What are you doing in your business that’s keeping it sailing smoothly? Do you have core values that could drive change and elevate your leadership for success? Restore confidence and be the best leader you can be. If you’re looking for ways to provide more value in your organization, then you have to listen to Lisa Jackson, the President of Corporate Culture Pros. In this episode, she shares valuable insights on how you could bring a strong culture to your business. She discusses the core values she has that benefit everyone. Tune in to learn how to improve, execute effective leadership strategies, management practices, and overcome challenges!

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Elevated Leadership: Building A Strong Culture With Strong Core Values With Lisa Jackson

We are so happy you decided to join us. I’m telling you, this is one of those locations you get positive, upbeat, be insightful and masterful insight on how you could be one of the best employers out there, one of the best leaders, and what we call a real employer of choice. My company says that to me all the time, and I’m very super proud. I say part of the reason for that is because I host these People’s Strategy Forums, so welcome.

This is sponsored by TMA and CompTeam and you’re going to know a lot about TMA and CompTeam through our presentation. This is a Mastermind and Leaders. We’re dedicated to creating workplaces where people can thrive employees reward. Not only reward employees but employees reward the customers that they love. What an amazing concept that your employees’ absolute love to bring customers a great experience. We are your hosts.

My name is Char Miller. I’m a People Strategist. I’m very happy to not only have many years of traditional HR and talent management experience when I finally decided to get into talent management strategy. I also do career coaching and I call it HR with the Heart, which is where it shows that you can have a heart when you work with employers and the HR people can have hearts, too. If you can find a company with a culture like that, then that’s the company to work for. I do that coaching. The third thing I love to do is work with CompTeam and I’m also a TMA Coach. I work with my lovely team here. The next part is Sam Reeve. He’s a Reward Strategist. Sam and I met a few years ago.

It’s been a while.

Sam and I have worked together. He is a Reward and Compensation Strategist. What’s been beautiful is how we have been able to integrate talent management strategy into compensation and total rewards strategy. It is masterful. We can show you real-life examples. My company has utilized what we’ve learned and we’ve become very successful. Anyway, Sam is also our host. I have to compliment Sam’s team because they’re behind the scenes helping us with all the technology.

I went to introduce Lisa Jackson. She’s a Cultural Strategist. She’s with Culture Pros. I’m telling you, what a brain. She’s a specialist and also integrates talent management strategy with culture and is also very passionate. She predominantly works with the C-level and also the leaders around talent and driving culture.

Also, I want to introduce Sumit Singla. What a pleasure. Sumit is from India. I have to bring up the diversity piece there because he teaches us stuff that I’m like, “I’m a typical American and I did not think of it that way.” Sumit has also worked with some big companies and also as people’s strategists. His insight is very powerful. Particularly if you’re a global employer and you want to learn, I would like you to reach out to Sumit because he’s phenomenal. These are our hosts. They’re going to assemble logistics and I’ll talk about the agenda. Welcome to the show.

Our culture is called Leadership and Culture, an exponential formula for growth and endurance. That is our discussion and at the end, we are going to have open discussion and questions. Let’s get going with our forum. I would like to have Sumit and Lisa. Let’s take it away. Sumit and Lisa, what’s going on?

Char, we are going to talk about leadership and culture. Particularly around some trends that I started researching as I’m putting out content on my social media and etc. What are some of the trends that people should be watching for and paying attention to around these topics in 2021? That’s going to be our focus. I’m looking forward to the discussion with Sumit because he has got wisdom that I don’t in this regard. Thank you, Sumit, for joining me on this topic. I’m going to confess I work. I’ve always worked in PowerPoint in my whole corporate career. We’ve switched to Canva because it’s got lots better tools for graphics and things but I’m not very good at figuring out the interface here.

You are brilliant. You got it. I knew you could do it.

I want to begin with this whole topic on leadership and culture with some wise words from McKinsey. This is from a June 2020 article, Organizing for the Future, “In business today, we see a story unfold before our eyes, one that has happened before but not in our lifetime. When technologies converge, industries transform, and work is remade. Since the 18th Century, at least three industrial revolutions have occurred in which predictability and scalability became king in business. For the innovators, productivity soared.”

“The fundamental challenge now is even the most successful companies are designed around old rules of management thinking that emerged during the First Industrial Revolution, approximately 250 years ago. Cultures built for uniformity, bureaucracy and control. Our research over the years suggests that what we see now is not the fourth Industrial Revolution. It is the first true information revolution. A new set of technologies is enabling the full automation of routine tasks, lowering transaction costs and interconnectivity that enables self-organizing complexity at unprecedented speed. In this arena, as any revolution, the innovators will win in business.”

Often, what happens in businesses is that the pilots up in the cockpit are making strategic decisions without talking to their ground crew. Share on X

These are some powerful words from McKinsey. They’ve got to be grounded in companies through intentional and bold change. What I talk about a lot is embedding the capacity for continuous change into the organization. It does require different leadership, culture and strategy than what most companies are built for. We’re going to talk a little bit about those five trends in a minute, but I want to tee it up with this awareness. This is a core teaching model in my work that in a healthy organization, it is a balancing act of three areas of focus.

The first, obviously, is strategy. What’s not here is vision and purpose, but what I’m talking about is once those pieces are established as to what is our mission? Why do we exist? What do we stand for? The balancing forces in any organization are always models of realizing that we only have so much scarcity of time. What do we put our attention on? I like to think of these as three legs of a stool. The foundation for any organization’s growth and health is about balancing these. It isn’t always about the perfect balance of them. During any change, which often changes led in the realm of strategy.

In an organization, they’re pivoting around a particular market, competitive force, a regulatory force, a growth force, and a merger happens. Whatever the change is, there’s a change in the strategy and that often tees up some reaction or non-reaction in leadership and culture in terms of how it’s appropriate. Is this making sense to you, Sumit?

Whenever I see the words culture and strategy together, it reminds me of the Drucker quote that culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’ve struggled to understand that quote. My variation of that is, culture eats strategy for breakfast and then goes hungry for the rest of the day. The second part of it is my invention. It’s the first time it’s been put up in a public forum, so it’s a historic day.

What my reaction to that is what it often means is that the strategy is what the organization puts most of its time, attention and resources on. The planning and execution of the strategy, even to the point of change management, is part of the strategy in terms of getting the people on board. What I’m advising, what I’m brought in is after those starving moments have happened, where the culture truly is misaligned with whatever the leaders and the organization are trying to do strategically. What I think you’re saying, and I’m going to ask this is what you’re saying, is that what we need to do is flip the switch a little bit.

If you know that you’re coming into, for example, a merger. That’s a strategy for growth. Tending upfront to due diligence around the culture and the merger is as important as due diligence around the financial piece. That’s how I think of this model as you can’t, in any change, eliminate anyone of them at any point in time. They should all be considered together.

The challenge I faced while consulting this is, typically, an organization will come up and say that we need to do something about the organization’s culture. Our people have been complaining that we don’t have a great culture. They keep leaving. I don’t think any employee leaves saying, “I’m leaving because I don’t agree with the strategy of this organization.”

Maybe a CEO or a CXO might. Regular employees don’t say stuff like that. The question when I look at this model is, for any organization, where do you suggest should be the starting point? Should you start with strategy, then move to culture, then move to leadership or do you address all of them together? What should be the starting point? How do you take this journey of building the three legs of the stool?

Are you asking that in the context of when a change is happening or in the context of more of a startup situation? Some of the answers to that depend on where the organization’s life cycle is. I’m assuming you’re asking it in the realm of we know we need some change. Where do we begin? If I had to pick one, it would be leadership. That is the group of people who presumably have their finger on the pulse of where the organization should be going and vis-à-vis its vision, its mission, what changes to the strategy, whether it’s a merger or whatever is being discussed there.

I think it happens more powerfully in this model to balance these forces if you start with leadership, look at what that group of people needs to discuss and what they need to know in order to make a decision about the strategy and the culture. The other two legs, to me, are simultaneous. I do advise that very clearly. There is not any need to separate them out. You should be talking about the internal and external customers you have at the same time.

That makes perfect sense. I do have a follow-up question as well. Since we’re talking about stools, with a typical stool, once you’ve got the three legs in place, you’ll end up sitting on the edge. Is that a good idea to do with culture as well? How do you carry on investing in these three pillars and making sure that the stool you’re sitting on is built on a sound foundation?

I think that’s a tricky question. If I were in a workshop format, I would throw that out to the group and ask for that input. Maybe there are folks that want to weigh in on this because I do think it gets back to a little bit of that chicken or egg problem. Culture is how we work together to get things done and executed in the business. Strategy to me is, we’re going to do to win in our market.

Those two categories are broadly answering. I don’t see them as separate. Because of my bias and my work, you have a lot more buy-in to the strategic plan if you’ve involved engaged people in their fingerprints organizationally first. I would tend to look at culture first in terms of evolving your strategy because the people in the business will have a lot more buy-in to whatever that change is but also ideas that you haven’t thought of. If you’re flying at 30,000 feet, which I talk about a lot as leadership are at that more elevated, they have a broader view and landscape. You see a different landscape and view than you do when you’re on the ground.

A lot of times, what happens in businesses is the pilots up in the cockpit are making the strategic decisions without talking to their ground crew. That is where I would begin is with culture. If I had to pick between any. Leadership first, obviously to get alignment around what change needs to happen, but then as we’re going about planning the change, I would reverse the order.

Too much of the time, companies thought they wanted to buy the I’s and crossed the T’s on the strategy, going back to the merger example. It gets the due diligence around that and gets all excited about this possible match made in heaven. They haven’t explored the cultural fit, so I would reverse the order of it and go, “Is this organization we’re looking to acquire a good fit for us, from a people standpoint and system standpoint? Does that make sense to you?”

That makes perfect sense. No wonder, if I remember correctly, more than 80% of mergers fail. I could be wrong about the number a little bit, but I think that’s the approximate number probably because organizations are not focusing enough on the culture. They’re thinking about vertical integration of products, building stronger supply chains, cutting costs and stuff like that without focusing enough on how to bring two diverse cultures together.

We’re not too in some cases and I agree. The sightings around merger failures are accurate. What causes it is always in the culture and leadership category. Those are the places that if you’re thinking about a merger, if you’re plotting one or if you’ve got one on the radar there. I had a contact from an organization that once they’ve got a great culture, they’ve grown leaps and bounds, and they’re about to almost double their workforce within a year and are literally thinking ahead. We know that we’re going to be either acquiring or become acquired in our space within the next X number of years.

We want to know now what we should be doing to build a culture that is healthy for that or preserve the elements of the culture when that happens. That’s awesome for a company to be thinking about that so far ahead. I do think that culture has become so prominent in our business dialogue now. Probably a lot of people reading are shaking their heads saying, “What is she talking about?” The real trick is that I think leaders need to understand what to do about it because of my experiences as an External Consultant, these are people that are confused about what needs to happen regarding culture.

That’s where I’ve been playing and that’s the arena of my work. What I see there is a lot of confusion at the executive level about what to do about culture. It gets short-changed. I think not because people don’t understand the importance of it and how much it contributes to success or failure but because they don’t know what the actual concrete steps are.

Agreed.

I’m going to move into the five trends that I’m going to talk through for 2021. I did a fair amount of research for this. Hopefully, some of these will make sense to you. There’ll be a couple of nuggets for everybody around us. For a few minutes, Sumit and I talked about the leadership role in culture building. Before I get into trend number one, I think one of the most important truths in business is that habits are formed through modeling, not preaching. I use this example. You’re more likely to eat like your parents, regardless of what they tell you to eat. If your parents were active, you probably modeled the habit of exercise more naturally. Your culture now in your company is an expression of what past or current leaders do more than what they say.

The leadership piece of that tool is about identifying essential behaviors that leaders and managers have to live. Why are these behaviors? What is the current state of these behaviors in our leadership and how will we reinforce them? I give some examples here because most of the time, what I see as core values are they are the posters on the wall but they aren’t lived in behavior. I know if Char was sitting here, she would be nodding her head. What we want to do is boil it down to behavior.

These examples are broad categories of behaviors. Fostering Goodwill and trust are more of an outcome-based behavior. I would cite one of my clients who built most of their culture turnaround on one core behavior, and that was the assumption of positive intent. Every single person in the business was taught and reminded on a regular basis by leadership that if they were in conflict, if they were in disagreement, if things weren’t working between people in the business, the assumption of positive intent. That in itself was a core behavior that changed everything. Having that willingness to boil it down to behaviors is essential in terms of the leadership role. Talking about the confluence between or the connection between leadership and culture nowadays. That’s where I live with that one. Anything you want to add there, Sumit?

I think the biggest takeaway for me here is what you said that the behaviors need to manifest themselves in the organization and not just be posters on the wall. That is the role of leadership to bring forth to make sure that the values and the culture that the organization promises on paper and then, fancy marketing brochures are lived up to. It’s probably one of the most important components of the employee experience.

Make innovation a core strategy in your business. Share on X

Again, I do remember some research where people said that they would take a salary hit if they had a better employee experience or a better culture to work in. It wasn’t a minor hit. The average amount of pay people who were willing to forgo was to the tune of $21,000 per annum, which is a fairly reasonable amount of money. It’s a lot of money where I live, of course. I’m sure even in the US, it’s a sizeable amount of money.

Significant that’s $2,500 a month and plus. That’s a lot of capital that’s placed on the idea of a good work environment. I’m going to talk a little bit about why I think that is as we move forward, but getting the values off the wall and into behavior is tricky. I advise companies to start with a couple, so as I mentioned, the example of the assumption of positive intent. The other thing that I’ve seen work well in a couple of clients that I’ve worked in was declaring that our job here is to grow more leaders. They knew they were growing as an organization, and they were going to fulfill a pipeline of leaders.

The most important role is the people who are enabling the well-being of the people doing the work. There can’t be enough said about it, but we’re going to move on and say some more about it as we go through some trends. Trend number one, make innovation a core strategy in your business. This is interesting because 95% of economic profits are earned by the top 20% of companies, according to a recent study of trends by McKinsey. That tells us a lot.

The innovators are a small percentage of what is producing the true profitability in organizations and 50% of annual company revenues across a broad range of industries are derived from new products launched within the past few years. What I think the big innovation is and the one that I teach in my work is to evolve outdated management practices that have fueled this massive disengagement crisis in US workplaces. That is something Gary Hamel talked about a number of years ago.

If you’re not actively investing and amplifying creativity in your culture, which is the foundation of innovation is allowing creativity to flourish on teams, means not every idea is going to end up in the next great product, but it’s this idea that people and the diversity of their thoughts, ideas and perspectives are being pulled out in a way that is creative and amplified. Businesses that are doing that are going to be risking extinction, for sure.

If you’ve got this like, “We’re in it for those.” I pointed to the McKinsey narrative on how we have been operating with management practices for 250 years that are largely the same around control around consistency. It doesn’t mean those things aren’t important, but you’ve got to infuse that with a dose of creativity. I’m going to talk a little bit more on some things to amplify that in the culture change trends a bit later. Do you have anything on this one that you’d like to weigh in on?

It sounds great in principle, but I’m going to wear an employee’s hat for a bit and say, “Lisa, we’ve had it not fair. As an employee, I don’t know whether my job is safe. I’ve struggled with work stress, COVID stress, childcare, and a lot of uncertainty about other things in life. How do you expect me to innovate or how do I contribute to the innovation culture that my employer talks about without feeling burned out? I’m barely staying afloat.”

I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in the next trend, but I want to address it here because I think that is the exact question, which is changes already burning people out with the pace of it, the acceleration of it with, the grief of what we’ve been through in 2020 as on the world stage of losing so many humans due to the pandemic and all of the things that have been lost. Let’s take a simple example of one of the biggest relatable changes that have happened in 2020 and that’s the remote work.

Not everyone is thriving in that but what innovation looks like is, are you consistently, as a manager group, asking people what they need? Are you asking for their voice to come into play about how we can do this better? What are some creative ways in which we can make life easier in this very challenging moment?

Listening to those voices and implementing those ideas, I think, is an example of what I’m talking about when I’m asking companies to make innovation a strategy, which is to start practicing the habit of asking people in a structured and organized way for their input. Not only as a result of the engagement survey. “Are you engaged?” It’s how we can make changes here in a way that feels healthy to the business, for these goals that we’re trying to achieve, for you personally.

Thank you for answering that one.

If that’s not happening, it’s going to be very difficult for organizations to have or have innovation if you’re not dressing the reality of what’s happening now, so that’s a good question. Trend number two builds right on this conversation and that is well-being at work. I was surprised when I came across this. I had seen it in 2020 before COVID hit. Deloitte’s 2020 Human Capital study cited well-being as the top-ranked trend 80% of nearly 9,000 respondents identified it as important or very important to their organization’s success.

This was before COVID. All this research was done back in 2019. What’s still missing is they talk about this dual imperative of worker well-being and work transformation, which are not connected effectively and you pointed to it in your question, Sumit. It’s a juggling act for a lot of organizations now. There is a lot of people who are approaching burnout, but I think what’s hopeful to me is that 80% of people are identifying this. Imagine, Sumit, many years ago, people would have been scratching their heads and going, “What are you talking about well-being at work?”

At least, that was how I experienced things earlier in my career. What I believe is powerful about this trend is that there’s a recognition that the business growth, the results that happen in an organization, is dependent on people still. If we accept this as a reality, well-being is important. What Char was saying in the opening was that she’s made a decision in her company. This whole idea is that you are seeing people’s lives as important as the work they do for your business.

It began as early as April and March 2020. We did have a few employees fakely say they had COVID where they really didn’t, which was an interesting thing because they wanted to take time off work.

That can happen, too and let’s talk about that. People will take advantage of it.

Let’s park on that one because I’ll share the experience. On this particular topic, we started evaluating the fact that my employees are public-facing. My employees are facing customers face-to-face, and with their former practices, some of the things that we do literally require that our employees are inches away from the public.

We had to think long and hard about how can we have the social distancing aspect of protecting the health and well-being of our employees. That required a meeting with my staff to get the innovation, ideas and think about what can we do differently to protect them and their own personal well-being in public. I saw it all over the media, obviously.

A lot of banks, nail technicians, those in the service level industry, and the restaurants started either closing down or having you wipe your feet, sanitizing, hand sanitizers, and all of that. By the way, in Mexico, they’re doing a far better job in all of those categories than they do in the United States. I would make that little side comment. It is important to think about this and the fact that when either you end up with the COVID or any other health condition or your family member does, it’s a different level of compassion and caring and providing the resources that employees truly need to help their well-being.

I would say that when I was the Regional Talent Management Director and Organizational Effectiveness Director of Kaiser Permanente, I had a strong partnership with the wellness director because we were trying to figure out how do you solve the puzzle of integrating talent management strategy and wellness strategy together? We were talking about that. I left that company in 2016. We realize that it looks so different now how to have a work environment that has well-being without it being, “We have a company gym. Our company offers flu shots to our frontline workers,” which at that time was required for all of our Nurses.

Our company gives all employees little pedometers to put on their belts so that we can track the number of steps that they’re taking every day. The well-being nowadays is extremely different. Well-being now is more holistic. It’s more about mental health well-being, stress management, how we can truly have a health care program and maintaining the cost implications. How can we improve our healthcare while maintaining the cost impact of the company? I could go on and on.

When you have your question here, what is still missing? What’s missing is that we need to sit down and have a conversation with your staff because every one of your staff has different talents, perspectives and probably has done a job elsewhere. Be it the health industry or not, that has some very innovative creative ideas about what we can do to improve health in the work environment. This is what we do. We talk about it and we talk about well-being at every single staff meeting. Many of our employees have had some amazing ideas and concepts. We’ve impacted those and it’s made a tremendous difference.

It totally makes sense. It’s not hard to believe that there’s a connection there. I did place a study in the chat if anybody is interested on that linkage. It was a Sharm’s sponsored study, so if you’re interested.

I want to grab that for sure. One of the things that I want to point out to build on what Char is saying here is that I’ve heard a lot of stories from clients around how conflict and bullying didn’t stop when the offices went vacant. Being aware and sensitive that there are people working from home now that feel like they’re being left out of meetings or slack threads. There’s no opportunity for a one-on-one with their manager for months on end. Surveys about engagement don’t result in any changes.

Have the ability to share wisdom about well-being at work and culture. Share on X

In some extreme cases, demands to return to the office before COVID was under control, irrespective of home life challenges. There are some different flavors of the challenges that are happening now when people aren’t in a building together. When you put people together, whether they’re via Zoom or in a building together, there’s still going to be conflict. There’s still going to be confusion at times or even verging on paranoia.

If you’re not sitting with people, you can see the person across from you. You might be more quick to make up a story about what’s happening there. That is an important thing to remember as well. It means a little bit of extra attention on checking in with people and daunt in your commercial lease yet because the remote work experiment is still fairly new. There’s a lot of people that will do better if they at least have part of their time in an office.

Another parking lot topic, but the trigger word that you brought up is bullying. We will have a whole topic on that.

It would be a good topic for this forum because it is subtle in many cases. We think of playground bullying as something that’s very overt, but a lot of what’s going on is subtle. It’s not something that is easy to point out or call out.

Do you mind if I share a quick story? We have a negotiation with malls. Believe it or not, my company is thriving and we are still open and facing the public. We’re working in metals.

I wanted to give a shout out to all of the healthcare restaurant and retail workers who are putting their health on the line.

Mall employees and retail grocery stores. My example is that two of my leaders, the newly promoted manager and my director, were deeply concerned because we have a location that is outside of a big box location. I’ll say they’re called Nordstroms. They have a coffee shop and they’re telling our employees that they can’t talk to people that come in front of our location. They’re not allowed to talk to the public from our location. Not only that, align was basically crossing our entire front of the store. My employees were upset.

The fact that our productivity was limited, which impacted my employee’s income. We had another owner of our company and he was mad about it. He started screaming, yelling and bullying on Zoom some of my staff about it. I immediately said, “We’re ending this call now. We don’t bully our leaders and our staff.” It was a conversation on a Zoom call. We ended the meeting. Now we’re adding the bullying rule. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to be added to our policies. We’re going to be doing some sessions, discussions about virtual bullying because it wasn’t only the Zoom call.

It was also texting because most of our employees text and communicate. There’s text bullying like what kids deal with in school. I would say in other workplaces, I would assume, gives guests in the health care system. There’s something called hazing and sometimes the newer nurses that come into the work environment are “hazed.” It’s still happening except virtually.

I think thought on with needing to have mental and emotional policies that support worker well-being. I love what you’re saying about that and that can include things like regular check-ins from managers. How are you doing in the company? How are we doing? This idea that you’re talking about, Char, is about teams developing with this very core spirit of caring for one another. If they have instances, there’s still this thing of caring for one another. If someone on the team is not exhibiting that behavior, that positive intent or the spirit in which caring is at the center.

We care about each other first and foremost, even if we don’t agree, even if we’re not alike, even if I don’t understand you. I care about you because you’re part of my team. That, to me, is one of the most important changes that need to happen if we’re going to have this idea of culture at the center of this idea of innovation. As a strategy, you’ve got to set aside some time for fun and play, even if it’s the first management Zoom meeting. Weekly communications, I think, is another piece from the CEO now. During a massive change in an organization, communication has to be more frequent.

The last thing I’ll say and I’ll let you go on with your discussion. Go back to your core values. What are your core values? Our core values are compassion, dignity and respect. What are your core values? Are you truly living them? Back to the way we structure our work schedules. We need to look at our work schedules or employees can have time to work on their well-being, getting exercise, eating healthy, taking care of their families, and facilitating that.

The way you said it is perfect. Ask your people. They’ll tell you what they need if they know you care. That’s one of the biggest things. I think that disconnects that connection between leaders who are promoted because they have demonstrated they care for people, not only because they happen to be the smartest person in the company.

In fact, the researcher you quoted in the beginning, Lisa, is very insightful. I’m quite proud of it because I was the India Champion for the HR Trends of Deloitte. A slightly lesson known factor is that Deloitte is one of the few organizations that has had a chief well-being officer for many years now.

That’s amazing. How cool is that? What’s that person’s overall responsibility?

They take care of things like work-life integration. They promote employee wellness and it could range from basic things like health checkups for everyone to instituting policies and processes that support people. Deloitte has a policy of happiness time off wherein you don’t have to specify a reason. There are a few days that you get off in a year. You can take those days off at a day’s notice. It could be for a birthday and anniversary or you’re feeling stressed, so you can take half a day off or the full day off. That’s outside of your regular leave.

No questions asked?

Yes.

That’s key that you’re not going to be punished because then in the earlier industrial era, I think there has been this more perpetuated that the hardest people, the warriors who were putting in hundred-hour weeks, are the people who get promoted. If you choose not to do that, you fall behind. We’re entering a new stage in which people’s lives are integrated more completely around family, business, work and play. There’s an acknowledgment of that. That’s happening. That’s certainly a great example of it. I want to talk about trend number three. Each year, I do this exercise instead of New Year’s resolutions.

I reflect on and declare my word. I did this when visiting my good friend Char down in Puerto Vallarta, where she is hanging out. I did that over the New Year one day, overlooking the ocean, which was beautiful. It’s fun to be able to have the opportunity to do it that way. I try to establish intent and a theme for my year, personally and professionally. In 2021, the word that came to me was confidence.

It came to me in terms of how I want to step forward and step out a little bit more in sharing some of this wisdom about well-being at work and culture. I was reflecting on it. I realized it’s also what we need in the world. Restoring confidence first and foremost in leadership, especially in our country’s governance, with some of the shakiness that’s happened in the United States but beyond also in business and incorporations.

Dictionary.com defines confidence as full trust, belief in the powers, trustworthiness or reliability of a person or thing. If this resonates with you, I invite you to introduce this as a discussion topic in your company. What creates trust and confidence in leadership? Especially here in our organization. Within your executive and management ranks. It’s a powerful conversation if done with the right ground rules and changes are implemented as a result. I’ve often facilitated a diversion using Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team pyramid. This shows that trust is the foundation of what creates accountability and results.

If any of you read that book, use that book. We use that book as a foundation and the pyramid. For one of the clients I worked with, their entire culture change was built around this concept. Trust is the foundation on which you can have a disagreement and that you can have these debates. You can have these conversations that are about, we don’t agree but, we’re going to hear and understand all points of view before we make a commitment and decision.

Those two bottom parts of this pyramid, I’ve seen in action with leadership that creates confidence organizationally and leads to commitments that then the accountability results fall out of that. One bad actor in an organization, no matter how healthy you think your culture is, can destroy confidence in leadership. A lot of that is about organizations leave those people unchecked because their results or their technical contributions are so big.

Previous generations considered bad bosses’ part of the territory. But the simple truth is that a new generation of talents is not going to stand for it. Share on X

A new generation of talents is not going to stand for it. That’s a simple truth. Previous generations considered bad bosses’ part of the territory. There was a whole famous cartoon built on it called Dilbert. Millennials and Gen Z demand leaders who support good teamwork and the ability to speak up and leaders who build safety emotionally and psychologically.

Lisa, since we only have a couple of minutes left. I also want to throw this in before we wrap up. Sam is going to throw up a poll. I think people talk with you directly about some of those specific concepts that you’re talking about.

This deck will be made available. There’s some cool stuff at the end of the day that I wasn’t planning to go through it in detail but this presentation deck is available for those of you who are reading on CompTeam. I’m done with confidence and leadership topic for the moment but I can’t emphasize enough that if there were one thing as Sumit and I were talking about the beginning that you could do is this.

Trend number four is to make diversity and inclusion. Let’s take meaningful action. Sixty-seven percent of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities. That’s from Glassdoor, and 45% of American workers experienced discrimination or harassment in the past year.

To me, one of the most powerful and courageous actions of our time is making the business norm to staff people from all walks of life. By the way, this is a parallel in nature. Diverse ecosystems are much stronger against extinction. I don’t want to over-generalize the longstanding role of HR in the organization but they had been credibility issues with HR throughout my career, as cited by employees.

They work for the company, not for the people. This is a huge opportunity that is right for human resource departments to claim their long desired and needed role as a full-fledged business partner. It’s in the area of concrete strategies, education and training to make diversity inclusion and equity a reality. It’s not about only promoting more people of color. We all know that.

That’s one good outcome, but I think it’s important to take courageous changes in the systems. One of them that I teach is providing educational tools and strategies in all management leadership classes around eliminating, first and foremost, the mindset of discrimination. If that’s what your company stands for. It’s not about eliminating bias, that’s human, but it’s choosing a mindset that supports cultural practices that are colorblind. Because of our time, I’m not going to go too much more deeply into that but that is trend number four.

Trend number five is boulder culture change. This is that same human capital port. We were talking about a while ago, Sumit and I. Seventy percent of companies from that same 2020 report are undertaking are experimenting with bold moves and cultural change. Those are agility, innovation of hierarchy, and automating to eliminate democracy. These are some very important culture changes you can consider taking on in your business. I want to talk about the basics here. I want to show you a couple of ways that we go about this.

As I have mentioned, this presentation is available for you to download from the CompTeam site. This is our step-by-step culture assessment process. There’s also a leadership workshop process around these five habits that we give you the step-by-step of what you can do organizationally to create both a cultural assessment of where do we need to change as well as leadership conversations about what do we need to show behaviorally in the organization to change the way that we do work forever. With that, any other final thoughts or questions Sam, Sumit?

What I would say about those last few slides is this process of what to do in organizations and how you walk them through it. It sounds very interesting. I’d love to have you talk about that on the next engagement when we talk about culture again and go through that. That sounds like a great topic. Thank you, Lisa and Sumit, for that conversation around those trends for 2021.

Thank you, Sam.

As we’re at the top of the hour, I want to thank everyone for joining us. We look forward to visiting again soon. Thank you, Lisa, specifically and Sumit for the wonderful content.

Please share, like, and tune in to us on the next episode, 10:00 AM, Mountain Time. Thank you all for joining us.

Thank you, everyone.

Bye.

Important Links:

• TMA
• Char Miller
• Sam Reeve
• Culture Pros
• Sumit Singla
• Organizing for the Future
• Deloitte’s 2020 Human Capital
• Dictionary.com
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team