culture – Talent Revolution

Another thought on listening

I wrote about listening a few days ago. Then yesterday, I came across this paper by way of HBR. The paper studies psychological safety and its correlation to how teams learn and adapt. Unsurprisingly, the study finds many positive correlations between psychological safety and team performance. I list a few below.

Direct relationship with performance. Team psychological safety was positively associated with team learning behavior (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting, adapting, improving).
Reduced friction caused by power and team dynamics. Teams with higher psychological safety give back greater returns to their employers in the form of learning, adaptation, output, and feedback to upward feedback.
Teams that are high in “team learning behavior” have high psychological safety and perform better… in fact, it reshapes our earlier thoughts on efficiency.
Team efficiency may be less important for helping teams learn than we thought. Psychological safety may be the friction reducing mechanism that enables more learning and productivity.

You saw the concept “team learning behavior” a few times. The concept describes how a team works. Seeking feedback, continuous improvement, and shipping work are all hallmarks of high performing teams and teams high in “team learning behavior.” It just happens to follow that teams that demonstrate high team learning behavior also are more likely to be high in psychological safety.

One Useful Thing

As a savvy leader, the best thing you can do is create space and time to get better at interpersonal communication.

Listen more and better.
Wait a beat before decision.
Ask more “what if” and “how might we” and “ooh, that’s interesting, how did that…” style questions.

These behaviors act as signals that communicate your desire for more openness. When your team perceives openness, they’ll begin feeling confidence to be more generative. Generative teams ship work. You only grow if you ship.

I hope I’ve shown that three simple behaviors above can start you on a path to increasing team learning behavior and improving the psychological safety of your team.

Investing in listening, and executive presence.

Talent: I’d like to speak about how we communicate with each other. I’m hoping we can work out something, I feel we’re not communicating well.

Leader: Is this really a good use of our time?

How confident are you at this conversation is not happening within your org?

At work, humans typically work with other humans to create meaningful and valuable outputs. For that work to happen, communication must happen. And communication is both a beautiful, elegant, and simultaneously messy process.

Humans communicate differently from each other. Some more direct than others; others more indirect. Some people are optimistic, others skeptical. The list goes on, and no one way is better than another way.

Understanding, of any kind, is iterative. We make claims, we test those claims, we are later proven right or wrong. We make Bayesian updates to our worldview and move on.

As systematic and logical as that process sounds, the human element is not always so logical. Enter the paradox of management.

Two people speaking to each other and each with vastly different communication styles and in the process of collaborating with one another towards the same end may experience friction. Friction converts kinetic energy into heat — and heat in this context could be energy, excitement, anger, or abuse.

The management paradox is that human communication is messy and the furthest thing from logical. The talent obsessed manager, like yourself, learns how to convert communication friction into energy, excitement, and joy. Why can’t friction be fun?

Workplaces that are fun are a joy to be in. And if talent is joyfully learning, growing, and iterating upon themselves what incentive might they have to leave?

Underrated

The value of improving your interpersonal communication skills is underrated and therefore undervalued. The returns from becoming a more skilled communicator are great. The Harvard Business Review’s Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote an article that “listening to learn” is considered the new rule for executive presence replacing “forcefulness” (read the post).

Here’s an excerpt from Sylvia’s post. I removed a paragraph and spaced out the wording to be easier to read. What’s most important to me, and hopefully to you, is how Unilever is cultivating the type of listening I advocate with their leaders. Read on:

“Trait: “Listen to Learn” Orientation.

Although displaying forcefulness was high on the list of most-sought-after communication traits in 2012, it’s less desired today. People now gravitate more toward leaders who listen and learn from others before they make decisions—a trait seen as critical to growing markets and retaining top talent.

Tactic: Go beyond your comfort zone.

Unilever, which makes and markets hundreds of consumer goods in 190 countries, takes listening seriously, asking selected current and future leaders to spend time outside the realm of their normal experiences in a program called GITS (Get Inside the Skin). GITS is designed to teach them how to better empathize with the company’s 3 billion customers, who come from all walks of life…”

One Useful Action

Evolving as a communicator isn’t about metamorphosing into someone else. It’s about having the humility to acknowledge that you can level up your listening skills, get better at seeking clarification, or take that extra beat before jumping to conclusions.

Here’s a simple behavior you can practice now.

Reflect on the question: How might I listen to learn more this week?
Reflect on the question: How might I wait a beat before making a decision?

Final Thought

Job searching is never easy, and there are networks of job seekers discussing their experience with firms and their hiring leaders with other job seekers. Networks give carriage to bad experiences and word travels fast.

Do your firm and your team a favor, and invest the time to not be one of those leaders known for being an awful and exhausting communicator.

Overthinking collaboration

I have a theory that leaders overthink how to create highly collaborative and productive teams. This article from the Harvard Business Review recommends the new rules include a culture statement, a way to measure performance, and continuous improvement systems. What’s novel? And why is there demand for this knowledge?

I respect HBR’s work, and I value that they’re serving a need. Thank you, HBR. And I believe their output is not new, it’s what we do everyday — culture.

Let’s consider culture a system of transmitted behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that shape our society or organizations. It’s everything we see and can’t see. The system, like any organism, evolves in adaptive and maladaptive ways.

If that definition is true, here are my reasons for why we’re overthinking teams.

Life Finds a Way

Critique: Large teams are composed of people likely organized in sub teams. When people are organized together to create work outputs, they’ll create a system of behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that help them create valuable outputs — Robin Hanson calls these developments “cultural gadgets“.

Alternative: Allow sub cultures to form and thrive. Great work cultures can have contagion effects. Enjoy that. In fact, go out of your way to share subcultural practices with other teams so that they can be adopted. You’re creating your own internal and mini culture market.

Robustness vs Performance

Critique: Establishing key performance indicators is critical. No disagreement. However, as initiatives change your team will need to adapt. You’ll want robust culture systems that evolve to meet the shifting demands and pressures.

Alternative: Employ real time performance management dashboards (recommended by the article) and track how well the team adapts to changing priorities. Keep a history of all of the changing demands your team evolved to meet, productivity levels during those changes, and challenges you all overcame along the way. Share that story with your team constantly!

Maximize for Bottom Up

Critique: It’s common to hear that culture starts at the top. I disagree. I believe, based on my experience, that the inverse is true. Organizational culture statements are often feel good statements defining “who we are”; however, those statements aren’t a system — they’re words. Platitudes ≠ outputs.

Alternative: Allow your cultures to pop up and grow. In fact, allow for cultural drift — the process of a culture system evolving and adapting to new demands. As leaders, create selection pressures that favor more effective team cultures — celebrate the groups (collectively) that are making the most valuable outputs. And be wary of rigid company-wide policies that may stifle cultural evolution.

Do My Ideas Work and Scale?

Yes. My ideas are not novel. Scrum teams and creative groups operate in similar ways. The teams I build need to be high executing and creative problem solvers — adopting ideas from software and collaborative arts makes sense.

Scaling is both easy and hard. It’s easy to allow cultures to form. As a leader, it’s hard to let go. I am comfortable letting go and allowing culture to form. It’s my experience that people want to feel trusted, and when they do, they create good work. Your mileage may vary.

Potential Downsides

My ideas may not be suitable for teams that need to run a certain way to be successful. More rigid teams or organizations may find my ideas too radical — and that’s okay. As a leader, you need to assess your own culture and determine what’s best.

Wrapping it Up

This blog is for people who are obsessed about talent — spotting it, cultivating it, retaining it, and successfully exiting it into better roles internally or externally. If you’re going to be that person, it’s critical that you create environments for talent to do their best work. That means, creating space for micro cultures to take root, evolve, and adapt.

Being a bad hang; never a good thing.

I’ve been on teams where senior leaders ask me: “David, how do we get people to engage more” or “How, we do we get people to complain more?” Leaders want to create open environments for new ideas to make things better. Sadly, these very same leaders engage in behavior that makes them bad hangs.

Professional musicians sometimes categorize other musicians as “good hangs” or “bad hangs.” People who are considered “bad hangs” rarely get called, “good hangs” always get called. To “hang” well is to engage in behavior that makes someone want to spend time with you.

Showing up on time and sober.
Being kind.
Active listener.
Plays well with others.
Shares.
Show up prepared.

That’s it.

And in the corporate world, why should a hang be any different?

Managers that show up on time, demonstrate kindness, listen well, engage well with others, share their time and space, and show up ready are people that anybody would want to collaborate with — they’re a good hang.

In most cases where a senior leader asks for more open conversation, the challenge has been that the leader doesn’t listen well, doesn’t share the space, and talks over people — they appear impatient. And when teams begin to think that they are causing someone to become impatient, they quickly learn to shut up. Generativeness dies on the vine. Good talent starts looking for other managers.

One Useful Action

Focus on listening. Here’s how to practice the behavior:

(In your off time) learn to play an instrument. I’m not joking. Learning an instrument requires slow and painful repetition and critical listening skills. In addition, you’ll get a fun hobby out of it too!
When a direct report comes to you with an idea, ask a few questions before outputting a decision. Questions could be: What are the ramifications of this idea? What are the implications? What roadblocks do you expect and how might I help clear them? How might I help?
Don’t give the answer. Leave the question/idea with your team member and encourage them to work on it.

Parting Thought

If the returns from the talent you lead matter, the upfront cost of learning to be a good hang — in this case, listening — is worth every effort.

10 Questions You Can Ask Talent Before They Decide to Job Hunt

Since 2015, there’s an increase in poaching vacancies — vacancies intended for employed workers. By implication, firms are becoming more competitive by poaching top talent from their competitors. That insight comes from a working paper by Anton Cheremukhin and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria. I write about the topic here.

Good firms conduct exit interviews when talent leaves. Admired Leadership via their blog, Field Notes, posted 10 Exit Interview Questions admired leaders ask. “Exit interviews are a best practice for an important reason. The best leaders want to know why people really left and what they can possibly do about it.” I think differently.

Customer success managers (CSMs) obsess over why and how customers make decisions. Decisions to adopt an innovation grow, or churn out. They seek to understand when customers make buying decisions and they seek to understand the factors that go into that decision-making process. The goal is to feed insights back via cross-functional channels and help the organization become more intelligent about their customers. Ideally, customer-centric organizations adapt to meet the needs of their customers and growth occurs. Worst case, customers churn. Just like employees.

Skilled managers, like you, are wise to think like a CSM when it comes to retaining their top talent. What if we took the 10 Exit Interview Questions offered by Admired Leadership and reframe them the way we might use them in customer success? They are:

How does the job deliver on your expectations? Are the challenges and growth you expected before starting here being realized?
Is it your intent to start thinking about your next opportunity soon?
What do you like most and least about the work now?
I would love your thoughts. Am I investing in you and supporting your success? How might I be more supportive?
How do you rate the quality of the recognition you receive for your work and contributions?
What makes it difficult to be productive? What gets in your way to achieve high performance?
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about our team culture, what would you change and why?
How about the organizational culture? What might you change if you could change one thing?
If we hire in the future, would you recommend a job on our team to a friend or former colleague? Why or why not?
What do you think we need to do to retain our best talent?

Conducting an interview of this kind with an employee is courageous — for you and the employee. Your questions may cause someone to start looking for a new job. You may only receive positive “everything is great” type responses. You may hear some hard truths. There could be other reactions. I’ve been there, here’s how you manage that.

Listen, and be open.
Actively listen – ask clarifying questions, rephrase what you heard, and ask for the employee to check how well you understood them.
Do not debate. Listen to learn.
Thank them for their time.
Commit to following up so that your employee believes their feedback mattered.

Ultimately, the quality of your answers may be a function of your ability to create open and trusting relationships with your team. It’s the same thing with your customers.

If you find that neither your customers nor your employees will be honest with you, you may have a deeper problem.

If anybody can do it, you can

I believe one of the most powerful gifts a leader can give the talent on their team is belief.

Loneliness could be a problem. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article reports “58% of Americans are lonely, religion is fading, and work doesn’t love us back.” People are turning to hobbies and the things they love — becoming super fans of the things they love and finding community through fandom. And community might solve for loneliness.

My speculative theory is that community gives us something bigger than ourselves to believe in. Our life begins to take on more meaning — we get a mission. And we get people, fellow community members, to join us.

Great leaders practice fandom towards their teams. They go to their team members and say, “hey, if anybody can do this super hard thing, you can, and I’m here with you the entire way.”

Beyond belief, statements like “if anybody can do it, you can” give talent something more — the sense that you trust them.

Imagine how it might feel to know someone who cares about you believes in your ability to succeed and trusts your judgment. You can be that leader for someone. If anybody can do it, you can.

Teams goals outweighing personal KPIs?

Tyler Cowen’s August 17th Bloomberg column (Bloomberg) highlights a significant shift in how how talent is evaluated and rewarded in modern organizations.

The Question

If the output to be created is a result of team-based functions, how do you determine who to put on the team and how to compensate that person for their inputs?

The Problem

Giving credit where credit is due. Who owns the largest % of meaningful contribution? How does that get measured?
The use of AI. How much was AI leveraged? Do you compensate people for improving the AI database? To reward or not reward for effective prompt engineering?
How do we find the right people to work on the team? Tyler notices that firms are starting to focus on ex ante signals of quality (a degree, signals of status, etc.) vs taking a chance on outsiders that may prove more beneficial.

My Take

Talent Spotters/Hiring Managers: Get better at spotting talent! Talk with other leaders about how they assess and look for talent. Talk with highly talented contributors and learn about their work. Learn about other disciplines and imagine how talent from that discipline may help you in yours. I found that engineering and music professionals are fantastic customer success managers.
Managers: Depending on your business, it’s possible you’ll need to rethink your KPIs. Perhaps team-based KPI and comp plans are best when the ideal outputs are a result of team dynamics.
Talent: Realize that the signals you put up to indicate your availability will need to change. Networks will become more important for people who have and don’t have credentials.
Managers: How do you reward people who improve the use and adoption of AI in the firm? It’s not enough to suggest good prompts. How are people incentivized to use AI as an efficiency and problem solving partner?

One Useful Action

If nothing else, simply ask yourself: do I have the right talent in the right seats? And, how sure am I that I’m not missing out on undervalued talent?

Proportionality

Reasons to deploy intensity:

Create urgency.
Communicate importance.
Communicate gravity.

Reasons to deploy aggression:

….

And now for something completely different.

And remember, if you find yourself reaching for aggression in the zoom room, perhaps it’s time to reach for a glass of water instead. Or a pen. Or better yet, the door. After all, nothing says ‘I’m a visionary’ quite like strategically excusing yourself to stare at the water cooler.

H/T to Adam Frith via Rohan Rajiv from a Learning a Day

The strength to restrain

Imagine a scenario where a customer satisfaction rep drops the ball on an account. The sales person, who worked tirelessly to secure the deal, needs to backtrack to save the deal. The customer is frustrated, they want to pay less. A group message is started with all of the parties (except the customer) in copy. The Leader says “customer satisfaction rep, I think it’s best you don’t engage with this customer anymore, and here’s why…” It’s stressful, people are mad, and someone needs to be held accountable.

It’s important for leaders to demonstrate decisiveness and strength at times. They must be able to create and hold accountabilities, and be perceived to be able to punish as well as reward. That said, a skilled leader never publicly humiliates — causing someone to lose face in front of others.

Nothing erodes the trust, morale, or psychological safety of a team more than a leader who publicly humiliates. And, a leader who engages in that way may believe they’re sticking up for the sales person. I argue no.

The sales person, who may have worked hard and may be frustrated, is on the same team as your customer satisfaction rep. They don’t want to see people hurt. They don’t benefit from seeing someone shamed on their account. In fact, it may cause the sales person to think twice before making a mistake — thus eroding morale, trust, and psychological safety.

The better path is to strategically leverage “negativity” and re-affirm the mission. Here’s how it might play out.

(In a Direct Message) Leader: Customer Satisfaction Rep A (Person A), when you did (insert behavior) the customer became upset and distrustful of our product. Don’t do that. Next time, you’re in this scenario, use (insert approach) instead. If you do that, you’ll be able to produce (insert benefit) here.

(In a Direct Message) Leader: Sales Person A (Person B). I am so sorry that I dropped the ball on your deal. I identified the mishap, addressed the issue in our process, and it won’t happen again. I know you work hard on these deals, and it’s important to me, and all of us, that our sales team is successful. Thanks for you partnership.

(In a Group Message) Leader: Person A, Person B, and I spoke. Thank you for the quick connects. I identified the issues in our process. We fixed (insert what you fixed). Here’s what’s happening next… Also, Person A and I discussed our account management strategy going forward and here’s how we’re going to pivot.

This approach is more collaborative, positive, and seeks to build people up. It places the go-forward first. The leaders real strength is realized — the strength to take the hit personally and not publicly shame their team.

Special Note

If you’re working with teams that may be locally in countries where losing face is a major offense, it’s even more important for leaders to demonstrates restraint.
The space between stimulus and response is the space where you get to decide who and how you are. Don’t discount that time.

Forming impressions, the scientific method, and feedback

A simple way to share feedback is to invite conversation into forming thoughts.

Here’s an example:

“I’m forming an impression that your work is becoming delayed. I think I’m 80% misunderstanding the situation, and I want to check in with you for your thoughts. Have a few minutes to help me?”

The person you’re talking to will appreciate your humility and the invitation for them to participate.

On the call, here’s how you frame it:

“Thanks for helping me through this. Here’s the impression I’m forming – and I think I’m likely wrong – (layout your impression).

I am forming that impression because I’ve noticed (layout your observations).

Where am I misunderstanding things? Where am I wrong? What are your thoughts?

Caveats:

Communication culture matters. This method works if your team members are direct or indirect communicators. Why? Because we’re using the scientific method to share our feedback. The scientific method starts with a hypothesis based on observations. In science, hypothesis are crafted so that they can be dis-proven, that’s when we learn. As a result, indirect people appreciate that you’re not rushing to judgment and direct people appreciate that you’re being fact-based.
Performance Issues. Don’t use this method when there are clear performance issues or violations of codes of conduct. Those must be addressed head on.

Personal Prerequisites

Perspective Taking. It is imperative that you develop the see the worldview of your employee. You likely already have this skill if you’re skilled at negotiating or as a strategist. Leverage that skill towards your team.
Curiosity Your ability to actively listen, repeat back what you heard, and ask thoughtful questions before rushing to judgment are important. You should be curious and desire to learn as much as you can.
Vulnerable. I observe leaders struggle to demonstrate intellectual humility. The ability to admit you might be wrong and ask to be taught strengthens bonds with team members and gives you insights into how they work.

How do I teach my team to do this?

In your next 1on1 with a manager on your team:

Ask the manager to pick a team member they want to give feedback to and tell you the feedback they want to give.
Be Curious and Challenge the manager: How certain are you that the basis for your feedback is 100% accurate?
Be Curious and Challenge the manager to provide evidence and question the quality of the evidence.
Share with the manager your forming thoughts on their feedback. Invite the manager to give you their thoughts on your forming impression.
Go meta and ask the manager what just happened. “What did we just do and how did I do it?”
Ask the manager “How might you do this with your team members on your next 1on1?”

Doesn’t this make me less decisive?

No. The perceived quality of your decision making is improved by your ability to collect data inputs, analyze that data, and then make a data-driven decision. Your teams will trust you because you are a thoughtful decision maker.

In addition to your improving your leadership brand, you’ll also improve your talent retention. People on my team have declined offers that are 2x their current salary to stay because of the quality of coaching they receive from me. I know this is true because the team member shared the offer letter with me.

The collaborative approach I am pitching to you works. I know it works because I use it; employees tell me that they appreciate my collaborative nature and how it pushes them to grow in their roles and as people. There’s no magic. You can do it.

Cultural Stagnation = f(AI, and Creative Output)? And why team managers should care.

I’m thinking about the connection between AI and human creativity. The question is: what’s the connection creativity stagnation and AI’s transformative potential? And what can managers do about it?

I observe two things.

Scott Buchanan of Economists Writing Every Day writes that investors had high hopes for AI-related investments. The thinking is that AI would revolutionize the world. Recently, analysts wonder if they’ll see an ROI.
Ted Gioia of The Honest Broker writes that the entertainment industry is stagnating creatively. Music preferences are regressing to the past, the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century contained writers who were mainly known in the 20th century.

Here’s what I think I know.

AI is built on human knowledge.
Human knowledge is an output of humans — largely from some creative/scientific (they can be the same) production function.

Is it possible that we’re realizing that AI is not as revolutionary as we thought because we’re not as revolutionary as we hoped?

This is not the blog for people to learn how to adopt AI into their workflows. Plenty of smarter people are writing about that.

This is the blog for people who obsess about talent and want a (often contrarian) perspective. And because you’re a person who cares about talent, here’s how I believe like us act.

We do all we can to find generative talent. We open our minds to people who are different or don’t have the “perfect” resume and look for people with skills we can use. We increase the breadth and depth of our human capital!
We adopt management styles that promote creativity. We engage in brain storming, ask for talent to give us inputs into decisions, we give inputs, we let people experiment, and we help coach decision-making versus coaching outcomes.
We stop talking and listen more. We let talent give their ideas and we engage with their ideas. We say, “I think you’re trying to accomplish z, and you got outcome y, and and if you take path x your process may get you closer to z.”

Happy generating.

Feedback 101 – Engage vs Tell

Instead of thinking about how to give feedback, what feedback to give, or when to give it; consider engaging in your team’s work.

When team members first join my team, they typically ask how I handle feedback. I typically answer, I don’t give feedback. I get a puzzled look.

Many managers, perhaps you, engage with their teams by sharing their feedback on their work. They will offer balanced critique of what they like and then offer areas for improvement. Skilled managers help their teams grow by engaging in their development. That method works, but it positions the manager (in my opinion) more like a professor vs a fan.

I share that I am their biggest fan. And as their biggest fan I want to engage with them in their work. I want to help them strategize, be a second pair of eyes as they make interpretations of data, and be their negotiating sparring partner. I share that I’m happy to play the role of editor if they need. When they’re ready to pitch, I often ask if I can play the customer so that I can give them ideas at the end that will help them prepare. After their pitch, I’ll ask how it went — what did they expect to happen, what happened, and what learnings can we pull forward for the next pitch.

In that process I shared, where is the feedback? Where is the point where I ask, “may I share feedback?”

People want to tell themselves a story about themselves. In that story, they are doing work that matters. The best way to show someone that their work matters is to engage as a fan.

As AI rises, so to must creativity

Culture and music critic Ted Gioia, the Honest Broker, writes:

“The rapid rise of AI is actually the most profound evidence yet of cultural stagnation.” – Ted Gioia, gated source

I like culture, and Ted’s work, because culture is a factor in production and Ted blends culture + economics beautifully.

Culture influences ideas, human capital development, organizational design, work habits and norms, the preferences around customer consumption behavior, and the preferences around what firms people choose to work at. Culture influences everything!

Principle: To get the most from talent, deeply embed yourself in the culture.

Now you have my thoughts and why I like Ted, let’s consider:

Why does Ted think the culture is stagnating?

New and innovative music is not being introduced into the market.
Consumption habits are regressing to the past versus consuming at the margin.
Firms are optimizing for the formula that works. Look at the various remakes of old franchises: Marvel, Ghostbusters, and how much music sounds like hit music from days gone by.

What are some reasons Ted believes AI doesn’t help?

AI is fundamentally backward-looking relying on analyzing and re-combinating existing data rather than generating truly novel ideas or content;
AI recommendations biases existing preferences; and
AI-generated content imitates rather than innovates.

Why does this matter?

Growth happens at the margin.
Growth happens when people become more curious about the unknown and under-explored. Ideas are good!
Ideas gets the most utility when it’s tied to production. Talent needs to leverage their curiosity to make and ship new things.

What can you do about it?

Ask talent: What have you been curious about lately? What ideas are you exploring? What ideas do you think are under-explored?
Ask Talent: What do you think we’re missing here? Where do you think we need to spend more time and attention?
Challenge Talent: What’s one thing you could do today to leverage that curiosity and produce something valuable for the business? How can I help?

Want an example?

I work in Customer Success. I asked a new hire two questions:

Based on what you’ve experienced so far, what are we missing?
Where are we going wrong? I want your gut reaction.

The new hire introduced ideas from their previous role — they took an idea from their last culture and suggested our culture adopt the idea. Good thing the ideas are implementable.

We’re we stagnating before I asked this question? No, we’re in hyper-growth mode and moving fast. However, like Galileo’s ship, having an outsider give you their perspective gives you insight into what you might be missing.

How does this connect to my principle?

By actively engaging with a new hire and seeking their fresh perspective, I wasn’t just observing our culture from afar – I was deeply embedding myself in it. This approach manifests the principle in several ways:

I acknowledged that culture is not static, even in a fast-growing company.
My openness demonstrates valuing diverse perspectives, including those from outside our immediate cultural bubble.
I showed a willingness to question and potentially improve our current practices.
I facilitated the cross-pollination of ideas between different corporate cultures, which can drive innovation.

If you deeply embed yourself in the culture this way, you can create an environment where talent can thrive, new ideas can emerge, and you can actively combat the kind of corporate cultural stagnation.