In this empowering episode, Carrie Fabris, Founder of CareerFrame, shares how to elevate manager engagement for lasting profitability and legacy. If you struggle with a weak leadership bench eroding your gains, you won’t want to miss it
You will discover:
– What ongoing practice turns insights into real behavioral change
– How to use Frame It for frequent, accountable leadership growth
– Why high engagement boosts profitability by 21% in top quartiles
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start scale and succeed podcast. It’s the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and today I want to talk to those of you who are in Stage Five, specifically those CEOs and founders out there who’ve been wondering if your leadership bench is actually as strong as you thought it was 2025 was a weird year for a lot of reasons, and one of the things I’ve seen in a number of my clients is that their bench just wasn’t quite as deep as they thought. And here’s what makes it tricky, you are becoming more and more dependent on that bench because, let’s be honest, you’re too far removed now to diagnose a lot of what might be going wrong in your organization all on your own. You can walk the floor, you can you know there’s certain things you can do, but at the end of the day, you really need to learn the ability to lead through others, to generate engagement through others, and to ultimately lead a successful organization. And it’s not just soft, touchy feely stuff. In fact, our guest today you’ll see has identified that 27% of managers are actually engaged. That means that what, something like 73% are not. And here’s the real kicker, in those organizations that are in the top quartile of engagement, they outperform their peers by 21% in profitability. It’s not a soft HR metric. That’s margin that you’re missing, and we’re going to figure out why and what you can do about it, because we have Carrie Fabrice, who’s here with us today with over 20 years of corporate experience and 15 years in leadership roles at Google, Travelocity, Saber and travel leaders corporate. Carrie combines real world business insight with her expertise in Clifton Strengths, EQ I, 2.0 situational leadership, and through her signature frame it method, which we’re going to talk about here today, she delivers high energy, actionable coaching and workshops that will help leaders bridge the gap between achievement and legacy while maintaining balance purpose and impact in their professional and personal lives. She’s also the author of all in we’ll talk about that a little bit today as well. The working mom’s unapologetic quest for a juicy live sharing her personal journey of navigating corporate ambition, entrepreneurship and motherhood without compromise. Carrie, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here.
Carrie Fabris
Thank you, you make me sound good, Scott.
Scott Ritzheimer
as I was researching for this episode and just kind of figuring out, what should we talk about? One you made it real hard on me, because there are a couple very interesting routes that we could have taken here. But the one that grabbed me was this, 27 stat. 27% stat, because most of the time when I hear about employee engagement, I hear about them all lumped in together and kind of hidden in that when most leaders interpret that, they kind of think it’s someone else, but here it’s the managers. It is the link to the rest of the organization, and I think it’s fair to say you’re not going to have a very engaged team working for a very disengaged manager. So my first question for you here for a stage five founder, they’re in that CEO stage. They’ve got layers of leadership, maybe just one or two, maybe 3457, and they’ve assumed that engagement was being handled. What’s actually happening beneath the surface that they’re not seeing?
Carrie Fabris
Yeah. So there’s a big, important topic that a lot of founders are missing, and I will tell you what that is in a second. First, I want to say I think most founders are focused on speed and revenue, grow the business, sell the business, be profitable, and that’s great, and that’s necessary. What many founders are also creating, whether they know it or not, is a grind culture, especially when it’s speed, speed, speed. And grind cultures are going to create burnout and disengaged employees, and the burnout is the most rampant at the middle leadership level, so the manager and that level is overwhelmed. They’re under coached. They’re saying they’ve got this, they might be drowning because they don’t feel like they can speak the truth of what’s really going on. If I slow down, I’ll get fired. So the big, important topic that a lot of founders are missing is really around energy. Now energy is not woo, woo. It’s strategic. And when you invest in your people in order to help them build and maintain their energy, then engagement is naturally going to increase. And so I think as you and I talk today, you’re going to hear investing in others is going to be a theme that I’m likely going to touch on quite a bit. And so a lot of founders are not investing in the energy of their people and just expecting them to show up and have the same drive and love and work ethic and everything else that they have. Founders, founders are different. They’re in a different bucket than someone who was hired to come in and work for the company.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it creates this fascinating problem, and this thing that shows up a few different times in the founders. Founders journey. But what you’re describing is, if we were just kind of say, founders are in this space here, right? They they’re, they’re fast moving. They make decisions if they don’t like them, they make new decisions. They go, they’re, they’re all in all the time. And then there are bad fits for the culture way over on the other side, right, who are so different that they should not be working at the same organization. Yeah, and oftentimes we kind of make it like it’s one or the other, like you have to fit into one of those two categories. But in fact, there’s this space between which is highly productive. Wonderful people make a huge contribution to the organization, but to founders might feel like they’re a little bit more on the other side, because they don’t just fall in the founder Venn diagram, if you will. Yeah. How? How do we discern that sweet spot in between where, yeah, they’re not wired just like us, but that’s not a bad thing.
Carrie Fabris
Yeah, So as a certified Clifton Strengths coach, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, I will say that it’s Scott I don’t know if I I can’t not talk about strengths, because I’m super passionate about it and the power of it. And when we start to understand how someone is showing up, and we tap in to what energizes that person, what motivates that person, we will get high engagement, high productivity, high excitement, high success, high producing, high performance. All of these things will follow. And again, a lot of times, leaders will show up and they will lead everyone the way that they think, the way that they feel, how they would do something, and they’re completely missing it. So when they take the time to be an intentional leader and understand what makes this person tick. This person loves to think, well, maybe I should have them in a strategic thinking role. This person is my doer. Maybe I should not have them in a strategic thinking role. I need to have them in an executing and so taking the time to get data on how your team is showing up and how they want to show up again energetically is a game changer for how the organization will perform. Yeah, tap into that.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. I love that. Now, one of the main thing I want to cover here is you have a model that you’ve put together, the frame it, method, and I think it’s fantastic, super simple to understand, really powerful. And I’m wondering if we could just walk through this so it’s an acronym. Did I use the right phrase? Anagram, whatever it is, acrostic. It’s one of those, a things that I was supposed to learn in high school. And so I want to walk through each of these ones. And so it’s frame. It starts with F, and F is for foundation and focus. Tell us. Why is this first, and what does it mean?
Carrie Fabris
Sure. So speaking of Energy, F and frame, it is going to start with the human, and the foundation of the human energetically. So how is the human showing up from an energy perspective? So we know the output towards the business that we can expect from that human. So founders that are leading through others are brilliant when they nurture the others. What we’ve been talking about so far so foundation to focus is about understanding where we’re headed and making sure that we have full engagement, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. And in this case, spiritual means purpose and meaning. It does not mean religion. So we can maintain high performance. So when we set the right foundation, which is the people coming to work, to do the work, that foundation is strong, then the organization is going to start running like a tuning fork, not a hamster wheel. So it really is about we got to focus on the business. We’ve got to make sure we are starting from a strong foundation. Anything on this planet, if it does not have a strong foundation, it’s going to be rocky. So in this case, the foundation is actually the human and the leader who’s doing the work. How are you feeling? How are you thinking? How are you doing all of these things that so many founders and executives do not slow down to touch on, and it is crucial. It’s crucial to avoid that for now.
Scott Ritzheimer
Good, good, good. All right, let’s, let’s keep moving through. These are responsibility and relationships. So talk to us. How did you come about this? And what does it look like, you know, in the real world, as you’re applying it with founders and CEOs?
Carrie Fabris
Yeah. I mean, when I thought about the frame it method, it was literally taking my 20 years in corporate, 15 years of leadership, 10 years of doing career frame, it was like, what are the themes that keep popping up? And, you know, a lot of people, I was coaching a person one time who had responsibility as their number one talent theme with cliftonstrengths. And I will never forget, she’s like, I mean, isn’t everybody responsible? And I’m like, no, no, everybody’s not responsible. And so this was, to me, a key thing to cover in this frame up method, and it goes anywhere from what the leader is responsible for also, do they. Understand, are they clear on what the people that report to them are responsible for? What’s the relationship you have with this person? This is where trust is going to start showing and living in this in this process that is also tied to foundation. Again, we have to have trust before we can build on other things. So we hold up when we go through this method with an individual, we hold up a lot of mirrors for that client, and we create the confidential safe space to do so. And what we’ve experienced and seen over the last 10 years is that sure no one really wants to see the ugly in the mirror, and when they do, they can talk with a trusted advisor through it, and they can start to own, it, get be responsible. So this is also where accountability lives. So we find that often it’s talking through scenarios, so the person can see that what ownership looks like and what responsibility looks like, and the ripple effect it’s creating good or bad. There is this great book, The OZ principle. Have you heard of it?
Scott Ritzheimer
I feel like I have explained it anyway.
Carrie Fabris
Okay, yeah, sure. So the oz principle, it’s basically written by collaboration of authors, Roger Connors, Tom Smith, Craig Hickman. It’s on Amazon, and it talks about above the line and below the line thinking. And it’s about accountability. So you have the courage to see it, the heart to own it, the wisdom to solve it, the means to do it. It’s also synonymous with the lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow of The Wizard of Oz. Hence the oz principle. So in responsibility relationship, we’re making sure, again, that you know what you’re responsible for. You’re clear on what your team is responsible for. We’re going through each person. What is your relationship with that person. Do they understand the expectations? Are you being accountable for what you’re demonstrating? Are you holding them accountable? Do they understand what accountability looks like? So all of this is baked in, and also something I’ll say is with each stage of frame it, there are assessments that the person is taking. So we have a baseline and some data of where they’re at when they start the process and throughout the method and the process and experience and experience, we will revisit these assessments so we can see them, right?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so good. I love that, because so many folks will come like my people aren’t taking accountability. And what I’m hearing, especially through these first two, is you probably haven’t laid the foundation that you need, and you almost certainly haven’t invested enough in the relationship and clarifying those responsibilities and just how all of that comes together, I think is brilliant. I want to keep us moving here. Yeah, go ahead, yeah.
Carrie Fabris
I was just gonna say. And also, a lot of times, you know people, the senior the founders, the CEOs, the executives, will bring us in or someone like us in? Do you have these conversations? Because a lot of times I say, bring us in because you you want to, you want to make sure it’s getting done, but you’re probably not the one that wants to spend the time doing it. So you bring someone like us in to hold this space and to lead this team and guide this team to think differently, to feel differently, to understand things differently, so your bench strength is getting elevated without you as the founder, having to put all the time and attention into it,
Scott Ritzheimer
And you get to be part of the team. I mean, how many times like you’re leading the team, and just by virtue of the fact that you’re leading the team, there is a degree of separation there. And when you can bring someone in with the skill and expertise, it allows you to be part of a team in a way that you can’t otherwise. There’s definitely something to be said for that. Now, a is adaptability and application, and one of the things that I’ve found, tell me, if you’ve seen the same thing, is founders are like, they’re just Ultra adaptable people, but they lack adaptability in some of the right areas, right they there’s this kind of mental block where we don’t see the need to adapt, or sometimes we even like think that we lack the ability to adapt. What’s that disconnect and why is it so important to be adaptable? As the founder CEO?
Carrie Fabris
Yeah, I have worked with some founders who I would say are not great at adaptability, massive ego. You know, this is the way it’s got to be. Because I say it’s the way that it’s got to be. And I think you lose a lot of you lose a lot of engagement when you’re a founder that has that kind of mentality. Sometimes you don’t realize you have that kind of mentality. It’s a of mentality. It’s a blind spot, and we’ll get to that later. But in general, I would say adaptability, in frame it, this is where adaptive leadership lives. Adaptability is not reactivity. It’s staying grounded when the ground moves. And it’s in every category, whether it be the market, revenue, culture, human resource, the people, the product, on all of the things. And for a founder at the top of the org, this means modeling how to pivot with poise, not panic. And it’s about testing ideas, iterating. Moving fast and understanding speed while staying steady and absorbing the feedback without losing momentum or your mind, in some cases. And so adaptive leadership is about not having a one size fits all leadership style. It’s about being intentional about how you lead each individual in order to maximize their potential and get the most energy and output out of them for the business. And so in frame it, in this stage, we bring in Situational Leadership essentials, which is through the Center for Leadership Studies, I’m one of their certified facilitators, and we walk the leader through how you can determine someone’s ability and willingness for task and how you need to adapt your leadership style based on what the follower needs in order to be successful and have high performance. So again, a lot of founders will get really stuck in their their head, kind of getting in their own way because of how things are supposed to be. And the best founders I’ve worked with are the ones that are curious and want to hear from their team, and they can be self assured, but self assurance is always healthy when it’s like, well, let me, let me adopt what you just said. Let me run it through my personal filter here, and if it Yeah, I’m pretty self assured that your idea is the right one to go with. Let’s do that. Those are really amazing, adaptive founders,
Scott Ritzheimer
So true. All right. M stands for mindset to motivate. And I’m curious in particular with how we navigate motivation outside of the hustle culture. What does that look like?
Carrie Fabris
How do we navigate motivation out
Scott Ritzheimer
of the grind? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Carrie Fabris
This is a juicy one. I would say that founders are going to often preach about mindset and how to motivate, but they may not practice it exactly. They unknowingly lead, sometimes from fear, like a scarcity mindset, perfectionism, control, and they might call it high standards, but teams will feel that energy. And so if we shift the mindset of to a mindset of trust, ownership, possibility, performance doesn’t just rise, it’s going to kind of sustain itself. And you can think of it almost like an emotional compound interest. And I know a lot of people at work don’t like the E word. They don’t like to talk about emotions, which, you know, we can talk about in the in the next, in the next stage, but in the frame it method, we’re going to walk the leader through a few different mindsets, four in particular. One is the Ownership mindset, which is taking full responsibility of your outcomes, behaviors and growth. And there’s no blaming. There’s no excuses. This ties back to above the line thinking versus below the line thinking. The second one is progress mindset, so valuing growth over perfection. Okay, so moving forward, even if sometimes slowly, we all remember the tortoise and the hare, sometimes we do need to slow down to speed up and win the race. The third one is purpose alignment, and so that’s connecting your daily work to a bigger why, or personal value. And this one’s always interesting, because it’s also your purpose might be completely different than the leader that you hired to come to work. You know, for you, they might have a different purpose. So again, there’s just all these different types of conversations we can have around this. And then the fourth mindset is energy conservation. So it’s protecting your time and energy by setting boundaries and focusing on what matters. And so we talk about these and how you are radiating these, how you’re demonstrating these, how you’re teaching these mindsets and motivating your leadership team, also by role modeling the way. And so it all boils down to how the founder is role modeling the behavior that they want for a productive, high performing team, and working 15 hour workdays, a shit ton of coffee, no sleep and anxiety is not the answer, and that’s not what we role model.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true. It’s so fascinating, how how easy it is to slip out of modeling the right thing, especially from a sustainability perspective. I want to get us to this, this last part of frame, at least, and that is to elevate and execute, tell us a little bit about what that means, and how do emotions and EQ play into that.
Carrie Fabris
Yeah. So this is taking everything we’ve done in the frame, it method, and really wrapping it up to where we can now execute it with our team. And, you know, you and I may or may not get to the IT part, which is integrating all of this into the function with the team itself, but when it comes to emotions. So let’s touch on that as since you asked is, you know, can emotionally can emotional intelligence, be trained. Let’s just say, or let’s ask. And I would say almost always, yes, growth is always going to start with awareness, and we have to have awareness first. Then we need desire and willingness to show up, right? So the emotional intelligence is absolutely trainable, because. It’s a muscle. And most founders were not handed a gym pass early in life. So they can assume, you know, they they will assume, I’m just not wired to be emotional. And I will tell you many times I have heard executives say, remove all emotion from the conversation. And I’m like, okay, Time out. Time out. Humans cannot remove all emotion. It is not possible. What we can do is we can be intelligent with our emotions. So it’s trainable because it’s a skill. We treat it like a skill through feedback, awareness, repetition, working with someone and helping them understand what this looks like, they take an assessment, so we have data, and we start that as a foundation, and we build from that with through coaching and helping them understand what this looks like, what this feels like. So every day we wake up, we are that person who had the childhood, who had the programming from those that raised us. We are the one that had the experience as good and bad that shaped us. And we also have choice. Every morning we wake up, we have the choice to change who we are today and tomorrow, despite all of the past. And so we also have the, you know, we can choose to see how being emotionally intelligent can serve us and others. And if we don’t, and we want to stay in, let’s just say, victim mode, then I would say that emotional intelligence would be more difficult to train, learn and adopt, and that’s why I say it’s almost always trainable. But we, at this final phase, are taking you will have taken the Clifton Strengths Assessment, the emotional intelligence EQI assessment. You’ve gone through situational leadership. You’re also doing career frame proprietary assessments that are specifically created for the frame and method. So you have all this data for us to build on, and then we go and integrate that over time, through reiterating everything that the person has gone through.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, we’ve covered a lot of ground, and we’ll show folks how they can get to the it part of this here in just a moment. But before we get there, there’s a question that I ask, that I ask all my guests, and the question is this, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Carrie Fabris
Everyone needs a coach. The highest performing individuals in the world have a coach. Elite athletes. They all have coaches. The most all star CEOs have coaches. It is an accountability partner. A lot of times it feels like work. Therapy is an advisor. It’s tough love. It’s the mirror holder. They’re the support system that helps someone truly elevate and truly have an exceptional culture within their company, and many founders and leaders do not think they need one that’s woo, woo stuff. I don’t have time for it, and they’re working harder, not smarter. So everyone needs a coach.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah So good, yeah. Carrie, there’s some folks who need a coach. There’s some founders listening who would love to find out more about this. There’s folks who want to know just what is this it? What’s the integration track? How does that work? Where can folks find the rest of the frameit method, and where can they reach out to you for more information?
Carrie Fabris
Yeah. So again, the IT of Frameit is integrating everything that the leader has gone through, and we are now their accountability partner, kind of side by side with them, as they start bringing all of these teachings and learnings into their team and start creating or embedding it into the culture. So that’s really it a lot of times. You know? It’s a shot of espresso, short lived Leadership Program. This is ongoing. This is making sure that we don’t just do something quickly and then we, you know, put it in our metaphorical drawer. We never look at it again. This is ongoing, frequent accountability, practicing doing it so it starts to stick. And all the investment, time, money, investment that the person has given is actually showing results. Okay, so that’s the whole it, part of frame it. We are in the process of a completely new website redesign that will be launching in early February. So right now you can find us when you will always be able to find us at careerframe.com and we will have our new website up in the early February where you will find more information about frame it. In the meantime, Scott, I think you’ve got something that you can post in the show notes for them to get a flyer and information on the frameit model to connect with us. It’s literally going to careerframe Send us a connection request. I’m also on LinkedIn. I’m on Instagram. I only do Facebook for personal stuff, so any of those ways are a great a great way to find us. And I would absolutely welcome talking to any of your listeners to see how we can help them elevate themselves and their team.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Head to careerframe.com and we’ll get all those links in the show notes for. You guys, so you don’t have to find it just a quick plug. Carrie also has the book all in a working mom’s unapologetic quest for a juicy life. Fantastic read, really fun. You feel like you’re right there every step of the way, Carrie, where can folks find the book and get a copy themselves?
Carrie Fabris
Yeah, sure. So we do have a link to the book on our website, on careerframe.com and we are also on Amazon as well. What I have learned is there are a few books with the name all in, one of them being from the great Billy King. So to find it easier, you would type in all in Carrie Fabris, and then it will pop up. But again, you can go to careerframe.com and there is a link to the book from her website.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, fantastic. Well, with that, Carrie, thank you so much. An honor and privilege having you on the show. Thank you so much. This was fun, and for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Carrie Fabris
With over 20 years of corporate experience and 15+ years in leadership roles at Google, Travelocity, Sabre, and Travel Leaders Corporate, Carrie combines real-world business insight with her expertise in CliftonStrengths®, EQ-i 2.0, and Situational Leadership®. Through her signature FRAMEit Method, she delivers high-energy, actionable coaching and workshops that help leaders bridge the gap between achievement and legacy, while maintaining balance, purpose, and impact in their professional and personal lives. Carrie is also the author of ALL IN: The Working Mom’s Unapologetic Quest for a Juicy Life, sharing her personal journey of navigating corporate ambition, entrepreneurship, and motherhood without compromise.
Want to learn more about Carrie Fabris’s work at CareerFrame? Check out her website at https://www.carriefabris.com/
Get a copy of her book All In: A Working Mom’s Unapologetic Quest for a Juicy Life at https://www.amazon.com/All-Working-Unapologetic-Quest-Juicy/dp/1945587776
Check her The FRAMEit™ Method Flyer at https://www.scalearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/FrameIt_Flyer_Final.pdf