Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success.
I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you
insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders, and experts who will share not just their expertise
but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements.
So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place. Subscribe now and discover the
milestones that mark the path to success.
Welcome to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. I'm Sheila Slick,
your host, and today my special guest is Wayne Berenger. He is founder at Jaro Group. He's a
team aligner, a turnaround expert, an executive coach, speaker, and philanthropist. Welcome to
the show, Wayne. Sheila, it is great to be here. Thank you very much.
What was a pivotal moment that led you to a significant shift in your approach towards
achieving your fullest potential? We're starting with the easy questions first.
I love it. I think there's been a couple of pivotal moments, but the most pivotal for me
was between me and my own coach a couple of years ago when I learned from him that I needed to sort
of get out of my own way, allow humility to actually be not shame or thinking bad about
yourself where you're less than in a group, but letting my circumstances change.
I'm not in a group, but letting my superpowers, my Superman, if you will, come out without feeling
superior to others. There's a lot of complication, but I think certainly for myself, and I see a lot
of this in the folks that I am privileged to work with today, we all want to be humble. We all want
to just sort of blend in, and we don't let our Wonder Woman or Superman out as a result. And I
think that's a big part of the question. I think that's a big part of the question. I think that
is the reason why I think that we all need those parts of us, and they need the best parts of those
from us. And when I started learning how to process that in the right way, it just took a huge burden
off my back, off my chest, whatever the analogy is, and allowed me to just bring my best self
to the table. So I want to hear the mountain story, but was it the coach that led you to the
mountain story, or how did you get there? Well, a different coach that I had had several years
back took some of his clients rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park in California, a beautiful
place. And on this rock climbing trip, I had never rock climbed, neither anyone else. And this
terrific sort of corporate and activities coach blends physical experiences with leadership,
emotional, personal experiences. And the night before we were going to go rock climbing, he took
us to dinner. We had some drinks, lots of fun, private room in a restaurant, all of this on him.
And we should have known something was coming. Right before we left, he turned on the slideshow
before you leave. I'm taking a group to climb El Quijote later this year. Would you all like to go?
And as I mentioned, we were having a great time. The drinks were flowing. We all said, yes, of
course, let's do it. We love to do that. Woke up the next day and thought, what did I just agree to?
You can probably tell my voice is scratchy. I don't breathe very well. I've had some surgeries. It's
no big deal. But then to think about being at 19,000 feet potentially and a week of climbing
and everything. Yeah, I got intimidated, but that's what led me to do it. I had already said yes,
so I wasn't going to back out. And so I figured out the plan and did the training and wound up
going on the trip in 2018. So where is this mountain? Mount Kilimanjaro is just about on
the equator in a country called Tanzania on the continent of Africa. And the biggest city near the
mountain is a city called Arusha. And it's a beautiful part of the world. People who go on
African safaris, many of them wind up in Tanzania or Kenya, of course. And it's just a great part
of the world. Sounds like quite the adventure. Certainly was. So what leadership lessons did
you learn from the Tanzanian guides on Mount Kilimanjaro? Yeah, well, I learned so many
leadership lessons that I renamed my company after Mount Kilimanjaro. So the Jaro group,
that name is in honor of that experience. That photo you see right there is, or that painting,
rather, is something that I bought in the neighborhood. You know, let me kind of set it
up before I give you the leadership lesson that kind of turned me in this direction.
It's a week long climb. Anybody can actually do it. So it's not rock climbing like we think about
when we're on our hands and knees roped up on rocks. It's really a week long hike.
But it's obviously it's a 60 mile round trip hike in a week. That's a good bit. It's 19,000
feet in elevation at the top. That's a lot and the air is thin. So there's quite a bit that goes into
it. On the third day of our hike, I turned to the friends of mine, you know, the fellow hikers and
said, I think we over trained for this. I feel like Superman. I feel terrific. And they all agree
that, yeah, we all feel great. So all this fear was starting to subside. About 20 minutes later,
I stepped off the trail to get a drink. They kept going. I was going to be right back. And
about 30 seconds later, I became really disoriented, almost sort of blacked out,
couldn't really see too well, lost a little bit more of my breath and knew that I was in a little
bit of at least disorientation, if not trouble. Where's my party? Where's my team? Where's my guys?
Nobody was around. And so all the fear that I mentioned when I agreed to do this came rushing
back in a single moment. What am I doing on this mountain? Why am I here? Just then the head of the
guide group that took us seemingly out of nowhere showed up in front of me and said, Wayne, take my
drink and let me have a drink. And I took some hydration and he said, give me your backpack.
And he took my backpack off of my back and put it on his back. So now he has two backpacks.
And he said, I want you to follow me and just put your feet in the steps that I leave behind
and I'm going to get you to the next camp. And that's what we did. And he walked very slowly.
He made sure that I knew where we were. And I just followed his footsteps all the way to camp.
And we got to the next camp and my group was waiting there and I took a nap and had some dinner
and was fine the next day. And three days later, we got to the next camp. And I was
three days later, we got to the top. Fantastic experience. What I learned
is what we try to help our clients with, which is, in fact, I started this business because I see
people in corporations and in small businesses get disoriented in the workplace. They're not at their
best. Work doesn't always bring out our best. The stresses and the chaos, the time pressures
exacerbate that sort of lower self sometimes. And what we want to do is take their backpack,
put it on our backs and help them get where they want to be and the path that they were on,
but they just sort of slipped off for a bit. So that's what we do. That's how we try to do it.
And it just was an amazing experience. The generosity and the genuineness and the joy
of these guides on the mountain that spent every all day, every day climbing to 19,000 feet and back
is just something that you have to experience. It was just terrific.
Well, I'm breathless right now listening to that, just envisioning what you described.
So back to the leadership lessons that you learned. I know that he helped you,
you know, he guided you to get to that next, well, in this case, milestone, even though it was a camp.
What other leadership lessons did you learn from that?
Well, I think one of the main ones is that no matter how hard the physical or mental or emotional
work is, if your values are aligned to that work, every minute is joyful. So these were,
you know, by Western standards, some of the least economically fortunate people I've ever met for
sure. But they were the happiest people by far that I've ever met. They were carrying 30 pounds
of luggage on their heads every day, going up and down for water and helping us do all the things
that we were moderately capable of doing. And we might, many of us might look at that and go, gosh,
I couldn't do that. Like that's a very hard job. That'd be very stressful to keep everyone safe,
et cetera. Never felt an ounce of that from them. It was only joy and impact and efficiency, right?
How can they get us the quickest, most impactful way possible and have joy doing it? That's a huge
lesson for us to learn. They're aligned with their values in the jobs that they do every day. And
when you do that, it doesn't matter how hard it is. So in our work, we try to help people find that
alignment. We find that most people haven't articulated their values clearly, and they're
not intentional about their aspirations beyond getting a promotion. And if we can help align that
in them, they can be the leader they want to become. So based on your experience, what are
some of those significant obstacles that individuals face on the path to achieving their goals?
Well, I think that that one that I just mentioned is a big one, right? So articulating their values,
aligning that with their intention so that the work that they do is joyful no matter what. That's
fundamentally the biggest disconnect. Other things that get in the way of that, we always
start our coaching with, do you own your calendar or does your calendar own you?
We see so many people, especially in big corporations, where their meeting schedules
are completely full from Monday at eight until Friday at five and everything in between. When
they do have breaks, those breaks are only really used to catch up on email. And then they really
never catch up. And so at night, they're doing email a little bit too. So their ability to own
their calendar so that they can spend time working on the intentionality, the leader they want to
become. Those are big gaps. I think another big gap is people tend to not think constructively
about the personal traits that they have. Maybe they're visionary or maybe they're detail-oriented.
And when those traits are working really well, those are our superpowers. When those superpowers
are overexpressed, those same traits, when they go too far, are our kryptonite. We tend to see our
superpowers, but other people tend to see our kryptonite. And we don't spend enough time in a
balanced state learning how to stop the superpowers from being overexpressed or being left unchecked.
So that's a second thing because people don't know enough constructively about their weaknesses and
how to moderate them. And then the third thing, I think we see a lot of leaders, we talk a lot about
there's two extremes of leadership. There's caretaking leadership, which is the extreme
of people first giving employees what they want. It's the extreme version of that. Caretaking.
The other extreme is authoritarian, sort of really performance-only based leadership. So
caretaking and performance. We see a lot of leaders that think they need to live on the
caretaking side. Well, if you're doing that, how is the performance of your organization being
measured and how are you elevating that performance every single day? So I'd say it's the calendar,
it's the superpower of kryptonite. And it's this idea of where on the continuum should you be
between caretaking and performance leadership. So you have the Jaro five-step framework,
and this helps improve impact efficiency. And it mentions the joy that I've heard you mention
twice. Can you tell us a little bit about that framework? I think people feel like work is
supposed to be work. And if you have fun at work, if you're enjoying work, it's not work. There's
somehow something wrong with it. So that's why the three things that we strive for, impact,
efficiency, and joy is so important. Our five-part framework is really for organizations that need
a significant shift or a turnaround is a phrase that a lot of people are familiar with. We often
find that most people try to improve organizations by fixing a process or acquiring a new software
tool. Well, those are steps four and five on the framework that we employ. 80% of corporate change
in the U S fails 80% of the time, 70 to 80% of the time when teams or companies try to fix things,
they don't get the result that they intended. The reason for that is that they try to start with
this process, or they try to start with a software tool. Our five-part framework starts at the top.
What's your strategic purpose? What's your North Star? We help you define that. A lot of people
have a vision or a North Star, but when you ask their teams what it means, if you ask 10 people
on the team, what it means, you get 10 different answers. We help you get super clear on a North
Star that is actionable and helps you keep everyone on track. The second is how do you develop roles
and responsibilities in an organizational structure so that you can achieve that North Star? What we
find is most people's org structures were designed and developed and built years ago. Well, if you
have a new North Star, it's incumbent upon great leaders to check in with the roles that they have
defined and make sure that those roles succeed in achieving that North Star. The most important thing
in step two here is to define those roles without people's names. So a lot of times we'll go to
companies and they'll say, oh, well, Johnny or Susie have been here 10 years, so they should be
in this role on the org chart. Well, Johnny or Susie may not have the skills required by that
new role. And if that's true, we have to train them. So strategy first, structure and roles.
Second, the third step is talent. Who are your best people with the best qualifications to fit
in the most important roles to achieve that strategic intent? That talent evaluation is where
most teams, leaders and organizations fall down because they have favorites and they have
wide spots and they want to caretaker like we talked about earlier. Evaluating talent for us
is not about who stays and who gets fired. It's about who gets put in your best positions,
which positions are still unfilled and you need to supplement with some great people outside. And
then what kind of training can help you bring everybody else up where you need and they need
to be. So strategy roles and structure talent. Then once you have that in place, go to work on
your processes, excuse me. And once your processes are defined, figure out what tools actually make
those processes work. That's the five step framework in it. It just doesn't fail when you
follow it in the right manner. So what is your next milestone?
Well, I've got a couple for this year. We're trying to expand the workshops that we provide
for clients and for prospects. We're just about to promote a workshop series. That'll be a three part
workshop series to dive deep into some of the concepts and more that we've talked about.
We've done small workshops in the past, so this is going to be a bigger undertaking. So
in effect, a bigger milestone as well. So that's one. Another milestone is we are working to start
another division of this company that actually delivers some creative design and writing product
for marketing teams that just have too much work and they need to bring that work elsewhere. So
those are two big milestones for us this year. So are the workshops in person? Are they live?
Yeah, in person workshops. We will do some webinars, some online workshops,
but these deep dive day long workshops, there's just no replacement for being in person to have
an intimate, close knit dialogue with peers and members of your job role in different companies
and different industries. So yeah, they're day long in person and essentially you sign up for
the series and you get to go to three and there's continuity zooms in between.
So what areas will these workshops take place?
This year, they're all three or they're in the same city to make it simple in Atlanta, Georgia.
Where can my listeners learn more about you follow your journey? Because you didn't mention
climbing another mountain, but after visiting your website, maybe you do have a next mountain
and sign up for your workshops. Yeah, my LinkedIn is LinkedIn Wayne Berringer.
We also have Jaro group on LinkedIn as well. Our website is Jaro.Win, J-A-R-O.W-I-N.
And people can also email us at info at Jaro.Win and let us know what kind of information you're
looking for. And we'll be happy to give you all that you like, probably more than you need, but
we'll be happy to give you the info you're looking for. So before we wrap this up, can you offer
one tip to our listeners that they can implement right away to tackle a big challenge?
Well, I think if you're listeners from big corporations or even medium sized business,
any business with more than 15 or so employees, the biggest thing is learn how to own your calendar.
How can you look at your calendar and prioritize the meetings you must go to and then
deprioritize and don't attend the meetings that you tend to multitask during, or you don't know
why you're even there. So I think for big, larger organizations, that's a tip that almost everybody
I tell that to says, I've never heard that. How do I do that? For almost anyone else, big corporations,
small independent worker, whatever, that notion of articulating your values, what things do you
value about how you should want and align those values with the leader you want to become writing
almost a manifesto of how you want to be a year from now, not the title you want to have, but how
you want to be, how you want to feel, how you want to show up, regardless of situation. And then
writing that down and then checking it periodically, that then becomes your roadmap for you to
become that leader that you want to be. And being intentional to take those steps is just a game changer.
Wayne, thank you so much for joining me today.
You're welcome. It's great to talk to you, Sheila.
And thank you all for tuning into another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership.