LEADx

Turnover is costly, in terms of both money and culture. Research estimates show that losing an employee costs a company approximately 33% of that employee’s yearly salary.

Leadership development is the lever for a thriving culture. Gallup research indicates that 70% of engagement can be traced back to an employee’s relationship with their manager. At DocuSign, employees actively love their leaders.

To write a great essay, you have to learn to write a great paragraph. To write a great paragraph, you have to learn to write a great sentence. A great company culture is developed the same way: You have to drive culture at each level of the organization, from departments to teams, team members, and individual actions.

Many companies currently face the challenge of scaling and sustaining company culture in a hybrid workplace. To state the obvious, you must adjust your approach. The same approach but in virtual format is not sufficient.

Many organizations struggle to identify their next generation of leaders. They may roll out rigorous selection processes or judge leadership capabilities based on past performance or increased responsibility.

The best way to obtain a realistic depiction of company culture is to ask your employees how they see it. That’s exactly how Buck approaches culture. She said, “If you asked one hundred employees why they're at Collective Health, all would say that they're here partly because of the mission of the company.”

Leaders are cultural carriers. Develop them and you can achieve an outsized impact on the day-to-day actions that shape your culture.

In a recent conversation with Chief People Officer (CPO) Shannon Sullivan, she said, “Building real authentic culture is a moat because it's hard to replicate. You've got to be really deliberate about how you build it.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to sustain company culture. Often, the best strategies for sustaining culture are those that are unique to a company. At Headspace, I couldn’t help but admire how aligned their initiatives are with their product and mission.

Across my thirty plus interviews with chief people officers (CPOs), Waymo serves as one of the best examples of how a strong sense of purpose can drive culture and ultimately growth strategy. In this interview with CPO Becky Bucich, she does a brilliant job of breaking down Waymo’s culture and the work her team does to foster it.

Gallup and LEADx research on employee experience shows that “your manager cares” is now a top five driver of employee engagement. It makes sense: When your leader cares, they’re much more likely to be tuned in to your career and job satisfaction. In turn, you’re much more willing to forgive small mistakes and stressors.

Luque described how NerdWallet’s culture is tied to its product: “When I think about what we provide to consumers, I'm not surprised that it mirrors how I describe our internal culture.

In his article titled “The Frontline Advantage” published in the Harvard Business Review, three-time Big Pharma Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Fred Hassan stated, “It is the frontline managers who must motivate and bolster the morale of the people who do the work—those who design, make, and sell the products or deliver services to customers.

For anyone working in people and culture, it’s important to strike a balance between moving quickly and reflecting thoughtfully.

Over the course of 100+ interviews with chief people officers (CPOs), an interesting theme has emerged: Companies with unique company values and characteristics seem to foster more authentic, creative environments.

When a company experiences rapid growth, growing pains are inevitable. Original employees find themselves in a sea of new employees. The way things are done shifts. The culture evolves.

When a company experiences rapid growth, growing pains are inevitable. Original employees find themselves in a sea of new employees. The way things are done shifts. The culture evolves.

Since research correlates 70% of employee engagement to an employee’s relationship with their manager, the way a company develops its leaders can be incredibly telling of its culture.

Culture doesn’t happen by accident. In Josh Bersin’s The Reset Playbook, he emphasizes the importance of getting intentional about how you want to change your company culture.

One thing that great company cultures seem to have in common is that they create highly original rituals that bring culture to life in an authentic way.

According to a McKinsey article titled “What’s Missing in Leadership Development?” 90% of CEOs don’t believe their people development efforts have a clear business impact.

With an active workforce of more than 5,000 people across 70+ countries, Toptal is the largest fully remote workforce in the world. How does it go about scaling and sustaining its thriving remote culture?

As companies grow, the need to define company culture poses a challenge. Companies must establish their culture in an authentic and useful way that is not overly formalized or bureaucratic. Adoption often becomes a hurdle.

Bringing culture into the recruitment and hiring process is the best way to ingrain it throughout an organization. But, how do you accomplish this in a thoughtful way?

The best company cultures act like magnets, repelling people as effectively as they attract people. Often, these same cultures operate from highly original core values. The type of values that are unique enough to have a polarizing effect.

To foster company culture, you have to address the behaviors that underpin your culture. However, establishing new behaviors as habits is no cakewalk.

When I had the opportunity to interview the CPO of Omada Health, Nancy Vitale, I was excited to hear that the founders spearheaded the creation and implementation of the company’s values.

Scaling a founder-led, start-up culture is the ultimate challenge. However, success yields large results. Reuters’ data shows that the top 400 founder-led companies have registered an average share price gain of 58.4% compared to just a 10% return for the top 400 stocks led by other founder-led companies.

The CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings wrote: “In all creative roles, the best is easily ten times better than average. The best publicity expert can dream up a stunt that attracts millions more customers than the average one. ”To capitalize on this idea at the company level, you have to grow what Hastings refers to as your “talent density.” Talent density is the collective amount of talent held by your employees.

Considering that 70% of employee engagement can be traced to an employee’s relationship with their manager, you would expect that most companies would get intentional about leadership development and company culture early on.

One of the most effective strategies to scale and sustain a rapidly evolving culture is to establish a values system. To dive deep into an example of a rapid-growth startup that built out a highly effective values system, I met with the Chief People Officer of National Resilience, Mara Strandlund.

How do you create a culture that revolves around speed at a company with 7,000 employees across more than 40 countries? To learn, I met with Vivian Welsh, the chief people officer (CPO) of Veeva Systems. 

Since research correlates 70% of employee engagement to management, the way a company develops its leaders can be incredibly telling of its culture. At Databricks, Reichanadter and her team emphasized leadership development during Covid as the company flourished.

Leadership development stands as one of the best strategies for a rapidly growing company to foster its culture. To learn about this strategy in action, I met with the Chief People Officer of 1Password, Katya Laviolette.

The more a company grows, the more challenging it becomes to hold onto its fast-moving, creative, start-up culture. That said, it is possible.

At Pinterest, there's a real sense of connection, relationship, and belonging in the culture.

Gallup and LEADx research shows that psychological safety is the second-strongest driver of employee engagement. But how can a company tell if they’re successfully fostering psychological safety?

At over 1600 employees, HealthEdge boasts a “culture of learning,” as described by its employees.

In this interview the CPO of Quizlet, Stephanie Douglass, shares her extensive experience and deep insights into organizational culture.

In today's episode, we learn from the CPO of Dropbox, a titan in cloud storage, with a mission “to design a more enlightened way of working.”

This episode is a LEAKED event from our private, members-only Community of Practice for Leadership Development Professionals. Join us as Michael Cabe, Sr. Manager of Learning Strategy at Home Depot, shares how Home Depot strategically uses ‘nudges' to scale world-class leadership development.

In a world where companies span continents and flexible work is the norm, how do you ensure consistent culture across every office, team, and individual? Enter Manuela Montagnana, the CPO of Criteo. With teams spread from Tokyo to Paris and New York, Montagnana has the mammoth task of maintaining a unified culture. In this episode, she shares her strategies.

In today's episode, we dive deep into the 70-20-10 learning model – a 40-year-old framework embraced by corporate learning and development professionals. But is this model truly serving our needs?

This episode is a LEAKED event from our private, members-only Community of Practice for Leadership Development Professionals. In this meeting, we delve deep into the DNA of organizational culture.

In today's episode, we delve deep into the vibrant culture of Revinate, a renowned software-as-a-service company known for its innovative guest-to-data platform in the hospitality sector. With over 400 “Revinators” spread across global offices, how does Revinate keep its core values intact and its culture thriving?