Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Today, leading is so much more than just managing the work. We expect more executive level leadership skills and capabilities out of our frontline leaders to communicate the vision of the organization. Collaborate not only with their team, but with their peers. And we've said, in addition to getting the work done, lead effectively in this environment. And I think that's an area where I'm not sure yet that we're doing enough to help these leaders to be massively successful.
Welcome to a new episode of the what Works podcast series. Today we're joined by Paul Walker, CEO of Franklin Covey, who brings a wealth of knowledge on leadership development and organizational strategy. In this episode, Paul delves into the evolving challenges faced by leaders in today's dynamic work environment. This conversation is packed with valuable insights for anyone looking to enhance their leadership capabilities and drive cultural transformation within their organization.
Let's take a listen.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Paul, welcome to the what Works podcast. I'm so excited to have you here.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Oh, it's great to be here, Kathy.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Well, thanks for joining me. And so I know we'll talk a lot about Franklin Covey, but before we talk about Franklin Covey, I want to hear a little bit about you, Paul. So tell us about who Paul is and a little bit about your background.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Okay. Well, so I'm Paul Walker. I'm the CEO at Franklin Covey. I've been with Franklin Covey 25 years. I was in a front level, kind of entry level position when I started with the company and I've had a chance to play a lot of different roles and see a lot of different things in the company, but it really has been kind of a, from the front level to the, to the CEO level job. Kind of a, kind of kick myself and say, how could that be the case? But it has been the case for me. I guess it's right place, right time and, and very fortunate in my career, personally. My wife Melissa and I, we live in just south of Salt Lake City, Utah where we're headquartered. Company's headquartered in Utah and we've got four kids and we are big skiers and outdoor enthusiasts, runners and it's it. I have a great family and I work for a great company.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: So you said you started with a frontline role, which is interesting. So what kind of frontline roles do you have at Franklin Covey?
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So Franklin Covey is about a thousand associates today around the world and we go to market around the world in about 15 countries directly. And then we have this fantastic group of, of partners, licensee partners that help Us cover the rest of the world. And. And so our clients are truly multinational, global companies of all sizes. So then within that, to answer your question, specifically at the front line, we've got all the kind of roles you would think of. My role, by the way, that I started in, was a. Was like an sdr. So I was an inside sales rep trying to help connect with prospective clients and see if there was interest there that I could line them up with one of our client partners. But we've got all the classic frontline roles you could think of in a company that's got around a thousand employees.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Wow. Wow. Fantastic. So a thousand employees. Let's talk a little bit about Franklin Covey and who Franklin Covey is. And for people that listen in, many people might think either of the Planner, right. Or they might think about the Seven Habits.
But who is Frank and Covey, and how did you become what you are today as a company?
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah, great question. So, yeah, when you first hear the name, depending on your. Your generation, or when you might have experienced the name Franklin Covey, you might associate us with the planners and so. Or you might associate it with Seven Habits, or increasingly, the last many years, you might associate us with the All Access Pass subscription or the Leader in Me subscription. So let me just give you a quick trip down memory lane here. So about 40 years ago, two gentlemen started both sides of the company, the Franklin side and the Cubby side. The Franklin side, of course, was the Franklin Planner. This was pre Palm pilot, pre BlackBerry, pre iPhone, when people carried the leather binders around with the inserts in there for your daily planning. And that business, interestingly enough, was started less to be a planner company and more to be a company to help people kind of live a very congruent life, to match up what was important to them, the values they had, the roles they played, the goals they wanted to accomplish, with a system to bring all that into alignment. And so it was a training company trying to help people become more effective. And companies started to buy this, you know, like crazy for their employees because they wanted their employees to be as effective as they could be. And this was back pre outlook and all the things that we have today to help us manage our time and stay on, on stay focused. And the Franklin Planner was that tool. But the real reason the tool existed was to help people be more effective.
Down the road, actually in Utah also was a guy named Stephen Covey, and he had started a company called the Covey Leadership Center. And he was also in the human effectiveness business. He'd written a book called the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And many of your listeners probably know that book.
And he created a whole leadership consultancy around that, helping leaders and individuals adopt these habits to help them become highly effective. And the two companies merged now, gosh, 26 years ago to create what is Franklin Covey today?
And the mission of the company is largely still the same as it was back then. Partnering with organizations, partnering with leaders to help those leaders create the conditions for their people to be highly effective, to be well led, to come together in a high trust inclusive culture, and to get everybody aligned and moving in the right direction to accomplish the organization's most important goals. We call that whole thing collective action. And so at our core, we're a behavior change company, helping people adopt and establish the behaviors that will provide maximum effectiveness for that organization to perform at the highest levels possible.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Got it. Wow. So all in the business of really making behavior change at scale, you said. Right. So helping people become more effective, changing behaviors, enabling leaders, are we also enabling culture? So where do you fit in the whole market? Are you a leadership development? Like, if people want to put you into a kind of a box, where would you see Franklin Covey Fitzgerald?
[00:06:36] Speaker A: Yeah, great. It's a great question, Kathy. So there was a box called the People Performance Partner to Leaders.
That's the box that I, that I would put us in. And let me just step back and describe kind of how I. How we view the competitive landscape or the industry landscape out there on a continuum. On one end of the continuum, you've got consulting firms, and they're oftentimes engaged by companies to help them think through strategy and then to help them align the operations and the organization and maybe even the structure of the company in pursuit of that strategy, that. That's not us. We will come in and follow those strategy firms to help our clients. On the other end of the continuum, you've got a lot of the, what we call the library skills providers. They are focused a lot on the skilling and the upskilling of large groups of people inside organizations that's consistent with that strategy. And there tends to be, historically there's been a real technical focus there, a digital focus on those skills. We have some of that. But where we play is kind of squarely in the middle of this continuum. Once an organization is clear as they or as they get clear on the strategy that they're pursuing and they've got a plan or the beginnings of a plan for what the technical skills are going to need to be to help make that strategy come to life. There's still this third component which sits here in the middle, which is are the people in the company up and up and down the company and across the organization, Are they ready and are they supported and equipped to help make that strategy come to life?
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Got it? No, that's fantastic. So let's talk maybe through a couple of use cases or examples, maybe from some of your clients.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Marriott came to us a number of years ago and in this case it was the business side of Marriott saying, you know, we are, the challenge we have is that we're locked in a battle with Hilton and Starwood. There just been an article written for Lodging magazine that was, was titled the Sea of Sameness. The Sea of Sameness. And the point was that as a consumer you could no longer tell a difference between Marriott, Hilton or Starwood. You'd go to their hotels. It was a very uniform and similar experience. And Marriott said, you know what, we're going to deliver better results than they do and we're going to focus on guest satisfaction as the defining difference between Marriott and these other brands. And what Marriott knew, like all organizations or lots of organizations do, is they knew what the key inputs were around Guest Sat. They knew that there were better performing hotels around Guest Sat than average and lower performers. So they knew that some hotels performed better than others. And they knew the conditions that existed in the best performing hotels. But they couldn't get those conditions to exist uniformly across all of their hotels. Well, of course, you and I stay in a lot of hotels and you recognize that, you know, while we might be a loyal Marriott or Hilton or Starwood customer, we're staying in lots of different hotels throughout the year and we're hoping to have a very consistent experience. And that wasn't the case at Marriott or any of these hotels. And so they said we've got to figure out how to create this kind of collective momentum where we can get the experience to be uniform everywhere you go. Whenever a guest checks into any of our hotels, they can have a similar check in experience. The room service is going to arrive on time and the food's going to be warm and you know, all the things that would go into providing a great guest experience. And so they engaged us for what became a very big leadership and cultural transformation.
And we became the partner to them and have been now for more than a decade at driving their guest satisfaction. So we engage with their, their leaders and their whole operations team and we train thousands of people a year at Marriott. And what we're Doing is we're training leaders to understand, you know, how to engage their teams towards this goal of increased guest satisfaction. And then we have this wonderful prod offering called the four Disciplines of Execution. And this is a goal alignment methodology where we come in and we help an organization establish what's the goal you're trying to achieve. In this case, it's an improvement in guest sat. And then what are the behaviors that actually have to either change or be demonstrated consistently at the front line of the organization that are directly connected to, in this case, guest satisfaction? And we have, we come in and we help train around those behaviors, but also around, we install a process that allows an organization to drive daily, and in this case, shift by shift focus around those behaviors where commitments are made every day or every shift around what can I be doing to drive better guest satisfaction from my position in a particular hotel?
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Did they come to you with that problem already articulated, or did you have to dig deeper to even understand what's the real problem behind the problem?
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Yeah, in that case, they knew that guest satisfaction was what they wanted to go after.
But I'll tell you, that's an insightful question you just asked. One of the things that I see a lot, I've been doing this for 25 years I mentioned earlier, is that oftentimes, what are HR or L and D teammates come to us with aren't always the same issues that the CEO is trying to solve.
And I do, I do, we do see that, that disconnect oftentimes, not in every case, but oftentimes you see that disconnect between what the CXO level leaders are trying to accomplish and where HR, L&D is focused. And there might be an implicit connection between those two things, but there's not an explicit connection between those two things. And so we don't just want to play on the general skills for general skills sake side of the equation. We're trying to make sure that what we're attached to is some major goal or initiative or outcome that requires a change in human behavior. And so sometimes the organization is very clear on that, and other times we have to kind of help tease that out a bit to really make sure there's an explicit connection there.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Got it? No, that makes sense.
The other thing I wanted, and then I want to hear the other example, but the other thing I wanted to hone in on is you said there's something about human behavior change is needed, or something like that. I can't almost think of any circumstance where change is needed in the organization and human behavior doesn't have to change. So I'm curious about what examples you have where this would not be relevant.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: When I step back and think about what leaders do every day, what the most effective individuals do every day, what the best cultures look like every day, or what the best execution looks like, I think within those four buckets are where the intractable problems live. Right. For as long as people have been alive, they've been trying to figure out how to lead more effectively. And the good news is there are principles around great leadership, but the circumstances in which those principles get applied are ever changing. And that's one of the areas that we're focused on at Frank and Covey is we try to take a very principle centered approach to everything that we do. Right. And so as demographics in the workforce change, there are different applications. But the principles of what great leadership looks like, the way that, you know, it starts with character and who you are as a leader, and then it extends to, well, how do you think as a leader? And that how who you are and how you think drives then the actions that you take as a leader. And of course, those actions, if they're the right actions, lead to great results. If they're the wrong actions, you get not as great a result. But underlying all those things are these principles that can be time tested. So, so one other example, where it came from the HR&L and D side, where I won't name this company, but very large global manufacturing company. And the issue here is that they've grown for a number of years through acquisition. What they started to sense was they recognized that each time they acquired a company, they lost a little bit of the common language, these shortcuts that we all use to kind of get around day by day. And they started to notice that the, that because people didn't know each other or had different expectations, there wasn't the same level of trust once they'd acquired the fifth company that there was back when it was one and maybe two companies. So they engaged us again. This time HR&L and D brought us to the table to the leaders of one of the divisions there. And they said, look, we want to create some common language and common thinking about the topic of trust. When trust is high, speed goes up and cost goes down. When trust is low, speed goes down and costs go up.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: Sure. Because you have controls, right? Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: All right. Right. There's all kinds of extra protocols and processes and approvals and all the things that happen when, hey, I don't, I don't know if I can trust you or not. Right. And so this happens at individual level, team level, organization level. And so they recognized, hey, we've done all these acquisitions. We need cost to go down and speed to go up. And so they engaged us and said, okay, we're going to have, as one of our cultural pillars, we're going to create an insanely high trust culture here.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: This was such a fantastic example. So thanks for that. How would people think about, for example, who would be kind of in your space? What do you think about coaching companies to be in your space? Other leadership development companies who would be kind of similar companies that people would say, well, Franklin Covey or Company xyz. And you don't have to mention obviously, what, like, names, but who is, who is in your space? Who is your competitors?
[00:16:01] Speaker A: What's different about us is that we do have a leadership practice and there are a lot of people that do. We also have a practice devoted to helping individuals with those interpersonal skills. And there are others out that do that as well. We have a whole practice devoted to culture and creating these high trust, high performing cultures. There are others that do that as well. And then there's this fourth area around strategy execution. It is an interesting spot that we play in. There's not a great competitor to what we're doing, especially for those clients that are benefiting from all four of those things from us simultaneously.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Got it, Got it. Now that totally makes sense. So you have this as an ongoing partnership to help them with all these different four offerings constantly depending on what's changing and how that where they're going and which environment they are going into. Right.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Part of the reason we've chosen to focus in the four big areas that we're focused is that these are the areas that, where the problems are intractable. What? You're never going to check the box and say, oh, okay, we've, we've, we've mastered leadership. Right. Or, oh, our culture is never going to have to get better. Or, wow, we now know everything there is to know and we execute perfectly. Like, these areas are the kinds that leaders are going to, you know, want and need and benefit from help on, not just tomorrow, but, you know, for years to come.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: Awesome. Well, this was fantastic. And I think we're almost out of time, Paul. So any last words or any last observations?
[00:17:29] Speaker A: You know, maybe to bring it back to this audience specifically, I had the good fortune of being on a call. It's probably been a month ago now with a chr of one of the largest companies in the country. But this individual we were just talking about, you know, what are some of the challenges that we collectively see? And I asked, you know, what's the challenge that they're seeing? And in this case, this individual shared that one of the things that they're most focused on right now is the many thousands of people leaders they have in their company and equipping those people leaders better than they have heretofore. And we got into this discussion about why is it so difficult today to be a people leader. You know, it used to be you became a people leader, especially at the front line of an organization, because you knew how to do that job better than the other people team. And that was all that you needed to do because you had all these layers above you of people who had done your job and they'd done that person's job and that person's job. And so these layers helped communicate information and they helped, you know, kind of make sure the business is running the way it needed to run. And you, as the frontline leader, just needed to make sure your team was getting done what needed to get done. And you really kind of managed the work.
Today. Leading is so much more than just managing the work. Right. It's managing the work in a remote or hybrid environment with, you know, situations where you have multiple generations in the workforce at one, you know, on your team at the same time where the layers above you have been cut out. And there might. There's fewer layers between the front line and the CEO now than ever before because of technology. It makes that possible. But that puts all these extra pressures on the first level leader who now isn't just a manage the work type leader. They're really more, we're, we expect more executive level leadership skills and capabilities out of our frontline leaders today. And so we've left to them the need to, you know, really communicate the vision of the organization well, make sure that they can collaborate not only with their team, but with their peers and up into the organization as well. They need to be able to be experts at giving and receiving feedback and selecting the right kind of talent and creating the environment to retain that talent. Talent, by the way, that's working from their bedrooms. Right? And so you're dealing with these high stakes conversations. People's emotional wellbeing is maybe a little bit more fragile than it was in the past. Right. There's a lot of mental and emotional health challenges out there at a greater level right now. And so we put all this into the mixing pot. And we've said to our leaders, hey, in addition to getting the work done, lead effectively in this environment. And I think that's an area where we all, as kind of practitioners and experts and partners in this space, we all can see the connection. But I'm not sure yet that we're still doing enough to help these leaders who are the leverage point in our organizations for everything we're going to go accomplish to really set them up to be massively successful. And I think that's a, that's something we, you know, I'm seeing a lot of and I think, hopefully, I imagine your listeners are as well and something that we're certainly trying to contribute to at least some of the answers there as well.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Wow. Fantastic. Thank you, Paul. We've covered so much ground. I really appreciate your time. This was such a fantastic conversation. I can't thank you enough.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Kathy, thanks for, thanks for inviting me to join you today. It was great to see you again.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the what Works podcast. Wasn't it fascinating to hear Paul's journey from Frontline employee to becoming the CEO of the company over 25 years talk about what great place to work that is.
Also, we learned about how Franklin Covey evolved from the merge of of the Franklin Planner company with Steve Covey's company that was built around the seven habits of highly successful people. If you read that book, if you use the Planner, you know what this is all about. But it really set the stage for the current focus of the company of enabling behavior change at scale so they can help individuals and organizations to become more effective. That's what helped Myriad significantly improve customer satisfaction and also differentiate from the competition.
We hope you found this episode useful. Stay tuned for more episodes where we explore innovative strategies and what works in today's world of work. Until next time.
