What does Fox Factory do and how would you describe your role?
Fox Factory is an outdoor enthusiast company. That’s not our actual title, but we’re all about the outdoors. So that goes from doing the shocks and things that we do for vehicles to upfitting vehicles all the way over into our new venture where we’ve acquired a baseball equipment company. So again, something that’s about the outdoors, about being active, and that’s really kind of that space that we’re in. Just pushing the extreme for those for professional athletes all the way down to weekend warriors.
My role is Senior Manager of Learning and Development. So I’m tasked with developing the people that are within the organization globally. We have about a little over 4,500 or so employees globally. And I handle most of the talent development for the organization.
What led you to seek out leadership development? TLG?
We have a large population of mid-level leaders, senior leaders, and we wanted to create something that we could share across the entire organization. I think everybody’s had leadership training in some form or fashion, but to really start creating what we call a One Fox, we wanted to standardize what that learning looked like across the board. So where Turknett came into that fold was really in the process of looking at our executive leadership, and beginning to create a program that we could use to help them grow. As much as I love what I do, it’d be kind of hard for me to tell my C-suite and my VPs, “this is what you should be doing.” So getting someone outside of the organization that has a wealth of knowledge and information and being able to use that coaching body, use the content that was available professionally, that’s where our connection came in.
And what really set TLG apart from everybody else that we had talked to for me was just the transparency at which you work. There was nothing too private and there was nothing that was really held back in that process. And it made it very easy to know what we needed to do or what was going to be done. That transparency made it so we could talk about it before we got into contract agreements. And it made a world of difference because everybody else didn’t want to tell you what the process is and all this stuff. You all came in and said, “this is what we do.” It was refreshing.
So what did you see different in your leaders and these executives from before to after they started working with our coaches? Did you see a shift in their behavior or their unity?
I would say I saw more of a shift in their personal awareness, which I think was huge. Being able to see them or even experience them sitting down saying, “Wow, I never realized that this part of my journey has impacted how I operate today.” And from that, being able to make adjustments or to actually dig deeper into their strengths, I think that was the biggest impact that the coaching had on our teams immediately. I know there’s some other things that they’re kind of still working on and working through that’ll show up in our company data later on, but that immediate hit was incredibly healing in some cases, but also very encouraging in others.
What advice would you give to someone considering leadership coaching?
I would say look beyond the paper. And what I mean by that is we get so caught up sometimes in trying to drive a KPI or a data point that we lose the person that’s behind that. And I think that’s something huge. Although we got great data, we got great analytics, we got some great starting points and foundations for us as an organization, it was that self-awareness or that came out of it that our leaders were affected by immediately that had the most impact. I encourage companies and individuals to lean into that a little bit more than they might naturally. It might not show up immediately on a data form, but it will show up in how it impacts the environment where people are working. It creates an environment where they feel like they’re valued, where they see the impact of their work. But that comes from being self-aware and understanding yourself and the value that you bring to the table. That’s my 2 cents.
I understand that your experience in this program that you created was a little bit unique. You had assessments as well as coaching, and then a final presentation. Can you tell me more about creating the custom process?
So the basis of our leadership programs is based on the Leadership Pipeline, which is a book that came out in the early two thousands. We had this structure of “leader of self”, “leader of others”, “leader of leaders”, “leader of enterprise”. And as we started building these stages, that “leader of enterprise” piece was where we noticed it was a little bit bigger than what we had been doing. And we wanted to bring in different aspects for our senior leaders that allowed them to grow personally as well as professionally. But we also didn’t have any real baselines or metrics that were set outside of having values and some competencies as an organization.
So the question became, what are we actually looking for? What do we actually want for our senior leaders or those that are in that succession line for leading this organization? What do we want that to look like, feel like? So in that we decided to look at it from the standpoint of some assessments that are more standardized to give us feedback. And with those assessments, we can begin looking at what those individual factors are for this specific group. And that’s really where we landed. We didn’t want to just do the coaching without having some metrics to it. We didn’t want to just have the metrics without having some coaching, but how do we put all this together to create something that works well for our teams? So that’s really what it burst out of is that need to find that happy middle ground for this audience that were the decision makers and culture and pace setters of the organization. While also making it very personal for them to have that self-development and self-growth in the process.
Could you tell me more about the final presentation?
What we were looking at originally was, “how do you take this and implement it back into your day-to-day?” What we ended up doing instead was to turn what you’ve learned into a purpose statement that can sit on your desk, that you can say, “this is why I do what I do.” Because we started to understand that purpose brings motivation, and when you’re motivated to do the work beyond the work, it shows up in the work. So everybody’s final presentation really was centered around their purpose statement based off of what they’ve learned about themselves and how they can carry that authenticity into the work that they do. So it was less the presentation and maybe the circumstance of trying to create this plan for work and became more of a personal battle cry, so to speak. “This is why I do what I do.” And that conviction that went with that really showed in how they presented it and their wisdom behind even their purpose. So it made it a lot more personal, personable, and authentic than just being another kind of performance check mark.
Any final words for our readers?
I guess I would say never underestimate the value of a “fail forward” environment. What we’re noticing as an organization and even through this coaching practice is that it wasn’t a matter of having the right and wrong answers. It was a matter of being able to reflect and pivot. And I think that’s something that newer companies are kind of doing better, but corporations that are of a certain size and publicly traded companies fall in this category where it makes it very difficult to make mistakes while trying to innovate. So really having that forward mentality, it makes a world of difference when your people feel better about taking chances, taking risks, and being innovative because they know that it’ll be rewarding instead of getting a slap on the hand for trying to make the company better. And it’s just something that we’ve seen through the interactions that come out of coaching, the interactions that have come out of some of the assessments that we’ve gotten through our experience with Turknett. So that’s been a good return on investment even in and of itself.