On today’s show, we discuss how culture impacts the health of your organization and what you can do about it.

Sophie Theen, an award-winning people management expert and author of The Soul of Startups: The Untold Stories of How Founders Affect Culture (Wiley: August 2022), helps business leaders reimagine the role of talent management in the financial services industry. With a deep understanding of how founders can affect culture, Sophie has profiled both successful and unsuccessful founders to offer insight on how a company’s cultural paradigm shifts as it grows from a startup to a scale-up to an enterprise. She is a recognized mental health first aider and delivers engaging and insightful presentations on creating an immersive recruitment and onboarding experience, diversity and inclusion, and getting executive and investor buy-in for HR initiatives.

Key Takeaways:

Founders have an impact on shaping the culture of the company throughout the life of the company, but especially in the beginning stages. They should be intentional and ask themselves:

• What is the company that I want to build?
• What type of culture do I want – How do I want my people to look, feel, and emote within the business?

Then, every action a founder takes needs to help usher people toward that direction.

Founders lacking certain soft skills in areas they want to create are smart to hire people with those skills to help create the culture they desire.

Culture change management – To change a failing culture, identify:

• What are the known behaviors?
• What are the YES behaviors?
• What change has impacted other people?
• What new changes do we expect to see in the future?
• How do we implement transition – through tools, changing the way we work, or collecting more feedback.

How do you approach change regarding behaviors in your culture?

• What are the goals we are trying to achieve?
• What are our limitations?
• What are the behaviors hindering our progress?

What should a founder put in place as the company scales to keep the culture on the right track?

• Start by having self-awareness and understanding your own weaknesses.
• Make sure you have hired others that have the ability to be strong in those areas.
• Empower others to help shape the culture as you desire.

Recommendations for HR people

• Don’t try to tackle it all on your own.
• Work together with the CEO and the founders.
• Communicate to leaders to help them understand how a culture change will improve the company.
  • Fewer people problems to manage.
  • Ability to deliver better products to our customers.
  • A healthier working environment that is easier to scale.

3 Top Takeaways:

• Culture continues to evolve. It doesn’t stop at any point in time.
• It is a collaboration with every single person in the business. Everyone matters.
• Leaders – don’t try to do it alone.

Connect with Sophie:

Website: https://www.sophietheen.com/

Book: The Soul of Startups

On today’s show, we discuss how stress is potentially costing your organization millions of dollars.

Ed Beltran is a contributor for Forbes and Fast Company where he writes about employee reboarding, the relationship between stress and performance, and how the Metaverse will shape business. He brings 20 years of expertise in finance and operations and has been a leader at Fierce since 2017, a leading communications firm that has worked with 300 of the fortune 500 companies.

He holds two Bachelor of Science degrees from Arizona State University in Accounting and Computer Information Systems, and an MBA from the University of Michigan. He has held an active CPA license since 2004 and holds certificates in Entrepreneurship from Wharton and Harvard. Prior to joining Fierce, Ed was Head of Finance with large multinational organizations such as Agilent Technologies, Avnet Inc., PricewaterhouseCoopers, Arthur Andersen as well as advising and supporting start-ups and early-stage companies.

Ed is an avid road bike cyclist clocking 120+ miles a week year-round helping his mental, physical, and spiritual balance as he puts it. He is passionate about helping those who don’t have the privilege, background, or resources to be fully prepared to engage in effective conversations at different levels in life (College, Professional, Personal, Parenthood).

Key Takeaways:

Stress statistics from the workplace:

• $300 billion is lost annually due to stress
• 81% of workers acknowledge that stress affects their work negatively
• 48% of all workers report crying at work due to stress

If someone says something offensive to you, you have three options.

• You can walk away upset – This harbors stress, and you will have a biological response.
• You can tell coworkers about it – This amplifies toxicity in the workplace.
• You can engage the person in conversation – This typically will clear up a misunderstanding.

How can you identify the source of the stress?

• There are apps that will integrate with wearables and attach context to the biometrics through GPS data and calendar data and give the user meaningful information to identify when they experience stress the most.

How can a person combat the physical stress that comes with having multiple problems to solve throughout the day?

• Self-awareness – Understand that this is a source of physical stress for your body.
• Mindfulness – Set the expectation for yourself that this is your job and is what you are paid to do. Shift your mindset to prepare for it in a positive way.

In a Harvard Business Review study, respondents answered this question – What is your biggest drain on resilience at work? These are the tangible interactions people are having that create stress and impact their resilience. Having skills to deal with each of these situations will increase resiliency and improve productivity.

• Stressor – Dealing with difficult relationships or politics in the workplace.
  • Skill – Knowing how to give proper feedback in a tactful and non-confrontational way.
• Stressor – When the volume or pace of work stretches me to my limits.
  • Skill – Culture is defined by interactions every day. Leadership can encourage employees to share when the workload is stretching them so that options for delegating or prioritizing can be discussed. Leaders can also be intentional about balancing transactional conversations with personal conversation so that employees feel valued.
• Stressor – When I feel I’m being criticized personally.
  • Skill – Knowing when to confront and how to hold people accountable while maintaining a team mentality.

Top Takeaway:

Every day you wake up with things on your mind that you need to address. These are your top stressors. Tackle them right away with tried and true skills to decrease your stress level.

Connect with Edward Beltran:

Website: https://fierceinc.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardjbeltrancpa/

On today’s show, we discuss how to develop an organizational strategy for user-centric innovations.

Prior to founding UXReactor, Satyam Kantamneni led various in-house design organizations such as Citrix and PayPal. He is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School. While at Harvard, Satyam realized that most businesses aren’t leveraging the full power of User Experience (UX) Design as an engine for strategic growth. So, he resolved to change that. Through UXReactor, Satyam demonstrated that UX can and should drive enterprise-wide innovation and business outcomes. UXReactor has enabled its clients-partners to generate hundreds of millions in additional revenue from user-cen- tered innovation. Satyam is passionate about user-centered innovation and he is authoring a book titled User Experience Playbook: A Practical to Fuel Business Growth, which will be released in April 2022.

Key Takeaways:

4 questions to ask anyone in the organization to see if you are user-centric:

• Who are your top users?
• What are their top pain points and needs?
• What are YOU doing about it?
• What is the measure of success?

Successful organizations have the:

• Right people
• Following the right processes
• With the right mindset
• In the right environment

Getting feedback from users requires the right people. Researching is not just talking to users. There are three types of research:

• Formative research – Understanding what the pain points are that are not being articulated.
• Validation research – Making sure what we have built is validated with users in a consistent manner.
• Sensorial research – Constantly tracking the satisfaction level of the users.

How do you cross the gap between what the user thinks they want and what they really need?

• Focus on the users’ behavior vs what they are saying.
• Observe them. Spend time with them, and propose something really useful for them.
• Create a way to experiment and validate your solution.

How to balance innovation and stability

• Run experiments from a user-centric perspective.
• Vigorously act on the results in a way that is measurable.

Should you ever focus on your competition, rather than your user?

Know your competition, but focus on how what they are doing relates to what your users care about.

Top Takeaways:

• A user-centric innovation or mindset is a success formula. Keep leveraging it and activate around it.
• Focus on having the right people following the right processes with the right mindset in the right environment.
• Experiment with this in an effective and deliberate manner or you may end up just reacting to the competition.

Connect with Satyam Kantamneni:

Website: https://uxreactor.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kantamneni/

Email: satyam@uxreactor.com

Book: User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth

On today’s show, we discuss how to have an effective revenue strategy.

Falkon CEO and Co-founder Mona Akmal is a product and engineering veteran who builds resourceful, kind, and output-driven teams that create and scale success-enabling products. With a passion for crafting elegant solutions to technically difficult problems, she has grown teams, businesses, and many products at Microsoft, Amperity, Code.org, and Zulily.

The impact of Mona’s work includes ramping from $0 to $11M in ARR and 15 household brands as happy customers at Amperity; from 10M to 100M students learning computer science on the Code.org platform; and from 1M to 1B docs in the cloud with OneDrive and Office.

Key Takeaways:

• Engineering and Business intersect by focusing on
  • efficiency
  • balancing the entire equation with analytical thinking
  • processing many variables to optimize an engine/business
• Challenges facing organizations in the Go To Market space
  • Siloed points of view. Various departments focused only on their departmental issues, and not net revenue retention.
  • Teams focused on execution and not thinking long-term.
  • Misunderstanding of the purpose of culture and operating principles.
• Indicators of a silo problem
  • Ask different teams why they are not performing and they blame each other.
  • Conflict between senior leadership.
• How to fix the problem
  • Executive leadership members are the neutral parties and need to do a good job of having a great data strategy, so there is a system of truth.
  • Have shared objectives.
  • Bottoms up feedback. Have conversations with average employees to gain non-digital data – very valuable perspectives. This will help gain a more full picture of the truth.
• Recommendations for key metrics to focus on
  • Input metrics – who you are targeting, how you are targeting them.
  • Marketing activities and ROI on campaigns and channels.
  • Sales development activities – conversion numbers.
  • Employee productivity – cost vs output.
• Recommendations for accurate and effective data
  • Data has to be directionally accurate. Focus on the trends, not the details.
  • Invest in operations – marketing and revenue.
  • Make employees’ lives easier by investing in the tools that will help them be productive.
• AI trends within GTM
  • Conversational intelligence and coaching driven by AI.
  • Data governance – anomaly detection and data cleaning driven by AI.
  • AI GTM intelligence tools that will look at massive amounts of activity data and pinpoint the key things to focus on to maximize your revenue engine.

Top Takeaways:

• Reflect on whether your objectives and key results as a senior leader are representative of a silo or not. Make sure you are also focused on revenue.
• Invest in a good data strategy and spend 50% of your time focusing on the future.

Connect with Mona Akmal:

Website: http://falkon.ai

LinkedIn Falkon: https://www.linkedin.com/company/falkonai/

LinkedIn Mona: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-akmal/

The expert guest was booked via The Expert Bookers, www.expertbookers.com. 

On today’s show, we discuss the new era of work and how companies can navigate it to stay relevant.

Emma Giles is one of the founders of SoWork, a product that helps digital-first teams do great work, no matter when they work or where they work from.

Emma leads product and spends her time working directly with SoWork customers who are leaders of organizations trying to navigate the digital-first work shift. This gives her a unique perspective on how the landscape of work is evolving, what leaders and their teams are struggling with, and how to solve the most pressing challenges with technology.

In her past life, she was a crisis counselor and a scientist. She dropped out of a PhD from Harvard/MIT in computational neuroscience to build a business, spent a year at Khan Academy creating free medical content for medical students, and scaled data initiatives for the WHO. Today, running a digital company allows her to live on Vancouver Island, where she spends her personal time hiking and running ultramarathon.

Key Takeaways:

• The concept of remote work isn’t new, but the pandemic has catapulted these trends. Companies are trying to decide where on the spectrum they will land between all remote or all on site.

• Performance of a business depends on people to come together in ways that are productive and high-functioning to drive great results. Teams need to be able to come together to be a unit that is greater than the sum of its parts. Team members as individuals need to feel seen, heard, and valued to perform at their best.

• New tools are becoming available to help build spontaneity in digital teams, allowing people to be in common spaces digitally. As companies realize that many of their pain points are related to connection and collaboration techniques, these tools will become more in demand.

• Teammates with at least 5-7 strong connections within the company are more likely to stay with the company. A strong connection is one where a person feels like they can be themselves with another person. These connections take cultivation to form and then touch points to maintain.

• Because people are different, leaders should cultivate an environment for people to get what they need, but not feel forced to behave a certain way. Meet people where they are with technology and make sure they are able to use the technology in a way that keeps the benefit of their flexibility.

• Adoption is often the biggest hurdle when implementing virtual team tools. Behavior changes require understanding, time, effort, realization for why it works, and then fitting it into people’s workflows. Less is more. Teamwork blocks are a great way to start. Select a unit of time where everyone comes together and works from the virtual office. They can see how it feels and build from there.

Top Takeaways:

• Every team is completely different.
• People’s need to feel like they can be themselves, be human, and connect in realistic ways is paramount.
• Everything in the business stems from the individual’s needs being met. This empowers them to connect in teams and create great results that affect the bottom line of the business.

Connect with Emma Giles:

Website: https://sowork.com/

On today’s show, we discuss how mindfulness can affect our organization’s ability to be successful.

Dr. Eric J. Holsapple is a successful developer and entrepreneur who has used mindfulness to transform his life and business, and helps others to do the same.

Eric has a PhD in Economics, has been a real estate CEO and developer for nearly 40 years, lectured real estate at Colorado State University for 20 years, and practiced yoga and meditation for 30 years. Eric was awarded The Colorado State University Real Estate Entrepreneur of the Year in 2010; and Bizwest Bravo Entrepreneur of the year award for Loveland, CO in 2015. Holsapple has a unique perspective on how merging business and mindfulness can be a catalyst in changing lives. Eric is the Founder of Living In The Gap. His popular workshops teach CEOs and professionals a different way to operate mindfully while improving the bottom line.

Eric has written numerous published articles in real estate and economics, and a book entitled Profit with Presence that will be published in early 2023. He is a regular speaker at public and private events, and a popular guest on business podcasts.

Key Takeaways:

• Essentially, mindfulness is focus.

• To change negative thought patterns, develop awareness of how much focus is given to negativity. Focus on building relationship instead or determining if a change should be made.

• Mindfulness helps to see other people as people and not just a means to getting the job done. End results are important, and should be looked at on a regular basis, but being present in the moment when speaking to people helps employees feel valued.

• Impact to ROI – Aetna did a study showing a $2000 annual savings in healthcare cost and a $3000 annual increase in productivity per employee after implementing a mindfulness program.

• A mindfulness exercise before a meeting helps the meeting to be more productive.

• Mindfulness helps to filter random thoughts and only focus on the ones that are part of the desired vision of the individual or the organization.

• Accepting our current reality reduces stress. Stress is resisting the reality. We can still desire and strive to make changes toward improvement, but accepting the current reality calms the mind.

• The world doesn’t change. Your perception of the world changes.

• The goal is to be able to focus on what you want to focus on to the exclusion of everything else. The exercises help to train yourself to do that.

• Consistency is more important in the beginning than the length of the session.

• One easy way to start is to just stop and take time to focus on your breathing.

• Corporate mindfulness could shift the mindset of the world.

Pitfalls to mindfulness:

• Time – We are all busy. Start small and focus on consistency.
• Culture – People will criticize. Keep it private until you are confident.

Top Takeaways:

• Start with 3 “gratitudes” each day. What are you grateful for and why?
• Start to be aware of your breath. You can do this wherever you are.
• Do service work. Getting into the community to serve others changes your mindset.

Connect with Eric Holsapple:

Paid programs and free resources available at:  https://livinginthegap.org/

Eric’s book launches Mar 7 on Amazon –

Profit With Presence – The 12 Pillars of Mindful Leadership