On episode 52, Tim Kight, founder and president of Focus3, a leadership development consulting company headquartered in Central Ohio, talks about what it takes to transform good leaders into exceptional leaders capable of executing great strategies within complex environments. As published in the Wall Street Journal, Tim’s expertise has helped current head coach of the OSU Football team Urban Meyer tap into the power of positive thinking.
Tim begins the podcast by sharing his three critical components for entrepreneurial success which, he later explains, is the premise behind his company’s name – Focus3. The moniker, Tim explains, comes from the three key disciplines within any organization or business – leadership, culture, and behavior. These systemic disciplines, he says, drive everything.
Focus3 and its skill-building systems are not simply a one-off project or a program. Rather, they help lay the groundwork for an organization’s journey toward greatness. This episode highlights the fact that optimized leadership, culture and behavior are the means by which companies execute strategy at an elite level. On this episode, listeners will:
- Learn How To Unlock Your Company’s Potential – A strategy’s potential, Tim argues, is controlled by the quality of leadership, the quality of culture, and the quality of behavior. He goes on to discuss how leadership works, why culture is dysfunctional, and what makes behavior embarrassing.
- Discover How Focus Three Impacts Your Organization’s Brand – Every organization’s brand is defined by how people behave and the experience this behavior delivers to its target customers. Southwest Airlines, for example, offers a superior brand based on the behavior of their people, their culture and the way their culture is built and sustained by the company’s leaders.
- Find Out What The ‘R Factor’ Means To Your Business – Of course an interview with Tim wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t dive deep into his organization’s cornerstone deliverable, “R factor,” an essential component of a life/work formula and framework, that states: E (Event) + R (Response) = O (Outcome). Focus Three teaches organizations how to manage the only thing they can truly control, their “R,” or “Response.” He shares the importance of businesses skillfully managing “R-responses” in a discipline-driven (above the line) manner, versus a default-driven (below the line) reaction. He concludes that by managing responses with discipline we get the best possible outcomes given the realities of the events we face. In a competitive marketplace, the company that manages the “R” the best – with intentional, purposeful, on-brand decisions – wins. Contrarily, default responses (those full of comfortable habits and momentary emotions, fueled by impulse and auto-pilot) – lose.
E + R = O is the new operating system for business decision-making, supported by six competencies for R factor management. Tim argues that, more important than strategy, IT, marketing, etc., the ultimate performance variable in any business, is the way employees manage their responses, because responses are what ultimately produces a company’s most impactful results. Listen to the entire podcast to learn more.
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official transcript
Click here to read the official transcript for episode 52, “Gain the Greatest Return on Your Business, Invest in the Human Response.”