How People-Centric Cultures Shape the Future of Work - Lorne Rubis

In today’s episode, we delve into the world of organizational culture with @Lorne Rubis. From the rinks of the @National Hockey League with the @LA Kings to the digital buzz of the dot-com era, to leading HR functions in financial services at @ATB and in education at @Norquest College, Lorne's professional story is one of developing leaders. 

He believes successful organizations are 'People First and Customer Obsessed'. He believes successful leaders are eternally curious. And in weighing the advice he wants to share most with the next generation of HR professionals, Lorne points to the importance of culture. 

We discussed why so many organizations get it wrong. And how we fix it. 

This was another memorable conversation and I hope you enjoy as much as I did recording it.

Lorne Rubis

Lorne Rubis has more than 40 years of culture, leadership and transformation experience in various C Suite roles at organizations

throughout North America and Europe. He currently advises CEOs from start-ups to well established, large corporations in both the private and public sector. He also recently co-founded Belongify (www.belongify.com) to focus on the evolution from inclusion to belonging in organizations.

Lorne held the positions of Chief Evangelist and Chief People Officer with ATB Financial and was instrumental in advancing ATB’s culture, to where it became widely recognized as one of the top companies to work for in North America.

Lorne has held executive positions driving culture and business transformation for a number of companies in the United States, including as an officer of a Fortune 50 company and as Vice President, Operations with the Los Angeles Kings. He has been the CEO of two privately held international companies, is a sought after thought leader, speaker, and cultural strategist.

Lorne is a published author (The Character Triangle) and was awarded the 2018 Ivey School of Business/HRD Magazine Canadian Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the Human Resource community and advancing the workplace in Canada. In 2020 the HRD Magazine included Lorne in their Global 100 list of top HR Leaders. 

Lorne holds a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Alberta and a Master of Science in Industrial and Labour Relations from the University of Oregon. He teaches courses on Culture and HR strategy at the U of Alberta EMBA program and at Harvard’s School of Extension. 

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Matt Burns

Matt Burns is an award-winning executive, social entrepreneur and speaker. He believes in the power of community, simplicity & technology.

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Transcript

Lorne Rubis: You. If you do those four things consistently in a work, in a team environment, you're going to advance psychological safety quite a bit. And it's also not doing some things like putting people in the penalty box, the contemptuous look, raising your eyebrows, all the things we do to, uh, distance people from going be, becoming fearful, to be genuine, and to be all in. Missing someone.

Matt Burns: Constraints drive innovation. Hey, everyone, it's Matt, here for another episode of Thinking Inside the Box, a show where we discuss the innovative ways organizations and their leaders overcome complex issues at work. If you're interested in checking out our other content, you can find us at our shiny new website, insidetheboxpodcast.com and on all of your favorite podcast platforms by searching Thinking Inside the Box. And if you enjoy the work we're doing here, consider leaving us a five star rating, a, uh, comment and subscribing. It ensures you get updated whenever we release new content and really helps amplify our message. In today's episode, we delve into the world of organizational culture with Lauren Rubis. From the rinks of the National Hockey League with the La Kings, to the digital buz of the.com era, to leading HR functions in financial services and education at ATB and NorQuest College, respectively. Lauren's professional story is one of developing leaders. He believes organizations that are successful are ultimately people first and customer obsessed. He believes successful leaders are eternally curious. And when I asked him what advice he wants to share most with the next generation of leaders, he points to the importance of culture. So we started there and discussed why so many organizations get it wrong and ultimately how we can fix it. It was another memorable conversation that I hope you enjoy as much as I did recording it. And now I bring you Lauren Rubis. Lauren, we've had a few of these in person, I think once at an awards ceremony for the great place to work. We've done this a couple of times over zoom calls. I'm fantastically excited to do this over at actual podcast. How are you today?

Lorne Rubis: I'm just great, Matt, thank you. And be as well. This is a chance just to have a conversation here, uh, and want to thank you and all your listeners for watchers, uh, for joining us. Great, awesome.

Matt Burns: It's going to be a great chat. But for those who don't maybe know Lauren Rubis, maybe about your background and experiences and what's led you to you.

Lorne Rubis: Know, I consider myself to be a, uh, culture strategist in some ways. Uh, my whole purpose in life is to dedicate, to find a way so that people at all levels can thrive at work and cultures can become more effective, workplaces could become more effective, leaders could be more capable. And, um, that's my whole purpose in life, is to kind of get up in the morning and contribute to that. So right now, uh, I worked for the CEO of a Fortune 50 company. I've started my own companies. Uh, I've been the chief operating operator of a Nasdaq technology company. I've, uh, been the CEO of a couple of companies, uh, with offices both in North America and Europe. Right now, after retiring from corporate life, where my last, uh, major role was the chief people officer and chief evangelist at, um, financial, uh, services company here in Alberta. But my work now is around, uh, advancing culture. I teach kick off the MBA program with the University of Alberta. I teach a culture ah class at Harvard University. We've got three or four major clients that we're working with to help them advance culture. So I have a chance to be a practitioner as well as to speak about it, research about it, and we're also dedicated to this notion of creating more conditions for belonging in organizations as well. We think there's an emerging need for that to be more, uh, to become more defined and a framework to act on. So, a little long winded, but that's kind of, um I've been at this for almost 50 years. Um, so I've got a few angles, and I think my best work is in front of me.

Matt Burns: Matt well, I couldn't agree with you more, and it's long winded because, to your point, it's anchored in a ton of experience across a multiple industries. And some of the things that you didn't mention, but I saw as doing my own research for the show, I mean, multiple industries, multiple roles, including VP of Operations for the National Hockey League, la Kings, chief operating Officer for Direct marketing for, uh, zones during the.com boom. Um, of course, you mentioned ATB a financial institution that's also a crown corporation owned by the province of Alberta. So you've seen business from a number of different vantage points, but one thread that seems to work its way through your entire career, Lauren, is this idea of high performing work. And I'm just curious, where does that passion come from? Where does that passion to drive high performing work in organizations?

Lorne Rubis: Know, I think, um, my childhood, uh, was, uh, dominated by I was, I just loved playing every sport and enjoyed it. Uh, so I had a sense for trying to understand what made teams work. Why do teams win? How could I contribute to being, uh, a leader on a team so that could be a winning team? And I've had, like, in most things in life, I had successes and failures at that. But I was, uh, playing football for the University of Alberta at that time when the Golden Bears had championship teams. And when I finished, I was going to, uh, just be a physician teacher. That was kind of my maybe I might want to be a principal one day, but I just love coaching teams. So my first job as a 21 year old kid with my hair down on my shoulders was, uh, to teach at a junior high school in northeast Edmonton. The school was kind, uh, of at a low point. Morale was not that high. Uh, their physic program was a tattered mess. Uh, morale was fair. It was low. Four years later, that school completely transformed. Completely. And it was the faculty, of course, and the students primarily, and parents and us, took something from here and made it to there. We became, in some ways, a high performing culture. And my last day there, that when I said goodbye to the students. So I was gone off to do graduate work. They all got on their chairs, was kind of the last day of school. We're in the gymnasium and cheered for about five minutes. I sat on the stage crying like a baby. And I realized when I reflected on that, we were cheering each other. We were cheering what we collectively did. And I had a role to play in that, maybe even an instrumental one, but it was hundreds of people. And that got me on this journey of what really happened there. I taught Mark Besse, by the way. He was, uh, in junior high at that time. Grade six actually tells you how old I am. But it was something about just triggered me around anywhere I went around. How might we consider how do we create a great culture so that people can flourish, performance can increase? And that was the, um, igniter.

Matt Burns: Matt. Well, one of the terms that I've heard you use a number of times, both in live conversations, but certainly in publications, is this idea of people first and customer obsessed. And I'm curious, from your perspective, in an organizational context, why is that so critical to having a successful work culture?

Lorne Rubis: Well, at the beginning of every single process, but let me just back up a little bit. If I've looked at many, many engagement surveys across all kinds of organization situations, often the number one frustration for people is a statement. Something like, I don't have the tools or the process or systems to get things done. And a lot of times people look at, uh, other more surface or things to really kind of increase engagement. Like pay would be one of them, which is important, of course, benefits or even more frivolous stuff. Let's bring in the foosball table and, uh, ping pong table and people are going to be satisfied. What really gets people up in the morning is when they can complete their day, whatever that day looks like when they've given someone another human being or a group of people, uh, a great experience. And when you could do that, you can get up all day long and you might be tired, but you're energized in a positive way. But imagine going to work every day and knowing you're going to fail, knowing you're going to be in conflict, knowing that the friction is so much or so variable you have no idea that you can be successful. And when I talk about people first, Matt, I talk about organizations and leaders understanding that at the front end of every processor system is a human being. And when we design roles, when we design positions, we need to carefully consider to create them in a way so people can feel a sense of success and well being at the end of the day. And that's what I mean by people first. A lot of times people think it's, uh, a big philosophical HR statement, and in some ways it is, but much more deeper than that. It's a design statement, it's a belief statement. It's a commitment to go, matt, we would never ask you to do something that was a miserable, lousy experience day in and day out. We would never do that. You may be doing it now, but we're working to fix it. We need your help to do it. Because as a human being, you are the source. You're not just a resource here. You're not just a line item on the income statement. You are the source. And we're going to be human first. And that's what we need. And that's why it's people first and focusing on the customers. And I think if you do that, the data will tell you your shareholders and stakeholders, shareholders in a commercial organization or stakeholders in a public institution are going to be well served because human beings are going to go home mostly and be productive.

Matt Burns: Uh, yeah, it's one of those misnomers that certainly earlier in my career you heard this tension point between doing the right thing for the employees and doing the right thing for the business as if they were at ODS. And I think you've well articulated that they're frankly symbiotic that if you deliver great success for your customers and your employees, you're going to have great financial results. And especially in a knowledge based economy where this idea of intrinsic motivation, the idea of supporting people by providing a psychologically safe place for them to thrive is absolutely critical if you're trying to elicit the best possible performance from them on a consistent basis. Because not to mention the things that are happening inside of work, but there's lots of stuff happening outside of work as well that contributes to people, um, and their performance at work. I'm curious, as a leader who's worked in a number of different capacities and with a number of different types of employees talking about athletes, the corporate setting, everything in between, how do you recommend that leaders go about creating psychological safety to drive performance within their teams?

Lorne Rubis: There's four things, uh, that I encourage that are accessible behaviors. They're very accessible to us. They're hard to execute on in some way because we have to be conscious and to practice them. One is, uh, first and foremost is to be authentic and allow yourself to bring yourself, your full, authentic, vulnerable self into the workplace and by vulnerable I'm not talking about, uh, exposing things about ourselves that are beyond natural boundaries of our privacy. I'm talking about the ability to recognize that we can't do everything. Leaders should be great, but not perfect. They are not perfect. And so the first thing is be authentic, be real. If we don't show up in our total authentic, full self, uh, then how could we ask everybody else? The second one is how we deal with mistakes. So if you want to create psychological safety, then either walking by a mistake and ignoring it or overreacting to it caused psychological safety issues. So if you genuinely take mistakes as fast learning and you jump on it with the best sense of engaging people to make it a learning experience and genuine, not one of these, oh, we're a learning organization until a mistake happens and I'm going to kick your ass. I don't like to hurt people's feelings, so I'm going to walk by it both cause psychologists. So those are two things, your genuine self, how you deal with mistakes, uh, as a fast learner. The third is, uh, having the ability to have crunchy conversations, clarity, know. And Brene Brown, the, uh, well known author and researcher, has probably, uh, coined this best clarity's, kindness. So how could if I care for you, Matt, I've got to make sure that you're clear about your expectations, we understand each other, blah, blah, blah. So that's the third one. The fourth is, uh, and it's kind of the sneakiest and maybe the most powerful one is that offer what you can and ask for what you need. So ask for help, offer help. If you do those four things consistently in a team environment, you're going to advance psychological safety quite a bit. And it's also not doing some things like putting people in the penalty box, the contemptuous look, raising your eyebrows. Uh, all the things we do to distance people from becoming fearful, to be genuine and to be all, you know, uh, Amy Edmondson, the, uh, famous PhD. Uh, and author and researcher from Harvard's. Done the leading work on psychological safety. But there are many other people that are doing that great additional work right now. So there's much more complete work on that. You do those four things though, you're going to really move your team a long way.

Matt Burns: Well, you need to have your team working all in the same direction because as you alluded to earlier, not everything goes to plan all of the time. And I'm sure if we asked 21 year old Lauren Rubis, long hair and all, about some of the challenges that you had faced early in your academic career and your athletic career and then moving on to the business career, you know that sometimes there's challenges in going from point A to point B. Transformation is hard, change is hard. As humans, we naturally resist it. You're building teams when you're building coalitions. How do you go about addressing some of those big challenges up front so that you can make the progress you need to see over in the medium and long term?

Lorne Rubis: Yeah. So you're going to laugh at this. Maybe, Matt, your audience may just kind of sit back and kind of, uh so I'm going to just park the bigger fancier, strategic notions of transformation for a, you know, we can talk about the pro size stuff, uh, or we could talk about the bigger stuff, know, the best thinkers are thinking about. But let me just back up for a little bit around one of the things about human beings, uh, that I always start with. Always. Uh, now, I've made it a resident part of my work. Whether I'm at Harvard or at the MBA class or client. I will put everybody in circle, and I will tell them we're going to share answer to a question. And all they have to do is be present, put everything away, and just listen to their colleagues for three minutes in an uninterrupted, total, immersed way at the end. No comments, please. Just allow it to be. And then we'll debrief the whole thing after we have a conversation, what we notice. So I often ask a question like, tell me about the hardest decision you've ever had to make personally or professionally. What you learned from it usually takes if you got ten people, it takes about an hour. It's one of the most profound things that happens every time. And my messages connect before content. And here's where I'm going. When you listen to the stories of each other's stories, what we find is that most of the stories are around how we've had to change. We've run into something that's caused us to have to transfer. So our stories of transformation and change, that's what makes us up. That's our story. And when people start to realize, wait a minute, we have all the resilience and capability to do that here. And knowing each other's stories is so massively important. So if at some level, if you're going to cause a major transformation, you need to kind of embed this notion of connect before content. You need to allow for storytelling now in a more strategic kind of a way. The key transformation issues are that people need to know Why? Why the hell do we have to first and foremost, why? And I don't care how long you need to spend on it, but until people can make a personal, emotional connection to the why. So that's not an email, that's not a let's, uh, do this, and hey, Mark, Tom, take care of that and put it on the internal website, and let's send an email out from the CEO that we're going to do this. It is a personal, emotional connection with whether you've got 80 people or 8000 people, every single person, they need to know why, and then they need to know how they contribute to that why, how it's going to impact. Them, um, how they can be part of it and that there's a community there that's going to help them be successful and be part of it, or if they are not going to be part of it, that there's a dignified way to say goodbye. But you need to have these elements. Uh, now on a leverage point of view, you got four things. You've got the learning system, the communication system, the engagement system, and the reward and recognition system. Those are the big levers. You can pull those levers, but you have to do it with, uh, people in mind first with an understanding of the why. And then we have got some other things we do when we're doing massive transformation, that there has to be a personal emotional connection to it or people will not be part, they will not sign up to be part of that movement.

Matt Burns: It's true, ah, if they don't know what's in it for them, people are going to resist it and struggle it, even if we know that it's ultimately in their best interest. Lauren I've done a lot of technology implementations and transformations over my career. And early in my journey through that I often get frustrated with stakeholders because I was frustrated because I could see a future state where this particular technology and pick any one of 100 we've implemented. But this particular technology was going to make your life easier. You're going to have better reporting or more automation or better visibility or whatever that might be. But the path to get from A to B requires people to change their current way of doing things. Learn new skills, new interfaces, new user experiences, and often requires them to do that incrementally to their day to day job when most people that I talk to are already working more hours a week than they would rather, and understanding that and ingesting that experience. We were able to adjust our approach earlier in the change management journey when it came to technology transformation, to your point, to elicit what's in it for them, but also to create a condition whereby we didn't set up the organization for failure by promising perfection, which I think is a mistake that people often do in transformation. It's like we're going to get to this utopian state. Well, to get to utopia, it takes a couple of bumps along the way. But if you collaborate with the stakeholders along the way and give them confidence that you're going to be with there and have a feedback loop that ingests their feedback course corrects, honors it, responds to it, you're going to have a much smoother process than to your point that Friday afternoon email and intranet, uh, update that's just simply going to fall flat because you can broadcast it. But if behavior doesn't change, you really haven't transformed your team, your organization, your process, I think your point is really well taken, Lauren. I think I know you enough to know that you don't like talking about yourself. So I'm going to put you in an uncomfortable position here, and I apologize in advance, but it's my podcast, so I can kind of do what I want in that regard. One of the first ways that you and I interacted was in 2018, and I actually had the privilege of sitting in an audience where you were recognized in 2018 for the Canadian Lifetime Achievement Award for your contributions to the HR profession in this country. And that was certainly a proud moment for you, I have no doubt, but certainly for all of us in the HR profession, because when we look back at the contributions that we've made as a profession, we look at people like you and say, you've helped get us to this point. Now, having your unique path through the professional landscape, I'm just curious, in your own words, what do you think sets your approach apart from perhaps the other contemporaries in the industry that has helped us advance this way of thinking into the corporate world?

Lorne Rubis: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for that. And, uh, I so much appreciate, uh, your comments there, Matt. But hopefully I can respond in a confident, but hopefully still humble kind of way. I do all kinds of and continue to do all kinds of clumsy things, make mistakes. Um, I think I'm a constant learner. I just never stop. I just love to just soak into this. So I'm constantly trying to stay current with what's going on, and I think that helps. But I think in the bigger context, um, that I genuinely care. I mean, I genuinely, uh, and deeply care about, and not to say others don't, but I'm sure I just in my own way, I do. And then what happens, uh, when you have so many experiences, is that you get to draw on storytelling a little bit more, and that helps a little bit. Like, I noticed that in my Harvard and my MBA classes, that they'll often throw challenges out to me in the best way. But I've got a repertoire of experience that I can draw on, and I get to explain that or react to it, or give some guidance or perspective. Only a perspective, one perspective with, uh, that, uh, context, sometimes that helps. And I guess the third thing, besides constant learning and deeply caring, is I genuinely have committed to building a body of work. Like, I have a clear body of work that I've published, that I've developed, that I've invested in as a tangible item or tangible consideration of, uh, uh, the work I do. And I try and share it openly. I try to give it. I don't give my consulting type away, but I give my content away as much as I can and, uh, just hope to generously share it. And hope that people find it useful. So I don't know if that is unique, but that path has worked for me. And then I'm blessed with my partner of, uh, 52 years. She was my prom date. And we have three wonderful adult, uh, children and four wonderful grandchildren. All that stuff in the background, with all its ups and downs and messiness and everything else, uh, has just allowed me and luck and a lot of screw ups. I mean, there are things along the way that I wish I could have redone, or they were painful moments, right? And moments of sheer joy and euphoria. All that combination is a messy puzzle piece of who I am. But constant learning, curiosity, uh, that goes with a deep care, and developing a clear body of work and then repertoire storytelling, that's been a useful pattern for me.

Matt Burns: Hey, everyone, it's Matt here. I hope you're enjoying today's conversation. And before we continue, i, uh, want to update you on my latest creative project, this Week at Work. Every Friday at 07:00 a.m Pacific Standard Time. That's 10:00 a.m. Eastern and 03:00. P.m GMT. My good friend Chris Rainey of HR Leaders and I discuss the latest trending topics on the minds of executives globally. From organizational culture to technology and the future of work. We cover it all, and we invite some of our favorite colleagues to join us, from Dave Ulrich to Whitney Johnson, um, and executives from iconic brands such as NASA, Krispy Kreme, and WebMD. What can I say? We like to keep things interesting. And if you've been following us for a while, you'll no doubt recognize the fun partnership chris and I have developed over years podcasting together. We're not afraid to be real, share our own challenges, and ask the tough questions. Joining? Well, that part's easy. Follow me on LinkedIn, click the bell icon on the top right of my profile, and you'll get notified when we go live. And now back to our discussion. While you said it earlier, I think the best is yet to come when it comes to your career and two ventures right now that you're invested in pretty seriously. One is culture genics, where you employ a, uh, proprietary culture, diagnostic and customer experience framework to help organizations develop those aforementioned extraordinary cultures and then belongify, which equips leaders to create team experiences that invigorate people and set the path for success going forward. Maybe perhaps in your own words, share a bit about each of those organizations and your inspiration for creating them.

Lorne Rubis: Yeah, thank you. And thank you again for noticing. One of the things, when I retired from ATV, uh, I had the knee replacement. So I was lying around, and I, uh, was thinking back around, how would I frame up the 40 years if I were to give something accessible in the form of a framework, what would that look like? And then what's the research telling me? And, uh, I started to kind of do a lot of sticky note kind of work around it and ended up developing what I thought was this integrated framework of cultural elements and there were ten of them. My view is that in order to advance a, ah, culture, you have to be intentional about it. And to be intentional about it, you have to take it out of its mushiness and put some definition to it so you can act on it. So that framework was ten elements of being people first customer assist, having an uh, inspiring purpose story, having intentional values that really mean something great, not perfect leadership, psychological safety and belonging, acute, uh, listening and inviting people to speak up, peer to peer power, uh, plane experimentation and personal equity. And I deeply go into all those with my clients and with people that I'm blessed with enough to have the students in my classes. And then with my partner, Debbie Blakeman, who is uh, a CPO at, uh, ATB after me and some help from industrial psychologists, we built a diagnostic to go with those ten elements and it gives you culture, uh, health score. And I'm proud to say that uh, people around the world are starting to use both the framework and the diagnostic. That diagnostic then provides a basis for where to start. Like everybody's at some place in their culture, everybody has them and subcultures. But this gives a whole picture of every thousands of people or hundreds of people and says there's where we are, there's where our strengths are, there's where we got some gaps. Now, uh, let's go to work. And then we have a process we use to bring people to go and make this transformation. Transformation may be a dumb word overused word. We already have a culture. We're going to try and advance it and make it better. On the Belong advice, I'll take a deep breath there to stop there. That's culture genics. Culture genics does that consulting work. We tend to compete with McKinsey, Deloitte, Heidrick, those people that are in it. But we're a boutique firm. Essentially, we just have us to uh, bring to the table. Should I stop there? You want to hear a little bit about Belongify?

Matt Burns: I'd love to hear more about it. I think it's two different lenses. You're talking about the organizational challenge. Now Belongify is that leadership helping their team?

Lorne Rubis: What about that right at team level? And what started that, Matt, is that when I was sitting back, lying there and asking myself if I was a CEO again, what would I do? And I'm going, you know, what I wouldn't do is I wouldn't wait for my teams just to evolve and hope that leadership by itself would make those teams more effective. That at minimum, I want uh, a number of things to happen to create meaningful belonging. Because I was also inspired that all the diversity, equity, inclusion work that's been going on. For well over 40 years now really m with marginal effectiveness. That what's missing is that uniqueness of that individual. And of course we want a more diverse, we have to have a more diverse, more equitable and more inclusive environment. But at the end of the day, it ends up to me, uh, you and me. Like people want to contribute because even though they may represent a group or an identity, they want to contribute because they're them as individuals they want to succeed and belong. So my view is how can we make that happen and ah, increase productivity and improve leadership effectiveness and do it in a really accessible, simple way. And my view was that you have to connect before content. You need to know each other's stories and strengths. So be intentional about that. Secondly, then have a psychological safe environment. If you don't have that all the data you can look at all the data, it's a huge distinguishing factor and it makes sense. Most of us have felt at times at risk and what do we do? We back off, uh, we turtle naturally. So you got to have a psychological safe mind. The third thing is that rather than just got to get caught in transaction, you've got to be making a contribution to the purpose. You got to know what that is, what's your purpose, team purpose and the organization purpose. If not you're doing a job and that's not the measurable contribution. Are you creating value towards that purpose? And the last thing is be a difference maker both at an individual a team level. Because even though you and I are replaceable Matt, in terms of the things that we do, you and I are know when I leave a team or you leave a team or a situation, that team will never be the same. Never. Because we bring this unique kind of thing. So how do we activate that difference making? My view was that if you can do that in a compressed period of time, every team can create a conversation about that and start acting on it. Every team would improve, the organization would improve, leaders would get better because they've got great conditions for it. Individuals idea would have a greater sense of contribution, of belonging, meaningful contribution and the teams have to make space for that with each other and that's a big lift for the whole company. Without the big giant strategic stuff that we're doing here in culture Gen X where we got CEOs and champions together, this can happen. Um, right. It doesn't matter what kind of team at the team level you do that your team is going to prove and that's what belongs trying to do. And it has been a struggle. I uh, have had my butt kicked with this startup trying to get it, figure out how to scale it, make it accessible and that kind of stuff. And we're two years in, we got customers and we're trying to learn and I'm telling you, we're having a hell of a time figuring out how to scale and it's a good thing to wake up in the morning and have to worry about doing well.

Matt Burns: It's a complicated problem to solve for and you pointed it out, well, it's easy and difficult simultaneously. So uh, I had the privilege in a previous life of overseeing people analytics for a large multinational in which we would collect millions of data points on employees around engagement and sentiment and belonging and all the things that you'd want to assess as a HR department, as an organization. And one study that came clear as day, that was frankly surprising to me was when we looked at the motivators for people to be engaged and to stay in the organization and to deliver performance, was this idea of do I have friends at work?

Lorne Rubis: Yes.

Matt Burns: And the idea yeah, it's massive. And in the context of team do, you mentioned this earlier, there's an element of team cohesion that propels collective and individual performance that once you crack that, it really does become a bottom up. To use a tired analogy. Bottom up type effort versus the culture genics piece is much more anchored on a top down methodology around transformation. And I think both can be successful, but both require alignment through the organization. And I think right now it's particularly challenging to approach bottom up, not because it's the wrong thing to do, but because organizations themselves are trying to figure out how they're going to operate in today's reality. And that generally necessitates, uh, a, uh, circling of the wagons and people kind of shortening up the inclusion sphere and trying to make decisions in a centralized way that they then cascade down. Like given all the ambiguity and the uncertainty and the volatility, most executive teams that I talk to are bringing things in. They're looking for outside perspective. But when it comes to driving team performance, they're very much leaning on tangible technological tools or artificial intelligence and they're looking for those types of benefits. Um, whereas to your point, while those are useful and certainly part of a balanced scorecard, you do need to have team cohesion. You do need to create that, um, resiliency and redundancy within the team process so that you can inevitably endure the ups and downs which transcend having a laptop for two years or getting access to a SaaS based software that can make your job easier. So I think the challenge is present, but I think you are doing the.

Lorne Rubis: Right you ah know, it's interesting because the two other bookends we add to this work of belonging and increasing team performance, Matt, are the welcome and the leave and the goodbye. And I want to just talk about that for a minute, back to your friend thing, uh, which is really important research and important for people to consider. But um, I'm just going to talk about the welcome for a bit. So we in many organizations, we do a lousy job of just orientation, right? And onboarding it's very mediocre. Some do it really well, but from a cultural perspective, so people understand what's expected of them, we often don't do a very good job. Even worse, the welcome is often a completely, uh, undetermined, undeveloped process. In other words, people show up, no one's there to greet them, um, they don't have their, uh, laptop or they're not on the system, blah, blah, blah. But way more than that, they don't feel welcomed. So if we could really welcome people and then give them success and give them this path to having relationships and build friendships, the success rate of that team, if that's done really well, the data is it's a massive increase, a chance of success. Now, at the same time, we have a paradox because we're asking people to lead. So we want you to belong and commit and be all in. But we may have to lay off six, um, months from now because something's massively happened, we've had to reinvent, blah, blah, blah. So I think we need to be great at the goodbye. So I can't invite you to come in and really have you commit to belonging. I think if you're looking over your shoulder all the time going, these guys could cut me off the system and I'm gone. I get maybe a decent severance package, maybe. But how do you expect me to be all in when I know that's going to happen? So I think we have to change the thinking and definitions around the leave and the goodbye, and knowing every one of us is going to have a last day. Every one of us. So why not predetermine the conditions for a phenomenal goodbye? Unless you do something that's totally inappropriate or immoral or legal or something like that, that's a different thing then. But otherwise, the leaving out of organizations and the goodbye sucks. Whether we do it or we're invited, and it's, uh, done to us. And we need to make that totally agree.

Matt Burns: And even in cases where someone leaves under conditions that nobody would prefer, even that needs to be handled with the degree of care and intentionality so as to support the organization. Because, Lauren, I mean, call it a privilege, call it a curse, but I had the privilege, I guess, in some cases, of architecting some of those activities where we're doing assessments of talent and we're going through the organization and saying, okay, we need to make some tough decisions. And we were very mindful of the fact that everyone that was to leave the organization, uh, as from our doing, they were alumni. And we knew that the people that would stay behind would look to the experiences had by their fellow coworkers or former coworkers, and would very much make judgments about our organization based on how their colleagues were treated on the way out the organization. And we learned that lesson the hard way. And I think it's something that can't be understated, especially in today's environment, where we're moving into more of a hybrid work modality, um, remote work modality. I mean, I've been lucky. I've worked remotely for probably close to ten years now in my last few roles, and even as a CHRO, most of my team was located separately from my actual office. Um, which taught me some hard lessons around being really intentional about connection, and being really intentional about experience design. And this is where I started my now seven year rant. Lauren, uh, going on, uh, with the inevitable merger of marketing and HR, because marketing does a great job mapping out customer experiences and moments that are excellent. HR is getting down that path, but can certainly learn more by creating journey maps, experience maps, employee maps that illuminate and elucidate the opportunities for us to have a positive interaction, or perhaps one that falls short. And you can measure against it, you can put resources against it, you can assess and determine sentiment for people who've gone through the process. But we need to get away from this idea of, to your point, the informality of we wouldn't onboard a customer the way that we onboard our employees. In a lot of cases, we need to bring the same standard over because we're entering into an environment now where talent is becoming increasingly scarce and as a consequence, we don't have the luxury of treating talent like a disposable asset that can be just simply m exploited until we feel like it's done and then we can move on. This is not a different era. We actually have to treat people with respect. Beyond it being the right thing to do. It's a business imperative. As we started this conversation saying so, I think your points are all well taken. It's really about how do you ingest all of that, and yet right size fit it for a world where we know things could change again in six months. But to create that tension, to create that trust, to create that balance, is a tough challenge for any organization today.

Lorne Rubis: Yeah, it's such an interesting thing, as you describe it, because I'm really invested and curious about, uh, what's going around the tension between working remotely or hybrid, and everybody getting called back, quote, into the campus or into the office. Goldman just called everybody back for five days. Amazon has made it a demanding thing. They had a million employees. They have or some crazy number, and the stories behind that are crazy. And you go on and on, even zoom, ironically. And I think we have this tension between top leaders trying to gather in and getting control post pandemic, and this very natural, vibrant tension from the experience that we all had two years being remote. I'm going, Wait a minute, don't call me in for the campus so I can go on a meet or a zoom call or a teams call the whole time. Don't come, don't put me through a two hour commute or make me turn my personal life side up. I said think about me as a human being in this. And whether we like it or not, top executives are going, and we need to get back to Ibada, uh, and we need to get back to performance. And I think we're on a teeter totter. And I think leaders that want to go back are wrong headed on it. And I think team people that want to just do everything around their own personal lives, not thinking about how to the impact of the organization, I think that's wrong headed, too. And we just need to find ways. But I'll tell you what, the way isn't demanding. Everybody comes in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I mean, that's just dumb. And I'm trying to be provocative. I think it's simplistic, and it's not the way we as human beings work. And it makes it simple to make a policy like that, but it just, uh, oftentimes just rolls people over. Yeah. Anyway, I just think that what you're saying is we have this very interesting tension about these organizations that must move quickly, make decisions, be profitable, sustainably profitably, avoid risk, while we're navigating through talent that wants a little more flexibility, the ability to contribute in a more complete human way. And they're not going to put up with just the draconian stuff. They're going to quit. Yeah.

Matt Burns: And they're going to have opportunities to go elsewhere to find, uh, something that fits better. It's an interesting question, and I have perhaps a unique vantage point insofar as being in HR for 20 years now. I started out in a world where most of my coaches and leaders were baby boomers. That came from a world where you met your boss in the office. When your boss said, Come meet me, you asked when and where. There wasn't this level of collaborative approach to leadership that was now present, which I'm thankful for the migration to that approach. And I talked to a lot of leaders that are struggling with the idea of, uh, to your point, a feeling of a loss of control or more pressure from an executive team or a board or somebody else that's saying we need to demonstrate urgency and action to solve problem, whatever that might be. And the easiest jerk reaction is, okay, of what I've known my entire career and where I've had success is, let's bring everyone together for a giant huddle and solve this problem. Awesome. Except that doesn't take into account, to your point, the nuances of the people that we're asking to undertake those activities, nor are we asking about the practicality of the request relative to the activities that are being done. And I think that's where intentionality comes into play. If you want to schedule a three day offsite and go to Jasper and have a team building session. What a great way for everyone to come together and have a conversation and talk strategy and team building and the path forward. But to your point, if you want to put people in a cubicle four days a week and have them do most of their work individually with their headphones on or on a zoom call, then you're basically robbing them of the flexibility that could be afforded if they were to choose to work somewhere else. Now, there are some people that prefer to be in the office and I certainly don't want to, uh, folks that prefer to be there. We create the flexibility for that. But I think the point you're making is it's this drive towards meeting people where they're at and creating different opportunities for them to interact with the organization such that they can choose to do so in the manner that makes the most sense. But what it doesn't preclude, and this is where I think it gets a little bit of a red herring. It turns into a binary conversation and nobody is, I think, suggesting it's all remote or all in the office. There's a place in between where we can say, hey, for your unique role at this particular time, at this particular evolution of the company, what would make the most sense? Let's have a conversation, let's figure this out. And in some cases that might evolve and change and that might cause us to rethink this employment relationship. But let's talk a bit about the problem we're trying to solve, how we can solve it together. And no matter where the work occurs, one thing the manager never loses is the right to follow up and manage performance. And some leaders, frankly, are more comfortable doing that in their office, reviewing paper based documents. And some are quite happily doing it asynchronously while everyone's in the flow of work. But there needs to be a shift around to your point, intentionality around design of leaders so that we can really meet employees where they need to be so they can deliver the best possible performance. Because if we take the premise that everybody wants to do a good job, let's just make it easy for them to do.

Lorne Rubis: And Matt, you're gifted as an analyst and m much more. But you know, uh, your ability to bring data and insight is just part of kind of who you are. And I think, uh, a lot of leaders, rather than trying to find what's the value that I'm looking for and a way of measuring that, it's easier to measure activity. Matt's in his car is in at 630 in the morning and it's 2023 and this is still happening. Or let's promote Mohammed or whatever because he works 18 hours a day. I mean, it's activity based as opposed to value based. All those people may be worthy of a promotion, but, uh, I think we have to get away from just measuring, just transaction and activity. And it's easier though, when you can see people sometimes. And I get it, I don't want to oversimplify, but there's a lot of you. And sometimes people look at the data but they're so emotionally vested in a binary kind of thing, they don't care about the data anyway. Yeah, I know my team is more happy when they can do this and they're more productive. But I genuinely believe there's more innovation that happens at work when everybody comes in and collides. So come in. Where's the research? Well, uh, I don't care. I believe it's this way. But I think here's what I do know. This 2023 and the stories I still hear. Here's some stories I sat in my car and cried, literally cried for a half hour before I could muster up the energy to go into work. I was let go from an organization that I raved about with my family and friends for 20 years and went to work for a month without telling them that I had lost my job. I went and sat in the Starbucks over that was too embarrassed to tell them or how was people go home and say, how was your first day? Well, my first day was after a really rigorous recruitment and selection process. No one was there to greet me. The uh, three meetings got canceled. Then they put me in a room. I did compliance videos for 4 hours. That was your first date. These stories, what the dinner table conversations? How would you describe your leader? And after two martinis or three glasses of wine and they have this story of being minimized, marginalized and those stories are still too prevalent in 2023, we need to expand those stories. Uh, we're human beings and we're always going to make mistakes and we're going to be clumsy and treat each other poorly from time to time. But those stories should be diminishing and they seem almost in some cases to be flourishing, need to expunge.

Matt Burns: I couldn't agree more. Lauren, thank you so much for your time today. It's always a pleasure reconnecting getting your insights on all things leadership, future of work, and organizational culture. For folks who want to get a hold of you, where's the best place.

Lorne Rubis: To find know drop me a note at lgrubis@gmail.com or, uh, Lauren@belongify.com, uh, or poken@culturegenics.com Laurenrubis.com my website or belongify.com and uh, I'm active on social media and hang out with me any kind of way. Matt, thank you for just allowing me to, kind know, just share, uh, my thoughts with you, and I just appreciate our conversation together and the thinking that you bring around talk, uh, about thought leadership and bring people to the if I can be part of that any kind of little, tiny breadcrumb way, I'm happy to do it. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. Thank you to your audience for caring enough to listen.

Matt Burns: Pleasure was ours. It was certainly more than a breadcrumb. And looking forward to continuing this conversation. Uh, offline. Thanks, Lauren.

Lorne Rubis: Yeah, I look forward to it, man. Thanks a lot.

Matt Burns: Ento HR is a digital transformation consultancy working at the intersection of strategy, technology and people operations. We partner with organizations, private equity and venture capital firms to accelerate value creation and identify the organization's highest leverage initiatives. And this can take place in many forms, from strategic planning and alignment to technology procurement, implementation and integration, along with organizational design, process reengineering and change management. With our proven track record of working with complex, high growth organizations, we provide a uh lens that goes beyond the balance sheet, increasing enterprise readiness, resilience and value. For more information, check us out@bentohr.com.