Your schedule should include time to think

That has been my experience as I have attended the networking events at The Persimmon Group’s downtown offices and listened to what Bill Fournet, founder and CEO of the 20-year-old Tulsa consulting firm, had to say.

Fournet will be the keynote speaker Thursday at the State of Workforce and Talent, the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s largest workforce and talent event. His topic is the multigenerational workforce.

I talked to him to reflect on the last 20 years in business and to give some thoughts on what he sees as he works with leaders trying to make it in today’s economy.

Take yourself back to 20 years ago. What were you wrong about?

It was tough. At the time when Persimmon started and really for almost the first 10 years, Tulsa wasn’t ready for us. It took time and we saw leadership teams really shift in the past 10 years, dramatically in a very positive ways.

So it went from, “this is how we’ve done it” — and I want you to say this exactly this way because it can come off a little rough — but honestly it was leadership teams that said “hey, we’re here. We agree we need to make some of these changes, but we just don’t have time.”

What changed is leadership teams now are more of the mindset of we know we need to adapt. We may not know where or how to adapt, right, but we recognize we don’t have all the answers. And that’s a profound and positive impact across the entire business community.

What is a success story that has stuck with you?

One that really affected me was going into an environment where there was very, very low trust. There was a person who was a senior manager. And he had been there for over 20 years. And he was known as pretty passive aggressive, pretty intense. People did not want to work with this person. And after we got through the trust aspects, went back up there and people literally came up to us and said, “What did you do to him? Did you stash his body? Because this is not the same person that we’ve known.” It was like oxygen coming into a room and this person had now become the leader. He was inclusive. He was engaging his team and asking them to help solve questions.

That’s an incredible turnaround.

The challenge for leaders right now is how and where do we make the change so that we’re fast enough to adapt and stay viable? At the same time, not wear our organization out with too much change. The whole notion of change fatigue. It’s very real. It’s something I’m really focusing on right now is how do you make those decisions proactively?

You can’t have 100 priorities. How many can you have?

You get to have three to five at any one time. You cannot have all of them be first priority. They have to be ranked.

What’s a problem that you see too much in business today?

Everyone is really focused on getting things done. And get it done means show me results immediately. Don’t focus on development or strategy or thinking. We get to a point honestly, and I fell victim to this at one point about 15 years ago, where thinking was no longer considered part of the workday.

Are you carving out time during your normal work week, not after hours? Are you carving out time to think, to reflect, to maybe catch up and read on something?

In today’s world, some people seem to have one job title but five actual jobs.

When I ask most managers and above how much of their real job they do outside of office hours, it is 50 to 60%. That’s a broken system.

I’ve been asking for almost 12 years now of audiences both for speaking as well as training or coaching: Out of an average one hour meeting, how many minutes of that meeting on average are valuable? What do you think the answer to that is?

Five to 10 minutes. It’s consistent, maybe 15. Why are we wasting so much time? Why do we treat time differently than the widgets that we make or the services we provide? It’s all about choices. You have choices every day. You have choices to keep saying yes to things. You have choices to not delegate. You have choices to keep overwhelming yourself.

The line I use is you will fail if you try to do it all by yourself.

Yeah. And that is not scalable. If I take you out tomorrow and put you on a vacation island for a month, the business may not know how to run in your area and that’s a disservice to the organization.

And then add in living in constant change and uncertainty.

Once you reset yourself and realize there is no new normal. It’s never normal. I’ve brought in techniques that are actually military techniques that are highly successful. They understand what the objective is. What success looks like. But as soon as a special forces unit lands on the ground, they expect everything to potentially not go to plan.

What keeps you up at night right now?

One thing that keeps me up at night is a lack of awareness and desire to try to understand the truth.

If we’re not willing to validate what we believe to be true or assess it, then we will become victims of emotion and feeling. And that’s never worked out well in the history of the world.