Your First Customers Are Your Employees: Building Teams That Thrive feat. Jean-Pierre Dumas

In this episode of Taking Back Monday, Jean-Pierre Dumas joins Alyssa to unpack the critical connection between employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX). Jean-Pierre shares powerful stories from his leadership journey, including how a culture in crisis became a thriving, best-in-class team. Discover why your employees are your first—and most important—customers, and how investing in their happiness leads to better results for your business. Whether you're a leader navigating team dynamics or someone passionate about creating impactful work environments, this episode is packed with actionable insights you won't want to miss.

Key Takeaways:

• Your Employees Are Your First Customers
  Investing in your team's experience directly impacts their ability to serve customers. Happy, engaged employees create better customer outcomes and help build a thriving culture.
• Culture Fixes Start with Leadership
  When things go wrong in an organization, the problem isn't always with the people—it often lies in processes and systems. Effective leaders identify these gaps, address them transparently, and rally their teams for success.
• Action Creates Trust
  Whether from employee feedback or customer surveys, taking visible, meaningful action on input is critical to building trust and loyalty. Teams thrive when they see their voices matter.
  
  

Key Moments:
00:00 Welcome and Introduction
00:20 JP's Origin Story
01:59 Lessons from Early Career
03:24 Merging Teams: Challenges and Insights
06:03 Importance of Employee Experience
13:40 Remote Work and Pandemic Challenges
20:18 Taking Action on Feedback
26:03 Leadership and Team Building
33:51 Final Thoughts and Contact Information

It's time to say "goodbye" to the Sunday Scaries.

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Transcript

Alyssa Nolte: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to Taking Back Monday. I am so excited that you decided to say goodbye to the Sunday Scaries and hello to a new future of more meaningful work. And I'm even more excited to introduce you to my new friend JP. JP, welcome to the show.

JP Dumas: 0:13

Thank you. Thanks for having me. This is a, an amazing experience. I'm looking forward to see what we're going to jump into today.

Alyssa Nolte: 0:20

Yeah, I was reading through your bio and you have a really broad depth of experience, but I want to go all the way back to the beginning. Tell us your origin story.

JP Dumas: 0:31

Oh, wow. Let's see. We've only got a half hour here, but I'll start really quick. So, I was always that kid in school, you know, when you had to sell things to win a prize. And, um, you know, I think we're all familiar with selling candies or what not. But I was the kid that ended up selling Seeds door to door. Now imagine being in, being in the suburbs of LA and trying to convince people to grow flowers and to grow vegetables. But for me, the point was I want to win that prize in the catalog. So you're going to buy this stuff. So I found myself selling, um, so seeds door to door. Chocolate, even so jewelry and, um, and I was a, I was a paper boy at one point. So I say all that to say at some point, I think I figured out that sales and customer experience may be somewhere in my future. Um, Even worked at a ice cream shop. You may have heard of them. I won't give you the exact name, but let's just say the ice cream shop is designated by numbers and most people know what they are. And yeah, anyway, that was a lot of fun, but I would say my first like quote unquote job, job in corporate world. I was an outbound telemarketer. So I will preface this by saying, you know, I apologize to any of your listeners out there who I may have interrupted. with my, um, with my pitch. But I tell you why that job was so foundational to my career. You know, outbound telemarketing is very hard, just like door to door sales. Um, but one of the things that I understood early on is that the importance of understanding your product, because if you know your product and like product knowledge inside and out. First of all, it makes you extremely comfortable and it makes you confident so that you have a number of things that you can rely on or draw from to say, well, why should a person purchase your product? And more importantly, you build that credibility. So that was really important for me throughout my career, particularly reminding my team's importance of know your product, know what you're selling. Because then, as we all know, in sales, people ultimately buy from you and they're going to buy from you if they feel like it. You're a credible source. So I think that was, you know, from an origin story perspective, I think that more than anything, kind of kind of helped me get my initial footing, just starting off with that particular piece. Now, obviously I've progressed throughout my career into various roles and. Throughout telecom and travel and, and, you know, up through the SVP level. I think there's another story though. I want to share around origin that I think really helped me crystallize my attitudes around the employee experience. So we're going to fast forward, you know, I'm early career, maybe, you know, you know, I'm a handful of years into being a sales supervisor. And running an outbound telemarketing team, one day they come to me and say, Hey, we want to merge your outbound team with an inbound team. I said, well, that's cool because I already know outbound people could sell. So you're telling me the phone's just going to ring. All we got to do is answer it. Boom. Slam dunk. So we undertook this endeavor, and I think we had at the time about 200 people. What we're going to do is grand experiment. We're going to merge our inbound and outbound teams. And I thought it would be easy peasy. I can't tell you the first two months into it. It was a, shall we say a challenge? It was, you know, we didn't have the same terminology. We didn't have the same playbooks. We had different leaders coming together. It was just, you know, we had aggressive targets cause we didn't quite know how to set them. It was all this crazy fun stuff. And I think I was one of three or four leaders at that time. It was going to be part of this grand experiment. And we had a sales manager and whatnot. And we had just hired a brand new director who says, you know, who was sold in the job that we've got this grand experiment. You get to run it and it's going to be outstanding experience. So lo and behold, this individual walks in. And like I said, a couple of months into it, it's mad chaos. And so she said, you know, we have a town hall. We're going to bring people and take people off site. We're going to find out what they're thinking. You know, we just want to get a. Since of where people are. So we go to this hotel. We've got everyone in a ballroom, you know, again, I'm a, you know, fairly new leader, five, six years on the job. I'm feeling pretty good. Um, and so we're kind of like on this panel and we have this whiteboard where people can write their thoughts or they can put like post it notes on the wall. And I never forget there was, um, you know, it's, it's, As we're going along people putting their thoughts up there, you know, people cheering, you know, okay, great. This is good stuff. It was one agent Um, I don't want to say he was a rabble rouser, but let's just say he had the ear of his peers And he walked up to the board and in very big letters. He wrote Union and the crowd went nuts. And then from there, the meeting devolved into everything that was wrong in the, in the organization and wrong in the culture that right there was a moment where. Really started to understand that you got to take care of your people. So I'll fast forward just real quick. I know you have a few questions, but the new director, I remember her bringing us in after that meeting and it wasn't in a threatening tone, but what she said was. Your number one job is you need to start kissing the you know what of those people out there because we need them way more than we need you. Now it wasn't a sense that we were going to get fired, I mean ultimately we did have a leader that got let go, but her point in saying that was, it focuses on the numbers and metrics and the performance and you've left the people behind in this change management process. And, and so that began the journey to focus on the employee experience as the critical piece to making all the other things go now, now with that, we did get a new manager, um, who I was a little bit salty about that cause I felt like that should have been my job. And she said, listen, you can learn a lot from this person. And, um, funny thing is, is he went on to become my boss in multiple companies. Um, so she was right on that. The second thing I learned years later, you know, she confided in me when she was brought in, it's like, she kind of had a hint that things were going a little bit off the rails and, you know, it was intimated that, you know, maybe you might need a new leadership team. And what I learned from that experience is she said, you know, she had faith in us as leaders, But I understood that the systems and the process were an issue. And I think sometimes in the course of us leading organizations, we get so focused on the people part of the business in terms of this cult of personality. And we forget that people need the right framework and the right environment in order to succeed. And she identified that. And hence gave us a chance to kind of work through the issues. So long and short of it is we went through this ragtag band of people in the first 60 days of, Oh my goodness, this isn't gonna work to within a year, we were best in class. And so, you know, I can read a lot of books. I've gone through a lot of different experiences and I said, you know, knowing your products important, having a business strategy, being enthusiastic is critical. But at the end of the day, Create that environment for your people and they will thrive. So that's my origin story on how did I get to the point of CX begins with the X.

Alyssa Nolte: 8:47

Yeah, I, I love that. And there's so many lessons learned that, you know, you, you maybe had to learn the hard way, right? In that experience, but benefiting from that 2020 hindsight, if you're a leader and you are trying to, to avoid all of that, what is the one thing you would do first?

JP Dumas: 9:06

I think there's a couple of things. I think one, it goes without saying having the right people on the bus is important, but that comes from you understanding. Who your people are like much as my leader did and saying what are their core strengths, you know Each of us brings a little something different to the table, you know, some of us are very technical I had one one colleague who was very very technical and by the books I had another colleague who you know had the ability to kind of bring people together I was kind of the person that had the the sales knowledge And some frameworks that I knew that were effective that would help the team do that. So I think you, you have to understand, you know, a couple of things, know who you have on your team and what they bring to the table. But then to have a framework for how you're going to. address your, your, your, your business, your situation, your problem so that you can fit the people within that. You know, I'm a big sports guy. So I often think about, you know, as, as someone's building a team thinking about, well, what sort of playbook do you have? You know, if you're a football team and you've got a really great quarterback, well, maybe we're going to pass the ball a lot, but if maybe we're a team that's not as big and physical as other teams, maybe we need to, You know, spread them out and be a little faster. Like you have to understand like what your system is and then have the right personnel that can help you get there. And so I think that that's an incredible piece, but you know, I can't underscore the importance of sometimes when things go south and this is the hardest thing, it isn't always the people. Conversely, when things go well, it isn't always the people either. So, we've got to have that understanding that, you know, yes, you have to know your people, you have to have the right experience, but have some sort of framework to help get you there. Those things matter as well.

Alyssa Nolte: 11:02

So you touched on it briefly and, and before I asked you that question about, you know, CX and BX, they're so, um, excuse me, CX and EX are so aligned. You know, we talk a lot on this podcast about leaders have a, a mandate, if you will, to create great environments for their teams and they have the power to do so to, to really help create an environment. People don't feel those Sunday scaries. And I've long been a proponent that happy and happy employees is happy customers. Where have you seen that else in the world? Or where have you seen that, that ideology work?

JP Dumas: 11:36

I'll tell you, I'll tell you a couple of stories around that in terms of what it works, because we're, we're really You know, like giving you one example, but I remember listening to a call one day and having an agent who was just, I guess he was having that Monday morning blahs or what have you, and it just wasn't working out and the customer picked up on it right away and the customer said, you know, your company can't even make you happy. How's your, Product going to make me happy. And so that was one of those lightning bolt moments when I say, and we've got to get these folks pumped up because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm and we we've not done well there. But the second part of that is, and this is the irony, you know, I've spent. At least half of my career in, in either acquisition sales or customer retention. And I remember where we were having a conversation that says, why does the employee experience matter? And I said, if we cannot retain our employees, how do we expect to retain customers? Pindrop because that becomes your first customer, like we, if we operate with a framework from an inside out perspective, where we focus on our employees, we find out what are the things that they value while working in our organizations. We find out what's their motivation for being here. We start to build those frameworks where there's career advancement, whether it's money, where they're contributing to this very thorny problem that we want to fix. Fix and we want to solve the world, whatever it is, when we meet that need, it's not unlike what we do for our customers. And we identify, you know, our market fit, we identify, you know, who's the target audience and all of these different things. We tailor our experiences to that. So when you can do that from internally and then take that same sort of. customer centricity outward to the world. Now you have a bunch of raving fans. Now you have people who are willing to take the hill. Now you have people who are willing to work hard and solve, um, difficult problems for your business. You know, when we were in the midst of the pandemic, I remember when we were going to, you know, we were wondering, well, his office is going to be shut down. What's going to happen. People are getting sick and whatnot. My teams did not take the attitude of, well, this will be an opportunity to sit home, watch Netflix for a few weeks. They take the attitude of what is the quickest, safest, most cost effective way that we can deploy people remotely because we're a hundred percent in office while continuing to run the business and, and to add another layer of complexity, how do we recruit? Retain and train new people to run the business while we're doing this. So it's essentially like, um, flying the plane while you're building it. So thankfully for us, we, um, several years before we had a remote work program and one of the managers who had that institutional knowledge, dusted off the playbooks and we. Updated it and said, okay, here's what we're going to do. You know, you get facilities involved. We need, you know, you know, a thousand boxes. I need, you know, network cables. We need to get with legal and HR, understand like what you can and can't do from a remote work perspective, it, can we unlock these computers? So you ended up getting this whole assembly line effect of people who were already bought in on the mission and wanted to see how we could succeed as opposed to individuals who took the approach of. Well, that's y'all's problem in management. And so that for me was important because if every day you're making deposits into your employee emotional bank account, you have this reserve and surplus and you never know when you're going to have these black swan events. I mean, obviously, hopefully we never have to deal with the pandemic again, but whatever business challenge that it is, you'll have people who because of goodwill you've built up in the environment that you created. are going to be willing to take that hill, who are going to be willing to figure out how can we, as opposed to it's never worked, it's never been successful, why do I have to do it? And so forth. And so those are those little lessons along the way. And I've even asked my peers since then, like, what, what have you learned from the pandemic? Because I think there was a lot of leadership lessons there and you know, it's not to necessarily pat myself on the back, but I think about it from a standpoint of, You know, and I looked through all my training documents and I looked through all my leadership manuals and I said, I didn't see pandemic in there. And so we had, you, you really have to, to rise to the occasion.

Alyssa Nolte: 16:30

I agree with so much of what you said, and I think businesses are still learning and reeling from, from the pandemic. I mean, we see all of these articles about returned office mandates and how companies are handling it differently and using that as a strategic advantage in, in keeping and retaining in their employees and whatever side you fall on, on in office versus remote, um, you know, it says a lot about a company, about the way they handle that transition and that announcement, regardless of what the decision is to where

JP Dumas: 17:02

Yeah, no, no, I couldn't. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It was, it was very challenging from a standpoint of, um, for two reasons. One, you know, obviously you have a number of individuals who. would like remote work. They like the flexibility that's involved. We had individuals who are driving quite a ways to get into the office. And so that gave them that flexibility. They understood they still needed to work. But I think what it does is they gave them agency and control over their work, if you will, and being able to do that at home. But the second piece of that too, because we did have some individuals still in the office, it isn't for everyone. Um, some individuals crave that, that interaction. Sometimes they crave the coffee that's in the break room, because it's just better than the coffee they have at home. I mean, we have, and you have to understand, you have all types. Of those folks, like we need all we need all of those personality types in order to run the business. It isn't a one size fits all approach, which goes back to the employee experience, which equates to the customer experience. We, you know, for some individuals, if I want to work two or three days in the office, I want that flexibility. If others, if I want to be 100 percent remote, I can do that. In other words, Using that as a customer experience example, we're going to meet you where you are because our end goal is to ensure that we have the, um, that we meet the customer's needs and we continue to sell the product that we continue to retain our business. All of those different things. These are just. mechanisms that are gonna allow us to facilitate that process, but the mission has not changed. And so I think that as a leader is where you have to get flexible and figure out how do you threat that? Because they aren't always going to be pleasant conversation. There are going to be individuals who, unfortunately, it doesn't work out for them. But what you're trying to do is address the many, if you will, you know, so that as the saying goes, we continue to be a viable concern moving forward.

Alyssa Nolte: 19:01

Absolutely. And I think there is a difference in addressing and for employees and for customers addressing employee slash customer needs versus wants, because I have, I've had the experience of like I work from home. I've been from home since since the pandemic. I think I would have a hard time going back. But I also have seen like these fresh out of school graduates who start in a remote job, and I think that they miss out on that opportunity to learn by osmosis where, you know, someone shouts a question across the bullpen, and you didn't ask the question, you didn't even think to ask the question, but you still heard the answer, and you absorb that information, whether you realized it or not, and so I think that sometimes You might not want to work in the office, but it might be what is best for you, or you might not want a certain thing as a customer, but what you really need and like really driving forward of what you need versus necessarily what you think you want.

JP Dumas: 19:57

Absolutely. And I think that's where the collaboration is important. I think that's where you have to get creative and say, you know, if it's going to be that one day a week or it's going to be that those two days a month where we're going to, you know, we're going to cater lunch, we're going to bring you on site and we're going to talk about some of these things that we need to solve for a business. So those are just practical matters as a leader. But I think yeah. You know, some of those ideas are born out of soliciting input from your quote unquote customers and then taking action on it. And that's another thing that, you know, when I think about how do you drive that, that right experience in that right type of engagement is. You know, we ask our customers, you know, whether you're using Qualtrics or Medallia, any of these tools out there to gather voice of the customer insight. And then custom, you know, same thing with employees. We have employee surveys. We get information from, you know, maybe once a quarter, we put the stick in the water, we want to find out what people are thinking. We gather information from exit surveys and talk about, you know, what did they like, they didn't like. You know, I think regardless of how you compile the data, I think the critical pieces are, you know, taking action and more importantly, publicly taking action, creating a road map, prioritize the issues that matter. And to your point, There's some things that are just simply once. And guess what? We're not going to have a petting zoo in the office. That's just, it is what it is. Right. But I think people appreciate a lot more when you, you value their opinion. They can see tangible results of either, Hey, guess what? This company addressed this product defect. They, they addressed this gap in their customer experience. They're telling us how they're going to do better. Sometimes it's just an acknowledgement of, Hey, we've fallen short, you know, and, you know, I can think of companies that had some issues and holiday season years back, um, that didn't quite get the packages to people one time. And their decision was to, um, pivot away from subcontractors to only the entire experience so that that didn't happen again. Um, But, but those are examples of we, we've gotten the feedback. We've seen a business problem and we're going to take action. And we're going to tell you what we've done. I mean, I could think about things where we have round tables and focus groups where, you know, we published the updates and said, Hey, here's what the main takeaways were, and then give you an idea of when we're going to address some of those issues and so much so that I remember at the end of the year, we had a huge poster, several posters made. That essentially said, you ask, we delivered with the dates and the timeline. So now you post that and say, here are tangible, here are tangible results out of a curve from your feedback. And not only made your experience better, but these were things that were going to make the customer's experience better, because if it's difficult for you to execute as an employee, it's also difficult for you to execute for our customers. You know, if a confirmation email isn't clear, or we send too many emails that are. You know, or SMS didn't function the way it needed to, all of these different things that you told us that we needed to address, we did those things, and so that, that's where I think the power of the voice of the customer comes in, when you can actually talk about, we're listening, because otherwise, And particularly I've seen this with employee surveys is that, you know, why some of your participation rates are low is because it's don't see anything happening with it. Like, and I think that also we see that with customers, it's like, well, big, bad corporation, are they going to do anything? And so when you're responsive like that, then I think that's when you start to get those better outcomes, which. And I think there's also a reason why you tend to see these very public responses happen to social media because of some of the more traditional back channels don't necessarily get that visibility or that speed to, to respond.

Alyssa Nolte: 23:52

Yeah, I saw a stat just yesterday, actually, that was something like 80 percent of people say they don't respond to surveys because it's a waste of their time. It's not going to change anything. And the idea that like. That's the perception, whether or not that's the reality of what the leadership is trying to do, but the perception that if I fill out a survey, at best, nothing happens, and at worst, I'm now a target because I spoke up.

JP Dumas: 24:15

Well, absolutely. Employees feel that the same way I can tell you, you know, I'm a, you know, and I talk with a lot of general allergies around these companies for legal reasons. But, um, you know, I'm a customer of a, of an airline and, you know, I'm at their highest status and, you know, I've been I'll go online or I'll go through the regular portals and talk about my experiences. And I can tell you that I've gotten a number of time where it said, thank you for your feedback. And we'll take it as a coaching opportunity. Coaching opportunity is not going to help me. I've already had, I've, I've been quote unquote, Injured by this experience. What I want to understand is not about what you're going to do moving forward. I want to know how you address the situation at hand. Then we can talk about moving forward. And I think that's what, and we see it in different places. Like, don't, don't tell me what you're going to do. I'm don't tell me about the glorious future. All right. Tell me like, thank you. We got it. I'm going to fix it right now. You can see we're going to own it and then we'll move forward because ultimately, you know, when I think back to my time in travel, we saw situations where your NPS was actually higher when you had an issue and addressed it, then customers that had no issues. So people will give you grace if they see that you're taking action.

Alyssa Nolte: 25:32

Yeah, it's funny that you, um, that you mentioned NPS. We, uh, I work for a research company, and we did an employee survey, like a third party survey for a regional bank, and they had a new CEO come in, and her mandate was basically like, we're not meeting our full potential, you're going to have to help us meet our full potential. And controversially, the first thing she did was an employee experience survey, and everyone thought that was kind of crazy. But the interesting thing is that one of the questions we asked was, How likely would you be to recommend your friend or family work at this place? And it was like, 100 percent of managers said no, and that was really shocking for her.

JP Dumas: 26:09

Again, that's the experience that you provide. I mean, you know, one of the things I found effective is that, you know, that was one of our number one sources of, of, um, talent or referrals, you know, people who said, listen, I know the good, the bad and the ugly, right. And. But I would still recommend friends and family work there. So when you're seeing a referral rates, you know, and it, and it differs by benchmarks, but you know, I say, you know, you get almost half of your employees or people are referred, you know, some will say, well, that's a blessing and a curse. I say, well, 1, you know, people tend to work at places where they have friends, great experience and things like that. But it really speaks volumes about the type of. Place it is. And so I think those things help. But when people are saying, you know what? Not only would I not recommend anyone, but what they didn't say is the quiet part out loud that and I'm thinking about going someplace else. And so we need to be able to read between the lines with those sort of Um, items as well and address those because it costs a tremendous amount of money to retrain. So first of all, source higher and replace an employee. Same thing we see with customers. It's anywhere from five X to 25 X to replace a customer that you lose. So you start to see again a lot of these parallels. between your employee experience and your customer experience. So those things become intertwined. And, you know, I'm going to continue to beat that drum because again, I, you know, I've seen it monetarily, I've seen it, you know, show up in so many different parts of the business. And, and again, that is informed my leadership style, take care of the folks. Um, and they'll take care of the customers or at the very least, if you're in a. Back off as a support role, take care of the folks who have taken care of the folks who take care of the customers. I mean, and, and that is, and that becomes the best customer experience that you can offer.

Alyssa Nolte: 28:00

Yeah, and the good news story is she came in, she fixed it, and then she is now like, she's been there for two years. Six or seven years now, it's like 10 X growth every year because she went and fixed what she believed was the root problem, which was the employee experience.

JP Dumas: 28:13

Absolutely. When you have people beating down the door to want to work there and you have employees who are like, I'm happy about this. And guess what? I'm on the phone with customers. We, we talk about this and customers can hear it in my voice and they get excited and they're like, my customers. Goodness, this is amazing. You're going to take care of me the way they're taking care of you. Like that's a, that's that virtuous flywheel effect that we talk about. Um, and we've all read the articles about those sort of, those sort of companies. And we may have been in our office going, man, what did they do this so different? I'm like, well, you know, you, it's, it's that one little thing. You got to start with that. You know, you start with that whole focus. Like our decisions are driven by. Um, our customers and their needs and wants and we look at it through the lens of MPS, CSAT, revenue, growth, conversion, all of these different things that we can point to it and say, This is how it moved the needle, you know, so it isn't just as nebulous. Oh, I think, I guess I feel, but it has very measurable results. I mean, pull up any Harvard business review article or anything like that. And it'll tell you like, you know, uh, it's the stuff works, but again, it's not easy and it's not a quick fix.

Alyssa Nolte: 29:28

Absolutely not, definitely not easy and absolutely not a quick fix. So JP, we have a couple of questions we ask everyone at the end of our conversation. Uh, number one, considering all of the people that you've had the chance to meet or that you admire that you learn from who is really taking back Monday, who else should we be

JP Dumas: 29:44

You know, there's a couple of folks that, um, that come to mind, you know, are we allowed to say their names or what have you,

Alyssa Nolte: 29:51

Oh yeah. Put them on the hot seat. We love

JP Dumas: 29:53

you know, it's funny. I have one coworker. Um, his name is Alec. I'll just give his first name. But, um, you know, he started out with us years ago as he was he was an admin with a temporary admin, and he's in our sales meetings. And for good, good, bad, or otherwise, he always had something to add or something to say as long and short of it is, and I was telling you the story about that director and whatnot, we ended up hiring him to be a sales leader because he had just, just, just. this energy about him, you know, a positive attitude and that energy where, you know, you need those sort of people who aren't necessarily formal leaders, but who can create the right type of environment. And, and he was that, that sort of person so much so that, you know, he ultimately became a good friend. And, and what I appreciated about having this individual on my team is that. You know, he would, he would give me the temperature of what was going on in the organization. And so, and, and, and I appreciated that because, you know, sometimes I could be, you know, I could be JP. It's most part of the great boss experience, but. He wasn't afraid to speak truth to power. So he's one individual and another individual I work with. Um, Pat, you know, Pat's interesting because Pat's never met a stranger apparently, and everyone becomes instant friends. But I remember, you know, Meeting Pat in a, in a, in a, previous role and you know, we had some experiences and said, okay, solid worker, taking care of business and everything. And so when Pat left that role, you know, had an opportunity to kind of talk in between the margins, if you will. So I had an opportunity to come up in another business I had landed in. And at that time I was in the midst of a cultural transformation. I am talking about like, When I, you know, within my first six months, we had to go in there and we had to do a major reorg. I mean, it was, it was tough, but I remember, you know, in the, in the course of this slog and understanding, I need to rebuild my leadership team. And I remember bringing Pat in and Pat, you know, spend a little time here and said, JP, this just isn't you. Like, and Pat could immediately sense that something was a little, little different. And so Pat ended up getting on the team and, um, you know, he used to always tell me the phrase pace and cadence and says, you know, when you're in the midst of change and change management, the pace, but the consistency and check in on people. And um, we ultimately got things on, on track. And um, but when, when, but when Pat told me that, Hey, this isn't you, I said, yeah, that's, that's why I brought you in. You understand what great can be, but more importantly, you know how to rally the troops. And what I appreciate about both of these individuals is they're, they're what I call in sports. We would call them glue people, meaning that they understand, they know how to bring people together. They understand the cultural. Emotional, like very high EQ individuals who can understand that, listen, the challenges that you're running into aren't market driven, they aren't technical driven, they aren't product driven, they're people driven, and you need to kind of understand where people are because you're moving a hundred miles an hour and you're leaving people behind, and so I really appreciated those individuals for two reasons, one, having a great The great ability to sense the temperature in the room, but number two, not being afraid to speak truth to power to say, Hey, we've got to think about a different way of doing this, um, in a non confrontational manner, because not everyone approaches it in the manner that they need to. So those are two individuals that in my career, I think, or, um, yeah, they were, I think they, they've, they've really helped balance me.

Alyssa Nolte: 33:51

I love that. And if someone is really connecting with you, they want to learn more or just have a chat with you, where can they find you online?

JP Dumas: 33:58

You know, basically the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. You know, if you think about what the LinkedIn address looks like, www. linkedin. com backslash I am backslash JP Dumas one. So you'll see my name reflected as Jean Pierre with JP in parentheses, um, Dumas. Um, and then also, you know, you can be a part of this is great community. I post pretty regularly. You'll, you'll see some information from CX and growth strategies. Uh, I said, that's a venture that we're putting together to really help companies elevate their. Sales performance, the revenue growth and more importantly, drive their employee engagement. But, you know, LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me. And so I look forward to hearing from some of your listeners and really enjoyed, you know, kind of a walk through the park pretty quickly of some of the things I've done in my career. But more importantly, what my leadership philosophy and style is,

Alyssa Nolte: 34:52

Awesome. Well thank you for taking back Monday with me.

JP Dumas: 34:55

we're gonna take back the hall of the month. We're gonna take all the days. How about

Alyssa Nolte: 34:59

all the days back, not just Monday.