Fostering Trust, Alignment & Growth - Leadership Strategies for High-Performance Organizations with Jim Tolbert

Curious how fostering trust, alignment, and growth opportunities can help leaders tackle talent challenges in high-growth organizations?

In this Leadership Levers Podcast episode, Jim Tolbert, CEO of Adelante Education Group, Chancellor of Universidad Santander USA & the Managing Director at PL3, shares his journey from investment banking to leading education-focused organizations.

Drawing on his extensive experience, Jim emphasizes the critical role of culture in driving organizational performance and aligning teams around shared values.

Jim highlights the challenges of attracting, retaining, and developing talent in high-growth environments, particularly in PortCo & people-centric industries. He explains how leaders must assess whether team members can grow alongside the organization and make tough decisions when they cannot.

One of Jim's key strategies is fostering a visible and transparent leadership style. By regularly visiting locations, communicating directly with teams, and sharing clear organizational priorities, he continues to grow a culture of trust and alignment that boosts performance and morale.

The conversation concludes with insights into PL3’s work, which brings analytics and data-driven approaches to evaluating leadership teams in private equity-backed companies.

Jim shares how this innovative focus is addressing a critical gap in leadership selection and development, driving success in high-performing organizations.

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Transcript

William Gladhart: 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership Levers Podcast. I'm your host, will Gladhart, CMO at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Address organizational change. Today, our guest is Jim Tolbert, ceo of Adelante Education Group and Managing Director at the Performance Leadership Learning Lab, or PL3. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. It's my pleasure, will. Yeah, let's begin by having you share with our audience a bit about yourself, your background and the organizations that you lead.

Jim Tolbert: 0:45

Sure, my pleasure. I started my career actually in investment banking. I worked with Morgan Stanley in the mergers and acquisitions department. I then got my MBA at the University of Chicago and had the privilege of working for McKinsey Company in their Chicago office for several years. I left and started my career as an entrepreneur. At that point I set up a company that provided funding for students that were attending trade schools, and this also began a very long career in the business of education, and I call it the business of education because it was very much not traditional academics. It was through that that I first became the CFO of a private equity-backed education company and then after that, became the CEO of an education platform that I started and also had private equity backing. Today, I'm working on several projects. One is I'm partnered with a university in Mexico, Universidad Santander, to help them expand into the United States to serve the non-English speaking Latino population in the United States, and I am thrilled to be the managing director of PL3.

William Gladhart: 1:57

Well, I'm glad you don't have that much on your plate these days, so we'll be discussing three questions today as a warm up to our conversation, would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?

Jim Tolbert: 2:08

Yeah, absolutely. I spoke with you at one other time, Will, and I really made this an important point. You can't be everywhere at the same time. You can't look at what people do when they're in their office and the door is closed, and so, to me, culture is one of the best ways of creating a value system for an organization. People don't like to be micromanaged, and I understand that. So by setting a very strong tone of culture, it gives you the comfort level that, to the extent that it does permeate the organization, people are going to make the right decisions.

William Gladhart: 2:46

Yeah, well, we often hear from leaders that you have a culture, whether you intended to or not, and many of those actions around culture are driven by the behavior of the leader and how people feel comfortable and connected in the organization and understand their roles. So, Jim, it's been our experience that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas people, process or profit. In your role as CEO in multiple organizations.

Jim Tolbert: 3:25

I guess people would be the biggest challenge, and particularly in an industry like I was in, in education, where it was a very asset-light business and it was very much of a people business. And there's a lot of other industries that have a similar high labor content to the product they deliver. You know pretty much any service organization hospitality, travel, what have you. It's, to me, finding the right people, it's attracting the right people and it's also being able to retain them, and this is going to become increasingly important. The United States and, frankly, most of the Western world, is dealing with this demographic time bomb where the aging of the population is creating a situation where we're going to continue to have workforce shortages and if any organization wants to attract the right people and keep them, that people part of the equation is absolutely critical.

William Gladhart: 4:12

Yes, yeah, it's an interesting challenge and I know that in our other conversations you've expressed that, in the private equity as well as the finance-backed marketplaces or business places that that people component is a huge challenge, especially amongst the leadership ranks. How do you retain, train, identify the performance gaps, et cetera. So can you identify one of the challenges in one of the organizations that you worked in and how did it negatively impact the organization?

Jim Tolbert: 4:41

Yeah, I'll tell you, something I've actually spoken often about is, particularly for a fast growing company is making sure that your team can grow with the company. And, frankly, sometimes they can't and they're able to and sometimes they're not able to, and what's good. You know what's a strong management team at one level of revenue may or may not be the right team at the higher level of revenue. So to me, the kind of the two big challenges we faced was growing the team as the company grew or, frankly, just being able to understand this person can't get to the next level and being able to move on at that point. And you know, I had incredible people at all sizes of my organization and sometimes you had to move on from people who were not able to grow with the organization.

William Gladhart: 5:37

Yeah, well, that's also a. I appreciate you address that, because that's also a unique trait for a leader to be able to identify those individuals who can move forward with the organization in a high growth setting and those that maybe need to find a different role at a different place. What was the one thing, jim, that you identified that helped impact culture or performance or that people element positively that you did across the board?

Jim Tolbert: 5:57

Yeah, one of the things and frankly, I enjoyed this the most about my job is I got to be the politician, I got to be the cheerleader. We had a distributed organization. We had locations throughout three states and I made sure that multiple times during the year I was at each of our campuses, I had a campaign speech. I used to call it. I'm out there shaking hands and kissing babies. But they got to hear from the leader of the organization what was important and I tried to be as transparent as I could. When I went out to the various campuses, it was usually around a lunch-type meeting and I think for a leader to be visible is really very important and I think that most organizations want to hear it directly from the leader what's important and how we're doing.

William Gladhart: 6:42

Yeah, I love that you shared that. We have seen, statistically, analytically, data-wise, across the board in our assessments when the leader communicates effectively and directly to the organization and next steps, we see increases in performance, we see a drop in anxiety, we see better retention across the board. So you're pointing out something that's absolutely critical to be able to measure that, but also think about how the actions of the leader are affecting the entire organization. So, Jim, there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up today for any other fellow leaders?

Jim Tolbert: 7:17

No, the only thing I'd like to add is what I'm doing now with PL3, and I'm very excited to be part of this organization. We have two incredible partners that we have pulled together with the Culture Think Tank, and we're addressing a very fundamental business challenge, particularly in private equity-backed companies, where having the right leadership team is critical, and I think it is not uncommon for private equity firms to have a very subjective process of evaluation and selection of their leadership team, and I think the one thing that we are doing with our partners in bringing a little bit more analytics to the situation is going to have a huge impact on private equity firms to back and to grow their leadership teams.

William Gladhart: 8:02

Yeah, and you're pointing out something that is a much needed piece of the marketplace, where 78% of leaders, especially C-suite leaders within private equity high performing companies, exit in two years because they're either not the right fit or they're not able to grow the company. They're not the right person that understands the growth trajectory. So, Jim, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Lovers podcast. Thank you so much for your insights.

Jim Tolbert: 8:28

It's been absolutely my pleasure. Thank you, Will.

William Gladhart: 8:32

Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. Find all our Leadership Levers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculturethinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.