In the fast-paced business world, change is not just an option, but an ever-present reality. Embracing innovative ideas is essential to propel a business forward. However, amidst this constant change, significant challenges arise. Overcoming these obstacles and introducing transformative solutions requires the implementation of effective and efficient frameworks.

Lisa L. Levy is the Founder & CEO of Lcubed Consulting. She helps companies align people, processes, and technology to utilize agility as a strategic advantage and acknowledge change is a business constant. Her secret sauce to success is leveraging key elements of Project Management, Process Performance Management, Internal Controls, and Organizational Change Management to build teams with the skills and capabilities to drive strategic results.

In this episode, Lisa shares about her adaptive transformation framework, which aims to empower women leaders by fostering clarity and enablement in their roles. She highlights the significance of women leaders venturing beyond their comfort zones to foster change and innovation. Additionally, she underscores the crucial role of a continuous innovation process in forging businesses forward.

What you will learn from this episode: 

  • Discover how women can gain clarity, communicate effectively, and step into empowered leadership roles that bring about their brilliance
  • Explore an innovative four-step transformation framework to streamline your organizational processes
  • Find out a key strategy for gathering innovative ideas to bring about the change you want to happen

“We need to swing bigger and take those leaps and step into uncertainty because that’s when we grow, that’s when we thrive, that’s when we shine.”

– Lisa Levy

Valuable Free Resource:

Topics Covered:

04:09 – Client problems she helps solve: We are helping our clients be effective and be efficient so that they don’t feel stuck

05:24 – What is this tool set called ‘innovation engine’

06:24 – The biggest challenge women face: Being willing to step slightly outside of our comfort zone

09:05 – How these four disciplines help women leaders with their challenges

11:51 – What a ‘conference room prototype’ is and how does it help with innovation

13:35 – How easier can entrepreneurs pool innovative ideas more than larger companies

14:57 – How to learn more: Join and watch my podcast, Disrupt and Innovate

Key Takeaways:

“If we understand the change process and build awareness and desire and train and educate and practice, and then create the change, we are moving people through that whole cycle and minimizing the friction, resistance, and everybody understands their parts.” – Lisa Levy

“If we are continuously ideating, prototyping, and creating our new products and services, we are driving business forward.” – Lisa Levy

“I’m willing to wager that a woman looking at that job description is far more qualified at whatever level of confidence she has than a man who is sitting there and applying for the same position. We hold ourselves back and we have to stop.” – Lisa Levy

Ways to Connect with Lisa Levy:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

Lisa Levy 00:00

I fundamentally believe in breaking silos and that each of those disciplines represent skills and capabilities that any person is capable of learning and applying. So, as we move into smaller businesses, as we look at more entrepreneurial businesses, combining the key elements that drive results fast with those four best practices allows a business to grow and scale.

Sarah Brown 00:33

Hello everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown.

My guest today is Lisa Levy. She loves a good puzzle. After witnessing the confusion that ensued after new technology systems were integrated into offices in the early two thousands, she didn’t panic. She saw an opportunity to establish effective processes that support employees and businesses grappling with evolving technology. Then a pattern emerged: internal teams kept failing to communicate with one another in the wake of change. To respond, Lisa founded Lcubed Consulting. Lisa helps companies align people, processes, and technology to utilize agility as a strategic advantage and acknowledge change is a business constant. 

Her secret sauce to success is leveraging key elements of project management, process performance management, internal controls, and organizational change management to build teams with the skills and capabilities to drive strategic results. Lisa is the three-time number one bestselling author. In her book, Future Proofing Cubed, she shares her insights on productivity, profitability, and process refinement in business.

Lisa’s goal is to prepare her clients with the skills, capabilities, and self-reliance they need to thrive in the future without Lcubed’s guidance. With this notion, she has broken the typical consulting model. She holds her bachelor of science degree in electronic media management from Northern Arizona University. She’s a project management professional and Lean Six Sigma Black Master Black Belt. Lisa was recognized as one of the top 50 female leaders in Phoenix by women we admire in 2022. And as one of the top 10 women leaders by industry era in 2021 and Lcubed was recognized as a top change management consulting company, HR tech outlook. In 2020, she enjoys spending free time with her family and Basset Hounds. Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa Levy 03:28

Sarah, thank you so much for inviting me to the conversation.

Sarah Brown 03:31

So how many Basset Hounds do you have?

Lisa Levy 03:33

Right now? We have one, and we have one that is a grand puppy.

Sarah Brown 03:38

Wow. Okay. Well, that’s an interesting dog breed to be dedicated to. They’re very lovable creatures, aren’t they?

Lisa Levy 03:47

They are big lovable oafs of abstinence and pigheadedness. But if you can take on the personality, they’re fabulous.

Sarah Brown 03:56

Yes. So tell me a little bit more about your day job, just so that my audience knows what you’re doing for clients, particularly what problem clients bring to you that you help them solve.

Lisa Levy 04:09

Absolutely. So with our adaptive transformation framework, which is all described in Future Proofing Cubed, and you alluded to it with a project management process, performance management, internal controls, and organizational change management, we are helping our clients be effective and be efficient so that they don’t feel stuck, right? It is all about getting unstuck from the, we have this problem, we solve it, and it presents itself again, in two weeks, three weeks, a month. We make decisions, but we fall back into the way we’ve always done it. These are key things that are really very addressable, and it all really ties down to communicating change and getting teams of people to understand what the change is, what’s in it for them, accepting to participate in that change process and moving forward into the future state.

Sarah Brown 05:07

So as we talked about before we started recording this, my audience is primarily women and women leaders. So how do you help them build clarity and enablement and get their communication crisp?

Lisa Levy 05:24

Absolutely. So the foundation of all of this starts with what I call an innovation engine, and it’s a tool set that every business should be using to ensure that they are building for the future. And what that does is it sets the priority. What are we going to do next? There’s our clarity. As we build through it, how are we going to  do it? I suggest that project management is the way to get things done. That’s how we’re going to perform. How do we do our work day-to-day, understanding our processes, how they work, so that every person understands their step in the process, what happens before their step and what happens after their step and holistically what that means to the end customer. That’s where we tune our performance. And then enablement is about having all of this work together as a business operating model so that we are driving towards results that are impactful to the end customer of the business. And when women start to step into understanding how to lead this or the analogy might be better, how to conduct this symphony, that’s when they really stand out and shine.

Sarah Brown 06:37

So what do you see as the biggest challenge they face in trying to do this?

Lisa Levy 06:43

The biggest challenge we face as women in this space is being willing to step slightly outside of our comfort zone. And what I mean by that, there’s studies that show if a woman is getting ready to apply for a new job and she reads a job description, she is less likely to apply for that job if she’s not 100% confident she can do everything outlined in that job description. Men will apply if they’re about 60% confident in their ability to perform. We need to swing bigger and take those leaps and step into uncertainty because that’s when we grow, that’s when we thrive, that’s when we shine. And I’m willing to wager that a woman looking at that job description is far more qualified at whatever level of confidence she has than a man who is sitting there and applying for the same position. We hold ourselves back and we have to stop.

Sarah Brown 07:42

So I was taken by the secret sauce being the combination of project management, process performance management, and organizational change management. Tell me how you combine those and how that applies to this challenge that female leaders are experiencing.

Advertisement 08:03

Hi, this is Sarah Brown, again, the host of the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. I hope you are enjoying this episode and gaining some tips and inspiration on how you can be happier, more successful, and experience less stress at work. If you would like to learn more about how you can empower the women in your organization to do the same, simply click on the show notes to see how you can connect with me. As an added bonus for my podcast guest, you’ll see how you can book 30 minutes with me to explore how you can implement a scalable self-coaching program for the women in your organization. Simply visit bookachatwithsarahebrown.com. Now, back to this informative episode.

Lisa Levy 09:05

Okay. So those four disciplines are individual best practices that the large enterprise billion-dollar corporations build teams around each of those individually. I fundamentally believe in breaking silos and that each of those disciplines represent skills and capabilities that any person is capable of learning and applying. So as we move into smaller businesses, as we look at more entrepreneurial businesses, combining the key elements that drive results fast with those four best practices allows a business to grow and scale. When we talk about that in a larger corporate organization, having the understanding of those skills, right? What is project management? It’s understanding that something has to change, that we’re going to plan what it is, we’re going to  do it, the work for a duration of time, it will be complete and we’re going to  move on to something new. Everybody should understand how to do that. It’s not rocket science.

Process performance management is understanding what I do and how it fits into everything around me. And being willing to say, hey, I think this step is useless. It adds no value, so that we can remove it, tune the process, and become more effective. The internal controls piece is about understanding where risk exists within the organization, within the process to make sure that we can mitigate those risks and if it breaks that we understand what happened and what that impact is. 

Organizational change management for me in this space is the most powerful of the four. And the thing that holds it all together, because it’s talking to people and taking people through change is hard because we naturally resist it. But if we understand the change process and build awareness and desire and train and educate and practice, and then create the change, right? We implement that project and then use organizational change to continue to reinforce the new behaviors. We are moving people through that whole cycle and minimizing the friction, minimizing resistance, and everybody understands their parts. And so when we use these together in a complimentary way on purpose, everybody is, I’ll go back to the analogy, playing from the same sheet of music so that orchestra is actually in harmony.

Sarah Brown 11:34

Well, other than stepping out of our comfort zone and finding these disciplines, is there any other advice that you would give women for experimenting with new ideas and innovating in their own organizations?

Lisa Levy 11:51

And that really is the innovation engine. And what that is, is the process of innovation on a regular basis. Going through an ideation phase where you bring together your team and you come up with new ideas, right? Things that aren’t working, how are we going to  fix them? New things we want to take to market, new ways of doing what we already do to make it more impactful. Continuously having a pool of ideas that you can then prioritize and experiment with them, right? Create a quick, what I call a conference room prototype. You’re sitting around the table as a group or in our zoom boxes, however we’re doing our business and designing out what that idea might look like. So if it’s a new product, right? What is it? What are its features? How does it function? How do we sell it, right? This is all still conceptual.

We’re not investing $0 in R and D, it’s just exploring the idea and testing what that might look like. So we might go through a dozen of those every quarter and pick one that we actually want to take further and make it become real. Take it to a focus group, take it to, I like to take new processes and new services to my client that might have the lowest level of satisfaction and test to see if we’re going to repair and recover that relationship. But if we are continuously ideating, prototyping, and creating our new products and services, we are driving business forward. And sometimes those innovations are purely internal and process focused, and that’s good too.

Sarah Brown 13:32

And do you think this is harder for entrepreneurs?

Lisa Levy 13:35

I personally think it’s easier for entrepreneurs. I believe that it’s easier for an entrepreneur because they have more control over their reality. There are oftentimes fewer people in the process, and there’s less bureaucratic silo stoppage. It’s easier to change direction and to do something new and make it stick faster. When we do this type of work inside of larger, more mature organizations, especially when we start talking about enterprises, billion-dollar, multi-billion dollar companies, change happens much slower. So in those spaces, the speed of these impacts may be at the team, at the department level, but moving a division, moving an entire organization that is that big is slower. So I think entrepreneurs have a unique opportunity to do these experiments cautiously with, right? It’s not about dollars. It’s about time and thought energy to play an experiment and find the things that actually work and make them real faster. I think the entrepreneurial space is just dying for this opportunity to be creative.

Sarah Brown 14:44

So Lisa, in order for my listeners to get a real appreciation for your contribution to other women and your contribution to organizations, what questions should I have asked you that I didn’t?

Lisa Levy 14:57

Well, the key question I would ask is, how can I learn more? And the fastest, easiest way to get into this conversation is to join and watch my podcast, listen to my podcast, Disrupt and Innovate. And you can find that at disruptandinnovate.com. And we have interviews with leaders who are deliberately being disruptive. And what I mean by that, they are challenging the status quo to make a positive impact and drive innovation forward. And that is the best place to find out more about what I’m up to.

Sarah Brown 15:28

And I will put that link in the show notes. So Lisa, thank you so much for being with us today.

Lisa Levy 15:36

Absolutely. My pleasure.

Sarah Brown 15:37

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes, and learn more about our podcast guest. Read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown

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