In this episode of Making the Ideal Real, host Ryan Goulart welcomes Carmen Orr, Senior Vice President at Think2Perform and fractional COO, to discuss the connection between emotion, values, and operational success. Carmen shares her unique insights on creating meaningful KPIs, fostering accountability, and aligning employee values with organizational goals. Learn how to diagnose operational challenges, build a culture of recognition, and achieve growth by emotionally connecting your team to their work.
As Carmen puts it:
“If you’re expecting as a business owner that your employees are going to only be supporting your value system, you’re wrong. They have to feel connected to what they’re doing—why it matters to them personally. That’s when you get great results.”
Whether you’re an operations nerd or just seeking clarity in your business processes, this conversation is packed with actionable takeaways to help you turn your vision into reality.
The Power of Emotion in Achieving KPIs
In any organization, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are critical for measuring success, guiding decision-making, and tracking progress. However, as Carmen Orr, Senior Vice President at Think2Perform, explains, KPIs are more than just numbers on a spreadsheet. To truly drive results, they must resonate emotionally with employees and align with both personal and company values.
Operations: The “Guts” of the Business
Operations form the backbone of any organization. Carmen describes them as the internal mechanisms that ensure a business runs smoothly—everything outside of sales and technology. Using the analogy of a Rolex watch, she notes that while the outside may shine, the inner workings are often chaotic if processes are inefficient. Good operations streamline these inner workings, allowing businesses to thrive.
“Without effective operations, you’re stuck in the weeds, and your growth stalls” Carmen shares.
KPIs: Connecting Emotion to Metrics
KPIs serve as a roadmap for success, but their true power comes from aligning them with the values of the people responsible for achieving them. Employees need to see how their work contributes to broader organizational goals. When KPIs reflect what’s meaningful to employees, they inspire ownership and accountability.
If employees feel connected to their work, they’re more likely to deliver excellence. It’s not just about hitting a number—it’s about caring about the result,” Carmen explains.
The “Care. Own. Do.” Framework
Faced with customer dissatisfaction at a fintech company, Carmen introduced the “Care-Own-Do” framework. Employees were coached to:
1. Care: Treat every customer interaction as meaningful.
2. Own: Take responsibility for resolving issues.
3. Do: Proactively follow through on solutions.
“We built a culture where every call mattered. When employees started owning the outcome, not just the process, we saw incredible results—like a 43% increase in our Net Promoter Score within a year,” Carmen recalls.
This framework wasn’t just about setting expectations; it was about celebrating success. Employees were recognized for embodying these principles, fostering pride, and reinforcing the culture shift.
Effectively Communicating KPIs
Communicating KPIs effectively is key to ensuring they drive the desired outcomes. Carmen highlights the importance of using tools like dashboards to make progress visible and engaging. Leaders should frequently share updates on KPIs, celebrate milestones, and connect achievements to individual and team efforts.
“Transparency builds trust. When employees see their contributions reflected in company results, they feel valued and part of something bigger,” Carmen explains. By reinforcing the purpose behind KPIs in conversations and meetings, leaders can create a culture of accountability and motivation.
People
Carmen Orr: Linkedin
Transcript
Carmen Orr
If you’re expecting as a business owner that your employees are going to only be supporting your value system, you’re wrong. Like they have to have their own values feel like they’re connected to what they’re doing. So whether that’s quality control or whether it’s testing a product or whether it’s a customer experience, those employees have to feel like it resonates with this is why I’m doing the work and this is why it’s important for me personally to do a good job.
Ryan Goulart
That’s Carmen Orr, Senior Vice President at Think2Perform. We’re talking about the power of emotion in achieving KPIs. I’m Ryan Goulart, and you are Making the Ideal Real.
I have with me today Carmen Orr, our newest member of the Think To Perform team, and she brings with her a service offering, an idea around fractional operations that we’re going to unpack today. Carmen, welcome to Making the Ideal Real.
Carmen Orr
Thank you, I’m happy to be here.
Ryan Goulart
Since you’re a new guest, I’m ask you our new guest question. And our new guest question is, what does making the ideal real mean to you?
Carmen Orr
That’s a great question. I think for me as a fractional Chief Operating Officer and a leadership coach, the short version of ideal to real would be that end to end journey. So from here, I’m meeting with a business owner, a business leader, and I’m understanding their values, their goals, their vision for their business and their operation. And then strategizing through to an execution plan and then executing at the end to get them to that reality.
So kind of for me, it’s that journey from vision to accomplishing that. And I think as business owners, a lot of times they find something that they love doing and they want to build a business around it. For example, I’m going to be a financial advisor, and I’m going to build this great financial advisory firm. And then they start to grow. And then they find that the operational weeds that are just part of growing a business become time consuming and they don’t have the expertise or the time or the knowledge to tackle that stuff. And then they find themselves not being doing the stuff that they love anymore.
And so for me, Ideal to Real from a career perspective is I’m super excited to be able to come in and understand those things and then come up with a strategy and a plan to get them out of the weeds. And for me, I’m an operations nerd and I just love to fix things and make things more smooth and make sure everybody loves what they’re doing and we get good results. My goal is from Ideal to Real is I see this great vision of where I think this business can go and then get them to it because that’s also very fulfilling for me.
Ryan Goulart
I used to always use this analogy, like when you have something into your client or your customer, it’s like this pretty Rolex watch and everything is like gorgeous and sparkly and it works really well. And then when you open up the watch, it’s like things are held together with paper clips and rubber bands and like people like holding on by a thread, just trying to make sure that you have that great client experience. But on the inside is the operation. So it’s everything from How is your client being treated? What is the processes involved in? I don’t know moving an application from A to Z or what is the process for how you talk to people on the phone or how do you manage property management for your for the office that you’re in like there’s so many things It’s literally everything that’s outside of technology and outside of sales.
So like all the guts is operations and if you don’t have good operations and things that move smoothly and good accountability frameworks and KPIs to refer to and to guide your progress, it can be really messy and you can find yourself not growing and not getting where you want to go because you’re just stuck.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah. And that’s a, what I’m doing right now is just reflecting on situations. like, you know what? That is true. I totally agree with that. I, when it comes to KPIs and you know, you, you’re often describe yourself as, like what, like that connective tissue, which I love of like how all of this comes together. What? So like to kind of start at like both the process of operations and in our context that we’re talking about today, we’re talking about KPIs. And when it comes to KPIs, I mean, I think if you’re listening to this and you hear KPIs or OKRs or all these different other little acronyms to help define a measurement piece, I’m sure there’s a bit of like, I believe that. And a lot of like, ooh, that gives me a little anxiety. how do you view the role of KPIs and then we can talk a little bit more about the emotion that comes with them.
Carmen Orr
Sure, think for KPIs, the really important thing about KPIs is that you always are creating those goals, so those key performance indicators for people that don’t really know what KPIs, sometimes I have to explain that to you, is they’re just really the goals that are guiding where you’re going.
And so if you don’t have them, then you don’t know if you’re making the right decisions. You don’t know if you’re trending in the right direction. You don’t know if you have people performing exactly the way that they need to, to get you where you want to go. And so for me, when I’m creating KPIs, the really important pieces of that are how, how do you get people to feel that what you’re asking them to do is important enough for them to care about what they’re doing. And so if I come in and I say, Carmen wants us, or someone comes in and says, Carmen wants us to do this thing and we need to do four of these things per hour.
That’s our key performance indicator. And then I have a group of workers that are going in and completing the steps, like steps, I always say like steps one through 10. I can go through steps one through 10, but I don’t care if my outcome is good. I’m just, I’m only responsible for doing the steps. And so what I think is really important is that you have to attach the company values, your business leader values, your employees values, especially your employees values.
If you’re expecting as a business owner that your employees are going to only be supporting your value system, you’re wrong. They have to have their own values feel like they’re connected to what they’re doing. So whether that’s quality control or whether it’s testing a product or whether it’s a customer experience, those employees have to feel like it resonates with this is why I’m doing the work and this is why it’s important for me personally to do a good job.
As a team why it’s important for us to see that we’re creating something good in the business too, because then we can see our revenues increased hey guys that’s because of what we did together and because it was important to us and we did a good job.
Ryan Goulart
I love that. And again, what is going through my head of just application. I’m like, that sounds awesome. I can totally see how it all fits together. And I’ve also seen situations when people aren’t that intentional about their structure and frameworks and support and accountability, that it tends to kind of look messy. What do you see are some mistakes that people make in setting up those frameworks in their business?
Carmen Orr
I’ve personally experienced some of these things, but I can give you an example. I was in a fintech company and we were having client satisfaction issues. Some of the clients were saying, “you guys, this isn’t working out. Like you’re not really any more effective than when we were doing it ourselves.” And so we went through the exercise of a net promoter score survey and what we found by the comments were that people found our process clunky.
They thought that they were speaking to way too many people and they got a different answer every time, the process was taking too long. And then as I kind of dug in to figure out what all of that meant, what I found was that there was from everywhere from sales to operations, there was this passing the buck trend going throughout the organization. It was about 100 people. And so people would be cold transferring to another department because that’s not my job.
People were like disconnecting calls. Honestly, there’s people leaving the same message at the same phone number four different times and expecting a different result, right? So it was literally just laziness. And to me, that was people not being connected to what you were trying to accomplish. And so I created this kind of, I don’t know, model.
It sounds silly, but it was a “Care-Own-Do”. So that advisors use, refer, and recommend us. And so the whole premise was we had to build a culture and an accountability framework around caring about every single call that comes in. Like every single call, you need to care about what they’re saying. And then you need to own the fix. You need to own the solution. So you’re not going to transfer the call to someone else. If you don’t know the answer, you’re to say, you know, like, hold on for a second. Let me talk to Susie who’s who can help me with that and then come back. And you are the one who does the thing to solve their problem. So you’re at care, own, do. And then when we do that, advisors started using us more, sending more applications into us. And then they started referring more people to us and then they started recommending other firms to use our services. And within a year we increased our net promoter score by 43%.
Ryan Goulart
Wow.
Carmen Orr
So like just attaching a culture of accountability, not like you’re punished if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, but emotionally connecting people and then celebrating every single win. Like we made it a thing so that every time one of your coworkers, witnessed them doing something that modeled the care, own, do philosophy that we like sent out blasts the entire company with like hashtag care, own, do.
We highlighted it on every quarterly town hall. We walked through a list of people that were recognized for things like that. And then you’re tapping into people that like recognition, people that like meaningful work, people that like excellence. You’re tapping into those people and those are the people you want working for you in the first place. So as we tapped into that, was a dramatic improvement just attaching those things.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah.
And you were able then to see, like not only through the due diligence that you did to discover the issue, but also because there were KPIs in place, you saw the improvement too. So, the absence of KPIs in that situation, you wouldn’t have really been able to diagnose.
Carmen Orr
Yeah, it’s huge. It’s huge. I think I’ve talked with people often and they’ll say, tell me about your operation. Like, well, we have a COO. I’m like, OK, cool. And I delegate all my tasks, I’ve been learning to delegate. That’s awesome. Tell me about that. Well, I have this person do all my one on one so that I can focus on driving revenue and doing those activities. And then I’m like, OK, cool. What do they talk about at their one on ones? I don’t know.
Okay, so do you have like performance metrics that they’re like they talk about maybe or that they’re accountable for? He’s like, I don’t know. He’s like, I’m not quite sure what everybody’s doing.
And so you run into like a really big problem. If you are expecting people to do something and you don’t inspect that they’re doing it, then you have a problem. And you also will see that very dramatically in your results because you have this big expectation that, we’re going to put this new strategy in place. And then you roll it out and then you leave it.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah.
Carmen Orr
Like you put the piece of paper that says what people are supposed to do in front of them and then you just leave it and expect that you’re going to have this 30 % increase in revenue or a 35 % increase in like client experience results.
But then what you find is that you’re exactly where you were six months ago when you rolled this new plan out because you didn’t set out to track your progress. You have to have kind of that roadmap for your growth and your plan.
Ryan Goulart
Do you see that, and this is just more, I guess, an observation versus just something that is structurally in a business. I want to understand a little bit more about the behavior of that leader that says we’ve set this all up. They do one-on-ones and I don’t know what’s happening in them. That behavior, what do you think of when someone says that, it that they’re not trusting their organization? Do they, don’t want to feel like a micromanager? There’s a weird behavior about that that I think is pretty prevalent in a lot of organizations.
Carmen Orr
I think so too, and I think there’s probably more than one reason. I think some reasons that I’ve kind of come up with are that they don’t like doing it.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah, yeah.
Carmen Orr
For example, someone is really good at baking and people are like, you should bake pies and sell them. And they start doing that and then they build a bakery. And then they find out as they hire other bakers that they’re not as good at it as them. like the whole brand rests on their name. So they’re doing all these things, but they don’t like managing other people.
They just want to say, go take care of this and not have to worry about it because it’s not, they didn’t get into baking so that they could manage people and so that they could set up operations that take them out of being the sole person that the brand relies on.
You gotta like it, I love it. I love it and that’s why I wanna help other people with it because operations is not for everyone, sales is not for everyone.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah, there, it just reminded me of, I just came back from a conference in Boston. We attend the consortium for research on emotional intelligence and organizations. And one of the, one of the researchers that was presenting her work was talking about how she, she is a neuroscientist in music. So very cool, like interesting spot.
And what she was telling us about was like, there’s a lot of music that we like out there. We, when we know how to like get the little treat, the little dopamine he had in the music. And, there’s a few musicians or a few pieces of music that we really want. That we want it. We’ll do anything to get it. So there’s a like, and so when she was kind of providing us with some context as like, there’s a difference between liking it and wanting it.
Like if you want something, you’re going to do everything in your power and you don’t care about what this or you care about it and are aware of the sacrifices. So it’s interesting that you say that and that, you you don’t like there are people like yourself that love operations and want to do it. And then there are things there like people are doing it right now that are, you know, I kind of like this, but I really want to, I want to do that. So very interesting, slight detour here. We’re coming back.
Carmen Orr
Yeah, I mean, it all goes back to what’s important to you. What things do you value? And if your values are around doing things that you love and doing things that impact other people in a positive way, a lot of people, not me, but a lot of people don’t think operations is necessarily impacting on a face-to-face way that would fill somebody’s bucket who needs that or who really values that. Where for me that fills my bucket.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it’s, one of the things too, you know, how, how does an organization, because again, like the emotional component of what you articulated in your story and the example of celebrating the wins and getting the recognition and attributing the meaningful work. How, does that work on the, on the downs? I can see the happy place of that.
What happens when it’s not going well? What’s the role of emotion in that situation?
Carmen Orr
So KPIs aren’t being met, or there’s not employee engagement in the way that you would hope, or you’re not driving the culture. The culture is not kind of being built the way that you want it to. I think sometimes.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah.
Carmen Orr
A big part of what I do is putting the right butts in seats is the terminology that I use. But a lot of times people are just not in roles that are fulfilling for them. And it’s okay to coach them through like this might not be the best fit for you. Let’s see if we can find something else that’s a better fit or talk to me about what you really enjoy doing. I’ve done that in numerous roles where you move people around.
And sometimes you move them out because they’re just not going to ever feel connected to the values of the business.
And that’s okay because you want people that can connect to the values of the business with what they value. And so that’s my primary thing that I see when things are going south or things are not moving along the way that you had hoped is that you probably have a people issue where it’s their values and the company’s values don’t align and they’re just not in the right role.
But if you can understand from them and get from them what they do like to do, what makes them happy, what makes them excited, you’ll find that it’s in a different kind of role completely. And then you can make that happen or maybe people get bored. It’s usually a people issue and that happens. If it’s not a people issue, it’s a process issue. But then it’s still a people issue because your people should be helping you understand that there’s a process issue.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah, yeah. Well, because I was reflecting on my in my head of as you were talking at that. like, man, like, that also a process issue? Or like, when do you decide that it’s a people in a process? And I’m imagining there’s some leading indicators that you might see in in a well run business as to when that issue is going to come to light. like so like people are just I always see it’s like
It’s a hard, people are people. And you know, like some people are really good at things, some people aren’t. And it’s just like, it’s, I just perceive that that conversation is, can be both fulfilling and really hard at the same time to help guide someone to where they want to go.
Carmen Orr
Right. I usually find that people are really responsive to it as long as you handle it in the right way and you’re really coming from a place of I want to help you, not a place of condemnation.
Because that often happens in the workplace. Like you didn’t do this and you make all these mistakes and most times when I have those conversations, you know, people give you a hug or they’re like, I just feel so much better. Sometimes you see people and they’re so anxious at work and they continue to make mistakes. And I had an example of one in a call center type environment that I was part of some oversight that I had.
The manager wasn’t quite sure what to do with this particular employee because she was really nice and she had a family to take care of, but she kept coming in and making the same mistakes. And they had multiple coaching with her. And when I sat down with her, I just said, you know, talk to me about your life and kind of go through that. then I feel like she also had several call-outs over a period of time. And I just said, I feel like…
Are you anxious about your work? it make you nervous that you’ve had multiple conversations and then these errors continue to happen? tell me about how that makes you feel. And we end up with, she’s totally anxiety ridden coming into the office.
She can’t make good decisions and she couldn’t do her work well because she was so scared that something bad was going to happen. We talked through that and helped her realize that that’s not the case and we want her to be in a position where she’s happy and it ended up being that in a couple weeks she had found another job that was something that was really resonated with her emotionally and that she felt good about and she was excited about and we were thrilled for her because you know it was going to be at a point where we would have had to separate her from that role anyway.
Having that conversation with her gave her the confidence to go out and find something that matched what she and aligned with what she wanted to do and be.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Carmen Orr
Those conversations, you have got to have them because you will find that you end up with toxicity in your organization if you don’t.
Ryan Goulart
Right. Right, right, right. Well, and even too, I reflect a lot and one of the things that I would have to imagine is pretty important within when you’re setting up a, KPI structure in an organization, and then also attaching the meaningfulness to them through the leader values or company values, individual values.
And I think this is more, might be a leadership question too. And you can provide some insight here. How does one effectively communicate and connect and keep score the KPIs and like almost also like keep in front of it? Cause I’m sure there’s a, when someone is talking to you and asking you like, like Carmen, like, how do I track all this? Like, is there like a system I should use? There’s so much tech out there that can do this. And I’m sure you have a very succinct answer to it.
Carmen Orr
Yeah, my succinct answer is it depends. It’s like the best answer ever. And it’s true because I think that’s the beauty of like what I like to do and being a fractional COO is that.
It literally depends. Like every business is different. Every business owner is different. It’s like different things are important to different people. And when you’re setting up KPIs, there’s wonderful tools out there. But is everyone tech savvy? No. Does everyone get excited about like a software package that would just automatically put things together and give you a dashboard? I would say 90 % of the population would be excited about that. But some people really like to get in their spreadsheet.
and like dig into that stuff. And so the really like non-exciting answer is it depends, but I personally am a big fan of KPI dashboards. I think that a dashboard is very powerful, not only for the leader to be monitoring on a weekly basis, but on a monthly basis, you need to be sharing the dashboard with your entire organization, like and talking through it, like where you are and where you were and
hey, know, Jill and Sue and Ryan, like the work that you’ve been doing and client experience, look at the results that we’re seeing from that. Like we’re trending up 12 % quarter over quarter because of that. And it’s attaching people to the numbers and the graphs that you’re showing. So I think that’s where that visualization becomes really important for people. And you have to have transparency in your operation.
Throughout my career, do you ever get to that point when you, like when I worked in more of a corporate environment, you would be hearing, we’re on target, we’re on target, we’re on target, we’re exceeding target, and then all of a sudden in October, you’re below target.
Because that’s the time they’re calculating their bonuses. it was like, okay, really, how did that happen? And you never got to see what they were, you you never got to see how what you were doing was impacting the organization overall. So I think it’s a really important piece to help people feel connected to, like you’re part of something bigger.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. most people aren’t tracking themselves. And so to have the business or the leader or someone come in and help put those frameworks in place to help people know that, that’s really good. That’s really good.
Carmen Orr
Right. I think there are, I mean, I’ve been in conversations with leaders who the way, I’m like, how are you tracking what’s getting done? And I’ve heard tick marks, like they’ve completed four of the things today and then they have to email that to their supervisor and then that supervisor adds it to a spreadsheet and then I mean there’s so much room for error and it’s just so silly to me but then you hear people that don’t even bother doing that and they’re just relying completely on the one-off complaint that they receive from a customer that so-and-so doesn’t know what they’re doing .
Why did we have to hire? Why are we hiring three people to do the job that maybe one person could do? A lot of times when you’re in a business and you’re like, everybody’s so overwhelmed. I I hear this all the time. Like everybody’s so overwhelmed. They have so much work to do. Like walk me through your day. And then as you start learning it, you’re like, well, they’re only overwhelmed because they have created this weird, jerry-rigged approach to completing the process that would only take 20 minutes and it’s taking three hours.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah.
Carmen Orr
And so then they’re adding more people because they’re just basing their decisions on somebody’s opinion that they’re overworked. So they bring someone else on and then they’re never improving the process. They’re never measuring their results. They’re never identifying the root causes of the problem.
Ryan Goulart
Here’s your think2perform tip. Doug Lennick, our CEO, often says, when considering change, how much behavior has to change in order for this idea to work? As you listen to Carmen talk about the power of emotion in achieving KPIs, consider reaching out to her at corr@think2perform.com.
Ryan Goulart
Yeah, that’s a fascinating observation. the role of the phrase, like capacity, like a person doesn’t have capacity anymore. And then it’s like, well, what do they think their capacity is? And then it’s I laugh because it’s, it’s, it’s a we all come from our own spot and our own seat. To your point of we build these things to do what we’ve always done and it’s so habitual that it takes an outside individual to come in and say, you know, like, you’re doing… Yeah, exactly, right? Like it’s just… And it’s just a really fun part, I would imagine, of having conversations like that to help put the puzzle together.
Carmen Orr
Talk to me about why you do it this way.
It is. It is, because a lot of times people’s gut reaction is we need more people. I’m never about throwing more people at a problem until you know what your problem really is.
Ryan Goulart
What would be some, some key takeaways for our listeners as they like start to understand this connection and your connective tissue to bring that back of, of operations? When it comes to diagnosing, like whether or not there is that power positive, emotion involved with KPIs, what would be something that you would suggest to them?
Carmen Orr
I think, well, I think even if you have KPIs in place and maybe you’ve had them in place for a couple of years and your team knows of them, you on a regular basis, if you’re not seeing growth or you’re not seeing a change, a positive change in certain areas, it’s likely that it needs a tweak. And so if you have KPIs, go back and look at them.
See if they’re worded in a way that would resonate with the people doing the work that’s feeding that KPI. And if you don’t know what’s what would feel emotionally connected to them and make them understand why they need to do it, then find out what that is. And then come back and restructure your KPI so that they do have that and then constantly reinforce that and support your team. like if you’re constantly connecting it for them in every conversation.
Then it becomes part of who they are and it just becomes part of the culture. If you don’t have KPIs, it’s really just sit down and think about where do you want to be and it really helps to have an outside person help you figure that out because you’re in your own space all the time and you bring biases. You bring the things that you’ve always done. You bring your annoyances with we should be here, but we’re not there. And if you just settle that aside and take a kind of a sterile approach to if you want to be here in these five areas, here’s the specific indicators that would you would be able to monitor to see if you’ve made the right decision, to see if you have the right person in the right seat to see if you are at capacity or you need more capacity. Having those KPIs helps you make good decisions. If you don’t have them, you’re just going with your gut. And sometimes people have that skill, but I prefer to inspect what I expect.
Ryan Goulart
Love it. Thank you for coming on.
Ryan Goulart
As we wrap this episode, we’re committed to helping you make your ideal real. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone else and make their ideal real too. Until next time, I’m Ryan Goulart.
