2152: Experiencing Growth? How To Swim Before Your Organization Is Sunk by Christine Comaford of Smart Tribes Institute on Effective Leadership

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[00:00:30] This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

[00:01:00] This is Optimal Work Daily. Experiencing Growth? How to Swim Before Your Organization is Sunk by Christine Comaford of Smart Tribes Institute. Are you in the midst of a mergers and acquisitions adventure? Growth can be threatening, but it doesn't have to be. My client had already acquired three competitors, tripled their headcount, and quintupled their revenue in only a four-year period.

[00:01:25] Revenue had surged from $50 million to $250 million as they moved rapidly through two key inflection points. Though mergers and acquisitions, M&A, are an exciting and powerful path to rapid growth, they often bring tremendous stress, leading to critter state behavior. Assess what we found. The amount of change due to the acquisitions had hurt employee retention due to four competing cultures.

[00:01:52] One culture was very conservative, ties every day in every role. One culture was very laid back, jeans, flip-flops, and t-shirts. And one culture was middle of the road, like the parent company was. Since the cultures hadn't been integrated into a singular, cohesive one, silos had formed, slowing effective information flow and decision-making. And trust was low as a result. Now that the basic integration was done, it was essential to ask, who are we going to be together?

[00:02:23] What is our tribal identity? It was time to create trust and tribe. Lack of trust creates an environment where concerns quickly evolve into fears. And when fears collide with a belief that the system is failing, or that one doesn't and never will belong, trouble results. As distrust and fear increase, the negative impact on employee morale, engagement, and performance accelerate.

[00:02:48] The end results are disengaged employees, frustrated management, and lower profits. And the problem comes from four key emotional experiences. One, a sense of injustice. The experience of unfairness tamps down the insula, the part of the brain responsible for emotional hurt and intuition.

[00:03:09] If a person is experiencing unfairness, they will spend more time in critter state, which adversely affects performance, decision-making, collaboration, overall peace, and happiness. Two, lack of hope. The experience of hopelessness is even more painful than unfairness. And it's below critter state on the emotional range. In neurolinguistics, the states of hopeless, helpless, worthless, and grief or terror are considered baseline states.

[00:03:38] It doesn't get worse than this. Three, lack of confidence. Depending on the person and the degree of lack of confidence, we'll likely see procrastination, reluctance to take risks, playing small, and, yes, more critter state. And four, desire for change. This is encouraging, as there's some energy here. Desire for change means we can envision a possible future where things are better.

[00:04:06] This lights up the ventral striatum, where we anticipate reward. If we can increase this experience, we can get into smart state. Act. What we did. In this case, we had to release resistance, make new meaning, and establish a new identity, and enroll and engage. First, we did an SPM index to gauge how everyone felt and determine what they needed most. We found that people really wanted belonging. No surprise.

[00:04:35] And we did culture coaching for a year to create the cultural rituals to help people come together. The new blend of leadership team then took a roadshow to all sites to make everyone feel everyone is in it together, and to make clear that no single site is better than others. The main communication? You are safe here. We are all in this together. And everybody matters. We also had to acknowledge the grieving.

[00:05:00] After all, some well-loved employees had lost their jobs, and you can't have two HR departments and two finance divisions. And some product lines and service offerings were cut as well, since they weren't profitable or relevant to the new entity. So we designed parting rituals to minimize the grieving, and acknowledge and appreciate the parting people's contributions. Together, we forged a new vision and set of company values, and of course, dress code, business casual.

[00:05:28] And we made sure to set up cross-functional teams that were, of course, diverse for all new initiatives, cultural, sales, marketing, or operational. In a word, we created more collaboration, communication, transparency, and mutual respect. Everyone owned that rebuilding trust is a shared responsibility. They were in it together. Mission. Why are we here as an organization? Why do we exist?

[00:05:56] What are we going to make happen because we exist? The mission is a long-term proposition that is lasting, that doesn't change. Vision. A vision is a picture of what you want, as far out on the horizon as you can see, as an organization or as an individual. This can be three to five years, or even longer. What's the clear future you see for the organization? What do you want your world to be like, and what do you want to have achieved in the future? And values.

[00:06:26] Values are what you honor and believe in, which will govern how you will behave as you are fulfilling your mission and creating your vision. Values determine standards of behavior, the code of conduct that you will not compromise. Building sustainable trust was key. This means taking employee engagement and empowerment to a new level, and ensuring leadership is engaged and empowered too. Engagement and motivation happen when people solve their own problems and create their own aspirations and expectations.

[00:06:55] That's why boosting communication via our outcome frame tool and the feedback frame is so powerful. Additionally, it was essential to... 1. Use inquiry over advocacy. Ask questions versus giving orders, and use the outcome frame for deep insight and clarity creation. 2. Hold team strategy and problem-solving meetings at every level. Meet to do the work, not to talk about the work.

[00:07:23] 3. Have team members create their own goals and action plans. 4. When we added empowerment to engagement, we witnessed even more profound results. The leaders learned that they could heal and prevent significant distrust by first understanding what a person is experiencing, and then intentionally helping them shift into engagement and empowerment. When we give people what they crave—more safety, belonging, and mattering—their critter brain calms down.

[00:07:53] And we can guide them into their smart state. ROI. How the organization benefited. Within the first year of working together, the organization shifted from 85% retention to 90%. Our clients successfully navigated the people work that had been missed because of zooming through two inflection points. And our clients' growth surged from 250 million to 400 million. The best part is when you walk through the organization, you see leaderboards tracking results,

[00:08:22] feel the enthusiasm and connection among this ever-expanding tribe, and hear people saying encouraging, upbeat messages as they collaborate, joke with one another, and pat each other on the back. You just listened to the post titled, Experiencing Growth? How to Swim Before Your Organization is Sunk? by Christine Comaford of Smart Tribes Institute.

[00:08:48] Queen Carvana stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions! I have sold my chariot on Carvana! T'was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it! Tonight, we feast! An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

[00:09:18] This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

[00:09:48] And thank you so much to Christine for letting us share her work. She is a leadership and culture coach, serial entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author of three books. They are called Power Your Tribe, Smart Tribes, and Rules for Renegades. For over 30 years, she's helped leaders navigate growth and change by specializing in applied neuroscience, which helps her clients achieve tremendous results in record time. As an entrepreneur, she built and sold five companies with an average ROI of 700%,

[00:10:18] and she was also a software engineer back in the early days of Microsoft and Apple. So come by SmartTribesInstitute.com to learn a lot more about and from Christine, to check out all the resources there. And as usual, I have that linked in this episode's description, as well as at oldpodcast.com. Okay, that's going to do it for me today. I thank you so much for joining, as always. And be sure to tune in tomorrow for another article. And that is where your optimal life awaits.