier of not everyone can know everyone. And so you need to have a more systematic approach to how do we do all of these things? That’s where process becomes much more important. That’s where clarity on consistent management, philosophy, leadership, philosophy becomes part of it. And then beyond that, you’re just growing in the level of complexity as to how much of this you’re having to do. So it might be more interdepartmental work versus larger organization, but really that mid 20s to 30s and like 150 to 200 headcount, uh, those are the two biggest inflection points that, uh, I in really enjoy investing in.

Lee Kantor: Now, we talked a lot about gaps, and I’m sure we covered a lot of ground in the book manager gaps. What would a reader get from getting that book and getting a hold of it? It sounds like that’s a good first starting point. If they want to begin an interaction with you or your firm.

Matt D Ley: Yeah. So the first gap is understanding like just the structural piece of like, what is the difference between a leader, a manager and a contributor as a role in an organization? And then the second gap is understanding what is the activity set of leadership management and contribution, particularly what is management. And so I have a epic model environment, performance, identity communication that I use to describe and identify where the structure, structure and struggles might be for new managers particularly. Um, and then the third gap is how do you bake that together? So like, okay, it’s great. We understand the organizational design, we understand the task sets of all of these. How do we make this work for our particular organization? Um, and so like, that’s the third piece that comes out of that. So it’s understanding structure, understanding the tasks and understanding, like how you, once you hit go, you continue to manage and make all that work.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more about your firm or get a hold of the book, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Matt D Ley: Uh, if you’re looking for both, uh, www.mattdley.com. So Matt D, that’s my middle initials for david.com. Um, you can go to ipn-advisors.com and it’ll direct you to the same space. I’ve just got my coaching, my book and, uh, the consulting all under that one umbrella.

Lee Kantor: Well, Matt, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Matt D Ley: Thanks, Lee. It was a great conversation.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.