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About the guest

Lisa Taylor is the Founder and Managing Director of Taylor Stein Consulting, with over 20 years of experience in organizational transformation and human capital projects. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Music, an MA in International Development, and an MBA in Finance. Recognized for her expertise in leading complex projects, she emphasizes diversity and inclusion while building high-performing teams. Learn more about her on her expert page.

Summary

In this episode of the Org Design Podcast, hosts Amy Springer and Damian Bramanis chatted with Lisa Taylor from L.T. Consulting (Taylor Stein Consulting), who shares her unexpected journey into the world of organizational design. Starting with a background in music and a series of adventures that led her to teach English in Taiwan, Lisa discusses her transition from performing arts to human capital and organizational consulting.

Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes the importance of focusing on people and behavior change within organizations, rather than solely on processes. Lisa recounts her experiences working at various firms, including Deloitte, where she found fulfillment in collaborating with clients to address challenges and improve organizational structures. She highlights the significance of conducting thorough diagnostics to understand organizational culture and the different experiences of leadership versus the workforce. The episode explores critical themes such as the need for alignment within leadership teams, the challenges of remote work, and the future of organizational design in a rapidly changing environment.

Listeners will gain insights into the importance of curiosity, open-mindedness, and collaboration in effective organizational design, along with practical advice for leaders seeking to navigate the complexities of organizational change. Tune in to understand how Lisa's unique perspective and experiences can inform and inspire your approach to building healthier organizations.

Show Notes

Taylor Stein Consulting - https://www.taylorsteinconsulting.com/

Organization Design Forum - https://organizationdesignforum.org/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Amy Springer: Thank you for joining us, Lisa, L.T. from L.T. Consulting on the Org Design Podcast. We are at an Org Design event, everyone we speak to says they ended up here by accident. Do you have a similar story? Help us understand how you got here.

[00:00:20] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, definitely by accident, by no intention of my own. My background is in music. That's what I went to school for, and through trial and error of not being very successful at what I was doing, I lived this bohemian lifestyle for a number of years, where I went to Taiwan to teach English. While I was there, I made a bunch of money. It was before the currency crisis in the late 90s.

And then met all these people from different countries, New Zealand being one, Australia, the UK, and they were having a stint in Taiwan just to make money to go travel. And I was like, what's this travel? So I backpacked around the world for a year, I came back, moved to Seattle where all my friends were living at the time started doing some dinner theater, but was doing some HR work, recruiting in my day job to pay for my night job.

Then decided I wanted to go backpack again. Moved to Hawaii. While I was in Hawaii, I said, Okay, I gotta get serious about life. So I'm gonna go to grad school. I'm gonna go to grad school to save the world and do international development because I was in a lot of developing countries at that time and that's where my heart and mission was.

In my graduate program realized what I was paying for my graduate program was what I was going to make in International development, and I said timeout we can't do this because I'll just go back to wait tables and being a starving musician. So I decided to do my MBA while I was at American University and a conjunction with my international development master's Throughout the MBA program, I heard about this thing called consulting. And I was like, what is this? What are these people doing? What do they do? I took a intro to consulting class and my takeaway was, you just talk to people.

And I was like, I can do that. I'm pretty good at that. But I'd had no skills at all. Only what I'd learned from either waiting tables or performing . A firm recruited me out of my MBA program. I was doing finance and internal controls because that was what my MBA was in and I was bored out of my mind. It was not for me. And when I was looking at transitioning out of doing this kind of bean counter work. I had heard about change management.

I'd heard about human capital and I was like, "Okay, how do I do that?" So when I was interviewing with other firms. One firm that I landed at, Grant Thornton, ended up having an organizational improvement practice. And it hit all the high notes for me. And that's where I learned org assessment and org design and org performance and business process reengineering and all of that stuff and really got more into the org design human capital realm from there. So yes, total accident that I ended up where I am.

[00:02:55] Damian Bramanis: So it hit all the high notes for you. And I'm assuming you're not meaning as a musician, what were those high notes?

[00:03:02] Lisa Taylor: What I had learned from my first, experience when I was just a little baby consultant doing this internal controls. It didn't matter how much we fixed processes. It didn't matter what shiny object we were bringing in, to implement, to improve people's lives and improve efficiency. If you couldn't get the end user to adopt it and take it it was all lost because it's all about behavior change. I didn't have those words at that time because I didn't come from a, background of business talk and business think and business speak, but instinctually I knew like the people side was really important.

And that's what I had seen throughout my whole year and a half being at doing IT type stuff, internal controls. And so knowing that we were going to focus on the people and focus on behavior change and improving org through human capital that hit a lot of high notes for me.

[00:03:55] Damian Bramanis: We definitely see that a lot, is that thinking just about, like you said, the processes without thinking about the actual people and behavior change is, you're missing the forest for the trees.

[00:04:05] Lisa Taylor: Yep, absolutely.

[00:04:07] Amy Springer: Can you tell us a little bit about your practice then? Where has it all accumulated to, for you now? What's the thing that really hits the high note for you now, after doing it for a few years?

[00:04:17] Lisa Taylor: So after GT I moved on to a kind of small firm and then after that firm was ten years at Deloitte, and I think what gets would get me up in the morning all the time, was the clients that I had an opportunity to work with and partner, not "What's the answer? tell me the answer. Thank you so much. Go away." But like real collaboration that always just makes you feel so good when you know that you're in there. We may not have all the answers, but we're here to fix or figure it out together. And there's no right solution. But through trial and error and testing of different things, we're gonna get to good enough or about there, right?

The other aspect that I love, is working with other people, like working with junior resources who really want to learn the craft, developing them, teaching them. Like, how can I be like you when I grow up? Okay here's the different projects that I want you to try out. Yes. So we'd love you to stay on my projects forever, but you're going to tap out at this level. So maybe go over here and try something else. So that development piece of really, being able to teach others what I do and have done for, now 18 years, which is crazy when you think about it. Those are the things that really inspire me and get me going.

[00:05:34] Damian Bramanis: I'd love to talk about the practical experience there. So you, you mentioned we might not know all the answers. And so day one, you walk in and you're with that, what do you do? What's the what's the first few hours, days look like? Yeah. When you're when you're walking in on day one.

[00:05:50] Lisa Taylor: Yeah. So I would say probably like most people who start this work, there's a diagnostic aspect of it. There's usually a hypothesis that you're trying to test Funnily enough, some clients already have the answer for you. What do you think about my org structure? And then, you have to entertain that for a while, because they're very proud of the org chart that they created. And always in the back of my mind is like, if I'm working with somebody who is an expert in aircraft design, I would not go in and tell you how to design an aircraft because I don't know anything about it, and I always find it hilarious that clients think they can do my job without having any background or experience in it. So some of it is just like bringing them along the journey and convincing them. Like you've got to build the credibility. You've got to build the trust. You're not going to call their baby ugly, right?

That would destroy all credibility you have walking in the door and say, Hey, that's great. Why don't we use that as one of the test cases when we get there? But I think you really have to start with a diagnostic and doing a really good diagnostic. If you don't have the data to see the patterns and things and understand what's going on in the organization.

And I know at this conference, they talked a lot about the Star Model and that's definitely a great model. I feel like every firm I've been at has had a different model that we've used, but that diagnostic is super important to get that data and I will also say in my experience, it's important to get the data from more than just the top line team because the way that leaders experience the culture and the system and everything that they're in is very different than what the workforce is experiencing.

And a lot of times that manifest in the data. And so I think that part is really important. So talking to them about that. This is the first thing we're going to do. Here's the scope. Here's the framework we're going to use. And what are the right employee groups that we can reach out to get information from.

[00:07:43] Damian Bramanis: Many of our listeners are those leaders. So they might not be organization design experts, but they're a leader who has identified there's a problem here I need to take some action on. Maybe they feel that they know what the problem is, that they should be what the solution is to that, and like you said, maybe their experience might be different from the experience of the workforce. What would you say to those people to know? Are they on the right track? How would they know? What is it that they should be doing to figure out? Before they take those next steps in their organization to make some change which could be the wrong thing

[00:08:15] Lisa Taylor: A lot of the data is around leadership, organizational capabilities, what are the processes and systems that they're using? What's the talent that you have? What's the structure that you are? And so when you think there's multiple others that you can look at and go back to that Star Model and all the things they look at that is the team aligned around the strategy, right?

So you start a strategy and then work your way down. So I think a lot of it is If a leader is not going to engage a consulting firm. First start off is your team aligned with your vision and what you're trying to achieve. I think, they think that they are because they have meetings and they update each other in the meetings and look at the status and look at what I'm doing.

But what they fail to understand is that the Team is just doing whatever it is that they think they should be doing, and maybe not necessarily collaborating with each other on how they, as a leadership team, can bring their organizations together to achieve the goals of the organization. So start with the alignment and making sure everyone's clear about what it is that they need to be doing not just individually in their business unit or in their functional unit, but as a team collectively and bring what is the leadership team's responsibilities? What is it that we need to collectively deliver versus just me my individual and my little unit? So yeah, if I was a leader, that's where I would start.

[00:09:35] Damian Bramanis: That's great, If I've had a meeting, it's definitely all okay. I'm sure everyone knows what's going on now.

[00:09:40] Lisa Taylor: I had the status report, right? Everything's green, but yeah, great. But is the green hitting the right things that you need to be aligned around? And that's really where a lot of the challenges come in.

[00:09:51] Amy Springer: Yeah. You work with leaders typically when you do org design. We've all been discussing this week how it used to be, used to happen occasionally it was a project that would come in. It's now needing to happen more and more. So our leaders needed to be more prepared for rethinking org design, responding to strategy, responding to external forces if we together could click our fingers, give every leader a skill that would prepare them for that and prepare them for you to come on and help them out. What would that be? What would that look like?

[00:10:22] Lisa Taylor: I think it would be have an open mind and be curious, ask questions. Don't come in with a fixed mindset and like kind of thinking, you know what the answer is and you know where the problems are and what the problems are and be open to the process because I think that's where.

I see a lot of resistance is not having that kind of openness to letting the process work itself through and wanting to get to yes and wanting to get to that answer super quickly because I will say some of the transitions I've seen is there's not as much of an appetite anymore to do the longer diagnostic that we used to do probably five ten years ago when we were doing this type of work now It's like I want it in three weeks and there's positive pros and cons to that, right? And it depends on the problem you're trying to solve and how deep deeply rooted some of the issues are but if you Don't allow the skimping on some of the diagnostic. I think you're going to have a much better product at the end of the day. You can accelerate some of the other parts of the OD process so you don't have to, spend six months to get a final answer and you can have some prototypes and stuff ready at the end of that three to four weeks, but those are things that still need to be tested and you need to look at the downstream impacts and all that. So yeah, be open minded. That would be, and that's hard for people who are always supposed to have the answer as a leader in an organization.

[00:11:44] Damian Bramanis: Speaking of diagnostics I'm interested to know what are the big red flags? What are the things that you see is flashing alarms that something's seriously wrong? That someone should look out for in their own organization.

[00:11:58] Lisa Taylor: I Think anytime you see really low culture scores. Understanding like what's happening in the organizational health that's causing that. You know whether it's a leadership issue or something else it usually is aligned to some kind of leadership thing that's going on.

I think also if the leadership team itself gets low scores, that's another thing to look at because as again, it's all a system. And so understanding what's going on in the leadership team that's causing the unhealthy behaviors with each other that the rest of the organization is feeling, and sometimes when I've done diagnostics, I have the leadership team rate themselves on how effective we are. And when those scores are low, then you also need to dig into that. Those kind of all go around what I would call organizational trust organizational, I don't know what the word is I'm looking for, but collaboration and ability to work together and have those difficult conversations and challenge each other.

[00:12:55] Damian Bramanis: Collegiality.

[00:12:56] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:12:57] Amy Springer: This week we've been talking a lot about the different things in the world that are changing and changing really fast. What are you most excited for as you look forward in to the near future of org design and a little bit further? What are you excited for your practice?

[00:13:13] Lisa Taylor: I think, it's a kind of endless sphere. I'm curious to see where all of this is going to go. I feel like we've all kind of been in the Galbraith model for a while, and I'm curious to see how that's gonna, How much that will ground us, but also evolve us as we, we move on in this practice. So I'm curious to see where the craft of it goes. Especially given, we had to do a lot of adjustments during COVID with virtual and all of that. And now we have a lot of resources that are remote. And what does that mean from an org design perspective? And so the future of work stuff is really interesting. I don't think then that's been solved on that yet, but I would say another thing that I'm really curious to know more about is like, how do we continue to train people in the craft when I feel so much that I learned was by being on client site, having those interactions with clients, having those interactions with people who were more experienced than me and the learning that I had to be like I'm, sometimes you just felt like the, I felt like the dumbest person in the room and I probably was but I learned a lot through all of that and testing my own skills talking in front of a client, having the confidence to do that. And so much gets lost in that virtual environment. I'm wondering how do we train up that next level to become experts and, is there a gap that's, going to be there for some period of time while all this gets figured out? Because that's where the learning comes from and I'm just trying to think through myself, how can I do a better job of training people who are remote resources and what we do so it doesn't become transactional type of activity, and they're actually getting the strategic aspects out of it.

[00:14:51] Amy Springer: Such an important question.

[00:14:52] Damian Bramanis: Thank you very much, Lisa, LT. I'd love to know if people are interested in what you've talked about today and wanted to know more, what's the best place to look?

[00:15:01] Lisa Taylor: Find me on LinkedIn. Lisa Taylor, you'll find me there. Of course, that's the most vanilla white girl name out there. So Lisa Taylor, Washington, D. C.

[00:15:11] Amy Springer: Cool. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for joining us.

[00:15:13] Lisa Taylor: All right. Thank you guys.

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Functionly is designed to empower organizations by fostering collaboration and enhancing organizational design through data-driven insights.

By utilizing Functionly's platform, leaders can effectively assess their team's alignment with strategic goals and identify areas for improvement. The emphasis on understanding the people side of organizational change resonates with Functionly’s approach, as it provides tools that facilitate behavior change and promote engagement across teams. With Functionly, leaders can navigate the complexities of organizational dynamics, ensuring that their teams not only implement processes but also fully embrace them, ultimately driving better performance and a healthier organizational culture.