The latest episode of our podcast is available now featuring Parm Chohan from Conquer Leadership. Parm works with leaders to optimize peak performance through leadership development, team building and coaching. When embraced, this changes behavior increases collaboration, improves engagement and builds stronger culture. You might ask how this connects with video storytelling, but having a clear picture of your core values, vision and mission are critical to being able to tell a story that is believable, authentic and engaging. You can find this and all previous episodes on your favourite podcast app including Apple, Google, Spotify and Amazon.
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Full video transcript:
I find having values based conversations helps honor the person behind the position and allows for a much stronger and deeper type of a conversation. From there, you can then have additional conversations because those are needed to talk about performance, organizational direction, projects and whatever the case is. Starting off with values based conversations really helps set a foundation for openness, transparency and authenticity.
Welcome back to our Video Storytelling Community Engagement podcast. Today I talk with Parm Chohan from Conquer Leadership. Parm works with leaders to optimize peak performance through leadership development, team building and coaching. When embraced, this changes behavior increases collaboration, improves engagement and builds stronger culture. You might ask how this connects with video storytelling, but having a clear picture of your core values, vision and mission are critical to being able to tell a story that is believable, authentic and engaging. Look out for more episodes of video storytelling, for community engagement by The Art of Storytelling on all podcast platforms.
Parm and I briefly met a few years ago when he was at the Town of Caledon, and I was working on a tourism project for their new website and he was one of the volunteers who participated. From then I did start following him on LinkedIn, and I found that everything that Parm was talking about was really interesting to me because it is very applicable to what my clients like to talk about in their videos and in their stories, which is mission, vision and values and, you know, your whole purpose and your why, why do you do what you do? So I am going to ask Parm to introduce himself. Tell us a little bit about what you do and your background and what you do today.
Sure. Thank you, Miranda. I appreciate being being on the podcast with you. Looking forward to a great conversation. So I have about ten years experience in the world of communications, public relations, including working regional and municipal government in the world of comms. I have a master’s in communications management from McMaster, Syracuse, and now I own a consulting practice called Conquer Leadership, where I work with aspiring and established leaders to optimize peak performance through leadership development, team building and coaching. And what I’ve seen is when this is fully embraced, it changes behavior, increases collaboration, improves, engagement, builds stronger culture, all of which impacts and increases productivity in the right way. I also work with Trillium Health Partners as a learning and organization development consultant. So it’s leader development, facilitation coaching. My life revolves around leadership development, coaching, speaking facilitation, and this is what fires me up. This is my jam. Ultimately the work I am privileged to do is changing the trajectory of careers and lives. And I’m seeing that with with the people that I serve and the conversations that are happening.
Excellent. So what this has to do with storytelling, at least for me, and when we spoke earlier, I think we both agreed that it’s really important to get your house in order before you start to tell your story. So before you want to tell your people and culture story or the whole “why” and purpose of your business, it’s really important to go through this kind of process with Parm before you try to make something public. So Parm tell us what kind of clients do you work with? Like what industries and what size businesses?
So the types of clients that I’ve had the privilege of working with include nonprofits, municipal government, law enforcement, private colleges, marketing and advertising agencies, consulting firms. In terms of industries and size, it varies. And I say that specifically because what I’m seeing is the common thread is organizations, teams, leaders that want to invest in training and development to further create high performing teams. This means that team members themselves also have an opportunity for or are given the opportunity to further develop themselves, but also knowing that there’s times where they need to lean on their colleagues and understanding the intersectionality in the dynamic of that. I work with teams and leaders in two ways. One of them is one on one coaching, whether that’s personal growth coaching or executive leadership coaching, the problems and the challenges that the folks often have. When I’m engaged in a coaching relationship with them, is many things, including wanting to bring further alignment into their lives and professional development, wanting to be more aware and intentional about how they show up, whether it’s personal life or professional development and personal growth coaching, executive leadership coaching is their distinct. But again, the commonalities at the macro level is as a coach, I am there to encourage you to stretch and grow, bring some organization and process to what needs to be achieved and also to hold you accountable in an appropriate, authentic, loving kind way, but to hold you accountable. And if you’re already operating at a peak performance level, my job is to help identify any friction that might exist and strategize how to lessen its impact, whether that’s negativity, judgment, imposter syndrome, or external obstacles, anything that stands between you and achieving your goals. My job as a coach is to make the implicit explicit so that you can show up with that much more intention and awareness, not by accident.
Yeah. So what happens if you don’t have a clear picture of your core values and your mission and your vision? There’s a greater chance if you don’t have a clear picture of core values, mission and vision, there’s a greater chance that you’ll you’ll likely to see problems with team engagement, strategic forward progression. Spending time on tasks or projects, initiatives, contracts that don’t align to where your team and organization is headed or you where you want them to head. This includes specific things like specific things like lack of direction. So teams might struggle with aligning projects and initiatives, contracts like I mentioned, and make decisions that are in line with overall goals of the organization. It could mean inconsistent decision making because core values, mission, vision, this serves as a framework for decision making within an organization and and without shared understanding. Shared understanding of these principles. This framework teams might make decisions that are not aligned to, again, the overall strategy and long term goals. Now, keeping in mind the mission, vision and values doesn’t mean painting nice words on the wall of your lobby or your office. It means doing deep work with your teams. It means having real conversations and bringing others along the journey. And then ultimately drilling down to answer the question, well, how does mission vision values impact the day to day? How do you operationalize that in the day to day, that relationship… and language has to be clear for that work to make sense and for staff and the organization to buy into all of that.
And during your training, what actually happens during the process with the framework of your mission, vision and values? What does that look like?
So this is a way, not the way, but the way that that works best for me. And the teams that I that I bring value to is getting clear on the values first. So perhaps that means a list of core values and maybe aspirational values, knowing that even within the work of values, it’s a dynamic process, it’s very rarely static and that these are the only values for now and forever. But perhaps it’s a list of core values, aspirational values. Ultimately, this this works best in small teams. So if there is a large team or multiple departments coming together, perhaps having smaller tables or smaller groups within that larger room, typically I usually share a list of values on the screen and ask each table or each mini group to identify the one value, the one value that resonates with them the most and their work. That’s important to have different departments or different verticals that each mini table. So that doesn’t mean having everyone from communications or finance or project management office all sitting at one table. But having a diversified group of individuals at the table because that will help you get a pulse check on the values that come up. And then ultimately, once everyone has selected a single value trying to land on four or five or six, that that really resonates. And then from there to the intention to mission and vision, and I typically share mission and vision statements of of popular brands that we all know to provide an example. So each table would then come up with their own mission vision statements that can link back to the values. And then from there, once all that’s wrapped up, one way to move forward is to is to assign a small, temporary working group that will review all of that work, review the values mission statements, the vision statements, and then provide some options to the larger group. And then working through all those drafts together in a short term working group fashion.
Mm hmm. Yeah, that sounds really great. And it does sound like it has a lot of value for businesses and organizations to at least just even going through that process must be really eye opening to them. And from my experience, I’ve worked with some really large multinational corporations. And, you know, when you’re trying to tell their stories, like people and culture stories, the large organizations I find often have maybe it depends on each organization, but I find they have a much clearer vision as to what the whole mission and purpose of the company is. And they’re able to explain that they use the right vocabulary. They all are on the same page with that compared to some other organizations that, you know, you start to talk to them, same people and culture type video, but they will just say kind of general fluff like, you know, we’re all one family here and it doesn’t actually really mean anything. It doesn’t it doesn’t actually give them any kind of mission or purpose. And it’s it’s really interesting because sometimes, you know, you come out of that interviewing process because I sit and I interview each person and I ask them, you know, similar questions, and then you get totally different answers because the employees are not all on the same page and they haven’t been through a process or training like this. So they themselves don’t know what is what is the purpose and the mission of this company. Despite having, you know, the words on the wall, it doesn’t actually mean anything. And I think that’s that’s really what drew me to what you’re teaching, is that I can see that some of my clients need this, whereas other clients have actually been through something like this and they come out with a much more powerful, well stitched together story because everyone is on the same page.
Absolutely. I had the I had the pleasure and privilege of leading a group of healthcare leaders through this workshop and through this exercise, and it takes time, right? This isn’t a quick, easy bandaid fix. It takes time. And it’s through that process of having those conversations that multiple things happen, right? So the team starts coming together, you start building some, some bonds, relationships, engagements, and then you’re also doing that mission vision values work. So the conversations that were happening around the table with with that health care team and group of health care leaders was fantastic. It doesn’t mean that everyone agreed on absolutely everything. Of course not. That’s not what we want either. But there was healthy conversation and discussion where now they’re able to take that forward and and a working small working group will be established to really pull out what are our final or soon to be final drafts of our mission, vision and value statements. So it takes time, but it’s it’s important work to really pull out culture and culture within an organization can make or break that organization, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And do you find that organizations that you work with are sometimes going through like a second round of establishing what their mission and vision should be? Because they might have something from the past and now it’s outdated and now they need to to update it and really kind of embedded into the culture. Do you find you see a lot of change between the old mission and vision and the the new one that they come up with?
Absolutely. I’ve I’ve had a couple of conversations, one with a nonprofit and one with a municipal government team. And they’re in a similar spot where they’re sorry, they’re in two distinct spots, but kind of on the same spectrum where one team is doing some of this work. And I can see that there might be some ongoing support needed, perhaps once they’ve finished this work, because again, it is a dynamic process. And there’s another nonprofit I was in conversation with recently. They’ve done a lot of this work and they’ve done some fantastic training development for for their leaders and their teams. And now it’s a matter of, well, how do we actually operationalize this? What does this look like in our day to day? That being said, like I mentioned before, this, this isn’t static work. It’s not a one and done type of an exercise. You mean not need to go through the full workshop, a full exercise every year. They might be overkill, but every couple of years it’s worth at least opening up that book, or taking a look at mission, vision, values. Hey team, are we still aligned? Does this make sense? Has anything changed? And if so, working on perhaps a smaller exercise or engagement process. That will help update everything that’s already there. The hardest thing to is, to get started, and once that’s in place, sometimes it can be a bit easier to maintain once once that heavy lifting has been done at the beginning.
Yeah, that’s great. So Parm tell me about value based conversations. What does this mean for leaders? Imagine having performance management conversations where some of the initial discussion that takes place is based on the values of both the leader and and their staff. How would that change workplace culture? How would that change improving relationships? How would that impact the bottom line?
Right. I find of values and values based conversations allows us to look at the person behind the position, allows us to honor the whole person, that whole individual knowing that everything is connected these days, right? Work impacts home, which impacts community, faith, everything in between. And typically how you do one thing is how you do everything. How you show up in one space is typically how you show up in every space. Some nuance. Yes. But if you’re a good communicator, then that’s going to come to the surface regardless of who you’re with. The language might change, but that’s still going to come to the surface. So I find having values based conversations helps honor the person behind the position and gives a and allows for a much stronger and deeper type of a conversation. From there, you can then have additional conversations because those are needed to talk about performance, to talk about organizational direction, to talk about projects and whatever the case is. But at the opportune time when it’s needed, when it makes sense, starting off with values based conversations really helps set a foundation for openness, transparency and authenticity.
Yes, that’s great. And I noticed in your training that one topic is everyone communicates, you connect. Can you tell us more about that?
So this content and curriculum is from one of John Maxwell’s books. John Maxwell is a leadership trainer, a coach speaker. I’m a partner with Maxwell Leadership, which means I have exclusive rights to use some of John’s material. Everyone communicates, you connect is all about building connection, which is ultimately the first building block of leadership. Because if you can’t connect with your people, what are the chances you’ll have influence or leadership with them? You know, it’s funny, I was I was facilitating a mastermind group last year, which I call Project Conquer, the mastermind group that we focus on. Everyone communicates. If you connect the six week experience, we had six, seven, eight leaders together in a room we unpacked or sliced and diced different ways to connect, which is which is almost a layer deeper than than just communication. One of those way is building intentional common ground. This is where you go to the person, where you meet the person, where they’re at, and identify similarities. And there’s always similarities. We’ve got more in common than we are than we have differences, right? It’s just a matter of asking the right questions at the right time. And then once you have that common ground, it’s then easier to take someone on a journey within that conversation. But really that common ground helps sometimes pull down barriers, helps increase that transparency authenticity, because it’s sometimes a little bit more comfortable to speak with someone that you have something in common with, that you see yourself in them, and then you can take the conversation wherever you’d like to go. So everyone communicates. If you connect, it’s it’s a fantastic program, curriculum content that really helps us slice and dice communication connection in so many different ways so that again, we can be that much more intentional in building relationships.
And do you see the training helping people like people who are public facing like salespeople or business development or communications people? Do you find the training helps them when they’re now trying to communicate, like on social media or any time that they have to represent the company in some way? Do you find once they and they have gone through this training and they have a better understanding that they communicate better?
Absolutely, because it helps them take the focus off themselves and puts it on the other party in the conversation. There’s no bigger turnoff than making a conversation all about yourself. And if you’re a salesperson, you don’t want to do that because as soon as that turnoff comes up, you potentially lose that client or lead or customer. But it’s also about building authentic relationships and having real conversations, not just faking it, right? Because you know, the famous slogan, fake it to you, make it. Most people can eventually figure out if you’re faking it. So if the conversations aren’t real and you genuinely are not trying to connect, that will come to the surface. So I find once this training does conclude, folks are able to build that much more intentional relationships, that doesn’t mean you have to be best friends with everyone. Gosh, no. But it does mean sometimes taking the focus off yourself and perhaps deep listening or active listening perhaps does mean taking the focus off yourself and asking the right questions at the right time to uncover and discover what the pain points of that particular lead client customer might be. Right? That’s a skillful communicator. That’s a skillful salesperson, someone that can ask the right questions at the right time.
Yes, definitely. Connecting. Connecting is is very critical to, you know, building your network and building the trust and it’s really just the trust factor with your customers and your audience and not making it transactional because there might be some conversations. It may not lead to a sale. So being careful that you don’t want that conversation to be transactional. Yes, we’re also in business and having these types of conversations to further progress business and further move people down the pipeline. But there can be a pleasant way to do it and in a not so pleasant way to do it. And I’ve been involved in conversations where someone was very hard trying to sell me and it didn’t feel right.
Yeah, no, you know, as the conversations were, it flowed that much better because of the time care and attention that was being placed on the conversation and me as a potential customer that made me realize, okay, wait a minute, I actually like this person. I like having a conversation with this person. So I’m now more inclined to purchase their product or service. Yes, absolutely. It’s a difference between having a transactional connection and a transformative connection because you want to be able to, you know, support each other rather than just one person take from the other one.
Absolutely. Yeah. So let’s bring this back to sharing your story and sharing your company’s story. How do you feel about the company’s story as part of the company culture, or is it the company culture is really what the company’s story is, because I sit with I sit with lots of people in leadership and we talk to them about, you know, their business, what they do, what their mission is. And we’re trying to bring out what’s the story of the company and how do you feel that that gets a little bit more embedded in the person and that the person can describe the story better if they have a good understanding of the mission and the vision?
I find that the culture and the story, it works best when they’re when they’re intertwined. And mission, vision, values can be the glue that brings culture and story together, because you’re then able to identify language that is consistent in everything that you do and shows up when you’re speaking about mission, vision, values along with projects, initiatives, bottom line results, all of that good stuff. And it’s it’s that common language and that distinct specific intentional language or you can also call it working from the same playbook that allows everyone within the organization to be aligned all the way from the top to the front line. This helps create high performing teams who are on the same page, who are working from the same playbook and cultivates, and an environment for individual peak performance. So now we’ve got individuals operating at a peak performance level which further fuels high performing teams. And again, the result of all that is increased productivity engagements, satisfaction, all done in the right way.
Yes, absolutely. And also, once you have the right vocabulary that everyone is aware of and using, it also comes out of the organization. And you can then see it in the social media, the websites, the impact reports, the annual reports. You know, any kind of video conversations, any kind of external communications that come out of the company will also reflect that and be on the same common ground or the same common vocabulary and language. So I think that’s I think that’s really important to have some kind of cohesiveness to your brand, because when it’s not there, it’s very, very noticeable.
Yes, absolutely. It’s very it’s very loud and it’s very noticeable when it is there. It can often be the same, too.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to add, Parm?
Other than the fact that again, this is it’s important work. It does take time, if I can be of any value to anyone whether it’s just a one off conversation or if you’d like to explore what a mission vision values exercise workshop could look like, please let me know. I’m happy to add value serve as best as I can, and more organizations that take this work seriously, the better you’ll be off with increased engagement, breaking down silos, all of that good stuff which ultimately impacts productivity and who doesn’t want a more productive and happy and engaged workforce. So thank you very much, Miranda, for the opportunity. I’m looking forward to having some conversations after this podcast with with anyone that might be interested in doing so.
Absolutely. And thank you so much for being here with us today. }