PODCAST: Custom Business Solutions for Unique Challenges

On this episode of Outback Talks, we spoke to Joe Britto about his custom business solution, Unique Challenges Consulting. Listen in to learn more about this one-of-a-kind management consultation.

We sat down once again with Joe Britto, a psychological coach, published author, founder of Innate Leaders, and Outback’s interactive management consulting expert, to learn more about his custom business solution Unique Challenges Consulting.

You can listen to the full episode below, or continue reading to learn more.

During the interview, Joe took us through:

• The 6 Attributes of a Leadership Mindset: Joe touches on the six attributes of a leadership mindset and discusses how they relate to Unique Challenges Consulting.

   

• Unique Challenges Consulting: Covering the ins and outs of Unique Challenges Consulting, Joe explains the specifics of this solution, identifying the corporate groups that tend to benefit most.

   

• How This Solution Is Different: In the episode, Joe also walks us through how Unique Challenges Consulting differs from more traditional management consulting.

“Unique Challenges Consulting is fun and enjoyable for us, and it creates something real and tangible within a business,” says Joe.

The 6 Attributes and Unique Challenges Consulting

So, what are the six attributes of management consulting? According to Joe, “There’s this thing called leadership mindset that we feel is comprised of six attributes, possibly more, but these are the six that we think are worth focusing on.” They are:

1. Mindfulness
2. Genuine Curiosity
3. Flexibility of Mind
4. Resilience
5. Creating Leaders
6. Enterprise Thinking

“We don’t normally work with all six attributes when we go in and consult,” says Joe. Instead, most groups will focus on shifting their mindset through the lens of a few relevant attributes. For Unique Challenges Consulting, however, Joe says, “We tend to use them all.”

Find more information on each attribute below.

1. Mindfulness

“Mindfulness is really about having the ability to be present in a moment to see what is going on under the surface of a situation,” says Joe. He continues, “To not react to a situation but to wait, to see, to understand the dimensions of the challenge, and then to make a decision based on that.”

Specifically for Unique Challenges Consulting, mindfulness helps groups notice that they are purposefully approaching an issue differently, even though they may prefer an easier, faster solution that they’ve used in the past.

2. Genuine Curiosity

“Genuine curiosity is asking sometimes very obvious, very simple, but also very profound questions about why we do things the way we do,” explains Joe. He suggests that the difference between curiosity and genuine curiosity is asking questions in the spirit of wanting to know, without having a predetermined end goal in mind.

With this solution, Joe encourages groups to ask themselves, “Why is this challenge present now? Why hasn’t it been present before?” And to be truly interested in the answer.

3. Flexibility of Mind

“Flexibility of mind has this kind of quality. It’s the only attribute that actually runs in a process. So, it’s a three-step process, you might say,” describes Joe. The first step is recognizing that you could be wrong. The second part is to understand that there are multiple valid solutions to any problem. And then the third step is to creatively combine these solutions into a revolutionary idea.

In order to move away from repeating what teams have always done, flexibility of mind can help groups be open to new concepts and piece together bigger, more revolutionary ways of thinking.

4. Resilience

“Resilience is really all about keeping keeping on,” suggests Joe. He explains that when it’s really difficult to get something done, resilience is the guiding light that allows us to live through it, keep our eyes on the prize, and get back up after we’ve been knocked down.

New ways of approaching a business issue can sometimes seem like an insurmountable change. Resilience can help groups stick with it and push through the challenge.

5. Creating Leaders

“Creating leaders is about creating leaders of others, but I just call it creating leaders,” says Joe. He explains that this attribute focuses on how to grow leaders and help people think for themselves in order to create a leadership pipeline within a business.

With Unique Challenges Consulting, all levels of the business should feel empowered to assist in overcoming the issue. Leadership should grow in people as an organization implements a solution.

6. Enterprise Thinking

Joe explains that enterprise thinking is about doing what makes the most sense for the business because you understand that by doing so, you’re also benefitting yourself. “When it works at its best,” says Joe, “we are working together to do what is best for our business areas and what is best for the enterprise as a whole.”

When tackling a unique challenge, it’s imperative that teams create revolutionary ways of doing things that are in service of the entire business. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that they will work.

Unique Challenges Consulting

What Is Unique Challenges Consulting?

Unique Challenges Consulting is a custom business solution that helps companies, from top to bottom, take risks, ask interesting questions, and approach things differently. Joe shares, “It’s quite a rewarding one, and it is really about helping businesses completely push the boundaries of what is possible for them.”

Joe says that it’s rare for teams to call him up and ask for help with a unique business challenge. Instead, companies will typically spend a fair bit of money, energy, and effort on unsuccessfully resolving an issue before realizing that it’s different from anything they’ve ever encountered before.

“So, what we do much more often with Unique Challenges Consulting, is we help teams or businesses look at every challenge that is coming at them as if it was unique,” explains Joe. “We call this Unique Challenges Consulting, but you could just as easily call it Creating a Culture of Innovation.”

Joe continues, “We’re helping teams to get to this place where they look at challenges with a sense of genuine curiosity, to go, ‘Okay, what can we do with this one now? What can we do differently here?'”

Who Is Unique Challenges Consulting For?

“This one actually could be a broad range,” says Joe. “We’ve done work for businesses where we have started at the top, then we’ve cascaded that down to middle managers, and then helped them to cascade that down to their frontlines.”

How Unique Challenges Consulting Is Different

Unlike a traditional management consultation, Unique Challenges Consulting offers leadership teams a shift in mindset using the six attributes. This new way of thinking enables groups to adopt a success-oriented outlook, helping them approach every challenge with a fresh perspective.

Working with Joe and his team means that your group will receive a custom business solution for wherever you are in addressing your challenge. “We always work with a business based on where they’re at, and we design something specifically for them,” says Joe.

But not only is Unique Challenges Consulting different from your typical business consultation – it’s also quite distinct from Joe’s other solutions. As mentioned above, this is the only mindset and management consultation of Joe’s that touches on each of the six attributes, making Unique Challenges Consulting one-of-a-kind in itself.

“It is different,” Joe says, “and I suppose the reason we call it Unique Challenges Consulting.”

Custom business solutions with Innate Leaders is all about expanding management team’s mindsets and implementing new behaviors that result in innovative and sustainable results. Employing the six attributes, Unique Challenges Consulting is different from your “traditional” consultation in that it supports a shift in how groups think about their organization’s challenges, rather than offering a quick fix. It’s ideal for all levels of management who need support in fundamentally altering how they operate as leaders.

Has your team ever participated in management consulting or coaching? Share your experience in the comments below.

Learn More About Custom Business Solutions for Your Team

For more information about how our leadership coaching and management consulting solutions can benefit your group, reach out to our Employee Engagement Consultants.  

Transcript:

Kara Sy: Hi everyone and welcome to Outback Talks: The Employee Engagement Podcast. This podcast is produced by Outback Team Building & Training, a leading team building, training, and consulting provider for organizations across North America. I’m your host, Kara Sy, and on today’s show I’m joined again by a special guest, Joe Britto, a mindset and management consultant over at Innate Leaders. Joe also is our lead coach and consultant at Outback and he sat down with me once again to discuss another exciting solution he has – Unique Challenges Consulting.

KS: Alright, welcome back to Outback Talks, Joe.

Joe Britto: Thank you!

KS: We’re so happy to have you back again today.

JB: I know – people are getting bored of me, I’m sure.

KS: No, no, no. We’re thrilled to have you back. So, today we’re talking about your solution – Unique Challenges Consulting.

JB: Yeah.

KS: So, would you like to take us through it?

JB: Well, so here’s the thing – is that, unique business challenges, like, I know all businesses have unique challenges, that’s not necessarily what I’m thinking about right now. What I’m thinking about is the challenges that we face in a business that are unlike any challenge that we’ve ever faced in a business, right? So just to be clear, every business is unique in the challenges that they face.

KS: Right.

JB: But that doesn’t mean that the challenge they face is unique to them.

KS: Okay.

JB: Does that make sense?

KS: Yes.

JB: So, you know – like, Outback, for example, will have unique challenges that some other company doesn’t have…

KS: Right.

JB: But these are challenges that Outback faces on a fairly daily basis, or weekly basis, or monthly basis or whatever it is, and like we kind of know how to handle those, right?

KS: Right.

JB: So, the unique challenges that I’m talking about are ones that a business has never faced before, never come across before, and what do you do with this now?

KS: Right.

JB: So, the way that mindset work fits in to this is that, when we have a challenge that we have never faced in the business before, do we think that the way that we have always thought about our business is going to be the mindset that we need to deal with this unique challenge? So, it’s really that kind of simple.

KS: Right.

JB: Because, obviously, my answer to that would be, “No.” My answer would be, in order to address a unique challenge, we need a different way of thinking too.

KS: Right.

JB: And that is kind of, you know, the nerve you might say, in unique business challenge consulting. And if that was the case, then what we tend to do is we tend to go into a business, we work with all six attributes – we don’t normally work with all six attributes when we go in and consult. We always normally look at the six and we go, “Okay, so which ones would be most useful in this circumstance?” And we talk to the business and we get a sense from our client about, okay which ones do we need to focus on. With unique business challenges, we tend to use all of them.

KS: Right.

JB: And not as a deep dive on every single one, but kind of as a, like an amuse-bouche or something like that. So, we’re kind of playing around with these concepts in order to then start to settle on, okay what would be a different way of thinking about our business in light of this challenge. So, sometimes with unique business challenges, it means that there are some systemic challenges in our business because, sometimes with unique business challenges, we need to make systemic changes in our business in order to address this challenge. And that’s just for the reason that we’ve never come across this before. So, as a business, we’ve never prepared, we’ve never planned, we’ve never done anything for this kind of challenge before. So, if I have, kind of like, a cornucopia you might say, of mindset to draw on, that’s why we’re working on all six. It gives us the opportunity to go, okay, let me draw on this in order to make some systemic changes to my business.

KS: Yeah, and the six attributes that you mentioned, that’s mindfulness, genuine curiosity, flexibility of mind, resilience, creating leaders, and enterprise thinking. And for those of you who missed Joe talking about these in our previous episode on Leadership Team Cohesion Consulting, I highly recommend you go back and take a listen. He goes through them all in great depth and detail. So, if you’d like to learn more about them, please go ahead and listen to that podcast episode. But for this one, you’re saying that Unique Challenges Consulting actually draws on all of them, which is unlike the previous solutions we discussed. They were kind of pulling from, you know two or three, maybe four. And you have mentioned that they all do interlink – they are all very woven within each other. So, that kind of makes sense to pull out the ones that are strongest with each solution but, it’s really interesting that they would all six be here and top of mind for this solution.

JB: Yes, it really is, because I think if we’re dealing with something unique, we probably want to re-evaluate all the ways for thinking. So, that’s why mindfulness, you know, becomes relevant, because we have a presence of mind for, okay, there will be an immediate reaction, really. Which is, here’s a challenge but I’ll just do what I did before, even though it is a completely different challenge, right?

KS: Right.

JB: So mindfulness is, you know, like in this case, is about noticing for ourselves that we are doing – that we are facing a challenge differently and noticing how I still want to do what I’ve done in the past, how I still, and perhaps not necessarily looking on to the surface but looking for the easiest, quickest, I don’t know, tool that I can find to fix this thing. So, mindfulness is kind of relevant there. Genuine curiosity is going to be relevant in terms of, “Why is this challenge present now? Why hasn’t it been present before?” For example, is this the best way of doing things? Are we set up in order to address this challenge not just now but in the future? What kind of challenges like this are coming down the road that we are not even thinking about? Flexibility of mind to start combining ideas to put together a revolutionary idea. Enterprise thinking to make sure that the revolutionary idea is in service of the entire business. Creating leaders to make sure that there is a leadership that will grow in people as we implement this. Resilience to make sure we can stick with it, because you know, I think sometimes when we come across a unique challenge, we’re slightly awed by it, and most likely thinking “I don’t know if we can go and become this.” So, there’s two aspects to this unique business challenge, because that’s one, right? So, let’s say a business calls us up and they’re like, “We have a unique business challenge. Come help with it.” Right? So, that’s rare, actually, that hardly ever happens, to be honest. But the other way of thinking about this is, you know, sometimes we can spend a lot of time and money and energy and effort on a challenge, before we realize, “Do you know what? This is different than anything that we’ve ever faced.” And it would be cool if we could avoid that, right? So, people are spending like lots of money and time and then realize, “Holy smokes. Like the thing that we normally do is not really going to work.” So, actually, what we do much more often with unique business challenges, or with unique business challenge consulting, is we help teams or businesses look at every challenge that is coming at them as if it was a unique challenge.

KS: Right.

JB: So, rather than kind of – we have this kind of nature of thinking of, “Okay, here’s a problem. This is the solution we’ve always used, we’ll do it again.” We’re helping teams to get to this place where they look at challenges with a sense of genuine curiosity, to go, “Okay, what can we do with this one now? What can we do differently here?” And that’s actually more of the work that we do with unique business challenges. Sometimes it’s more of a crisis when someone calls us that says, “There’s a problem, could you come help?” 

KS: Yes.

JB: Not that common but that does happen, but more often than not, people are thinking, “How do we create an innovative place to work? How do we create a place where it’s possible for us to have challenges that come our way which aren’t strange or unique to our business but can we be curious and can we be innovative and creative about the way that we handle these challenges?”

KS: And so, what types of groups are you usually working with?

JB: So, this one actually could be like a big, you know, like a broad range. We’ve done work for businesses where we have started at the top. So, to create an innovative, creative mindset there, and then we’ve cascaded that down to middle managers, and then helped them cascade that down to their frontlines.

KS: That’s very cool.

JB: Yeah, I know. Because really, we call this unique business challenges, you could just as easily call this creating a culture of innovation. And if that’s what you want to do then working with the entire business right? From the very top, all the way down, helps people take risks, ask really interesting questions, think about different ways of doing things, push the boundaries of what is possible in that business so that people start to think about, not just their roles differently, but what the business is capable of doing differently. So, it’s quite a rewarding one and it is really about helping businesses completely push the boundaries of what is possible for them.

KS: And so, can you tell me about the type of results when you’re working with a whole company like that? What do you usually see happen?

JB: I could give you an example because we have just done one of these recently. I won’t mention the business…

KS: Yeah, no. We’ll keep them out of it.

JB: Yeah, we’ll keep them out of it. There was a business that we worked with where they weren’t facing unique business challenges in like the way that I described it, but they did want to start to think about every opportunity that came to them as unique. And they were a global business. We were working with a country unit. And this business, the global part of it had taken a pulse to see where the company globally was in terms of its creativity. And the country unit that we were working with was among the lowest on that scale. So, the business itself was actually pretty creative, but when you started to go down in to country units, there was a problem with this one country unit that we were working with. So, they called us in and they said, “Can you help?” And they really like this idea of the unique business because, like, it’s actually – the thing that they like about it is, “Can we treat everything like it’s unique?” So, they liked it. They were going for this, “We want our people in our business to be fired up about the possibilities of anything that crosses their desk.” So, that’s what we did. So, we started – we worked with the senior team first of all, and we did a whole bunch of work there around growing mindsets that were curious, that were flexible, that were adaptable. And we worked with the senior team first of all and then we worked with the middle managers, then we worked with the senior managers, and then we worked with the senior managers to cascade it down. So, this business, after I think a year and a half that we were working with them before – after that time, they went from being the lowest rank for creativity and innovation, to being third ranked.

KS: And out of how many?

JB: Out of…it’s a big business. I don’t know how many country units they have, but I would suggest probably something like 30 or 40?

KS: Yeah, more than three.

JB: More than three.

KS: Yes.

JB: Exactly.

KS: That’s great.

JB: Even for a three, it’s just three…

KS: Just to clarify, they did make a jump.

JB: Yeah, they did like a jump. So, yeah, it’s probably like 30-oddish country units.

KS: That’s amazing!

JB: I know.

KS: That’s a pretty incredible result.

JB: And you know, more than that – so, that’s cool all by itself. But what’s also cool is that they, there’s just a different vibe in the place. You know, so like you walk in and people are a bit more challenging with each other, they are a bit more – there’s a lightness to the place, I think, is the best way to say that. There was this lightness that wasn’t there before. There is an almost, dare I say, a fearlessness about willing to go, “Hey, what about this idea?” And it is true that when I first arrived at that business and when we first started to speak to them and I would just go around randomly and talk to people. Because the business is actually really cool and they are very happy. Like I normally, when we do our consulting, more often, we normally call a certain number of people and get like a pulse on how the business is operating. And these guys said, “Well, like, you could do that or you can come and spend the day and you can walk around and chat to everybody.” So, it is – I just randomly walked around and chatted to everybody. And on the first – when I first arrived there, there was a certain guardedness. There was a certain sense of, you know we put ideas forward and they never ever go anywhere. And it was like a certain, it’s too strong to say malaise, but there was a certain resignation to the place, and then when you go back two years later, not so much.

KS: What’s interesting is – because you’re tackling unique challenges and in itself, the solution seems to be quite unique among the four that you have. It’s really interesting.

JB: Yeah. It is.

KS: When you talk about it, it’s a little different from the other ones.

JB: It is different. And I think that’s the point of, like, I suppose the reason we call it unique business challenges. This is kind of off route now, because I think we don’t have a better word for it, but it really is. We’re going to kind of work with a business. I mean, like, we always work with a business based on where they’re at, and we design something specifically for them, but there’s something about unique business challenges that seems like it’s a much bigger area to work within. And businesses tend to, who are working with us on this, they tend to be, “Yeah, man. Let’s do something different.” So, it is kind of fun for us and enjoyable for us, and it does create something real and tangible within a business.

KS: Yeah, well I think that’s a great place to stop. Well, thank you so much for joining me again today.

JB: No worries, thank you very much.

KS: Wonderful to have you back.

JB: Thank you.

KS: That’s it for this episode of Outback Talks. Thanks again to Joe for joining me on today’s show and thank you for listening. Outback Team Building & Training helps organizations across North America build relationships through memorable team building, training, and consulting experiences. And our team has been recommended by over 14,000 corporate groups in the United States and Canada. To learn more about Joe and his coaching and consulting solutions, visit the Coaching & Consulting section of our website at outbackteambuilding.com or get in touch with one of our Employee Engagement Consultants, and don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you may listen to your podcasts. Until next time, this is Outback Talks: The Employee Engagement Podcast.