S1E10 Breaking Through Your Barriers To Success with Sabine Lehner

Our Barriers To Success are often of our own creation.  On this podcast, Sabine Lehner, highly qualified Coach to Burnt-out Leaders and Hypnotheraptist, interviews me to offer insight into 3 key areas that I have addressed to break through my internal barriers to success to prompt your thinking so that you can break through yours.

For more information relating to the podcast and how you can gain access to advisory services to assist you with your business, see www.lseconsulting.net.au

Transcript

CEO Thinking Ep 10
Breaking Through Your Barriers to Success
 with Sabine Lehner

Ep 10 Break Down Barriers with Sabine Lehner 240410.mp3

Welcome to the CEO Thinking podcast. I'm Philip Belcher, a successful CEO and CEO, mentor, advisor, and business consultant. On this podcast, I provide insights to inspire ideas for CEOs, directors and senior managers to use as they lead their. Businesses to achieve outstanding results, I've applied these ideas to start and grow, turn around, and successfully exit businesses as well as to mentor my clients that have achieved great results, regularly host eminent special guests who share their experiences and ideas to inspire CEO's. Can if my guests and I can use these ideas successfully, you can use them too. 

Philip Belcher

In this episode of SEO thinking I'm honoured to have Sabine Lerner join me to discuss breaking through your barriers to success. I had the pleasure of meeting Sabine at an Institute of Leaders and Management event recently, and we subsequently caught up over coffee. 

The subject of what gets in the way of people achieving success was raised. I offered my input and agreed it would make a useful contribution for Sabine to apply her outstanding coaching skills to interview me. Now, usually I'm the one interviewing luminaries on this podcast, so Sabine has swapped seats with me and it's now my turn to be under the light. 

Please allow me to introduce Sabine. Sabine is an executive coach, hypnotherapist, and senior transformation advisor with over 20 years of experience working with executives, high performers, and corporate professionals across industries in 13 countries. Sabine helps her clients define and reach their next level of success while preventing burnout. She introduces powerful mindset tools, such as hypnosis, into executive coaching to take executive coaching to the next level for her clients. Through Sabine’s executive coaching and hypnotherapy programmes, she guides executives in cultivating a success mindset, crafting strategy, and taking actions that accelerate their journey to their desired destination. Her approach is also especially catering for overwhelmed executives who are seeking to again have more energy, meaning, and excitement in their role. 

Sabine’s capabilities have been honed through her successful career, personal experiences, and academic pursuits. Sabine grew up in a family that was impacted by severe psychological distress that provided touch points with anxiety, depression, and trauma from an early age. In 2012, Sabine's life fell apart with burnout in her corporate role. Within 10 years of professional life, Sabine had to acknowledge that this professional life was not providing joy or meaning in life whatsoever. 

Sabine conquered her own burnout, transformed with a new career in consulting, working as executive coach, and going on a global adventure. Now she leads others on their journeys to reignite their spark. Sabine has extensive experience in executive coaching, project management and digital transformation in high powered roles at Accenture Australia and Accenture Austria. 

Sabine's qualifications include, and they are extensive, Diplomas in clinical hypnotherapy and psychotherapy. Diploma in coaching, organisation and personal development consulting services, Gallup certified strength Coach, a Master of Arts in Business, and a Bachelor of International Business Administration Economics. 

I couldn't think of anybody better to be talking about this subject than Sabine. So Sabine, welcome to CEO Thinking and thank you for being here with me.

Sabine Lehner

Thank you, Phil. What an honour and what a pleasure to talk about these topics with you here today.

Philip Belcher

Fantastic. That's great. So, in our conversation, which was a wonderful conversation and I do have to say that physically we did at that meeting swap seats, and I must say it felt a little uncomfortable because here I am, who sits here and talks to people on podcasts that organisations and. It was up to me then to be thinking about some of the questions that you asked. So, this is a really wonderful experience, and again, we're going to swap seats today, albeit virtually.

To set the scene before we swap chairs. It's the format of CEO thinking to cover three key areas for the listeners to consider. So Sabine, it's over to you. Could you please let the listeners and me know the three key areas you'd like to cover and why you chose those 3?

Sabine Lehner

Yes, Phil, I'd love to. So today the three areas I would like to get your inputs and your CEO thinking on are:

·       Mindset, 

·       Strategy and 

·       Implementation

 as this is really what executives usually use as pillars for their work to get to their objectives.

Philip Belcher

OK, so mindset, strategy, and implementation. Is this something that you work with in your practise with in general, with the people that you talk to?

Sabine Lehner

Yes, these three pillars are the core approach to Turn-around Practise to work with executives. So the mindset part is really the foundation that propels you forward on the mindset to build your strategy and from there you move into implementation. And all of these three areas are connected, and both stand on the sound ground of mindset. And if you get the mindset wrong, potentially your strategy and your implementation get derailed or fall over.

Philip Belcher

That's interesting. So at the basis of it you, and reading out your qualifications there and all of the study that you've done into this, I presume that that supports the fact that to be an effective leader, you need to have the right mindset.

Sabine Lehner

Yes, you do. Many of my clients raise barriers around their strategy and their execution and what objectives and metrics and KPIs they want to hit. At the same time, they very often so-called other mindset with soft skill factors which aren't supposed to be called soft skills anymore. But these are getting in the way, and also top executives hit the wall in terms of needing more confidence to achieve that, their objectives or leading their teams or creating offerings for clients or delivering on something. So yeah, it is a crucial part that can either enhance and prepare you on your path or can really limit and devalue.

Philip Belcher

OK, so this mindset, what I'm hearing is that they are creating their own barriers to success in their thinking.

Sabine Lehner

Yeah, sometimes that happens and that's called maybe, I mean for sure, you've heard of this. It's called a limiting belief. It's something that we believe that we pick up, learn sometime, usually early in life and that needs to get updated. Otherwise, still, in stressful situations, as executives, we fall back onto beliefs that are maybe 30 years old that we believe we cannot do something or have to achieve a certain proficiency level or a certain standard of something. And if we fall short of this, then it feels that we either procrastinate, feel we, we can't do something, cannot achieve something, or don't get started in the first place.

Philip Belcher

That's interesting. That is really interesting. And in your biography there, I noted that you made a career choice to... I mean, you had some high-power jobs there with Accenture both in Austria and in Australia. Did you find that through your journey and getting to where you are now as a successful coach, that you had to change your mindset?

Sabine Lehner

Ohh yes, and I think I still need to do this about every other week. Yeah. So as you referred to, 12 years ago, I really hit the wall, which is also connected to quite a difficult family background and my limiting beliefs around what I should be doing or have to achieve, otherwise, I would be a failure and that was my thinking back at that time.

And that really got, that really. Yeah, led me to at some stage and end up... If you read more about my biography, there's this magic moment where I sit in tears on the wooden stairs of my house thinking, well, you know, this is not how I can continue. And then that was probably the turning point. And then it was very clear that finance was not giving me this work with people and this helping them to breakthrough barriers and helping them move forward. And after a while I had to figure out that it is for me to be a coach and the idea of Turnaround Practise was born with working with, with people and coaching and therapy setting. So that was roughly 12 years ago, and then Accenture was a very integral part of my life in consulting. And then it came back to implementing. Implementation of my strategy and my vision for Turnaround Practise so...

Philip Belcher

I find this wonderful. There are so many times where in business I've had consultants or spoken to advisors, and when you talk to these people quite often, they've never run a business, they've never been at the coalface, they've never carried a, what we call, “Carry a bag”. They've never had to get involved with a client or a customer and make a sale, or deliver a product. What I'm hearing from you there, Sabine is, is that you have had the experience of where you've had to deal with your mindset, so when you're talking to your clients, you've. “Carried the bag”. You've been there and you've gone through your own process with yourself, so when you're talking to these people, you've got the opportunity to relate to your own personal experience as well as then dig into the depth of all the study and the knowledge that you've gained through your pursuit of the knowledge of this thing.

Sabine Lehner

Yeah, I think an incredible barrier we are especially facing in our society in our time is the pressure that we have to achieve and the pressure to meet certain standards and the pressure that we can't fail. And so what a number of my clients who really deal with are somewhat on the trajectory of burnout is that they feel they are a failure if they do not hit the sales, get the acquisition over the line. All of these things.

And also, and that's probably the second part of it; why it is so hard for people to really get help is that it feels insurmountable to admit that to themselves, let alone anybody else, that they might feel they don't have their life under control, that they have to achieve otherwise they’re a failure. So to see that actually I'm feeling like that is something that none of us really want to face, and that is the case because it is a threat to our identities. So, for certain people, it's confidence, for others, it's certain achievements, status, money, you name it. So this is where the target is set towards and then the frustration if they can't be achieved. And then the more stress somebody has, the more the brain goes to “Ah, I didn't do this. What does this… I didn't achieve this. What does this say about me as a person?”

And maybe it's time to reference your last episode of the CEO Thinking, how lonely it can get in the CEO chair and what that says. And that's still value as a CEO. This is not you as a person, it’s your role and for some of my clients that sort of blends together and the first step is to separate those two. Who am I as a person? Who am I in my role? So that's really on that topic. The topic of mindset, when, Phil, you and I had a chat the other day, I wanted to know more about you, how you deal with setting yourself up for success.

Philip Belcher

OK.

Sabine Lehner

Maybe your barriers or your beliefs that may hold you back.

Philip Belcher

OK. Well, we've, we've swapped chairs now. OK?

Sabine Lehner

Yes, we've officially swapped chairs, so I get to ask you the question.

Philip Belcher

Over to you Sabine, you're in control.

Sabine Lehner

Yeah. Yeah. So we talked about all about our wonderful coffee chat, we talked about mindset and we shared a great story of how you start or how you approach things, so would you share with us how do you approach your endeavours?

Philip Belcher

OK, let me give a little bit of a background. Unlike a lot of people who end up in CEO roles, I've come through a very practical upbringing. A lot of people that you look at CEO's and you think “ohh well, you know those those people went to a private school, they got extremely good marks, they excelled. They might have been captain of the football team, or they might have been the head prefect or School Captain or whatever. And then they went on to university and they got a degree. And so you go probably came from a “Well, to do” suburb. So let me turn all of that on its head. 

I grew up with a very supportive family, very supportive mother, very supportive father, but we were from a trades background. My father was in the Army in the Second World War, he became a diesel mechanic and then he started his own business as an appliance repairman, and he used to work all sorts of extraordinary hours and as a child, I observed that and thought, “Well, the way that you make an existence is you work hard”. 

And on the other side of things, I had two older sisters, and my mother was a person who had gone through her own demons with her own basically mental health. She had had what she called at one stage, “a nervous breakdown”, and in her search to deal with that, she'd gone off and read many, many books. And I always remember this bookshelf in our lounge room that had all these books on it. And I remember being a child thinking “I really would like to read those things”, but I always looked at them and I'd open them and read one or two pages and then think “I don't understand any of this”. 

But as at a young age, I got this thirst for learning. But again. I started out from a trades background and the other side of things is, and I think I shared this with you, Sabine, because I don't consider I've ever been the best at anything. I wasn't the school captain. I wasn't captain of the cricket team. I wasn't the standout. The only thing I did in the end realise, was that I went to a technical school in Melbourne school. Fine school was called Box Hill Technical School. I did end up on the Board of what is now Box Hill Institute of Technology, and I did. End up on the board of that organisation for 12 years. But I never considered myself the best at anything but what I did do was I won the public speaking contest when I was in what was called 5th form (year 11) then and that was where the school finished. 

So I never really consider myself as being the best at anything, but what I learned from my background in the family and considering that I wasn't great, you know, I got good marks, but average marks. I didn't get the best marks, but what I did discover was that if I didn't know how to do something, I'd try and work out how to do it. And there was one other thing that really helped me along the way and that I refer back to. And that was both of my parents, but in particular my mother, used to say to me, “Just strive to be the best at what you do!” and then they'd say “If you don't think you can do it, just have a go and whatever happens, doesn't matter whether you, whether you don't make it or whether you do it, we'll still love you!”. That just echoes. 

So I apply this, “Just have a go” to anything I do and I've translated that now through the businesses that I've started, I started a modest business doing telecommunications cabling, and then one day I decided that I should try for something bigger and better. Then I got myself into the corporate world. But that underlying “Just have. Go”, and where you don't quite know how to do it, go and find out. Read. And so I've taken that attitude all the way through and out of that I've been able to end up CEO of various companies, ended up in the multinational companies with responsibilities across Asia Pacific.

Sabine Lehner

Which is very impressive so. I would disagree with you that you're not the best. It's something I think you are.

Philip Belcher

Well. I'm still working at that, Sabine.

Sabine Lehner

Yeah, you give it a go!.

Philip Belcher

I'm even sitting here right now giving it a go.

Sabine Lehner

Yeah. And I think that when I walked away from our conversation, that's that resonated with me almost like a mantra. It's not about hitting the mark. It's not about achieving some standards somewhere. It's just to give it a go and take it from there.

Philip Belcher

Something that, and I walked away from that conversation, and something that I reflected on and thought “I don't see myself at the pinnacle yet”. And let me say I'm advanced in years, but I still don't see that I'm at the pinnacle. And the day after I actually pass away, I probably still won't have got there, because when I've achieved something, I then say “That's fantastic. Really good. Now where do we go from here?” So I don't have that fear of not actually achieving and having to stay at a status level. And I think probably that just ‘down to Earth’ background has allowed me the comfort of saying “Well, I gave it a shot, did the best I absolutely could and got some good results, however, it could have been better, now I think I'll go away and have a go at something else?” 

But one of the things that I did do through my career with a company called Datacraft, I made a sale that was massive. It was the largest sale that they had ever made to that date and out of that they wanted to promote me because they knew that, well, where do you go from here as a salesperson? And they put me into turning around a branch here in New South Wales. And I got there, and talk about imposter syndrome. I was there thinking, “Ohh no, I'm not quite sure what I need to do. I don't know what I need to know, but I know I need to know it”. And luckily, just up the road was Macquarie University and I thought, “I know I always wanted to finish my degree”, because I dropped out of my electronics engineering degree and ended up doing a diploma. I didn't finish the degree, I went back to do it and then got bored with it and I thought, “I know I always wanted a degree. I'll go and do an MBA!” so up to the university I went because I thought I'll find out in that MBA what I need to do to run and turn this branch around and I am happy to say that that was successful. I did complete the MBA, I did turn that branch around and ended up Managing Director of that company and ended up turning that around as well. But it was all out of “I don't know what I need to know, but I'll go and find it out and I'll just have a go!

Sabine Lehner

That's wonderful. What would be your advice for leaders to break through their internal barriers?

Philip Belcher

I think a lot of it's situational. I think that if you pull back because, it can, you can get caught up in the pressure that there is for you when you're appointed to a role. So I think these two pressures. I think there's one that you have your own internal barriers, and you have pressure to live up to your own expectations and they can be almost insurmountable at times in the quiet of the night. I don't know why, but things seem to come to mind at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning in the still of the night. So that's one that you've got to observe. And I find that I have to deal with it. I take it out and I look at it and question myself in a third-party method and say “Really? Do you really think that?” 

So that's one but then the other pressure, and I think it's enormous, and I think the more prestigious the organisation you're with the more you can get caught up with this, is you are living up to the expectations of the other people, whether they are the people you report to, whether it's the owners or whether it's the clientele or whether it's the Press, that all of a sudden you feel that you're trapped in a persona that you've got to live up to and you may not feel all that comfortable with it. 

So my advice to people that get into that situation, and I can say I have been in that situation, more from the pressure on myself, but also to an extent, you are in front of the press doing a press interview and you are the CEO and on the board of a public company, they expect a certain type of behaviour. You've got to sit down, and what I have done to deal with that, is look at it dispassionately. Try and take myself out of that situation, analyse it and say, “OK, let's just wind back from that” and then I do a, it's a little bit of a project management approach, but it's a risk management and say “What's the worst thing that could happen here? What's the worst thing?” And when you peel back the layers of that onion, you do realise that, well underneath it all, I'm still me. I've still got a personal life. I've still got other things going on here, so let's just base myself in that and then I'll approach this perhaps with a different, to use your word, mindset, to say “OK!” And I do come back to my ‘give it a go’, do just work on pushing forward but out of a basis of not trying to live up to the expectations of those people, by all means you want to keep them somewhat satisfied and you don't want to do things that are going to cause your reputation damage, but by the same token, you don't want to do things that are going to do you damage at a personal level, or at a family level, or a friends level damage either. So that's #1 Take a dispassionate approach. #2 do a risk assessment and look at the scenarios and fall back to, “Well, the worst thing that could happen here is… then how would I deal with it?” so you come up with a plan, so you're prepared and generally that doesn't happen. Generally, things work out and work out well, but then the #3 thing is: Seek some advice. Talk to someone that may be a mentor, maybe someone you respect that's got wisdom. They might not be involved in what you're involved in at all. They may be a councillor such as yourself, Sabine. They may be a professional that can help you through, or it might be all of those where you say, “No. I really do need to go and talk to someone here and get a different perspective” on things. 

So, they're really the three things. 

·       One step back from yourself. 

·       Two, take a realistic approach to this thing because sometimes these things can amplify into ridiculous things. 
 I read an article in a Reader's Digest about a guy that was on a country road. And he got a flat tyre, walked to the closest house and he's thinking on the way to the house was. “I've got to get a Jack. I haven't got a Jack. The Jack in the car doesn't work. I got to get a Jack!”. And then he thought “When I get to the house, it's 2:00am in the morning and they're going to yell at me. They're going to want money for the Jack. They're not going to give me a Jack!”. And by the time they got to the house, he was so steamed up that he bashed on the door. The. Lights came on upstairs. Someone put their head out and he said. “Well, you're not going to give me a Jack, at least tell me!!” and the person just went, “I don't know what you're talking about?” and this person had built this up in themselves so much that they had assumed that this person was going to charge them money, yell at them, and never give them a jack. And then when they spoke to the person, they said “Sure, would you like us to come down and help you fix your tyre?”
 So we do this, I think, to ourselves. 

So #1 take a dispassionate approach #2 be realistic about what is really happening there, and then #3 get some advice and talk to some people who can help you on the way through because as I talked about on the Last Podcast, it can feel really lonely and quite often some of the decisions you've got to make, you can't talk to people inside the organisation until you're clear on what you want to do and the strategy that you're going to take. Does that answer your questions?

Sabine Lehner

Yes, absolutely. So, I have a bit of a side question now Phil, since I saw you’re a ‘I give it a go’ type of person, do you ever procrastinate?

Philip Belcher

The interesting thing about procrastination is… The answer is yes, absolutely. The short answer is yes. What I've found is I use procrastination as a tool. One of the… there's all these sayings, you know, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” but then there's another saying that says “You've got to take the first leap”. So, there's all of these conflicting saying, you can go in and find them all over the place. 

I use procrastination. I like to stand back and look at a situation first. That can bring up different scenarios and that can cause confusion. Now what I have found is that using that delay, which may be an innate “I don't want to do that I'm. I'm just going to procrastinate and wait around a little bit”. I catch myself and say, ”No! Action has to be taken”. You can consider it. But once you've considered it, you've got to do something. And that do something, by the way, can sometimes be “I will do nothing and see how it unfolds”. 

So yes, I procrastinate, but I make it quick. I use that time to get myself steady and then I do something. And as I say, doing something may be actively not doing anything. I have seen that unfold many times where if you, particularly with people, you leave people to their own devices and give them some time to think, sometimes the problems do go away or they solve them, or, there's another saying, “Time heals all wounds”. Sometimes what you consider in the heat of the moment is very crucial. When you look at it in retrospect, and it might only be an hour or two down the track, it's actually not that crucial, and there were more important things to do. But getting caught up in a downward spiral of doing nothing because you're fearful that if you do something; I have on occasions done that, and then I have looked at it and thought “That was not productive!”.

Sabine Lehner

Hmm. Yeah. So what it sounds like is that you make an active choice even if the active choices are not doing anything, rather than being on autopilot of just hanging in there. Being that that group of an autopilot which goes with you and might keep you from this active doing or not doing.

Philip Belcher

Yeah, my career tends to have been one of either starting something from scratch or turning businesses around, turning situations around. And I can go through them all, but we don't have time on this. I have found that almost invariably the reason that I have to go in and turn something around is because there's not been timely action taken in that organisation or in that situation and that old “Time heals or wounds” I find to be 70% incorrect, particularly from a business point of view, because in a business point of view, what you've got to remember is it's not just you that's dealing with this, it's your organisation and your people, but more, what you've got to realise is that any business, and whether it's for profit or not for profit, any organisation actually has competitors and they aren't waiting. 

So while you're “Ohh well, we'll just see how it goes” or. “Well, no. We'll get around to dealing with that”. The old “Around to it!”, they aren't and meanwhile, you might think, I've seen it with organisations that have been leaders in their field and they've really just procrastinated about the organisation and just left it as ‘business as usual’, meanwhile, they get overtaken by competitors who aren't satisfied to just leave it as ‘business as usual’, and some of those organisations have ended up: they're gone, they're not here anymore. So, procrastination, yes, I do. I catch myself out when I'm doing it, and then I make sure that I take a very proactive approach to doing what's necessary, even if that is actually “don't do anything”, and I'll put a caveat after that. “Just yet!”

Sabine Lehner

Well Phil, you've talked about turnarounds, and I know that this is your, one of, your main areas of activities. What strategies now moving to the second pillar, so what strategies do you apply to turn companies around?

Philip Belcher

Strategy’s something that I came across as a formal approach, and yet I didn't realise it, but from the youngest age I practised it. And the strategies are actually… you can go through, you go to any texts you like, and you'll find that strategy, whilst it's one of those words that consulting companies like to make a lot of money out of, it's actually relatively simple. 

And the strategies I use at a personal level and at a company level is, first of all, “What's the vision for this?” Whatever it is, what would I really see it being and getting a mental picture of what will I see it being? The reason I wanted to come to NSW and take on the branch that I took on was because I came to Sydney and saw that the skyline was huge. It was a city as big, if not bigger, than Melbourne, where I came from, but the results that they were getting here were nowhere near what we were doing in Melbourne, so I had this vision of “This organisation should be at least as big as what was happening down in Victoria” and I had a vision of making it number one in this region, so I had that vision for it. 

And then I said, “OK, well, if I'm going to do that, so the vision, then I worked out, well, what would be the steps I would take to do that? So I defined a few things, and what now is termed a Mission. This is just jotting things down. This is not being terribly formalistic about it. “Be the biggest, get into the big companies”. So I had this mission “get into the big companies, sell our best products, get the team together”, you know? 

So I put just a short thing together and then I look at things and I do a situation analysis. So I look at what we've got, and then you do this at a personal level. I looked at the strengths and weaknesses. OK, at a personal level, I'm pretty strong. OK, I'm determined. I'll work hard. OK, well that's a strength. Well my weaknesses “Ah, well, I don't know enough about a certain thing or maybe we haven't got just the right product to sell or...” OK. So I do an assessment of those, but then I look at the external factors and of course you look at the economic situation which affects everybody. And the good thing about the economic situation is: it affects everybody. 

So then I have a look at the opportunities and then I look at the threats and so in the opportunities: Big city, lots of lights, they spend a lot of money. What a great opportunity! Threats: Yeah, but there's some serious competitors here who are really good and they're already in this marketplace. Now out of that analysis of attributes - strengths and weaknesses, and out of the analysis of the external factors then I formulate now what am I going to do and I set goals. So alright, what's the goals? Then you set realistic goals, all that together and then write down the plan. This is what we're going to do. 

Make it timely. Put actions in there that you're going to take. Then go out and work out - with a company I work with all my people in there and ask them for their inputs and get them involved in bringing this together - or whether it's at a personal level. As I said earlier, if you’re overcoming your barriers get some external advice here, because no one knows everything. So, to put your strategy together, whether at a personal level or whether at a business level to turn things around, get your team together. Could be a huge team, could be a very small team, but get your team together, get them involved, come up with a plan and then: Lead! Lead, any strategy is just a useless piece of paper, unless someone has the vision for it and leads to get it done. So, in those turnaround situations I have found that all of them that I've gone to, the people really want to succeed. So to turn an organisation around it, really… the first thing I do is go and talk to people and ask them what they think and then get them involved. Now I've already got an idea. I've already written down what I want to do and I've got quite a clear strategy, you know, doing the external internal analysis and come up with what I think. But that's based out of working with those people. And then once you've got that together and the goals are realistic for you and for your people, they believe, “Yes, we can do this - it's going to be a stretch. Going to be hard work, but we can do it!”. Then you've got a strategy. That's. That's something you can then say, “Right, we've got a strategy here!” and I am adamant that any business must have a written business plan. And that's got to be in it.

Sabine Lehner

You said “No strategies were something without the people in it, and without its actual execution, and that leads us to the third pillar, which is implementation. How do you ensure successful execution on your turnarounds?

Philip Belcher

Start with that strategy. So you've got the strategy together, you've already… It's interesting. You've already started to execute when you first come up with the idea. Execution starts right from the inception. And again, I come back to a project management approach. When you are going to… If you're going to build or create something, it generally comes down to a set of steps that you have and the execution of it starts right with the idea, the formulation of the idea, and then it builds and builds. 

You do your planning and then you get everything you organised, and then you start to execute. So you take the strategy, I get the people involved, get the team involved. And if you're a one-person business, sit down and have your own ‘Team Meeting’ because out of that strategy, there's a lot of things that need to be done and they will fall into different areas. So, if I'm a one-person business, well I’ve got to do some marketing, OK? What's the marketing person going to do? Hmm. Look in the mirror. What are you going to do? OK. And then you jot that down, right? So I break it down into the constituent parts of it and work out… And finance: Can we afford to do this? So you so get all of your people across the organisation together and then set realistic goals and realistic actions and timely - what's going to happen every day. What's going to happen every week? What's going to happen every month? 

And what I do is create scoreboards, scoreboards. I, for one reason or another, took up running. And as a kid. I was not a terribly athletic type person at all. The only thing I ever represented at school was shot-put because I was strong. If it came to running… 

Anyway, later on in life I took it up and got it in my head I was going to run a marathon. Right. Going to run a marathon. That's it. Well, I went away and read. And it's only 42.2 kilometres. This is not really walking to the moon, but it's a long way. And what I realised was, and I went and consulted, it's every step you take and it's every day, the action you take every day leading up to the day you have to run the 42 kilometres and that's very similar to turning around an organisation and executing. 

So, the execution is saying “right, what are the actions we're going to take? What are we going to achieve in minor milestones?” It might only be a very small thing, but “what are we going to achieve?” and then track them. So I keep a scoreboard. I had on the fridge where I was at in terms of the kilometres that I'd done and every time I came in, I. crossed that off. In a business, I had the sales numbers and share them with the people, and they get to see where we're at with the sales. I share the profit and loss with them as to where we are at in terms of our gross margins. In terms of our bottom-line profit, I share the expenses with them so that everybody knows “ohh, OK, we are on track”. Now where we see we're not on track, then we work together and say “oh, what are we going to do about this?”

OK. And this isn't a matter of pointing the finger and blaming anybody. This is saying, “what are we going to do about this? What are we going to change?” So that's scoreboard. I mean, imagine putting two teams of people, any discipline you like, on a field. Imagine a football, as in soccer, game and you get those players out on the field. “Right ho! Kick the ball around, have a good time and at the end of it we'll see who won” and they'd run around and they kick the ball and they'd keep looking around and in the end they'd look at each other and say “Well, hang on you, did we kick a goal, or didn't we, or…?” No, you’ve got to have a scoreboard, because they've got to know at any stage of the game where they are at. Basketball, Australian Rules Football - doesn't matter. You’ve got to have something that you're tracking yourself towards. So execution to me is breaking the strategy down into achievable steps, applying the right resources to it and then tracking it relentlessly and adjusting as you implement so that it falls into that ‘Plan, do, check, act’ role until finally you know that.

And sometimes it you do get to a stage where you're tracking it and you say. “You know we really are pursuing something here that isn't going to work”. Now,that's where procrastination comes in. If you procrastinate and go “Ohh no, no, that's the that's the document. That's the strategy. And no, we've just got to keep doing that because that's the plan” well you're procrastinating. So now it's time to say, “Wait a moment. The scoreboard tells us we can't keep doing what we're doing here. We're going to take action”, and then you act, and then you do what you need to do. And if that means that that particular project isn't going to work, you call it out early because the scoreboard will tell you. You work on it, but if it becomes insurmountable, then you say, “OK, we're going to now come up and readjust the strategy” so then you go all the way back. So to me, execution is about, as I say, breaking it into achievable chunks, tracking it relentlessly, celebrating your successes on the way through with your teams. Don't wait till the end, celebrate the wins on the way through and then keep, just keep pumping. Just keep going for it. Until then the end result you achieve. 

But, what I, the other thing about execution is I find, you've got to create the next vision, the next goal before you've finished the current one because your people need to understand “OK. Well, if we achieve that, then what?” No, no, no, no, no. This is a continuum. Yep, we've reached the foothills of Everest. Now we've got to reach base camp. Now we've got to... And even when we get to the top of Everest, you’ve got to get down. So if you only aim at getting to the top of Everest, you may not make it to the bottom because you haven't planned how to get there, right? So, execution is all about achieving what you're going to achieve, but then making sure that it's part of your long-term vision and where you're going. That's my approach anyway.

Sabine Lehner

Very good. So it’s mindset, strategy, and implementation or execution.

Philip Belcher

That's my… and it was interesting going through just thinking this through. I call my practise LSE Consulting, LSE Consulting because I was thinking about what had worked for me in my corporate roles and in my leadership roles. And I boiled it down to three things, one was Leadership, one was Strategy and one was Execution, and hence LSE - leadership, strategy, execution and that's what I work with my clients on is helping them with their businesses, and as I say, you know, getting business plans together.

But no strategy will work unless you've got someone providing, or a team providing leadership. And leadership is all the way through. It just doesn't come from the CEO. Leadership's at every level in the organisation. Some of the best leaders I've worked with have been people who've walked into my office and said, “Hey, Phil, what about?” And go “Yeah”, and we've done some great things and they’ve been people that are field technicians or bench technicians. That's leadership. The next step is if you don't formulate a strategy and you just go off and do things, that can be a ticket to disaster. There are documents written and sitting on the shelves of organisations all over the place. And they are; they're well written documents, good business plans, good. strategies, and they fail because no one executes effectively in that particular organisation. 

So it's a 3 legged stool as far as I'm concerned. You take any one of those out, it will fall over, and I've seen it, unfortunately, too many times.

Sabine Lehner

Good. So, summarising today's podcast, and it has been very inspirational for me and also for your listeners, I think it will be, so plenty of things to take out of what you have shared today. What are your key points around mindset, strategy, and implementation?

Philip Belcher

The key points around those three areas:

·       Mindset. You've got to believe you can do it, and even if you don't believe you can do it, have a go and get assistance from your people and others to help you get through that barrier and have a go. So that's number one: Mindset 

·       2. Strategy. Wind back and practise. Look at something that you have done that is not your job and then something you've succeeded at. It can be anything you like. It might be building a garden bed at home, and break it down into the steps you took and that you're now proud of. And you will find that you went through the process of creating a strategy. You had a Vision. You worked out the mission for it. You looked at what the barriers to you doing it would be. You looked at your strengths and weaknesses. You looked at the opportunities and the threats that there would be in making it. You did something and you built it. Now whether you paid someone to do it for or not. So strategy don't believe all of the massive books and consulting companies and everything else that it's some magic. It's not magic. It's down there and dirty. Getting a plan together and making sure that it will work. That's creating a strategy. 
 Apply common logic to creating your strategy, no matter how big or small it is. There was a gentleman, Jeff Dixon, who was the CEO of Qantas, and he came from Wagga, Wagga Wagga, which is out back of NSW, and he had a saying that he said “If it doesn't make common sense, it doesn't make any sense at all”, and apparently he would say that to his people and they would say, here's Jeff with his Wagga logic. Believe me, if it doesn't make common sense, it doesn't make any sense at all. So write your strategy. I am absolutely a stickler. Now. It doesn't matter if it's with a pencil on a piece of just scrap paper, write it down and share it with your people and make sure they buy into it. 

·       And then finally, in terms of the implementation, use a project management approach. Set the goals, make sure that you've got everything assembled. Put scoreboards around the place. Make sure that everybody understands how they're tracking, and then just do it.

Sabine Lehner

Wonderful, Phil. Thank you. Well summarised.

Philip Belcher

Thanks Sabine. I've enjoyed the process of you asking me the questions and hearing about yourself and the way that you've dealt with the challenges that you had; and you've really gained these insights out of your own circumstances and experiences with your clients etcetera. So, the listeners of the podcast, how do they get in touch with you for you to help them?

Sabine Lehner

They can find me on LinkedIn, Sabine Lehner. Send me a DM is probably the easiest to get in touch with me and I'm happy to help out with short consults and advice. As you said, and I offer one hour power sessions, ignition sessions to 30 day ‘Unwind your mind’ programmes which are very popular at the moment because these are short programmes and something you can really bake in on a daily basis. Fits with execution, and I also have signature programmes around turning Overwhelm into Success, so getting from overwhelm, getting to the strategy, building a mindset and then navigating that with the right implementation of the right actions to achieving their goals.

Philip Belcher

That's fantastic. I strongly recommend, if you're listening to this podcast and you need someone to talk to who will help guide you through your challenges and breakdown your barriers, get in touch with Sabine.

Sabine Lehner

Thank you, Phil. Turnaround Practise is here to help.

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the CEO Thinking Podcast. If you’ve gained value from this episode, here are three actions for you to take. 

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·       And finally, to help you use the ideas to drive your business, go to www.lseconsulting.net.au for the show notes and other resources you can use. 

For a no obligation discussion on how I can assist you with your business, ensuring there is an effective business plan, and that it is being executed contact me via  info@lseconsulting.net.au.

I'm Philip Belcher and I'll look forward to talking to you in the next episode.