55. How do you build trust across an organisation?

Brandon 0:05

Music. Hello and welcome to the operations room. I am Brandon minsinga, joined by my lovely co host, Bethany Ayers, how are things going? Bethany,

Bethany Ayers 0:13

I don't know. I am still just juggling too many things and going up to Manchester all the time, so I don't know if I'm coming or going, and I'm trying to figure out how to optimize my life.

Brandon 0:26

Okay, so Manchester there all the time, optimization problems. Let's unpack it. What's happening? Bethany, so one

Bethany Ayers 0:33

of the things that I've decided I'm going to do is double up on all of my toiletries. I know this doesn't sound very interesting.

Brandon 0:41

I was not expecting that as the first thing to roll off your mind there.

Bethany Ayers 0:45

Packing for whatever reason, causes me a tremendous amount of stress, and I get very upset about it, and it's like hard enough to try and figure out what to wear, which is already a problem, and then the toiletries. And then I can't fully pack my toiletries the night before, because I have to use them in the morning, and I have to decide what I want, women and vanity and the obscene number of things that I use on my face, it's going to be a few 100 pounds worth of an investment. I have two different serums in the morning and a moisturizer and something else. So four things in the morning, three at night, and then makeup. But I'm going to do that because I don't want to have to deal with packing and unpacking things. Yeah,

Brandon 1:27

you can be like a George Clooney from that movie, where he has the precise packing ready to go for each and every trip that he does, whereby he doesn't have to do anything. And

Bethany Ayers 1:35

so then also I was like, do I just create a uniform, and do I wear the same uniform? A la Zuckerberg,

Brandon 1:42

most guys, or me in particular, I tend to, at this stage of my life, wear the same thing pretty much every day for the most part, whereas

Bethany Ayers 1:48

I have wardrobes and wardrobes and drawers and drawers of clothes. And I've just done a, I can't remember if I mentioned this, but I did a massive wardrobe clear out.

Brandon 1:57

Okay, Allah, what's her name? That woman that's famous for condo, you condoned, yes,

Bethany Ayers 2:02

Marie Kondo. I've done the Marie Kondo thing twice now, and so it's like, back in control. But then when I'm starting to pack for Manchester, I just like, it's just too much. And then I'm trying on all of my outfits, and I hate all of my clothes, and I don't know what I should wear. This most recent time I had some prime clothes, and I really liked the outfits, but then I was like, Well, do I just wear it every single week? Maybe that's what I do. I was just thinking, basically I had a pair of trousers that I absolutely love from me and em. So this is my, you know, I definitely promote my different favorite brands, don't I? So I have zip for my face, and I use a lot of beauty pie products, and me and M is basically all of my clothes. I

Brandon 2:42

feel like we should have a lot more sponsors than we currently do based on your skin care treatment.

Bethany Ayers 2:46

And so it's just a pair of gray trousers that I love. And so now I'm thinking, do I just wear the gray trousers and alternating black, gray and white shirts for the entire winter? No? Love that. I

Brandon 2:58

think that's a tremendous idea, and

Bethany Ayers 2:59

we just get rid of any sort of mental load. That's how I am. I mean, I think I've just been moving around too much, so I don't have really any funny stories. Nothing's happened to me. Oh, something did happen to me. I had to use an Airbnb this week in Manchester because there was some football along. That's the one problem with Manchester. There's always football or Metallica came to town a couple of years ago, and that just meant that hotel prices go from 80 pounds a night normally to like 800 pounds a night. So I was in an Airbnb. I really want to give them three stars, because I'm pissed off, but then I think that that's just me being petty. And the AirBNB apartment was fine, and probably is five stars, but the entire and process around it was horrible, and I hate them,

Brandon 3:44

so the Airbnb process, or the actual apartment process, so

Bethany Ayers 3:49

Airbnb was normal, and then at the end of the Airbnb, it came up with needing to verify my identity. And I had different options. So it's like, I verify I've been working with Airbnb, using it for 16 years. My identity is verified, but whatever, I'll verify my identity. Then I get a message from them saying, Can you verify your identity and sign a rental contract? You know, I'm very busy, and I have noticed that I don't do it. Then I'm heading to the Airbnb, and remember, I supposed to do this. So I quickly sign all of these stupid things and have to take pictures of my driver's license to verify my identity, and this is for two nights in an Airbnb in Salford. And so then I fill in my stuff, and then they say, Oh, by the way, you have to collect your key from a key nest in some convenience store on Salford High Street. Then I go to convenience store, and the code they've given me is for something in Edinburgh. And then I have to chase them down to get a new code. So I finally get my key. It's like this key scavenger hunt, and I go into my room, and the room is, you know, whatever, the little apartment is fine, no problem, except there's no soap, no shower gel, no amenities, no coffee, no tea, no welcome. But it's clean and it's fine. I get over myself fine. The day before I check out. The evening, I say, Where do I drop off my keys? And they say, Oh, by the way, you have to return it. Where you collected them, which is, you know, like a eight minute walk out of my way. But they're not going to tell me this. And so if you're a busy person who's trying to get places, every minute counts, it's like, okay, so now I know in the morning I wake up and they say, and they have, like, an automated message about the fact that I have to return the key to the place and strip my bed. Really, yeah, and paying 40 pounds for a cleaning fee on a tiny place that is not going to take more than an hour at most to clean, and they want you to strip your bed. I was just so pissed off. My husband says I should be kind send them my complaints and not leave a review. What would you do? Would you give them three stars or not? Oh, no. I

Brandon 5:50

mean, this is what reviews are for, and that's literally the purpose is to give them a review. So what you're doing is like, from your point of view, trying to be used as, you know, rational as possible, but like, the story that you just told me sounds pretty bad, therefore, they need to understand that, and future folks that are going in there need to understand that. All right, perfect. So we've got a wonderful topic for today, which is, how do you build trust across the organization? We have the first and foremost guest for this with Nellie wartoft. She is the founder of Tiger Hall and chair of the Executive Council for leading change. Before we get to that, Bethany, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. The first one was this idea that oftentimes in companies, as a senior executive, a lot of employees have this mindset, especially these days, where this question of like, why is management doing this. Why are they not doing that? You know, we expect more from management, et cetera, et cetera. And ne referenced this idea that a lot of employees are now coming in to companies with a bit of a consumer mindset, where everything's served for them on a platter, with a lot of fantastic consumer services that we have today, but they're taking this being served on a silver platter or attitude, and applying that to companies in terms of expectations, in terms of what they should be getting from management. And I'm just curious, what do you make of nelly's hypothesis, but also this reality of expectation for management? Well,

Bethany Ayers 7:12

it's kind of both, isn't it? So it's the expectation for management from execs down, of what management is capable of, and then from all of the teams that want super managers. So there's a lot that managers need to deal with. I guess. My experience is, I agree that prior to the last couple years and the downturn that we've experienced and the cost of living crisis and everything, that there was a very high expectation for what companies were responsible for. And actually, guess Nadine talks about it, didn't he, in our interview with him, around companies taking on some of the responsibility that governments have abdicated, like a lot of social services, in a way, I think I used to just be a big believer in, yes, companies need to have these responsibilities. It's interesting that nelly's talking about it around consumer I almost think there's like a paternal thing around it, but maybe reflecting on it, the changes in the environment and the lack of resilience that I see in a lot of people, I think we might be doing People a disservice being as paternalistic in and accepting this high level of responsibility for everyone's well being and self esteem that we didn't used to. And I'm really conflicted, because there's part of me that's like, no, no, I want to be a nice person, and I love to take on loads of responsibility, and yes, we should totally do that, and am I just being in my day? We drank from hoses and ran around in the street and we survived. But then I also see the lack of resilience in so many people, and wonder if we are doing a disservice and also a distraction from what we are fundamentally doing, which is growing businesses. At

Brandon 8:59

as Geffen had talked about in: 2024

Bethany Ayers: 10:04

I think maybe some of my tension is around that accountability piece, and it's uncomfortable to be held accountable. And so then that kind of like leads into is a wellbeing issue, or is it too much stress, or I don't like it, it doesn't feel good, and therefore I won't want it. I was speaking to my cousin, who's a professor, and so she's dealing with a lot of the same people at university, and she says what seems to be missing a lot is freedom and accountability or responsibility. So she has like students who are like, well, I don't want to turn in my paper, and you can't make me, because it's my right to not turn in my paper. And she's like, you're 100% right, but you then have to take the consequence of not turning in your paper. And there seems to be like a feeling that you need to not turn in your paper and have no consequences. And I think that there's sometimes within businesses some of that as well. So everybody wants to be empowered, but the equal amount of accountability and responsibility for the decisions that you make has to come with that. What execs need to do, what managers need to do, is everybody needs to get comfortable saying that there's two elements here. I think that it's easier to hold people to account when you hold yourself to account. I

Brandon: 11:24

agree 100% and at the end of the day, there is consequences, as there always is, especially in scale ups, whereby you don't have a job if you're not performing at a certain level. And I guess part of the exercise in terms of some of the things we've talked about in the past, making sure that everyone's role and responsibility is clear, and the performance around the outcomes or expectations for that role are also quite clear. The one to ones include proper coaching and difficult conversations when they need to occur at the right time, and if there's structurally, at least the right scaffolding around OKRs or at least objectives and results, good ways of cross functional working across teams. As an example, all this kind of scaffolding that the operator would think about to allow accountability to happen with individuals and with teams. All that needs to be there. And that's like on the operator side to help make that happen. And it sets up the individual to be accountable at the end of it, but also in a way whereby, I guess in some companies where if you don't have that, it becomes much more difficult as a manager to hold that person to account, because none of this other scaffolding is in place. And if you don't have it, it just becomes more of like a one to one conversation between the two of you that may not match the reality of what the role can and should be in the context of that particular company. If that makes sense. Yeah, 100% so second question, how do you build trust on a one to many scale? Oftentimes, as operators, we're definitely good for the most part, at building strong one to one relationships or with our key cluster of individuals that we work with. But this question of with a growing organization of size where you can develop or cultivate one to one relationships with 200 people. You have to do it at an industrial scale, especially as the company's growing. How do you do that? Part

Bethany Ayers: 13:07

of it is being authentic. People can tell when somebody is just trying to pull the wool over their eyes. There's like subtle clues that are not what you say, but how you show up. And people can tell whether you're being honest or not, or there's a facade. And so the more facade you can remove, and the more you can show up as yourself centered in who you are, subconsciously, people will believe you. And then the second part is, I think building trust isn't just around whether you're telling the truth or not, but whether or not people think you can do your job and that your plan is a good one. And so then how are you trusted that you're competent is around having a plan that you can communicate clearly with evidence behind where it's come from and why it makes sense. And the people can be like, Yeah, this is something I can get behind. They can trust in the leadership that you're not just a bunch of clowns the company

Brandon: 14:02

and the individuals in the company believing that there is a strategy. The strategy actually makes sense. They understand it. And then the second bit of really humanizing yourself when you talk through things like this or whatever talk that you're having with the company, where they can connect you as an individual. And then, just to tag on here, she talked about loving video fundamentally as a tool to get across to folks. I've become a huge fan of loom videos. I'm looming everything these days as a communication tool. I'm just curious when you make a video

Bethany Ayers: 14:31

as a consumer, I'm not a fan, and so therefore I find it hard to believe that other people are obviously I'm wrong because Tiktok, but like when somebody hands me a video for a training document, or I have I was interviewing somebody, and they had two tasks, and it was done on loom videos, and I watched the videos beforehand to do the interview, my stomach always drops, and I'm like, oh, to do videos, and I definitely put them on, like, one and a half or 1.2 1.5 To get through it. And I prefer if I'm going to do something pre prepared, like that, I prefer it to be podcasty, and I can do it on the go. There's something about not live content that isn't an Instagram or a Tiktok or a TV program that just kills my soul, like if it's work related and it's a video, I can't do it, but I can listen to it while I'm moving, yeah, but

Brandon: 15:26

actually, when you think about it from an executive standpoint, you have to work with a format that you like and that you're comfortable with, in a way, because there's different personalities for different things. I mean, it's interesting, because even we think about us in the context of this podcast, there's certain parts of this kind of activity that I tend to gravitate to that is just better for me in some ways, when we think about the promos that we do. This is a really good example, actually, right? So the promos that we do, I'm the voiceover script guy, I guess, in a sense, and you're the ad hoc, spontaneous voice of like, sanity and humanity, yeah?

Bethany Ayers: 15:56

Because if you give me a script, I sound so wood, and then I can't do it. I hate it. So

Brandon: 16:01

why don't we Park it here, and we will move on to our conversation with Nellie wartoft.

Nellie Wartoft: 16:09

Unfortunately, most large enterprises is in us and them. And I started asking like, how can we bring that more into a we? How can we make that one we and one we that are transforming the organization together, and then looking into all the different aspects that make up those cultural pieces and the elements of behavior change, trust is a huge part in all of this. And looking into data, both third party research and data from our own work in the space, you can see that trust is actually one of the, by far biggest elements that makes or breaks a big transformation. So that's why I think it's really, really important. So I think it's both interesting from just a human psychology point of view and how we operate as human beings, but also what actually makes businesses succeed is very much dependent on this trust aspect. You've come

Bethany Ayers: 17:00

from a large business background. We come from smaller and medium sized businesses. And as always amazes me, how small a business can be and already have an us and them culture, 6070 people, and it suddenly has this divide of management. What does management want? Another thing, there's a question there. It's just a comment like, it's pervasive, and it's really early, and

Nellie Wartoft: 17:23

you can see it in our societies as well, right? Like our entire society is in us and them. There is no we anymore in society. And I think that for all the good that technology has done in the world, and I'm a pro technologist, I do think that much of it has also made us more into that passive us and we and if you think of the consumer mindset, right, and how convenient it is to be a consumer today, everything should be delivered to you. Everything is same day. Everything is engaging, everything is easy. Everything is easy to use, like it's so easy to be a passive consumer and not really contribute or be proactive or think about anything. And I feel like that consumer mindset, and a big part driven by the internet and social media, also is a big part to play in it. I think that consumer mindset has also trickled into the employee mindset many times, and you see it in politics as well. People are like, I'm a citizen, you're the government. You're supposed to deliver this to me like people don't feel like they're part of the solution anymore. And I think that's a huge issue, not only in corporate but also in like all businesses, and in government and in our societies at large, it's so easy to just shift the blame onto someone else and refuse to take accountability and responsibility for the issues we're facing, and I think that's the biggest challenge of our century.

Brandon: 18:43

So when you're getting into a bit of a hiring process, how do you set the tone, either in terms of the types of individuals you're looking for the company, or when you're actually onboarding them into the organization to put things on the right footing in terms of trust, everything

Nellie Wartoft: 18:57

starts with leadership, right who you are as a leader and a big obstacle to being a good leader, many times. And I see this both in small and in large companies, is fear. There is so much fear out there. And I would say, the bigger the company, the bigger the fear. And when I look at some of the C suite and CEOs of companies that that we're working with, they're really, really afraid. They're really afraid of what employees think, what they're going to say, and like it leads to this, which we also see in broader society, not only in corporations, where you have this fear of whatever you say is going to be weaponized against you, and there is cancel culture and all the rest of it, and that has led to transparency going away, and what you used to see 1020, years ago was CEOs doing these live town halls, right, like they would go out on some kind of video conferencing and talking to the organization. That doesn't happen anymore. It's all pre recorded. It's edited. It's 12 PR people who have touched it before it reaches anyone. So it kind of pulls in the. Two different directions at the same time, right? You have people trust less, and then in response to that lack of trust, leaders withhold more. So it's just this vicious cycle where it gets worse and worse and worse. And if you look at research around like public trust in government or trust in media and trust in CEOs, they're all pointing in the same way everything is going downwards. So coming back to your question on onboarding, I think it's asking yourself, as leaders like, what is it that you're afraid of if you are being more transparent, if you are being more trusting? And a very key part of trust that I believe a lot in is you need to give it before you receive it. And I see most leaders having the other way around, like they think people need to trust them before they can trust their employees, whereas you just need to trust everyone and then give that trust before you can receive any of it back. That's just how it works.

Bethany Ayers: 20:51

And so how does that work? In practicality, most of our listeners are coos. I'm sure they're dealing with this us and them how much of it is being trusted as an individual. And again, we come from smaller companies where I feel like a lot of leaders rely on one on one relationships to build trust, but there comes a point where you can't, or it has to be building trust at scale. How do you do that in this new world?

Nellie Wartoft: 21:19

So the first thing is that you are going to do things wrong. Like, if you're going to do things, you're going to do some things wrong. And I think the first thing is to accept that, like, I've trusted people that I shouldn't, and that has led to, you know, I've had people in my company that have turned out their Moonlighting, they have two jobs at the same time. But does that mean that I suddenly shouldn't trust anyone else and think that everyone has two jobs and being paranoid? No, like, but you're gonna find some of those out. And the same with we take the whole return to Office, work from home, environment, conversation, RAID, are there people who are taking advantage of working from home and slacking off? Yes, 100% probably never a company. Does that mean you shouldn't trust anyone to work from home. No, you just need to accept that those things are going to happen and those will be anomalies. But you can't just stop trusting everyone because of a few bad eggs. But some of the things that impact trust a lot at scale, a lot of it comes down to how you communicate and how like, raw, authentic, unscripted, your communication style is and also the kind of formats that you use. So if we take two examples, like, let's say you write a very formal email that's the least effective in building trust. It might be effective in many other ways. It can be effective with conveying information and like looking formal, like you achieve other things, right? But if trust is your goal to build, then sending emails, isn't it? So you need to bring your personality to the forefront more. You need to be very human. You need to kind of like humanize yourself. And a big part of that, if we look at take Instagram, Tiktok is an interesting example. The reason Tiktok grew so much over Instagram is that Tiktok is raw. It's real, it's authentic. Instagram is polished. And what do people resonate with? They want to resonate with people who are like them. They want to feel heard, they want to feel seen, they want to feel recognized. So the biggest thing you can do for trust is choosing a format and a style that resonates with the people that you're talking with. So for example, podcast is a great format. When you have voice, you have much more nuance. You're like a fly on the wall. You can hear someone's reaction and personality to a much greater extent. Video is great at scale. Doing video, whether it's on with video conferencing tool or like, sending out videos, like just video in general, is really good as a format. And then when it comes to the way that you communicate, like we all have leaders who literally see them go, oh, in this quarter, we are very excited about announcing these individuals, and these are our results. And I'm very proud of all the work that you all have been doing for this guy, like no one is resonating with that. That's not going anywhere. And people see through that, like people see through PR bullshit and agendas and like, what you're really trying to say. So being really honest and to the point and authentic in the way you speak like speak like you would speak to your not maybe friends and family, but your closest colleagues, like in a normal business setting, to a close client, and you don't have to prop yourself up in like a speech to the nation, kind of style. You can talk as a normal human being. And that goes also with the words you're choosing and how you blend in things like humor. Like there's nothing more effective than humor at work. Again, people are super afraid of using it because of cancel culture and the rest of it, but humor is a very effective weapon to use in these situations, and then just making sure that when you communicate like it is directed to the people that you're speaking to, right? So like at scale, like there will be certain things you need to do which are broader and touches everyone, but the more you can be targeted and specific and speaking to specific audiences, the better you. When you share information, being sure that you share the good and

Bethany Ayers: 25:03

the bad. It's interesting to talk about the bad news, because I think that one's a really hard one. Everybody starts in business saying, Yeah, I'm going to be the leader that shares the bad news. Everybody's an adult is absolutely fine. And then share bad news. Or in startups, you know, we're always losing money, people don't necessarily understand whatever it is, and then you get this backlash of people freaking out over the bad news. And then you have weeks of building back all of the context that you may be missed, etc, and then people learn, okay, I'm not going to share bad news because bad news is horrifically painful, and everybody's going to freak out, and it's unnecessary, and we're worrying people for no reason, and I don't see a lot of people then coming back to try it again. Have you seen this as well? I

Nellie Wartoft: 25:50

think it comes down to what kind of organization do you want to have, and do you believe that you've actually hired adults with business acumen who understand how these things work, or have you hired different kind of people. I believe a lot in being honest about when people are joining the company. Coming back a bit to the onboarding question, even before onboarding with interviews, right? Like telling them what they're signing up for, say, in a small company, like less job stability, you might go bankrupt the next year, right? Tell people that. Tell people that before they join. If they're joining a startup, if they're joining something that is very exciting and growing fast, there's also a lot of risk, and being very upfront with the risk there is. And I regularly tell people, if you want a stable, high paying job, go to Salesforce or Microsoft. Don't go to Tiger hall like those are much better places to have that stability. So I think it comes down to, again, the pros and the cons, and knowing what your value prop is as a company, as a leader, as an organization, why should people work for you? What's the point in working for your company? And what's the point of not working for your company? If this is what you're after, don't work here. Don't come here. This is not the place for you. So that's where you can stop a lot of these things from happening in the first place, and ensuring that you have the right people in the business. Because then when you communicate that, yeah, you know, like, now we've lost this much money, or, like, our revenues going down, and we need to get it back up here. Like, otherwise, these things would happen. Like, people understand. And another thing I think is really good is to almost treat bad news as an education session. Because again, if you have the right people in the company, they actually want to learn and grow by being in your company. So if we take a small company right like most people who join small companies with startups, if they do it for the right reasons, it's because they it leads to ownership and growth and exposure that you can't have in a big company. But that also comes with a lot of hard hitting things in your face, right? And when you then share bad news, if you position that as Okay, so this is how the world is working, and this is what has happened. Like, take the funding environment after 2021 right? Like how that went up and down, and very hard to get funding, etc. I use that as an education session to tell the team like, this is how funding works, and this is how interest rates are impacting how VCs view it, and this is why this is affecting our revenue growth rates and what is expected from us and so on. So treating it as an education opportunity for your employees is something that I've seen also works well. People want to learn. People want to feel like they're part of something. They don't want to feel like they're hit by something because they were not part of the inner circle. But if you can make all of them part of that inner circle from the beginning, then they feel much more bought in and like they are actually part of it. Whether it goes up or down, it's good or bad, it's something they are part of, and telling them about the resilience they learn through these things and so on too. I think

Brandon: 28:43

this is where things are tricky. I think for leadership, because what you're trying to do on the one side of it is just with the onboarding example or the recruitment example. You're trying to sell the candidate. They have a ton of options in front of them, in particular the more talented individuals. But at the same time, you're trying to be authentic, real and straightforward or candid with them in terms of the state of the company, where things are at and so on. And there's a very fine line or balance to be had in terms of how you position that and how you characterize that. Having an internal comms person to help you, help you think through those subtleties, help you think through that messaging a little bit deeper than you would otherwise, and then also to help you package it in ways that are more useful, ie video or whatever these different formats and so on. What do you think of that? So

Nellie Wartoft: 29:22

I have a hot take on internal comms departments. I think they are like a really, really good compliance and risk management department. I think they can avoid you getting into sticky situations. They can avoid you doing bad things. I do not think that most of them. There are some really, really good ones out there, of course, but most of them cannot make you good or better. Like, they usually come from what I've seen, mostly a place of fear again, so they will again tell you to downplay it and like, don't share this. If you tell them, I'm gonna share this bad news, they will be the first ones, usually, in my experience, to go, no, no. No, no, no, don't tell them that, and they will be the first ones to tell you to patronize employees. And there's nothing employees hate more than being patronized. That sounds

Brandon: 30:06

like a bad piece of advice, flat out, exactly,

Nellie Wartoft: 30:10

a bad piece of advice, and that's usually what it ends up being like. It's not, of course, the intention to do that, but it ends up being the outcome. Then you tell something that isn't really the truth, but it can be spun as the truth, and people see through it all the time. So transparency is always the best way to go, and including those cons as well pros and cons, because people know that it's not perfect. So I think when you work with internal cons, just have that in mind that it's kind of like, let's say you're working on a large contract and you bring that to legal, you know, legal is going to protect you, but legal is not going to help you close the deal, and that's how I would view internal comms. They would protect you, they will not help you build trust and get that message out in the absolute best way

Bethany Ayers: 30:52

I find. As the company grows and increasingly, your job is communication, like communication at scale, all of the com How many slides have I built? How many presentations have I given? How many slack messages and updates? How many loom videos like all I feel like most of my job is communicating, but also it gets really boring because it's the same message over and over and over and over again, and to have internal comms for me, take so much of that off, building the slides, being able to grab it and repurpose the content in loads of different ways. I just found it such a relief. It meant that I got a lot of my day back, and I didn't have to spend as much time doing all the communication. But

Nellie Wartoft: 31:40

then you use them more for production, right? It was more like the operational work, if you will, rather than the strategy of how to communicate it. Or did they do a bit of both? Did a bit of

Bethany Ayers: 31:50

both. And they also kind of just like helped on, why don't we do it this way? Or this would be really good. And then also, they were quite in touch with the rest of the organization, so could pull up, like, this is a rumor that's going around that I think we should address, or this is an issue that people are concerned about. So it was very helpful, actually, kind of the opposite way. Maybe because they were sitting in marketing rather than sitting in, I don't know where, where they normally sit, analyst relations or something like, it made it a much more helpful tool, or, like a much more helpful person, for me,

Nellie Wartoft: 32:26

and that's really good if they can have that role as well, because that's the other thing that you need, right? Is that, like, two way feedback loop. You need listening. You need to understand what is happening across the organization, what people are thinking and feeling. And most leaders do not have that, like, not formally and not informally. So if they can have that perspective and that point of view and bring that to you as a leader, I think that's incredibly useful, and that's usually what leaders otherwise would use, like a Chief of Staff for, or like they would have certain relationships with, like EAS are usually really good at knowing what people

Brandon: 32:59

so do you have a bit of a grab bag of recommendations or toolkit a little bit in terms of, like, how best to do this for organizations, and I don't have the change transformation background to myself, I'd be curious like, what that looks like to create trust within a change transformation project, and how that might differ from a scale up company. But what I do know is, when Us and Them develops over time, it seems to happen organically, in some sense, and what we had to be very thoughtful at one point, based on an enps score that we got back where there was lack of trust, we were thinking very deeply about a house has happened? B, what do we now do? And then we started tactically to do a bunch of different things to try to break the silo, so to speak. You want to break the silo. You want to make the change transformation happen in these bigger enterprise companies, what is a bit of, like, the grab bag of tactics that you might want to pull

Nellie Wartoft: 33:44

out? So I have a grab bag of five, top five, which are based on, like research data, like what we're seeing that people do differently and what leads to high trust. So what we've done is we've looked at what are the organizations where people respond most positively, agree to I trust my leaders. Decision making, my leaders tell me the truth and like I'm excited to be part of this organization, and where we see the highest scoring on those factors, it tends to be five things that it comes down to, that the leaders do. So number one are the two way feedback loops, and the more instant they are, the better, the more employees feel like their voices are heard. They are part of the conversation. They can share feedback back to the leader. So removing this one way top down communication and the feeling of the One Way top down, even if you think it, oh, this is two way people can email me, no people will not email you

Brandon: 34:39

or I say the open door policy, where we have an open door and nobody ever shows up, you're just like, All right,

Nellie Wartoft: 34:45

just email me anytime. Like, yeah, you're the CEO. No one is gonna do that. Like, even at our small scale, like, no one is emailing me directly, right? Like, you need to proactively provide those two way feedback loops opportunities. Encourage people to share their viewpoints, their thoughts, give their feedback. Feedback. So that's number one. The second one that is super effective is to communicate even when there are no news or updates to report. So when you don't have anything happening, still communicate. That is the biggest rumor killer. And a lot of the work that we've done around divestitures and Mergers Acquisitions like it's a lot of rumors usually happening around these right where we see companies doing really well is where they constantly go out like could be same day of the week, same time, and they just say, this week, nothing is happening. Nothing is going on this week. We don't have any news to report. It's just the same Bau as it was last week. Incredibly effective, because it kills immediately all rumors, because if you don't communicate anything, because in your point of view as a leader, oh, nothing is happening. I have nothing to say. I have nothing to communicate. I'm just going to cancel this meeting or announcement or town hall or whatever it might be. That is what makes people go, Oh, now it's something they don't want to communicate. Now they're withholding something. Because

Bethany Ayers: 35:56

everybody loves drama. It makes life fun, and

Nellie Wartoft: 35:59

then the guessing game.

Brandon: 36:01

Yeah, exactly. So when Microsoft bought my former company, SwiftKey, they started publishing a newsletter about the acquisition. Every single week. We got a newsletter from Microsoft to us being swift key about what was happening, step by step in the acquisition itself. So to your point, some of those newsletters, you would read it and there's like, literally nothing happening. And there

Nellie Wartoft: 36:19

is nothing more important than consistency in communications, especially in change, transformation, uncertain times, another third being the transparency around the person cons or the change like, I can't emphasize that enough the number of leaders that go out like, everyone is a winner. No, not everyone is a winner. There's always most situations there. There is a loser. Our preferred investor, our biggest shareholder is the winner. Fine, like and I think also, when people work in public listed companies, right, they also need to understand that 90% of the time it's about the stock price. And it's not about saving the world or making society a better place. It is about driving the stock price. And if the two of them can happen at the same time, brilliant. But many times they don't. And when you make an OPEX, cut or change anything to get that extra percentage for Wall Street, tell people this is what we're doing. And people might find that meaningless, but then go work at a charity or something else, right? If you're working in a public listed companies, this is what it is about. So it again, comes down to that transparency and like, what are we actually doing here? And not saying that we are trying to save the world and all the pan does when we're actually just trying to drive the stock price 2%

Bethany Ayers: 37:31

you can see that with Google, because Google originally started with what do, no evil. And Google was a little company, and everybody really loved it, and there got to be a point where that just wasn't going to work anymore.

Nellie Wartoft: 37:40

All they did was evil at one point.

Bethany Ayers: 37:42

Yeah, exactly. And then they lost a lot of trust. I mean, they didn't actually lose anything other than trust, because everybody still used Google, but they did have to drop it at a certain point. So I think there's also small company to big company. If you hit it big, you're going to make those transitions throughout. And what your mission is when you were little will not be the same as submission when you're

Nellie Wartoft: 38:02

big. And then the fourth thing I see that is very effective is when leaders are sharing their personal change experience and again, making them and this is not like, oh, like, I'm also sad, it's also really hard for me and stuff, but just sharing your experience going through the change as well, both, again, good and bad. Like, I'm very excited about this change personally, because I've seen the work that we've done in this area, and it's exciting to me that we continue to double down on that. Or like, you know, I understand that some of you might be thinking this, and that's also what I thought initially. But then, you know, I had these conversations with our customers, and I can actually see that this will be very helpful for them. You know, like sharing your own thoughts and your own personal change experience is also very effective. And then the last thing I'll say to to wrap this back up, is the environment that you're sitting in when you communicate. There's some very interesting data around virtual backgrounds. How much decrease Do you think it is in trust from the audience viewing that meeting in percentage compared to if you have your normal background?

Brandon: 39:00

I have not heard this before. I'm eager to hear this. What is the drop?

Bethany Ayers: 39:03

I'm gonna guess 30%

Nellie Wartoft: 39:05

30 any guesses? Brandon,

Brandon: 39:07

I want to say it doesn't matter, but apparently it does. It is,

Nellie Wartoft: 39:10

you're probably spot on. Bev is between 30 to 40% so Some studies show like 37 some show 32 but it's in that like 30 to 40% mark, because unconsciously, what happens in the audience mind is, what are you hiding? And they think, like, why can't I see your home? Are you not letting me into your home? People don't say these things. But just when you compare trust scores and metrics after and compare the backgrounds, that has come out as one of the differences as well. So virtual backgrounds, especially the professional ones, I know there's a few that are like, like, you're sitting in a conference room or like stuff like that, like that's also not helpful because it it dehumanizes you.

Brandon: 39:46

So I do have a question, which is this phrase psychological safety? I feel like I've said this phrase 8000 times in the past four or five years. So a, what do you think about the concept and B, how do you make it happen?

Nellie Wartoft: 39:59

The. Concept, I think, is generally misunderstood. We've actually had at Tiger Hall, we have Amy Edmondson, who's the like originator of the concept. We've done podcasts with her and interviewed her about this, and those podcasts are in Tiger Hall, and she says that it's very, very misused, and has been misused in ways that she couldn't imagine. So I think people understand it as everything should be safe all the time, no criticism, no negative feedback, and everything should be positive, which is a complete misunderstanding. What it actually means is that you can be negative and critical and voice things, but without fear of retribution. That is what it means, right? Like you can openly disagree and have open conversations without the fear of losing your job. That is incredibly important, that we can speak up and share voices and share feedback. I think the way to make it happen is many of these things that that we've spoken around like it starts with building trust, right, and also what example you set. And I love, I think it's from Netflix that your culture is who you hire, fire and promote, and that's something I think about all the time, like, who are the people we hire, who are the people we fire, and who are the people that we promote, and that is what sends the biggest signals to your employees about what they should and shouldn't do. So if someone is critical and you end up firing them that's going to teach everyone else that you shouldn't be critical as an example. So I think it comes down a lot to those things like, how do you action critical and critical feedback, or constructive feedback, or sometimes just blunt negative feedback, like, how do you handle it? How do you action it? How do you treat it? Because that is kind of what is setting the precedent for the rest of the organization. It's a good concept, and it's very important, but often misused. But thinking about how you set the precedent, I think is very important. I

Bethany Ayers: 41:49

completely agree with you Nelly, because I am big into accountability, and it seems like a lot of people feel like a psychologically safe environment means an environment with no accountability. But it's not just retribution of losing your job, it's retribution of being shunned, because there's a lot of you'll be looked down upon. You won't be invited to the next meeting, you won't be promoted. I know we've just moved into a completely different space, which is to create an environment where people trust that they won't be shunned. Because at least for me as a leader, I know particularly under stress, I can have favorites and I can have, like my cringe list, where then, no matter what they do, I'm annoyed. For me, it doesn't tend to come from their behavior. It will come from not trusting that they can do their job. It's actually something that Divinia from the CEO roundtable told me, and I can't remember who the research is originally, but there are two different types of trust in environments and teams. One is the trust, like the psychological safety, that we trust that we can be ourselves and be accepted. And then the second level of trust is that we are competent and respected, and we need to have both of those trusts. And actually, today, we have covered both so we never haven't necessarily split them out like I think a lot of what you do as a leader to be trusted is to show that you're not lying and that you can do your job well.

Nellie Wartoft: 43:18

But if you don't trust someone to do their job. Why are they in the company?

Bethany Ayers: 43:22

Well, sometimes you don't have a choice as a CEO. You have a choice.

Nellie Wartoft: 43:28

Got it so colleagues or peers that you don't have control over firing or not,

Bethany Ayers: 43:33

which I think is particularly large organizations, that's a lot. There are a lot of people that you're working with that you might not, they might trust as a being, a decent human being, but you don't trust to hand things to or work with.

Nellie Wartoft: 43:47

Yeah, that's interesting is, yeah, two different types of trust. I don't think I've thought of it that way, because I've always had the power to fire people. I don't trust them to do their jobs, then no place. Yeah, that's tough, if I think back on like, my corporate days with like, peers and colleagues, yeah, of course there were people like, yeah, you trusted to get things done, and others that that you did. And that's true, but you don't have to trust everyone to get things done right. Like, you also need your role is also to get things done. And if you know there's someone that can't, then it's also fine to not give it to them. Or what do you think? Unless

Bethany Ayers: 44:19

you have to, like, or, you know, but basically, in terms of those levels of trust, and conversely, you can have somebody you can trust to get loads done, but you know, they're a backbiter and you know that they're going to stomp all over you. The second they can like, the ideal is when you trust them in two ways. But it's not always common depending on the environment.

Nellie Wartoft: 44:37

Yeah, true politics is one of the biggest obstacles, I think, for for companies in general. And just like, how do we combat politics? And that's hard even for small companies, right? Like you start seeing politics kick in, usually around 100 people, or sometimes even earlier. Again, I believe a lot in in leadership, and starting with leadership and how leadership is treating it, and again, how they. React to it, and do they allow political people to fester? But it is a tough one, especially in large companies, where many people are not in touch with the direct customer or the problem you're solving, or like they're not very close to actually solving the problem that the company set out to solve. And then it just becomes this political environment, and people are focused on getting a certain process done in a way that makes them look good, and that's actually my my greatest fear as a CEO is for Tiger all to become political and to have that political environment. I think that's very hard. It comes down again to hiring the right people, but also then the environment. And I think that's a tough one to crack. It

Bethany Ayers: 45:36

is particularly because if people are very good at upward management, I think sometimes the CEO may be the last person to know. It's like, no, they're great. They're great. This way, this great, yeah. And at some point, when do you believe the other people are just like, This person is great when you're in the room and they are toxic the second you step out,

Nellie Wartoft: 45:54

exactly, yeah. You need to have very good feedback loops and very good psychological safety at all levels, and people feeling like they can raise things and again, they wouldn't be retributed for racing things, even if it's against someone that the CEO might trust. Right? If

Bethany Ayers: 46:10

our listeners can only take one thing away from our conversation, what is that?

Nellie Wartoft: 46:15

I would say the number one thing to start practicing is to share bad news, share the cons, share the downsides. Not everything is perfect. Only on Instagram is everything perfect. Everywhere else is not perfect. So start sharing the downsides, the cons, and experiment with it and see it as education for the group and see what happens. I think that would be my recommended action to take away. I

Bethany Ayers: 46:39

like that. See it as education. I think that's the SHARE IT education. Don't obsess about it. People won't care to the level that you do most likely

Brandon: 46:48

lovely. So thank you, Nelly. I will keep this in mind to be the Tiktok CEO, and not the Instagrams to your point. So thank you for joining us on the podcast. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe or leave us a comment, and we will see you next week. You.