Company Values Masterclass with Lynn Walder, Founder & Principal of Executive Management Partners

Lynn Walder is the founder and principal of Executive Management Partners, and she's also one of the folks at Lab Central. You may remember her from an earlier interview we did with her. More on the Lab Central ecosystem and how she helps the labs get going there. But today we are doing a masterclass on culture. Lynn has helped to build many biotechs and she has really studied how to make a really good culture. What do foundational core values mean? And who needs to create those values and uphold them? So buckle up because this is a little bit different than our normal episode. So if you're curious about what makes a good culture and what makes a bad culture, this episode's for you. Welcome to Building Biotechs by Recredomics Consulting. We've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human health. We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm Karina Klingman, founder and principal at Reconomics Consulting. Enjoy the show.

Well, Lynn, thank you so much for joining us again. You are our first repeat guest on Building Biotechs and we are honored to have you here.

Thank you. I'm so grateful to be back. I. I loved my time last time with you. I'm excited to talk about culture as a very passionate topic of mine. Lynn, you're a great guest to have.

On for this because you've been in.

The biotech industry for a while now.

And you've helped a lot of companies grow. You've seen a lot of culture cultures.

That have been really successful.

You've probably seen several that have not.

So we're going to pick your brain.

On that as a whole. You know, have you. Let's just start with the basics. What have you seen kind of shift in the past, I don't know, two decades? Would that be a fair amount of time?

Yeah, yeah. Because I've been in the biotech realm for about 15 years now, and obviously I was working in other industries prior to that and I've worked in all different size companies as well, which has been a very helpful benchmark to see what works and what does not work. I do believe that there has been a shift more towards the understanding of importance of culture and an investment in it in a different way than it used to be many, many years ago. I think that it's very industry specific and we have been blessed that we work in the biotech industry, which is Quite progressive in the, I would say, operationalizing of culture and investing in the strategy of culture. Still a lot of work to do and we can talk more about that. But in general, I would say it used to be kind of this like side gig that was living under hr and it was about fun times and events and making people feel good and. And there really wasn't a lot of, I would say, importance placed on it at the leadership level. And I feel like that has changed, especially within the last five years. I mean, Covid really blew it out of the water of pulling back the veil of how important it is for connection and accountability and the idea of behaviors and how we come together, particularly in times of crisis. And so I have philosophies that have built up around that. I also have experienced the implementation of what everybody considers core values, which I get saucy about that too. So we can talk about what I think needs to be happening there from a complete paradigm shift of when and how those get implemented. So that's the beauty of being in biotech and working across so many different companies at different sizes. I've seen where a culture and thoughtful implementation of culture has worked well and I've also seen it where it hasn't worked so well. That has kind of brought me to where I am today with some of my theories and you know, I love frameworks that. And so I've put together and I'm testing out an updated framework right now within the lab central area. And some in my consulting world as well, I'm very explicit about how I define culture. And when I go in and speak with companies that want to work with me on implementing culture initiatives, I meet with the leaders first and I ask them straight up, and I'm going to ask you actually, what do you think culture is? How do you define culture?

Ooh, putting us on the spot here.

Yes, I am. This is what I do to leaders when I work with them. So I like that.

So personally, I think culture is a combination of the mission and the values of the company and how people in the company embody that. And I think that comes from the top. So I think culture typically needs to be a trickle down effect. So we need leaders to start to embody it. I also think that typically when a leader is talking to their company and this should be a regular check in, whatever that looks like in the company, I think that should be, if possible, you should lead with culture and mission. This is what we're doing and this is why, and this is the direction and this is why. And so kind of tying it back to that, that mission or that culture. You said something earlier that really, it sparked a lot of memories. You said those core values on the wall and things like that. We, that was a big thing, right? Again, I'm looking back to the 2000s. Every single biotech I used to walk into would have this, you know, five or six values painted on the wall. First thing when you walk in, right. Or in every conference room was like named for a different core value. And I don't think that's culture that I have not seen actually become culture.

Yes.

The culture question is so difficult, right? Because it's like, does your culture actually trickle down, like you said, Karina, into actually being the values? It's like two different things that really should tie together. But I think what you see is people giving credence to one and not the other. And it doesn't tie together for the entire ecosystem. And so honestly, I'm not going to be able. You're able to answer the question better than Karina did because that really hit a lot of points and you threw a thumbs up in there. So now I just, I feel like you gave her the answer before the podcast.

I'm going to expand a little bit because again, great start, starting point. And the two thumbs up that I gave were around. It's, it truly is a top down affair when it comes to the implementation of core values. And I think this is where a lot of the approaches to companies working towards discerning and then implementing core values breaks down. Because the, the experiences I have had with companies that have gone to work on their core values has some pretty major flaws in it. And I will go through those right now. The first one is many times companies and leaders, they don't even think about core values until they're, I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 employees. Your culture is already embedded at that point. Most of the time when they're bringing in people at that stage of a company to do a core values exercise is what they're internalizing is there's a lot of behaviors I'm seeing around here that I don't like. And I want to codify something so that people follow what I want them to follow. So it's a little bit of cleanup from, I would almost say a lack of leadership, focus on behavioral accountability. And so that's number one is I think the timing. I'm a big believer that values should be implemented way earlier, I would say under the 10 employee mark. And the main reason of that being is leaders are the decision makers and the resource holders of the company. And whenever I give my presentation on what do you think culture is? I I ask the question and then I read through a couple of quotes. And we all know Simon Sinek. He wrote the Power of why, right? And his definition of culture is cultures who you hire, fire and reward. That's like his simplified version, which is quite true. And then I also read a book that I was shaking my head like, yes, almost the entire time, which was written by an individual and a leadership development thought leader called Cy Wakeman. And her definition is culture is organically created by the worst behaviors that leadership is willing to accept. And that's kind of an expansion of that, of, you know, who you hire, fire and reward. Right. I layer onto that even further because I wanted to be much more explicit about where culture really comes from and how it stays and remains sustained and why it's so important to do it very early on. And I believe that culture is ultimately defined by the desired behaviors that, that leadership clearly and consistently communicates and then holds their employees and themselves accountable to, which is a lot of the disconnect you end up seeing when it's a much larger company. And that's why when I come in, I have a very specific approach that I have been testing out to help rectify some of these gaps. And I'm going to share a quick story that is the perfect example of what you run into when you are working with a company that has tried to implement core values and they bring everybody into the room and they say, well, how do you feel about this organization and what are, what's most important to you? And they're asking these questions and they'll bring you through exercises. If you were a car, what kind of car would you be? And, and they ask you all of these, I would say, kind of psychology questions. Right. The problem with that is twofold. The first part is that people aren't always self aware of what their true underlying values are, of how they react in the moment, particularly under stress. That's, that's number one. Number two, when you get to a certain size and you haven't already codified and been able to communicate what your expectations are from the people who are the decision makers and the resource allocators in the company. You have too many values that have come on because you haven't been recruiting or communicating or aligning the, the building of your organization, both from a talent acquisition standpoint, but also a behavioral accountability framework standpoint. I call it operationalizing these values, core values. And when I work on them, I call them foundational values because they're so early and they can morph and change over time. These are really important. They're meant to inspire in good times. That's what we've seen. When you go in and it's on the wall and you have all the swag and it's in the, you know, you have all the cool stuff that's meant to inspire, but real values, both in professional and personal life, they're really meant to guide you through times of change, uncertainty, and real crisis. There's supposed to be a line in the sand that, that you hold onto when the storm is coming through and you say, I'm going to stay on this side of the line. And even if it's painful, this is what I believe. And that's actually not the mindset that most of these individuals go into looking at core values with. They're like, we just want to bring everybody together and have people have an understanding of what we think is important for building a resilient business. Right. The story I want to share is I worked with a leader a number of years ago and I was in charge working with HR on redefining. Actually, we didn't even have core values at that point. And so we, we were about, maybe we were about the 60, 60 employee mark at that point. So they wanted to codify the core values. We went through the entire exercise, worked with an incredible, incredible communications vendor. Absolutely amazing. And we did all the exercises and actually we did it from the bottom up and the top down. There was a huge committee that actually worked on and did incredible work with gathering all the information from all the employees and sussing it down. And, um, really, really did a, a great job around that. Came up with, I think it was five core values. One of the top values was collaboration. We all love this. And this is the other thing. I also do a lot of pushing back on certain words that crop up all the time, like collaboration and respect and transparency and accountability. These are very nebulous terms that people actually don't understand until you have to put them to the test. And so I bring them through exercises to test that too. But the top one that, that was in our core values was collaboration. And wouldn't you know, when you gave the CEO a personality assessment, his top value that came up was competition. The behaviors that are rooted in competition are in complete juxtaposition to collaboration. Competition makes you want to go fast. It makes you aspire to excellence it makes you want to get to the end as quick as possible. Whereas collaboration is something where you have to actually hold back for a hot second and be inclusive, try to bring people in, get information. Right? And so when you have a CEO that is acting on opposite behaviors as one of your top core values, you got people giving you the stink guy sideways because they're not living that value and they're not doing it out of purposeness, right. Or maliciousness. This is how they function in their innate core fundamental behaviors day to day. I had to bring it to his attention. He would be skipping over meetings because he just wanted a fast answer. And I was like, this is not collaboration. And you were flying in the face of everything we just did. And when you start layering that across other leaders in the company where their innate values of their behavior in the day to day is going against what is written on the wall or that the collective has agreed to as being a norm, you break a lot of trust. And before you know it, you have a very toxic, toxic organization because you have nobody that wants to engage. They just say, this is a farce. I don't agree with it and it creates a really awful environment. And I've seen that more times than not. So want to throw it back to you to say, have, have you experienced something like this, similar to me of leaders who are like, yeah, we're championing.

We have all these core values and.

Then they do the quintessential opposite?

I think yes and no. I can just tell you from my own experience, that whole story actually really resonates with me as my story. Right. So I wouldn't say I'm a competitive person person, but in my personality test, I am a classic CEO like I am. And so some of the core values that we have worked on within our company challenge me. I guess I wouldn't say that's a bad thing because we all have things that we need to be challenged on. And for me, moving slower, not throwing out as many ideas to people, you know, getting more buy in, that's all been something that I've had to work on over the years. I'm definitely aware of it. And it's, and it's painful at sometimes, sometimes it's not comfortable. I think that collaboration is an important. You don't do science in a, in a vacuum. You have to collaborate. That's really kind of a core tenant of science.

Right?

But then there is that CEO tendency of like move fast and break things that a lot of people have to reign in. And so I'm curious for the end of the story, you know, how did that go down with you? Kind of shining light on that, having that CEO recognize, perhaps this is not my nature. This is not how I naturally want to be. Were they able to learn and grow or was that just something that had to change in the core values?

Yeah, so this is, this is where it gets kind of dicey. One, the leader needs to be self aware and open to feedback like that. I was blessed to be working with a leader that was absolutely open and self aware that he was falling down in certain respects. And we had a very mutually respecting relationship that I could be very honest with him. And so I did shed some light on it. He, he was a, a typical CEO in the sense that he absolutely attempted to change his behavior, but then it would just sift right back into the previous behavior. And that's where I as a support partner had to step in. And then I became the buffer where I did everything to be proactively ahead of it and try to again set up those approaches or frameworks to, to, to wrangle both him, but also be the water to flow around him sometimes and keep that core value within the interactions that were happening. And so that is, this is why I'm so passionate about ensuring that one, you start when you're very early and very small because there's a disconnect sometimes around what you know is necessary for a thriving and resilient scaling business versus how you actually are. And we, many of us, are innately who we are. And you can tell that when you are under high levels of stress. So this is why the new model that I've built, I call it the foundational values. I bring it when they're under 10 employees. And I actually do three assessments and I only do it with the leadership first. And the first one that I do the assessment is I do the strengths finder. Strengths finder Clifton Gallops. My favorite. This is your normal talents. It's where your happy place is. It's where you naturally are in your flow and you don't have to work too hard at it, right? So I do that. And then what I do is I give an assessment around the, it's called the Values and Action Survey. And that's. Those are values that you were probably raised with in your family or your culture or experiences in your life. And those can shift over time, but overarching, they stay pretty steady. And, and so like you have a list of 24, that crop that pop out and there's some up and some down. Then the third one is probably one of the most important that brings those two together for me. And it's a fairly new one called the positive intelligence saboteurs assessment. I gave it to Allison and we're gonna have a whole lunch over it. It's wonderful. And it spits out your top 10, what's called saboteurs. And what that means is these are very deeply held behaviors that I would say many times are rooted in trauma from when you were a very young child. And trauma, I'm not saying like you have abused or anything like that, even though that can be part of the, you know, trauma that might have happened for some people. When you're a child, you process time differently, you process relationships differently. So even if your mom or dad or guardian was in the hospital for like two days, you would process this as a young child as abandonment. And you don't even realize it because it's a developmental state. Right. And so these particular results that come out of the positive intelligence saboteur test, these are actually good behaviors and good values that get pushed too far in a certain extreme nature that it starts becoming detrimental to the relationships and the way that you're interacting with the world around you. And this happens when you are in high states of stress and crisis. It's an automatic trigger. You do not even realize you're doing it. And these are many of the behaviors that crop up when you are in a very high stress leadership position. And so this is the self awareness mirror test that brings the other items together that is quite interesting. You see a lot of the similarities of, particularly in the scientific realm, hyperachiever is one that shows up very high. And when you're a hyperachiever, you are have a tendency to, to always have a cynicism around things or you're poking holes when people are asking you questions. And it can come across as really aggressive and, and very demeaning if you are interacting with some of your, your employees or your direct reports. And to you it's natural state. And it gets even worse when you're, like I said, in crisis or stress. And so these are the kinds of behaviors that you really have to pay attention to. And you need to learn how to emotionally regulate and get back to the center part so that it's actually beneficial to when you're working with relationships around you. Oh, the other one, funny one that always comes up on the values in action survey. Teamwork. Teamwork is almost always at the bottom of the values chain. When I'm working with biotechs because many of them come from academia, which is a very individualistic environment to work in. And so I always kind of joke or laugh when, when I bring them together at the end and I say, okay, well let's start working through some of the words that we want, I want to bring to the top of the list here. And they're like, well, I think we need to add teamwork. And I was just like, I hear you. And I'll talk about how I handle aspirational values that might not be in the innate values that come up from the reality of the team that has come together and the assessments that I do. But I have to say to them, I love that idea. The unfortunate reality is that this, this value showed up at the bottom of all of your assessments, which means it will be extremely hard for you to automatically or naturally behave in a team based collaborative manner. I'm not saying that it's not important. I'm just saying there's other values here that are already coming to the top of what's actually more important to you. And you do have to layer what these values look like. So there are some trends that I see working in biotech where there's a lot of part partially phenotype of coming out of academia of being a very linear, logical kind of individual and, and how that translates into the value sets. I also want to put a caveat here that when you're dealing with values, no matter what relationship you have in your life, understanding the underlying values that will pull you through crisis and is really critical. People approach things in different ways though and, and that's okay. And that's actually the beauty of, of inclusion and diversity and these other ways that you can build out a very broad and lovely organization that isn't just all robots working together and that's what matters. What are you going to do when you are in crisis time and there's a lot of crisis in business, especially survival scale scale up businesses.

Hey there, just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are, you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace and but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for the biotech career coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show.

Some people who listen to the podcast are early stage founders, right. And maybe they're like a really small team, but maybe they also know we also talk to a lot of people who are like, yeah, I only want to stay in up until it's like, I don't know, 10, 15 people and then I kind of want to exit out. I only like the small core beginning of a company. So when you're working with those people and you're thinking about core values, do you think about the authenticity of the people who are at play at that moment or the aspirational values that they want the company to be as it grows, as it scales? Where is the box that you're kind of like, well, this is where you are now. But if all these people are like.

But we don't want to play to.

Our strengths, we want the company to be this better thing than we are. And you know, how do you balance that?

This is why I think it's really important for us to redefine how we approach both discerning core values and how we talk in language around core values and then how we implement and operationalize it. That's the next step because you can, you can discern and plaster your core values everywhere you want if you don't put frameworks of accountability, behavioral accountability, that's actually what makes culture and core values powerful. And so that's, that's also how I bring it to the table when I'm speaking with leaders. Culture is not about fun. Culture is about very clear messaging of how we function as a trusted team to deliver on what we're here to deliver on. And, and there is fun in that, don't get me wrong, it's there to inspire, but it's really there to be clarified for psychological safety. So we understand expectations for decision making in really difficult times and, and for resource allocation as well. And so when you say that, you're right. And I was just mentioning, look, in a perfect example is the teamwork thing. You know that collaboration and teamwork is really critical when you are in a startup or a scale up environment. And when you come from academia, it might work where you're more individualized and the, the structure and the culture of academia supports that kind of approach. Right. So I, I title Them in two things. I say, look, this core of what I'm bringing to you as the first round of my suggested cream of the crop, core values of what came across all of the team members. So I know that you are aligned on this. I call the foundational values and usually that's around three or four that I'll bring to them. I say if you are recognizing that there's some gaps here, and usually there are, I encourage you to come together as a team. We can do a workshop to do that to come up with maybe one or two additional values, but you call them out aspirational values and you are very clear on communicating that. And you say this is who we are. These two we know is really important for as we're growing as a company and, and we're working on it, we're not there yet and it's okay. And, and we want to get better and we need feedback and we want to be held accountable to those as well because we know that this is important for building high functioning teams, high trust, good collaboration, amazing communication and, and so one or two adding on there, but you have to have it in a different bucket. These are our aspirational values that are within, within the foundational value set.

I really like that. And I think that clarity of communication sets the stage for we're not lying to you. We quite honestly know we're not here. And I think the hard part of this has to be the accountability piece, right? Because who wants to go tell their boss like, hey, you just broke all the core values. Could you not. So how do you see people mitigate that and how do you create that psychological safety so that maybe someone who isn't on the same level as say a leadership member can go and be like, hey, we're uncomfortable with this.

Well, first of all, when you go through the process, the way that I bring it so early in the process and hyper focus first on the leaders and then kind of bring in and match up and align with the rest of the employee base. And I would say that usually there's, there is pretty much alignment in the early stages of a company because you don't have a lot of people that you've hired and it's just a lot easier to consolidate the value alignment and a lot of values approaches. Just ask people what they think of themselves or what they're feeling in that moment and that's actually quite fleeting or not always a true assessment of how people are going to function. And so I would say 80% of the problem is Taken care of because you're already basing it off of through this three part assessment. It's not just one, this cross sectioning of innate talents, cultural and experiential upbringing and then crisis value behaviors. And when you cross section that you, you take care of a lot of that problematic aspects of leaders not understanding or, or following their own advice, right? That being said, when you add those aspirational values in, I will say that usually the conversation has already been there and they're the ones who have approved these aspirational values. So they're quite locked in and are open and understanding of exactly where they need to do the work themselves. And it's been communicated to the rest of the organization. Please let me know this. I will say for the actual really hardcore accountability, how leaders come to the corporate goal setting process would be the first step for me of how they hold themselves accountable. Because if you look at corporate goal setting and if they are not following the core values, the foundational values that they have set in motion, it, it will show up fairly quickly with how they approach the goal setting process from a resource standpoint, from what they actually focus on, from the decisions of who and when and what they're going to be hiring. A lot of organizations will have a value that's rooted in a learning growth mindset. Yet you will go to their corporate goals and you will see nothing of anything for people. Talent management, development or acquisition or anything like that. There's no budget line item. Budgets are another place that you can quickly see how, how leaders could and should be accountable to this. I think when you have the language and people have already spoken to it and it's been agreed upon across the leadership and with the employees and with the approved language, it's just a lot easier to come to the table and, and have those conversations in a safe way. Especially I think it's funny when you do the saboteur assessment because most people, when they get that back and they look at it, they're like oh yeah, like it's, it's, it's, you know it, but it gives you words to use. I'll give you a perfect example. One of my top saboteurs is hypervigilance. And I never heard that word before, but as soon as I saw it was like oh yeah, what in psychology they call it catastrophizing. And I'm like that's a little bit too rough of a word for me. And I don't like using that word. That makes me feel like not so good about Myself, hyper vigilance is, is just someone who is very hyper aware and in a constant planning mode and trying to let other people know that this stuff's coming down the track and we need to plan for it. But when you're in a hyper vigilant state, it's rooted in fear instead of just proactive, thoughtful planning. And so you want to try to pull it back and, and that's what you're trying to do. So when somebody says to me, Lynn, you're being hyper vigilant again, I don't actually get upset. One, because the word isn't saying catastrophizing, even though that's kind of what it is. But I've also been aware and taken the assessment and I, I know it's true. Like, I know that's true about me. And so how could I get upset about something I absolutely know is true about me? So I just think it gives a different playing and language field to work within. That gives it a little bit of a arm's length distance to have those kinds of conversations in a much more constructive way.

There's a lot of research around language is power. When you, when you actually can accurately name something, a phenomenon, something that you know you do. Hyper vigilance, for instance, I think that's really powerful and I can see why that sort of takes the sting out of it and gives people a common ability to talk about it. I would love to take that assessment.

Yeah, it's amazing. The saboteur's assessment is free, so I can send that to you. It is quite insightful and it is rooted in a lot of Jungian psychology. Saboteurs are just enough of a language opportunity to showcase the less desirable behaviors that crop up for all of us. Language really is a collective understanding of emotion and feeling and it offers context.

I just heard the funniest thing the other day. There's a Japanese word that means the sadness that one has when they get a bad haircut. Like, it's so specific and I love that. I know, right? And so there. The Japanese language is actually so beautiful and eloquent and there are a lot of words that are that nuance. But I just thought that was so funny because you just. How much more can you commiserate with someone if you have a word that actually describes exactly what you're feeling?

Karina, you will not be surprised. No, I also got hyper vigilance very high and I sort of wonder if that's like an operations person's just like default, right? Like we're always just looking at things and being like, all right, the train seems like it's on the track, but yes, yes.

And it's like we said, if we pull it back and we don't become hyper stressed around it and we don't try to hyper stress everybody else out around us with that, it's a wonderful, wonderful talent. We just have to emotionally regulate and pull it back and, and not again, make everybody freaked out. As freaked out as we like to get around organization and precision and, you know, planning and things along those lines.

You talked about the strengths finder earlier, and I think this may not surprise anyone, but my number one strength is achiever. So, so we were talking about, you know, when we're talking about what that classic sort of CEO strengths finder is, I'm sure that some of these themes kind of crop up and these are the things that we know about ourselves and we have to mitigate. I. On the Myers Briggs. I'm an infj, so at least I have the feeling in there, which is important. Um, but yeah, I'm achiever, learner, futuristic relator and competition. Those are my five, my top.

I already know how your, your saboteurs are probably going to come out then, so. Because there is some overlap when you do that and you'll see some of the, A lot of these, A lot of these assessments are all rooted in the similar, again, underlying fundamentals. And it's just how they are language and. Or grouped together within that certain structure of however they're delivering it. Because, you know, I've also taken the DISC assessment. I've taken, you know, Myers Briggs. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not a fan of Myers Briggs at all because nobody can. I've taken it five times and I still can't remember my letters. And it's just, it is what it is and it's confusing. Whereas when I work with StrengthsFinder, it's normal everyday language that you could just, you talk and say, oh, these are the top five that I have, or the top number one that is the word is true. And in saboteurs, I would say there's 10 of those and the values in action. Again, languaging. That's very easy and simplified and, and, and just to let you know, when I do do my process, I have a communications and an HR background as well. So I've been through a number of these exercises before. I not only do this assessment, I then go away and I, I create kind of a branded set of initial proposed core values or Foundational values for the team for them to review as a baseline reaction item. And so they do get this, I would say, really nice kind of package of scientific backend study and baselining rooted in what I would say, true accountability and reality. And then they get the beautiful branded personality that is specific to their company that I try to put in that whether they choose to use it or keep it, that's fine. They can modify it too if they want to get together, and they can. But I give them the initial reaction document and the fundamental essence is there and that's what they need. They just need the fundamental essence. And I worked at Vertex and they were one of the companies that I saw do this incredibly well. And I got there when they were 400 employees. But they had done their core values very early in the process when Josh Boger started the company and they had, I believe it was only three values for full 20 years. They kept the same values because companies grow and they change. Right. And so I also am not a person or CEOs or leadership. Like the main founders will leave and a new CEO will come in. I believe that there is some evolution that sometimes has to to happen. Not full on, like throw out all the fundamental values and we're going to redo this from scratch. But you can either add or maybe switch out one as you grow as an organization to show that evolution. And that's actually what Vertex did when Jeff Lyden came in, he added an additional value and it was a patient centric value. And that's has remained to this day. So they have four values I believe now and, and they operationalize their values in an incredible way. I learned a lot of how an incredible culture is built and nurtured and developed at a very people centric way. At Vertex I just worked with the most incredible human resource people strategy team over there and they're all scattered now because it's been a number of years, but wow, I mean it was incredible. And that was the good example that I had. And then I had some other examples that both in consulting because I see a lot of companies that they're trying to figure out their identity and, and you can see right away there's going to be some, some bumps in the road, as I would say. And, and I have come across some organizations where I've brought the assessment to them and it was kind of like holding up a mirror and they didn't like what they saw and so they, they just kind of stopped process. And I'm okay with that too because Then that is allowing them to reassess. What do we need to focus on as a leadership team? I believe that when you end up discerning and choosing and implementing your foundational values, it has to be pulled into every single system and guide every decision and align around the resourcing and be included in your languaging and be reinforced at every single all team meeting and put out in your recruitment and talent acquisition material. And I'm telling you, like, it has to be permeating everything, but it's rooted in that. Who you hire, fire and reward. I mean, that's really what it is. And it's hard sometimes because when there's a person who is, say, very high up in the organization and that person might not be aligned anymore or is not delivering at the level that they need to be delivering at. And push comes to shove and rubber has. Rubber has to hit the road on making a decision, it gets really hard. And this is what you have to literally print out the thing and look at it and go, what do we have to follow in these. These values that we have agreed to as a team? I do want to also point out there's one term that really gets me that I try to be very clear with leadership on, and that's the term transparency. And every team that I work with says, we want to have transparency, communications transparency. And I say, okay, well, we need to define what that means to you, because transparency means different things to different people. And radical transparency, that's one end of the spectrum. You just tell everything to everybody. And if you have only three weeks worth of Runway left, that means you're going to sit your employees down and you say, we can't pay you next week. We have three works, three weeks of Runway. That's radical transparency. And when you put it in those terms, they go, oh, we're not that transparent. We don't want to be that transparent. Relevant transparency is what I call it. Where you are sharing information that makes people feel like they are in control and have psychological safety. Also within the legal boundings of when you're delivering within a highly regulated environment, there's some pressures there. Sharing, not oversharing in the sense that you are going to put people into crisis and make them lose sleep at night and. And distract them from their work. That's not good transparency or contextual transparency. So you have to be very. We were talking about language, be very clear about what kind of. Where you are on that spectrum of transparency. I think it's really important for leaders to understand that yeah, it's a, it's a tough one and I've seen that one play out more than once. Especially if, if you have to let a significant, you know, early high level leader go. And transparency, that term crop starts cropping up a lot when you, when you have to start communicating those kinds of things.

That's such an interesting exercise. Like, okay, here's all the places you could be transparent and where's our stopping point to where it's uncomfortable? Now that's really, really interesting. Well, Lynn, we could absolutely keep you for hours because this is such a great conversation and I feel like we, every time we scratch the surface and there's so many more questions, if someone is listening to this and they're like, I gotta work with Lynn, I've gotta get, you know, these values in alignment and I really wanna do all these like cool assessments and make sure that my organization set up for success. How would someone work with you they.

Could just reach out to on LinkedIn. I'm on there all the time. I love interacting with the community out there and they can also visit my website. I'm very passionate about values and in the business world and I'm a big believer that if we truly could get back to the foundational values that are truly people centric and look for the best in both business and in others, we, we could change the entire world for the better. And, and I think a lot of us, there's, after Covid, there's a huge reassessment around this from both a micro perspective, personally community perspective, and even from a macro perspective from institutions to countries to the world and our global crisis that we're dealing with right now. So I'm a big believer.

Well, thank you so much for that masterclass. That was really, really good. We will link all of that into our show notes so people can click right through and link in with you.

Check out your website.

That's such an important, important topic. So thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me for my second time. I'm super excited.

Building Biotechs is brought to you by Recruitomics Consulting. You can find Building Biotechs in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes and join our mailing list for a weekly dose of biotech news and a podcast overview. And if you need to install a recruitment engine that saves time and money for your growing company, reach out for a free strategy session. I'm always happy to to share my expertise and show you techniques to simplify your hiring process and maximize returns. On behalf of the team here at Recruitomics Consulting, thanks for listening.