Is the pandemic changing how you lead your organization? That’s the question we asked C-Suite executives at five different companies in this mini episode of the Being Human is Good for Business podcast.
Over the past several months we’ve interviewed dozens of executive leaders from a broad range of businesses and social impact organizations. Yet, we seldom had a discussion that didn’t touch upon how the pandemic has changed how we lead and work.
For Bret Furio, CEO of Canidae, the pet food company, learning to see the positive in constantly changing circumstances helped him as a leader. He says, “I’m learning to be more generous in terms of work life balance and being flexible about work arrangements. It lets people do what works best for them, and allows them to still contribute greatly.”
Carnegie Mellon University CFO Angela Blanton told us how the pandemic had taught her the importance of building trusting relationships, of taking more time to make decisions, and to be a lot more flexible. She says, “I am learning to back up and let my leaders lead. I’m trying to not make any decisions too quickly so that we can be flexible when we need to shift direction.”
The former president of International Brake Industries (IBI), Paul Johnson, told us how his team has been able to innovate under difficult circumstances. He says that learning to work through the pandemic has raised their level of innovation.
EA’s Vice President of Worldwide Customer Experience Joel Knutson told us his organization has been able to pivot, thanks to increased investment in the health and wellbeing of the team. He explains, “We’re flexing up our empathy, significantly. We’re flexing to focus on employee needs and are rolling out additional benefits to all our employees.”
When we spoke to Misan Rewane, the former CEO of the Nigerian social enterprise Wave Academies, she told us how the pandemic is teaching her to hold space for her people while they are work as virtual team. She says, “It’s the simple things like starting a call by genuinely listening as people tell you how they really are.”
Listen here:
Watch for future mini episodes where we’ll bring you highlights from all our past shows. To hear the full interview with the leaders featured in today’s show download these episodes:
Episode 6: Interview with Bret Furio: How Leaders Can Accelerate Business Growth
Episode 7: Lessons from the C-Suite: My First Year
Episode 10: Creating Connections Beyond the Org Chart
Episode 11: Electronic Arts’ People-Centered Approach to Business
Episode 21: Creating a WAVE of Positive Impact for Nigerian Youth
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MACHINE GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. It may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.
PODCAST with Five C-Suite Leaders
Sherrilynne: Hello, I'm Sherrilynne Starkie. Welcome to Trilogy Effect’s podcast Being Human is Good for Business. It's the podcast for business leaders who want to build high performance teams. The goal of this podcast is to help people discover who they are as a leader and as a human being, and to help them unleash their full potential.
Over the past several months, we've interviewed dozens of executive leaders from a broad range of businesses and not-for-profit organizations. As with most conversations that we all have these days, we seldom had an interview that didn't touch upon the pandemic and how much it's changed how we lead and how we work in what today's new normal is.
Our first ever podcast guest was Bret Furio, who is the CEO of Canidae, the pet food company. It was early on in the pandemic when we spoke to Bret and he shared how he had to change his leadership approach when everybody suddenly went home to work.
Bret: Everyone's going through things, you know, we only see what's visible in our world, but a lot of people have personal challenges right now.
We had people with COVID, people who have sick parents. I mean, there are other things that are going on in people's lives that we tend to not be aware of. We need to start asking those questions and seeing how we can support one another, because I have a sense that this is going to last quite a while. At the end of the day, I think people are well intended in general and I think they all want the same thing.
So my positive thing is that I feel, if I think, about my current team, everyone is here because they want to be here. You know, it is ‘free will’ employment and if you really want to be here, so some of the messages that we're sharing with the team are in terms of, ‘Hey, this is where we want to go and we can't get there without you.’
I think that's a positive message and I do think while there's a lot of restrictions right now, in terms of everyone being able to come together as a team. I also think there's a lot of opportunities here to learn. As I mentioned before, we got the call. I mean I was always the got to be in the office guy, got to be in the office, got to be in the office.
I will be honest, this has said to me is ‘You know what, while this isn't ideal either because we went from one side of being in the office to now we're all at home. There's a real, I think, solution in the middle, that says, especially for working parents is, ‘You know what, you can get a lot of work done and be effective from working from home more often.’
So my sense is positive is, I think we're learning a lot through this. It's a gift that I think, as we apply these lessons, when things do open up and hopefully there is a vaccine that we will be able to apply these learning’s and be more generous to employees in terms of work-life balance, flexible type of work arrangements so that people can find what works best for them while still contributing greatly.
At the end of the day, we are a performance-based organization and I'd never say otherwise. I mean we’re in private equity, that's what we do. That said, if employees love who they work for and they feel they're really, really supported, my sense and my experience has always been they'll give you more than what you're asking for.
Sherrilynne: We also spoke to Angela Blanton, who's the CFO at Carnegie Mellon University. She told us about how the pandemic had taught her the importance of building trusting relationships and that she also needed to take more time in making decisions and that she had to be a lot more flexible.
Angela: My tendency when I get stressed is to really buckle in a lockdown and become very rigid.
Obviously, working with Heather, I have to understand that tendency and I have to trust that my employees can do the work. That it's not all about me, and what decision I think I need to make, because I'm stressed. So I think, again, it just helped me understand that I can't just go into that natural mode of buckling and just really buckling down and being very rigid.
I have to just back up and breathe and talk it out and let my leaders lead and continue to allow information to come to me so that I don't make decisions too quickly. Even in this time of a lot of volatility, we still have flexibility to kind of shift as needed.
Sherrilynne: Paul Johnson is the president of International Brake Industries, which is also known as IBI.
He shared with us how the pandemic forced his team to innovate, and that they've been able to deliver really amazing things under difficult circumstances. He also talked about the challenges of onboarding new staff members in a work from home world.
Paul: It's been the most challenging, you know, in, whatever, twelve months or so of our professional careers, clearly mine as well.
Yet it's been so powerful, I think, for us on multiple levels. In our case, simply just trying just putting the social elements aside, just trying to keep business going has been just a tremendous challenge, like if my boss had come and said, ‘Paul develop a plan, so your team can work remotely and can work one hundred percent remotely, if necessary.’ I suspect it would have taken at least six months for us to come up with that plan. Then we'd come back and probably with something along the lines of, ‘It, can't be done, by the way, it can't be done.’ Nevertheless, I think, within 72 hours, we went to, essentially, our headquarters staff went to a remote environment. I know we're not unique, so many companies in the US and Canada had to do exactly that in the spring of last year.
So it does show that, when necessary, the organization can do pretty amazing thing. It's definitely been challenging and it's definitely harder to work projects forward when everyone's in a remote environment.
I think it's particularly a challenge for our new hires, because when you bring new people onboard in a remote environment, because it's harder to understand the culture of the company when you're doing it remotely. It's there, but for those of us who've been there and understand it. It’s kind of natural, we don’t have that additional hurdle, and our new folks do have that additional hurdle.
Sherrilynne: We had the pleasure of welcoming Joel Knutson, who is the gaming company EA’s Vice President of Worldwide Customer Experience. He talked about the company's pandemic pivot and how it was underpinned by investing time and resources into making sure that everyone's okay. It was about ensuring the well being of each and every person on the team.
Joel: One of the largest changes is that it has significantly increased the time that we spend focusing on people's well being. You know, 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 or 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 have to take to actually set that up so it works well, that’s challenging.
Then 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 it has been very challenging for my family.
What that means for us, as leaders, is 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 well-being. 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 they've 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 and definitely additional benefits that we've rolled out, as a company, to our employees and managing through all of that.
Sherrilynne: In our interview with Missan Rewane the former CEO of the Nigerian not-for-profit WAVE Academies, we learned how the pandemic taught her to make space for her people while they were working exclusively as part of a virtual team.
Missan: I think for me, just learning how to create shared meaning, virtually, has sort of been the biggest skill set that I worked on and come through the pandemic and we're still in the pandemic. Simple things like starting a call and just genuinely listening and waiting for people to tell you how they really are and volunteering that information first.
I think everyone expects me to say, how are you? You get a one line broad, vague thing, but like trying to show first that vulnerability and tell people how you really are. About what's going on in the background and leaving your video on and letting people know like, ‘Hey, I'm going to have to go put off the beans that are burning on the fire.’
Then letting people know that there's no longer a perfect wall between our work and our lives and letting people know that it's okay. So creating spaces for shared meaning, virtually, has been an interesting challenge. I think people think it can be done and everyone's just waiting for, ‘Okay, when the pandemic is over, then we're going to go back to being in the classroom all the time, being in full space.’
Yet there's no world where you're going to go back to just fully in person, because virtual has opened up the room for you to work with so many layers of an organization that in the past would not have been accessible. So yeah, I've seen a lot of possibilities, but just very simply as just holding space for people.
I think that's something Wendy taught me as language. Just something that I enjoy doing, something that I think I do well holding space for people to just be in this time.
Sherrilynne: Yes, It's certainly been an unusual time for us all since the onset of this pandemic. We've all looked to our leaders more than ever for guidance and support. The ways and means of managing organizations and teams might have shifted, but the principles of great leadership have not.
One thing remains true is that being human really is good for business. That's what drives the leadership development experts at Trilogy Effect forward and that's what this podcast is all about. Thanks so much for listening. I've included links to these interviews in the show notes so that you can hear the full discussion.
Listen to them and learn from the experiences of leaders of some of the world's biggest and best-known companies and make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing to this podcast. If you have a second, please drop us a rating or review on Apple podcasts or any of the other podcast platforms so that other people can find us too.
Please recommend our show to your friends who want to become better, stronger, more effective leaders. I'm your host, Sherrilynne Starkie and this is Being Human is Good for Business.