Karen:
Today's guest is the founder of Grategy, a philosophy that blends
gratitude and strategy to help leaders build stronger cultures and more engaged
teams. Lisa Ryan is a leadership engagement expert, certified speaking
professional, and author of several books, including her upcoming book, The
Smart Plant: Aligning AI, Automation & People, which couldn't be more
timely as leaders navigate technology change and the human side of work. Lisa,
I am so glad you're here.

Lisa:
It is so nice to be with you and to see you again. It's been way too
long.

Karen:
Let's get started with your story. I would love for you to share how
you found your way to this idea of leadership engagement and to this company
you've created called Grategy.

Lisa:
I had a career in sales for the most part. I started as an executive
recruiter — one of the few people on the planet who can actually say they sold
their mother. Mom actually hated the position I placed her in. I said, mom,
you've got to stay at least 90 days, because I have a guarantee and I can't
afford to give back the commission I made on you. Thankfully she didn't disown
me. She stayed two and a half years.

From there I went into
industrial sales, selling a high-performance line of electrical cord and cable
into the maintenance environment over the phone. I did that about five years.
Then there was one comment a manager made during a meeting. I was the top rep
there, just on my way to celebrating my five-year anniversary and getting
vested. When he told the group of inside sales reps that trained monkeys could
do what we do, I decided to celebrate my five-year anniversary by sending out
my resume.

I ended up in the welding
industry, my first outside sales position, for seven years. That was my
favorite job in sales. I loved being around manufacturing and construction and
the trades, being around people who are passionate about making stuff and fixing
stuff that most of the world takes for granted. Then there was the whole
boss-not-listening thing when he wanted to hire somebody in my territory. I
said, don't do it, I've got my territory where it's at, I don't need some
rookie coming in and messing everything up. He got a little greedy and I got a
little mad, and I put together my resume to see how marketable I was. With 17
years of sales experience and an MBA, I was pretty marketable. So for the last
seven years of my career I was in healthcare. Great job, cushy sales job, all
the benefits you think about in medical sales. But when that position was
eliminated via group conference call with 12 of us getting canned at the same
time, I said, no company will ever do that to me again. And Grategy was founded
on that day, which is why I know it was October 12, 2010.

Why that whole background
leading up to Grategy? Because not only have I been in lots of workplace
cultures and worked with some great bosses, I've also seen what it takes to
create the type of culture where employees feel valued and appreciated. Especially
in manufacturing and the trades, where it's difficult enough to find good
people — we have to do what we can to keep them. I celebrated my 15-year
anniversary doing this on my own last October, and I can't imagine doing
anything else.

Lisa:
When it comes to gratitude, a lot of times we think it's a soft
skill, or something where maybe we have to coddle our people and make them all
feel soft and mushy. That's got nothing to do with it. It is a basic human
connection.

It became apparent to me very
early in my speaking and consulting. I could do an hour program — 55 minutes of
workplace culture, employee engagement, retention, recognition, you name it —
and I'd spend five minutes on the power of gratitude, how it impacts us
personally, how it rewires our brain, how it trains us to find the good no
matter what's going on in our life. And just from those five minutes, you ask
people what their biggest takeaway was: I need to be more grateful. I need to
start a gratitude journal. I need to thank my people more often.

Yes, money matters. We all
measure ourselves on money. But money is not the be-all end-all we look at it
to be. It's that feeling of connection, that feeling that what I'm doing
matters and I'm making a difference. That's really what led to Grategy.

Lisa:
My newest model, from my last book Gear Up for Greatness, is based
on the six gears of Grategy. The first is attitude. If you still have the
attitude of, well, if you want to work for my company you have to change to
work for me — that is not working anymore. What is your attitude when it comes
to bringing in people who see the world differently from you, who have more
experience with technology, who are looking for how they can have it all: a
great job, good pay, and work-life balance so they can spend time with their
family?

The second is appreciation, the
personal practice of gratitude. When you can find it in yourself at home, it
makes it easier to find it at work. Then access — access to leadership and to
the tools and resources people need. There used to be this hierarchy where if I
wanted to talk to you as president of the company, I'd talk to my boss, who
talked to her boss, who talked to his boss, because we didn't want to jump the
rungs of the ladder. Now you have brand new employees who will walk into your
office uninvited, sit down, and say, I know I don't know anything about cranes,
but I see some things and I'd like to share them with you. That access is an
expectation in the workplace now.

Then applause, the tangible
recognition for a job well done. After that — and this is a big one — acts of
service: how am I giving back, how is my organization making that dent in the
universe so employees know they're part of something bigger? Sustainability.
How are we taking care of the planet? How are we giving back to our
communities? That matters. And then we end with accountability, making sure
this really is a process for the long run and not just a program we do one time
and check off.

Lisa:
Every once in a while at a speaking engagement I'll run into
somebody with that attitude — I can't find anybody, nobody wants to work,
nobody wants to be loyal, it's all about the money. And what I want to say is,
oh honey, they're leaving you. But that is my inside voice.

Company culture didn't happen
overnight, and it's not going to change overnight. It's not me saying thank you
one time to an employee. It's: what do I need to change about myself as a
leader? Here's the other thing people may not get — managers will raise their
people the way that they were raised. So if you're a manager and you've never
been appreciated, never been valued, never been told you're doing a good job,
there's a really good chance you're going to treat your people the exact same
way. And we need to break that pattern, because it's not working.

Lisa:
One comment said at the wrong time can really destroy a company. I
shared the trained monkeys comment, but I had another guy come up to me after a
program. He was working for a big box store and took really great care of a
customer, and she ended up writing a really nice letter to the general manager
about what a great job he did. During their weekly meeting, his manager got up,
read that letter, and shared it with the team. Here's this guy, all proud. And
the next manager who came up said, yeah, nice having your mom write that
letter. Ha ha ha. It completely popped the balloon of his enthusiasm, and he
was gone within six weeks.

We want to create a culture
where people can have fun. I'm not saying watch every single thing you do and
always be politically correct — but we don't want to have fun at the expense of
somebody else. If you're saying something hurtful, the thing is, you have no
idea what happened to that employee five minutes before they walked in the
plant that day. You don't know they just got into a fight with their spouse, or
their kid's in trouble, or there are problems at home. And the first thing that
happens is they're embarrassed in front of their colleagues, which is supposed
to be their safe space. It comes down to erring on the side of kindness.

Here's something else. There's
a small percentage of your employees, let's say three to five percent, who are
going to jack the system no matter what you do. They're going to take advantage
of you, find workarounds, do everything possible. We know they exist. However,
we treat the 95 to 97% of our good, honest, hardworking people who are doing
the best they can with what they have as if they're part of that three to five
percent. None of our employees come to work going, you know what, I'm going to
really suck today. They come in wanting to do a good job — especially if they
feel valued, appreciated, and known by the people they report to.

Lisa:
The technology — we are not putting that genie back in the bottle.
But what this new book really focuses on is that little by little, with AI,
we're learning to rely on the dashboards. Back in the day, if we automated
something, you still had a human there who had to learn the messy process of
how the robot worked and how the two of you could work together. Now AI comes
in and AI learns. Every time it makes a judgment and gets approval, it gets a
little better, and better. So little by little we're removing the human
judgment.

We don't realize that there are
times things happen and the dashboards aren't going to pick it up, because they
haven't been trained on it — it's a one-off. Where before, a person with 40
years of experience would say, you know what, something's going to happen with
this machine, something's not right. But the dashboards are still green, and
leadership is more likely to listen to the machine than to the person who's
been on the floor for 40 years.

So this book is really about
putting human judgment into the infrastructure of the organization, so it's
just as important as finance, just as important as maintenance. Is it going to
slow things down a little? Maybe. But think about all the people starting to
leave the workforce and taking all of that history with them. We're hiring a
whole bunch of people trained in classrooms, learning to read dashboards and
acknowledge green lights, instead of really building up that sensory library of
feel and smell and sound and what things are supposed to look like.

Lisa:
With every piece of automation or AI you bring in, sit down and ask:
what is the judgment we're removing as a result of that? Have two columns. This
is where human judgment is absolutely necessary. Here is where AI can do the
job. One example in the book is a company that noticed they had eight
supervisors and wondered if they were overstaffed, since with all the AI and
automation the supervisors weren't doing as much as they used to. So they
brought it down to five. It saved them money — but the conversations on the
floor weren't happening anymore.

Lisa:
I'm going to go right back to the practice of gratitude — that daily
practice of rewiring your brain to find the good. My practice started in 2009.
Have I written every day in my journal since then? No. But I also know that
when I get out of practice, my life doesn't work that well. And I know that it
works.

On December 31st of 2019, I had
more business going into 2020 than I had done in all of 2019. It was going to
be a record year by far. And then the pandemic happened and everything went
sideways. I never sat down and said, gee, I wonder what would happen if a
worldwide pandemic killed my speaking business for two years. So one thing
that's really important for manufacturers going into the future is: what are
the questions you don't realize you should be asking? For me it was, what would
be my plan B? For a manufacturer, how do we incorporate flexible scheduling?
How do we give people more work-life balance and family time? Flexible
scheduling and manufacturing weren't in the same sentence — how do we figure
that out?

Looking back, that practice led
to my podcast. It led to discovering I have a little bit of a talent for
acrylic art, because painting saved my life during those days. It started with
paint by numbers on Amazon, and then I had a bunch of paint left over and found
out I actually have some skill. I wouldn't be museum worthy, but from a mindset
standpoint it really saved me. I saw a lot of my speaker friends really
struggle when everything just disappeared. Even though it's a personal
strategy, I don't think there's a better practice on the planet — because when
we can find gratitude in ourselves and our lives, we feel better physically,
our relationships at home get better, and then we can take that person to the
workplace, and that's the one who can find the good and connect with employees.

Lisa:
I lost my dad during the pandemic. He got COVID, and then there was
about a year of slow decline, and he died in 2022. About a month ago I was
really missing my dad, so I decided I was going to do art therapy. I brought
out the canvas and the paints and went in with no thought in mind, just putting
brushes to the board to see what happened. I put on some Neil Diamond, because
Neil Diamond was my dad's favorite. And what came out was a painting I call
Song Sung Blue Heart — this beautiful blue heart manifested out of it. It was
really cathartic.

What I love about painting is
that when you start, it's really ugly. It's flat, it's ugly. And then you just
keep working and working, and all of a sudden it starts to show up. At the end
you step back and say, holy cow, I made that. There's something really
beautiful about that.

Karen:
Thank you so much for the thoughtful conversation and these real
tips on how to keep gratitude top of mind. It's a practice I picked up from you
and have kept, and I'm grateful to you for that. I love how you remind us that
gratitude isn't soft — it can be strategic. Through Grategy and your ongoing
work, you're helping leaders navigate change without losing our human core.

Lisa:
Thank you. It's been so nice to reconnect with you. I'm honored to
be on your show.