In this episode of the Being Human is Good For Business Podcast we talk to the Vice President of Worldwide Customer Experience at Electronic Arts (EA), Joel Knutson.
EA is a US $5.5 billion video game company headquartered in California with operations all around the world. Battlefield, Star Wars, The Sims and Medal of Honor are all EA games. Best selling sports games FIFA, Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL are also among its successful products.
Joel started with EA in an entry level position and over the past 25 years has worked in a variety of roles before taking on his current executive position. And he’s learned a lot about leadership along the way.
“People are by far the most important part of any business. A business wins or loses on people and that’s why it’s critical to have a strong team and to invest in developing their talent,” explains Joel. “I try to always create an environment where our people can be their best and can do their best work.”
To that end, Joel’s team is using the Leadership Circle as part of a leadership development program. It’s a competency-based 360º review that opens constructive conversations to reveal a leader’s gifts and areas for development.
“I like that it includes a detailed survey and provides information on multiple dimensions,” explains Joel. “It was a very different process from any I’d been involved in before, and I was impressed with the way the outputs are broken down between reactive and creative tendencies.”
Trilogy Effect Partner Wendy Appel credits an open approach as being key to the success of EA’s leadership program. “Joel and his team spend time upfront to ensure people feel safe and secure. They make sure everyone understands the long-term commitment to the development journey of each leader and educate everyone about the program’s intentions and process. Joel is offering a wonderful gift to his people. They can take on as much or as little as they feel comfortable doing.”
Listen to the show to learn how and why leadership development continues to benefit Joel and his team. Here are links to the some of the tools mentioned in the show and other resources to support you in your commitment to your ongoing development as a leader:
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MACHINE GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
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Being Human Is Good For Business Podcast with Joel Knutson
Joel Knutson: [00:00:00] No, no one has ever accused me of being amazing at focused, like literally ever. I want to do it all. I hate, I truly hate shutting down options. There are all these great ideas, all these great things we could go do. And I'm excited about all of them. And I want to go do all of them and I've always been like that.
And now I understand why.
Voice Over: [00:00:25] Welcome to the Being Human is Good for Business podcast. In each episode, the leadership development experts at Trilogy Effect explore how the process of self-discovery, unleashes potential in us all. Now here's your host, Sherrilynne Starkie.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:00:43] I'm your host, Sherrilynne Starkie. Welcome to the Being Human is Good for Business podcast. Today I'm joined by Wendy Appel, a partner at the Trilogy Effect, the leadership development experts. And she's also the author of InsideOut Enneagram, the Game Changing Guide for Leaders. Hi, Wendy, welcome to the show.
Wendy Appel: [00:01:02] Morning
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:01:03] And we are also welcoming as our guest, a tech industry leader, whose company is definitely a household name.
Welcome to Joel Knutson. He's vice president of customer experience at Electronic Arts. Yes, EA that's the company behind many of the games that are keeping us entertained as we, while away the hours at home. Examples include my personal favorite, The Sims, I'm a long time Sims player and other games that you will recognize for sure are Battlefield Three Dead Space, Star Wars, Medal of Honor, and thousands of more titles.
Welcome to the show, Joel.
Joel Knutson: [00:01:43] Thank you. It's good to be here.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:01:45] So let's start at the very beginning. Can you start by giving us a little bit of background on your career trajectory thus far?
Joel Knutson: [00:01:55] Absolutely. so, I'm currently the vice president for customer experience, as you stated. but I've also been here for 25 years at EA.
And I like to tell people that I started when I was five years old. Because of course we know 25 years is a long time and I don't when people know how old I am. But really, I've been fortunate to cover, a lot of space during my time at the EA and learn through a lot of different disciplines.
I've held roles in things like customer service, QA localization, partner relationship management, business operations, portfolio management, analytics. I ran a PMO for a while. And of course, now in executive leadership, I've had a really strong interest in both creative and analytical endeavors, throughout my life.
So, you might say right brain and left brain. I'm really, that's, that's driven me to take up a lot of new challenges and try new things that I think has, formed, my career and my skillset and capabilities. I also, I think we'll speak about this later, but I also now know more about the why behind that having worked with, Wendy and, learning about the Enneagram, better understanding of what my drivers are, which I'm excited to talk about.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:03:18] Before we get into talking about all the great professional development work that you're doing, and your team is doing there at the EA.
I'm just wondering, maybe you could share with us a little bit about how the pandemic has impacted, the way that you work and how you lead your team.
Joel Knutson: [00:03:35] A lot. Iin a lot of ways it's impacted it. One of the largest, changes is that it has significantly increased the time that we spend focusing on people's wellbeing.
In this moment, everyone is struggling, right? Everyone is struggling in some way, whether that is because you're living alone. and you're lonely whether you have, family loved ones that are in a high-risk category or you're in a high-risk category to yourself.
That creates a lot of anxiety. Trying to suddenly be thrust into an environment where you're working from home, without all of the normal work that a company would take to actually set that up. That's challenging. You might have children doing school from home while you're trying to work from home.
That's challenging. That is my personal situation, and has been very challenging, for my family. A lot of extra effort. So, on top of trying to get the job done, and ensuring that you are enabling your organization to get the job done, that you need to, there's a lot of extra effort focused on ensuring people's wellbeing, right?
How do we change how we're engaging with our employees? On top of a time when we're already changing how we engage them. Because there's all shifted to work from home. We are now trying to engage with them in a way that. We are there to support them. We are really flexing our empathy up significantly. Flexing to focus on employee needs, additional surveys, additional benefits that we've rolled out, as a company, to our employees, and managing through all of that.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:05:35] Wow. Joel, that's a lot, I think like, like most of us these days, you guys really have a lot on your plates. With a lot of different competing priorities. But what I'd like to do now is kind of shift pace a little bit and talk about life before COVID. Now you spent 25 years with EA and that's a little bit unusual these days, especially in the tech industry.
Most of us, spend two or three years with a, with an employer and then move on, but you started at the entry level. And if you worked your way up to the very, very top of one organization over 25 years, and that must give you a unique perspective on leadership. Doesn't it. So, in your opinion, what do you think is the key to being successful as a leader?
Joel Knutson: [00:06:16] Well, there's no one silver bullet to that. So let me, let me walk you through kind of what I think the key focus areas are, that I have found for leadership. The first one is people. People are by far the most important part of business. I believe that you win or lose on people. And because of that, I think it's critical to have a strong team and to really focus on developing their talent.
In my work, I have really learned and try hard to set up an environment that allows everyone to bring their best self to work, and be their best self and really do their best work at EA. Second area is vision. And of course, this won't be anything that will be, mind altering for people who have listened to a leadership podcast before.
But I truly believe that for people to do their best work, they need to know where they're going, why they're going there and be able to buy into it. And so, as a leader, communicating a compelling purpose and vision, and then, helping the team build a path to get to that vision, I think is critical.
The third one, which again, won't be anything people haven't heard before, is execution. But I have a specific take on this one, which is execution through continuous improvement. At the end of the day, having a vision, doesn't matter if you can't execute. And so, execution is key to success.
But I found through my time that building a culture that's focused on continuous improvement is really the most effective way to deliver. When you have a culture of continuous improvement, you constantly challenge yourself and your team to change the status quo and not accept it, to innovate, try new things, fail, learn quickly and then integrate those learnings.
And, as you do that over and over, you really accelerate how you become good at executing. The continuous improvement focus might feel a little bit slower in the beginning, but ultimately you accelerate to being much faster and improving and gaining benefits in execution than if you're just building out some kind of waterfall approach where you got these steps from point a to point B.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:08:29] So be more flexible and to alter course based on current situations and circumstances and as facts, new facts and new information arises.
Joel Knutson: [00:08:40] That's it that's exactly right. Exactly.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:08:43] And do you feel that this is even more important because you're in something that's essentially a creative business?
It's a technology company. Yes. But you sell fun, right? You sell fun experiences. So that's a lot of creativity to go behind developing your products.
Joel Knutson: [00:08:59] Yeah, that's exactly right. In fact, EA really positioned itself as an entertainment company and a creative company, more so than a technology company.
Obviously, what we do is technology, building video games, delivering them to players digitally, and all the services around that are technology based. But at the end of the day, the work we do is very different than other technology. And that, as you said, we sell fun, right? So, we are in fact trying to engage people in a way and entertain people, where they, they leave that, feeling like they had a really positive experience and that it added value to their day in value to their lives.
And so doing that's hard. It turns out that building fun, designing and executing fun is way more difficult than building an enterprise software application. And I don't want to say that that's easy because it's not, but there is a clearer path to execution against that than there is to delivering fun.
Fun is different for different audiences and it's different for different types of games. So, fun in the Sims, for example, is very different than what’s fun in Battlefield or in FIFA.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:10:13] So that sounds like it might be a little bit complicated. How do you go about rolling out this kind of continuous quality strategy when your product offering is so wide ranging?
Joel Knutson: [00:10:26] What we have done is really taken an approach where we, look to continuously learn through that, apply learnings, not only within the same franchise, but learnings to across franchises, other delivered a player, then build on those and then share those back out. So that as a company, we are continuously improving our knowledge around how to deliver fun to players.
I think we have been. One of the most successful companies, at consistently delivering that across a really broad portfolio of experiences. And a lot of that does have to do with focusing on continuous improvement, a couple more items in relation to being successful as a leader, that I think. Are important to share the first, the next one is learning.
And of course, learning is not going to be new. but my particular take on it is really learning through diverse experiences. Given my broad set of experiences I've had, at EA across multiple different areas of business, I've learned that that's a strength, right? And it's a strength I've leaned into, to be successful as a leader.
And so that desire to constantly learn new things that, drove me to make jumps, leaps in my career to areas that I didn't have any experience in to gain that experience or really bore out to be a positive for me,
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:11:48] Lifelong learning is just so important for both personal development, as well as professional development. What advice do you have for people, Joel?
Joel Knutson: [00:11:56] Something that I would recommend to others, be curious, learn, but beyond just learning about the, how to be better at what you are doing now, be open and willing to take a completely new experience. That might be scary. Cause you'll gain a lot of learning from those that will help you down the line.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:12:14] And then at some point you came into contact with Wendy and the folks at Trilogy Effect. Was this your first, experience of leadership coaching?
Joel Knutson: [00:12:27] No it wasn't actually my first experience was several years before I met Wendy. That was when we brought in a company to help us do some team leadership development with our leadership team and extended leadership team.
For me individual coaching is trying to figure out what my own personal needs are. To be able to deliver better for my team versus thinking about things like team dynamics, team interaction, and team capabilities tools et cetera. So yeah, you dive deeper into your own psyche, if you will, right.
And you dive deeper into understanding yourself. In a lot of ways, it's far more uncomfortable than team coaching, which in my opinion, if you want to get the most out of it, you kind of have to get uncomfortable. I'm sure Wendy will be willing to tell you all about that because she likes making me uncomfortable.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:13:35] Is this true. Wendy, do you make Joel feel uncomfortable?
Wendy Appel: [00:13:39] Growth begins at the edge of your comfort zone.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:13:43] So when you first started working together, Was a 360 review the starting point?
Joel Knutson: [00:13:50] When we started working together on my development, we did a pseudo-360, not as robust as we might do.
And actually, as we did later, which we can speak to because we did do a very robust 360 later, but we kind of did a two, a 360 gathering insights from people directly in my leadership team and a few others that I thought were. Going to be really valuable to informing, what areas I would want to work on and, and understanding how it was showing up.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:14:20] So I'm interested that you do went through the exercise twice. So, what precipitated that?
Joel Knutson: [00:14:26] Well, the first one was really, I say pseudo-360. It was really interviewing, right. It was Wendy, talking to people. The full, legitimate, like 360 was the Leadership Circle 360, which we did relatively recently, which is a robust process, with a lot of people feeding into it.
It includes a detailed survey. That people fill out, it gives you information on multiple dimensions and all that. So, it was a, it was a very different process. And the reason why was because we were trying to serve a different need at that point in time, right? Our relationship had matured, between, coach and coachee.
If you will coach and player, not sure what the right analogy is there. But our relationship had matured. We were further along. We were really trying to identify what is the next step, right? What are the next areas of focus? for me to really develop my leadership plan, that would help me not only become the best leader I can be, but also, progress in my career.
I had a bit of experience at it through two of my employees that had actually done it, that I had set up with, coaches as well, so that they could get the experience of having an individual coach. these are two very, very strong, employees, that we're looking to, further their leadership skills as well.
I was impressed with the outputs. Then Wendy got, not because of me, but Wendy got certified in Leadership Circle and we decided to go ahead and do the 360 for me, which has been really valuable, honestly.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:16:11] Okay. Can we talk a little bit about that? What was the biggest value that you saw in it?
Joel Knutson: [00:16:16] Probably the biggest value is the clarity between creative and reactive, leadership dimensions, leadership circle. It builds out this circle of dimensions where it scores you against those. And you score yourself and the other people filling out the survey. So, your peers, your employees, and maybe indirects are filling it out in scores.
You can set as well. and then it gives you back results and how you're showing up. Broken down into areas on the probably the most impactful split for me is the reactive versus creative dimensions, where reactive leadership is exactly what it sounds like. Right. You're constantly reacting creative leadership is the proactive side of that, right?
It's about leading in a creative way that creates a space for others to do their best work. and how do you show up, across different dimensions to enable that. Which as you heard me talk about in the, in the beginning is something that I think is critical for leadership success. so that, that delineation, I think has been really valuable.
And then of course you can dive into specific dimensions within both reactive and creative leadership and how you're showing up to help you understand, where you want to focus your work to improve.
Wendy Appel: [00:17:36] And I think Joel was saying it, but I'm not sure it was fully fleshed out is that he takes the survey as well.
So, when he gets his results, he sees the gap between how he sees himself and how others experience him. And then distinctions among whether, his boss experiences some differently than his peers than his directs and indirects or any other stakeholder groups. So, you, you can see those splits.
Are you showing up the same, no matter who you're working with or are you showing up differently? And I think that Joel and I at our work together with as coach and coachee actually began with the Enneagram.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:18:20] Wendy, if you could kind of explain for our listeners what is meant by the word Enneagram and what exactly is it?
Wendy Appel: [00:18:28] So the Enneagram is just a Greek word. It means nine sided symbol. And it’s a, a very holistic, look into nine fundamental worldviews, nine fundamental archetypes, really archetypal energies of people from it. Doesn't matter where you live in the world. it works. Cross-culturally that just show up worldwide in the global population.
So, when you land on your best fit Enneagram type, so what makes it distinct from other systems is that it gets at the underlying drivers and motivations of your whole life pattern. The idea is that its temperament based. Do you out into the world with what I like to call superpowers? They're very much these gifts that you have to kind of as this, as this innocent little baby to deal with the world around you.
Are sort of powers that ultimately become coping strategies. And there are both reactive sides, less healthy sides of, of those behaviors and very healthy sides, gifts, overused become challenges. So, when working with a client like Joel, he gets to see, he gets to take a look back, do a bit of an archeological dig.
And understand how his particular, Enneagram type has both served him in tremendous ways. And you could see it in how he was just talking about leadership and also where. It gets in the way. And then you can use the Enneagram actually for your own development, finding your type is a starting place. And then breaking free of some of the habitual patterns is where the work is.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:20:09] And how was that experience for you, Joel, when you first discovered your Enneagram type?
Joel Knutson: [00:20:14] It was great. I will say the very beginning, when I, got Wendy's book, and the cards there's a, a bit of a scary moment, right? Because you start reading and you realize, Oh, you're, this is going to dig really deep.
Right. You're going to dig really deep into yourself and to understand yourself and explore places that. Are uncomfortable. Right. So, I was both excited to do it because I wanted to learn and I was fascinated by learning about the Enneagram, and all of the hundreds of years, perhaps of, foundation, that it is based on and really the insights I was going to get from myself.
But also, some trepidation at the same time, digging into places, those, those places that you don't look in yourself a lot of the time, because you're scared too.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:21:10] Well, this is the uncomfortable feeling you were talking about.
Joel Knutson: [00:21:13] Yeah, it is exactly that. but the truth is, and as Wendy just said, it's been like super valuable.
Yeah. Learning my motivations, my fears understanding how those create some of the behaviors that I have or influence those behaviors has been an unlock to allow me to step out of that. Right. Even if sometimes it's just like a check, you're like, Oh, I'm doing that. Like, I'm doing that again.
Okay. I need to stop doing that. Right. So, I'll give some examples. So, and I'm an Enneagram Type 7, which is The Enthusiast. And really what that means is I have a fear of losing out and being boxed in I obviously there's a lot more behind that, but I can't tell you all that right now. And Wendy's the expert on that anyways.
But what I've learned is like that, that leads directly to some behaviors that I have, that I've gotten a lot of feedback on from my employees, over my career one is. Focus like no one has ever accused me of being amazing at focus. Like literally ever. I want to do it all. I hate, I truly hate shutting down options.
There are all these great ideas, all these great things we could go do. And I'm excited about all of them. And I want to go do all of them. And I've always been like that. And now I understand why, right? Deep down, I have this fear of, of losing out, this fear of being boxed in and shutting down options, that has translated into me being excited about all the things.
So, understanding that is great because now I can check that and I can go, okay. I know no, I have to be up to focus. We got to, we got to boil this down to the top three things. We're going to spend our time on, which has become even more important during the pandemic. So that that's one of the ways in which understanding my type, and the core drivers have really influenced how I approach leadership.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:23:14] You mentioned that you brought the Enneagram to your team, be nice to hear a little bit about how that's improved or how it's changed, how you all work together. And then also, I'd be interested to learn about how your teamwork is thriving or managing through this very, very unusual life and business circumstances that we find ourselves in right now.
Joel Knutson: [00:23:40] On the, on the team front, we brought a Trilogy Effect out for one of my leadership summits really to focus completely on how we work together as a team. And that included Enneagram work for every member of my leadership team, plus some additional, tools that trilogy brought to the table. And we worked through as a team, which have been really helpful for us, but on the Enneagram front specifically, it was.
It was amazing to really hear from every person about their type, who they are, what they've learned about themselves through that. And then the subsequent work that we did really learning about like how the types interact with each other. Right. And what does that mean for us? And, I would say through that work, we.
Really create a new sense of empathy, for each other, for every member on the team. We're a good team. So, understanding where each other's are coming from, understanding each other's, fears, underlying motivations, things that cause them to behave a certain way, behaviors that might frustrate a, another person, right.
We really dug into all of that and have a much better understanding of what our needs are. and how we can show up for each other, knowing what their needs are as well.
Wendy Appel: [00:25:13] When we were working with Joel's team, Mary Beth Sawicki and I, the two people who had already had the Leadership Circle, plus Joel, we brought in the Enneagram to his team at that, summit and what was really terrific for us to experience.
And I think Joel's. these particular folks at Joel's team were when they found their Enneagram type and, and saw a new head, had their leadership circle profile. It was so elucidating for them because it, it helped them really understand why they got the results that they did, the drivers and the motivators for some of the reactive patterns.
And so just, we were watching that and noticing how well, the two dovetail together. The two together, such a powerful combination.
Joel Knutson: [00:26:09] I completely agree with that. In fact, my own personal experience shows that, with the leadership 360 where, one of the areas, that is clear that my employees think I have opportunity to improve in was effectiveness of decision making, directly ties to, my type and my desire to do all the things, and not focus in and focus down. Which is one of my constant challenges that I need to focus on. so even in my own Leadership Circle, it shows up and I'm able to see how my type influences, how I'm showing up across different dimensions.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:26:56] Question for you on this Wendy. It sounds like everyone at Joel's team was enthusiastic and got onside for this. But I can imagine there's some teams out there where key people will be like, don't want to share this with my colleagues., I don't want to go this deep with my colleagues. How do you manage something like that?
Wendy Appel: [00:27:14], Part of it is the container that you create the level of safety that you create for people to do this work. And so, we spend time upfront. making sure that people feel safe to reveal and share. And a lot of that has to do with the leader of the team in this case, Joel, and people understanding why they're doing this, the why, the intentions behind it, how it's going to be used, that it's not a one and done.
Providing additional support for people to dig into this more and making sure that they know that Joel is really they're doing this for their development and that they're not going to use it in any way against each other. And so that'll get set up upfront and nobody's pushed to say or do anything that they don't want to say or do there's no coercion whatsoever.
It's really a people's own pace and timing. we never tell anybody what their Enneagram type is. One of the things we do with our upfront assessment with each client, with each person has to have a conversation with them to help them discover their best fit, any attempt, Enneagram type, and allow them to explore.
At their own pace and timing. And, sometimes when I'm looking at someone, I'll think I'm not sure that they've picked the best type for them, but I don't know for sure because I'm not in their skin, but even so it's a rare day when I'll reveal that to somebody, because that's a journey that they're taking.
So, I think that approach that makes people feel safe.
Joel Knutson: [00:28:54] I agree with what you've said. I think safety is the key, right? Making people understand that it's for them. we are going to be extending this to, my extended leadership team now, as well and one of our core messages is this is for you, right?
This is for your development. It is a tool for you. it is not something you're going to be measured on. so, your, your job performance and assessment will not be measured, upon whether you engage in the Enneagram or not, or how you engaged so it really is for, for each individual to get what they can from it and use it to, and, hopefully, advance their skills and advance their understanding of themselves and how they show up.
But if they don’t, that's fine too. I mean at the end of the day; we are going to assess people's performance against what we're asking them to accomplish, on the job and that includes both the what and the how, of how they show up. At EA that is well defined, well-articulated, already before. The Enneagram has nothing to do with that. And so, they know how they're going to be assessed and this is a tool that hopefully will help them, if they buy into it, we'll help them. We'll help them advance and it's something we are investing in, for them.
Wendy Appel: [00:30:29] It is the gift that keeps on giving and there's, it's so multilayered, I've been working with it since 92 and constantly peeling away, more and more layers.
And there's a certain readiness that people have to take it to the next level to take it to the next level. So, Joel's offering this gift to people and they can take on as much, a little. As they feel ready for, and then continue to dig in over time. Sometimes, you harken back to an experience you've had.
And you go, Oh, I get it. I get it. Now I get what they were trying to tell me. I get what this Enneagram thing meant. And you just don't know, sometimes you don't know what you don't know. And so, there's always this rear view, mirror moment that people have.
Sherrilynne Starkie: [00:31:14] Thank you to Vice-President of Customer Experience, Joel Knutson and Trilogy Effect partner, Wendy Appel for joining me on today's show.
And thank you also to all our listeners. Please make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing to our podcast, leave a rating or review, or recommend us to your friends and family, or anybody really who you think wants to become a better leader. check our show notes. We'll be links to lots of tools and resources that we discussed in this podcast.
I am your host, Sherrilynne Starkie and this is the Being Human is Good for Business podcast.