The Beginnings of Introducing RO in Our Organizations

Speaker A You're Mike Weaver. I'm with a company called the Weaver Group, which consists of four different companies totaling about $30 million in sales, annual sales, with out a little bit less than 200 employees, providing both commercial and residential real estate products and services that are done from Florida to South Carolina to Pennsylvania here in the United States. I was brought here as part of a succession plan that the owner had. This year, we're celebrating our 50th year anniversary of being in business. I came here from, actually the nonprofit sector where I spent ten years in leadership ten years plus in leadership of a nonprofit organization and began to find myself working in multiple organizational collaborations to achieve end goals. Once we were on sound financial footing within the organization I was responsible for and began to look at conducting mergers and other avenues of bringing agencies together to reduce costs and to provide better services. Through that, I became involved with a foundation called the Hourglass Foundation where I joined the board and a gentleman by the name of Art Mann introduced me to the Requisite organization. What I've learned through not only serving on the Hourglass Foundation board but also through my social agency and leadership was that much of how we go about making a better community and making better lives really comes down to a system and the systems within the organization. And so I've always liked that. And when I was introduced to the Requisite organization, I learned that the concept of stratas, the concept of different cognitive abilities for different levels and it really sort of revolutionized and maybe in some cases made me not be so critical of some people who might be a different strata but are extremely valuable to our community and to our organizations. But began to see why in some cases, people maybe didn't get it right away and weren't able to think sort of out of the box but what was right. And I began to see that, and it actually probably made me have a little bit more grace for other people, which was good. Rick Oppenheimer is a Vistage chair here in our community. And Rick began to see the needs of many small business owners as it began to look at succession and what does that really mean and what issues do you need to start to look at if you want to go through a successful succession? And as a result of that, the Vistage Group has several CEOs who get together and discuss matters of importance to their business. It becomes sort of an accountability group as well as a support group for each other, and through that begin to introduce a lot more of the concepts of requisite organization. I would say that these small businesses are just beginning to scratch the surface of discussions on requisite organizations. I myself have probably come through a period that I recently, as of today, I guess coined as. For the last two years that I've known, this has been just an awakening for me and a new way of looking at the world and a new way of looking at the systems within companies and within organizations, both for profit and nonprofit. And now I'm really beginning to implement and beginning the introduction of this then more formally into the culture of our companies. And I guess what I'm beginning to notice is that some people have latched on to the there's different strata levels and so forth. But I don't know if the discussion has gone. There's a few companies for which the discussion has gone a lot deeper. But I would say probably most companies are probably at this point in the awakening stage with the exception of two or three, I think one has introduced the concept and two of them are pretty far along. The rest of us are just beginning. At a training session recently, the deans had gone over with about 30 some of companies. The application then of a lot of the work done by Elliot Jocks and the work with the Global Organizational Design Society and the work that was done in a recent publication that they've done but began to say how can we begin to apply this more in our businesses? I was most struck with as I'm beginning to introduce this concept to our companies, taking it from starting at the leadership level and now presenting it to others, I was probably most struck with what's the quality, quantity, time and the resources given. But now to take that and look at each of my direct reports and begin to say, what is an assignment that I can give in its complete entirety that would stretch these individuals, that can be used as a means for me to begin to assess, where are each of these people at in terms of strata and cognitive ability? And probably more importantly, to share even more in the teamwork of where we need to go as a company, as a group of companies, and our next level of organizational maturation, I guess.