Leadership

Focusing on Culture to Drive Leadership Strategy

Jennifer Long

In Fall of 2018, Gary Anderson was hired to be the CEO of Nova Mutual Insurance in Ontario. This was a new position as Nova Mutual was a newly merged organization.

Now two and a half years post merger, Gary in his first C-suite role is clearly writing his own playbook. Gary and his team at Nova Mutual are doing things a little different, and they believe that culture will drive results, so although the results matter, culture trumps results.

Gary is not the typical CEO, and in fact carries the title of Chief Empowerment Officer.

But is that just a cute play on words, or are there significant differences in the role he plays in the office? At Nova Mutual, one of their chosen core values is empowerment, and according to Gary, the title change seemed to fit the mold. At Nova they pride themselves in doing things differently so much so that even now Gary is considering the next evolution of his role. 

There are several pieces to the puzzle of culture and transitioning from a traditional office to an office driven by culture, and Gary believes it starts with servant leadership.

Servant Leadership

A servant leader could be well-compared to the scrum master. If you haven’t heard of this term before, a scrum master is an individual that facilitates good discussions, but isn’t the expert. Their primary goal is to listen and remove obstacles that are hindering the real experts from creating the best team or outcome  possible. 

If a traditional office structure is a hierarchy like a triangle, servant leadership means turning that triangle bottom up. As a servant leader, you’re removing obstacles, allowing the superstars to do their thing, and in turn they’re going to make things more efficient because they’re making the decisions about their job and how to streamline it.

Instead of having one leader at the top, with all of the pressure and control, there are many minds figuring out the details of how to get done what needs to be done in the best way possible. By removing the top down approach you start getting all sorts of ideas that no single ‘top-dog’ would ever have the time, freedom, or energy to think of.

When you have this kind of participation, it paves the way for buy-in, rather than begrudging (or worse, apathetic) compliance.

Issues with Traditional Top-Down Leadership

We know some of you might be wondering if this change is even worth the effort. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right? However, there are a few clear issues that come with traditional top-down leadership, and there’s one in particular that is impossible to avoid and that is poor communication. Top-down leadership means there’s someone at the top with typically three people as next-level leaders, who in turn relay information to 10 other employees, and continuing down the line. 

Usually, this process of communication doesn’t go well, because somewhere within the middle management, details start to get lost, twisted, or added to.

Like a classic round of the popular party game Telephone, the message totally changes by the time you’re done. That’s exactly what traditional top-down management communication does.

Transitioning to a Different Leadership Strategy

When transitioning to a completely different leadership strategy and structure, you have to start by gathering information about the existing culture. By using preliminary surveys, you can reveal a lot of information, mostly from the comment sections. The typical click type answers can lead you down a general path, but it’s the comments that are key.

You’ll find, as you get to know the existing culture and individuals, there is a wide difference in beliefs, priorities, talents, and expectations. Somehow, you have to convince this group of diverse people to buy into a new culture and a new identity. But before that, you’ve got to decide what you want that culture to be. 

Culture will happen regardless of what you do. It’s constant. You can either be completely invested in constructing or influencing it, or you can do nothing and it will create itself. 

Gary used the first year as the transition year, and his goal was simply to bring everyone together. Not transforming anything, or making big moves, just getting everyone accustomed to these new concepts. 

One step in this transition is getting your team involved by participating in conversations about purpose and values. It takes time, but it’s vital to create a safe space to have these conversations, because during transition periods, your team members are all asking themselves the same questions: 

Where do I stand? 

Am I staying, or am I going?

They may find out they’re not a fit. Maybe there’s not a career opportunity for them with the direction you’re going. You want the culture to be a genuine place for conversation and empowerment, so if one of your employees discovers something new they want to do, they will be supported. If they can do that within their current position in the team, great, let’s do it! If they can do it in a different position on the team, also great. If they can’t fulfill that goal with your team, they’re going to have the support they need to find a new job that gives them what they need to grow.

The change is gradual. Some team members might have never been put into a work situation where they could speak freely. Some team members might not believe you mean what you say. Everybody’s watching to see what moves are actually going to stick, and it comes down to trust. You have to build up the trust in advance, before you start making claims or taking chances.

This transition period, where you’re focusing on communication with regular, inclusive conversations is not just for building rapport and practicing for the “real thing.” As the leader listens and the team talks, culture is co-created. You’ll notice patterns in how the team communicates, what they talk about, and why.

Purpose, Values, Culture

Rather than simplifying it as a traditional mission and vision statement that you see on everyone’s website, Nova Mutual chose to alter it. 

They started by answering the question, ‘What is our purpose?” and “Why do we exist?”

Then, they boiled it down to core values. These are catchy buzzwords, and they can sometimes be put on a plaque and ignored, but it’s getting the team members involved in the discussion. Instead of a CEO saying, “We’re going to believe in these three things, and if you don’t like it, hit the road” that’s what this process is all about.

Nova Mutual came up with six values, but Gary made it clear that they could change at any time as the team changes. Here are the words the Nova team  chose:

  • Integrity 
  • Courage (to make decisions that were never made before)
  • Empowerment (to realize you can do it, and you can get your buddies to do it as well)
  • Respect 
  • Service
  • Community

This, they decided, was their true culture.

Ultimately, the servant leadership strategy leads in one direction. However, ater the transition phase, the goal (at least, for Gary at Nova Mutual) was to also create self-managing teams.

Many people think the idea is madness, and wonder how anything gets done, but really it’s just the natural extension of culture-driven strategy. 

At first, you keep it simple with functional management. When the team has a discussion about potential changes, the servant leader (traditionally the “functional manager”), gives options of how these changes could be implemented. Then, they give them a small structure to work with, using examples from what they’ve been doing as a larger team up to this point. For example, meeting together every day, talking about stuff, taking 10 minutes to clarify who is doing what, and being intentional about problem solving within the group.

If self managing teams are going to be high-functioning teams they have to want it. They have to be ready to give 100 percent, especially at the start. As you build trust, the goal is to be able to rely on anyone on your team at any given time. 

Even with loads of experience in the field, this sort of experimentation requires agility. You have to be more infinite minded. The leader will have to identify certain things for the team to achieve that are aspirational. Agile, self-managing teams figure it out together and are highly efficient and collaborative.Creating a culture of servant leadership simply lays the groundwork for the magic to happen. 

For more resources from the combined genius of Sandi and Jennifer, check out Management Possible and Satori Consulting Inc.

Jen is the owner of Management Possible® focused on training and coaching multi-level management and leadership individuals and teams nationally and globally. Sandi is the owner of Satori®  Consulting inc. a global consulting firm focused on helping organizations solve complex problems in strategy, leadership and governance.

Success Tips from a Virtual Teaming Expert

Jennifer Long

Remote Teams: Success Tips from a Virtual Teaming Expert

Organizational change takes time to complete and even more time to master. It takes patience for the changes to take root. Now that teams work from home, and leaders are managing remote teams, there are new challenges causing the implementation of changes to be even more difficult. There are, however, a few things that organizations can do to make that change happen, as we’ve all become virtual team members in a very short period of time.

Trina Hoefling is an organizational development and transformational change consultant. She’s a graduate school professor, master teacher, strategic facilitator, leadership coach, and virtual team collaboration expert. She’s also the author of a book called Working Virtually, Transforming the Mobile Workplace and a contributing writer for The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams. 

OT KungFu was grateful to learn more from her expertise about virtual team building, managing remote teams, and everything a leader should know about teamwork from home.

Remote Workforces and Virtual Teams

Is there a difference between these terms? 

There are certain terms you can use interchangeably: virtual worker, virtual team member, remote worker, all of those are interchangeable in day-to-day life. For our use, however, there is a difference between a virtual worker and a virtual team member. 

Do those employees who work from home need to depend on each other to get the job done? Are they coworkers who are in an independent team, like in a call center environment? Or are they team members that need to work together to deliver their final product or service to their customer? 

There are some things you need to know to engage the worker rather than the team member. Businesses treat every employee as a team member, whether they have to engage with others to get the work done or not because it’s collaborative. 

But, the truth of the matter is, when we’re moved suddenly to a virtual environment, we have to ask ourselves two questions: 

1) How much do the team members need to work together to get the job done and 

2) How much is the virtual manager the conduit of the work?

Leaders and Remote Teams

A good team leader is always the most powerful piece, but when managing remote teams, they become even more important.

 The virtual managers are the cream of the Oreo cookie. No matter what, they’re the primary connector of the workforce to the organization. Whether your manager is your primary contact or not, when you move to a virtual work environment, especially suddenly, that manager is your major connection with the organization, your major purpose giver, and your major contact.

It doesn’t remain that way, but at first, as people are trying to figure this out, that manager is a critical person in determining whether or not the employee can succeed. The virtual manager is the key influencer of work satisfaction and employee retention.

You take people away from their teammates, and they’re suddenly looking at their own four walls and wondering what signals they need to pay attention to and what’s most important. They need that manager to bring people together and recreate that connection to the workplace.

So what advice is there for a manager who’s just been thrust into this new virtual work environment, especially if they’ve never done it before? 

How do they hold people accountable?

How do they manage results? 

What do they need to do differently? 

 How do they know the team is really working?

First of all, the data suggests your team is working even harder because you don’t have those built-in stops and breaks. For a healthy, efficient team, the transition from team office work to teamwork from home is as simple as adding the word “virtual” to whatever you’re already doing. If you’re managing by results, now you’ll be managing by results virtually. The real question is:

How do you know they’re working now? How do you know they’re getting the job done in a normal office setting? 

Do you have a result and management process in place? Do you have a performance evaluation system? Do you do coaching sessions? How do you observe behavior? 

In short: What do you do now? 

If you’re managing by sight alone, you’re not managing. Whatever you sucked at before your team moved into a virtual space, you’re really going to suck at it now. If you didn’t know how to really manage your team before, it’s going to be even more difficult now.

It all comes down to communication skills, and if everyone is out-of-sight, and you have no idea how to manage or communicate with others when they’re out-of-sight, then that’s where you have to start.

Pick up the phone, have a conversation, get an understanding of what’s going on, and what you’ll find is, as time goes on, fewer phone calls will be needed. But, if you’re starting from the ground up, it’s going to depend on how often and frequently you’re contacting people to really find out where things are. If the correct systems of communication aren’t already in place, you’ll have to create them. Watch for areas where the disconnects are happening that may not have shown up before.

If you feel like somebody is not doing their job, or that a coworker’s not working as much, if there’s a system in place where the leader is regularly touching base with the team, and genuinely wants to connect, those issues will take on a completely different tone. 

The Top Skills of a Successful Virtual Leader 

First, good communication skills: written and oral are imperative. You don’t have to be an extrovert to be a good virtual manager. That’s a myth that we should dispel right now. You do have to care about your team members and be willing to reach out to them, but not as “big brother, big sister” oversight. What’s needed is the human-to-human connection. Authentic care about your team, communicated through the time and attention you dedicate to intentional, relational communication.

Those are the big things: interpersonal skills and caring. The other one is being clear, and helping the team be clear with each other so that you can start establishing trust in this new world. A good leader that is trusted can help a team accomplish that better and faster, rather than a leader that is hands-off and disconnected from the team.

The Needs of a Virtual Team

What about the virtual worker? What are they experiencing coming into this? Panic, fear, and isolation. 

Obviously, as a manager, there’s only so much you can do, but as far as work goes, some people are more comfortable using digital tools than others. Assuming that some of the team is not as comfortable, we still all have to use these tools, share information properly, and get on video conferencing once in a while. 

So how do we make this part of life separate from panic, fear, and isolation?

Workers and virtual professionals can get some fun-time learning to use the tools: doing a collaborative brainstorm on a whiteboard, some light-hearted practice playing with annotations, and other forms of opportunities. Allowing them to be a learning professional who is in transition, and communicating that the expectations have shifted, will simplify things and get people’s confidence and comfort up, so they can go back to focusing on the work they’re there to do, instead of how they’re having to do it. Virtual team building doesn’t have to be completely separate from practical work or run by an external team for a one-time experience.

Teaching and training team members together as a group is also important. Let’s do some fun things, let’s make some mistakes together, share part of this transition as a team, so that we avoid the panic and isolation that might set-in if you’re forced to go through this process without sharing the experience with others.

No matter who you are, mistakes will be made. There will be miscommunications. Just plan on them, and make an agreement to assume positive intent and talk about it. The little frustrations can really collect and show up in a virtual environment. You can hide it from each other, but you’re still steaming inside.

Creativity and breaking up the day-to-day can reveal really great information on the status of your team. A mix of virtual team-building activities that range from practical to relaxing or stress-relieving is vital to managing remote teams well. Virtual happy hours, free online webinars using Zoom, letting somebody else teach the whole team together, are just a few examples. 

Through these experiments, you can find the invisible threads that are connecting the individuals on your team. If that thread is M&M’s, start mailing out packets of hard boxed M&M’s to all the team members.

Be creative and fun, and realize that even in a non-crisis environment, when you are virtual, you need to make time to have some fun together, whether it’s a virtual pizza party or a virtual office tour.

But these are the extra pieces. What is the foundation of a high-performance virtual team?

3-Step Process for High-Performance Virtual Teams

The first step is simple. Develop your team. 

Identifying who’s going to be on your team, helping them get to know each other, creating the right dynamic between team-members through virtual team-building opportunities, and negotiating agreements. 

The second step is to support your team. This is a shared responsibility with the manager and the team members. Team care, clear flow of communication, and project scope have to be done together. Managing a remote team doesn’t mean the leader has to drown themselves in responsibility. The problem isn’t that we’re asking too much from our team members who work from home, it’s that maybe we’re not using their energy, gifts, and talents properly.

One of the most disappointing findings right now is that before the crisis, 70% of virtual team members reported they felt they were not trusted, and that they were left out of critical communications which impacted their ability to do their job. 

That’s high. 

Distance and Unconscious Bias

We could go on and on about distance and unconscious bias, but we’ll cover it quickly. 

We think like cavemen. We’re creatures of habit and we tend to trust the people we see right next to us, or at least we pay more attention to them. In our unconscious mind, we believe that somebody far away can’t be as dangerous or as helpful, because they’re not there. It’s inaccurate in today’s world, but our brain still works the same way.

This is an opportunity to get into better habits: be more intentionally inclusive, right? Nothing like a good crisis to help you grow your leadership skills!

Likewise, the team members have the responsibility to speak up and ask. It’s not all on the manager. The best way to keep each other engaged, informed, and supported is by delivering results. We all want to be part of a successful team, and if we deliver results, then we can learn to work together. 

For more great resources on teamwork from home, managing remote teams, or virtual team building, check out the combined brainpower of Jennifer Long and Sandi Verrecchia on the OT KungFU podcast, or learn more about their individual work through Management Possible and  Satori Consulting Inc.

Jen is the owner of Management Possible® focused on training and coaching multi-level management and leadership individuals and teams nationally and globally. Sandi is the owner of Satori®  Consulting inc. a global consulting firm focused on helping organizations solve complex problems in strategy, leadership and governance.

Episode 23 – The Hybrid Workplace Challenge

Episode 23 – The Hybrid Workplace Challenge

Jennifer Long

Sandi and Jen discuss the opportunities and issues of coming back to work after the pandemic. They talk about the opportunity to remake and restart the workplace culture, that we are never going back to the same workplace, that work and home have collided, that short an long term decisions need to happen as a manager and how are you standing in the company values as you reshape the workplace. 

Jen’s Website

Sandi’s Website

Episode 22 – Diversity Equity and Inclusion Revisited

Episode 22 – Diversity Equity and Inclusion Revisited

Jennifer Long

Sandi and Jen speak with expert Renee Bazile-Jones about Diversity Equity and Inclusion in the workplace.  They describe what DE&I is, how is it being done, what is currently right and what is wrong. They discuss leadership and DE&I and unconscious bias. Renee discusses data for good DE&I. She also relays an example about good DE&I practices. They also discuss the uncomfortable conversations about understanding this issue with leaders and managers. 

Jen’s Website

Sandi’s Website

The Customer Experience

Jennifer Long

Is Customer Experience Strategy More Than a Trend?

This week on the OT KungFu Podcast, we spoke with Ray Kong about customer experience strategy. Ray is a seasoned marketer and strategist with over twenty-five years of experience in consulting at the executive level of major Canadian corporate institutions, currently working with clients in a number of different sectors in customer experience strategy, brand development and measurement, and operational improvement.

He served three years as an adjunct professor at York University in Toronto, and he speaks regularly at consumer-to-consumer events and marketing organizations.

What does it mean for an organization to be customer-led? 

In January 2020, Harvard Business Review put out an article about the need to emphasize the importance of measuring and managing the worth of your customer, however most organizations undervalue the power of the customer experience, focussing on  and succumbing to the pressures that companies have concerning profit. Profit led decisions often to the shortchanging of customers. 

When people are really focused on the quarter, it can erode loyalty and reduce the value that customers actually create for the business. It’s kind of counterintuitive. This research shows that loyalty leaders, the ones that focus and measure customer loyalty, actually grow two and a half times faster than their peers in the industry. So, why don’t all organizations lead with customer-first strategies?

Ray believes it’s not because they’re being malicious or that they don’t care about customers,  but rather  it’s done relatively unconsciously. It’s not a natural behavior to consider customer experience as a strategy. This is why he loves the Kung Fu analogy for the podcast because it requires discipline to do something which is unnatural or counter-intuitive. 

There are reasons to look elsewhere for strategies. Reasons such as  time, energy, legacy, and infrastructure. Not to mention that MBA Students learn about providing value to their shareholders not about being customer-led or customer focused.

Every organization has its own unique set of circumstances, or excuses, for not being customer-led, which means it’s important to recognize what those might be and deliberately begin to make change.

Everybody seems to have a balanced scorecard strategy, and a big piece of that strategy map is focused on the customer. So the question becomes should an organization apply the same weight to all strategies and the answer is no, the weightings should be and need to be different for each unique company. 

What needs to happen to be truly customer-led?

In some ways, it’s about being more extroverted looking from the outside in than the inside out. It’s easy to say, but when you actually put that into action, everything vastly changes. It’s very, very different. 

Many people ask:

What’s the first thing that you need to do in order to be more customer-led? What’s the one simple step?

Ray recommends hiring somebody off the street, having them experience your organization in the way that your customers do, and then talk to them in-depth about their experience. A customer experience strategy really does mean experiencing, and driving your decisions based on how your customers, your stakeholders, your members, and your employees experience your organization and then by making educated changes based on their feedback. 

How do you measure a customer experience strategy?

Loyalty is a popular measure, as measured by a recommendation, but that’s an outcome. That’s not an input. The most common complaint we hear is “our score is going down, but we don’t know why or what to do about it.”

The truth is, there are lots of different kinds of loyalty, but in the end, it’s more about when you measure it, and how you measure it. Many organizations measure the wrong thing, at the wrong time, at the wrong cadence, and they end up getting frustrated.

If an organization really does need specific information for really good reasons,  efficiency and speed of average handling time, for example, you need to balance that off with the experience. 

This might sound a little bit alien to smaller organizations, ones that are naturally  service organizations because they’re typically more attuned to what their customers are looking for and to their customer experience. But even then, having a third-party or external view of how your customers experience your brand is very insightful. It is important to note that being customer-led doesn’t necessarily have to lead to big, expensive fixes, they can be small and be extremely impactful. 

What is Journey Mapping?

A journey map is starting with the task and running it through from the perspective of the customer to understand the positives, the negatives, and the roots of truth.

The temptation, and what organizations tend to do, is try to do everything. Instead, to start the journey towards becoming more customer-centric or more experience-led, pick one journey  and run through the journey map. Then, identify what needs fixing, fix it and then move on to the next one.

When choosing where to start, pick what you believe to be the most important thing you offer, or do  for your customers, or the most important strategy for the organization. . Maybe you want to attract  new customers. This is a very popular starting point. What is the new customer journey and onboarding process? How do people go from being somebody who doesn’t know your brand  to becoming a customer? Start by looking at that process from the customers perspective and then move on  from there. 

So many organizations are trying to boil the ocean. They’re just trying to do too much. 

5 Things to Consider

According to Ray, here are the top five things to consider when assessing your customer experience strategy: 

  1. Being customer-led is a philosophy, not a thing. It is a way of thinking, not a number of activities. 
  2. Start with the long-term, start with the journey map, and go from there. Don’t start the process if you’re not ready to be in it for the long-run.
  3. Don’t be in it for the flavor of the month, because the flavor of the month isn’t going to help you. 
  4. Get a third-party look at your organization. Don’t use your executives. 
  5. Always remember it’s an unnatural act. It doesn’t come naturally to organizations, so you need to be persistent.

Strategies work when they’re top-down, bottom-up, side-to-side, and everybody buys into it. Understanding the need for the change in philosophy and how it transcends through the organization is the first step.

Ray is on Sandi’s team, so if you’re interested in learning more about this, find Ray and Sandi at Satori Consulting inc.  Don’t be afraid to put your questions out there: this is the future of business and a key piece to a successful growth strategy. 

From more conversations and examinations of current movements in business management, you can also visit Management Possible. 

Jen is the owner of Management Possible® focused on training and coaching multi-level management and leadership individuals and teams nationally and globally. Sandi is the owner of Satori®  Consulting inc. a global consulting firm focused on helping organizations solve complex problems in strategy, leadership and governance.