Clear Communication: Stop The Confusion In Your Organization With Rich Layton
Tom Dardick and Rich Layton discuss the concept of 'the cost of confusion' in organizations, emphasizing the importance of effective communication, understanding interpersonal conflicts, and managing cultural differences. They also highlight the need for leaders to be present, honest, and courageous, and for clients to genuinely want transformation. Lastly, they share their personal experiences and missions, with a commitment to continuous learning and improvement, and potential collaborations in the future.
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Clear Communication: Stop The Confusion In Your Organization With Rich Layton
The Cost Of Confusion
On the show, we have a guy who is a guy after my own heart in the sense that he’s a musician, and frankly, a more accomplished musician than I am. He has that passion for being a musician and leading a band and has built his career as a consultant and helping organizations. His latest is Cutting the Cost of Confusion. It’s a book that identifies those things, the ways that a lack of clarity and lack of communication, can be very costly to all organizations. He’s adept at helping organizations see those things, get past them, and guide them in a direction where the business or the organization is operating much more cohesively, profitably, and towards better ends. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Rich Layton to the show.
I love the fact that you’re a passionate guy who has a successful career in music, and then you also care about people and want to make sure that they end up with the best. Your book, Cutting the Cost of Confusion, when I see it, I’m like, “Obviously.” Confusion is costly because we don’t know what to do. We don’t see the right thing. We end up doing the wrong things. We end up miscommunicating or thinking other people are idiots when we’re making mistakes ourselves. It causes all this chaos. How do you look at the confusion in organizations and that cost, and what can people do about it? I know that’s a big question, but where do you start with that?
This notion of cutting the cost of confusion was a way to quantify what organizations were losing or leaving on the table because they weren’t spending the necessary money to do a polished communications piece, have a decent website, or put a video out there. They always wondered, “Why do we have to spend the money on this particular piece of creative communication?” It’s like, “This is a drop in the bucket compared to what you’re losing if you don’t solve this problem.”
The notion of cutting the cost of confusion was a way to quantify what organizations were losing or leaving on the table.
It started out as a way for me to justify when people said, “I don’t know why it costs so much to do a professional video about this change management initiative that we have going on.” I would have to explain why it was important, the difference that it would make, and that the investment had an incredible return.
The cost of confusion was something that people could track. It’s like, “You’re spending this much on having these extra people. You’re losing this much sales because people don’t understand your product.” Getting people to walk through that process and put hard dollars onto things that were seemingly amorphous was the tipping point for me, if you will.
What would you say are some of the broad brush strokes of the work that you put into the book and what you bring to that conversation that otherwise people might miss?
The piece for me was being able to show these examples in every forum. There’s a chapter devoted to what happens when you confuse your customers, what happens when you confuse employees, and what happens when you confuse citizens. Every day, the paper has another thing that I could have dropped in the book. It’s like I picked a point to stop, but every day, I can come up with another story of Boeing’s cost of confusion.
They’re in the book, Boeing’s cost of confusion with moving these planes through their huge facility when parts of the work are being done out of sequence. It’s incredibly expensive. It shows what a universal concept this is. The fact that if there’s an understanding deficit or if people don’t understand something and they’re in a group of people who can impact your success, then you need to deal with them upfront as a risk management piece.
I want to circle back to something you said about that communication piece. Maybe you’ve encountered this in your work. When I’m working with clients, sometimes, there can be a, “Not another program,” or, “What’s the new thing today?” There’s a little bit of a calcification against any efforts to change and efforts to learn new programs.
Your communication piece seemed to point the light towards how important it is to frame things properly and say, “Here’s what we’re doing.” You let people in on the secret here, not just throw something at them. Am I getting that right? Is there more to it than that in the communication to make sure we’re set up for success?
Framing Communication
Framing it appropriately really is the key. You’re framing your initiative or your new product in terms of what’s the benefit to the organization that we’re part of and what’s the benefit to us as individuals within that organization? It’s always that, “What’s in it for me?” kind of thing that has to be up there right away in a very explicit way.
It’s like, “What’s the thing that you hate most about your job right now?” They’re like, “I’m wasting time spinning my wheels doing these forms and these processes on four different websites.” It’s like, “What if you could enter all that information one time? Would you want to be part of that solution?” When you break down those individual promises to each role, you get engagement. You’re getting buy-in. What a lot of organizations think is that people all buy-in for one big kumbaya moment. The reality is that people are going to buy for different reasons. People are going to engage for different reasons.
When I work with a high technology company that’s been marketing 26 features and they want to be sure that everybody sees all 26 features, I have to say, “If you do that, people are going to glaze over like a Christmas ham. You’re going to lose the sale. This group of people is going to buy features 2, 3, and 9. This other group of people is going to buy for 12 and 13. This other group of people is going to buy 25.” That ability to break down and give that agility and that nimbleness to your marketing and your messaging so that you get the right spin to the right person at the right time is what makes communication so highly effective compared to the way most organizations tend to operate.
That’s super insightful. You got a great experience and these kinds of insights. To me, it smacks of its hard-won experience. It seems like you’ve seen this happen. That makes me wonder how you got into the consulting world and got into coming up with a book called Cutting the Cost of Confusion.
I realized that I’m somebody who was genetically incapable of surviving in a corporate structure. I was always the person who asked why. Even as a little kid when I got in trouble, I was like, “Why?” Organizations are famously bad at taking the time to explain why, like, “Why are we asking you to do things a certain way?”
I was blessed to be able to work my way through college with summer jobs. They were always blue-collar jobs. I’d be in the aluminum canned factory in the lunchroom and some new announcement from corporate would go up. You could hear everybody snicker and drop the B words. It’s because these organizations weren’t doing a decent job of communicating at a genuine level to the people that they depend on for success. It was that naivete maybe or that passion being this eternal optimist that there’s got to be an easier, better way to run this organization and an easier, better way to harness the enthusiasm of people.
I very rarely met people in any line of work who were cruising. I met people who wanted to make a difference. I remember writing the mission statement when I formed Transform Communications. It’s like, “I want to celebrate people for the work that they do.” That led to the idea that we have gifts. How can organizations make it easier for people to come in every day, give their gifts, and contribute to the success of the whole?
To me, that’s music to my ears. In the Eye of Power model, the purpose quadrant specifically, we increase our power there through the identification and development of our unique gifts and talents, putting those to the best service in the world, and contributing to other people. That process seems, to me, to be what generates our sense of meaning and purpose. That’s why I call it the purpose quadrant.
It’s the same thing that you’re talking about there where you’re making sure that the road and the path towards that is the giving of the gifts. Another way of maybe seeing that is also, people have a need to be seen, seen for who they really are even though they might be the ones putting up a front and making it hard to see them sometimes. That doesn’t take away that need. It becomes one of the greatest gifts we can give, which is to see people for who they are. We’re talking about the same thing there.
What are some of the things that you might have witnessed along those lines where you’ve seen either a gift unlocked or something? It could go either way. You might see a tragic situation where somebody was shut down and ended up having to leave or ended poorly. The other side of it is they were clamped down and something happened that opened them up. We then have this shining superstar. Can you share either stories or insights along those lines?
I recall a time when I watched two engineers almost come to blows over where an arrow should go on a flowchart. I found that engineers had this passion for flowcharts, but I could find a common ground. I like workflows. I love developing workflows. It was realizing that they would feel as passionately about that as I did about a chord in a song, a certain line in a lyric, or something like that that I would be willing to go to the mat over. That was a pretty important one.
Often, you see people leave companies. You see people leave because their gifts aren’t welcome. I work with a lot of global corporations. There has never been a framework for the individual contributor. You get rewarded for supervising larger groups of people. One of my long-term clients, and I featured them in the last chapter of the book, we talked about our experience of working together over twenty years. This guy could walk down the hall, step into a meeting, watch people struggling, and say, “Have you thought about this? Have you looked at it in this way? Have you considered this?” All of a sudden, there’s $10 million of savings on the table.
He called me one time. He had come up with something called a balanced cost culture. He said, “I was speaking to this in a room full of people. The CEO came in with a coffee cup and sat in the back row. He was listening to my presentation for 10 or 15 minutes. He finally said, “This sounds really good to me. What does everybody else think?” Everybody else was on board with it, and it became an initiative.” I said, “Where did it come from?” He said, “It’s something you wrote.”
We had written something about the project management system, and I needed a closing paragraph. What’s called for is a balanced cost culture that’s able to balance all of the competing elements in a project in order to achieve success not just on one level, but on multiple levels. I had a line in a handbook that turned into a corporate initiative that’s still at work. It has been so fun to kinda see how that stuff lives on even after we’re all gone too.
I’m always coming down to seeing the people who are frustrated because it’s so difficult. They know what the right thing is. They know what the most effective thing is. There’s some aspect of the organization or its structure that’s preventing it. I used to see people come to blows and this antagonism between one group of people and another group of people.
I’d go, “I’ve discovered that you’re rewarding each group for conflicting behavior. This group is being rewarded when it spends money to find oil and gas in the ground. This group gets rewarded right when it saves money on finding oil and gas in the ground.” You have these two at loggerheads. The reality is that once they recognized that and we aligned the reward structure, then the entire system generated a lot more efficiency and a lot more return on investment.
There was a lot that I took from what you shared there. One of the things I was thinking about is that it's amazing the power of small things. That one line can have this ripple effect that can end up moving mountains. I find that inspirational because everyday matters. Everything we do matters, so you might as well bring it. That’s what I take from that.
The other thing is how we can paint ourselves in corners. There’s a little bit of the emperor’s new clothes syndrome where people are like, “It’s got to be this way.” You can come in with new, fresh eyes and say, “Why are these two things at loggerheads?” It’s because they want two different things. That’s the way things emerge, and I don’t think anybody’s immune to that. The two things then are that small things matter and to always question and always look at your base assumptions. That’s the other big thing I took away from what you said there. Did I get the meaning there? Is there something more to it?
Yeah. Sometimes, we look at interpersonal conflict in organizations as, “This guy is a jerk.” The reality is that he might be judged, evaluated, and rewarded from a different set of criteria that are the underlying reason that you think he’s a jerk and tell you no when you need him to tell you yes. We can take the personality out of it. It’s not about personality. It’s because of the framework in which two sets of people are working that puts them at odds.
Leadership And Organizational Culture
To me, there are two layers that you pointed to. It’s the actual and factual element of, “We have a shared mission here. How are we going to proceed?” It’s then being able to clearly take on the realities of that structure. You also brought in the personality side, which is our style of how we communicate and how we interact with people. This is why I’m always driving towards cultures of trust and respect.
Respect, to me, is valuing other people. It’s saying they are a valid member of the human family and they have unique gifts there. If I’m wise, patient, and open enough, I can learn and be enhanced by that person. That creates a bond because that person’s being seen, heard, and valued. You get past those stylistic differences. Whether it’s generational, cultural, or demographic, none of those things matter because the things that unite us are way bigger than the things that divide us, especially if we’re on the same team.
I love your focus on leadership in terms of being humble, being willing to recognize the way we think it should be done isn’t necessarily the only way, and giving people the latitude that we agree on the goal and we don’t have to necessarily agree on how we get there.
That’s one of the answers to the problem you pointed out earlier about how you let people give their gifts. If you’re saying, “You can give your gifts in this little lane here,” versus, “Here’s the endpoint. You go,” and let them express themselves, you’re going to end up with better dynamics in all those areas we’re pointing to.
There’s a lot of strength in operating an organization in that way. Who wouldn’t want to surround themselves with people smarter than they are? We’ve talked about our shared musical passion. I lead a band. I want every other member of my band to be much more musically accomplished than I am.
It’s way more fun when you have awesome people to play with, right?
Yeah. They’re always making us better too. That’s the other reason for having that. I don’t know where it came from, but servant leadership resonates so much with me. I’ve not run a company or managed a group of people. My leadership is expressed in 4 or 5 people picking up musicians, learning material, going on stage, and putting on a show. It’s fun. It’s fun to be encouraging. It’s fun to lift people up. It’s fun to say, “Let’s try your way of playing that particular chorus more than my way.” We end up getting a much better product out of it.
Music, to me, is a special case in the sense that there are rights and wrongs. You’ve got to be within the same key. You have to be in the same modality. You have to be in the same time signature. There are actual objective constraints on it as an expression or it gets unlistenable. You’re speaking gibberish to people. There are experiments with atonal and stuff like that, but nobody listens to that because it doesn’t hit you in your heart, which is the point. The point to me is the expression of the human experience.
There are those rules. It’s analogous to a corporate mission as well because you’ve got this set of rules in the playground, like, “Here are the cultural things that are inbounds, and then here’s what’s out of bounds.” Within that, there’s a wide universe. It becomes very rewarding when you do see individuality. One of the highest compliments that I can give and the thing I appreciate most in musicians is when I can hear a short amount of a clip and tell it’s them playing. To me, that’s the highest level you can get. It’s when they’ve developed themselves to the point where they have their voice and it’s super distinctive. It’s also got to be good. You could be distinctive and be a little bit displeasing.
Within those bounds and that style, even if I don’t particularly like the style, I’m always going to respect them as an artist if they find their voice and they speak to other people through that voice. It seems to me that the only path to get to that is that attitude you were describing where you are allowing that leeway for individual expression. It’s obvious in music, but it’s also analogous in the world of work too. What do you think?
Culturally, it’s a lot more difficult because people who get to the top of organizations are expected. It’s like doctors. Doctors are trained to have a certain level of arrogance. In some ways, it’s almost a defense mechanism to them. It helps them bully their way through situations where they have no clue what’s going to happen, but they need to create this sense of competence to give a patient some hope.
It’s hope and confidence that they’re in good hands. There are utilitarian reasons for that approach. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It seems to me that if you’re too far in one and you don’t have enough of that human element, there’s going to be some room for improvement. In the medical field, it’s good.
Respectful Use Of Knowledge
It’s a little bit of a lane over from that concept. I was thinking about a time when an American company that I worked for was purchased by a British company. In this case, it was in the oil and gas business. The leadership came in, and that whole class consciousness and that class structure inside of old-school British society carried over. It was BP.
It led to some of the huge tragedies and some of the largest accidents in the field because these guys at the top were raised in a culture in which they had no consideration for lower classes and the knowledge that might be coming from the trenches of an organization up or from the guys who were saying, “These pipes are vibrating in a very dangerous way.” That class consciousness gap allowed for some tragic things to happen. It was that difference in those two cultures and what happened when they came together in a big corporation.
It shows you the power of the paradigm. You reminded me of a lesson I learned from my father who was pretty young. He worked for a company called TRW, which was once in the top 100 companies in the United States. It’s no longer in existence. At the time, he was managing a plant. There were maybe about 1,300 or 1,400 employees. They made compressor blades for jet engines, which are very high-tolerance machining. They had the plant, and then they had the offices in another building more towards the main road from the plant.
The culture there was people in white shirts and ties stayed in the building, and the people doing the machining stayed in the plant. Never the twain shall meet. That was not my dad’s style. He spent most of his day in the plant. Why? It’s because that’s where all the action was happening. Anybody who knew anything about what was really going on was there. They weren’t in the front building because they were on the machines. They know where there’s a problem. They know what’s going well and what’s not.
He knew everybody. For years afterward, whenever somebody would hear my name, they’d say, “You’re related to Steve Dardick?” I said, “That’s my dad.” If they worked for TRW, they loved him because it was a sign of respect. He wasn’t doing it for the purpose of blowing smoke up people’s butts. He knew that that’s where the wisdom was. He thought that was part and parcel of doing his job.
I was fortunate to learn that from him at a fairly young age. It’s those paradigms. Why are people all thinking that they are above or it’s not their role, or something like that? It can be cultural, but usually, it’s a function of we’re getting our egos in the way. We think we are our ego. They’re not seeing the big picture of what human beings are.
I love that story. What I love about it is that where’s the wisdom coming from in your organization? Do you know where it lives? Are you tapping it? Are you leveraging it? Are you using it to cut the cost of confusion? That wisdom will cut the cost of confusion, especially when you disseminate it in the right way and also at the right time.
That wisdom will cut the cost of confusion, especially when you disseminate it in the right way.
A concept that I talk about is the time value of your knowledge. If the train has left the station and you show up with your late report, it doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest guy in your field. If it doesn’t show up at the right time in the process, it’s worthless. It can’t help. It’s a broader thing to think about communication and knowledge. It’s the timing of it. It’s the amount of it.
I think of it as being right-sized information delivered to the right person at the right moment. It’s not one thing. It’s niching it and getting it packaged so that it’s exactly what people need to hear at the time that they need that information. When your organization is doing that, you’re demonstrating a huge amount of respect for people.
It’s respectful, and it does take a little bit of humility. It’s a theme throughout our conversation. It keeps popping up where it does come down to how we think about human beings. I keep going back to respect, but it’s really wanting to let people fully live, fully give their gifts, and fully express themselves. I’d be interested if you touched on this in your book, Cutting the Cost of Confusion.
What stops the pipes is we want to broadcast and make sure we’re seen. We do better if we receive more. We focus on trying to see other people. Once you see them, they naturally want to see you. It’s better to first receive the information from them and give the gift of seeing them than it is to expect them to hang on your every word because you’re saying it or you did something before in the past.
There was an early tagline after I created Transform Communications. It was, “We help you speak in exactly the way you need to be heard.”
That’s tricky.
Particularly when you talk about leaders and executives, they’re always saying, “What is it I want to say?” They take a step back and say, “What is it that all these people need to hear and understand?” If you speak that to them, you’re going to get so much more of what you want than if you put all your energy into trying to get your words right and they hear what you want them to hear. That’s not what magic is. The magic is in when they hear what they need to hear to give you what you want to get you where you want.
Confusion In The Organization: The magic happens when they hear what they need to hear to get you what you want.
That is absolute gold. There is a high percentage of CEOs that if they would take that advice, their effectiveness would skyrocket.
Maybe that’s my road show. I was like, “What do I have to offer to people at that level?” I partnered with another consultant. When we met, I thought he was a real jerk. He was a senior VP at one of my client companies. They asked us to come in for a peer assist on some stuff. I took away, “This guy is really an arrogant SOB.”
About 4 or 5 years later, I got a phone call and he was looking for me because of some work we did. He’s out on his own at his own consulting firm. What I realized is that he operated at that level. He operates at that C-Suite level. You need that arrogance and that level of confidence that I would call BS on, but it’s expected. I let him sell there, and then I deliver here.
My feeling on that is it is analogous to that same thing of the AMA professional distance of the doctors that you pointed to earlier. It’s a similar paradigm that people take on. In that way, there is utility and a reason it’s there, and it does serve a purpose. I’m not going to say that it has no place or no bearing. I’m also going to say that it has downsides that are probably as far down if not more of a drawback than the advantages you get from it. You feel it as arrogance, but different people will feel it in different ways. Whatever that is, I see that as noise. I don’t see it as something that has to be there necessarily.
It’s not contributing value necessarily.
You’re far better off if it’s coming from a place of ego or protection. It might not just be ego. It might be political or you feel vulnerable or some sort of defense or protection strategy. Most of these things are unconscious. They’re not something that people are thinking about. They’re learned behaviors. In that world, that’s your learned behavior because that’s what you’re seeing around you. Those few that are able to break free of those chains end up standing even taller because people come to love them because they let people know them.
I’m thinking about somebody who’s in a position of really limiting everybody’s ability to give gifts, mine and all the people working for him. You go, “How does somebody get to a place at that high level of an organization without somebody seeing the huge constraint that it is and the amount of unnecessary work that we do to jump through hoops and not add any value?”
That’s a reason I’m not in question. What’s your guess to an answer to that question? That’s an excellent question.
A part of me wants to go, “Who kicked your butt on the playground?” A lot of times, there’s a woundedness to people who operate that way. It’s not my job to fix that, but it does help me find compassion for people. Sometimes, I could end up having a divine conversation with somebody like that in an accidental setting. You run across them and you know that this conversation is headed to a place outside of what you anticipated. It’s your ability to see them in that moment not as an adversary and a jerk, but as somebody who’s compensating for some woundedness. You’re like, “What can I do? How can I serve that person and serve that person’s development at that moment?”
It results in some sort of openness or even perhaps an a-ha moment for the person, or something that might not happen in the moment. It goes back to what you said earlier about that small line and the one man. You never know. You could be planting a seed that sprouts a year or a decade later, and we don’t get the chance to view that. To me, that underscores the importance of being present, honest, courageous, and showing up as a real boy and not the puppet version of Pinocchio.
Client Engagement
You make a great point too. People who do the work that we do need courageous clients. My wife for years had said, “What you do in Transform Communications is not for the people who need it because there’s a whole world full of corporations that need what you do. It’s for the people who want what you do.” I’ve had to learn that I can walk into situations and I can see what I can do. If those people don’t want that, if they don’t want that shift, if they don’t want that change, or if they’re not willing to be genuine and real, then they’re not my ideal clients.
The profession of consulting does have a bit of a stain because sometimes, they don’t really want to learn. They want to have the, “I checked the box,” or it’s the cover, or it’s, “Tell me what I already know so that I can be more assured.” It’s not a true exploration of the real, but more of a bolstering of what we already believe. Whether it’s real or not doesn’t matter as much.
There’s way too much of that in the profession of consulting. However, I have to say that most consultants that I meet want to get to the real and serve. Few that I ever come across in this forum are what I put in the other categories. The big consulting firms tend to be guilty of that. Why? It’s because they’ve got a different paradigm they’re operating on. We all move in the direction that serves what we think is our best interest, and that can cause a lot of myopia in the world.
I met a VP from Accenture. He said, “Here’s a deal. You’re a guy that wants to make a difference for your clients. In my business, it’s all about the billable hours. I spent ten years dang trying to partner, join, or create a department doing what I do and have a bigger impact, and I finally stopped.” I was like, “Okay.” I’m not a fit with these big consulting firms.
Usually, I would come in either parallel to them and still be working for the clients after they left. They’re like, “Why is this guy still here doing stuff?” It’s because I’m focusing on communication and what we call a benefits realization. The consultants told you all these things you needed to do to operate more efficiently and get your business where you want it to be, and then, they leave. I’m like, “I want to help these people realize all the benefits that we promised them are here.” That’s a different kind of work.
It was something that I was reluctant to embrace the moniker of coach or consultant. It was because of that very reason. It seems so cheap to me. It’s easy to diagnose and say, “Here. Do this,” and then you get to go home and they have to sit in the mire. It’s icky to me. We’re in alignment on that. The work is in what I call SIA, Sustained Incremental Actions, that over time end up making a difference.
Those big contracts or these big, fancy 110-page documents that are very impressive, the reason they get so much attention and so much resources thrown at them is because we want to believe in magic. We want to believe that there’s a big idea that’s going to change everything. We want to resist the idea that no real life is a day-by-day, minute-by-minute disciplined thing that you are doing. That’s why paradigms are so important because it’s affecting every single decision and perception that you have from moment to moment. That’s where the magic is. It’s in the little, the constant, and the sustained. It’s not in the big-sweeping revelations.
I have run across organizations where I call it silver bullet thinking. They’re looking for the next big thing that’s their silver bullet. It’s their magic. It’s going to make all their problems disappear. It’s not like that.
It doesn’t match reality.
It’s in everyday things. It’s in the connections. It’s in the foundations. It’s in the knowledge. It’s in the knowledge and how it flows, the timing in which it’s available to people. That wisdom doesn’t live in one corner. That wisdom is leveraged throughout the organization also. You’ve got to get to that point where you are taking what people bring and integrating it, leveraging its value, and seeing and appreciating the people who are bringing those gifts.
I love that. To me, that view is really almost a qualification to help people in a way. Hearing you say that, I have absolute confidence that whatever you charge, they’re going to get more than that in value. This is the kind of thing that needs to infect your people to get them to see the bigger picture and more of a deeper reality.
Nobody’s perfect. We all have our flat sides. We all have things we’re working on. We’re all works in progress. That’s why we do what we do. We need to have that humility, openness, and hunger to be a little bit better tomorrow. One of the things I preach to people I’m working with a lot is, “Status quo has to go. Tomorrow, we have to be better than we are today.” That becomes a mission saying, “I’m going to continuously learn. I’m going to be hungry to learn from everybody, and I’m not going to be afraid of mistakes because those are opportunities to learn.” It starts getting all these healthy mindsets encouraged and nourished. What do you think?
Continuous Improvement
For six years, I have had a bass player in my band who is as far away on the political spectrum as we could be. He designs and machines gun parts for a living, which we couldn’t talk about often. What we did agree on is that both of us approach life as a continuous improvement project. It was always about, “Every day, what can I do better to be more efficient, be a better contributor, and be a better husband, father, partner, band leader, and consultant?”
It was the same thing. It was like, “What can we do with this band to make us a better, more polished, more professional, and more entertaining act going forward?” Whatever we had difference-wise, we had this really powerful overlap and appreciation for one another’s work ethic, if you will. The challenge to all of us who are working in organizations is finding that commonality, the things we share in common.
The challenge to all of us who are working in organizations is finding that commonality – the things we share in common.
I love that. That’s a wonderful story. First of all, you have a shared mission. You have compatible end goals. That allows you to work side by side. It fits into our earlier conversations about how there’s more than one path to getting there, but we do have to agree on, “Here’s the effect we want to have,” or, “Here are the overall parameters of what we think is good and desirable.” We do have to have alignment there. There are foundational principles that we have to agree on. Once we have that, then there are many paths to that. It’s cultivating the attitude that says, “Let me learn from your path. I wouldn’t have taken that path, but maybe I can pick something up from that.” That’s one thing.
The other thing is I was smiling when you talked about guns because my grandfather, David Dardick, invented the open chamber system, which is a novel gun system. A long time ago, I started a company called Open Chamber Systems that was building on his inventions. I’m technically in the gun business myself. I got the guns, the music, and the consulting. We’ve got all this stuff going on together. It’s been fantastic to get to know you a little bit.
It’s great fun. These conversations, I’ve probably had 3 or 4 of these that it’s like, “Let’s see where this goes.” I could hear the spots where you’re going to be able to put some nice bookends on the sections and things like that. You have plenty to work with.
This was wonderful. I’m very happy with our discussion. I appreciate your time. I’m sure I can find your music right on YouTube. You got it on Spotify.
I have a YouTube channel. We are also streamable on all of the Apple Music and all the music streaming platforms. If you’re old-school, you can contact me. I still have CDs that I mail out to people.
I’ll be doing that. To anybody reading this, if you like what Rich is laying down here and you’re curious, reach out. I guarantee you there’s some value there. There’s no doubt about that. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. The Eye of Power model is such a great thing. The timing’s perfect for everybody. To your audience, thanks for bringing that lens to the work world that we all have to operate in. Thanks again. I appreciate it.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
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Rich, thank you so much for being on the show with me. I very much enjoyed our conversation. You dropped a lot of good wisdom nuggets for the audience. I really liked how you identified the understanding deficit that it’s something that takes a little bit of effort. It’s on leaders and leadership to make sure that we’re nourishing the people and not dictating.
You framed one where you don’t assume people are going to be naturally emotionally connected to a strategic objective. Rather, you have to drill down a little further. We’ve got these twenty outcomes we’re looking for. Outcomes 2, 9, and 11 are going to be what this person’s going to relate to. It’s spending a little bit of that extra energy to communicate, whether it be a department or even as granular as the person. That’s a fantastic bit of advice for leaders.
It’s a little bit of awareness towards CEOs to the idea of what they need to have heard from you rather than what you want to say to them. That’s maybe a linguistic trick, but the paradigm shift is very powerful. That’s fantastic advice. Your natural gift of asking why it’s such a pain in the butt in a good way and a productive way. Otherwise, we’re slaves to our paradigms if we don’t step back, ask, “Why do we do it this way? Might there be a better way?” and leave space for trying new things and new ideas from people no matter where those ideas are coming from.
I enjoyed the strings of humility and openness that went through our discussion. Our philosophy as it relates to working collaboratively, whether it’s a creative endeavor as far as music or a creative endeavor as far as business, seems to be in very good alignment. I feel honored and fortunate that we were able to connect in this way. Thank you again, Rich, and thank you for tuning in to this episode.
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About Rich Layton
Richard Layton is a visionary thought leader and the innovative mind behind the renowned concept, the Cost of Confusion®. With over three decades of experience, he has established himself as a results-driven strategic communicator, providing invaluable insights where "strategic communications meet risk management". Based in Houston, Texas, Richard founded Transform Communications in 1992.
Throughout his impressive career, Richard has collaborated closely with prestigious consulting firms like CSC Index, DiBianca Berkman, Deloitte & Touche, and more. His expertise has played a pivotal role in driving the success of major organizational change, reengineering, and technology initiatives. Notable accomplishments include global project management processes, SAP implementation, Value/Supply Chain management, e-Commerce integration, and other critical efforts for esteemed clients such as BP Amoco, Intel, J. Sainsbury’s Grocers (UK), Marathon Oil, OxyChem, Tektronix, and WebTrends.
As a thought leader and strategic communicator, Richard Layton continues to inspire innovation and empower organizations to navigate complex business, technology, and marketing challenges. His transformative methodologies have left an indelible mark on the industry, making him a sought-after authority for those striving for excellence in the ever-evolving business landscape.