2451 - Progressive Culture Coaching Transforming Organizations Through Decentralized Decision-Making Liberty Mind's Lizzie Benton

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. with us right now lizzie benton uh lizzie you are outside of beautiful cambridge uk uh which i i had to do uh what was it what was actually the town that you were in so the town is called stanford stanford i i encourage anyone if you want to see some just beautiful picturesque you know it's like straight out of a storybook uh kind of uh i i don't i don't blame you for for living there. It just looks absolutely gorgeous. But do a search, do a Google image search so you can see exactly where Lizzie operates from.

1:30But Lizzie, you are the founder of Liberty Mind. You are a progressive culture coach, which we'll get into, your keynote speaker, and you are a podcaster. Your podcast is called Make It Thrive, the company culture podcast, and you were found on the web at libertymind.co.uk. It's great to have you, Lizzie. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Before we get into your superpowers and your impact in the world, you always love kind of hearing what leaders are into, up to, outside of work. I understand you just finished a book that you enjoyed. Yes, I'm a big bookworm. So my latest book that I've just finished is called meditations for mortals by oliver berkman absolutely recommend if you're someone who doesn't like you know the kind of the overly woo-woo kind of idea of meditation and maybe you're a recovering people pleaser or perfectionist tendencies then like me then i would definitely say it's one to pick up wow okay and it's called it's called one more time what was it called it's called Meditations for Mortals.

2:41Mortals. Yeah, there it is. Came right up for me. Four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. I love it. Oliver Berkman. Okay, cool. Thank you so much for that. Tell me, so, you know, for me, sitting silently and trying not to think is really hard for me. I know that doesn't work really well. You know, I certainly enjoy just kind of sitting and hanging out, watching the birds, watching the fish, you know, that sort of thing. Or just out for a walk in nature with no headphones in, not looking at the phone, you know, kind of thing. I find that to be restorative. What were some of the biggest takeaways that you got out of this book?

3:32yeah for me it's this idea so I feel like what Oliver really shares beautifully is this mindset about how actually in terms of a meditation about how life is a journey and experience and how often we can kind of be in this mode of over optimizing absolutely everything and trying to perfect things and kind of get into this mindset of being hyper-efficient around everything in our lives. And it kind of sucks the joy out of the lived experience because we're in this hyper-optimization. Yeah. Okay, I'm with you. So maybe you found that that was helpful in maybe letting some of that go. Because you're right.

4:20I mean, I watch probably a lot of YouTube videos on productivity, you know, technology kind of, you know, and then, of course, like, you know, how you can use AI to improve things and, you know, kind of, you know, organize your life, you know, offload thinking, you know, that sort of thing. So, no, I think this sounds like a good counterweight to that. I love it. I would definitely say so. And even if it's just, you know, I like that it's really short as well. So I added it into my morning routine. And I think one chapter took me about 10 minutes. So across four weeks, it's such an easy, consumable read.

5:00You know, it's not going to take loads of time. So I found it hugely beneficial just to read a small chapter in the morning. And it would have a huge influence on the way I thought throughout the rest of the day. I love it. Lizzie, thank you so much for the book recommendation. All right, please share with us what is a progressive culture coach? Yeah, so progressive. So when we think about culture, it can often be around the materialistic work perks that we see in companies. We offer out benefits, packages, or, you know, the open joke that it's the bean bags or the free food or, you know, kind of these fun things that people try and do, like the social events that you put on.

5:43So culture has had this really bad reputation of just being these materialistic work perks when the reality is and where the progressive piece comes in is actually looking at your entire system holistically, because that is the manifestation of your culture, how your culture truly is, is the system that you're building. So for me as a progressive culture coach, I'm not just looking at the work perks that you put on and how good your social events are. I really want to understand, you know, your systems, your decision making processes, all of the things that actually manifest into your true culture.

6:22All right. Well, how do we get there? Maybe you could just kind of I'll just give you the stage for a moment and give us a little mini TED talk on the topic because I'd love to learn more. Yeah, absolutely. So very often when we're starting a business or growing a company, we lean on very traditional hierarchical structures. You know, we have the CEO or the business leader at the top, and then we kind of get overwhelmed by decisions that we have to make. We start to feel that decision fatigue, that burnout. And as we're growing the company, we accidentally fall into the default of a hierarchical system.

6:58we hire managers and VPs and all these kind of people to try to filter out some of that decision making and to essentially make the business more efficient and also as a leader to kind of alleviate some of those pains and stresses that happen but what actually happens is we create a very bureaucratic slow organization that isn't quick enough to adapt because we're creating those silos that bureaucracy and it's all happened by accident so one of the things that i do with founders who are coming to that point where they're so fed up and frustrated of decision making fatigue feeling like you know as a visionary leader they're not able to execute that vision because they're stuck in the day-to-day weeds of dealing with things that they don't really want to deal with so what we look to do together as the founders and the team is how do we decentralize some of this how do we actually create more organic adaptive structures how do we make sure that decision making sits with the teams when it's most reliable most effective so that less decision making gets funneled up to the top and we're only making important decisions that actually matter at that level so really it's stripping out some of that bureaucracy that we've to put in place, that command and control mechanisms, and enabling the team to essentially self-manage?

8:21This sounds divine. So Lizzie, let's say that I've got a small consultancy or agency. There's the visionary founder, and she or he's got a couple of great operational leaders. really, you know, they're very, very competent people. But maybe historically, again, the visionary has been the one kind of just, you know, calling all the shots. And they're like, listen, Lizzie, help me. I need to reform. I need to change my ways. How do I start? Absolutely. So the first thing we look at is what is the aim of the organization, the company? What's the vision? What's the mission? So we always start there.

9:06as the north star of where we want to go. And then when we look at that, we think about, okay, so in terms of this mission, in terms of this goal, how can we break that down into the work that actually needs to be done? So what do we need to do in order to achieve this mission and these goals or this business strategy? And what we then do is build teams around the work. So we ensure that we have those teams who are focused on that particular work. And what we do is we give them an aim so they have you know the team has a particular aim that they are working towards but we also give them decision making power related to that aim so that when they're executing the work they have the authority in order to do something so it might be for example that you have a sales team and they need to go out and get business for the organization you know they're selling something well how can we give them greater decision making power in order to make the best sales?

10:06What do they need in order to do that to the most effectiveness possible? So it might be things like, do we want to give them a set budget, for example, so that they don't have to keep coming up to the top to ask for financial sign off on things? Do we want to support them in building particular policies or rules around how does sales happen here? So we're really giving the team the mechanism to be the most effective they can be without being held back by overly controlled mechanisms. Yeah. Lizzie, what if, what if you, you know, the visionary, the founder gives far more decision making or, you know, starts running some experiments, you know, just really tries to get the decisions into the hands of, you know, folks within the organization.

10:58and they maybe suggest some things that the founder would be like, oh, that'd be a bad idea. Like, how do we circle that or how do we square that square, square that circle? How do we get that? How do we figure it out? Yeah, absolutely. And that is a very valid question because it feels risky, right? It feels a bit chaotic to give your team decision-making power on things. So the first thing that I will always say to founders is what feels safe enough to try right now? How can we like test the boundary first so that we're not giving the team something that feels overly risky? So we might, you know, co-create some boundaries.

11:39I was working with a team recently who wanted to create a hybrid work policy, right? So they work sometimes in the office, sometimes remotely. Now, the founder of that company said to me, you know, Lizzie, I don't want this to be a mandated policy. I don't want me at the top telling everyone else how they have to work in a hybrid way. So we came together, you know, the team, the founder, and we'd ran a session about, okay, what does hybrid look like for us? And what are some of the boundaries? Because there's also a reason we're coming into the office. So exploring these ideas and actually co-creating a policy together, you know, gives that psychological ownership to the team because they are then aware of the expectations we're making expectations clear we're enabling them to understand the boundaries of what it looks like to work remotely you know for example don't do you know sensitive things in a coffee shop you know sometimes we have to make common sense common for everyone and so putting that together explicitly in a policy that's been co-created you're far more likely to get buy-in from people than if you're just the founder kind of mandating this from the top.

12:52Wow. All right. So if we kind of present, if you will, a path toward the future for, let's say we have a visionary leader and they are a little burnt out. They really just want to share that leadership burden a bit. Like they, you know, it's a lot, right? It's, you know, So can you maybe just address this? Why does it feel like so much? I mean, if we're just making decisions all the time, why does that tax us? I mean, that is something to, I mean, explore in itself, because I feel like it's that decision fatigue. You know, there is just so much. And in terms of it all coming up to us, you know, as founders, we have what's called that authority bias.

13:43So sometimes it's not clear about who has the final say on a decision because we often don't make that explicit anywhere. You know, if you think about job descriptions and job titles, there's an assumption there, but it's not explicit. So what happens is we have this authority bias of, oh, actually, let's just kind of filter that all up to the top, because we also don't want to get it wrong as people in teams. We kind of don't want to get sort of told off or do anything wrong. So we're kind of playing this game, right, where one person suddenly becomes responsible for every single minor decision.

14:18And we haven't given the team the capability or the confidence to make those decisions. And, you know, we're surrounded by decision fatigue, even in our society, our culture, you know, I mean, go and buy something from the shop and you've got about 20 different options. It's almost become a norm that we've created. awesome all right lizzie your podcast is make it thrive your website is libertymind.co.uk and i know you've got a lot of resources share a little bit more about how you work with your clients um and like what that looks like how you show up yeah absolutely so i'm very holistic in the way that i approach all of my clients you know they come to me and they've maybe heard of this idea of decentralizing or self-managing teams and they've maybe read a book you know like reinventing organizations or maverick by ricardo semler and they've got really excited by this idea of oh actually i can kind of liberate myself from this monster that i've created you know wow there's a there's a way out so the first thing we always absolutely look at is you know where are they right now you know what is the capability of the team what's the capacity to go on this journey and also as a as a founder and as a leader what's the what's the mindset and the behavior that's driving that need like what is it that they really want to get to at the end of this transformation so we I work in a very holistic way there's no blueprint or framework because I believe every individual and every business is different they have different challenges and so the first place we look at is okay let's just get an idea of where you are currently at right now and where you want to be so we understand the capability of the team we understand are there spaces where they're already self-managing and there's a little bit of this going on um you know we look at what's one experiment that you could try um to test this out you know a common one that i do with some founders is say to them what happened if you took the summer off would you allow yourself to take the summer off and to see how the team would react oh my goodness I think I feel I felt the uh butts clenching of many of our listeners just now yeah and it is it's like if you took a month off what would happen and so we kind of play that scenario and I encourage founders to do that as well and it and absolutely you see then where the where the things go wrong right that's the perfect litmus test lizzie benton uh your website once again liberty mind.co.uk you have a book as well how to build the company culture you really want um i know you've got some great resources to our friend that's been listening um what would you recommend their next steps be yeah so the two things i would recommend is definitely go over to my youtube channel because there's some really short educational videos there where I explain some of these concepts so if this is totally new to you and you're a bit curious but you're short on time then there's some very short 10 minute educational videos there and then if you really want to know what this looks like in practice I've interviewed some maverick founders as I call them on my podcast who share very openly and transparently the highs and the challenges of this way of working as well they're very open about you know the the things that they've been liberated from, but also where some of those tensions have arisen as well.

17:50So that's almost like a warts and all, hear it for yourself kind of situation. Yeah. I've clicked over to your YouTube channel, in fact, and you actually have a video that Meditations for Mortals, 10 Minutes that Will Change Your Mind. So for a friend that was, you know, as I'm going to be watching this as soon as our interview is done, because I'd love to get a little bit more of your take on that. But this is fantastic. Lizzie, thank you so much. Again, your website, libertymind.co.uk. And again, you've got your podcast, the Make It Thrive, the Company Culture Podcast. It's all linked up from there.

18:29It's been wonderful. You're also a speaker as well. So thank you so much, Lizzie, for sharing all of your insights. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Thank you.

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