How to Expand Your Culture to Build High Performing Companies with Kerel Cooper, LiveIntent, Inc.

I think it is the responsibility of a company to provide some support for their employees. And so I would say those two things come to top of mind transparency and support. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

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Check out launchacademy.ca Hiring has turned into gatekeeping, right? Building a great company is not about selecting people that fit your culture and keeping people who don't. And it's a very stressful exercise. You are building this MAF or this click where if you fit in, then you're in. If not, you're out. And when you do that, you're limiting yourself to just a small set of people, right? You're not expanding the scope of your company. And the fundamental sort of truth behind growth openness is the biggest and most indispensable enabler of growth, right? There's this gartner Stat where 75% of organizations with frontline decision making teams that reflect a broad and diverse sense of culture will exceed their financial targets. So today's session is not so much about being like it's not a DNI lecture, right? It's not a lecture on diversity and inclusion. It's a discussion on how do you expand your company's Culture. So the people who come in with you, they're bringing their own skill sets, they're bringing their experience, but they're also bringing their culture. And it makes your company bigger, it makes your culture bigger, and you expand and you grow because of the openness of it. So I want to kick this off by asking you, Carol, what's your definition of culture?

Just going back to what you just said there, it's really interesting to think about how when it comes to business and how when it comes to growth, we always think about new markets and how to expand and being open. But then when it comes to sort of culture and who we hire, it's the opposite in many cases. But to answer your question, Lloyd, for me, when I think about culture, I think about what is the personality of the organization? And what I mean by that is, what are the values, what are the beliefs, what are the behaviors that the people within the organization are living out day to day? And so that's what I think about when I think about culture. And a good example of this, and I was just thinking about this as we were preparing for this chat today, is I always get people. So I've been at Live Intent for six and a half years. I always get people from time to time that will ask me, why are you still there? What keeps you at Live Intent for so long? Because apparently being in one organization for six and a half years is a long time in our space. And it usually comes down to two things for me and how I respond, right? The first one is about the people, right? And the reason why it's important to work with people that you enjoy working with is because you spend the majority of the life with the people that you work with.

With.

So you better find some common ground with them. You better enjoy being with them day to day. But I think beyond that, one of the values that we have at Live Intent is we put people first. That's one of our values. And the reason why we say that is because we do care about our employees. We do care about our customers, right? We are a very transparent organization with our employees in terms of how we communicate to them and all the information that they know about the. The status of the organization and where we're in, the direction we're going, so on and so forth. But we also make sure that we are supporting our employees as best as possible. And Obviously, the last 12 months, this is actually the week. This is our actual. Our anniversary week, I think, when we started working from home. So it's those sort of you know, values and beliefs that tie into me and why I've been with the company for so long.

Coming back to this whole culture aspect here, what sets the culture in a company and what breaks the culture?

Yeah, so I think that the tone of the organization in many ways is set by the executive leadership and then other leaders throughout the organization. But I feel like from a culture perspective, I think it's really the responsibility of every employee within the organization to not only live out that culture, but. But the other piece of this is protecting that culture as well too. Right. Because not everyone that comes into the organization, not everyone that maybe interviews for a job, is going to have the same values and beliefs and want to live that day to day. And I think when you have individuals within your organization that don't sort of align to the culture or add to it in a significant way, it can actually end up hurting the organization as well too.

And what, what are some examples you've seen where, like culture breaks?

Oh, examples where I've seen. So, yeah, let's go back to values and beliefs. Right. If you have people in the organization that don't believe in the strategy or vision of the company, culture can break them. If you have people that maybe don't get along with each other, that can ultimately be detrimental to the organization, especially at the executive level. If people don't, and I'm speaking in general terms here, but if people don't get along at the executive or senior leader level of the organization, that can be detrimental to a company as well too.

If you had to start your own company today, what would be the key cultural elements you would put in place?

Yeah, great question. Transparency, I think, is super important. I think now more than ever, every employee within an organization wants to understand where the company is going and wants to have complete transparency into or as much transparency as possible into the status of the organization. I think that's super important. I think across the organization is super important. Again, think about the world that we live in now and everyone being spread out in this virtual world and what's going on. I think employees want to be supported in ways that maybe they have not before. And you think about, again, us all being home, but, you know, think about parents and kids that they have at different stages of their life. Think about how people are dealing with and maybe struggling with mental health and other things. But I think it is the responsibility of a company to provide some support for their employees. And so, Lloyd, I would say those two things come to top of mind. Transparency and support.

You can't have transparency and support without empathy, right? And having empathy and being. And every empathy gets tossed around like a bag of trash here in the community. But what, what really it means is can you feel and understand, can you really feel the pain alongside them? And empathy is needed in building a company, building a product, building any relationship. The key to long lasting relationship starts with empathy.

And I will say to that, Lloyd, like one of the things and, and I was talking to someone about this the other day. One of the things that I have really tried to improve on as a leader, especially over the last 12 months or so is listening. Listening more than talking. And I think like I bring that up because of what you just said in terms of empathy, right? Like you can't really get an understanding of what your teammates are going through, what your peers are going through, what your employees are going through if you are not really listening to them. And it doesn't mean that you're gonn always have all the answers for them. It doesn't mean that you're going to be able to solve all of their challenges. But I think as leaders who lead organizations, I think listening is something that goes underrated at times. And I bring that up because you brought up empathy. And I think that the two go together.

Yeah, definitely. You have to slow down to listen and observe. You have to be humble to learn and change and strive to not only know what they're dealing with, but feel and understand it with them. And I think that is the key thing here behind empathy. And a lot of people just say we're going to listen. But if you're going to listen and tune out because you have too many reports or too much going on, then you got to clear a plate. As a leader. That's something that I've been wrestling with is like how do I reduce the burden on all the, in the weed stuff. So the six or seven people that do report to me end up getting all the attention and I'm invested in their life and their growth. So if you're invested in somebody's growth, then they're going to be invested in your growth. There's this book I like a lot. It's called Influence by Robert Cialdini. It's a fantastic book. A lot of people think it's a sales book, but what it is, it's just the art of building long term relationships and the steps to influencing somebody starts with reciprocity, like doing something for them. And if you do good and you help them succeed enough, then they'll do the Same. There's a few questions here. How do you deal with a toxic personnel? What are some traits? Have you observed this in the workplace and how have you dealt with it?

Yeah, in the past what I try to do is I try to address the situation as quickly and as soon as possible and I try to use those types of situations as educational moments, meaning if someone is being toxic in a meeting, I try to address it with that person and point out the example where maybe they were toxic and then that sort of maybe derailed the meeting or made someone else feel uncomfortable, so on and so forth. So I think education is a part of it because not to make excuses for people that are toxic at times but sometimes they don't that they're actually being toxic. And so I've used that as such times where I can point it out and quite frankly, sometimes it's worked and people have gotten better about it and sometimes it happens right where people don't get better at it is what I meant to say and what I think the important thing as leaders is to address those situations. And that sort of is a great example. Going back to what I said earlier about like it's every employee's job to actually protect the organization's culture and to point out when people are being toxic. To point out when there may be an unconscious bias situation. To point out when something is not going right. It is the company's job to protect the culture.

If you look at your whole company as culture contributors versus they have to fit this culture, then they will protect it. That is the key thing. We oftentimes get caught up in this. They have to fit our culture. But if you say you got to hire for the people that are going to grow your company and add value, there's key things like integrity and honesty and relationship and empathy. If they hit some of the key things. But there may be other things that not part of your culture. If you allow them to bring, then they'll protect that. We are the sum of everyone. Jody asks, how far do you go with transparency? We struggle with too much and not enough.

Great question. I would say at Live Intent over the last six and a half years we've tried a number of different things related to transparency within the organization. Some have worked and some haven't. And what I mean by that is I think it's something that you always have to try to work at and figure out what works best in your organization. I will say right now one of the things that we do that seems to be working out really well for us is we regularly have Q and A sessions and essentially what they are now is, and I think we're doing them once a month now where we will have an all hands meeting and we will set up a polling system and all employees are free to ask questions. And we will use that in all hands meeting for the executives to answer the employees questions. And they can range from everything from our strategy to how we're doing financially, to what our product roadmap looks like, to any recent news that we may want to respond to, questions of working from home and when we're going back to the office. It really runs the gamut of things that our employees are concerned about and want to hear from our executive leadership team about. And that seems to be working really well for us right now.

I'm going to ask you around hiring here, right? So how can leaders and their teams foster this broad and diverse culture in the workplace from the beginning? Right. Like it all starts from the hiring. What is your advice there?

Yeah, so actually I think it actually starts before the employee is actually hired. I actually think it starts during the recruiting process. And what I mean by that is, right, like before people even apply for a job, they're going to potentially do some research. And so how does your brand actually show up in the marketplace? How are people perceived perceiving your brand in the marketplace? What does that sort of look like? And when I say. And when I say what does that look like? I'm not talking about putting a bunch of stock photos of diverse people on your website. I'm not referring to that. But what I am referring to showing and highlighting the real culture and real things that you're doing in the organization. And so one of the ways that we do that at Live Intent on our website, on our blog, we actually have a culture section on our blog. And that section is really filled with stories and events from around the company and highlight employees from different areas within the organization. And we know that section of the website gets heavily visited by people who are looking to apply for jobs or people who have applied for jobs and are, you know, preparing for interviews. We've made some changes to our job postings now, right. Where we make sure that we're using language that's inclusive. And even in our requirements for specific jobs, we're really trying to make sure that we are truly pushing for only making sure that what's in the required section of the job description is actually truly required. And so those are some of the things that we actually do even prior to an employee coming on board. And I will tell you, more and more people we've seen this trend and Lloyd, I'm sure you've seen it, and others who are listening in, where people are really more concerned about the company's culture and making sure that is a requirement for them, that their beliefs and their values align with the company, that they're applying for a job. I've even had people at times reach out to me on LinkedIn and say, hey, Karel, I'm thinking about, not that I've applied, but I'm thinking about applying for a job at Live Intent. And I'd love to understand from you what has been the experience of a black employee at Live Intent. And so that that's an example of what I mean. But then moving towards after we've actually hired someone and we're actually onboarding them, I think it does start right there. From the beginning. We have a very thorough onboarding process thanks to our people development team, where we make sure that any employee coming on board understands all of our company values. We make sure that they understand that there are resource groups out there. We have a number of employee resource groups that you can join and be a part of. We have other initiatives that support our employees across the organization. And another thing that we do too is every new employee during their onboarding process, they have an introductory meeting with a representative from every department within the organization. And the reason why we do that is because again, we want to make sure our employees understand not only our company culture, but what every single department does. And one piece of advice I always give to every single employee that joins Live Intent that I have a chance to speak with is I tell them that take your time when you join the company and make sure that you spend time truly understanding our customers and truly understanding our company culture. Because I've seen it over the last six and a half years. I've seen the people that take their time and build that foundation from the beginning. They have long lasting careers at Live Intent and the people that don't do that, they have a very tough time.

I want to dive into Jodi's question here. Jody. She's a VP Finance at a fast growing startup and they're seeing growth like never before. And their wonderful, scrappy veteran startup team is struggling with the change. Like how do you get them on board with the change? How do you empower them to participate? And how do you quell their doubts about going from fun startup to corporate scale up? And this is everyone's problem right now. This is what I started with is like hiring is not meant to be gatekeeping. It's not. And if you do that, you're never going to grow. Openness is the most indispensable path to growth. So how do we preserve the culture we have while still growing up? I think. Carol, what are your thoughts there?

Yeah, it's a tough one. That is certainly a tough one. And again, like you said before, Lloyd, you and I aren't experts at this. We're speaking from our experience and we're. We're trying to learn from people just as much as we're trying to share our experiences. At Live intent. We are 12 years old, actually, our anniversary is next month. We will be a 12 year old company. And so again, I've been there for half of the company's life and I've seen us go through the changes. Right. That is one of the hardest things to do is to go from a startup to a much more well established company. Right. Because your processes have to change. You have to hire more people. You're going from an adolescent to a teenager or a teenager to an adult. And that. That can be tough. I don't know if I have all the right answers there other than to say that as you look to expand and grow the company, I think you have to have as many people from different areas of the company that are involved in the hiring process to make sure that you are focused on culture ad and not culture fit. That would be one of the pieces of advice I would give, definitely.

And I love that. Culture ad versus culture fit. Jody, I want to invite you to talk if you're open to it. It's been a while. Anyway, it would be good to invite you to join.

Come on up, Jody.

Yeah. So what is your feedback? I think what I'm seeing here is sometimes the internal people end up becoming not the experts. Right. The suggestions are coming internally, but they go on deaf ears. And it's almost like you have to hire an external expert to say the same thing to the team. But how are you solving this?

How are we solving it? You know, I think that your point about having as many people participate in the hiring process as possible is something that we're really focused on. We spend a lot of time talking to our staff about how we're planning to grow the company and why we need to. To add these processes and add people and become a little more formal than we're used to. But getting that buy in is a struggle and it's so time consuming and I feel like I'm constantly defending our decisions as an executive team. And when we set to scale up this year, we had a town hall meeting where we said things are going to change. And I've been through this before and I want you guys to just have an open mind. And when these changes come down the pipe, I think your natural inclination is to just push back and be like, oh, I hate change and this is so awful and our company's getting destroyed. But in reality, you need to have a mindset of, I'm open to change. I know it's for the greater good. I'm going to embrace this change as much as possible and enjoy the ride. And we keep having to that message and they're hearing it, but it's. There's still pushback. They still, the change is really hard on them. So I'm looking for more ideas.

Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you on that, Jodi. Yeah, change is hard for, for people. Listen, change sometimes can be hard for me as well too. I think it's just in everyone's human nature that change can be difficult. And what I always just try to do is just put my mindset myself in the mindset of just this is just an evolution of what we're doing as a company. And again, everyone has evolved in their life, right? No one is the same person, or at least I hope no one is the same person at age 15 than they are at age 30. Changes is inevitable. I. I think if, if you want, if people want to have long lasting careers within their industry, they do have to adapt. So it's a tough one. But I would strongly consider, like I said, the diverse interview panel I think can be something that can be effective. I've seen it be effective for us at Live Intent as well too. And yeah, don't have all the answers, but hopefully that one helps.

One thing I want to just bring debate on is this, how can we walk away with something like something very concrete? I think the only thing constant is change and a lot of people don't want to change it. And because they don't, I think it's like an innate weakness, right? It's you're protecting yourself when you don't want to change. You're thinking about all the possible things that could go bad. But I think reasoning with data always helps. We have this awesome T shirt that I'm not wearing today. Or maybe I am. It says he said I love it when you talk. I can send you that T shirt. You can send it to your exec team. I just ordered 500 of them. But I love it when you talk data to me. Like reason with data, bring data about where diversity and openness of ideas have led to growth. Right. There are some core values that companies have at the top, right? Maybe that's empathy, maybe that's integrity, maybe that's teamwork. As long as you're, you're as a company not being an asshole or being evil like Google calls it. As long as you're not being evil. I think everything can be culture, ad in a good way. And what I would recommend, honestly, if your team members or executive team is not open to that change first. Like reason with data and case studies. It's a sales process. You're selling all the time. You're selling to customers, you're selling internally, you're selling to the press, everything. So as a people and HR leader, your job is to sell them. What is the top of the funnel? The way I look at it is when you're selling to a customer, top of the funnel content, you're educating them on this idea, let's call it. Then you have middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel content, case studies and testimonials and then you go for the close. And I think here if you take the same approach with articles, just sharing, incepting them, and we hate this because as humans we want instant gratification. But the fact is when you have so many people around the table, sometimes you have to incept the idea, then they internalize it and then maybe a couple of months later. But I think like things like sharing articles, sharing case studies and bringing experts to speak on the topic can be the first step of the sales process. And then if all else fails, I think just saying bringing an external expert always helps because when you pay for something, you want to listen to them. When you pay for an external help, I don't know. That's my thought. Suman has a bunch of thoughts here as well. Suman, would you like to join us and add to this? Awesome. I'm going to unmute. I'm enjoying this very much. I've never done this format, but this format was encouraged by Carol. So I'm thankful that it was making it super interactive. So let's start this way. I'll let you comment on Jody's question here on how do you take a team that's struggling with change, an executive team that's struggling with change, and learn to help them get on board? I think just startups fundamentally hate the fact that it's going to be corporate, but it doesn't have to be. What's your advice for Jodi?

I don't necessarily have any advice for Jodi specifically, but I think that the point she made is very accurate. I think the hardest part about getting people across change is change. And I think when you say incepting people, I agree. But also I think there's a different element to that. It's not so much trying to get them to the idea of incepting is making the idea theirs. But conceptually what we want to do as a team. And I've seen this kind of in my department as we've gone and grown, is evolving that concept, introducing the idea of simplicity through departmental process or these modifications that allow for the company to say, hey, if we change, what we're actually doing is improving X, Y and Z. If X, Y and Z are clear improvements, it's really hard to argue with that process. To say I don't like it is one thing, but to be empirically against it is another. So I think that all the stuff you guys are saying and Jody's points are extremely valid and they totally make sense to me. It's. So the comments I made were the trouble I have, or at least that I've seen across kind of evolution is definitions of those changes. So if you're introducing departments, defining departments with clear separations between other departments really makes for a lot more clarity. And I think that any company that's going through a scale up or going from a startup to a more quote, unquote corporate because I think the term is derogatory as it is.

Corporate.

Yeah, you know what I mean? It just sounds so negative. Nobody wants to be corporate because it's like, yeah, being like, hey, a bunch of people hanging out, doing work, crushing it and then suits. That's like the difference between corporate. Now obviously that's not really the case, but I think definitively when people say turning corporate or growing, it's that expectation that things are going to change. But I think there's a better way to say it without having to say we're going through all these methods and these improvements so that we become a more efficient, more effective and more process and intelligently process driven business. That's where my logic sits. And how I relate that to my team is encouraging that level of like clarity and support.

Yeah, definitely. I read this book recently. Ask your developer. There's a lot of cultural elements tied here. Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, has built one of the largest developer communities. And the way he structured and built the team Is great. But the point I'm trying to make is maybe this is a question to ask other people on the team. Like, how do I sell this to the executive team? And I often find, like, for us, we have this rock star salesperson who's very good at communication and messaging. And I tend to ask him a lot. He's like, how do I position this? Like, maybe asking somebody who's not in your job but whose job it is to sell is sometimes almost better. Like, how do I position this for buy in from the customer? Or rather the exact team. I want to ask some questions in rapid fire here to you guys. Everyone's on the Whose voice is being heard? Do you hire for strength or do you hire for lack of weakness?

Ooh, awful.

I want to hear Carol first.

Man, I was gonna let you go first.

Oh, damn. Sure. Hiring for. Right now I'm in the middle of processing resumes and interviewing as it is first in some positions. And my inclination is always to hire for strengths because sometimes in your team you have a few gaps, you have a few soft spots. Maybe I'm gonna not call them gaps necessarily, but a few differences in experience and knowledge and. And hiring somebody for their strength that fills in some of those gaps means that their weaknesses can be made up by the rest of the team and also supported to grow and learn and become like that solid, strong team where someone's strength now becomes a pillar for them to help others lean on and learn from. That's my process at least.

Yeah. Just to add to that, I would say I always try to figure out where I need to add to the team in terms of skill set, in terms of perspective and background, so on and so forth. So I guess to answer your question directly, Lloyd, it would be more of hiring for strength, but filling in where maybe we need to be stronger in a certain area within the department. Again, going back to thinking about my marketing team. We manage a number of different areas within marketing, right? From pr, corporate communications to product marketing, demand gen, creative and branding. And the skill set and expertise across those levels of marketing are going to be different. And what I'm always trying to do with my senior leadership team is figuring out where I need. Where we need to fill in the gaps and hire someone who might be strong in a specific area where we as a team are weak at.

Do you hire different or do you hire similar? And that is the key to that. Everything we're talking about is probably in this question. Do you currently hire people who are similar or people who are different?

Yeah. I say everyone has particular weaknesses. We all do. I try to probe what their strengths are to see if their strength matches what I'm wanting them to be strong about because I feel like being weak in other areas is fine because that's the whole point of diversity. We're going to learn from each other. If we're all weak in the same way, that doesn't help. So I say hire absolutely differently for the diversity aspect because you want strengths coming from all different pillars.

Definitely. I want to take a few audience questions here because now we've got this interesting conversation going on and a few more perspectives. One is how do you deliver honest but painful feedback? Like how do you do it in a sensible way?

Carol it's one of the things that I hate most about being a manager, to be frank, and I think most managers probably feel that way. No one likes delivering bad news, but what I try to do is deliver it in a way where there are clear cut examples and a clear path to how I want that individual to improve. So instead of delivering the news and it coming across as hey, you suck, it's no hey, here's an area where I think you need to improve to continue to grow your career. And here's why I'm saying that. And here I think are some good next steps for you in order to improve this area.

Definitely Jodi or Suman.

Yeah, I would say it's such a classic answer but I always like to start out with what they're killing, what they're really good at and how much I and why I admire that, that particular skill set or strength. And then I always say in order to grow and become better, constructive feedback is the only way to do that. And it's hard to, it's hard to hear, but it's also really useful and really powerful. That's how I try to approach it.

Suman.

Yeah, I'm on board with a lot of that. Karel I think your point about being the hardest part about being in a manager position is really being able to deliver that and being genuine about it. I've taken the attitude with my team. I'm a very candid person and I'm generally very honest with them and I think that's been the feedback from my team too consistently that they appreciate that there is no pretense of difference in roles and leadership. And I think that my approach to them is always being honest and candid without being and clarifying that this isn't a hurtful situation. Because I think that the hard part about giving Management or criticism or critical feedback as a manager is that people tie themselves to their work and when they do something and it fails and they're told, hey, that was unfortunately a bad idea, but maybe we can take some learnings from it and evolve further. I think is you can hear that and say, you weren't so far off, it just didn't work, and maybe consider it differently in terms of personal feedback. I think, yeah, being open and honest with them without being. You have to be professional. If you're not professional, then there's like any feedback unprofessionally taken is taken as an affront, is taken personally. But if you keep it above board, you're honest about the feedback, use the numbers, bring the data into it, have a discussion that's open, clear feedback back and forth, like, what were you trying to do? What was the accomplishment, was the expectation. And maybe this way we can improve this. At no point does anyone feel they feel heard, they feel acknowledged and appreciated without feeling like, wow, I suck at my job. Because nobody ever wants to feel that way, especially if they're doing their legitimate best or they're making that strong effort to deliver.

Yeah, this is a great book, by the way. I'm like, coming up with books here.

I have that on my shelf too, man. It's a great book. Love it.

Radical candor. So the awesome thing is I don't like reading, and so I have all these books here to remind me that I need to read. But what I do is I end up inviting people who wrote them or people who invented implemented them, and then I interviewed them, like we're doing here. I learned that way. But my dad always says, and he still tells me, it's like when you curse in an argument or in a conversation, like in a heated argument, when you start using foul language and start getting aggressive, you may be right, but it just comes across like you're wrong. And there's a lot of truth to that. The other thing I want to say is it's a consistent theme that I've seen, and as an engineer, probably coming at everything with data is everything has a leading indicator and a lagging indicator. Right? And performance reviews are probably the lagging indicator of a whole bunch of things. And it's our job as leaders to be proactive with the team. And that may be something like you have a real time dashboard on KPI's objectives and key results kind of thing that they're monitored through that journey for the quarter or whenever you do the. Whenever you do the performance review. So they know it's your reasoning with data. They're seeing it. Maybe if there's multiple people in the department, maybe you have have like a scoreboard to see who's doing better and whatnot. But there's human, there's like emotional aspects as leading indicators and there's metrics driven aspects as leading indicators. For example, if it's a sales rep, if you're not making X calls a day, then you're not going to close wide deals. You don't have to have this performance conversation that you didn't hit your quota at the end of the month. You can watch every day that oh, this person's not making X calls or their calls are only lasting five minutes and then you can hop on and you can coach them. The goal is to spot the leading indicators so you can coach your team so they can become successful. And then that's a much better conversation versus you come in at the end and you hit the hammer. On this performance review, I'm a big believer in weekly one on ones, regular one on ones and you can't do an effective job and be invested in people's growth if you've got like 20 people reporting.

And I always say too, as a leader, if we get to the annual reviews and I'm giving you feedback on something and it's a surprise to you in the annual review, then I haven't done my job as a leader as well too. So to your point about the weekly one on ones and making sure that your team knows where they stand and how they're performing throughout the year is super important. And it's the manager's responsibility to make sure that happens. Nothing should be a surprise in an annual performance review in my opinion.

Definitely agree.

I wanted to also add, just going back to this, we were talking about pillars of culture in your organizations and that their empathy which come listening comes with that. I want to talk about servant leadership style which is very much in line with those cultural pillars you were talking about where you are also asking your team for feedback. In addition to giving them feedback, you are regularly asking for feedback on your leadership style. And I think another way to give constructive feedback to team is to demonstrate how to receive feedback. So if they're giving you feedback and you respond well, then they will model that in turn when they receive feedback.

I think you nailed it. That's the approach I've taken too. And to your point, Lloyd, the weekly 101 has been a very powerful tool because it's not exclusively me giving them feedback it's also my request at that time and I've told them this openly and over again that give me that feedback back. Tell me what I can do better to help support your position and make you feel heard and more effective at your job. If there's something that I'm doing to be a blocker, I need to know and if there's something I can do to encourage you in your career path, these one on ones are set aside. They're not always work related. Let's talk about stuff, let's get it out in the open. So you feel you have a good relationship with me and you can talk to me directly without feeling like you're worried about any kind of backlash or problems. And that goes right down to the PRs, right? If you're hearing it for the first time from me, then absolutely I've miserably failed at what I was supposed to do.

Yeah. And I think to add to that is when you get the feedback from your direct reports, making sure that you actually take action on it as well too. And that they can see that their feedback is being heard and acted upon. Because if it's not, then you're just going to stop getting that feedback.

I want to end with a couple fire questions here. Emotionally driven indicators. Can you talk a little more about it or suggest a book article? We're all emotional beings and I say this all the time and this is something you got to punt right at the beginning. When people start getting emotional and it's usually towards a person, you have to have this philosophy that attack the problem, not the person. Attack the problem, not the person. Just separate the person out. And the way I think about it is if somebody is constantly attacking a person and it's forever and you can't get them to think outside of that, then I think that damages the culture and you gotta part ways. Relationships transcend companies and relationships are like gold. Right. There's people who I've worked with in the past that are coming back to work with us. If you the way you build relationship, look at what you're doing with your family or anywhere else, like you got to treat the same at work, right. If you are getting everything comes into toxicity, getting emotional and starting to attack the person, then it's not professional anymore. And that's why marriages also fall apart is because you're not focused on the problem. When you're focused on the problem, it becomes collaborative. This is the problem. It's not a you problem, it's not a me problem. It's an us problem. And then when you attack that, you can come up with a solution. But if you're attacking the person, it becomes extremely difficult. I want to take one question here. Do you hire for trajectory or you hire for experience? And when I say trajectory, meaning you spot this thing in a person and they could like 10x your company or 10x in that role versus somebody who has years and years of experience.

You know, I think that all depends on the position you're hiring for and what you're looking to do. We've had situations within our marketing team where, you know, we needed to hire someone that we needed to work on something that was super important to the company right now. And then we've had other situations where we knew that in nine 12 months from now that a specific initiative was going to take off for us or be a key focus. And, and we said to ourselves, okay, let's get an individual in that seat now. Let's get them up to speed on who live intent is and our culture and our values and our customers. And by the time they're ready to go, we'll be ready to move forward with this initiative. So I think there is a use case for both, depending on the situation.

Definitely. I want to end by thanking you folks. It's been great, Carol, a lot for me to learn from you, lots of experience, but more importantly, your openness. Right. We started the conversation with let's do some slides and you were like, no, I think let's make it collaborative. Let's have a chat and let's invite some people on and let's have a conversation. And that I think elevated this whole experience here. And we'll try to do more of these with other speakers in the future. But Jodi and Suman, if I had to ask you for advice, what is the one thing you think you could put into action when you leave this?

I like the idea of balancing the emotionally driven indicators with data driven, and I like the idea of bringing in third party people to just reinforce what the executive team is already saying. And I liked that thing that you said about the funnel approach where you're educating at the top and then you're supporting it with data in the middle and then obviously you're closing at the bottom. I think that's all really helpful for what we're trying to do at our organization. So thanks for that.

Definitely.

Yeah. As a takeaway, actually, I just saw in the notes there, Francesca, The Q&As, that's incredibly valuable. And I think that at the company Right now we do that. But it's, I think it's maybe not often enough or maybe there's not enough comfort for people to be, you know, able to do that. But I think that's a big part of it. I think that takeaway is really good. And actually the stuff. Jody, you're absolutely right. I think those takeaways, that third party element, having that sales pitch from like an individual and external party who's done the review of it, but also even like vertical feedback. So if someone built a plan out, maybe discussing that with members who are going to disseminate it to have a little more feedback into it, hell, a little more, hey, how do I get more clarity? I think it's super valuable and I really appreciate that. When you're talking about the trajectory, that goes right back to the hiring for strength versus weakness though, right? Because what you're really looking for is how do we take that, fill the hole and make this person become lead off into a better opportunity for themselves while also building alongside the company. So I thought that was a really good question, genuinely.

Definitely. And I want to add to that whole executive team the idea of monthly Q&As. I'm going to add one more flavor to that and I'm going to implement this. We're going to implement this as a company. I feel like we're adding more and more people and we all don't know each other. And yes, you can put the stuff in chat in the company chat and you can put it on the company wiki, but I think it would be great to do these mixers maybe every two weeks or start with a month and not just have a Q and A with the exec team, but interview your new people, the culture adders, not the culture fitters. But like, you know, you're adding people to the culture. Interview them. Why did they join? What do they see in the company? What do they see that's exciting them to excel? What do they need help with their personal lives? Interview each other? Maybe the CEO or CTO or whoever on the existing team interviews a new person and vice versa. Culture ad is where it's at and that's how we're going to build diversity in the company and you. And the key to growth, the biggest key to growth is openness. Thank you everyone for joining us.

I need some traction.

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