Leading growing organizations in time of change
In this episode, Within People partners Kendall Clifton-Short and host Anique Coffee gather over coffee the morning after a leadership event in Denver, Colorado. They recap what this group of leaders are doing to cope with the Great Resignation.
Join us as we dig deeper into how you can design, lead and foster environments where people want to come to work.
“The struggle is real. This idea of the war on talent, the renegotiation, all the things that we’re going through right now, it’s real. And it permeates every single industry.”
Key Takeaways from the Episode
The ‘Great Resignation’. The ‘Turnover Tsunami’. The Great Discontent. The Great Renegotiation. Grand names connoting the mother of all employment reshuffles. In short, people en masse are rethinking their relationship with work, and with that, their place of work.
Whilst visiting Denver - a city they both love - Kendall and Anique hosted an intimate, interactive conversation amongst like-minded leaders to:
Explore the keys to landing - and keeping, great people
Dive deep into how culture is being harnessed as a driver of growth
Hear how other leaders are reimagining growth in this time of huge change
Some key things they heard:
On the minds of leaders now is how to design, lead, and foster environments where people want to come and work
It’s not about enticing people back to the office, but more about reframing the opportunity to come back to:
feel valued and that they’re doing meaningful work
be in closer proximity to key people that can support them to grow and develop
Invitation for Leaders:
Ask yourself and your team:
“How do we reimagine the purpose of the office, and what the office has to offer our people - in a way that doesn’t exclude anyone?”
“How can we harness the new opportunities that have emerged and use that to offer people flexibility, rewards, and the opportunity for connection and growth?”
Think about your equitable employee experience in the holistic way by looking through these four lens:
How do we help people feel rewarded for and able to do meaningful work?
How do we provide meaningful opportunities for them to grow?
How do we provide them some sense of flexibility and opportunities to really lean into their talents and roles?
How do we make sure we feel connected to the organization and to each other?
“I believe there is infinite possibility in us all. That when we engage with things that really matter to us - things underpinned by purpose - our authenticity and truth attracts other amazing people with similar passions.”
“Our shared belief about what we want this changing world to look like then drives innovation, out of the box thinking, and an unwavering commitment to finding a way.”
Episode Transcript
Kendall Clifton-Short: Okay, it's snowing outside.
Anique Coffee: Is it actively?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Well, no sorry. There's snow on the ground, which was exciting until it became slippery.
Anique Coffee: That's right. Okay. So here we are having our coffee the morning after. We are just off the back of a really energizing leadership event. We both are not from Denver. We don't live in Denver, but we came here for other reasons around other client work and things that we're working on.
And we thought, why not see who wants to have cocktails with us and have a conversation about what they're seeing right now as people leaders.
And it's a really fun city and there's heaps of people doing some really inspiring things here. So how can we serve that community even more.
Yeah. What do you have in your coffee?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Oat milk
Anique Coffee: We're both having oat milk lattes,
Kendall Clifton-Short: Anything I saw in the fridge.
Anique Coffee: They didn't really give her many choices in this cool Airbnb, but here we are. Okay. I just realized that we never even said who we were. We got so excited about having the conversation, like who is this beautiful Australian voice on our podcast today?
So for the folks who haven't met Kendall yet, this is Kendall. She's one of our partners who's based in Bozeman, Montana, Australian. Tell us about yourself a little bit.
Kendall Clifton-Short: You know, I think my background's in sort of sustainability education and my personal appetite to support organizations, driving sort of a change agenda that I align with, is really strong. And in doing this work, the sort of gap or the, the realization that I kept having is we can do a ton of stuff to support those organizations, the sort of, how do we tackle this problem? What does our strategy look like? But if we don't have the conditions for people to show up to that conversation and bring creative solutions and want to invest in finding a new way forward, all the work is kind of a waste of time.
So I think the really energizing thing about our work at Within from a sort of, how do we drive the change we want to see in the world? lense, is if I through my work and we, through our work can help organizations create cultures where the whole person can show up, the whole person can be in service of sort of an inspiring problem that they're solving and that we can unlock all that, that person has to offer. You know, we can make magic together. So yeah, I love the fact that at Within we're really focused on like, how do we create cultures where people can thrive? They can bring their whole selves, they can show up with humanity and humility as leaders and how do we support them to yeah, create that for their teams as well.
It's really inspiring. And how do we shape a powerful employee experience that especially today, when the war for talent is real and we're in the middle of this renegotiation, how do we help people, help great companies doing great work, find great people, and then create a place where they would want to stay and grow with the company. And solve the problems that that company is designed to solve.
Anique Coffee: And yeah, this event, I was like, I'm going to be at Denver, let's do an event. And you're like, let's talk about this. Yeah, it was fabulous. Okay. Now we can get back into the event. Got so excited. We didn't even say why we're here. Here we are. You know, my voice, my name is Anique.
I'm a partner that's based in London, but over here in the U S visiting and tripping around and meeting leaders. So. Oh last night. What was sort of like the you've said you, what kind of your purpose and why you're at Within but can you tell us a little bit about how we framed this conversation specifically last night?
Like what got leaders in the room last night? What were they excited to talk about?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Well, I think they were just really excited to talk about how they design, lead, foster environments where people want to come and work. I think obviously they're having trouble finding great people and keeping great people. So how can they rethink opportunities to do that differently. I think the, shall we go back to the office? Shall we stay at home? Dance, if you like. And especially sort of leadership, maybe wanting one thing, especially when they've invested a lot of money in some beautiful space for their people and the workforce, if you like sort of rethinking whether that's what they want. That's real. And so there was lots of appetite for people to talk about how we sort of, it started as how do we entice people back to the office? And then where we sort of landed is how do we reimagine the purpose of the office and what the office has to offer people in the context of what they want from work and how do we yeah, harness sort of new opportunities that can emerge when we stop thinking like, "Hey, everyone has to be in the office 3, 4, 5 days a week from nine to five". Like what if we just threw that thinking out the window and said, okay, what does the office provide us? And how can we really harness that? And how can we use that to offer people sort of flexibilities and rewards and opportunity for growth, some opportunity to be connected?
And how do we do that in a way that doesn't exclude all of the people who've now become part of their organization with the intention of remaining fully remote? Obviously, as people have had the opportunity to look outside their local community for talent, they've leapt on that. And they've got, you know, many, many big organizations such as in Denver, but we see them Bozeman and I think it's happening across the country and globally as well. We now have people who we don't ever expect to be in the office because of where they live or because of the type of job they want. So if we, as a leader, spend all of our time reconnecting culture to place, which was sort of massively disrupted in the pandemic, what does that mean for all these people who don't get to come to the place?
So I felt like that was a really big topic of conversation, too.
Anique Coffee: Yeah that was huge.
That was huge. I feel I'm still buzzing. It was really cool to have like literally drop into a city. Reach out to my community and say, "Hey, we're going to be here. Come join us for a cool conversation". And the people that showed up I thought were so great. It was so and energizing.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah. And the appetite to have conversations with other leaders about what's going on in their experience, leading people in a time of massive change and uncertainty. There's a real hunger and appetite to both offer support and learn from other people. Think about, find ways to think about this conversation.
Even though what I found really inspiring is even though all of them were from sort of different industries, we had tech there, we had the investment community, we had a sort of health and wellness. We had property. We had people from all sorts of situations and their organization size was large and small.
But yet they all, and while their actual experience was different, the way we set the conversation up, like, "Hey, let's anchor what you're experiencing around a couple of new ways to think about this one", provided them an opportunity to all come together around solutions which was really cool.
Anique Coffee: That was really cool.
Okay. So we gathered leaders and at, Within we love to have a check-in and check-out as our like tops and tails of the conversation.
So we asked leaders actually to draw a picture, color or a symbol about what it feels like to be a people leader right now. And can you remember some of the things that people put?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah. I mean, we had some squiggly lines. We had a fire because one gentleman was talking about how it just feels like I'm putting out fires all the time we had. Yeah, I think the theme was there's a lot of complexity. Like, yes, there's beautiful parts of it and like, it feels like the sun's shining, but then it also feels like this turbulent river. And it also feels like that river keeps changing course. So the sort of rules of engagement were constantly evolving.
It felt chaotic. It felt like a massive opportunity, but it also felt like it was hard to harness the opportunity. So, and yeah, it was really inspiring hearing from each person. And I think it was really great for them to all feel like, wow, it's sometimes it feels like an island and sort of the only custodian of people and culture in my organization, I feel like I'm doing all this heavy lifting by myself. And yet here are all these other people who are also having a similar experience.
Anique Coffee: Yeah, I quite liked how one of the leaders drew some like waves and for her that meant in flow because she's having such a collaborative conversation with her team. And the leader sitting across the table from her, saw that exact same symbol and thought it was like turbulent waves
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yep up down and up and down.
Anique Coffee: She's like, actually, I mean flow. And she's like, oh, I saw that as a scary wave. So it's kind of interesting, like there together in it. You're right. There's a lot of commonality, but there's the uncertainty, the difference. There was a lot of spoken to, of as people leaders, as, as people growing teams, obviously, none of us were kind of expecting this pandemic, but it sort of, it really made their job compounded was the word that was used. Like we're supposed to be managing people, helping grow our cultures, create our cultures, grow our teams. And now all of a sudden we're responsible for dealing with the pandemic from a people perspective.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah. And I think that sort of change of course has really forced people to approach that job in a radically different way. Like culture was always based on place for like 95% of organizations. And that was the paradigm, a person or people that had walked into two and a half years ago. And so if they have to throw that paradigm out the window and find a new way of being. Like that they need to take their, their leaders on that journey too. It's not just right. Great. That's rethink this. So I think absolutely there's a lot. Obviously you step into that role thinking that there's going to be a lot of work, but I think that this has created a whole different they're feeling that they're operating in a whole different paradigm.
Anique Coffee: Okay. After we did our check-in and heard all the voices of all the leaders, we kind of got into our questions. And so we had them kind of do some self-reflection and answer the question: what is your biggest employee experience challenge right now? And can you talk a little bit about what you heard there?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah, I mean, the challenges were all different. Like we sort of have mentioned. I think the vulnerability that these leaders showed up to this question was inspiring. There wasn't any like, Hey, I've got everything sorted out. So thanks for coming. I just wanted a free cocktail. That was the real you know, how do we serve a multi-generational workforce? How do we provide legitimate opportunities to grow our people and connects them to great mentors, especially when were not in the office? How do we entice people sort of was like, I spoke to, was that the question that started? How do we entice people to come back to the office, if that's what we think we should do. And that was a really great conversation where we sort of landed where perhaps it's a bit less about enticing and more about sort of reframing the opportunity and really creating sort of a way for people to feel valued and feel themselves growing by being in closer proximity to key people.
Anique Coffee: Yeah. And we talk about it as like the promises over perks, right? Like it's an invitation, it's not an enticing, it's an invitation to come and be here with us and grow and be a part of our culture.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah. And I think we. At Within we think about employee experience through these four lenses.
Like how do we help people feel rewarded for and able to do meaningful work? How do we provide meaningful opportunities for them to grow? How do we provide them some sense of flexibility and opportunities to really lean into their talents and roles? And how do we make sure we feel connected to the organization?
So we sort of framed the answers as possibly lying in one of these lenses and everyone was then able to feed into it, like, wow, what if we thought about this challenge through the lens of flexibility? And so we had some questions like, well, you know, we don't all do the same job at the organization we're in manufacturing and obviously we have a corporate office. So, you know, how do we offer flexibility to folks who can't work from home and need to be in the manufacturing plant to do the first, second and third shift. And so it takes a little bit of you know, it's easy to say, well, we can't offer flexibility there, but I think the real opportunity that sort of emerged from the conversation is like, "Hey, there's always a way for us to re-imagine flexibility when we sort of stopped thinking we can't and step into that space from a place of, of creativity". And I think another thing I really heard from the team and resonating with the people there last night is sometimes as leaders we think we have to have all the answers and yet not very many of us have led teams through a global pandemic before. So that's a tricky situation to find ourselves in. So how can we sort of step into that more armed human centric way of leading and be vulnerable with our team and say, Hey, there's a great opportunity here. I don't know the answer, but maybe together we could find a great way forward. And it was inspiring to hear how people are already doing that. Yeah. And how they can do there and adjust to do it even more.
Anique Coffee: Yeah. You just spoke to the flexible focus area. And we've got the other three that you mentioned, but physically we had these cards, these like bright colored cards on the table.
So you can imagine we're at a cocktail bar, there's cocktails everywhere. And we've got these really beautiful cards that kind of walk them through each focus area of our equitable employee experience. And we were asking leaders like, hold up the card that helps you solve this problem. So we've gone through flexible. What was sort of the big question we heard in Growing?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Well, I think the theme was all our people want to grow. Right? We know that from the data, we know that millennials particularly jump ship when they don't feel like the company's investing in their growth personally. And I think we're moving from a sort of linear way of thinking like, Hey, this is the role you're in, it ladders up to this role. You now need these skills. Ladders up to that role. To a much more organic, holistic, perspective of growth. Like from this role, you could go to all of these different roles. What, what inspires you? Where is your interest and passion and then how do we widen I guess, the opportunity that we're looking at growth through so it becomes less like what's the next skill I need? To like, Hey, these are the places in my life holistically that I have an appetite to explore growth in. And how can that then marry up with where the company's going and the, and the goals of the organization. So,
Anique Coffee: And even organizations that selflessly want to create a culture where people grow and have that sort of like growth and development, learning and development, even if that means they're going on to the next place, still like creating a culture where people just can learn no matter what happens and what they do with it next.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah. And wasn't a cool to hear people talk about when we grow our people, knowing that they might leave us. And I mean, one of my favorite quotes or questions that we get like, well, what if we invest all this money in people's training and people's growth and then they leave? And the counter being well, what, what if they don't and they stay? So I think it was so cool to hear people say you know, when we grow our people, even if they then go on to other organizations, collectively we're growing our industry.
If this can be us moving the needle to the quality of people in the industry and the quality of outcomes that they're getting, because we're making this investment, that, that then everybody wins, which was inspiring to hear.
Anique Coffee: And even now I'm getting all full moon hippy-dippy about it, but it's also like the human side of it.
Especially if you've got this 21st century human centric way of growing and learning and developing, it's a lot about emotional intelligence. It's about self-awareness and now you've got these sort of humans just roaming the earth, right? It's like a better, like bigger oneness and wholeness to if like we're learning and developing our people this way. It's not just how it improves our industry. It's just how we radiate that to our families when we go home to, how we show up everywhere in our life. So,
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah and just to pull it back to like ROI, I think that also there's a massive ROI for an organization when they are fostering and cultivating those types of skills in their people too.
Anique Coffee: Totally. Okay. I think rewarding was next. What was sort of the big question we heard with rewarding?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Well, I think the big question everyone was holding is like when people don't do the same job, how can we start to think about reward equitably? So from our perspective that Within reward has often sort of meant money and in America particularly pay and benefits. So how do we challenge that paradigm again? And how do we think about reward way more holistically? How do we have sort of asked questions? Like how do we find opportunities for people to do meaningful work? How do we help them feel valued for the work and contribution they're doing or they're making? How do we help them sort of feel like they are growing performance wise and how do we obviously compensate them equitably with money is important. But also like is it is their experiences that they want to have that would feel really rewarding. Is there opportunities to learn things that are really energizing for them. And now we're sort of getting into the intersection of two different lenses. So there's some really interesting stuff there, but yeah, the big question for people that people were holding, especially when, like, okay, we have some manufacturing crew, we have some production crew, we have some corporate crew.
How do we find equitable ways to think about some of these different questions? How do we think about reward differently? How do we support people to really feel the value that they're adding to our organization and connect into their role or into a role that's meaningful to them personally?
Anique Coffee: Great. You started to talk about the overlap, so maybe we could do our last one connected and then we could talk a little bit about some overlap.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah sure!
Anique Coffee: Cool. So, the last one is about connected and it's how we make and communicate decisions. It's how we create community and belonging. We had a couple folks there from that community space. So I thought this one was a really important one, especially because culture is not necessarily built around place anymore. So what was the big question we heard under connected?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah, I think it's exactly that like, as we continue to renegotiate place, how do we keep our people connected? How, if we have some folks that we want in the office, like, why do we? Like let's really dig into what we believe our office will give them. If we were a company where the. office was the culture, how do we start to become way more intentional about building culture, both virtually and remotely? You know, I think we all just sort of left the office in a panic and made it work. But now we have had the experience of working for home, proven that we can deliver and do our job well from home when we don't have our boss breathing down our neck and supervising us. So how do we start to think intentionally about the opportunity or the hybrid workplace or a fully, I mean, everyone, every organization is different, but very few organizations from what our conversations that we're having leaders, anticipating fully back to the office, nine to five, Monday to Friday workforce. And so how do we start to become really intentional about how that culture is built and fostered and cultivated and shared and scaled and make sure that we have every single person in our organization, whether they're in the office one day, a week, never five days a week, feeling like they can actively experience the culture and be a custodian of it.
Anique Coffee: The kind of big takeaway which you kind of spoke to earlier was about this humility and this vulnerability that leaders brought, which is I don't have all the answers. And what we really heard was: we can actually empower our people to help us solve this puzzle. Like if we open it up and listen to how our people want to be connected and how they want to show up, we can find the solution together rather than leaders leading this top down approach of this is how it needs to be done. Why not listen to our people because even listening and then reacting helped create connection. Nevermind what we're trying to create on a bigger scale in our culture. Great. Okay. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the overlap? So I heard you start to speak about it with the overlap of rewarding and flexible, but what were some of the things we heard there?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah, I think some really fun, inspiring things happen when we think about these as less as four different buckets that we need to serve, but more as an interconnected sort of Venn diagram with four pieces, because some of the challenges that we heard these leaders speak to is our young people don't want to go back into the office, but this is the first job they've ever had.
Perhaps we don't believe that they have all of the rules of engagement, how to show up as a professional dialed yet. And so we, we want to serve them by filling that gap. And we sort of believe that connecting them to mentors in-person in the office is the only way to do that. So I think what we're starting to see is how can we use connecting to mentors, which is going to help you feel more closely integrated and woven into the fabric of the organization, as a way to serve you from a and I want to be growing perspective. And so now we're actually providing the opportunities for growth and opportunities for connection through the one thing that we're choosing to do differently, or one opportunity that where providing individuals same for flexibility. So, okay I want some autonomy in my role, I want control over how I use my time but, and I also have this appetite to go and explore this aspect of how to lead people, for instance, what you were talking about before in terms of emotional intelligence and stuff. Okay. If we find a way to marry those two things and give people the opportunity to be involved in designing their own personal growth plan or independent learning program or whatever, they're getting their need for flexibility met and then getting their needs to be growing in a way that's meaningful for them, which also then connects us into the rewarding bucket because they've had an opportunity to design something that is rewarding to them personally, which then makes them feel way more connected to the organization.
So really beautiful things happen when we start thinking about these through sort of one dimension and start to see the overlap. And that's really inspiring to hear leaders getting that and seeing how that sort of way of thinking about things can really transform the experience of being in the organization.
Anique Coffee: Great. Okay. So we heard a lot about our takeaways and big questions from leaders. Do you have any like top key learnings from yourself as just sort of a participant in this conversation?
Kendall Clifton-Short: Well, I'm always inspired by all these amazing people so committed to doing great work. That personally is really energizing for me. I think they found it really energizing to have some anchors to keep coming back to. Okay. So that's the challenge your experiencing I wonder what would happen if we started to look through this lense for a solution. And I feel like it gave both the other leaders in the room opportunities to offer really valuable suggestions, advice, insight, and it meant that all of these leaders from diverse industries, diverse sized organizations, diverse roles across those organizations, ways to have a really meaningful conversation about their individual challenges and, and learn not only from what people were offering them in service of their problem, but learn from the way that other leaders were approaching their challenges as well. So I think that would be my key takeaway. When you give people a framework and we help them with tools, like how do we stop talking about the perks of the job and really lean into what promises are we making you as an employer?
Anique Coffee: Bi-directionally
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah, reciprocally. What promises are you then making us as an employer? Sort of beautiful magic starts to happen and great opportunities start to emerge.
Anique Coffee: Yeah. One of our values, learn together, felt like that was alive and well last night, in this conversation, amongst leaders.
Kendall Clifton-Short: They really appreciated the vulnerability that we showed up to the conversation with. And they all showed up to the conversation with what were some of your key takeaways?
Anique Coffee: I think it's sort of what we spoke about before at the top. Like all these leaders, not anyone was from the same industry and I don't think anyone had the same job title either, but they all are struggling right now as people leaders with these things.
And when you actually create the space for the reflection, that's a huge tool. Isn't it just like the creating the space to sit down and think for a second, even if it's over a cocktail, really beautiful things emerge and they were able to kind of see each other in their problems. It felt like at some point, like a mini mastermind, cause they were supporting each other and providing so much ideas and flexibility with each other. But yeah, just that there was such a diverse group of leaders and the struggle is real. Like this idea of the war on talent, the renegotiation, all the things that we're going through right now, it's real. And it permeates every single industry. And it's really important to kind of stay, take a step back and say, what are we really offering our people here?
What is really going on that they need? Right now. And that sort of selflessness of leaders that they need to step into right now to make sure that their people are connected, feeling rewarded, feel like they're growing. And there's like an offer that's flexible for everyone, but in an equitable way, because everyone's different.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Yeah. And I love what you said. Like how do we serve our people? And I think what sometimes what I'm seeing out there is like, how are we serving our new people, these new people that we try to, trying to find and trying to get to come and work for us. And, you know? Yes, absolutely. They have different expectations to what they did two years ago, they have different sort of negotiation demands or they have different things that they're going to advocate for as an employee and how we serve them needs to flow in throughout a whole organization and encompass how we serve those our crew who have been here over the long haul and with us through COVID. And so, yeah. How do we use sort of this idea that people want their employee experience to offer them these four opportunities to evaluate not only what we're going to offer new people about how they're serving our current crew too.
Anique Coffee: It was a beautiful conversation and something that I feel like could scale to every city, so if you're listening to our podcast and you want us to come on a road show to do this event with you, let us know. We love to travel. We're in, we'll be there. Just tell us where to go and send us your favorite cocktail bar recommendation. So we know where to get the space, but it was great to do this with you.
I'm so happy that we're here. It was so fun to be with these leaders and have this conversation.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Absolutely. It was really fun and yeah, that they're hungry for it. And for us to be able to facilitate an opportunity for them to come and step into both speaking to their experience and a framework for them to sort of look through when they're finding solutions. Felt really great.
Anique Coffee: It really did great. Well, thanks so much for listening. We love these sort of from the field conversations where we can tell you the morning after exactly what's on the minds of leaders. So hopefully we can keep these kinds of conversations going and we'll keep it all flowing to your ears.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Thank you.
Anique Coffee: Thanks Kendall.
Kendall Clifton-Short: Well, this has been really fun. If you're looking for more conversations, Re-imagining Work from Within is available everywhere that you listen to great podcasts and we release an episode every other week.
