Colleen McCreary: I think when we've tucked the HR leader underneath a country manager, or we tuck them under a president or those types of things, it really puts that person in an awkward position to have to try and advocate for the right thing or hold that leader accountable for the behaviors and how they're acting as leaders.
It's a way better scenario to have that person be a peer, and when you have a challenge, or when you are at odds that you can handle that directly as leaders together, just optically for your employee population...
I think if you're a company that has said, employees are our most valuable resource, or the employees are the most important thing, or we care about our employees, more than anything else, if you don't have somebody who is thinking about your employees all of the time reporting into your CEO, I don't think any of those statements can really be true.
Now you're even starting to see the CEO report to the Board of Directors just like the CEO, because there are companies that are saying, I really want to hold not just the whole management team accountable, but I think it's going to be better if the CBO reports to us because we can also hold the CEO even more accountable.
Felicia Shakiba: Colleen's episode sparked serious contemplation among board members, yet their focus hasn't been solely on that. The uphill struggle of championing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) isn't news just to HR professionals; employees also face the challenge of persuading leadership about its value.
However, Dr. Todd Kashdan, a distinguished psychology expert and professor at George Mason University, shared compelling evidence highlighting the significance of DE&I, emphasizing its benefit in providing a competitive edge to businesses.
Felicia Shakiba: I know a lot of organizations are focused on, "We need the numbers of women in tech or different ethnicities in certain places, or functions of the organizations."
Beyond that - succession planning or promotions, workplace culture, or even having that distribution of voices within the organization, what is the benefit to all of those things beyond hearing the ideas and voices? What is the end goal for an organization? What are they going to do better than their competitors with this distribution of diversity or increase in belonging and inclusiveness?
Todd Kashdan: I mean, Felicia, you just asked the question that every single organization that invests in whether it's diversity, equity inclusion, or now the term is diversity and belonging, whatever that is, they should be asking themselves that question and making sure there's a concrete answer.
So if we go back a couple years, the answer was this is an end in itself. And I think your question is a really important one, which is, it's not. It's not an end in itself. The only way you can figure out whether you're making inroads towards these things you value is that you can measure and assess them in some way. If the end goal that you have is you want to have a representation in your group of people, demographically that is close in proximity to society, then you have to explain well, what's the reason for doing that?
Now you can say it's fair, and then you could ask yourself- so in this group, though, why is fairness important? And you should be going down that hole, not as a philosophical exercise that you would do in your philosophy, 101 class, because you are going to have detractors. You're going to have people that aren't sure that this is the path to go.
And you should be able to clarify, the reason that we want to have a potentially equal distribution of men and women is because we know that if you have one woman, in an organizational group, they are more likely to feel excluded, and on the outside, less likely to share their views, and feel as if it is an us versus them mentality, just the inclusion of a second woman in a group has this transformative effect.
Or now there is a faction, where they can feel as if because there is another person, we are a block a voting bloc in this group. And so we feel empowered, we've had a sense of agency, where we're willing to challenge ideas that we think are foolish and share ideas that we think are fortunate.
Felicia Shakiba: Dr. Kashdan's insights truly resonated with me regarding the value of DE&I, but shifting perspectives is no easy feat. It's a process that demands time and heaps of patience. Welcoming Ann Le Cam to the show was a stroke of incredible fortune, as she expertly guided us through the intricate steps of cultural transformation.
Ann Le Cam's background as an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School and former Senior Vice President of Studio Planning & Talent at Walt Disney Animation Studios made her perspective incredibly valuable.
What advice would you give to leaders who are currently working through a cultural transformation?
Ann Le Cam: It's not an easy journey, you have to be very resistant, and you have to allow time for change to happen. My words of advice would be to be competent and confident and consistent. Cultural change happens when everything starts coming together in a logical way. That could be the work you're doing, the processes you're having, but also the policies you have as an organization, how your building is laid out what your habits are, as you come together.
When that consistently starts sending signals, that change is going in the right direction, and that people can speak freely and shouldn't be worried about psychological safety. I think that's where change happens.
Is there anything that you want to talk about we haven't touched on yet?
Ann Le Cam: Yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about the importance of understanding the problem. Staying with the problem long enough, before starting to go to solutions, especially in cultural change, people will start throwing out ideas and start doing things. But, sometimes without having spent sufficient time analyzing the problem, what's at the core of this?
It's a little bit like peeling an onion, where you see certain behaviors, and you're wondering why they are behaving that way, but it's actually something deeper underneath, and we start fixing the symptoms rather than really understanding the problem.
As a leader in an organization, I always keep saying to my teams to fall in love with the problem, don't go to the solution to quickly stay there, and make sure you have the right problem. Because if you fix that one, things will unfold a little bit like a flower.
But if you're fixing the wrong one, it will just be a leaf and it fall off. I think that's really important as we listen, to not listen necessarily to the ideas that people are suggesting to us, because then you will sit with 100 ideas, and you can't implement all of them.
But really look at all these ideas and see what they have in common. What problem are they trying to solve? And when you can find that I think you ca find richer solutions and more impactful movements in your cultural transformation process.
Felicia Shakiba: As if Ann's insights weren't remarkable enough, you'll also get the chance to hear from her incredibly successful husband, Stephan Le Cam. Stephan wears multiple hats as the President of Logoden Advising and Elevation Investment Management & Funds. His work takes him to Africa, where he develops renewable energy investment solutions for local financial institutions.
Having a non-HR leader on the show to illustrate the application of how leadership development influences success was pivotal. And so, Stephan generously shares his most crucial and valuable leadership skill that distinguishes him from the competition, and it’s not customer focus.
As a successful entrepreneur in the field, how have your politically savvy skills played a role in navigating the complex political landscape in Africa? Can you share an example of a situation where your political acumen was crucial to the success of a project?
Stephan LeCam: It's a very important point, it's a very good question because often it's all about it in Africa. It's finding the right local partners. And among those local partners, it's not only the economical and financial collaboration on the ground in the country, it's a lot of political and cultural relationship, where what's happening is that those infrastructure investments are very important for the governments and political leaders to show their local action.
You will be surprised how much we are being interrogated one year before any general elections, where political forces, local forces wants to show and demonstrate that they are active for their population and want things to change. And so that relationship has to be very well established with the Ministry of Energy with the Prime Minister office, the president's office, depending on the countries- we get into those negotiations with them.
Also [it] has to be handled, the very often there is some form of embedded corruption. What I mean by that is that local politicians want to know how they can benefit from an investment. So sometimes it's very direct, they want to receive some proceeds of an investment on which we are very firm, we're not going that direction.
But some others, it's more, how can you support my next election? How can you contribute to my actions to the countries, and this is where we get into some form of a thorough conversation, where we, for example, in Zimbabwe, we develop a school close to a small solar park we developed and we were actually it was a great experience, it was a beautiful local community school we developed for the local populations, and everyone was happy.
We were, the local politicians were and the community was. You know, that kind of very good collaboration where, at the end of the day positively, you can help local political forces which are very important for us and for the project to develop, without falling into straight corruption and things we don't want to be engaged in.
It's very important to find, engage the conversations, and find the way to provide services to these local forces, political forces, which are very important for the project to take place, by supporting and helping them without falling to the dark side of the spectrum.
Felicia Shakiba: Stephan's clip really hit home, emphasizing the crucial need for values in leadership. That led us to an episode featuring Hugo Veiga and Diego Machado, the Co-Global Chief Creative Officers at AKQA, a WPP company. This particular episode truly stood out as one of our best. What they achieved resonates deeply with what we advocate at CPO PLAYBOOK consulting—they embedded values with absolute dedication while establishing the Sao Paulo office from scratch.
Their success speaks volumes as they attracted powerhouse clients like Netflix, Google, Usher, Lady Gaga, and others.
It sounds like the key to growth and success was focusing on the people that you brought under your roof, not necessarily the work. But essentially, you're saying that the work will come as long as we find the people with the right values that fit the culture of what we're trying to build for the future.
Hugo Veiga: Exactly. You know, when you start a business, everything is just, it's a vision. So it's a speech, oh, our intent is to do this, or to do that. So the way that people believe and you get the team's trust is by actions. So there was just an example that is very iconic on the way that we operate. We won a Grand Prix at the Clio International Awards.
And so we didn't have a lot of money, like we were a small studio. But we found like, we're gonna fly everyone that participated on the project. So it was the strategy...the editor, we're gonna fly them so we found, like, the cheapest flight, we'd go through Panama for like, I don't know, six hours. There connection, we rented a big Airbnb, and everyone went on stage.
So this is an example of showing to everyone like, it's not that oh, we are a creative agency, and the creatives are, No this actually is a collaborative process and everyone plays a role on seeing an idea get into, the into the world.
So these are the things like you might have a strong vision but it's on the day to day on the actions that you do then everyone understands like this vision is being implemented every day on our on our day to day.
Diego Machado:
The small acts will build a culture.
It's not like a big town hall every year that we will change from left to right or from this direction to other. It's like this is- we call it small things but like it because our quick decisions but like they're not small, right? Like they become the big things. These decisions are flying the team was like something very, oh, you have to go now let's do it.
And then I think this brings consistency of the mindset. So we don't need a book saying hey, every time you win awards, you have to fly everyone, dah-da-dah. Or, every time you present, who jumps inside the room, who presents what? There is no, that is not like that. So we have the mindset.
And it adapts to time, through different moments and different situations. I think like, that is lots of like going back to the Radiohead or the collaborative process that Hugo is mentioning, I think like, this is how we like to be creatives, just by one opportunity or by one decision the best, we landed in advertising, but like, we are creative people, we like to do creative stuff.
We would like to create things. Maybe one day is a film or Super Bowl the other day is a song, or the other day like creating a new dish. So I think we like to explore that, as everyone here has want to work with us is like that.
So I think like we started also exploring, how can we take AdWords or like the agency word or AKQA word to other boundaries? So how can we start working with musicians? We don't see other companies working beyond music labels or those? How can we be as the learnings and the strategy and our best skills that we craft with Netflix with Nike with Google and all these clients? How can we take that to partner with musicians?
So started like thinking, how can we one learns from these other creatives? How can we learn from an architect, from a chef, from a graffiti artists? But also how can we collaborate with them and bringing the knowledge the skills we use for Nike for Netflix for Google for all the brands that we already work? How can we bring these skills and this knowledge to artists, to a chef, to architects? So we started getting closer to this and making like events and inviting them to the house.
And I remember in the first in the beginning, like one of the first or second year, we brought like a chef to make like a special dinner in the office. So we have like special guests who have like 200 people three days in a row, like a massive dinner here. And it was so nice, so inspiring to see the process of like, designing the house as a restaurant. Which dishes are you creating, how you present the dishes? What's the name of the dishes, how you tell the story.
And then we started bringing musicians with made like a few small concerts here in the office. And from there, we started meeting musicians. We did like an album cover for one artists. And then we started writing scripts for a music video. And boom, suddenly, Ajaz sent an email, Hey, Usher wants to work with you guys. It's like, what like, which Usher? Like the Usher?
Or like, What do you mean like, and suddenly we were in a Skype call like with Usher, and his manager and he was sharing like a brief like, oh I have this song. I want you to do this and this and that. And then was one of our first global projects in music. And I think like from that, like we never stop it like going from Usher, Lady Gaga, Elton John, like some local artists going for music videos, or album launches for festivals, events.
Felicia Shakiba: That’s the Best of 2023 Part One. Be sure to follow the CPO PLAYBOOK podcast to listen to next week’s episode, Best of 2023 Part 2. Happy Holidays.
