Growth Mindset: Thriving In The Face Of Change With Andy Clement - Replay

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Barkel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change.

Proof. Hey, everybody. Today, Today on the Change Proof podcast, I'm joined by Andy Clement, a name maybe you don't recognize, but he's been an executive with an epic company called Kimberly Clark for the last 30 years. He's had 18 different roles, including sales, marketing, strategy, innovation, manufacturing, and general management. He's currently the Chief Customer Officer and he's been in that role since 2019. And of course, you know, talking with him today about the pandemic and how Kimberly Clark and his teams have been resilient in the face of so much change and so much disruption is really something I'm looking forward to, to put it mildly. So just please give it up in your space for this amazing interview that, that I feel really honored to have with Andy Clement. So, Andy, I know it, it's always a strange thing, I think, when you hear somebody else read or say like bio and your introduction and maybe, you know, I think I kind of, I don't know if I twisted your arm to get on the show because it's not, you know, with all the years that you've been with Kimberly Clark and all the different roles, I mean, 18 different roles, actually, interestingly enough, I didn't see sort of speaker trainer as one of those roles. So maybe today is going to be the beginning of like a 19th role.

For you, you know, to update the bio. Sounds good. Yeah.

Update the b. So my question is, what's something that's not a part of your bio that you would love for people to know about you at the outset?

Yeah, I mean, I think the bio has lots of information about my career. Kimberly Clark, which is all great, but it's kind of probably more the personal stuff that it's not in there.

Right.

You know, my 20 year old daughter, she turns 20 this week, was diagnosed with diabetes on her first birthday. You want to talk about resilience and what I've witnessed her have to go through over the past 19 years and, you know, being with her, my wife and I have been heavily involved in JDRF in Camp Kudzu, which is a diabetes children's camp, City of Hope, which does a lot of fundraising and research for type 1 diabetes. So that's something I'm really passionate about. And then the other thing that's not in the bio is just what we've done at North Pointe Church over the past 10, 12 years, leading small groups there. That's Andy Stanley's church here in Alpharetta, Georgia. You may have heard of Charles Stanley. I've always kind of found that that's a way to get away from it all and get away from kind of the day to day at work and make sure that you're thinking about things that are bigger and, you know, rebuilding yourself for Monday morning when you have to go back to work.

Yeah, I think a really good segues where you started there in asking you if you've got your own personal definition of resilience. What does resilience look like to Andy Clement?

Yeah, I mean, to me it's kind of quite simply the ability to recover quickly from challenges. Right. Day in and day out. And those they happen at work, they happen at home. But that's, you know, in simplistic terms, kind of how I think about it.

Indeed. Yeah. You know, it was interesting, I thought in our work together in my asking that question to, you know, group of your leaders, how everybody has their own definition, right? Everybody defines resilience a little, a little differently, which is curious. I'm curious, does Kimberly Clark have a definition or do you see in the culture or in the, in sort of the value statements or mission statements that resilience is something that the organization that has been around for what now 150 years, do they actually define resilience, do you think?

You know, not that I know of, but our culture, purpose is purpose led, performance driven. Okay. And I think that somewhat does tie to resiliency, that if you are purpose led, you are, I believe, going to be more resilient in the ability to get through, through the day to day challenges. Right. I mean, you talk in your book about the growth mindset, right. And that's actually something we've been promoting a lot in Kimberly Clark the past couple months, which is, as you know, really accepting challenges. Right. And not running away from them, learning from them, being okay to fail. Right. And as I think about the history of Kimberly Clark and myself, I think that growth mindset has really helped us be around for a while and does tie to our culture. Does that make sense to you?

It totally does. And it has me thinking, you know, the concept of a growth mindset, I think people get that. They get it on a, on a, on a philosophical level. I want to go maybe get a little more granular even to get so what is, what does it look like? What does it mean to have a growth mindset to you?

I mean, to me it's, it's not if you're going to have challenges, it's when you get them, how you act right and you view them as opportunities for business improvement, for self improvement, versus kind of shutting down and saying, hey, you know, I've been successful, we're just going to do it my way. And then, I mean, there's lots of examples of this growth mindset through Kimberly Clark's history and even the past couple years at Kimberly Clark, you know, through the pandemic of how we've got to have adapt and kind of overcome challenges.

So let's, let's take a scenario like maybe a common scenario like there's somebody in the sales area. I don't know. I'm just picking sales, for example, because often, you know, salespeople are being, you know, they're, they're getting yeses and they're getting no's. And when somebody, you know, I love winning business. I am a huge fan of that. Nothing more fun than that really. But when you lose business or meaning you, you lose a client, lose a customer, or when you just don't get one that you think you can, you ought to, you want to, et cetera, you know, in that moment, it can really be depleting. People can really get caught, really caught up in the emotion of the rejection, et cetera. So if you're applying a growth mindset, looking at what Kimberly Clark has no doubt been able to do over, I mean, gosh, 15 decades. Yeah, say it that way. You know, what do you say to somebody who's, who's in sales and they, they lose, they lose a client. Customer.

Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. Salespeople hate to lose. We're very passionate. Right. But I think figuring out what you're going to do differently and how you're going to approach that similar typ customer in the future so you don't lose. Right. You know, and we do have a process here at KC where we look at the big deals we lost and kind of step back and say, now what happened? You know, how could we have done this differently? Right. Sometimes it was the relationship our national account manager didn't have with that end user. Sometimes it was the selling method, sometimes it was maybe a product we didn't have that we can then build into our R and D funnel, you know, to make sure that our team's developing that. But you know, these types of losses or problems can be gold if they're not ignored. Right. And it also means like, hey, okay, you missed your quota. You didn't get these four or five sales that we expected it to. That's okay. But how do we make sure that we make you better in the future? That's kind of a growth mindset from a sales manager perspective versus a hey, I'm gonna have to put you on a plan.

So, yeah, that's the worst. The worst words you can hear is, hey, I'm gonna have to put you on the plan. I mean, there's worse words, obviously, we know the one that comes after that.

Exactly, exactly. You know, but that's typically how we try to handle it.

Yeah. I mean, I think the value of feedback cannot. Cannot really be overstated in my, in my experience and that, that often feedback, while so valuable, on the one hand, I've worked with a lot of organizations and I, I've been running, running or part of senior leadership in organizations that I was more integral in its getting started kind of thing. But we say feedback is great and yet often there aren't systems for giving and receiving valuable feedback. Like you said, there's a golden nugget. It's like, are we looking to find it? Do we have the capacity even to find it? So the three things that we came up with some years ago that I'll share just for folks that haven't heard this model are three questions that we will often ask, and I'm curious if Casey does something similar to this. One is the question, what's working for me? You know, like, what worked in this situation? Followed by the question, well, what didn't work in this situation that we're talking about? And then finally, what could be done differently? And I think what's been valuable in my just having used this for a long, long time now is starting first of all with, you know, what. What actually did go right. You know, what are the things that you'd say, yeah, that really did work follow, because it's starting in a positive place, for one thing. And we often, when we're talking about criticism, critique or feedback, you know, Right. It's like you immediately go to, this is why this, you know, should never happen again or whatever it might be. But starting in that place of what didn't work, get very direct and specific about that. And then ultimately, what's the, as you said, the growth. What's the growth opportunity. What could be done differently? We don't know if it's going to be done better or worse. Right. That's the thing. We never know he's got a crystal ball. But we know one thing, we could do it differently and get a different result. Do you guys have a kind of a formalized system to provide?

Well, yeah, it's a great, it's a great point. And I would tell you, KC in general, across the company does a very good job of asking for and providing feedback. It was a big cultural change about 12 years ago that we trained everybody on. It felt very uncomfortable at first, but we've gotten pretty good at it. Specifically in sales. The three questions you talked about, I mean, we have a very structured process around pipeline reviews that, you know, starts with me to my, my leaders, my leaders to their middle managers, the sales managers, then to our reps, where you look at all the accounts that are in the pipeline and you look at the ones that have closed and say, what can we learn from that? What did we do? Right. You look at the ones that maybe we lost, then that fell out of the pipeline and that's back to then the, okay, what happened and what can we do differently? You know, and that happens at a very senior level and it happens at a very junior level. And when you get in that routine of doing it, I think you begin to build that growth mindset that we talked about.

Yeah. I think the thing, the one thing too that we've heard in, in doing this in a kind of a formalized way, it's, it's not quite, you know, you try not to have it be mechanical because then people are just like, well, we're going through the motions on that thing as opposed to something else. Right. But it, what we found is that when people are open, when they see that the feedback is actually a thing that fills them up. I like to say that feedback should be something that's additive, not subtracted. So you're not, you don't, you know, you can, you can steal somebody's dignity very easily. You can steal their self esteem. You can steal, you know, a win from somebody. You can steal so much with, with the way that you provide that feedback or you can really plus them in some way. And that's what I've heard a lot. That just that being so open to getting it and to giving the feedback in an environment like that, you know, you feel like people really have your backs. Is something that you and we talked about with your group. Right. Is that, you know, you ultimately want to know that people are there and.

They got your back.

Right.

Well, and I think a lot of that ties to why Kimberly Clark has been around for 150 years. A lot of it is the culture, right? Okay. It is a very supportive culture. Not, not out to get you, not backstabbing, but just, hey, we want to win together. How can I lift you up? How can I, you know, give the feedback to help you grow? And that's why people like myself stay at Kimberly Clark for 30 years, is because of the culture. And I've just had, whether it's bosses, whether it's mentors or peers or people that work for me, I feel like you've just done that to me. And like you said, it's how you give the feedback, whether it's pipeline review or somewhere else to pass it along.

So what do you think gets in the way of resilience? I mean, I think you're bought into the idea that today, in a world of constant, you know, a never ending change, right? We wrote this book Change Proof. It had a leverage, uncertainty to build our long term growth. Resilience is this unsung hero in that, that, you know, ultimately, if we're resilient, we're going to figure stuff out, right? You're going to, you're going to make a bunch of mistakes along the way. But if you've been around 150 years, you figured out more, more than you, you didn't figure out. What gets in the way of resilience, do you think? And how important, you know, how important is resilience, in your opinion?

Yeah, I mean, it's really important. I think one thing that gets in the way, and you talk about this in the change proof book, is the deposits and the withdrawals, right? You know, is that if you're pulling too much out, we all have a breaking point where we withdraw or we get stressed and we get to burnout, right? So you've got to make those deposits, right? You've got to find the time to exercise, to get away, to have breakfast with your wife, to, you know, meditate, whatever it is that helps you, right? Because if you take too much on, eventually you will break, you know. And for example, we had a guy that works for me that is a top notch leader that just was burning out a couple weeks ago and it was a Thursday night and he called me and I just said, hey, you know, take the next day off, take the weekend off. I didn't tell him that this is about a deposit withdrawal, right? But that's basically what it was looking back, right? And he called me the following Monday, said, I feel so much Better. Thank you for letting me do that. Right. And sometimes it's on us as leaders to be able to recognize when people are kind of at that breaking point. So does that make sense to you?

You know, I mean, it really does, because the idea of this bank account is like a resilience bank account, but it's like any other bank account. Like, if you withdraw more than you put in, you get a love letter from the bank.

Right.

I was an attorney for a bunch of years, so that's the way we used to refer to those little letters. You know, those nice little letters you send out. It's a love letter and you get, ding, 25 bucks or whatever it might be. But when we're. When we're depleted, when we're withdrawing from our resilience bank account, mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually more than we're depositing, then that overdraft or that state of being overdrawn shows up in other ways. And it sounds like you met key person in your team that was showing those signs of being overdrawn.

Yes. No, that was it. Exactly right. That was it. Exactly. And luckily they made some deposits over the weekend and didn't have to get any more of the nasty letters or the penalties from the bank. Right, yeah.

Well, I want to talk about uncertainty for a second, which is, if you can give us an idea, how has uncertainty impacted the business?

It's been a challenge. There's been a lot of uncertainty the past two years since the pandemic hit. Right. And so I think we took for granted a much more certain world before 2020. I mean, just think about selling. It was very easy and very certain in the model that all of us had grown up in, in KC and in our industry. Right. Face to face selling, leveraging pretty good relationships, of course, strong negotiating. Then all of a sudden, everybody had to do it digitally. Everybody had to do it virtually. You had to have a camera on you versus doing it in person. A lot of it had to be done using digital assets for the first time, which was very different. And so that was a lot of uncertainty and a big pivot that we had to make. You know, not just my sales organization, all sales organizations. And it was hard, but I. I was proud of how the team adapted over a couple of years.

Yeah. You know, I'll say this, Andy, without naming any companies. I mean, I get this. The privilege of getting embedded on some level in organizations and because they bring me in to. To speak on. On resilience and some other strategies for, for developing individual More individual and organizational resilience. I get to ask the question, what are your challenges and what are the things that are, you know. Exh. So that's when it becomes. It becomes a very interesting moment of transparency. I get a lot of, I think, quite real information. And one of those things has to do with the sales teams that the challenge you just brought up, the uncertainty about how we do this in a world that we used to do it very differently. And as we know, or I'll say, this is what I've heard you tell me this is the case, things have not gone back. I don't know that they'll maybe ever go back to the way they were. Because the customers are also pretty okay with it being instead of face to face, eye to eye, over lunch or a handshake or something, that they're doing it virtually. And so those same salespeople thinking that the pandemic was going to end and things would go back to some thing that was more familiar to them. No, it has not happened. Has that?

You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right.

How have your sales people continued to pivot or, you know, and what does that look like for you guys?

Yeah, I mean, your selling organization starts with your buyers, right? You have to build your selling organization around the buyers. And like you said, it was slowly changing this way. You know, between 2015 and 2020, it accelerated significantly when all the buyers were sitting in their basements instead of in an office. Right. And they started experiencing the fact that, you know, I can get most of my information on B2B products, like I do my at home products digitally. I can buy them this way. And yes, I do need to interact with the salesperson, but it can be done virtually or it can be done occasionally in person, but not three to four times for a purchase. So it was a big transition. Some people, I would tell you, that were more resilient, had a growth mindset, were like, hey, I got it. And others kind of struggled at times. Part of the reason we wanted you to speak to our team earlier in the year is to just kind of build that resiliency, muscle up, Right? But within our team, we have really trained everybody on this idea of hybrid selling is that you got to look at your buyer, you got to look at their stage where they are, you know, if they want to have a digital interaction, great. If they want a face to face interaction, great. But really think about your selling method and model based on what the buyers want. Does that make sense?

Totally does, yeah. So you guys Pivoted like a lot of folks did in that time. And I wish, man, I wish since I wrote a book called pivot a few years back, I wish I got sort of a dime for every time people have used that word in the last. In the last few years, man, I was a little ahead of the curve with pivot. I think change proof really met them all. More met the moment, you know, timing wise. But. But I'll use the word now. So what. And this is a broad question, so anything in particular, but what have you learned from the pivoting? What have. What's that been like and you personally or, you know, just within the teams that you've seen?

Yeah, I mean, I have definitely learned that whole idea of look at your buyer and adjust your selling method and organization accordingly and just don't think about one selling method. It's going to be continuous improvement based on your buyers. I've been amazed at how certain people in our organization have been able to pivot and be successful with it. Quite frankly. Certain people that I maybe would not have thought of initially and then other people that maybe were outstanding sellers in a previous model have taken more time to get there, you know, that kind of weren't as change proof. Kind of thought that they would all go back to the way it was. And as you said, it's not going back to the way it is. And it's hard to predict necessarily how people are going to react to that and whether they've got that growth mindset or not.

Yeah, indeed. Now, I know that one of the things that we did talk about was how it is that, you know, if resilience is something that we have to have and the time to create it is now, before you'll need it next. That was sort of first level, but the second level was developing. Resilience is about ritualizing your recovery. It's not about trying to outrun the pandemic or outsmart or see somehow see into the future like you get a crystal ball. Maybe you could do it, but probability wise, not likely. But ritualizing our recovery means that we're not depleted. And when we're not depleted, we have the resources mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually to deal with almost anything. I mean, that's the one truism about not just Kimberly Clark, but about the human species, is that we are incredibly adaptive and we can deal with a lot more than we think often that we can, and do it even elegantly, do it in a really positive and productive way. So I'd be curious to know what are some of the rituals that you have for your own recovery? If you could share a couple of those personally with us. And maybe what are some things that you've worked on that maybe didn't pan out like you stopped doing because it didn't work, or things that you're even experimenting with in this moment?

Yeah, I mean, certainly making sure that you take time for yourself. Exercising, sleep, eating. Right. Those are very obvious. Right. But still easier said than done sometimes. Right. Spending time with my family, my wife. The nice thing about the last couple of years is I haven't had to travel as much. And so we can have breakfast every day, connect, you know, away from work before the phones start ringing, you know, spending time spiritually, certainly at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, really important. I mean, one of the things I got from your book was, you know, writing down your code of conduct each day, which I have done, and I keep it by my home office and my work office. I'm at my work office now. Right. Looking at, at that every day. There's six or seven things on here. Right. But one of them is just making sure that I, as the chief customer officer, are doing all I can to put the customer first every day within Kimberly Clark. Right. That's a, that's a sales type thing that I, that I try to do. Right. But you know, I have found. And you said this in your book, if you don't do that and look at it every day, guess what? Certain things start to fall off. And so thank you for that. I have swiped it with gratitude.

Yeah. There for you to take.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, that's one of the things we won't, we won't talk about what the specifics around that are. Maybe it's a little teaser for people to go get the book or what have you. But the code of conduct is in essence, a way to start your day with the end in mind. So, like reverse engineering, go at the end of this day, which, you know, if we're blessed, we'll get to the end of the day safe and sound and all that. How did you want to experience the day? What would you have liked to have experienced during the day? Or even experienced how you were being the way you experience yourself during the day? So my theory is that if you start with that in mind, this greater likelihood that that's actually what you end up with, and that's just proven out. I know I only have anecdotal what people say about having used it. And my own personal use of it to go on there. But it's great to know that that's something that you've adopted and that, that it's clearly, you know, paying a dividend of sorts.

So it works. It really does. It really does. And I thought it was a little corny to print it out and read it every morning and every night, you know, but I was like, yeah, give it a shot. And sure enough, it keeps you focused. And hey, you know, I can be my own harshest critic at times. And sometimes I'm like, Andy, you did not do all the things on here, right? So what are you going to do differently tomorrow?

I love it. Yeah. I mean, the other thing, too, I'm not sure if you've done. So we started. You took a resilience assessment. Like, we've got this resilience assessment that we've been using for a bunch of years with a lot of, I gush, I don't know. It's hundreds of organizations now, thousands of leaders, and I don't remember what, what your score was, the rank in those four different resilient zones. But. And I should have said this to you even before we started our podcast today, but if you've not yet taken it again, it would be kind of cool to have you do it again. And by the way, people are listening, you won't take the same exact one is Andy, because we've, we did something specific for, for the Kimberly Clark folks. But you can go to rankmyresilience.com or resiliencerank.com and get your own. It takes about three minutes. It's 16 questions. But Andy would be really cool if you did that, if you haven't already and see what the before and after scores look like.

I need to do that. And I took it the first time. I don't, I haven't printed out at home, but I don't actually remember off top of my head what the scores were. But I definitely had room for improvement. And I think a lot of the KC people did, you know. And as you may recall, we had even done just a sales test even before we engaged you last year, ranking and looking at where the Kimberly Clark sales team was strong and where we had room for improvement. And we were good at negotiating and selling with insights and closing deals. But it was this idea of resiliency, especially in certain functions where we were not as good and me included as we would like to be. And that was kind of what prompted us to, you know, to head down this path with you and It'd be good, actually, for everybody to kind of retake the test, as I think about it, Thinking about it, too.

That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, Andy, I've so enjoyed the conversation and the insights, and it's congrats to not only the company being around so long, you know, but you've been with the company the equivalent of, I think, what, one fifth of the time that the. I'm making you feel old right now. I'm so sorry, but you are. I mean, 30 years with a company these days is really unheard of. And I think that in part it's because companies aren't around that long. That's obvious. But then there's also this other thing where the culture of those organizations doesn't really support the longevity of someone like yourself. So I think it's definite, pat on the back to Casey, that they've got a culture that would nurture someone like you so that you could be around and be continuing your growth. And I see it in your eyes. I've heard it in your voice and everything. There's just no. There's no end in sight, you know, at the moment. So you're being able to influence in a positive way all these other young leaders, these new leaders, and helping them to have even just, you know, some of the resilience that you've had and the career with a great company, I think is just remarkable. So thank you so much for.

Thank you, Adam. Enjoyed the conversation for sure. So congratulations on the book. It seems just to be great.

So fantastic, folks. We love that you provide us with your feedback, so please feel free to do that. You know, you can subscribe to the podcast on any of the, you know, in the formats that you. You dig. And you can go to AdamMarkel.com podcast if you'd like to leave a comment there. You can leave a review on itunes. And of course, if you've not yet taken the resilience assessment, you can do that@resiliencerank.com that's simple. And if you want to find out more about change proof, get the book. And you can also get the assessment there as well. You can go to changeproof.com very simple place to get more of what we've been talking about today with Andy Clement. We'll see you soon. And thank you so much. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation with Andy Clement. Man, I tell you, working in a company that's been around for 150 years like Kimberly Clark is special to be with that organization for 30 years in in 18 different roles. Talk about serial pivoting. I mean, just amazing. And, and I love the conversation, especially since we were able to get into, you know, really nitty gritty, detailed conversation around things like feedback and how it is that, that feedback is such an important tool to be able to make those pivots, to see what, what's been working, what's not been working, and what in fact could be done differently. I love the fact that we got to really dig into Andy's personal definition of resilience as well as how resilience is operationalized within an organization such as Kimberly Clark and, and how it is that, that even big companies like that, not only do they have to be resilient, but they have to deal with this ever present uncertainty that all of us deal with. Of course. And within, within a company that's got so many thousands of people that are performing so many different roles where things are uncertain, you know, it could really have a devastating ripple effect across many, many different channels. So I love the fact that we got to talk specifically about this uncertainty, especially in the arena of sales and the fact that in so many ways when the pandemic hit, people really had to relearn how to sell. I mean, this is a function that is almost, you know, you can't do without it. In a business, there's some things that are a bit optional, but every business has to be able to sell. There's no money, there's no, there's no, nothing being sold. There is no business. I mean, we get that. It's so vitally important. And when you're on the ground, your boots on the ground sales team don't know how to sell because everything that has been the way the standard operating procedure for selling is no longer operative, is no longer relevant. As has happened when all in person meetings to discuss and to enroll disappeared, stopped entirely. And to this point, even two years beyond the beginning of the pandemic, much of that has not been restored. People have had to learn how to sell virtually, be online, be on a, on a zoom or some other face to face digital meeting, and had to create assets, digital assets to present the story of the product and be able to continue to develop that relationship and that enrollment conversation in ways that had never been done for most of these sales folks before. So that was really, I thought, quite interesting to hear Andy talk about where his team was at the beginning, the struggles and challenges that they had along the way, the pivots they made, and ultimately where they are now. A more resilient organization, a more resilient selling selling system and sales team thought that also really powerful and has lessons for all of us that are whether we're we're a sort of a solo preneur act or we're running or part of a larger organization. So being change proof is the name of the game right now folks. We've got to learn how to navigate constant, never ending change. And the way that we do that is by creating resilience, resilient systems, resilient individuals and resilient organizations. Because then we don't have to worry about weathering a storm. We use the storm, we utilize the storm, whatever the storm might be, as a catalyst for our growth. Which is something that Andy and I talked about as well. You know how it is that we more and more are able to model and produce greater growth mindset within the groups that we find ourselves a part of. So changes change is constant. Change is not going anywhere anytime soon and none of us have a crystal ball. The uncertainty is going to be there. What we can count on is being resilient and being able to well not know what the unknowns will be or know what the uncertainty will be. We know that we can plan for how we perform in that state of unknown or uncertainty. And if we're performing in a resilient way, if we're performing in a way that is growth centered, then ultimately the change, regardless of what it might be, is net positive to us. And I think that's just what we're looking for personally and professionally. So love the interview, love the conversation with Andy Clement today.

Thanks for listening everyone.

We hope you now have even more.

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Sam.