Adam Torres and Joshua Washington discuss happy workplaces.
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Show Notes:
How do you use human behavior principles to understand self and others, optimize performance, and influence positively? In this episode, Adam Torres and Joshua Washington, Founder of Lee Malveaux, explore people’s strategies and solutions that help businesses.
About Joshua Washington
Joshua’s career really began to take off around this time while working for one of the largest healthcare organizations in America. Here is where he received the opportunity to coach and train leaders of multi-million dollar enterprises, along with some of the most brilliant minds in medicine.
Working in this environment provided me with an incredible experience, and is where my creativity began to thrive. It was here that he first cultivated a knack for solving complex people and performance challenges across all industries through creative strategy and solutions.
About Lee Malveaux
Grow your people and your revenue with our Mission Critical Performance Method. Recognized for excellence in over 10+ years of Senior Executive coaching and training.
– Increase productivity
– Master advanced communication skills
– Learn Executive Essentials that drive influence
– Leverage the scientific study of human behavior to drive performance
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. So today’s guest is Joshua Washington. He’s an organizational psychologist and human behavior specialist and also a founder of Lee Malveaux.
Joshua, welcome to the show. Adam, thanks for having me, man. Happy to be here. Oh, man. Well, we’re happy to have you. And we’re talking about today, positioning your team for success really how to create a happy workplace. A lot of business owners, executives entrepreneurs that listen to this, and who doesn’t want happy employees, right, Josh?
Yeah, I mean, doesn’t that help right in your business? I’m saying, I’m saying well, Josh, what we like to do is we like to do a little thing. We call it the Mission Matters Minute as we start off every episode and that’s where I share our mission. And then we give the guest a chance to share their mission and have some fun.
So Josh, our mission at Mission Matters is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Joshua, what mission matters to you? The mission of people. So our slogan here is we help businesses maximize their greatest resource, which is their people. So that’s our mission.
So, did you get into people’s strategies and solutions? Like, like, what drew you to that, field? Let’s go all the way back, man. My mother asked me when I was leaving high school, what do you want to do with your life, son? And I told her, I said, you know what? Well, I have no idea. All I know is I love people.
And she says, well, son, I don’t see that in the curriculum for majors. So I don’t know what we’re going to do with that. So that’s why I started man. have always had a love for people. I’ve always had a I had a desire to help people grow, to help people just see a sense of purpose within themselves.
And that’s how I got started. I started working in the corporate world and found a little bit of a niche in coaching and training development work. And the rest is really history, man. I’ve been able, my love for people and serving people has allowed me to serve everywhere from, you know, your frontline employee.
To the c suite, all the way to doctors, man, which is something I never expected, but that’s also in there. a lot of people, you know, have a passion or something they want to go after, but not everybody can turn that passion into profit. Like you or when did you figure out that you could actually make a living, you know, helping people and do what you like doing?
Well, it was scary there for a 2nd, Adam, like, a lot of people, we could rename this to the real entrepreneur show. So, if somebody said it wasn’t scary in the beginning, they’re lying. I don’t care. Go ahead on my face pretty hard. But like you said, that passion and, wanting to serve people, and then just finding how to serve people, finding, figuring out whatever the problems people are having, and how does my value help bring some value to their worlds?
And that was really the light bulb for me, Adam, when I realized, okay. Here’s the problem they’re having, and I can be a part of that solution. It took a lot of the stuff you see when, you know, you think about advertisement and marketing. A lot of that stuff can be made really complicated, but it really boils down to providing value.
And that’s how I kind of found my, my little niche here to be able to make a living off of it. How did you, what kept you strong, like, when the times got tough? Like, how did you push through? My faith, man. My faith has been the foundation of my life. Amen. know where we’re going to go here, but I’ll share because I just believe in the transparency because I know that maybe you never know who’s on the other side of this.
So, at 22, I’m on the other side of this. I love talking about faith. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, at 22, man, I was sitting on my, my couch and my, my 1 bedroom apartment, all 700 square feet of it. And I found myself with this little black spiral notebook. I’ll never forget man. And I’m sitting there writing a letter to my parents because I didn’t think life was worth living anymore.
And it’s from that, it’s from that place, brother, that I found the Lord and I found purpose. And since that moment, I’ve never looked back. My goal in life has been to help people see their purpose so that no one else ever gets to that point, man, because that’s a dark place to be. But that’s where my faith kind of from.
And that’s why, that’s how I make those things. Yeah. Do you feel like having, and obviously I’m glad you’re with us and you’re going to help a lot of people by sharing that story. So I appreciate that vulnerability. And feel that maybe even hitting some of those low points helped you be able to do what you do today and help you to be able to help people?
Oh, absolutely, man. Listen, I come from probably what’s been recorded as the second poorest place in Florida. And I tell folks all the time, when you are that poor, you don’t really have a lot of high, you know, you don’t have maintenance. You can kind of survive in any season. And that’s what that’s how I feel about the low times when you get that low.
Everything else is looking up because when you when you are at the edge of life, and you don’t even think your value is worth being here anymore. Yeah, absolutely. That helps you moving forward. Because when I had to go a year with no one wanting to hire me, I knew, okay, I’m going to keep at this because I know there’s value.
I know I’m not where I was, so I can keep moving forward. That’s amazing. And I think it’s an interesting point that you make about, like, when you come from a certain place, like, just your concept of what’s possible and what you need, what you don’t need. I mean, I grew up in, in Detroit in the 80s. So for anybody listening, Thing that knows what that means, then you know what that means.
If you don’t know, it’s okay, you should never know. It’s okay, . But, you know, I look at some of those points and I’m not gonna say whether, you know, it’s beyond my scope. I’m not, you know it’s all in God’s plan. So it’s beyond my scope of what should be or shouldn’t be. I, I’m, I’m not in that business.
But that being said, I can, you know, look back and find traces of what allows me now to have conversations with, so I understand when you say. You never would have thought that you were helping, you know, doctors or consulting, like certain levels of entrepreneurs or other things. I mean, you’ve worked with, you know, hundreds of businesses at this point, from startups to multimillion dollar enterprises.
So I understand like that’s a privilege and I feel like we value that. Right. Oh, absolutely, man, because you see, I think that’s the word that keeps coming up. You see the value in it, that is what really it comes deeper than just a paycheck. It becomes deeper than just a status or being able to reach some sort of title.
represents a part of who you are, man, and what you believe, and that’s why it matters to me. Talk to me about human behavior to jump around a little bit here. Talk to me a little bit about human behavior principles and really that concept of understanding yourself and others and how this works into the, into the, into the workplace.
Well, after working with so many businesses, I begin to grow a little fond and I probably should back up here. So my 1st, my bachelor’s degree was an interpersonal and organizational communication. So, I really grew up just loving talking to people, listening to people but as I began to work more and more at businesses, I began to see a little bit of patterns and I wanted to know more about those patterns and then I discovered organizational psychology, which really begin to help me see how we can break down performance in the workplace into a science because the patterns that people display.
Can always give you kind of a map towards what performance may look like for your organization. So putting those 2 things together, man, I just, I love seeing the human behavior side of what makes a good team because it’s always a lot of the same things and then seeing teams go from kind of that underperforming realm.
To really thrive and with just a few short changes, Adam, we’re not talking about when you hear science, you may think it’s like some, some real in depth changes, but a lot of them are really simple things that we just tend to overlook. Can you give an example? I mean, obviously, there’s not a one size fits all for any type of change in any organization understanding that, but you got me curious.
You’re like, what? I can make small changes, make a difference. Give me an example. Come on, man. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll give you a few. So. One thing I’m really big on is building the work around your people, not building your people around the work. And this is one big mistake I see fairly mostly with a lot of these small companies small to midsize, I’d say.
Think of like you’re a hundred employee company where people are just trying to get the work done. They’re just, it’s big now. We’re just trying to make sure we deliver on our service or product. And often what happens is. Businesses get into that hot body syndrome where they’re just looking for a warm body that that’ll fill a spot and be productive enough to keep things going.
But it actually hurts you from from the scientific perspective and performance aspect, because we work at our best when we are operating within our strengths and the areas that we innately. And then the organization can take that and cultivate it. So that’s really what I mean when I say some of those small changes.
So something as simple as making sure your people, making sure you invest into your people to see what are their strengths, whatever they really good at, and then simply put them in position to do that. Your organization will thrive much more. When you structure it that way, and so just to kind of a little bit more meat on that bone.
So, if somebody has a preference on a particular project, maybe that you’re working on, or otherwise, and when you’re thinking, like, oh, this is the right person for it. If you then that’s the route you want to go. Am I understanding that? Right? I just want to make sure I’m clear here. Well, it’s deeper than having a liking for something.
Right? Because we’re talking science here. Okay. So think about it this way. Maybe I can break it down this way and it’ll make more sense. We all kind of operate within three overarching buckets in business. There are the people who are really good at the ideating piece. There are people that are really good at the, you know, getting the thing started, the activation piece.
And then people who are really good at the implementation piece. Now, all across your, your teams, you’re going to have people that their best work takes place in one of those three buckets. And so, what you want to do is figure out. Who plays best where, and then map their strengths to the work that best fits what they do, or how they innately are created.
Oh, I get that. It sounds a lot harder than it actually is, but it’s actually really fun and easy. I don’t know that it does, though. Yeah, no, I, if you’re aware of the process in the first place, I feel like just being aware of that, like, that’s not necessarily intuitive, what you just said.
After you hear it, after you’re, you know, maybe you’ve been through a methodology, obviously after a company’s work with you and your team, but like, at first glance, it’s like, oh, you know, that makes sense. But like, how do you do it? I guess, that’s where I’m getting at is like the how, how do you do it?
And I know there’s only so much we could do in a, in a 20, 25 minute, whatever. You, but you know, I gotta get No, I listen side of you as possible, Joshua, from my list is, you know, you know how it’s . Well, I love that. I’ll take you everybody that’s, listen in. Go ahead . No worries. No, I love that. Let’s, let’s do that.
So I’ll take you through kind of our process. Mm-Hmm. We always start with data because we’re talking science, right? So there’s two kind of assessments that I would take your team through, Adam, if we’re talking, like, let’s say you’re the, the example here for sure. I take your, your people through two.
Assessments to really figure out we call it executive profile when I’m working with executive leaders, but basically your employee profile and we want to know with all the data and technology out there. We really want to know as much as we can about your employees and then we want to switch over and look at the work.
Okay, let’s do the same thing. Let’s look at the data of the work. What’s the highest impact work? What’s the work that has the lowest impact? What’s the work that’s kind of there in the middle? Who’s doing what work? And how often, you know, are we measuring? And so we’re looking at your entire performance system, but we’re looking at it from a scientific approach because we assessing, right?
We’re testing people to see where they’re at. Based on their answers to certain assessment, we’re looking at your work and we’re mapping it all out based on the framework of those assessment. And then from there is how we can begin to plug and play. Because what we will find out Adam is okay. Where are we strong?
Where do we have the right personnel for that high impact work? And then where are we deficient? Like, where have we been suffering as an organization in our performance because we don’t have the right prototype of person in that position. And that’s where your talent acquisition changes because now you begin to hire differently because, you know, exactly what you need to succeed.
So, it’s like, if I told you, Adam, to go make this pie, but I, I didn’t give you, I didn’t tell you what ingredients you never made a pie before, but I didn’t tell you what ingredients make the best pie. Instead, through this process, you know, I use these ingredients. I am 90 percent sure I’m going to get this outcome every time.
Hmm. Is that better? no, that’s great. it makes a lot of sense. And what I like is this idea of having a framework around it so that you can, you know, if you can’t measure it, if you can’t, if you can’t, then, then how do you know if you’re making, if you’re making progress, right? So having a framework I feel is is critical and important.
want to jump around here a little bit. So mission critical performance framework. I’m just a big fan of a framework in general. Like, like, what does that mean to you and the word mission? Right? We started off with the mission. So how cool is that? They were aligned like that.
But this framework is one that actually came to life when I was working. Yeah. I was working in the healthcare industry for one of the largest healthcare enterprises in the country, and we were over their central division. And a lot of the work we were doing, I just, again, I started seeing some of those patterns.
So the mission critical performance method was really, it represents the three critical areas that drive performance in a business. And the 1st is they all start with Steve. The 1st is connection. The middle 1 is is our conversations and the 3rd 1 is cultivation. Now, if I were to put those in more of a business term, we’d say leadership communication and talent management.
But the reason why I named them that way is because when people think about leadership. And one thing that often gets missed the most is the connection piece, and that’s what drives influence and leadership. In fact, they did a study and they found that a recent study on today’s workforce. And they found the number 1 thing that today’s workforce is looking for the most, and that’s the millennials, is connectedness in the workplace.
So when we talk about framework, happy workplaces, that’s what we’re talking about. Right. Right. And so the part of the framework is just focusing business on those three critical drivers of performance. That’s great. Well, Joshua, I just want to say 1st off. I know we tip tip of the ice. I know you got a whole lot more to offer and again, you’ve worked with a lot of companies, a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs and executives.
How do people connect? How do they follow up? How do they see your content? How do they, how do they connect if they want to continue the conversation? Well, let’s connect on LinkedIn. That seems to be one of the safest places that people, you know, like to join and get linked up. That’s a good place. And then I’m a little bit crazy.
hand out my cell number. If you ever got a question or something, shoot me a text at 239 834 3875. I’d love to help if there’s any way that I can. Man, that’s fantastic. Well, hey again, appreciate you coming on the show and to the audience as always. Hey, if this is your first time Listening to the show tuning in and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet because you need a special invitation I’m giving you that special invitation right now hit that subscribe, but we have a whole bunch more.
Really Amazing guests just like joshua coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss any of those interviews you won’t be mad if you’re feeling really happy or maybe you’re Long term listener and you haven’t left us a review yet. Come on. I’ve been asking you to leave me a review.
Leave a review that It helps the show. We appreciate it. Thank you for coming on the show. It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Adam.
