The Learning To Lead Show with Mark J. Cundiff

"Why Storytelling, Selling, and Strategy Matter More Than You Think" Interview with Shon Isenhour Part 1

• Mark Cundiff

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"Why Storytelling, Selling, and Strategy Matter More Than You Think" with Shon Isenhour

In this episode of the Learning to Lead Show, host Mark Cundiff interviews Shon Isenhour, founder of Eruditio, an education and training company specializing in project-based applied learning in the industrial manufacturing sector. 

Shon shares invaluable insights on the perpetual journey of leadership, the importance of emotional intelligence in communication, and the power of storytelling in driving change. 

He emphasizes the need for intentional pre-work, effective communication plans, and the role of marketing progress to ensure long-term success in change initiatives. 

Shon and Mark also discuss situational leadership, maintaining momentum after training, and the significance of selling and marketing within the organization to sustain change efforts.


00:00 Welcome to the Learning to Lead Show

00:13 Introduction to Shon Isenhour

01:17 The Importance of Storytelling in Leadership

01:28 Preparing for Change Initiatives

01:54 Effective Communication Strategies

02:28 Interview with Shon Isenhour Begins

02:37 Shon's Journey into Reliability

03:50 Leadership Lessons and Challenges

05:11 Leading Change Without Authority

10:34 Developing a Communication Plan

12:06 Success Stories and Pre-Work

14:50 The Role of Sales and Marketing in Change

19:26 The Power of Storytelling

21:42 Skills for Growing Leadership Influence

24:02 Coaching and Continued Education

27:01 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Ways to Connect with Shon Isnehour

Learning To Lead Free Resources


Storytelling is something that I think we don't do enough of. We know historically the reason we know many of the things we know about past culture is because it was passed down through stories. We know there is no better vehicle for communicating. For some reason, over the years, we've got this idea that spreadsheets and acronyms are the best way to communicate. Hello and welcome to the Learning to Lead Show. I'm your host, mark Cundiff Our goal is to equip busy growth-minded leaders by helping them grow on the go. Now in today's episode, you will hear from my interview with Shon Isenhour He is the founder and owner of Eruditio. They are an education and training company with a focus on project-based applied learning. Working in the reliability space for industrial manufacturing companies. Shon is a proud graduate of NC State University where he studied engineering. He has built on that with multiple certifications in the maintenance and reliability space, including being A-C-M-R-P. Shon has been a good friend of mine from nearly 15 years, and I've watched him grow and develop as a leader, taking on more and more responsibility during that time. He is a great teacher, mentor, and developer of leaders on the front lines in the industrial manufacturing space around the world. In today's episode, part one of my interview with Shon, you will learn how leadership is a journey you never fully arrive. He also teaches us how emotional reactions often block people from hearing your full message. He shares a great illustration about how storytelling is a powerful tool for selling change. But that stories must have a purpose and a takeaway to be effective. He also encourages leaders to prepare for the valley of despair in change initiatives and that they must market and sell this progress throughout. Intentional pre-work is also a key. You must have good learning frameworks, building credibility. You must have good planning of communication, and all these things work together to determine the long-term success of your change initiative and projects. Are you a busy leader who struggles finding time to learn and grow? If so, I then I have the perfect resource for you, the Learning to Lead Newsletter that I publish weekly with five to seven minutes of quick leadership insights, book reviews, and tips to help you grow as a leader, you can get instant access by going to markjcundiff.com/newsletter. Again, that's markjcundiff.com/newsletter or by clicking the link in the show notes. Now let's dive in and learn from Shon today. Hello, Shon. It's good to be with you today. Look forward to our visit. Hey, mark, glad to be here. Looking forward to this discussion. I think we've got some really cool things to talk about today. Share With our audience a little bit about your story, how you got into the world of reliability, let us know your path down that road. So I started out years ago working in a diesel mechanic shop. My dad was a diesel mechanic and when I was old enough to hold a wrench, I was old enough to work. Child labor laws do not apply when they're your children with that said, that was where I started. And you know what? I learned a lot there what not to do. My dad's my dad's training program wasn't quite as good as maybe it should have been. So I made a lot of really boneheaded decisions for him and for the company. So that was, that was certainly an interesting thing and way to start. But I think the other thing it gave me was a very good perspective of, what we need to do as reliability and maintenance professionals in order to enable our technicians to be successful in what they need to do. And so I've always carried that forward and went to NC State, got an engineering degree. In doing that we beat Wake Forest many times over and over, and I could see that on your shirt there. It was it was good. It was good. It was a good way to start, but I knew I didn't want to necessarily turn wrenches full-time. I still do it as a hobby, not as a full-time endeavor. So being an engineer worked out really well. So how did that foundation shape you as you moved into different roles from a leadership standpoint when do you see your leadership journey beginning I think my journey on a leadership journey is an eternal one. I, I don't think you ever really arrive. I feel like I, I learned something new every day from a leadership standpoint. And at some point there was this gradual transition from being a participant to being more engaged in the leadership side. Arguably that probably was college. No, it could have even been I was a assistant manager in a yogurt store years ago when I was in high school. So it just started down that direction. I. And it went from there. And I would say the early years were really watching other people do it and trying to understand what they're doing and how they do it and what works and what doesn't work and what works for certain audience and doesn't work for other audiences. Yeah. So one of the things that, that I would imagine that you run into in the reliability space is a lot of times. The people you're training and even in roles that you were probably in there's not a direct leadership, positional authority to try to make some of these things happen. A lot of times it has to be a. Really done through influence to move continuous improvement, to move reliability improvement through an organization. How do you go about helping your students and how have you done that in the past to make change in an organization when you don't have authority? It's, there's, I think a lot of discussion around whether you need to have direct authority or you don't need, and how much that changes the leadership style and that sort of thing. And I don't know that I have it fully figured out, but I'm beginning to believe they're closer than I thought originally. A lot of the things you do as a leader with authority. You would do something fairly similar unless you're using a very directive style, you would use something very similar in a in a non-direct influence role. Yeah. But if I were gonna, hit a couple points here, I think I would talk a little bit about really acar as a great place to start as a model that was developed by Jeffrey Hyatt and the Prosci folks. And, one of the things that I think it brings to me is a good linear process for thinking about just this kind of thing. And so Acar is awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. And awareness and desire are two areas that I think, an informal leader has to spend a lot of time focusing on. What is this thing called reliability or what is this thing called? Predictive maintenance or leadership or whatever. And then how is it going to benefit you? How can I help you create desire to want to go to the next step, which of course is attaining more knowledge and building from there. And as I think about informal or formal leadership I think this, at least this category of that topic is the same, regardless. Okay. That's good. What do you see as unique challenges in the maintenance and reliability space for leaders? What are some of the challenges that they run up against in their settings? Yeah. I think some of the big challenges we see a lot of folks really struggle with communication. They struggle with selling. In fact, when I say that word, I think some folks probably cringe a little bit. But selling and marketing are real skills and they do have a role in leading change initiatives. I. So let's start with communication. A lot of my engineering friends, and I'm one of them, we tend to think, we go tell somebody to do something and that's the end of it. It's done. All right. I have checked the box, but what we really know is it's probably gonna take five to seven times of telling a big deal message before people can really embrace the full message and. I've thought about a way to, to describe this a little bit because I struggled with that whole come on five to seven times. Really? Yeah. And I'm gonna draw something on a piece of paper here and I'm gonna stick it up to the screen. But one of the things that I think is as we go through this, we need to understand that the message, there's gonna be key points that are developed all throughout your message. As you're conveying a message to a team, there's going to be first laying kind of some foundation, the ad card, the awareness of the desire, all those sort of things. But you're gonna get to points that are gonna be emotional, and every time you get to a point that is emotional, that is a chance for that individual. To go to their inner voice or as I tell a lot of my students it's when their inner voice gets louder than your voice, right? Yeah. And for me, that's pretty loud because I'm a loud guy. But if you look here on this graphic, we're traveling along. When we get to this first emotional point right here, that's the first time that they could check out. They could go to their internal voice. They may be saying, how's this gonna affect my job? How is this gonna affect my overtime? How's this gonna affect my schedule? And so all this stuff that happens after that, they can't hear because they're emotional, they're listening to their inner voice. So I may have to now tell this message again, get to this point, and then I lose them again. So if you have a complex message with multiple emotional points, you very easily can see how it might take you five to seven times before you can get all the way through that message before they check out on you and start listening to that internal voice. That's really good. One, one of the things I've experienced in my career when I was doing continuous improvement training and workshops. I would always ask to brainstorm what are some of the challenges that a team has. There was not one time in my whole career that communication was not on that list. So what you're saying, and people recognize it and, but we're seems like we're really poor about fixing it. A lot of times. I think we have to be intentional with communication for us specifically in the maintenance and reliability field. If we were talking about other people, I. Who came up from a communications background or came up from, maybe other disciplines, if you will, they may be better at communicating, but for maintenance and reliability folks, man, we just wanna do our job. Yeah just give us alone and let us do our job. And it does take sometimes a little more of an intentional approach to communication. We would tell our clients and our students that, you do need a communication plan. You literally need to write down the message, the deliverable who's going to deliver it, who's gonna craft it and be intentional about the way you do that, because we just tend to struggle a little bit. Yeah. Do you have some ideas about how somebody goes about developing that communication plan? Because, I don't think a lot of people do that. No, it is funny. I get to teach this a lot with our implementations when we're helping clients do this and I always ask them, Hey, have you done this before? Have you done something like this before? And I would say, 90% of the time, everybody in the room is gonna say, no, we've not done this. So that means we are not intentional in the way we communicate. So the way I might go about it, if it were up to me, is I might spend some time first getting a clear vision for what it is we're trying to do. Okay. Once I have that clear vision, what could cause it to go wrong? Just like you were talking about earlier, what are the challenges? What could get in the way of us being successful here? Once I know the kind of things that can get in the way, I can start to figure out when they might happen. I. If I know when that might happen, then I can start to build a communication plan with very intentional dates and times to communicate with a cadence partic, for some things or with varying messages or varying ways of delivering that message. We call those medias. Things like email versus TV versus face-to-face conversation, all those sort of things. Okay, good. So yeah, so that's how we would do it. Clear vision. Understand the risk associated with that vision, with a risk analysis, and then take that risk analysis and use it to drive very intentional communication as you go forward. Moving back to leading with Influence, do you have a success story you can tell from your past or from when your client's past where? They didn't have direct authority, but they did a really good job of developing credibility within the organization and driving change, through the influence and through their the way they handled leadership from that position. Yeah, I think I could probably tell you some horror stories and some success stories. Okay. And I think we can learn from both. I know we don't have time to do all that today, but, okay. When I look at successful implementations, and there've been many of them over the years a lot of them, they, the individuals took the time to do the pre-work. And what I mean is not just the stuff we just talked about a few minutes ago, but sharpening the acts before you start to go after the tree. You know what I mean? And I know you do this a lot, that wall behind you is covered with things to sharpen the ax with. But they did, they took the time to understand things like situational leadership from Ken Blanchard. They took the time to understand the ad car model that we talked about a few minutes ago. So then they took the time. To go through and plan out what they were going to do. And in that facility, they knew they had to make a change and they needed to do it in less than a year which is fast for reliability. Maybe almost unexpectedly fast. Yeah. But they were able to do it and I think one of the big reasons they were so successful is that while they didn't have direct influence, they took the time to sell. What needed to happen to the organization. They took the time to understand what was in it for different parts of the organization and market that to those parts of the organization, and that allowed them to get buy-in because going back to Acar, they created the desire, right? Yeah. They created the ability and then the, or the awareness, and then the desire to be able to take that forward. They were very successful. They were able to change the trajectory of that facility. It was likely going to be shut down. And it ended up operating for another eight or nine years and probably would've run longer. But power costs got so high Power cost eventually took that facility down because you could sell the power they were consuming for more than the product that they were making. Wow. So at that point, it didn't make sense anymore. Yeah. I love what you talk about pre-work.'cause a lot of times we'll see somebody in an organization be successful and we just think they're lucky or we just think that it's their charisma or whatever. But a lot of times what you don't see is what they've been doing behind the scenes in that pre-work that's enabled them to be, when they're on stage to be successful. So that, that's really good. You talked about selling a little bit earlier and we. We don't think of ourselves as salesman a lot of times when we're in a manufacturing environment out on the shop floor. But elaborate a little bit about what, how you see that skill is critical to driving change and what do you, how do you encourage your. Students and team members to take that task on. Let me draw another picture.'cause this might help. I probably should have just had this thing in front of a whiteboard today. But it, I don't know. I know you're familiar with it, mark, but I don't know if everybody will be familiar with the old grief cycle or the change curve. And I'm gonna draw it real quick here just so we've got something to look at, but. Basically what I'm showing here is what could happen, right? If we do nothing, there'll be a slow degradation over time because of entropy and that sort of thing. But if we do something, there'll be a Hawthorne effect. There'll be a valley of despair where we're trying to do at the old way, in the new way at the same time, and then we will eventually get to where we were before, and then we finally get to go on to being that new level of performance. Yeah. The reason I drew this is because I believe sales and marketing has a very big place here and here. I've got to sell reliability to the organization to get them to even start, okay? Yep. But here's the really interesting thing. When we get. Over here where I'm making this circle, all this negative area here means we didn't get a return on investment yet. Yeah. In fact, once you cancel out that little bit of Hawthorne there, you got a whole bunch of negative space. So we lost money by going through this change. Yep. But if you look at your master plan or your project plan, you'll see that we've done a ton of work in that phase. Yeah. We've mapped processes, we've created race cs, we've developed tools, we've done FMEAs, we've optimized PMs, right? But we don't have anything to show for it because of all that negative area under the curve. This is where sales and marketing comes into play. And I would specifically say the marketing side, because you don't have an ROI, the organizational attention spans today in the US and probably globally or shorter than they've ever been. Yeah. It would be very easy for your leadership to say, look, you got me no ROI. We're nine months into this thing. We're moving on to the next flavor. If you don't sell and market as you travel up this area here, then you may never get the opportunity to arrive up here at the new level of performance. So what does that look like? In my mind, the way it looks for me is it is taking the time to connect the little stories and pull them together. Taking the time to share those little success stories with the organization. The first time somebody uses a kit and it saves an hour and a half worth of time because they didn't have to go look for parts, right? Or the first time we get that new optimized PM and oh by the way, the line actually starts up and runs when you finish. Instead of having. To fight for two hours to get the line to run because of all the invasive work that we had done in the previous sessions. It's about taking those little successes and marketing them out to, to keep the interest of an organization that could very quickly lose its focus, but also put more energy into the flywheel and get more people on board such that this is not a champion model anymore. This is an organizational way of doing business. There's a couple things that I take away from that one. When you talk about that valley of despair, you really have to manage expectations. You need to really, your pre part of your pre-work needs to be to explain to the people, because I've experienced it where I've had a president that didn't really understand the valley of despair. He thought, once you implemented PMs and implemented these things, all of a sudden it's going to rocket to the sky. That's right. Everything's perfect. And he didn't understand that there was a learning curve to it. Then the other thing that you were saying there. Is the, continuing to sell throughout the whole process, using stories. Can you elaborate a little bit about,'cause I think that's a, an art that is really needed, but like you said, in the engineering world and in the manufacturing world, that sounds like soft skills and, Fluffy's, we're not concerned with that. But tell how powerful that is how you've seen that change a dynamic in an organization. Storytelling is something that I think we don't do enough of. We know historically the reason we know many of the things we know about past culture is because it was passed down through stories. We know there is no better vehicle for communicating. For some reason, over the years, we've got this idea that spreadsheets. And acronyms are the best way to communicate. Yeah, and of course we know that's not true. Probably a lot of people know that's not true. What really works is telling stories. In fact, in January of this year, I charged my, I give my organization a word every year or a focus for the year. And this year's word is storytelling and you didn't know that when you asked me this question. Because of that we spent a lot of time reading and talking about how stories are constructed and what they look like. We went all the way back to like sixth grade or fifth grade when they start teaching you the phases of the story and everything. Because stories have power, but stories have to be connected. In other words, one of the problems I've seen in industry is there are a lot of folks who just like to get on the stage and tell stories. That doesn't work. You've gotta finish the story and then really unpack it for the audience. Here are the things that you might want to take away from this, or here's how you might use this going forward. Because just sitting up there and having story time is not going to change the culture. You have some people that are just visionaries and tell a great story, but they don't really connect it to reality and then there's a disconnect there and actually lose credibility when they do that. Absolutely. Yeah. I've seen people removed from giving training in organizations and other things because they didn't feel like they got enough meat. And in reality, that person has an incredible amount of knowledge to convey. They weren't taking the time at the they probably weren't taking the time for the pre-work to figure out what stories to tell when, and so it felt disjointed. And then the other half of it, they weren't unpacking those stories to make sure everyone in the audience understood what the takeaway was. You've already hit on a few of these, but I wanna see if you had any more skills and habits, behaviors that have helped you grow your leadership influence. You've already talked about communication, the storytelling and a number of other things is there any other skills that you think we as leaders really should be focused on? I talk about, when I teach change management, I talk about three models. I talk about the Prosci Agar model, which we've already talked about. I tend to talk quite a bit about leading change. By John Kotter. His eight step, which has now grown a little bit but originally it was an eight step process. I tend to use that pretty heavily for large organizational change. Yeah. So if Acar is about getting your first followers and getting your team behind you and that sort of thing, then the leading change model, John Kotter's model for me is the organization. Okay. Now I've got my team behind me. I need to get the organization on board. Yeah, and that's a great model. I love talking about that and telling stories about facilities that have gone through that over the years. And then the last thing that I really think helps folks is situational leadership too, by Kim Blanchard, which kind of goes back to that curve I was drawing earlier, but now it talks about what you should give. To someone as they travel along the points. Yeah. In this journey. And I think that can be a really good one, because that's one that I really screwed up early on in my consulting career. You have a style that you prefer, or at least a lot of people do. Most people aren't super balanced, so that means there's a phase of that change that you're really comfortable in. And I unfortunately found myself in the place that I was comfortable when someone new came into the organization and I didn't realize I needed to go back and meet them where they were. And it led to what I would say is a pretty negative return on investment. It really, I. Took a lot of the energy out of the sales of the organization because he and I couldn't sync up and get together to move forward. So for me, that's one that when I finally learned it years later, I was like here's why I've been having these problems. It's not that this person didn't like me, it's that this prop, I wasn't meeting that person where they were on that specific topic. That's good stuff. Yeah. Knowing where people are and meeting them there. Sometimes you throw a fire hose at'em and they're just ready for a sip of water and Yeah. And it just doesn't work. That's exactly right. You deal with a lot of people they come to your training, whether they're on site or you're doing it offsite at the different locations that you do it at times. You get people fired up about what you're doing. You're passionate, your team's passionate, and you got these planners. You got these reliability engineers, maintenance managers, supervisors, they get fired up. And then they gotta go back to the real world and they have to lead up. So do you do some coaching for them on leading up in the organization? Because all that fire can get really squelched very quickly when they go back into the real world. If they don't have some tools to deal with that. The real world's got a big bucket of water and it's ready to pour it all over'em when they get back. Yep. And we see that over and over. So one of the things that we developed, and it's probably at this point been about 15 years ago that we developed the initial curriculum we call it IBL or inspired blended learning. And it was designed specifically to address that issue. We, what we watch is we watched a lot of planners come to planner scheduler training. They get super excited and then they go back and it is quickly beaten out of them. And now they're back in the reactive day to day. They're running parts, they're, being a fill in supervisor, all the things that we just told them not to do. So what we developed was an extended curriculum, a blended curriculum where. They come to face, but then. To your point, when they go back, there is more e-learning. So they continue to see new and fresh content and there's a project that they're working through with their coach. So now they've got a person that they're almost forced to interact with that they can have some conversation like, and this was real a planner, called the other day and said, Hey, I can't get anybody to come to my scheduling meeting. Notice, I didn't call it a planning meeting, a scheduling meeting. While that's not part of the project, the coach gets to help them. Okay what did you do to communicate it? How did you get it out? How did you convey the value and why they should be there? All the things that we've been talking about so far that coach can remind them of. That as they go forward. So now instead of this, fiery and fun session that we'll do here in Charleston, South Carolina and get you all excited, now you've got continued education, but you also have a coach that you're being forced to interact with. Yeah. That is, is holding you accountable for a continuing to push forward. And I'll tell you sometimes Mark. That means we end up having a telephone conversation with the coach calling their boss. Yeah, their manager, their supervisor. And saying, Hey, here's some of the things we're seeing and hearing. Sometimes that leads to them coming to IBL. Yeah, coming to the Venus manager, IBL, sometimes it doesn't, but Yeah. It's that idea of, everything, every change, it's not instantaneous. It, it continues to on and on. And I think we're doing that through that and reinforcement, that coaching process that you mentioned. That was some great content from Shon on how to lead effectively when you're trying to implement change. A couple key quotes I got from him was, leadership is an eternal journey. You never fully arrive. If you don't market the progress, you'll never get the chance to reach the return on investment for your change initiative. The next one was, we think of communication as one and done, but most messages take five to seven touches before they stick. And I love this what he says about storytelling. He says, storytelling isn't just about telling a good story, it's about unpacking it so others can use it. He really went into some good detail about how storytelling can be effective, but it must be related and connected to the project, the change initiative, or the objectives that you're trying to implement. If you got great content from Shon today, Andd like to learn more about how to get in contact with him and his organization. Please see the show notes where we list his website, social media contacts, and give you an opportunity to reach out and connect with Shon. Make sure to come back for part two. We'll get more great leadership insights from Shon if you found today's episode. Helpful, enriching, equipping. Make sure that you subscribe, share it with a friend, and give us a ranking on your favorite podcast player. Until next week, make sure that you grow.'cause a growing leader is a more effective leader. Have a great week.