An Introduction to Waymaker’s Leadership Curve.

Craig Hindman 0:02 Welcome to Leadership Torque, the official Waymaker podcast, the place for conversations about leadership, strategy and technology that helped make business improvement. Business as usual. Welcome Stu, Leo CEO and founder of Waymaker. I’m your host, Craig Hindman. It’s we’re in the same room together. If you wondered beforehand, we’re other sides of Australia. But today we are in the same room. Stuart Leo 0:37 It’s exciting. So good to see. Craig Hindman 0:39 You look good, mate. Yeah, well, you know, you too. We wanted to we wanted to do a, do a quick episode, today on the Waymaker leadership curve. Now, if you’re well, actually, I’m going to handle to use do to kind of set this up for us. Stuart Leo 0:55 Okay. If you’ve been a long term listener to Waymaker. Firstly, we apologize for that bad jokes that we repeat. But you may have listened to some really early episodes in our journey, our startup journey, where we refer to the leadership curve as an experience curve. And there’s no better example of the leadership curve than the renaming of the experience curve to the leadership curve. We, when we first launched we referred to as Waymaker as experience curve. So if you find any artifacts, published material episodes, I believe they’re collector’s items. They may be very valuable NTFS there on the dark web. But so if you come across something called Waymaker, has experienced curb it is actually now called and has been for some time Waymaker As leadership curve, but we thought it was actually about time, we went back and kind of re laid those foundations and use the right terms. Craig Hindman 1:57 For a start, so that people know what we’re talking about. But also just to kind of help bring clarity to some of the terminology that we’re that we’re using every day, in the Waymaker world. So Waymaker leadership curve, just just give us your best succinct definition of what that is. Stuart Leo 2:14 It’s a, it’s a simple line from bottom left to top right. That, when used in our diagnostic tools, helps you make sense of what’s going on, around you in your business or in yourself, depending on the diagnostic you’re using. And it helps you go on the growth journey. So it wasn’t one of the reasons we changed. The name was actually customer feedback, which is if you’re in the early stages of the leadership curve, a traditional growth maturity curve, you’re gonna go through the stages of ideation and identity and what we would call finding market fit. Yep. And in those stages, you’re adapting, you’re changing, you’re listening. Not everything’s perfect, and everything. In fact, most things are not perfect. And so in those early stages, you’ll change change a lot. And so, one of the things we changed was, was how we talked about this curve, from Waymaker experience curve to Waymaker, the leadership curve. So what was the feedback? Well, the feedback from the lawyers was, you’ve been published this. You might, you might get in trouble from a very, very, very large management consultant that was already using the experience. That’s correct. Which somehow we missed it out to the customer’s feedback Craig Hindman 3:37 was that we should stick with it, we would have, we would have had the vibe. Stuart Leo 3:42 That’s like David coming up against Goliath. Craig Hindman 3:45 But it was fortuitous in some ways, because as you’re about to explain, that’s correct. Stuart Leo 3:48 Customers, were saying it’s this isn’t really bad experience. This is about leadership. This is this tool is helping me lead my business or lead myself more effectively. And so we’re like, Oh, that’s cool. It’s actually a leadership curve. I hadn’t thought about it like that. So I thought, well, that that kills two birds with one stone will avoid a really expensive legal case. And we can go away and trademark way makers leadership, and we can Craig Hindman 4:13 we get more clarity in our communication as well. Correct. So Stuart Leo 4:17 hey, we help customers love us, which is about finding market fit. We avoid paying for the next lawyers, Ferrari and we all get to live to fight another day. And that’s what we do. The, to get back to what it is. It’s a sense making framework. And it’s, it’s, I describe it as the science behind Waymaker. So, behind every new idea, there’s a little bit of science, and really, it’s the way we connect a bunch of sciences. So the science of sensemaking the science of systems thinking, the science of scaling, the science of it Mmm psychological mindsets and performance management. And we’re using Waymaker as leadership curve, to connect a lot of dots to build a system of thinking, a way of thinking, that will make your life a lot easier. Waymaker. So what’s it helping us make sense of it depending on the? Well, it’s helping you make sense of the journey you’re on? Yeah. So one of the greatest challenges for any leader of either leading themselves or their team or leading their business is, Well, where am I? Yep. If you’ve ever been in space, which none of us have, unless you’re an astronaut listening, you Craig Hindman 5:41 welcome. Give us a call, we’d love to chat. Stuart Leo 5:45 You know, your greatest challenge is perspective on finding a fixed object. And the thing about travel is, and I’m going to do a bad job of this. But you could be an airline pilot, as soon as you move up. And all the Flat Earthers can tune out right now, because the Earth is round. It is you Craig Hindman 6:05 arguably, oh, Stuart Leo 6:08 I know, you’re joking, when I say that. When you’re an airline pilot, you need those three points, you need to vector yet, you need three points to figure out where you are, because two points is no longer enough, because of the curvature of the earth. And so when you’re when you’re trying to work out where you are as a leader, to points is never enough. And so Waymaker is helping you find a sense of perspective in where you are in the growth journey, the maturity journey. So imagine a curve bottom left, top right on a curve, classic, traditional products, go back to business school, and your professor would have drawn out a curve an S curve, and said, every product, every organization goes through this maturity curve. Cool. That’s the shape. There’s no rocket science there. And hey, we’re not trademarking that. That’s in every business textbook in the world. What’s not in every business textbook in the world, is the way you figure out where you are on that curve. And what things you need to do to help you move up the curve and to stop you from falling back down the curve. Good. So it’s like, everyone said, Hey, this is the curve, everybody goes on from here to there, which is never a curve. It’s more like a bowl of spaghetti anyway. But nobody’s ever stopped and said, Well, what are the things in order that actually help us? Get up the curve? And what are the things that we need to know how to do as we start going up that curve, so that we don’t fall down the curve? At the mean, that’s kind of common sense. Yep. And critical, pretty darn critical. And so the challenge was, what are those things? So if you had to say, Hey, first of all, here’s where you are. So now we’ve got some objectivity coming into the journey, this is actually where you are. So if you’re a business leader, business owner, and you’re like, man, everything’s happening to me, I can see where I am on revenue, I can see where I am on expenses. But that’s actually not giving me the picture of where I am in reality. Where am I? Where am I on my maturity of sales? Where am I on my maturity of leadership? Where am I on my maturity of vision casting, or maturity of my business model? Not just I’ve done a business model that sits on my wall, but how mature is that inside my business? What skills what systems? Do I need to actually embed these ideas into the business to stop my business from slipping back down the curve? So making sense? Craig Hindman 9:02 Yeah. Wouldn’t you say, though, that, like you’re actually saying that this is actually an objective measure that we can make, as opposed to? Because wouldn’t normally be a subjective? Stuart Leo 9:14 It’s always been subjective. Yeah. Yeah. And so you would always have? Well, I think we’re here, I think we’re there. And what we’ve done with Waymaker is build an objective model to say, this is where you’re at. Right? Now, some may say that subjective because it’s our opinion. It’s just somebody that’s just data driven this time. That’s true. And in one sense, sure. That is it is perceptive in that sense. It just has years and years and years and 1000s and 1000s of records feeding into it. So that it’s kind of getting smarter, as opposed to one person walking into your business saying, Hey, I think that’s where you’re at. They could be right, that could be wrong. We’re just trying to de risk that conversation. So it’s a bit like running a diagnostic across an engine and going, Hey, how’s this engine going? Well, let’s ask the computer computer says no, let’s ask management consultant management consultant looks at it and says, Oh, yes. Okay, well, who’s right? Who’s wrong? So the engine, the science behind Waymaker leadership curve? Is this capacity to take the abstract ideas of business. Well, how do you measure your maturity of vision? But you just have a vision? Or how do you measure that? Well, actually, there’s a way of measuring that. And we take that subjective, the abstract stuff, that’s really hard to wrap your hands around in the business that feels like water running through your fingers when you’re trying to kind of react and lead your business. And we put some objectivity to it. And we turn around and we say, if if you and your team and your stakeholders take this diagnostic answer these questions over the next five to 15 minutes will tell you were you are on this growth continuum. And not only that, because we’ve worked out or believe that there’s only two things you can do to move you on that. Now, that’s a brave statement, I’ll come back to that later. But there’s two things you can do. Those two things are invest in skills or invest in systems. So that’s fairly broad. But basically, if we build skills, and we build systems, then we can influence the movement up or down the curve. But not only that, we think there are steps in a certain order that are best practice, that once you’ve done this step, you should do that step. And if you want to do that step, and you haven’t done this step, the step before, then, in fact, you may not be able to do that. It’s like your music. We’ve loved hanging out over the years bashing around on guitars and whatever. And Craig Hindman 11:47 looking forward to this analogy. Carry on. Stuart Leo 11:49 Yeah. Your mom, me mortal. And I’ll try and play you know, a Bob Dylan three chords, and then somebody like you will pick up an instrument. And, you know, play it like you invented it. There’s a skill and a system that you’ve acquired. You’re not just basic strumming three chords in the truth. You’ve you’re now playing jazz. Sure, adapting, you’re reacting, you’re proactive. You’re adding a note here, leaving out some notes there, your your fingers are working systematically, in, in alignment with the brain. And you’re saying, well, actually, although the music, the sheet music might say this, if I do this, well, that brings my style to it that you’re you’re being strategically agile. Yeah, well done music. That makes sense. Craig Hindman 12:39 Yeah. And before I, you know, try and teach you how to do that, straightaway, there’s a whole bunch of other things that you have to learn, right. So in the, in the world of sport, which I’ve been watching a lot lately, because my team is going through like a complete revamp of everything. And there’s this whole language around an idea around external reviews, right, someone actually coming in that’s outside the business, they can get like, a bird’s eye view of everything. In they interview a whole bunch of different people across all the departments and identify, in some respects, it’s kind of like that. Stuart Leo 13:13 It’s sort of like that. Yeah, but not that. One of the benefits that the Waymaker leadership curve diagnostic is, is that it puts a third party objective voice into the conversation. That is not biased. Sure. So when you put an individual and you know, one of the problems we wanted to solve with Waymaker, his leadership curve, and the diagnostic tool was I could go into a business, and I could diagnose it. You know, I could classic man, you know, business analysis, management consulting thing. Yes. Craig, love your business. You’ve asked for help. Fantastic. I’m going to sit down, I’m going to talk to you, I’m going to go and spend a few hours interviewing each of your key leaders, I’m going to maybe talk to some customers, I’m going to open your books, I’m going to ask a bunch of questions. Three or four weeks later, 40 or 50 hours later, I’m writing up my report. Now I’m a human. Yep, I’m automatically biased. Yep. There’s something going on in my head in my heart, that’s biasing how approaching this right. And you’ve already made some assumptions already made assumptions. And what we’ve done is to say, Not only have we removed some of that bias, that either groupthink or personal bias, that could be existing in the management consultant, or the consultant or the coach. We’ve also made that process faster. So we’ve removed by us it’s kinda like, you know, get the external reviewers in. So first thing is we remove the bias. The second thing was, gosh, if we could do this faster than interviewing 20 people and 100 hours to get through the process, then that could be useful. Which means you would do it more often. Yep. Which means if you were reviewing more often, because it was easier, your cycle of calibration would be faster, right? You’re identifying if we go off track much quicker, correct? Yep. And you’re identifying the next things to do much faster. Yeah. So the way I like to think about it is the torque in an engine, hence why this podcast is called Leadership Torque to qu e bring it, I think. Yeah, and talk is the Gosh, I’m not going to do the definition, justice. But it’s the power generated through the leverage created in the moving parts. And so I love getting out and doing full driving, it’s the pastime of many outdoorsy bogan here in Australia, Craig Hindman 15:51 I was gonna say middle aged, but yeah, I Stuart Leo 15:53 was gonna say it’s a great pastime, a middle aged, overweight guy that wants to see the great outdoors by a truck. And, and when you in, you know, your modern your rock, and you want to have high powered talk, so you’re going into low gears. And that allows you significant leverage with, with the capacity to lift high weight. Slowly, with less effort with less effort talk to. And so the Think about the revolutions on an engine, the engines, rotating the gears or shifting the ratios up or down accordingly. And using those gears to shift down to create high torque, so you can actually, you actually achieve great outcomes with less effort. And that’s, that’s kind of the thinking behind Waymaker leadership curve. And the way the seven questions operate in terms of driving your business. So if you can, if you can, if you can map, okay, what maturity and leadership looks like. And across different areas of the business, you can start to build a data picture, a data model of what maturity looks like, it’s, and then you can start to assess that. And if you can assess quickly and at speed, you can affect change, which means you can start to make changes more quickly and more easily, faster, then you’ve suddenly got talk, you’ve got power, you’ve got leverage. And it’s like a high performance athlete going out onto the field of play. And they’re all kind of stick it up with oxygen trackers and health trackers. And clearly, I never do that, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. And when they come in at halftime, you’ve got a coach who is tracking all that data, and they’re able to say you should be doing this, you should be doing that. And they’re, they’re using that moment to recalibrate, in ready for high performance for the next. Does that make sense? And that’s kind of what Waymaker leadership curve is doing. It’s saying, if you want to get from bottom left to top right. numbers matter, but it’s not just about the numbers. It’s kind of like one point on the vectoring skills and systems are the other two points. What skills are you building? What systems are you building? And which ones are most needed across the business? And so Craig Hindman 18:21 that was going to pull you back to the skills and systems thing just to talk about it? Yeah, Stuart Leo 18:25 so what is a skill and what is a system it’s not. It’s not as clear as you know, a skill is something that I or the business knows how to do. A system is a process, or a system or a way of doing things. That means it can be repeated. It could be technology, that’s that’s clearly repeating it, or it could be a process that you’ve learned. So. And it’s not just my skill, it’s not always an individual skill, what we’re often talking about on the leadership curve. Things the business knows how to do I’ll give you an example. Yep. When the business knows how to identify, document and write a customer persona, that’s a core skill of the business. Now there are people within the business that will need to know how to do that. But the business needs to know how to do that. That’s what we’re assessing Sure. We’re not assessing Craig’s ability to write a customer persona, we’re assessing the business’s ability to identify, develop and communicate that persona. Craig Hindman 19:36 Great. So remove me from the organization, can the business still do it? Stuart Leo 19:39 Exactly. And that’s the point. Because in order to move from bottom left to top right to grow on the leadership curve, the business as a whole needs to have these things baked into the organization. It needs to be what we’d say intentional about that. Not if I could use the language charismatic, it can’t be something keep buying one per Isn’t, and when that person leaves, the skill set leaves with you the skill set leaves with you. That’s not a business. Yeah, that’s a that’s like to use your sports analogy, we’re just gonna go and hire a bunch of stars. And we’re not, we’re not going to bother train them because they’re already at peak performance. And we’re just going to milk them for a season, then we’ll go buy another bunch of stats. And that clearly doesn’t work. Craig Hindman 20:22 Yep. And we think that maybe that’s just from the top down, like from a CEO perspective, or something like that. It’s actually at every point of the organization at every point of the organization. So can you give us an example? Well, you did give us one good example. Give us another example of the relationship between skills and systems. Stuart Leo 20:39 Okay, so I talked about a customer persona. Yep. So what might sit above a customer persona on the leadership curve, would be a customer journey. So if the business doesn’t know how to design a customer journey and execute it, well, that’s great. But it can’t do that piece of work until it’s identified its customer persona, because what journey mapping? What are the problems they’re facing? What content do they require? What’s the well, that requires, who if you don’t know who the who, who is, it can’t find the journey they need to go through. So that’s an example of a couple of skills sitting on the leadership curve, that you can’t really do customer journey until you figured out customer persona, classic, simple, you know, kind of basic 101 stuff, don’t worry, it does get more sophisticated. An example of a system and I’m trying to use simple things. So everybody can relate would be to say, Well, okay, early in, in the systems of the organization would be something like a CRM job. But you can’t really do sophisticated marketing automation work, if you don’t have a CRM. So marketing automation might sit higher on a sales and marketing leadership curve, and CRM, why? Well, to do market automation, you need to know when you didn’t know what to automate. That’s right. You know, what’s the journey? What’s the what’s the digital? Yeah. So from a, a systems point of view, close to customer journey, on the opposite side of the curve. And when we talk about the leadership curve, we talk about the top side being the skills and the bottom side being the systems and that will make sense when you see skills and systems identified across the curve. On the bottom side of the curve would say CRM on the top side would say customer journey. Yep. So once you’ve done customer journey, you should be doing CRM or your first iteration of CRM. And then that will lead on to more sophisticated steps, which will lead on in both skills and system, which will lead on to greater maturity, I’m trying to give a simple picture here. The idea being that you shouldn’t be building a system that is more advanced than the skills that you have. That’s kinda like putting a learner driver in a race car. And things tend to go bad. And, conversely, you shouldn’t be building an organization of high skills, without providing them with the systems to suit their skills. That’s kind of like putting racecar drivers in Volkswagen Beetles, going to have lots of fun, but you’re gonna walk away pretty quickly. So the, when the Craig Hindman 23:28 true traditional way of thinking about systems, though, is like you do need to build the systems. Like first to actually create the frameworks in which skills can be developed. Stuart Leo 23:39 This is great. The chicken versus the egg question on skills and systems. Yeah. Well, who’s building the system? Craig Hindman 23:45 Yet the people with the skills? Stuart Leo 23:48 That’s right. So when we talk about skills in a business, we’re talking about things the business knows how to do. So if it’s a customer journey, what are you going to build first the CRM or the customer journey? To the customer journey? Yeah. Because what are you going to put into the Craig Hindman 24:03 system say that you’re good? When people listen back? They’ll think that I didn’t know. Stuart Leo 24:08 Should we replay that? So when you’re in business, what are you going to what are you going to build first a customer journey or a CRM, a customer journey? While you’re smart? So the, but it doesn’t mean everybody in the business, always going forward is going to have to figure out the customer journey. Yeah. Because some early people in the business figured out the customer journey. Yeah. Then they deploy the system to make it easy to execute the customer journey. Yeah. And then the next people coming along, who are trained in both the skill and the system, go, oh, you know what, at this point in the journey, we could improve it. So they start making tweaks and making improvements. But the first people that designed the customer journey, they don’t have to do that. Why? Because they’ve taught and trained, the people coming behind them. Why because they lead And, and so this, we have this mantra in Waymaker that goes like this, show the way, build the system, train the leader, hold them accountable, help them win, say it again, show the way, train the leader. Stop. Thank you, thank you for making me repeat that and get it wrong. It goes like this, show the way build a system, train the leader, hold them accountable, help them win. So show the way when you’re showing the way, you’re applying the first set of skills, you know, what’s the way we do a customer journey? Welcome to our customer journey. Here’s how we do a customer journey. Step two is build the system. Why? So that you can support the person you’re showing that way? To make it easier for them? You don’t? It? If you’re showing somebody how to do it, your job is to make it easier for them to do that thing. Yeah, that’s what leaders do. They make. They make it easier for people to do the things they need to do. And you’re carving the way ahead. So show the way build the system. So show the way what’s the skill, build the skill, invest in the skill, developed the thinking the IP, build the system, train the next leader, show the way build the system, train the leader, train the next leader. Fantastic. Now I can delegate this to you. Yep, I’m going to equip and empower you to be the leader on this skill now. So now there’s two of us that have the skill and a system that keeps us both in check. Hold them accountable. Fantastic. You own customer journey now, young man. When it needs improving, I want you to improve it. Yep. Now if you need anything to make that improvement, come back to me. So I’m going to hold you account now to keep improving that skill. Excellent. You want to win by improving that skill on that system? Fantastic. You come back saying oh, if we had $100,000 We could do all these great improvements and make it better? And I go Yeah, if I help you win, I win. Yep. Fantastic. So train the leader build the system. Sorry, man. Clearly, show the way. Yeah. So the boom, I’m gonna show you the way build the system. Here’s the system so that you can keep doing the way train the leader, now I’ve trained you, you’re gonna hold them accountable. Fantastic. I’m holding you accountable to keep improving the skill helped them win. Oh, well, now, here’s how you win. Excellent. I’m going to help you win. Because as I’ve created that, that way across my team, my interest is in helping you win. You’re interested in helping the people around you win. Yep. And every time you develop something new, you’re always showing the way building a system, train the next leader holding them accountable, helping them win. And that’s just classic leadership. And so that’s kind of what the leadership curve is doing. It’s saying, you’re frustrated, you’re stuck, you don’t know where to go. Next. It’s business feels like water running through your fingertips what’s going on in this business, I can see my revenue, I can see my expenses, but what’s really going on. You know what we’re at this point on our growth continuum. These are the best practice activities that if improved, and most likely going to help us move forward, I can see where I’m at, I’m starting to get perspective, I can see the skills I should be investing in or my team should be investing in or the business should be investing in, I can see the systems that those skills will underpin. And that’s going to create the new floor, the next rung in the ladder. Excellent. I can now start to take what’s been thrust at me. I can start to move the subjective into objective. I can start to build some clarity and go, Yeah, okay, we need to do this, we need to work on this, that work on this, I can start to prioritize around those things. And I can start to ignore the distractions now. Because I’ve got some perspective of I’ve got my evicted, I’ve got my three points, I can fly my plane from point A to point B. I know my starting point, my endpoint and my height and my velocity on the way through, I’m not going to crash. I’ve got clarity. Craig Hindman 29:20 That’s awesome. I actually think that’s a really great foundation for understanding the leadership curve, we’ve actually only just scratched the surface, like even just talking about systems versus skill. So there’s actually a whole bunch of extra stuff that we actually want to address around understanding the leadership curve. Maybe we actually dive into that in next episode. That’s a good idea. So in in the meantime, actually, that was actually a really great refresher and we talked about it all the time, just so if you’ve got anything out of this and you want to dive into it further. Well, you can always jump on waymaker.io Sign up for a free trial if you haven’t if you’re already existing Waymaker user then like the way Waymaker Academy has a whole bunch of this stuff that you can actually deep dive into and you know get some clarity clarity on my business improvement business as usual