Ep. 10 - Why Culture Fails Until Leaders Are Held Accountable for It - with Quinn Slaughter

If culture isn’t measured, it isn’t managed... and leaders know it.

Quinn Slaughter, Owner of Total Solutions First, explains why culture breaks down when it’s treated as a value statement instead of a leadership system. Most companies can describe their culture, but struggle to enforce it. The impact shows up in places leaders often misread: early talent leaving just as they become valuable, inconsistent leadership behavior, and performance gaps that don’t trace back to strategy.

Quinn breaks down how culture actually operates inside a business: through what leaders tolerate, what gets measured, and what gets rewarded. From leadership scorecards to tying incentives to people outcomes, she outlines how to make culture measurable, enforceable, and owned by leadership, not just by HR alone.

You’ll learn:

1. Why culture defaults to tolerated behavior if leaders aren’t held accountable
2. How to measure culture through business outcomes
3. What a leadership scorecard reveals about culture in practice
4. How incentives reshape leadership behavior and decision-making
5. Why lack of leadership capacity becomes a barrier to culture change

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Quinn is open to connecting about operationalizing culture and leadership accountability. Reach out to her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinnslaughter/

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Quinn’s recommendations:
Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success | https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AEBEVTQ
Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness | https://www.amazon.com/dp/0809105543

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About the host James Weier:
James is Director, US at EGYM Wellpass and President of the Denver chapter of the Level Up HR Community. With 10 years of experience and a degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, James brings a collaborative, community-focused approach to his work. When he’s not elevating employee experience or strengthening HR leadership, James enjoys spending time with his wife and their two young boys in Colorado’s great outdoors.

Get in touch with James Weier on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesweier/

More episodes and insights: https://www.level-up-hr.com/en

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Culture is the worst behavior that you tolerate. It is whatever is in your organization that you consider to be acceptable when someone is not being their best and perhaps not even aligned with your mission and vision. The point you let that go and don't set a standard for that, then that becomes the culture that you set.

SPEAKER_03 0:23

Welcome to Level Up HR, the go-to knowledge platform for HR professional. We bring you insights from top executives and top leaders on making HR sustainable and future ideas. Through real-world experiences and best practices, we're building a community equipped to tackle tomorrow's challenges. Level Up HR is produced by E Jim Wolpass, the unlimited corporate health benefit. So I'm pleased to welcome um Quinn Slaughter and welcome to the podcast. Quinn, can you share with the audience a little bit more about you, kind of what you're up to, and take us from there?

SPEAKER_02 1:02

Thank you, James. This is a great opportunity for me. I am the owner of a consulting firm called Total Solutions First. My husband and I have owned the organization for a little over 20 years. It's been something that has kind of always been in the sidelines to catch us when we fall or do things on the side, have a way to help other people. And then about three years ago, I decided to go out on my own and do this full-time. So I am an HR professional by trade. I have done a lot of different things in various um centers of excellence within large, medium, and small organizations. And now my clientele consists of what I consider helping with people strategies. It's more about how to bring talent and people into the business strategy and how to maximize that investment for our my employers and solving some of the people problems that we may have because that would drive that's what drives our business. And so I spent a lot of time with that. I work with clients of in all different industries, um, education as well, healthcare, um, and all different sizes. So the beauty of what I do is because I could work with many different people and at the same time, and um I love the fact of being able to reach out and help others.

SPEAKER_03 2:15

Love that. I love that a lot, and I'm really excited about today, uh, and some of the experience that that we've talked about already. But I want to set a little bit of the groundwork for the main theme, which is how do you operationalize uh a culture and leadership accountability? Um, and roll really into the first topic, but why culture often stays theoretical instead of living every day in the organization? Um, but why do you think culture is so hard to operationalize, especially in uh in the larger organizations you've worked with?

SPEAKER_02 2:49

A lot of it is because people look at it as uh maybe an initiative or a culture is something that is more of a uh the social aspect of who we are. Um, some organizations don't even think that they can, you know, drive their culture. They just let it be and then let it morph on its own, which culture can be um created, or you can let it uh create itself. Either way, there's going to be a culture within the organization, just like there's a culture in your family. There's a culture in the groups that you you know that you might be affiliated with. And so I think that's why it's hard to operationalize it, is because it's not a tangible thing. It's not something that sits on your uh PL. It's not something that, you know, you sit back and talk about. In most cases, they don't talk about them in their strategic planning processes, although they should. We'll probably talk get into that a little bit later. And so I think that's why it's hard to operationalize, is because it's not something that's hands-on in a business setting that has been, you know, up until probably recently, where people were starting to find out the real impact of culture during COVID, probably when people starting to stay at home and what it really was starting to feel like, that uh a lot of business leaders just didn't pay a whole lot of attention to. They just let it be and figured it what it is what it is.

SPEAKER_03 4:06

Yeah. No, I think what's really interesting about the culture piece too, um, especially when you talk about it in it doesn't matter what size of the business is how you measure it um and how you're going to measure it across the org because you think about a developer versus maybe somebody who's a little bit more frontline in customer service. Two wildly different roles roles, but in theory, they should be exhibiting the same kind of cultural behavior. Um, but when you first um think about that and managing it as a metric, can you walk us through kind of your thought process behind it?

SPEAKER_02 4:44

Well, it was kind of, I think, the the bottom line, the basics to thinking about it, right? So culture is the worst behavior that you tolerate. It is whatever it is in your organization that you consider to be acceptable when someone is not being their best and perhaps not even aligned with your mission and vision, the more you let that go and don't set a standard for that, then that becomes the culture that you set. That it becomes the culture that starts to evolve. And so measuring that has to be from a business perspective. What happens when the culture in your organization does not align with your mission and vision? And there are definitely some bottom line impacts to that. When you start thinking about the cost of turnover, when you start thinking about training and not being able to have a good pipeline and talent, when you start thinking about the impact of that customer service person that you just talked about and how they interact with your customers, when you start deciding you're going to go into new markets and expand and how you can't do that without having your employees represent you in most cases. Now, there are some cases where yes, you can use AI, you can use other things that are not human-based. But if you are an organization that has people at its core and you utilize human capital for those things, then you have got to make sure that you're measuring the outcomes of that. So when you think about culture, you think about equity, it's an outcome. It's an outcome of the things that you do and how people behave in your organizations and how they get the work done. So you want to, you don't want to measure it as a, it's nothing that's gonna be in your goals that says here's a culture measurement, right? The performance metric. But there are gonna be things in there that should be in there around how do we attract talent? How do we retain talent? What is our again, what is our bench look like? Um, what is what are people saying about us on Glassdoor? How is social media reacting to us? You know, how do we attract customers? How do we make sure that our vendors have the same like-mindedness that we have? And guess what? All of that at some point in time does hit the bottom line.

SPEAKER_03 6:50

Yeah, no, 100%. Yeah, no, I I absolutely do. Uh, and I think that's been it's always so interesting because you hear people say it all the time like you walk into an office and you've got, you know, the core the core principles or the DNA that's plastered all over the wall. And some organizations have like 50. Some other organizations might have three or four. And I think back to personally, some of the best orbs culturally that I've worked with um made it so simple, and that was what was ingrained, but also what was screened during the hiring process of who they were bringing into the organization, similar to what you described with the bench of you know, not only who's in the organization now, who we want to develop into leaders or leaders of leaders, but also who are we attracting at the end of the day. And the ones that I think, in my personal experience, who have done it the absolute best, are the ones who keep it extremely simple, but every decision's made around those kind of core beliefs. Now, on the flip side, um, what I think is even more interesting, and I would love to get a little bit more uh of your opinion on this, is when you do roll out those like cultural definitions or what you're expecting the employees to do, um how can you see if that is working? And how are you like quantifying it at the end of the day, or anything that really sticks out to you around those topics?

SPEAKER_02 8:23

You know, so the first thing you've got is our mission. Our mission says here's what we're trying to accomplish, here's where we're going, our vision says this is how we do things, and your culture becomes part of that. And so you want to make sure that everything that you're you know, kind of doing a litmus test against that. That's what should be up on the walls that you just mentioned earlier. And so when you just want to start thinking about um um how are you gonna measure that and how are you gonna make sure that there are metrics around that and and what do you kind of tools do you use for that? There's all kinds of ways. So a lot of and very familiar to a lot of companies are engagement surveys or what they can call employee sentiment surveys. And so you're trying to understand what are on the minds of your employees, how are they feeling about the organization? And that's a great place to put questions. They're not called culture, again. You want to just call them, you know, you want to make sure you're talking about how do you communicate in the organization, what's the relationship between leaders and their and their staff? You know, how do people feel when they come to work every single day? What are the work conditions and all of that becomes part of your culture? And those are questions and things that you can ask in those types of settings to get real true information. The other thing is to understand will people leave. Again, why are you leaving? What is it that where do we not meet your expectations? What's important to you as an employee that we were not able to maybe to provide for you? For you know, a lot of the organizations and one of the organizations I worked in in particular, where they were working with this engagement survey and where we did a lot of work around it, we started to find that turnover, not all turnover is bad, but when you start to recognize turnover within what I consider to be early talent, where they're making a choice between the job and their career versus working at your company, which comes at about the three-year mark, right? Three to five years. Because when they first come into the workforce, it's not age related, it's just when you come into workforce and when you decide you're gonna come out of school, whatever it is that you do to make that change in your career, you take a job that you think is going to fit what you're looking for. When you start, when it starts to be a gap between your beliefs and core beliefs and the organization, or you start to feel like you're not treated the way they said they were gonna treat it, or the conditions were not the way they promised, and the organization is not meeting the promises that they made to you as an employee, that's when, you know, when you start talking about um unwanted turnover, that's when it starts to happen. That's when you start having employees that are leaking the organization that are probably have the potential to be top talent. And it's the cost of replacing them then, yes, but it's also what you lose might not be able to retain them over the long term over years and having to make a career choice with your organization that you almost can't even put a price tag on. And so there's lots of ways to go about using those tools, um, one-to-ones with managers and how those conversations are, making sure that they happen. Perform how you manage your performance. What does your performance management process look like? These are all things that don't sit in HR. They may start there, they may have governance there, they may have oversight by HR, but none of this can be driven by HR. They have to be driven by the leaders and the employees and the on the boots on the ground every day.

SPEAKER_03 11:45

Yeah. No, I I couldn't agree with uh with you more on that. And it sounds like, again, if I'm hearing you correctly, uh, with the example we're speaking about right now, it was more of a structural process than, hey, we just have these little tiny gaps here and there where we're trying to plug a couple holes.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 12:04

With what you found with that and kind of rehashing it completely or redesigning uh the system um at its core, what was it that stood out that wasn't working with the old approach? Is there anything that really jumps out at you that we can share?

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Yeah, it goes back to what I just said. It was it was um undesirable turnover. It was taking the time to really be very focused and intentional about bringing in early talent in a way that we was an investment, right? And a lot of resources and a lot of time. And then finding that when they were they we couldn't get them over that three to five year mark. And so this there was this constant churn. And so at some point in time, you have to say the trend is not lying. We have to figure out what's going on here, and you have to dig a little bit deeper, you gotta pull behind the curtain, right? It's great, but if someone's always off key in the course, right? And all of a sudden everybody else is sitting there just squinching, you have to ask yourself the question do we really know if everybody here is singing on this, singing on the same sheet of music? What's going on? And so that's where a lot of it was coming from. And so you could start off with the cost of it, you can start off with the the recruiting processes and all those kinds of things. And and then it was a matter of it's got to be deeper than that. And so, really just saying, okay, let's try to take a look at it from a standpoint of how they're feeling, what's going on, taking a look at all these different data points, the engagement survey, the exit surveys, the social media posts, the you know, customer feedback, all those things are trying to pull all that together to synthesize that, to determine what is it that you might want to think about doing differently. Then you can put some of that in place, and then you got to build another structure around that to make sure that you're in you're doing the right things and that you're having a positive impact. Otherwise, it's a it you should always assess, reassess, hit the reset button where you have to. Sometimes you got to say, okay, we are completely in the wrong ballpark. We have to do something completely different. But you can't do that if you're not keeping in touch.

SPEAKER_03 14:16

Yeah, no. And what I'm curious about too, um, before, and this is a perfect segue into into the next topic, is what was it about that three to five year mark? Was it more tied to that bottom line that we were just talking about? Or yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Two sides to it. The side for the organization is, you know, about that three to five year mark, you're ready to start promoting people. You're really starting to ready to see what their potential is in your organization. You're ready to start investing more and more into their development. Because the first year in a job, they're just trying to get to work every day and figure out where their instrument is, right? The second year is when they start becoming a little bit more proficient. And the third year is when they start to really, really perform. So years four and five is when you say, okay, I got someone here that were really good, that's gonna be a good, you know, the good bit strength for us. They're gonna be good successor for different roles, even though those successors will take time. They're not successful, you're not gonna succeed in from coming in as the individual contributor to a, you know, a director or a high-level manager within three to five years. But that's when you start to see that you really start to ready to make the investment in someone. And so when the decision is made, you're ready to make an investment into these employees. And in their mind, side of that is the employee side, right? The first year is when they're saying, I came in here thinking I was gonna have, you know, a good way to pay off some debt, to have a good income, to get some stability in my life, all those kinds of things. And and really thinking that they're believing the promises that you've started, right? The second year is when they start to say, are they really gonna uphold to those promises? Right. I can then the the fog is going away, and I'm starting to really understand the ins and outs of things, how things get done around here. And if you haven't convinced them by then, the third year, by year three and four, they're looking to do something different. Yeah. And by the way, if they're strong and they're good at what they do, yeah, they don't have to look far because there's people coming to them. They're tapping, people are tapping up talent on the shoulders all the time. That's the, I guess, the beauty and also the downfall of all the technology that we have. Yep. People can find you and they know what people are saying about you, and they know how to find you without you being a job seeker.

SPEAKER_03 16:33

Yeah. No, and I think now, especially these days, it's that's more relevant than ever, especially as people lean out and realize how much more you can do with how much or less. Um, and I the other thing that I find so fascinating as you're highlighting that too, is at the same time you think about people who are early in their careers, for example, that even that first year mark, how critical it is, but also going back to hiring the right people and how not all turnover is bad turnover. So many candidates, um, at least in in my experience, and I fallen victim to this as well, um, where you think you're gonna get promoted the first year and you're ready. And really, as the you know, the employee tempering your expectations of you look at a business that's been around for a hundred years, do you think those people are getting promoted year one or two right off the bat? No, that's just not how it works. So it's just an interesting dynamic that I hadn't thought about um as you're speaking, where it's like you kind of have to balance both sides of the fence because you have to have realistic expectations on both sides, but you also have to have this performance history that there's longevity behind where it's like anyone could have a good two, three quarters. What are you gonna do for three years straight is a much different story. So um I love I love how you put it because I think it's a good reminder too for for people, myself included, where it's like, hey, I know you want it now and you think you're ready for it, but it's a business and we need to see some history here. So um I love that you just expanded on that and thank you for that. So I want to shift a little bit, um, same topic, uh slightly different in terms of turning culture into a uh, excuse me, turning culture into a leadership operating system. So as you were doing this um redesign for the system we're talking about right now, what principles really guided your decisions? Can you walk us through that a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 18:45

Well, as it guided us, we're coming from both sides. They were coming from not only the employees and you know, the direct reports, but also we wanted to find out what were some of the things that were getting in the way of leaders to be able to truly dedicate time and really live and represent that culture, right? Because you need to make sure that if leaders are working managers, which we know that's a very common phrase. If you're a working manager and you spend most of your time doing a job versus leading your team, then that is a that sets the culture as well, because it says what's important to your team members. It says you're more worried about getting this and that done than you are about me being able to develop me, being able to help me understand my expectations, let me know where I'm falling short so that they don't have, they're not, you know, um, looking for things too soon, making sure that they know that what does readiness look like in the next role, right? And then also being able to identify desirable versus undesirable turnover, right? Because there's, you know, there could be when someone's not maybe doing the best that they could do in their job, is it because they're in the wrong job, right company, wrong timing, or just incapable? And so good leaders can do those. And so we had to bring systems around all of that for leaders to be able to own that talent and to be able to understand what that looked like. And so we want to make sure that we were getting input from all sides of the equation, using focus groups, using um task forces, you know, I spent a lot of time sitting down with managers, whether I was coaching them or actually talking to them and listening to them and trying to hear and asking more questions around how much time do you really spend on leading your people? And then trying to get an understanding of that. And I worked with this with even another client since I left that organization to say if you were to think about the statistics that say if you are a people leader, that 60% of your time should be dedicated to leadership types of responsibilities. How do you measure up to that? Because there's research that says that's where it should be, right? And um that floors them because you're like, there's no way I can't carve out 60% to anything anywhere to do one thing. That's just not gonna happen. And so that's when you start to realize how you're gonna shape this thing, because you get got to come up with solutions that are gonna be able to be uh that are gonna create some type of significant change, right?

SPEAKER_03 21:26

Yeah. I think that answered your question. No, it absolutely does. And I I think what you just said um kind of as the final statement there with sustainable over time. Again, I I reflect back on personal experience and where I've seen cultural shifts, whether it's you know, new leadership comes in and you're going through a different path of growth, uh, whatever it the case may be. And I think about people who had done it extremely effectively, and then where there's maybe some room for opportunity and the one. Who again who did it the best were let's invite everyone to the table, but that also didn't mean let's invite everyone to the table and we land on the group decision. It could be a discussion, and no, we're not going to do it that way, and here's why. But at least people had that opportunity in the leadership room to voice their concern or opinions. And there were times that senior leadership or ELT made different decisions based on the input and feedback. But those scenarios where people were at the table where they felt like they could share or push back, even if you didn't get a different result. Now you have change agents that are actually bought in and are marching towards the exact same goal, which I think is the only way you could really make it sustainable. Because if it's just top-down, where's the buying to come in? Well, you're probably gonna have quite a bit of turnover and bring an entire new team in and likely a short amount of time, too, on top of it. So um my gears are turned a little bit uh on that side.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

So I'll share with you a quick lesson on that topic too, because I think had I known then what I know now, when you bring those groups together, you start talking about, you know, suggestions and things that come up and this, that, and the other. I think the time is not to say yes or no in the meeting. The time is to listen, right? And give space for opinions. And then you can go back afterwards and say, we're not gonna be able to do that now, and here's why, or we're not gonna be able to do that ever, and here's why. But, you know, being able to not shut people down in the moment, you miss out on a lot of things that people want to say, and you also miss out on the emotion behind that to make sure that you can drive that sustainable change.

SPEAKER_03 23:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

No, trust is key in any culture.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

I cannot agree more with that. Um, and again, I think that comes back to just listening to and giving people time to process even what they said, because sometimes you hear it out loud and it's much different than what you had in your head. So if the answer comes back and it's different and it is no, it's almost like a sigh of relief at the end of the day because you're like, oh, in my head it sounded way different and not so great coming out. Um, one thing that you've said that has really stuck with me is you get what you tolerate. And what does that mean in practice? Because I feel like I have a really good sense of what you mean by that. But for anyone who's listening, can you share a little bit more um on that statement?

SPEAKER_02 24:39

Yeah, I'll I'll I'll share it using an ugly phrase, that whole ugly phrase of entitlement, right?

SPEAKER_03 24:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 24:45

And so um when you have long-term employees that feel like they've been there forever and they just know how things are done, they can do the job on their sleep. Um, you know, some of them may get comfortable to a point to where they're cutting corners or they the people are not in the forefront because they are working manager and it's all about getting the job done. Um, they don't have time, they haven't been given the resources. Um, sometimes promoting people too fast is a sense of entitlement. So you would promote them from being an individual contributor to a people leader, and yet they were you were promoting them because they were really good at the job, but nobody's teaching them how to be a leader. And so then they don't understand where that entitled, oh, if I'm entitled to do this every every 24 months, I should be getting a promotion, right? Um, there's also that entitlement that comes in from you know, new hires that you promote and that you give a whole lot of attention to because you do feel like they're going to be able to come in and just, you know, make a significant contribution in your organization. And if you don't manage that in a way that brings them into the culture and the fold and and the way you do things and the mission and the vision, then again, you could be find yourself tolerating poor behavior longer than you should, because you don't want to admit that you made a bad hire, right? In some cases, you also want to make sure that you can continue to promote someone that you feel is really good, even though they might be making some costly mistakes, and that's not acceptable. And with those managers that have been there forever and ever and ever, well, everybody just kind of tends to leave them alone, right? Just they we know that they're gonna get the job done. We know that you know, so-and-so knows where all the light switches are, they can make sure to build all those same kinds of things, and so you don't pay attention to the little things, and so all of that becomes some of those bad behaviors that you that just become tolerable in the organization.

SPEAKER_03 26:46

No, um, that resonates so much too. Uh, I think back when I got promoted pretty quickly early on in my career and just kind of had to figure it out. And thankfully, the people I had around me had a really good support system. So I went to people who I aspire to be like and how they worked and how they operated. But I looked at some other peers who got promoted at the same time, and you just you didn't have much. So, again, though, going back to the whole culture piece, like it's behavioral characteristics, which I think is a a perfect segue uh for my next question is so how did you start um turning culture into something you can measure, especially with what you just said?

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Yes. So first step was building the business case for why we needed to measure it, right? And what was happening with within the organization that was uh directly, I would say, um opposite or opposed to what we wanted as a culture as an organization. And so the business case was gathering all that data that I just talked about. And then the second thing was to say, okay, based on that, we if we really want things to change in the organization, just like anything, if you don't measure it, right, it's not important. And so we had to make sure from an employee standpoint, they know that the expectation was there from the leaders and them, not just one-sided. From a leader standpoint, they had to know that we were going to give them the tools and the training and the time and all those things to do that as well. And so, but we had to make sure that it was important enough, just like any other goal that they had, right? Just like any other goal from a standpoint of from a leader standpoint, if if they had a goal to make sure that they did X, Y, and Z, part of that was gonna have to be getting at that, chipping away at that 60% to lead their people, right? Maybe not getting to 60%, but something better than where you are today, to make sure that your team can perform better. And it was all about making sure that we were increasing performance to make sure people could come in and do the best work they could do to make bottom line impact. And so we started to measure it using those kinds of things. We started to build the case around why we need to measure it. And then we said, okay, second to that will be how are we going to measure it?

SPEAKER_03 29:10

Absolutely. So I think you mentioned something about a scorecard as well. What, like, how did the conversation specifically around the scorecard and the leadership affiliated to that scorecard and that being tied to compensation, how does that even begin?

SPEAKER_02 29:30

But actually came out some of the engagement surveying. So we kept seeing that when we were doing the engagement survey, that there was the same areas time after time that were coming in with some of the lower scores. And we kept asking ourselves, well, how it can't be impossible to do this. And then we decided that it was boiling down to two things action and accountability. And so you start to ask yourself to keep your question, well, how do you get a manager to take action on something? Well, they anybody, not even just a manager, but you get them to take action when they know that there's something that's going to be measured behind it, right? And so the scorecard came into play because it was a way to measure things that were not necessarily just their day-to-day measurements. And so we started measuring things on that scorecard, like within your team, how many promotions did you have in the last year? You know, what's the overall team performance when it came down to KPI? They were used to KPIs and OKRs, right? So that was so what does your team look like when it comes down to that? Where are they failing? And what did you do about that, right? From year over year. Um, when you start thinking about what kinds of individuals are you hiring into your team and how are you working with those hires? The hardest thing is to say, well, we want to make sure we're hiring people with organizational fit. All that's trying to say is we want to hire people with that are like-minded with our culture, right? That's what it really should be talked about. And so how the question is, oh, how are you doing that? Right? That's not HRS's fault. I don't HR doesn't make the final hiring decision. The manager does. And so we started measuring that. We started measuring what were their engagement scores from one to the next. And then we're thinking why I've been having trouble doing pulse, little pulse surveys to try to understand that. Looking at the exit interviews to understand what are people saying when they leave the organization and not trying to tie it back to the to punish the managers. And instead of punish them, we decided that instead of making it, you know, we were gonna make instead of it being a hammer, we're gonna make it a carrot. And it was gonna be the better you do these things and the more you show progress in these areas, and the more, the better people you are, and the way you drive the culture within your realm of responsibility, we're gonna give you a little bit of kicker to that. We already had a long term and short-term and long-term incentive plan in place. That's all we had to do was adjust those numbers to make sure it didn't require any additional funding. It just made a difference on where the money was going and how you were cutting the pieces of the pie. It was a no-brunner.

SPEAKER_03 32:03

I love that. And again, the the whole incentive piece where wherever wherever your incentive lies is generally where the behavior is going to get driven. And as long as you can measure it, usually the the two coincide, assuming it's realistic. What was the initial response from from the leaders once the accountability and the visibility came um into play?

SPEAKER_02 32:26

Well, it's interesting because I think the leaders that understood the importance of all of this and understood what human capital was and what talent meant to the organization, they may not have had everything that they needed. They might have been a little bit um worried about it, but they embraced it. And so they asked more questions and they got more information and they wanted to be part of the process and they wanted to make sure that they were able to be successful as a leader. Those leaders that might have been where we were having a lot of our struggles were probably the ones that pushed back on them because they felt like, again, it was one more thing, and they felt like it was, you know, what you've already said that I've got 15 factors on my bonus, and now you're gonna put 16 factors in there. And this is one that's out of my control. And that's the biggest thing is you have to make sure people understand this is within your control, and you have to show them how they can how it is within their control. But you can't do that and not give them the time and space to lead their people either. So we had to make sure that we were providing tools and support and structural changes if we needed to, and taking a look at how the organization should be, you know, positions and roles and how that should look. The bigger it got to be some bigger things and some small things. So you had some low-hanging fruit, you had some midterm goals that you need to work on, and you had some big structural organizational things that need to be looked at over time. And we made sure that we planned those out as just like you would any other business strategy, right? It's a business strategy that you have to play. It's that talent piece, the people talent piece that goes in your business strategy that you start to build that in. And when people start to see that it was a thread all the way through, and they understood it, no difference than the ROI or eBIT or any of those other things that get measured. Yeah. When you start thinking about that, um, then they start to understand, okay, not only are they serious, this is here to stay, but I can control it and I can do better with this. This is something that is within the realm of where I want to be as part of my success.

SPEAKER_03 34:33

Yeah. No, I think it's uh it's brilliant at the end of the day. On the flip side, what what were the risks associated or any considerations around risks once those incentives were tied in?

SPEAKER_02 34:48

The biggest risk was reputation and disbelief, right? So we really ran the risk of if we don't do this right, yeah, we can have a lot of people start walk out the door. Because again, promises, unkept promises, right? You can have talent walk out the door that you really wanted to key. The other risk was that people will flip things sometimes to say, Well, now you're saying, well, I need to spend X percent of time leading my people, which is why I can't get this done. Yep. Right. So that was another risk is shifting responsibility. So that because a lot of people thought it had to be a this or that instead of an and.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:25

And start to understand that. And so there was a risk with that as well. Um, and then the other risk is just what is that gonna do to the reputation when it comes down to again, social media, when it comes down to what people say about your company, when it comes down to references that you have, but if it comes down to being able to track talent into the organization, are you gonna be able to track the right talent in there? So those were some real risks that, again, they're not direct costs, but they're indirect costs that are a lot more expensive in the long run.

SPEAKER_03 35:53

Yeah. Well, I would imagine too, with the way that you went about the process and really redesigning it as a whole, inviting people into the conversations and also actually listening, going back to you just don't say no in that moment. Maybe you come back and you rediscuss it, and then the answer, you know, it's yes or no, or you change your mind. Um, you're at least getting this buy-in where you can mitigate most of that risk. You're never going to get to a place where you eliminate it entirely. But you could mitigate a lot of it, I would assume, by doing the process in which the exact way you did it. Um, and I I think it's it's so smart the way that you went about it, because it's never easy, especially when you think about a larger group of humans, I don't care how like-minded they are, to get them good moving in the same direction and feeling somewhat in a similar way and also good at the same time, where it's like, okay, we can do this. Uh, but then to to get to a place where you did just by inviting people in. It's so simple. Um, but I I don't know how you could design something nearly as effective without doing it in a way where you're having people give me your input. I I want to hear where you're coming from. And sometimes you uncover that there's true blockers that are preventing people from doing the exact things that they're saying, and then you get to adjust. Um, but I think it's a perfect pivot point for the next topic, really scaling uh without losing the human care behind it. So I know um the example we're talking about right now with the redesign was a global org. So, how did you design this framework really where it worked more at a global scale?

SPEAKER_02 37:40

The the task force, the focus, but we started to see, and when you're crunching data, we started to see the same trends no matter where in the world people were, right? Because at the end of the day, the basic human needs of people are kind of the same, right? Now, how you get there, what's acceptable, you know, those kinds of things might be different, but they want to be treated fairly, they want to have a chance to succeed, they want to be able to help the organization, and they also want to make sure that they uh can sustain their their livelihood, right? Basic human needs at the end of the day. And so we started to see that it didn't matter. Um, and so, but we also started to see that one of the things we kept hearing was if you want all this to happen, then companies gotta invest, they've got to show that they're serious about this. And so we completely scrapped an engagement survey that we had been using for double-digit years, right? And with a brand new uh vendor. They weren't well known, they were smaller, but we had a lot more flexibility. We were the questions made a lot more sense. We because everybody was like, if you management was saying, if you're gonna measure me on this engagement survey, nobody loves this, everybody hates this question, and so it's not fair to do that, right? And employees were saying, you know, I just I don't even pay much attention to it because you guys don't do anything with the survey anyway. I know it at the end of the day, I just take it and it falls on deaf ears. And so we said, okay, we gotta really make sure that they know we're serious as an organization about engagement. We care about employee sentiment and we care about leadership as well. And so we completely adopted a brand new tool, a brand new action planning process, set brand new expectations around it. We had a lot more, again, a lot more flexibility with it. Um, we ran that survey in 20 plus languages. Why? Because we had global employees, and it wasn't fair for them, even though the majority of our of our workforce, yeah, they spoke, spoke some portion, you know, some version of English. But we also found that in our um, you know, for a lot of our blue cloud collar workers that were doing the day-to-day work, they had no need to speak English. And so, yes, if they could understand it, that doesn't mean that they could read it and respond back to it. And so we thought it was important to meet them where they are. And so we made the investment to also do those translations as well. One small, those were just two things that we did to make sure that people understood this is a two-way street. The company starts first and setting by example and making sure that we, you know, are trying to mitigate some of these upfront issues that you may have, and then also give you what you need to make sure you can come along on the back end. There's still blockers out there to every change. But what we started to find is that when the more advocates you have, especially the more early adopters, and then the more late onboarders that start to see the change and start to change and shift their mindset because they start to see the change actually happening, that's better than any announcement or communication plan you can write because they're the ones speaking for you.

SPEAKER_03 40:50

Can agree more. And I think that goes back to the the whole flexibility piece too, where if it wasn't relevant for even, let's say, 10% of the workforce, well, that's gonna add up and compound over time where, you know, we we know where that road ends up leading. Um can you walk me through a little bit more on what you decided what the organization was going to standardize versus allow for more of that uh flexibility based on the region? Was it more of the language piece or were there other components to it?

SPEAKER_02 41:23

Yeah, so we, you know, we standardized the fact of we were we had core questions and then we were able to ask questions that were specific to a region andor location. So that was a standardized and a flexible piece. Um, we also standardized the fact of making sure that every leader within a certain, you know, that had a certain um size team had to do action plans, but they had a lot of flexibility on how they did those and what they consisted of and how they executed those, because that needed to be something that was done that was very, very close to their organization. Um, so those were two things we did within the engagement survey. When it came down to hiring processes, right, we knew that there was legal things we had to do from a compliance standpoint in every country. They vary from country to country. So we made sure we paid attention to that. But at the same time, we we talked about here's how you're gonna do behavioral interviewing, here's how you're gonna assess when a person is, you know, what's a good answer, what's a what's a poor answer, how do you select the right questions to ask? Those were things that we said, you know what, we're gonna be a little bit more flexible with that, but we're gonna make sure people understand how to go about going through that cafeteria line and making those selections best for the role. Um, the other thing would have been when it came down to understanding how to assess talent. So when you start thinking about potential on talent, we define what potential looked like. And that was a standard definition across the organization so that we didn't have, you know, a person that might have been looking for an international opportunity, and all of a sudden you they go to maybe have a conversation with a manager in another country, and that manager's like, this doesn't fit our standard, right? This doesn't fit our standard of being a high potential talent. And so we made sure everybody understood this the same everywhere because why? It tied back to our mission and vision in our culture. And so that was always the litmus test that we used. So those are a few that I can think of when it comes down to that.

SPEAKER_03 43:30

The definition piece, I think, is something worthwhile to highlight because so often, and I don't think this is just a professional related uh thing in life, but so often it's like you're operating, it's the same word, but two wildly different meanings.

SPEAKER_02 43:49

So why don't we get to a fear versus not, right? Um it took us a you know, I said we got to a standard definition, but it wasn't easy getting there. It was. And then even when we thought we were there and we translated into a different language, uh oh. That doesn't work, right?

SPEAKER_03 44:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

So um it's it's also something that you have to be willing as an organization to constantly make sure that you're looking at things in a different view, paying attention to some of the small things that employees might say because it might be small to you and big to them. Yeah. Um, and that's where the HR governance comes in, that's where their oversight comes in, but also making sure that they're doing it in a way that hearing is hearing the word and the and you know what's coming from the employees to make sure that the talent is there for the leaders to be able to set a business plan and you can achieve that business plan. It's a simple, it's simplistic, but very, very difficult when you're talking about, you know, large organizations with employees in 22 different countries.

SPEAKER_03 44:52

I mean, you even think about it just in the US, state to state, you're in the Northeast versus the Southwest or Southeast, you've got wildly different, you know, expectations or norms. You start going on the other side of the globe, man, same words are gonna look wildly different to two different people. So um above the definition piece, and I think it's just so critical anytime you're making any kind of change or even just having a simple conversation, because if that's not the same baseline that both parties operate off of, well, good luck getting anything done or moving towards where you both think you're moving towards. So um, how did you help the people who struggled with the change? Because I've heard a lot about support. Um, what does that look like? Because this is, although at its core it might be simplistic on its face, people obviously were operating a certain way for double-digit years. What does that look like for the people that seem to be struggling to get on the bus a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 45:55

Yeah, so I think we did it in two ways. One was you want to make sure that just because you have a task force and focus groups and things like that to start something, you need to continue that conversation, that dialogue some way. So we didn't disband those, right? We had champions that we wanted to make sure that that knew and they were closer to um to the business in their particular locations or their particular business unit that could always identify things and deal with those things and help to execute the change. Um, and then we also made sure that we were offering training that was ongoing training for managers that have been there, but then new hires, right? Wanted to make sure it was part of the orientation to also understand these things right from the beginning. Like, don't get a bad habit because this is how we do things here, this is what we expect, this is what how how you know we look at talent in an organization. And so um that's how you was that's how we tried to not only sustain it, but also to make sure that people that were struggling didn't feel like they had to sit there and struggle alone. There were multiple levels of resources, right? Communication coming from senior leaders was great, and we did that. But we also said when you're on site, walk the talk, right? Have some conversations, be aware of your surroundings, be aware of the things that you say that might send people in a frenzy. Um, and so it was just minor thing, minor tweaks and changes all the time. You know, you think about it. If you've got an automobile that you love, and I don't know if you're a car lover or not, but if you've got an automobile you love, it doesn't matter if that happens to be a 1957 Chevy, right? No or 2025 Catalog, whatever it might be, you're gonna nurture it, you're gonna care for it, you're gonna make sure the leather is good, you're making sure it's praying all the way through, you're gonna make sure the tires are there, you're doing tune-ups, all you have to do the same thing in business.

SPEAKER_03 47:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:54

No, you love it, you gotta nurture it.

SPEAKER_03 47:58

100%. And I think the car example is actually a perfect one, too, because you you might even need to give it a little bit more care, an older car. But if you're giving it care along the way, and you neglect the newer car, it's probably gonna last longer and get you better results over time. The newer one, although it might be newer, better tech or better talent, whatever you want to call it, you neglect it even a fraction of the time, it blows up. So I do it.

SPEAKER_02 48:26

Even if you can't find parts for that older vehicle anymore, there's a way to retrofit things. You figure out ways to take something new and get it on there to make sure that it works again. And so it's just a matter of where your mind is. And we pay attention to things that are important to us. That is, as humans, that's what we do. Um, and couldn't agree more. It might be something what's important to me. You might consider something that's bad or you know, kind of weird. Um, but I might feel the same for you. But the fact of the matter is that's where we spend our time and intention and our efforts. A hundred percent. Plain and simple.

SPEAKER_03 49:02

A hundred percent. I uh I love how you how you put that. I'm a big analogy person. So you just you struck a chord with me. Um moving uh to the last topic, uh, incentives, trust, and future of culture uh measurement. I think there's a lot of what you just said um that really anyone who's listening can take away. Um, but how would you say tying uh people leadership to incentives influence how leaders showed up day to day?

SPEAKER_02 49:32

Oh, we always made sure that, you know, there's fair pay. And obviously, you know, the longer you're with the organization, you have an opportunity for more financial gain, right? So that's the incentive piece. And it wasn't around, you know, the two or three or four percent pool that is for everybody for merit increases, you know, understanding that incentives play a different role when you start thinking about total rewards, right? On top of all the things and benefits and that kind of things. And so that was the piece that said, we wanted to make sure that that this was something that was more in your control, because that's where incentives are all about. It incentivizes you to do the right things in the organization, to stay focused on the things that are important in the organization, right? And to make sure you do that. And then I'm sorry, what was the second half of your question?

SPEAKER_03 50:24

Oh no, just how the leader showed up day to day with those incentives.

SPEAKER_02 50:28

So once they understood that, you know, if you take care of the first part with the incentives, right, then it uh you can't show up day to day doing the opposite of that. You can't come in and say that, you know, just mistreat your people every day, you know, not take the time they're with them, and then also say that yeah, well, at the end of the year, you're surprised that your incentive wasn't where you thought it was gonna be, right? Because the one thing about incentives, it's not a it's not a cookie-cutter approach for everybody. That is not a peanut butter spread. Not everybody gets the same amount. That's the whole point. And so it changed the way leaders showed up because they also recognized this is an organization that is gonna allow me to do the things that I do best and reward me for those things. That's how it changes, how they showed up every day.

SPEAKER_03 51:25

I love that. Um, and also, too, could be a great moment for some other people to say this isn't this isn't what I'm looking for as well, and make that decision accordingly.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

Sure was. Yeah. So we we you might see people that decide that this is no longer a fit for them, right? That's not undesirable turnover at that point in time. You might think it is at the beginning, but it's not. And so that's why this whole thing, the beauty of this whole thing is saying if you've got a strong bench, you've got a strong succession, you're doing the right things, you should never be held hostage by poor behavior and bad habits. Don't error as an organization, put yourself in a situation where that's happening to you. Because when it happens to you, you will find that you're chasing away more than the one individual. And you'll also find out that if that one individual was to go, it's not as painful as you thought.

SPEAKER_03 52:21

I you summarized it perfectly with the you get what you tolerate and whatever you tolerate, even if that's good performance where it shows up in a really good number on a spreadsheet, that's not something sustain sustainable long term if it's the wrong people. At least that's what my experience has been.

SPEAKER_02 52:42

So if there's a lot of casualties with that number, then you know, are you really accomplishing anything?

SPEAKER_03 52:49

No. And certainly not long term because people can't be there forever. So there's gonna come a day of reckoning. So is there anything you would uh redesign today after going through the experience you you had?

SPEAKER_02 53:02

I think it's what I mentioned that I learned. I would listen more in those meetings and not try to correct or you know, put the guidelines around people. You know, I think for some of us, I won't say all of us, but for some of us like me, I don't realize when I'm putting a fence around conversation or a fence around people. And so um, the one thing I would change is to say we are not gonna make a single decision here, we're not gonna quote a single policy in this meeting, we're not gonna talk about, you know, anything that has to go a certain way or the way we do things here, as far as our rules of engagement, those things are off limits.

unknown 53:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:45

I think by doing that, things might have moved a little bit faster. We may have gained traction a little bit sooner.

SPEAKER_03 53:53

It's uh it's a great takeaway. Were there any other blind spots you saw that come uh came up, say after the system had been running for a little bit longer?

SPEAKER_02 54:04

Oh my gosh, I think um a blind spot is the fact of saying, you know, you want working managers are not something that you can get away from. You know, you just don't have enough people in any organization to say their sole job is to lead the team. That's not gonna happen. Um, and so trying to even remove some of those barriers and give them tools and all those, it still felt like it was just more on their plate. And so the blind spot was just thinking that they would be able to find space for it. Yeah. It wasn't their heart, it was not enough minutes and hours in a day, right? And so if finding space for something means that you're taxing them with more, regardless of what they look what that looks like, you're not allowing them to be their best. And so you might be doing better for the you know, the group of people, the direct reports, but your frontline managers were sinking. And so that might have been a blind spot to say, how do we really make sure that we can that's where we start talking about structural changes. Like, is this really realistic or do we need a structure change?

SPEAKER_03 55:24

Another great uh call out, and I have to bring it up because it's always at the it's always the topic of any conversation at this point. AI now being in the scene. Do you see a place where with the redesign you did, do you see a place where AI can fit in and really help with some of that measurement or accountability, whether it's for those frontline leaders, for senior leadership, anything that comes to mind uh with current state, with where the world is at?

SPEAKER_02 56:01

I definitely think that it would come into play when you start talking about crunching data and getting trend analysis and those kinds of things. But even at that, you can you can build those algorithms, right? But I think from AI, information does behavioral analysis from benchmarking. And you know, we we wanted to do benchmarking in the industry and this, that, and the other. But it's like, okay, how do we think about this from a standpoint of what's happening in the world today and what that's doing for behavioral analysis and why that's driving some of the things that people you saw them yesterday and they operate this way, they were happy. You see them today, and you're like, what happened to that person, right? There could be a lot of things that are happening outside, internally and externally to the organization that could be driving some of that. I think that's where AI could really help. I still think that it requires that human judgment and that human touch to understand what's real and what's not, how much of it to take and how much of it not to, just like anything else in life, when you're getting you know put from various places, you have to just use discernment that I believe that only the human brain and heart as a combination can do. That's my own personal opinion. Um, but I do think that AI could definitely help with some of that and speed up the process.

SPEAKER_03 57:19

Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about too, especially with the the head and the heart, because you can have these wild chiths. And it's literally like what you just said, overnight. Is a bot gonna pick up on, hey, is there anything going on in your personal life? Maybe if you program that, if somebody can give you a completely bonk answer where it's like, I don't know about this, but it can give you these incredible trends where maybe it can give you a little bit more predictive indicators in the future. So it's it's interesting, it's too early. You just you don't know what you don't know. But we've got one last question I want to wrap uh wrap up with. If if the CHRO was listening to this and they want to really operationalize culture in their organization, where do you recommend they start?

SPEAKER_02 58:12

You gotta start knowing where you're at. You gotta figure out when you want to operationalize culture, why? What's the business case? If you can't find the business case for it, then it's not gonna stay. It's not gonna stick and stay. You've got to be at the table to ask the question around when we think about culture or when we talk about our people, what are the business indicators that we want to improve on, reestablish, or where we're gonna go? And so if it's a growth strategy that you're trying to understand, do you have the right people in the right jobs? That that's a question. But having the right people in the right jobs has to be around the culture piece, right? If you are looking to um just maintain where you're at today, then you have to ask yourself the question do we, you know, are we too skinny or too fat? What's that month?

SPEAKER_03 59:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:07

And and when you make those decisions, what is that gonna do to your culture? Either decision is gonna have an impact on culture. And so I think every time you have a question in your mind, a business question or a business conversation, the CHRO is the one that brings the human aspect to that question, brings the human aspect to being able to achieve that. And unless it's something that is completely automated or robotic, then that's what the CHRO does. It's brings in that heart and that human, that brain and that and the heart together to ask the question what is the impact on our folks? How is this going to impact people? How is this gonna impact our human capital? And start asking that question and really being open to some wild answers, to answers you hadn't thought about before.

SPEAKER_03 59:54

Yeah. It's so simple, but I I think it's absolutely perfect because how do you make a change if you don't know what you're trying to change and why, more importantly, why you're making the change in the first place? Because you could you could find out you don't need to do what you're about to think you want to do. So um thank you so much for all of that. We always wrap this up with uh four rapid fire questions. Um, some of my favorite parts of uh of these conversations, but what do you do to make sure your mind and body are operating at the most optimal state?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:30

Prepare.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

Breathe. I think those are the two things that I do is make sure that I'm prepared and make sure that I breathe during it, before, during, and after, just taking that time to cleanse and to reset.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:47

I love that. Uh if if you prepare, you never have to worry, is is another analogy that I've heard in the past.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:55

Um at least you can prepare, you know, when it's outside the lines, right? And at least you can figure out what you need to do at that point in time. But if you're not prepared, it's fair game.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:05

And you know. Well and it's so obvious too. Um, yeah, like it's just a perfect nugget in life that anyone could take with them. They don't have to be an HR. I love that. Um, your personal why in life, what is it that they get you going?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:23

You know, everything I do is the backdrop to that is setting an example for my family, my kids mainly, my children and my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren. I want to make sure that I'm showing them the good in the world. I want to make sure that helping them to understand what you need to do to navigate and how to get through those tough times because not everything is for everyone. And guess what? You're not entitled to anything. But you can certainly understand the blessings that you have and make sure that you can maximize those. So everything I do is to make sure that I'm setting that example. I would like to say I'm trying to lead the world a better place, but that feels like a bigger, more daunting thing for me personally. And so what I'm trying to do is just show them through the example and the life that I lead every day.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:11

The action piece is the only piece that matters, in my opinion. So I love that. That's what you anchored to. Um, and I think you have you have plenty of examples that speak to and show it. So um any books that stick out to you that have funnel it fundamentally shaped how you think or how you view life.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:32

You know, um, I a couple of them, and they're probably older ones. Um uh Phil Jackson, he was a coach, right? Yeah. As a Lakers coach, he's got a book, I believe it's called Eleven Rings. And it just talks about how he led his team to victories. And the rings were like the least of a book. It was all about the day-to-day stuff. And he it wasn't about wins or losses, it was about the whole player and that kind of thing. And so that's one. Um, another one is servant leadership. That um I love the idea. It's it's um to me, it tells us we're AI is not going to be a fit ever.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:12

Uh, it was written before AI was a thing. Yep. I had to relate it to today. Those would probably be that those would probably be two of them for me.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:20

I love the call out with the 11 rings, um, because it's it's almost a perfect example of what we just talked about for the last hour, because it's all character and what what behavior you're trying to make sure is in everyday life. And that's the number one driver of wherever you're trying to go, whatever you're trying to accomplish. If you don't get that right and get those people right, good luck is all I have to say. Um, so I think it's just a perfect call out. So if you got to have an opportunity to have a conversation with your teenager self, what's one piece of advice you would leave in much earlier stage in life, Quinn?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:01

I would probably tell myself that um two threes, two things can be true at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:09

And the other one would be you don't have to have the interest for everything. It's okay to walk into a problem situation and not walk away with this and walk away with it unbeing without it being resolved. It doesn't have to be solved. Um doesn't mean you won't go back to it, but you don't have to serve it, you don't have to solve it in the moment. That would be the two things I would tell myself.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:33

I love that. Thank you so much. That was uh that was great. Thanks for listening. Want to learn more about the level up HR community? Follow us on LinkedIn. You'll find all of the details in the show notes.