We talked with Maritza Davila about what unclear leadership is really costing your team.

Transcript:

All right. Well, welcome everybody to our impactful projects and planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani. I'm happy to be with you here today, and we have a guest for today's such session. We have Maritza Davila, who we are going to talk about unclear leadership with, and really, you know what it's costing your team when there's that lack of clarity, and so Maritza is a leading operations consultant and keynote speaker who specializes in building accountable high performing teams that drive results and accelerate company growth with an MBA and over a decade of operations leadership experience. She has guided organizations across diverse industries to consistently exceed their business goals. So, welcome. Thank you for being here. My first question is always, you know, tell us a little bit more about your work, about your business, about the impact that you're trying to create for your clients,

of course. Well, thank you so much for having me, Jami. It's a pleasure, and really, my work comes from the experience that I had working with leaders. Right, I was often the kind of like the operations manager, like the right hand in making sure everything happened right, and that led me to understanding that we need a lot of structure for companies to grow sustainably and predictably, and often most leaders in companies and organizations have a huge grand vision and are drivers, but everyone else is left to pick up and discern, and you know, kind of hear their brainstorming ideas, and then try to understand what actually matters the most, and what do I need to be focused on right now, and you know, because that's never been clarified. Once I learned how, if we implement like an operating system within the business, and had it implemented in one of the businesses that I was working with, the biggest change in how the teams was working really led me to seeing it's not my biggest mission in my, in my business is to change the way that leaders think it, because if you can change the way that you think, it ends up changing the way that you act with your team, and that's really like my goal every time, because most times we have a control issue as leaders, where we think that, you know, we're the ones that, especially if you're a founder, right, you, you may be built the business from scratch, and it is essentially your child, and it's really hard to let go, but if we want to grow, we have to learn to let go, yeah, and these are the things that often I find when working with different types of leadership and founders, and I think if we can create more clarity with our teams, we build accountable and more confident company culture within our employees.

Yeah, that's.. I think that's really interesting. I, you know, and then, because I mostly work with nonprofits, there's that founder syndrome of, sort of, you know, you started an organization, and how do you grow it? And when it's just you and a handful of people, and you know how each other thinks. You don't have to have that kind of clarity and those sort of systems in place, and often you know people will bring me in to help them with project management and collaboration at a similar stage where they're trying to grow, and it's like, but what you know, the two or three of us, or five of us, or 10 of us were doing just isn't working as you sort of scale up, so, so how does being unclear show up emotionally, sort of for leaders and team members?

Yeah, so like I said, unclear leaders create uncertain teams, but with research that Gallup has created, it shows how if we have poor clarity within organizations, there is a 50% higher chance of turnover, and companies are 40% less productive. Often it's because the founder has not clarified what matters most in your role. What is the company goal that we are looking to attain this year or this quarter? Like, what should be my focus for this month or this quarter, and. And how does that reflect in my weekly activities as, as an employee, right, or as a department leader, you know, whatever the case may be. If that's never clarified, if we don't know emotionally, like, what we should be doing, then we feel uncertain a lot of times, and we're frustrated often because frustration from the leader and frustration from, you know, the person under them, because they don't know what they should work on first, or maybe they did something, but they didn't do it the way that you wanted them to do it, because it wasn't clearly communicated what it was that you wanted, you want someone that could just, like, read your mind, and, like, that's not, you know, that doesn't, you know, I've been, I've been married, I think I told you, like, this is my, you know, ninth wedding anniversary, and like we're still figuring it out, right, like I still, you know, and there's someone that you're with all the time, so imagine as an employee, right, you need to have a lot of time to really clearly understand the founders' preferences and how they want things done, but if they struggle with clear communication, which is part of leadership and giving clear feedback, then you never know, like, why you're not, why you're not doing a good job, and that's, that's really it, boils down to that, is like understanding what a good job looks like in this role, and when they don't do a good job, being able to clearly communicate what you need to do next in order to get it there right, and what we need to fix.

So I'm, I'm wondering, and I'm, yeah, I'm going kind of off, maybe off on a tangent. I'm wondering, what, why you think leaders feel like they don't have to be clear, or what, why they're this sort of, you know, not recognizing the importance of

it. I think there's a maturity to leadership, right. So, when you become a business owner for the first time, a lot of times I've seen that when you have smaller, smaller businesses, they, they think that their employees should just know, and they say things like that's common sense, right, and they think everything is common sense, because to them, if they were to do it, it would be common sense to them, because they've already done this role, or you know, they understand all the context, but often I think that we should, once you start growing in, in your maturity within leadership, you realize, I can't blame my team, right? Like, I need to take accountability for how can I become a better leader and give them the best direction, because that's, that's really, that's a big part of the role, right? And understanding how do I give clear direction, and just like, if you, if you, if you take any communication, anything, if you read a book, if you listen to podcasts and talk about communication, one of the things that they say is, is asking the question of, look, this is what I heard, did I hear correctly, right? So, if we're able to communicate to our team in a way that they understand us, like that's up to us, that's not, that's not the employee's job to understand what it is that you're saying it's your job to be simple and easy to understand, so that the person that's hearing it receives the information and can execute correctly on it, and I think that the reason that most, most leaders often kind of just blame it on the team, like they should just know, is because I don't think that they've sat sometimes I think it's a lack of accountability and humility that they, that they are missing, that you start learning because the leaders that are the most humble and accountable that I worked with, like they always blame it on themselves, and so if you blame it on yourself, it's a good thing, because then you have control to be able to change it, you can change it, you can't change other people, but you can change the way that you, you lead and the way that you communicate, and the way that you, you are, you're able, as the founder, to have so much change in the culture, and it's not until you, you take that and you, you drink that horrible cup, right, of like this was my fault that you start to, I think, go to another level in leadership and understand. Okay, yes, it matters who I have on my team, but I'm the one responsible for recruiting them, right? And like hiring them, and two, it's also my job to develop them. So, what is it? I, you know, what can I do? And it's a conversation you can have even with your own team, but you can start thinking, well, how can I clearly communicate to someone you know this is not the job, they're not doing it right, like, for, like, for example, I know someone that recently got a job, and they're like a customer success manager, and they sent them, like, the 30. 6090 day KPIs, of like, you know, if you're hitting these things, then you're doing a good job, and you're, you know, you're on par with how fast we want you to grow. And I noticed that in the second month they said something that was in my mind could be clear. They, I read it, and it said something like, are you are completing tickets with on par with the rest of the team? I would want to know, or have a minimal ticket like backlog, that's what it said. And I thought to myself, what's a minimal? What's minimal? Yeah, is that five, is that 10, is that 20?

Right,

what's minimal, right? Like, we could be a little bit more clear about that, and then second, what's on par with the rest of the team? What's the average ticket response time? Is it three minutes, is it one minute, is it five minutes,

is it 15?

Right, and so sometimes as a leader, when you first start out, you're not sure about these numbers, and we're vague, which is confusing to people, but if I tell you, hey, you need to complete tickets under, you need to have an average ticket response side of under three minutes, that's pretty clear,

right? Right, yeah, no, that's, and that's a great example, because I think, yeah, I think, particularly with the founder syndrome, people are used to doing, and then you know, sort of leading is a very different thing, and often during growth you're doing both, and sometimes I think the leading is hard, and so we fall back on the things we know how to do, and hope other people sort of figure it out, and obviously sometimes you have employees who do figure it out,

right,

or you know, kind of are thinking similarly, so what are what are the first steps that a leader can take to, under, you know, to kind of figure out and understand where they are lacking, where clarity is kind of missing or lacking.

Yeah. Well, I think that clarity comes in mind. I'm very like goal-driven personally, and I think that when we know where we're going, like, because goals gives us direction, so the first steps I would do, or I would tell a founder to giving clear direction, is what's the company goal, and how can we communicate that in a way that's easy to understand, and then also, what are the employees' goals, because we need to tie right the growth of the company to the personal growth of the employee, because nobody wants to. I mean, the only, the only employees that want to work in a company that is, like, you know, that is stagnant. They're not, they're not going to grow in their position, they're not going to get promoted, or they're not going to grow in how much they're going to make, are people that are comfortable, right, people that don't think they're capable of probably achieving that, or people that just, you know, they're just, they want to stay there, they're comfortable in where they're at, and you know, personally, I'm, I'm not that way, so I think most companies want to grow, most people want to be promoted, want to make more money, and you know, or want more flexibility, right, like it's not always one thing or another, so it's understanding. Okay. Well, where does the company want to go? So I would clarify that as the owner, whether that, you know, that could be a very specific number. So, for example, I had a client, it was an insurance agency, and they were really good at saying, like, we want monthly to hit this amount, for you know, commercial insurance, home and auto, and you know all this stuff, but I was like, How can we make this even simpler to understand, right? Because it's like, now I have to remember, like, all these different numbers, like, let's, if it's like more than

I I

don't know if anyone else is experiencing this, but I think you're frozen, and hopefully it's not. Hopefully it's just me, but I think you may be frozen. I'm going to try to remove you and bring you back. Yeah, unfortunately, it looks like we may have have lost Maritza. And oh, there you are.

Yeah,

okay, okay. Sorry, I don't know what happened there. So, anyway, you were saying kind of setting goals, and that you were going to make it simpler. That's where I lost you. So, I'd love to hear.

So, oh

no, oh no. I feel like this is an answer we just aren't, maybe meant to get, so let me, let me try again, let's see, yeah, we lost you again.

Can you hear me? Okay,

yeah, yeah.

This internet

right at the critical point where we're going to answer. Oh no. Yeah, you seem frozen again. Shoot, all right. Well, I'm hoping that what we can do is, is have Maritza give us the answer, maybe in a comment, or you know, we can sort of try to record, court an answer, because I'd love to hear how that was made more simple. Oh, sorry, yeah, I don't know, I don't know,

I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna try, basically what I said was, instead of saying how many home, auto, commercial, client, all these things, how many we want to get, why don't we clarify and say how much we want an additional premium, and to this day I remember she wanted, they want to do 2 million in additional premium, so to the, like, you know, this is, this was a while ago, and I still remember the goal, right? So, if I can remember it, the people under them can remember, and that way they understand. Okay. Well, how do we split this up into weekly,

right? So, yeah, and unfortunately, you've frozen again, but that's helpful. I mean, I think you know creating this environment where the goals are clear enough that people really can understand them, that they can internalize them, that they can remember them, is is what you're trying to get at. That was that was my takeaway there. So, what's the best way for folks to reach out to you?

Yeah, well, I would, I would love to kind of make things simpler to understand and just clear, right? Because if we're clear, we can be practical and just execute on what it is, because we understand what what we need to do for the company to get to the goals, and to get to my own goals, right, the best way to anyone, for anyone,

shoot, we keep losing you, so we can, I will make sure that in the comments under the video you can get, or it's Marit says contact information. Oh, sorry, we lost you. Yeah,

I can't control.

Yeah, no, it's okay.

But yeah, the best way to get in touch with me would be through my website, Op 360.co There, you know that you can schedule a free clarity call with me. I love talking to founders and understanding what issues they're going through and trying to solve, you know, some of these things. And I also have a newsletter that they could sign up for there, where I talk a little bit more about clear leadership and how can I be just

okay, so thank you. I'm sorry, I feel like, you know, maybe it's a good example of when we can't, we can't hear people we don't know, so that lack of clarity there on, you know, kind of what's happening is, and we've, we've shown, shown the challenges of it. So, all right. Well, thank you so much. I enjoyed our conversation. I'm sorry that we had some technical challenges here today. So, thanks everybody. Thank you for participating in our impactful projects and planning series. This video, and all of the videos in the series, are available at YazdaniConsulting.com IPP. Thanks everybody.