What is at the center of your organization? Or rather, what is the heart of your organization? Is it money, customers, franchises, or something else? And what is holding up that center? Our guest today is Glenn Akramoff, and he shares with us his six pillars of workplace health from his book, “The Human Centered Team.”
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Every business is created in some way to serve a human being.
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Glenn’s life experiences and core values are the center of his purpose. Having worked from seasonal maintenance to City Manager and now consultant and business owner over a 30-year career, he’s observed a connection between fulfillment at work and happiness at home. He has an intense desire to improve the lives of everyone he works with. Glenn creates environments that are innovative, inclusive, growing, and rich in communication and respect. His Human Centered program empowers teams and leaders to overcome and succeed together.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
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TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Tom DuFore (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week, we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team, and as we open today, I’m wondering what is at the center of your organization, or rather, what is the heart of your organization? Is it money, customers, franchisees, or something else? And what’s holding up that center and keeping it together?
(00:33):
And our guest today is Glenn Akramoff, and he shares with us his six pillars of workplace health from his recent book, the Human Centered Team. Now, Glenn’s life experiences and core values are at the center of his purpose. Having spent the last 30 years of his career as a city manager and now a consultant and business owner, he’s observed a connection between fulfillment at work and happiness at home. He has an intense desire to improve the lives of everyone he works with. Glenn creates environments that are innovative, inclusive, growing, enriching communication and respect. His human-centered program empowers teams and leaders to overcome and succeed together. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
Glenn Akramoff (01:17):
My name’s Glenn Akramoff. I am with Akramoff LLC. I’m the founder and CEO, and I’m glad to be here.
Dr. Tom DuFore (01:25):
Thank you so much for being here. Really looking forward to talk about your book, the Human Centered Team. And so, I’d love for you just to give a brief overview on what it’s about, and I always like to ask. What led you to write it?
Glenn Akramoff (01:39):
Okay. So, let’s start with what led me to write it. I’d had it on my list, right? A lot of us have that to-do list, right, of, “Hey, I think I got a book in me.” So, I knew I did, and I’m real goal-oriented. And I set goals every year and had been on there for 20 plus years. So, I finally said, “All right. It’s time. Let’s go.”
(02:01):
So, I did. And really, what it’s about is the less … It’s the program that I’ve developed of being a leader of teams for 40 years now. And I started a consultant business to help other people build teams, so it made sense to write one on what the program is. What I didn’t realize when I started writing it is how personal it would be. So, the main focus is the six pillars of a successful organization and then the eight keys to building a winning team. So, that’s kind of the premise of the book.
(02:39):
The big thing that we ended up doing though is we wrote it with those concepts but also the stories on how I learned those lessons. And one of the things that I’ve been told throughout my career is, yeah, the leadership and the team-building philosophies are out there, right? There’s not a big difference between how you do it. There’s different nuances, but there aren’t a big difference to the theory, but what everyone has said to me is, “Hey, you’re really good at taking the theory and implementing it and then showing us how to implement it.” So, I wanted to talk about how I learned the lessons to implement things, and that’s how it came out. And it ended up being super personal, but I think, in the end, it was more rewarding for me because of it.
Dr. Tom DuFore (03:27):
I just even think about the title of the book, the Human Centered Team. Well, coming from a human, very human approach in your own writing of it, sure sounds like a great place to start, right, with these very real, lived experiences.
Glenn Akramoff (03:45):
Some were back in my past, when I … Growing up, my parents were a big part of my development. And so, they’re in there. Actually, the book’s dedicated to them. They’re no longer with us, but it’s dedicated to them. And I think it was, for me, that some of those lessons were humbling, right? There were some things that, as a young man, I made judgments about people, and I learned, even though my dad told me not to, right? I learned from people. That was one of the big things that he taught me was you can learn something from anybody. And there’s a great story about how I learned that lesson in the book.
Dr. Tom DuFore (04:25):
I’d love your six pillars of successful organizations, love for you just to walk through those and share a little insight on each one.
Glenn Akramoff (04:33):
Sure. So, the first one is always culture, right? We have learned that. We always thought we knew it, but we really learned it during COVID, how important culture has become and how connection is important to that process. So, we always start there.
(04:48):
And so, I should step out and say I do a lot of business assessments, and I use these six pillars to assess a business, and then we make recommendations on what they should do to improve it. Always start with the culture, for sure.
(05:04):
The next one is structure. So, one of the things I learned about structure is it tends to be built organically, right? We lose a person. We add someone with a skill set. We try to replace them as close to possible, but sometimes we do. Sometimes we don’t. Looking at your structure in a holistic way and really trying to fit the puzzle pieces together, I have a core belief that you build the position around the human in it, not the other way around. And that’s part of that human-centered piece. And so, we look at structure next.
(05:37):
The next one is systems. Now, we all have a lot of technology systems that we use to do our work, but I work a lot with field people as well, and theirs are their tools, their vehicles, their machines, all those sort of things, so whatever. I also count your building, right? So, we now have a lot of people working from home remotely. I’ve always been a big proponent of it, 10 years before it started, for a lot of reasons, but I think we have to also take that into account when we’re looking at our systems and how well they work. Not to get too political, but when you look at … A lot of my customers are government, and when you look at government, they don’t keep up with technology, and it puts them behind. And some of it is because of funding and the process of doing that, but that’s one of the challenges there.
(06:31):
The next one is process. It’s how we do our work. What are the steps we take to do the work? So, we evaluate what those processes are. Now, you hear a lot about lean and those sort of things. Now, do we use some of those concepts? Yeah, and I recommend them, but you don’t always have time in this fast-paced world to take … pull out for two, three days and do a full lean process. If you can, I highly recommend it. So, one of the things though that we’ve learned about process is that you … If you don’t do it consistently, your customer experience is inconsistent, and that becomes a negative for you. So, that’s one of the reasons we focus on that.
(07:11):
The fifth one is external forces. That’s the things that impact your business and your operation and your organization that you have no control over. So, I’ve been using inflation, right? We don’t have a lot of control over that, but you have to have a plan on how to handle it. When you’re evaluating a really good organization, they have a really good plan and strategy on how to handle those forces that they don’t control.
(07:40):
And then the sixth one is the analytics part, right? What are you counting? How are you measuring your success and failure? And you can’t measure everything, right? It’s not baseball. Baseball measures every little thing, but in your business, you shouldn’t be. There’s those key things. So, we help you identify what those are. And in my past, that’s what we’ve done is we’ve narrowed it down to four or five key things.
(08:07):
My mission in life, one of the things that I … One of my goals that I have not been able to do, and maybe AI will solve this problem, is I want one number that gives me a productivity per hour number, no matter what business I’m in, and I haven’t been able to … I’ve messed with it for my whole career and haven’t been able to come up with it. So, maybe AI will do it eventually for us, but because it would … I just thought it would be really cool to be able to say … One of the reasons, like I said, is government is part of my clientele, and everyone says government is inefficient. Some is, certainly. That’s why I have a consultant business, but in some places, it’s very efficient and effective. And so, I wanted to be able to learn how to measure what … put all those factors in. So, but that’s how you go about creating a world-class organization.
Dr. Tom DuFore (09:03):
Excellent. Thanks for walking through the six pillars. And with the human-centeredness of this and that human focus that you share, just even in the title, what’s some of the human side of maybe an example or two on some of these pillars?
Glenn Akramoff (09:16):
When you look first at culture, a lot of corporate and a lot of government focus on what they deliver, either the profit line or what the product is or what the service is. And I think that’s what you want to do. That’s why you exist, but one of the core principles of our program is that every business, in some way, is created to serve another human being. And so, if your culture is not created to serve and to understand humans, then it’s not going to succeed to the level that it can because people will read into the insincerity.
(10:00):
The other part that I think is … comes up for me is especially when it comes to structure. I mentioned that you want to put people in … The position needs to be built around them, but I also find that many people, as high as 30% when I go into an organization to do an evaluation, are miscast. They’re in the wrong spot, and they don’t want to leave for lots of reasons. You find this in government, or they’ve moved up and had a successful career, and they’ve been successful sometimes. Some aren’t, but they don’t want to move because someone says their job’s real good, or, “Hey, you’ve got all these benefits,” or, “Look at your salary level now. You don’t want to leave that,” even though they’re miserable.
(10:46):
What we do tend to do as leaders is, because moving really fast, we’re like, “Oh, got to get that person. Got to move them on. Got to move, get them somewhere else, and maybe I got to fire them.” And then you go down that road rather than focusing on the human side and getting curious and saying, “I wonder why they’re doing this and why they’re not succeeding,” and asking them. So, when I go in as an interim leader, that’s … When I see that, that’s what I do. I start a conversation by saying, “I see that you’re not very happy in the role that you’re playing and happy here. Why?”
(11:21):
And you would think that the reaction would be, most of the time, would be, “Oh, no. I’m fine,” or real … or to get defensive. Almost always, it’s, “Thank you. Someone noticed. I don’t know what to do about it.” And so, we talk about finding them their skill set, finding what the reason that they were put on the planet, their purpose, and then helping them move on. Sometimes it’s moving totally out of the organization. Sometimes it’s just moving two or three offices down the road, just in another role. And that’s really one of those core pieces of human-centered.
Dr. Tom DuFore (12:01):
As I was listening to you share the story, it made me think about something you said earlier about pillar six on measuring and talking about comparing it to baseball, where you don’t want to be the organization that measures every little thing. And in today’s world, with data analytics, AI, software and technology systems that can process and compute and spit out all kinds of numbers and data and information, it’s easy to get lost in all of that and be unclear on what is it that actually matters. So, how do you work with clients or might you respond to a leader of an organization that says, “Okay, Glenn. This is great for the performance measurement, but am I looking for the holy grail of-“
Glenn Akramoff (12:45):
Right. [inaudible 00:12:46]
Dr. Tom DuFore (12:46):
” … the one item there?” Is there a handful that you kind of look at and kind of narrow it down?
Glenn Akramoff (12:52):
It’s kind of personal to the business in some ways, right? There’s a couple of different measurements that are always specific to whatever you’re trying to do. So, as an example, a lot of my recent clients have been in the parks and recreation arena. I did some speaking, and they liked what I said. And a number of them have hired me, which is awesome, but one of their measurements that they were working on is how much work they get done. And one of the things I pointed them to is, actually, in parks and recreation, you’re in the experience business, right? When you come to a park, you may go to the skate park. You may go to the playground. You may go to the ball field, but everything leads to an experience. So, we need to measure the quality of the experience of the people who use the park.
(13:44):
So, you can do that through surveys. There’s lots of different ways you can do it, but one of the ways that we came up with, especially for the field personnel who don’t always get that direct feedback, is we’ve been teaching them, “Pay attention to how many smiles you create in your workplace, which is the park.”
(14:04):
So, they come back on a … and I got a new client that will just … will start doing this soon. They’ll come back, and they’ll report how many of those they see a day, right? It really helps them start to pay attention to what’s really important, which, again, is that human-centered, that human experience that they created because there’s nothing cooler than to watch a six-year-old jump on a cool playground that you know is safe and their parents know is safe, smiling and having a good time on a sunny, sunny day, no matter where you are in the country or in the world. And, again, they don’t measure that, so we point them. So, that’s a great example of how we start looking at things a little bit differently to get the human experience measured. And that measures two different experiences, not only the user, but the employee gets part of that measurement as well.
Dr. Tom DuFore (15:01):
You also mentioned the eight keys to building a winning team, and would love for you to either pick a few highlights or maybe walk through each of them here, just to give us a quick overview of what’s involved with each of them.
Glenn Akramoff (15:15):
They’re all important, but the first one is aligning purpose, which goes kind of with the culture, right, is aligning your purpose, your personal purpose, with the organization’s purpose. And I spoke earlier to the fact where you want the employees to be successful, and that’s how you … Sometimes they’re miscast. That’s usually where it is.
(15:37):
One of the things that I’ve noticed is I think roughly, statistically, only about 15% of people really know what their purpose is, why they’re supposed to be on the planet. Sometimes it’s not directed at their career, but for most of us, it is. As a leader, you need to … and an organization leader, you need to help people kind of determine that, which is a delicate little dance, right, to help them understand what’s important to them. And you got to ask questions and be inquisitive and be supportive of it because it may not really be what your organization can provide, but you also have to be very clear about the organization’s purpose. And one of the things I find is a lot of the organization’s purpose gets corrupted.
(16:27):
One of them is certainly in business. We’re in business to make money, but if you focus on the money, it doesn’t align with any … very few people’s purpose, right? We’re here to serve in some form or fashion, so we need to connect that purpose to our individual purpose, and that’s kind of that dance. That’s why it’s so important.
(16:50):
The second one that I talk about a lot is having a season. And one of the things that I noticed when I first started my municipal career before I became a consultant was that everyone talked in the 30 to 35 year realm, right? They started talking about retirement on the day they started, which I found silly, but I also said, “That’s not sustainable to keep a high performance up through 35 years. It’s just not going to happen.” So, I realized, in order to do it, and I was a field … Well, I started in the field, and so, you got tired, right? Your body hurt and all this stuff. So, I realized there was a season, and you need to create a season so that there’s a time that you can push performance.
(17:36):
So, like athletes, right, athletes have a time where they’re in season, and they work hard, and they focus on performing in the games. And then the season ends, and then they perform on healing their body and then training their body and their mind to get ready for the next season. And that’s what you have to do in any career, in any job. You need to have that off-season so you can do that, and leaders need to understand if you give them the off-season, their performance over the six or eight months that you have them performing at the highest levels will outlast anything you’ve ever tried to do. If you try to be steady in performance, which is what I was taught at the beginning, you’ll be at a lower performance level than if you peak and valley in the long run.
(18:28):
Which leads me to the last one I’ll talk about here, which is what I call the performance flow, understanding that we, as human beings, have a flow of our performance. I’ve generally found it comes within a six-week period. You go up for two weeks. You get on what I call the performance plateau for two weeks, and you drop off for two weeks. You can notice this in your own behavior, right? One of the ways that I do it is that I’m not super great at typing, but I type a lot of stuff in my work. And so, when I’m in my top performance flow and on the performance plateau, I can type and produce and produce and produce and produce, hour after hour, not a problem. When I start to drop, I start to get frustrated with it. That’s how I know that my performance is dropping.
(19:18):
And you can notice this. If you look at yourself and you watch yourself over the next six weeks, you’ll be able to see that that happens. And one of the things I learned in that is that from, personally, is to let myself off the hook when my performance is going down. That tells me I need rest. That tells me that that’s the time for me to kind of regenerate and think about taking care of myself so that I can perform at a high level.
(19:43):
And the way that I’ve started over the latter part of my career is I’ve learned to manipulate it a little bit. And so, I know I can extend my performance plateau by a few days. If I do, then my drop-off is going to be steeper and deeper. And so, if I do that, and then I have a vacation, no problem, right? I can relax, and I’m going to need to. If I try to do that long-term, that’s where burnout comes from. And so, it’s the way I’ve learned to manage it. I’ve also learned to manage teams that way. And there’s a lot of highlights in the book about it, but that’s … Those are the three of the eight that come to mind right now at the top.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:26):
Thank you for sharing that. And how can someone get a copy of your book, learn a little bit more about what you’re doing? How can they get connected here?
Glenn Akramoff (20:33):
The book’s on Amazon, so you can find it there. It’s also on our website at akramoff.com. You can find it there and find out all the stuff we’re doing. It’s called the Human Centered Team. It’s also at humancentered.com. There’s another website there, but you can find it at our akramoff.com or on Amazon.
Dr. Tom DuFore (20:52):
We’ll make sure we include those links in the show notes. Well, Glenn, this is a great time in the show, and we make a transition. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go, and the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Glenn Akramoff (21:07):
If you don’t have a miss or two, you’re not learning, so I definitely have had my share. And I’m a risk-taker, so I tend to have a little bit more. I’m a believer in fail fast.
(21:18):
So, one of them I had very early in my business was we wanted to create and are still working to create a training program. And I’ve done … had a lot of success with that with clients, and I wanted to create one for leaders. And so, we created it all, and then we put it out there, and we spent some money, and we got it. We had a lot of people say, “Yeah, I’ll sign up. I’ll sign up.” So, we got a room, and we spent a bunch of money, and no one signed up. It cost us 10 grand, but in the end, what it taught me is people are busy. They’ll be excited and tell you what you want to hear sometimes, and you need to have that commitment to make the commitment. And that was kind of an entrepreneurial lesson that I learned the hard way. It was expensive, but I definitely appreciate it because it’s part of that humility piece that is important.
Dr. Tom DuFore (22:13):
Excellent. Well, let’s talk about the other side. Let’s look at a make or two or a highlight you’d like to share.
Glenn Akramoff (22:18):
Well, one of the cool things, I think it’s how I got in. It’s kind of my story to get into being a business owner and an entrepreneur is I got a reputation, and I worked for 25 years in local government. And I got out of it, didn’t know what I was going to do. And someone called me, actually found me on LinkedIn and called me and said, “Hey, we got a problem with our team, and your name keeps coming up.” I wasn’t a consultant or anything, right? I hadn’t even engaged in that world yet. And so, it was just based on my reputation. So, I said, “Sure.”
(22:52):
So, I started the process of using the pillars and all of that stuff that I had done when I started new, in a new organization on my own. I figured the first deal was just for a $25,000 assessment. And so, I said, “All right. This is awesome. I’ll give it a try.” So, I did. And later on, after we did the assessment, they asked me, “Can you help us implement it? Can you come in as an interim leader and make it happen?” And I said, “Yeah. That’s what I would prefer to do.”
(23:26):
So, a phone call from LinkedIn, based on my reputation and some of the stuff I’d done before, turned into a half a million dollar contract, and it was because I was willing to take the risk. I knew I could do it. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew I could do it. You don’t always learn big lessons from wins, but for me, the lesson was, personally, was you can be humble, but you also have to be confident in what you can do. And what it did for me is it made me realize. We talked earlier about purpose. It really made me understand that my second half of my life was … This was my purpose was to serve people in this way.
Dr. Tom DuFore (24:13):
The next question we ask is have you used a multiplier to multiply your success professionally, personally, or organizations you’ve been a part of?
Glenn Akramoff (24:23):
Well, something that we’re working on now, right, is that I … My skill set has allowed me to do this, and so, but there’s a number … Plus my passion for it, I think, is the key to it, but there’s a lot of people out there who have the passion. So, how do you multiply yourself as a business owner? And one of the things that I’ve learned is I’ve got to stop doing things that I’ve done before, right? I started the business from scratch, so I did everything. And so, I hired an executive assistant. She’s fabulous, and I have to keep giving more and more to her and sometimes giving away things that I like to grow and to grow the company. We’re in the middle of that. So, for ’25, we’re looking to expand and hire more consultants and bring people in and let me teach them. So, yes, I’ve used the multipliers, certainly, but it’s been challenging for me, personally, to let go, but I’m learning, even at this stage of my career.
Dr. Tom DuFore (25:28):
Well, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Glenn Akramoff (25:33):
It’s interesting. I just turned 60. For me, success, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Does success mean 100 million dollar business? Does it mean all these things? And what I came down to, and this came from my … kind of the way my dad lived his life, but I realized I measure success by how many people I impact and in a positive way, of course. And in the end, that’s how I measure success day to day, year to year. We had a goal a couple years ago to affect a quarter million people in a positive way. Hard to measure, certainly, because it’s … If you impact one person, you don’t know how many others they impact with your message, but we came up with a formula, and we … That was two years ago, and we figured, based on our formula, we impacted about 225. So, we’re a little short, 225,000. We’re a little short, but it really helped me understand that impact is incremental, and you don’t always see that impact. You don’t always get that feedback.
Dr. Tom DuFore (26:44):
Well, and as we bring this to a close, Glenn, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Glenn Akramoff (26:50):
The one message I like to put out there is that the reason I wrote the book, the reason I do what I do is because there’s a lot of organizations out there struggling. People will call them toxic. That’s the buzzword of the day. I think about 90% of them have a little bit of that. If you need help, whether it’s me or someone else or the book or whatever, find help. It’s not okay to have an organization and the people in it struggling. That compounds and causes everybody be unhealthy and hurts our … hurts the planet in the end. So, that’s always my message is if you are struggling, you don’t know what to do, ask for help. There’s someone out there who can help you.
Dr. Tom DuFore (27:33):
Glenn, thank you so much for a fantastic interview, and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So, takeaway number one is when Glenn talked through the six pillars of a successful organization from his book, the Human Centered Team. So, those six pillars are culture, structure, systems, process, external forces, and analytics. Takeaway number two is when he said throughout the interview that you can learn something from everybody. I thought that was a great little takeaway. And takeaway number three is when he talked about having seasons and performance flow.
(28:10):
So, I really liked this idea of seasons, where he said there are three different parts during these three seasons. One is you push for performance. Two is you heal from performance, and three is that you train for the next season or the next performance. And then when he followed that with the performance flow he talked about, which goes in a six-week cycle, where you’re able to perform highly for two weeks, where you plateau or perform in the middle for about two weeks, and then you’re in a low end of production or performance for about two weeks, and talked about that cycle going through. And if you don’t follow this type of a pattern or cadence, he said that’s where burnout occurs.
(28:53):
And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So, today’s win-win is when Glenn talked about and said that every business is created in some way to serve a human being. I thought that was just a great little nugget, and I think he’s right. Every business is created and designed, in some form or fashion, to serve or support a person. And I think that’s just a good reminder, and certainly, the nature of his book with the Human Centered Team, but really keeping that perspective that your business is likely here to serve others. I think that’s a great win-win for everyone. Keep that in mind as you go into the week here in serving your team, your customers, your clients, and those that are in and surrounding and supporting your business.
(29:48):
And so, that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.