How to Ensure Company Culture Doesn’t Become a Casualty | with Kevin Oakes

Foreign. Welcome to the show. My name is Johnny Campbell. I am going to be your host for the next 40, 45 minutes. I'm the CEO and co founder of Social Talent and you have found yourself listening to or watching the Shortlist, our weekly show that broadcasts on LinkedIn and YouTube but is also available as a fantastic podcast podcast wherever you find your good podcast, but notably in Spotify, Apple and everywhere else. It is the last Wednesday of February 2021. Can't believe we're nearly at the end of February. It felt like the longest month month ever. Last month, as we all know, in January. We're getting there. Hopefully you're in somewhere in the world that's getting out of lockdown. I, for my sins are still in still in Dublin, Ireland and I saw on the Guardian in the UK this morning we are the third most I know this is a phrase locked down country in the world behind only Cuba and Eritrea. I think I'm pronouncing that country correctly, but I'm probably not. So yeah, welcome from my lockdown home to your lockdown home. We got a great show lined up for you today. We've got a fantastic guest and we're going to be discussing the topic of culture. Culture is on lots of people's minds right now. If you're a leader, you're managing your team, you're hiring for teams, you're developing teams, you're, you're probably thinking about culture and how different it is this February to last February. It's difficult to maintain culture, build culture culture when you might all be distributed or remote or part of your team is distributed or it keeps changing. It's really hard to get that right. And we're going to be talking about how to ensure company culture doesn't become a casualty of this pandemic. So big topic and really hope you're going to be engaged in it. For those of you listening live, would encourage you to add your questions on the LinkedIn chat or YouTube chat.

So can you.

So please do. I'll make a call out during the rest of the show. If it's your first time to the show, welcome. You can find out more about our previous shows and our upcoming shows by going to socialtalent.com theshortlist where you can get our lineup and you can see who's coming next and who's been before. So companies are in such flux at the moment. We've had so many lockdowns. This is lockdown three for us here. We're migrating to remote work at different Paces. Some have said this is the way of the future, some are saying it's only till July or October. We're trying to figure out how to do all this stuff whilst our teams are balancing with issues at home around their, their, their, their schooling. I've had a 12 year old pop into my office all day asking me to correct his math homework, English homework, etc. Etc. Like this is the norm for many of us having to do these different things and balancing it all. We've got a culture of our, you know, our home is mixing with the culture of work and we're not necessarily seeing people the same way we used to as well. So there's a lot of change. That's why we were delighted to be able to invite on the show this week Kevin Oakes. And Kevin is the CEO and founder of the Institute for Corporate Productivity. That's i4CP which is the leading human capital research company in the world. More importantly for today's conversation, he is the author, the bestselling author of Culture Renovation which you can find on Amazon or any good bookstore, although you might not find it in good bookstores because Kevin tells me that it's been sold out a couple of times and in the month or so it's been on release were already on the third print. Kevin, you've got an illustrious background. I'm going to let you explain that and particularly why you chose this topic of culture so timely as your latest book.

Well, thanks Johnny and thanks for having me on the show. Appreciate it. Yeah. As you mentioned, I've been in the human capital industry for many years. The company that I run today is one that I co founded almost 14 years ago called the Institute for Corporate Productivity. And we're a research organization, we're doing more HR research than just about anybody on the planet. Always with a business lens of what are high performing organizations doing with their people practices versus low performing organizations. And we about a year and a half ago had set out to look at the topic of culture change under the understanding that most companies who try to change their culture, they fail. In fact our research shows only about 15%, 1,5% actually succeed. But the goal of our research was to look at that 15% and figure out is there anything in common amongst those companies that are succeeding. And lo and behold we did find some commonalities, quite a few amongst those companies and from that came out with a very well read research study. It was really one of the largest studies ever done in corporate culture and from that wrote the book called Culture Renovation that really explores the blueprint for what organizations can do if they want to positively change their culture.

I've added it to my Kindle library, Kevin. It's my next up as soon as I finish the one I'm currently finishing on psychological safety, which is not unrelated, I imagine, to all of this. So I've got to get to that. I'm really keen to hear some of those insights, as many as we can squeeze in. But first, Kevin, I thought we'd jump to the news because culture is quite topical. I want to take a couple of news items and get your thoughts on it.

Sounds good.

So first up, Kevin, there was an article recently published, I think only this week in sherm, that's the Society for Human Resource Management in the US particularly. And the viewpoint there was why remote work doesn't have to dilute your company's culture by Pam Hines and Brian Elliott. Want to get your thoughts on this particular article as it relates to the current environment with such an amount of remote work. What were your thoughts on this?

Yeah, and I think that article actually was a reprint from Harvard Business Review that had published it originally. It's interesting, Johnny, I've been telling companies your culture has changed during the pandemic, like it or not. In fact, we actually have done a research study on this and we asked employees and companies, do you believe your organization's culture has been affected by the pandemic? And 93% said yes. What was really interesting to me though is that 75% of that survey population said yes in a positive way. Our culture's been affected. Only 18% said in a negative way. And I think, you know, as companies think about their corporate culture, you have to take an attitude. Are we going to just let the pandemic affect our culture and be sort of passive or reactive to that, or are we going to be proactive and make sure that we are shaping the culture to what we want to see in the future? And you know, I think the high performing organizations are recognizing we've got to make sure that we're taking control of our culture. The work setting, work life is probably forever altered. It will never go back to exactly the way it was before. And so I think that article, you know, really did a good job just taking a look at all different aspects of culture, whether you're newly remote or whether you had remote, you know, work before. And how are you planning to handle.

It going forward, do you think, Kevin, though, you know, because it's very interesting that comment about obviously 93% saying it affected their culture. But three quarters of that group saying it's a positive effect, how long do you think that would last? And do you think there is a relationship between that positive sentiment and the well established research phenomenon of when individuals go through a trauma together, how they tend to bond and align together? How much of it is just related to the fact that we've all gone through a trauma. And if you work in an organization that shared trauma in the last year has brought you together, but it may be temporary.

Yeah, that's very observant, Johnny. And that's the fear of a lot of us in the human capital space that it is going to be short lived. What you hear over and over again from organizations is that the empathy that senior leadership has shown has never been greater during the pandemic. And so the fear is that once things, once we get out of the pandemic anyway, we'll never return to normal, that that empathy will wane and we won't have as much empathy shown as we have during the pandemic. I think the other positive for a lot of workers is that they've seen the whole person of their coworkers during the pandemic and it's a side of people that they didn't see before. A lot of times we only saw the business Persona. But now, you know, we're jettisoned into people's homes and you know, into their kitchens, their living rooms. We're seeing their pets, their kids. You know, some we're understanding that maybe they're have elder care responsibilities, childcare responsibilities and I think it's helped people gain a better appreciation for their co workers. I don't think that'll go away. But the empathy part I do worry about that it could be short lived.

I have a friend of mine who works in a very fast growing business with these unicorn startup organizations. Now they've over a thousand employees. But he was commenting how come next month, March 2021, more than half of the organization that they will employ at that point would have joined post pandemic. I know it's the extreme, but you know, what do you think about cultures that have literally will be dominated by post pandemic hiring? Post pandemic ways of working. Do you think that's a new area to explore? Do you think it's been much different than other types of organizations that have been perhaps around a little bit longer?

Yeah. Keep in mind there have always been organizations that are mostly remote companies. Right. So this isn't a new phenomena for them. However, on A grand scale. It's a new phenomena for many organizations. And I think a lot of companies have done a marvelous job at shifting their onboarding processes during the pandemic so that they can handle this remote hiring. Even in my own company, I have to take a step back sometimes and realize when we've hired many people that have never met anybody else inside the company other than, you know, like you and I are talking right now. But, you know, the, the biggest part of onboarding, and we have a lot of research that backs us up, that high performing organizations use to be successful, is making sure you make connections inside the company. You know, in the past, onboarding was always around, you know what, let's get you your laptop, your badge. Here's the bathrooms. Today, the savvy companies recognize to make people successful. I've got to introduce them to subject matter experts inside the organization, make the right connections for those people across the organization so that they can help this person be successful long term and vice versa. This person can get some immediate value out of helping and providing value to others. Our research has shown time and time again that that will keep people employed long term. And you've seen it many times. You know, the, the people who flame out in year one, they typically are, you know, a little bit lonely. They never really assimilated into the culture. They never really made those connections. And the pandemic and remote work gives us an opportunity, I think, to focus even more so on making sure those connections are made.

I think the, the intentionality you have to have around those things is so much more in this post pandemic world. Some of it may have happened naturally, I guess in a typical office or workplace environment in the past, but you have to deliberately create it. I want to come back to one of those points you just made there in a second, Kevin, but I want to flip to perhaps some of the shortcomings. I love the positive message you shared about your survey results, but our next article comes from the Irish Times, my home newspaper here, and it talks about the pandemic has Shown up Shortcomings in organizational culture. It doesn't really go into a huge amount of depth in this article. So it's called the Pandemic has shown up Shortcomings in Organizational Culture. We'll share a link on live chat and we'll also put it in the show notes. But really a quote from here is, more and more companies are starting to understand that they need to show employees that they value them as whole people. Can you talk to me about that? Comment and the thrust of this article and perhaps tie it back to the research you've done to see is there a connection? Have you seen something like this in the research you've done for your book?

Yeah. You know, it's always interesting to try to paint broad brushes across all organizations and all industries. But I think one of the biggest shortcomings that the article touches on a little bit is the lack of serendipity that the office environment provides. And I was talking to the chro of workday about this a little while ago when, you know, it's really hard, I think, in a remote environment like we are in right now to schedule innovation. Right. Innovation typically happens from serendipitous moments, chance encounters, ideas that are sparked from those. And that has suffered a little bit in organizations. And both articles I think even touched on this, that innovation is something that worries people a bit. You know, have we become a little less innovative now? I talked to the head of talent of a major organization last week and he was saying, you know what, I disagree with that. I think what the pandemic has shown me is that I have a lot of people on my team and in our company that are more creative than I ever thought they would be and they've come up with solutions around our current situation, but solutions just outside of it that are for the benefit of the business that, you know, he was saying, have been instrumental in keeping that business really flourishing through the pandemic. So, you know, it's, I think we adapt, you know, as people, we adapt to our situation. But I think as an organization you have to allow adaptation to happen and to, from, from my perspective, flexibility has never been greater and needs be greater for organizations. It's very, very hard to have blanket policies right now that apply to everybody because everybody's situation is just so different.

Johnny, 100% agree with that. I'm going to make a quick shout out to anyone listening live. If you questions or comments you want to put to Kevin, please do so by joining in and putting them into the chat on YouTube or LinkedIn and we'll be delighted to take them. Kevin, I want to take you back to the book itself and your research. And you know, at its heart you set out, I believe, to try and understand what are the commonalities amongst organizations that are high performing from a cultural perspective. And you hinted at a couple of those already. I wonder if you could go back and maybe walk me through the top, top issues or items that correlated amongst those companies that were high performing from a cultural Perspective that you think, you know, are perhaps the most repeatable, are the most easiest, not the easiest to copy, but most likely that somebody could say, we can do that. That's achievable for us. Yeah.

And there are many examples of companies in the book to follow, but we created 18 action steps, as I mentioned before, and divided those up under the renovation theme into three phases. Plan, build and maintain. And much like when you're renovating a house, Johnny, what we found successful companies was they didn't transform or start all over again. In fact, even though culture transformation is the more common term, the successful companies really held on to some of the core values that made them a great company to begin with. They held on oftentimes to their original purpose, which was very applicable still. But they renovated for the future so that they could be more agile and like I said earlier, flourish in the future. That was really the genesis of coming up with that name, culture renovation. And as I look at those three phases, what I often find in companies who want to change their culture, they leap right into that build phase. They just decide, all right, here's what we're going to do and start building that new culture before they take the time to plan. And the plan phase, it's much like you're renovating a house. You don't go in and just start knocking down walls, because if you do that, sure enough, you're going to knock down a load bearing wall and bring the whole thing down. You've got to lay out that blueprint. And first you have to understand inside the organization what is the sentiment of the employee base. And during the pandemic, this has probably been even more pronounced. But companies are more and more listening to the workforce through a variety of methods. In the past, it used to be the annual engagement survey, right? And they'd spend a lot of money and a lot of time putting that survey together. That's a point in time survey. And you know as well as I do, you know, your mood that day, what happened to you the day before might affect how you're going to, you know, respond to that survey. And so you get a lot of false positives. What many organizations are doing today is more frequent surveys. They're doing pulse surveys on a weekly basis. Some companies are doing this daily. In fact, Amazon has been doing a daily survey that when you log on in the morning, you have to answer a question. But they're using that question very strategically. In fact, one of my favorite ones that they asked is, is your manager a simplifier or a complexifier. And I love that one because it just has all managers kind of pause and think about their own managerial style and how are they doing it. But that sentiment analysis will help educate senior teams, particularly the CEO and the senior team, on what the culture is today before we want to go start changing it. Because I guarantee if the senior team locks themselves in a conference room and decides what the culture is today, they're going to get it wrong. You've got to really understand the sentiment first. And there's a number of other steps in that plan phase, like figuring out what to keep setting your cultural path where we talk a lot about the importance of purpose, defining the desired behaviors. But one that I really like in that plan phase is identifying the influencers inside the organization. There's no question that successful culture renovation has to start at the top. And you need the championship of the CEO and the senior team to be successful. But you also need a co creation mindset and the cooperation of the workforce. And the first place to start is trying to make sure you understand who those, those influencers are. Again, if you just ask the senior team, they will get half of them wrong. They, they will miss many of the influencers inside the company. And you know this as well as I do, Johnny. If you think about any organization you've ever worked for, there are key people inside the organization that everything seems to flow through, right? Everybody goes to these people for advice, for information. But oftentimes those people aren't super visible. They're not really high on the hierarchy. They might be introverts, they're not extroverts, but they're the ones that make the company hum. You identify them through a scientific tool that we talk about in the book called Organizational Network Analysis. And this is really a methodology that was championed by Rob Cross, who's a professor at Babson College in the States. And it's a method of really uncovering those influencers, but also energizers in the organization. And I know there are people in my life that I talk to them. And I walk away from that conversation just super pumped up, energized, excited. There are others you talk to, and it's like Darth Vader, they just suck the life out of you when you talk to them. You want to identify those influencers and energizers when you're trying to change culture, because they're the ones that are going to make it happen at the, at the grassroots level. And so that's an important aspect of that plan phase.

I do Love that. Going back to the title of the book, it makes so much more sense. You can build a culture if you've got a greenfield site. You're a brand new company, you've never hired someone and don't have any employees. But you're right, you know, when you have an existing business organization and group of employees, you can't build because you're renovating. You're, you know, you're not knocking the house down. That would be a disaster. You are renovating. And I think the analogy holds very, very well. So when you look at, you know, your comment around obviously network analysis and trying to understand who the influences are, you know, my sense is that in pre pandemic times it was easy enough to figure that out. After a few weeks when you just look around a room, whether it's a warehouse, an office or a store, you kind of see who the person or persons are who seem to be at the center of conversation. So it's not a job title thing. It's not something you need software for. You could just probably figure it out and you could probably just get in on the conversations and know more instinctively who to basically align yourself with or you know, you know, understand a bit more, get a better relationship with. Do you think this is, you know, all the more difficult in a virtual world where literally the people you're probably going to be talking to are? As you said, it's like this. It's a zoom on zoom type scenario team meeting that has to be deliberately set up and organized and you're not necessarily seeing everybody else's zoom or team meetings to understand what's happening. Like how do you, short of buying a piece of software that does the network analysis and gives that to new employees, how do you figure this stuff out? How do you figure who the people are?

I think it might even be easier, honestly right now because you do have the ability to track the communication flow and there are organizations that are monitoring slack or teams or zoom or you know, various communication channels. I find that a little intrusive, frankly, you know, a little scary that companies may be monitoring it even though it's definitely happening. We're bigger advocates of just surveying the workforce and really asking them, you know, who are the influencers? Who's your go to person? And then you can kind of triangulate from the survey who gives you energy, you know, when you talk to them and you can triangulate from there. But I say it's easier because it's harder to monitor who's talking to who in the cafeteria. Right. Or at the water cooler in an office setting. The point is, you want to make sure that those people are your culture ambassadors going forward and you want them to be on board with the culture change that you're trying to create. And I've talked to countless companies that have done just great jobs at bringing those culture ambassadors into the fold and leveraging them throughout the organization.

I've seen, even anecdotally, examples, even perhaps on a smaller scale, where those individuals are perhaps given more prominence in roles such as sports and social and organizing events. So you're deliberately pulling them in a situation where they will, through osmosis, reach lots of people and expose themselves. Whereas their job title would necessarily expose themselves to certain individuals in the organization, give them a role that does have a more pan company or pan departmental role, which can work quite well. If you don't mind, Kelly, I'm going to take some questions and comments from the audience here. Kislea Srivastava has a lot of question, but essentially she's asking. Due to lockdown, most organizations adopted work from home. Now, few of them who've never thought about work from home concept have actually included in their policies. Though when we talk from an employee perspective, a lot of people find their working hours are increasing, which is interfering with personal space. And I guess that can breed resentment towards the organization. Have you looked at this from the perspective of culture to understand how you better manage this, this kind of situation, this, this stretching of the hours, if you like?

Yeah, great question, Kaslaya, and appreciate it. In fact, it's a very hot topic with a lot of the companies working with. And we're embarking on a new research study called From Cube to Cloud, where we're examining many of these issues. Yeah, let me, let me start with just the attitudes towards remote working companies have just really a wide range of attitudes towards this which really probably emanates from the top more than anything. For the book, I had a great conversation with Ajay Banga, who's the CEO of MasterCard. In fact, he just moved to executive chairman at the beginning of the year. And he was saying to me, you know, he was surprised that CEOs of other companies were making blanket statements about what the future would hold for their organization. Some CEOs were saying, you know what, we're getting rid of all our corporate real estate. We're just going to go remote because we've been very productive, you know, in this environment, way more productive than I thought we'd be. And Ajay said Yeah, hey, that's, that's pretty easy to say when you're in your 6,000 square foot house with awesome WI fi and your dedicated home office. It's like, look, we have employees. Most organizations who are global have employees all over the world and the situations vary greatly. He said, I've got employees that live in a one bedroom apartment with a mother in law and dogs and kids. And look, the office is the respite and they don't have the WI fi they need or the accommodations they need to be productive at home. You know, the flip side to that is a lot of individuals recognize that working from home gives them much more flexibility than they ever had before in Freedom. And in every study that I've read, most people say, I want that flexibility going forward. It's not that I don't want all the benefits of being back in the office, but I don't want to be chained to the desk or the cubicle in the office going forward. I want flexibility to sometimes work remotely, sometimes not. There are other CEOs who have said, like Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase or Reed Hastings at Netflix, both have come out pretty emphatically that they don't think remote work is productive at all and they want people back in the office. And there's been, you know, some reasonable, you know, criticism of those attitudes as well. And again, it goes back to what I said before. I think flexibility is going to be the key, key for your organizations. I think it's going to be very hard to make these blanket statements. But to get to, you know, some of the things that Kislya said in, in the question, I do think people have had who are new to remote work. Now, I talked to a lot of people who are not new to remote, remote work and they've been dealing with this for decades. The idea of work life balance, I don't, I don't even love that term. I prefer work life blend because I think that's what most of us are, you know, dealing with. I think organizations have to encourage people to take time for themselves. I've seen some companies say to employees, look, we know you can't really go anywhere but take a vacation. They're doing things to make sure that there are off hours inside the organization. They're shortening meetings, 45 minutes instead of 60 minutes, 25 minutes instead of 30. There are other things that they're doing to try to make that work life blend a little easier for employees. And I think all of that is very healthy for companies overall. And I think the well being of the workforce has never been discussed more than it is now. Not just the physical well being, but the mental and emotional well being. And more and more companies are putting effort into that. And to use the term used earlier, Johnny, they're making it psychologically safe for workers to raise their hand and say, hey, I'm burnt out, I'm overloaded, you know, I need some time. And I think the, you know, the more productive companies are making that psychologically safe environment a common place inside their organization.

We've a LinkedIn listener and viewer saying, you know, here she says she calls it work life integration, which I think is another great term. And I reminded me of a good friend of mine, Stacy Zapar, we've had on the show before, who many years ago, on the back of a napkin at a conference one day drew two circles and she drew one big circle and she drew a small circle inside the big circle. And in the small circle she wrote the word work. And in the bigger circle she wrote the word life. And she said this is how I see it rather than the seesaw. She said life is something that's work is part of something that's bigger called life. And basically ideally want to have the right balance between the two. And in a perfect world the life bubble is growing all the time. And then that affords your work bubble to grow too perhaps. But you know, you can't have the work bubble growing at a higher, faster rate than the life bubble. That will lead to dissatisfaction. I've always since then thought about that. You know, whether you call it a blend integration, it's kind of. It isn't the seesaw balance like that trade off. It's one versus the other is. It's the common way of thinking about it. But I think it is, it isn't good. I'm going to jump into one more comment from Kathy Iverson. Kathy's saying clear and consistent communications are important, but they're challenging when working remotely. Can you speak to that value or kind of element of culture around clarity and consistency when it comes to communication, even in a pre Covid manner? I imagine it's something that probably came up in the research.

Yeah, in fact, Kathy, that's step number seven in those 18 steps is clearly communicate that change is coming. And we give several examples of how successful companies have done so. I think communication has evolved during the pandemic and many organizations have recognized they've had to have more frequent communication than they had before. I think even those articles that we were talking about Johnny mentioned that a lot of companies have gone to maybe shorter meetings, but just more frequent meetings within the workforce. I know in our own company, we've done a number of things around that. We do every. Every Wednesday morning we do a coffee, virtual coffee, and don't have much of an agenda. It's really just everybody, you know, getting together and, you know, just like you wouldn't in a break room, for instance, or we have happy hours at the end of the day, or we have a book club, we have a movie club. I think all of those things are, you know, kind of healthy for organizations to. To do. But from a communication standpoint, I think it's important that companies are clear with their workforce that some of the decisions we're making today are made in the moment. Right? It's made for what we know today. It may change down the road. And a lot of companies have had. Have been forced to change. We. There's a lot of companies that have said, hey, we. We're coming back into the office by a certain date. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning about this, and they've had to shift those dates. And if any company asked me, hey, should we put a date out there? I'd say, no, don't put a date out there and be honest with your workforce. Just say to your workforce, look, we're not exactly sure when we're going to be back in the office. We're not exactly sure when things might change going forward, but we're going to keep you up to date, and we will let you know as soon as we have an idea of, you know, what, you know, when we can make that decision. That kind of transparency, and I'm a big fan of transparency, Johnny. That kind of transparency I think employees appreciate they can see through, you know, if you. If you make a false claim or if you make a claim that you just don't know that you can keep. And so there are companies today who are saying, yeah, we're going to come back in September. Like, Labor Day is the most popular day right now for companies to say, yep, we're going to come back in September. September. I wouldn't say that because, you know, we were giving dates, you know, months and months ago that didn't come to fruition. You know, it's great that the vaccinations are rolling out, but they're rolling out a lot slower than we thought. Look, there's new variants out there that we don't know a whole lot about, you know, and there's all kinds of issues that companies are wrestling with around vaccinations in the workforce that I think we still need to think through for in a lot of those organizations. So just be transparent that we don't have all the answers right now, but we're going to keep talking to you and as we get answers, we'll, we'll convey them.

We had a good friend of ours, Jason Lawrence, on the show a few weeks ago, he spoke about that, that there was attributes of candor and empathy in terms of leaders that are shining at the moment and, you know, being honest and, you know, it ties in with the psychological safety element we spoke about already. You know, that you have to be, be open and honest and, you know, employees embrace a leader who shares that she doesn't have the answers. The old school autocratic style of leadership was very much, I have the answers, don't question me, look to me for all the answers and you'll be fine. Whereas that new style that promotes that higher level of safety is one that says, hey, I don't know, but let's find out together. Let's go solve this. Or who in the organization can help us solve this. Would you agree though, like, on the question of return to work, can. Is it okay for a leader to share, hey, I don't know when, but it's not going to be before X to give some sort of certainty around planning to say, hey, I know it's not going to be before June. I don't know if it's going to be June or later, but. But right now we're saying not before that. Just to give some level of certainty.

Yeah, I suppose I, I still would couch that is, I don't believe it's going to be before June. You know, it would be, it would be shocking if it was, you know, but we don't really know exactly when it will be after that time frame. I think that's fine, Johnny, but yeah, I wouldn't say things you can't guarantee. Right. So who knows? Maybe, you know, maybe vaccinations, you know, maybe this all just goes away and life, you know, returns to a, you know, a better place, you know, next month. I don't think that's going to happen, but maybe it does. And, you know, we're dealing with something none of us have ever experienced. Right. And it's just a very difficult thing to say with definitive language that, you know, what's going to happen.

I want to take you back to the subtitle of your book. We talk about building an unshakable company. And you mentioned, obviously only 15% of organizations are successful in changing the culture. Speak to me about the business rationale and the benefits of changing the culture. Like, you know, sometimes we get wrapped up in, oh, how do we do cultural change successfully? It's like we forget to ask, well, why? Why do we need to do this? What are the actual benefits to our organization? Is there data, is there science behind the benefits of changing your culture? And is changing your culture the best way to reap those benefits?

It is. And yes, there is science behind it. A positive culture, a healthy culture, translates into better performance. And there are countless examples of that in the book. Maybe the best one is Microsoft. And I start out the book talking about the wonderful culture change effort, culture renovation effort that Satya Nadella and Kathleen Hogan, who's the head of HR at Microsoft, have completed. I shouldn't say completed. Initiated in 2015 and continue on their journey today. They get upset with me when I say that they have accomplished something because they feel like they've got a lot of things they still want to do with the culture at Microsoft. But it's been a wonderful story where Satya took a culture that was very. It had a lot of history to it, right? A lot of success in the past, but was in a slump. You know, a company that some people were predicting was going to go the way of Sears and just wasn't innovative and being outpaced by Google and Apple and, you know, their, their competitors. And he rallied the organization around some simple concepts, the biggest one being growth mindset, the concept that we all can improve our skills and capabilities. They're not innate, you know, they can be learned. We learn from our mistakes. Satya has said I want a culture of learn it alls, not know it alls, which honestly, in the past they had a lot of know it alls and a culture where knowledge was power. If I held onto my knowledge, that made me more powerful. And today the concept of knowledge sharing is what makes people power powerful inside of Microsoft and in a relatively short period of time took that company from a place where a lot of pundits were predicting they were going the opposite way and turned it into the most valuable company in the world. I am a firm believer that a healthy, positive culture translates into performance. It's very rare that you've got a horrible culture but are making money hand over fist and that changes the culture somehow. I'm not saying that's impossible, but that's a pretty hard way to do things. The Right way to do things is to, is to make sure that you're being proactive around the culture you want to see going forward. And you mentioned unshakable in the title, Johnny. Create a company that long term is unshakable and that can withstand change. There's one thing our research has shown is that cultures that where change is not feared, where change is not only accepted but there's almost an anticipation of it. And when change happens there's, you know, there's a feeling amongst the workforce that we can take advantage of this and do better going forward. Those are the companies that tend to succeed versus the ones that just fear change and try to stay away from it.

I love the model of Microsoft and what Satya's done there. It's been one I've followed as well and done some work with the teams there and seen how they progressed from six, seven years ago, even on the cultural change amongst leaders. But let me just point to some of the maybe high profile examples where organizations did get by and went to significant market cap valuations and IPOs or near IPOs with toxic cultures that have been called out and hopefully are looking to change. Those two being that come to mind. Uber and WeWork are probably most famous in the last few years. Have you looked at either of those companies to identify what went wrong? Or more importantly, have you looked at them to see what they're doing to change? Because both obviously in the last few years have made bold moves to try and massively change their culture to positive effects. What are your thoughts on either of those?

Quite familiar. And we've worked with both companies. I'll take WeWork because I think it's a more drastic example. I had many friends in very senior roles at WeWork and even during the height of their valuation and hiring and revenue generation, I was quite worried about that company because they did have a very unusual culture inside the organization. And we've all read about their founder and CEO and some of the shenanigans that went on in that company. And I was concerned that it would come tumbling down because I didn't think it was very sustainable. And I root for WeWork. I hope they come out of this and I hope they continue on their path forward. But it was a very stunning downfall and I think that's what a toxic culture creates. You know, you, you, you create these situations where you can overnight or just, you know, a very short period of time drastically cut the valuation of the company. And a lot of boards of directors are worried about this now. In fact, the NACD has been telling boards for the last three or four years that they need to govern culture as closely as they govern the financials and the other aspects of the organization. Traditionally, they have not. They've overarchitected on financial acumen. They have very little human capital acumen on boards of directors. And as a result, we're seeing more former chros and current chros join boards. They also had very little data on the organizational culture. In fact, most boards of directors, their impression of the culture is 90% filtered through the eyes of the CEO. So you can imagine on a WeWork, for example, most of their impression of culture came through what Adam was telling them about culture as opposed to independent measures. And what boards are trying to prevent is a, you know, a Boeing 737 Max issue, which the US House of Representatives said was the result of a culture of concealment. You know, that's. That's how they labeled it and why that happened. Or a Wells Fargo sales culture situation. Right. That there's still, you know, wrestling with and, and trying to overcome. You know, that really hurt the organization. We're seeing some boards of directors set up separate culture subcommittees. So just like you have a, you know, the audit committee or the nominating committee, they have a culture subcommittee where they are exploring what's happening in the culture of the organization. All of that, I think, is healthy and it's going to become much more commonplace going forward so that you can avoid, you know, those toxic culture cultured situations and nip them early on.

Yeah, I think the Wells Fargo example is fantastic. We don't have time to go into it, but brilliant one. For those outside the US who might not be familiar with it, it's worth looking up the Boeing example again. Unusual in many respects in the aviation industry because they have quite as demonstrated in black box thinking. They have come such a long way compared to other sectors in transparency and openness around disasters and faults. I think the interesting you mentioned obviously the craziness in WeWork and Adam's shenanigans. I think that's a real shame because we work is probably a company who should be booming. They should be doing an Airbnb right now in terms of finally positioned really well coming out of this. But aren't. I think it's probably a stroke of luck that Travis was ousted from Uber and Dara's come in instead, because Uber are now having a massive comeback and being able to transform their business, you know, expand into the delivery market and everything else to really really come back against what could have been a really negative year for them. I don't think they could have done that without the transformation that they'd begun in their culture and won't say transformation, renovation that they began in their culture a few years before that. So probably I come into a close already, and I can't believe the time on this. Kevin, you know, it does strike me on your. Right, the business value of renovating your culture need only be looked at. When you look at the bad examples of, you know, negative culture in Boeing, example with the Air Max, with Wells Fargo, with WeWork, and then the positive examples. When you look at Microsoft, you look at Uber's turnaround as they've been engaging with the last few years. You see the market cap, the satisfaction and happiness of employees and just doing better for the world. Right. Which is, which is obviously a good benefit as well. It's rattled by. I could Talk for another 45 minutes, VicKevin, and hopefully we'll get to do so again soon offline. But we're at that point in the show where I can't believe we're at the end, but we're at that point where we ask all of our guests every week to please drop us one piece of advice to add to our shortlist, our advice shortlist. And, Kevin, it's come to that time where despite having given as many pieces of advice in the last 45 minutes, I'm going to ask you for one more.

Sure. It's hard to give just one. I think for organizations. I'll go back to. Your culture has changed during this pandemic. So be proactive and make sure you're shaping it to be the culture you want to see in the future. Don't sit back and be passive and reactive about it because the culture may take a turn in an area that you don't want to see. I'm going to give one more piece of advice, Johnny, if it's okay. Individual level. You know, we've seen a lot of discord over, over this past year. You know, there's a lot of conflicting opinions in organizations, always has been between co workers. I think the healthy companies, they don't try to dissuade conflicting opinions or differing opinions. They simply try to stress, act with respect. And I, you know, that would be the one piece of advice I'd give to individuals. It can sometimes be a challenge working remotely if you haven't been doing it. And tempers can be short. Just make sure you're treating each other with respect.

I think in Ireland, we rephrase that as don't be an asshole. But each culture is their own. Kevin. Kevin, if our listeners and viewers are interested in finding out more about your research, about your work and particularly the book, where can they go?

The best place is culturerenovation.com We've set up a separate website for the book. There's not only more information on the book itself, but we have additional case studies that weren't in the book. We've also set up an area where people can share their culture stories. We know there are techniques and tactics that organizations are using that have worked that aren't in the book. And we want people to share those on the site with us. And you'll see some a newsletter that you can sign up for that comes out monthly around culture, renovation and some other tools that are available for companies to try to change their culture.

Kevin, we can't wait to check it out. And as this is an ever evolving issue that's never going to end to your point, I think Satya's Microsoft's point around that rings true for us all. We'd love to have you back again on the show in a few months or more towards the end of the year to see how things are evolving. What else we're seeing as we hopefully see more of a return to work for different workplaces. We see the vaccines beginning to kick in and see their effects and hopefully society moves into its new phase. Kevin, it's been absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining us from Seattle this morning for the show. I wish you success and I wish the book, massive success as you've already found in the last month.

Thanks, Johnny. And as I told you, Ireland's one of my favorite places on earth. So maybe next time I'll come visit you in Dublin.

I'll have a, I'll have a three wood in my hand and I'll be missing, I'll be going left and right. But as long as you don't mind and we get a pint afterwards, Kevin, I'd love to take you up on that. All right, Kevin, thanks for joining us and thank you for joining us this week. But please do come back next week. We've got a fantastic show lined up for you next week, our first in March. We're going to, we're going to be bringing back the wonderful Dr. Beverly K. Bev's been a regular guest on our show and Bev is a good friend of Kevin's as well. And Bev will be releasing her, I believe, ninth edition of her Love him or Lose Him Book A fantastic companion piece for anyone working in the talent space or any leader who manages 2 manages 20 manages 2000 people love him or Lose them the Engagement Focus Leader Bev is going to be back giving us updates in terms of since the first edition of the book 20 years ago, what's changed, and particularly the focus she's given around inclusivity in the newest edition. So join us on Wednesday, 3rd of March. That's at 4pm UK Ireland time. That's 11am east coast, 8am west coast. Or you can check out the podcast, which goes Up Wednesday evening, 3rd of March on Spotify or Apple. You can find out more about our show and subscribe for alerts and updates about our show@socialtalent.com the shortlist. But for now, hopefully that's given you lots of food for thought for your organization's culture and how you can renovate yours, not build yours. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening.