Building Brand Gravity Podcast

00:00:02:14 - 00:00:15:07
Anne Green
Hello and welcome back to building brand Gravity. I'm Anne Green. I'm principal and CEO of the G&S Integrated Marketing Communications Group, and I'm so delighted today to be joined by Ethan McCarty. Hi. Ethan, how are you?

00:00:15:12 - 00:00:19:16
Ethan McCarty
Good morning. I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. And it's really a pleasure.

00:00:19:18 - 00:00:35:19
Anne Green
So, Ethan, just for background, for, our listeners that don't know him, he and I've gotten to know each other the last few years through the Page Society, which has been wonderful. But Ethan has a really interesting background. 13 years at IBM and all kinds of I mean, this is just a short list of your whole life.

00:00:35:19 - 00:00:38:00
Anne Green
I'm not going to go through everything that right. But.

00:00:38:02 - 00:00:39:21
Ethan McCarty
Ethan McCarty, this is your life.

00:00:40:01 - 00:01:01:07
Anne Green
This is your life. I mean, bring on some surprise guests. It'll be exciting. Amazing. But at IBM and really, during, I think, some golden years at IBM, although IBM continues to be such a thriving organization. But corporate comms content, internal comms, digital and social strategy. You were at Bloomberg as head of employee and innovation Communications, so that was really cool.

00:01:01:09 - 00:01:26:13
Anne Green
But then most notably, you founded your own shop in 2018, Integral, that focuses on employee activation, employee experience, employee engagement. So there are a lot of things I want to talk to you about today. As you know, because it is a crazy world for organizations and alike. And I, I think just to set up the conversation, it's it is a challenging landscape for both people, individuals and organizations.

00:01:26:15 - 00:01:55:12
Anne Green
There's a lot to experience and navigate right now, and it's quite symbiotic. And I think as two organizational leaders, we're both client counselors and we're both organizational leaders, and we're both very worried about internal and external comms. I just love to start riffing on the big picture that like the macro impact both individuals and organizations under these pressures, in what ways do you think are similar individual versus organization, and what ways do you think they're distinct is and how people are experiencing this?

00:01:55:14 - 00:02:19:13
Ethan McCarty
Wow. I mean, we all operate in the context of our society and the sort of group identities that we're affiliated with. You know, whether you think of yourself as an American or a European or, you know, a northern hemisphere and or, you know, or smaller communities like, you know, I feel like I'm part of my family or, you know, my faith or whatever.

00:02:19:14 - 00:02:43:18
Ethan McCarty
And, you know, there's so much change happening at those sort of macro levels that we then have to integrate as individuals. And so, you know, when you have, you know, the level of, you know, not just a frequency of changes that are happening in very significant ways, but the, the, the, you know, the, the level of those changes.

00:02:43:20 - 00:03:06:19
Ethan McCarty
So the significance of frequent change, it's not just like, you know, the color of houses is changing or something like literally the fabric of our society is changing. It seems like on a daily basis. And so organizations need to accommodate those and so do individuals. And it gets down, I think, to a very sort of existential level where we're thinking about our identities as individuals.

00:03:06:19 - 00:03:34:19
Ethan McCarty
You know, what does this mean for me as a dad or as, you know, as somebody who lives in Brooklyn versus what does this mean for, you know, an organization like my company? And so I think, you know, you're set up at the beginning and is very on point, you know, where, you know, the two of us are, you know, constantly navigating the space in between those sort of brand identities for our clients and for our own companies and then our individual identities and how we relate to the people we care about.

00:03:34:21 - 00:03:43:08
Ethan McCarty
So I think, you know, that that VUCA thing, which, by the way, every time I hear VUCA, I think of Veruca Salt from a Willy Wonka. But I.

00:03:43:10 - 00:03:50:03
Anne Green
I think of Vulcans from the 70s, Star Trek row. So says Vulcan to me. But I think you're closer with love, that.

00:03:50:03 - 00:04:01:15
Ethan McCarty
Is for sure. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, they both had to experience a lot of change, right? That's true. Yeah. I mean, what do you what do you think that, you know, that that sort of tension between the, the, you know, what's happening on Mars and what's happening for us as individuals?

00:04:01:21 - 00:04:30:16
Anne Green
Yeah, I think tensions are a way to describe it. And I don't want to get into that in a moment because I want to dig into what you're saying. I think it's very much related to the idea of identity, and I want to get to that question of values, which to me is an essential tension. But, you know, even before we get there, it makes me think about that whole nomenclature of employee experience, where you, as you say on your website, employee activation or you know, you've been dealing with and that interplay between the organization and the person.

00:04:30:16 - 00:04:46:07
Anne Green
Right. And I've, I've had folks on the podcast before talking about it. I find it like a really rich, you know, vein to mine. But in all the years in the arc of your career we talked about earlier, how do you understand those concepts? And then let's get back into what you were talking about a moment ago.

00:04:46:09 - 00:05:06:15
Ethan McCarty
Well, you know, I think if you Google the phrase change management is dead. You'll find many, many articles, going back for a long time. Same thing with knowledge management, by the way. But, I think it's particular I mean, you know, at this point having, you know, so I've been working for nearly 30 years, I believe that more now than ever.

00:05:06:15 - 00:05:31:08
Ethan McCarty
I mean, like people have always been saying, I mean, since I've been in the workforce in the late 90s, people have been saying like, you know, change is the new constant. But my sense of it right now is that this idea that there's periods of stasis that are prolonged, interrupted by these sort of, you know, episodes of significant change that need to be then, you know, managed and then there's sort of a beginning, middle and end to that change.

00:05:31:08 - 00:05:50:06
Ethan McCarty
And then we're back to this period of stasis and stability that's going to last a long time. I, I do think that's kind of done. I mean, you have it in, you know, sort of in, you know, layers within an organization like, okay. So these things may be constant for a while. And then we're going to have a big change like, okay, we've deployed a big enterprise right.

00:05:50:09 - 00:06:22:15
Ethan McCarty
Pardon me enterprise resource planning system. And we're probably not going to do that for another few years. Okay. Sure. You probably need you probably need some traditional change management, change communication around that. But the, the VUCA of it all is happening constantly. So, you know, even those periods of stasis, they're kind of one dimensional. And, you know, what you're having is, you know, relative stability in one dimension of your life or your organization or your business strategy.

00:06:22:17 - 00:06:39:08
Ethan McCarty
Meanwhile, everything else is changing. And so, I, you know, I, I liken it to spinning plates. I always think about that, you know, it's like you're spinning plates and, you know, you've kind of got these broomsticks or whatever, and you're spinning plates on top of them. And there's probably a couple of them that you can turn your back on, but maybe just for a minute.

00:06:39:10 - 00:06:56:20
Ethan McCarty
And I think that's where I mean, frankly, it's, it's there's never been a better time to be in the communications profession because it's ever more strategic. I mean, I was actually just talking with a friend of mine who I was in, future leaders experience with like 15 years ago. She's now our chief communications officer of a major telecom company.

00:06:56:20 - 00:07:22:19
Ethan McCarty
And she was like, oh, my God. You know, when we were in the Future Leaders program, which is our pages I.T program, you know, you know, I thought, you know, you'd be a, you know, chief communications officer mostly like handle PR, you know, and for the CEO. And now I'm like, I'm doing, you know, government relations investor relations, you know, the employees, the communities that we're in suddenly, you know, they're like, they're a company that's really mostly operating in the United States.

00:07:22:19 - 00:07:49:17
Ethan McCarty
She's doing international relations. I mean, it's just such a different role and level of complexity that people in our profession are contending with. It's really exciting. It's very interesting. The opportunity landscape is really, really rich. It's also super stressful. It's super high risk. And it's really I mean, frankly, it's scary and it's complex and there's all these, you know, layers of change.

00:07:49:17 - 00:07:56:22
Ethan McCarty
So even if you get that one plate spinning and you're feeling good about that, chances are there's another one that's, you know, next to hitting the floor.

00:07:57:00 - 00:08:18:01
Anne Green
I love the plate spinning analogy. My analogy is the old carnival game whack a mole. So, you know, the moles pop up and you hit them with the big rubber hammer. And I was choked. I've joked for decades because, like you, I've been in doing this since like 92, 93. So it's been over 30 years now in agency side, all agency side, large agency.

00:08:18:01 - 00:08:38:14
Anne Green
And then building an agency over decades and now CEO again at a at a mid-sized, larger firm. I've always felt that whack a mole was a good analogy because there's always something popping up, right? Trial clients, the world and the. And the moles are not hiding out down there. They're not sleeping. And it's constant. And you never know where they're going to pop up.

00:08:38:14 - 00:09:12:05
Anne Green
And I think these metaphors are helpful. But I do think that even though I've thought of it that way for a long time, the intensity is ratcheted up so much. And you're right, it's very, very interesting, almost too interesting at times. So that's part of, I've spent a lot of time recently contemplating sort of the organizational level of that as a person like yourself that's responsible for people, that's responsible for brand ourselves, and then is also responsible for our clients and thinking deeply about their business and not just them as an entity, but they're people and all those levels.

00:09:12:05 - 00:09:32:04
Anne Green
And remember, back in the day is and how external and internal communications is like, never the twain shall meet and all external matters. So it's like the people internally doing internal comms. I've been saying for years also, that's like the drop in the pond where the rings radiate out. The first ring is your own people, right? And it's a very it's very symbiotic.

00:09:32:04 - 00:09:52:16
Anne Green
It flows through. So I think we understand that more now and that that's a good transition to sort of the heart of the conversation. It goes back to what you're saying before, which is I see a very pervasive and common tension or surprise when it comes to the values of an organization relative to the values of the individual staff members.

00:09:52:18 - 00:10:08:14
Anne Green
And I think that feels to me more salient than ever right now. And I think we're going to have a chance to unpack that. But I do find it persistently hard to unpack. I find this dynamic tension to never feel resolved. I mean, first of all, do you agree with that assertion? Does that resonate with you?

00:10:08:17 - 00:10:32:18
Ethan McCarty
Oh, 100%? I mean, I in fact, even the name of my company, integral, you know, the, the, the sort of root of it was I was having a conversation with, with my old colleague Ben Edwards, who was for a time at, at IBM and at The economist and PayPal. And we were we were this is actually this is almost ten years before I started the company.

00:10:32:20 - 00:10:53:18
Ethan McCarty
And we were just talking about this idea of, you know, individual identity and the brand. And, you know, because I was running social media for IBM at the time, and, you know, I had this notion that, you know, individuals could confer a sense of, authenticity to a brand and brands could, you know, confer a sense of authority to an individual.

00:10:53:18 - 00:11:20:09
Ethan McCarty
And there was like this value exchange that was happening, you know, in, in social media for big companies and, you know, getting employees to be enlisted as advocates for their, for their brand. But one of the things that, you know, was to me, very apparent was that one's identity, it has to be like there's a sense of integrity to one's identity, like wholeness, not integrity, like, you know, following the rules or, you know, ethical behavior or what have you.

00:11:20:09 - 00:11:55:12
Ethan McCarty
But that integrity, like, it's able to hold together. And when you have to sort of traverse this space between, you know, the brand like, oh, I'm an IBM or versus like, oh, I'm, I'm Ethan. You know, the larger that space is, the more that you're going to be sort of, you know, spending your day with this sense of cognitive dissonance where you have to believe to opposing ideas like, I'm like this, this whole set of values that IBM purports to hold versus the, you know, the set of values that I know myself to hold.

00:11:55:14 - 00:12:23:01
Ethan McCarty
If those are not aligned, I'm going to feel a lot of stress. And cognitive dissonance really is like crazy making it causes a lot of stress. It causes people to behave in erratic ways, anti-social ways. I mean, you know, things that you would, you know, that you would say, like, you don't want those kind of behaviors. And so, many years later, you know, when I did start this company and yes, you know, the idea of that integrity is in the name of, you know, my business.

00:12:23:03 - 00:12:44:11
Ethan McCarty
But we started do some research around this, and, we do this research every year at the Harris poll where we look at. And then one of the things that we ask people is, well, do you know what the company's values are? Are they exhibited, you know, at the company? Do you see those, you know, like that's actually real or is it just poster sort of fodder for the walls, you know?

00:12:44:13 - 00:13:29:06
Ethan McCarty
And then how much do those track with your own sense of values? And one of the things that we found is that the more those correlated, the more that people. And it's again and again, now this we're going into our fifth year of doing this research. And, you know, again and again, we see that when people feel high alignment between their company's stated values and their personal values, their like two times like 200% more likely to do things like, you know, volunteer, go the extra mile for a colleague, you know, participate in mentorship programs, do extra to satisfy a client or customer's needs, even by the company's stock.

00:13:29:06 - 00:13:58:01
Ethan McCarty
I mean, like all these, what I would call pro-social behaviors go up by an enormous and it just categorically different level of that kind of behavior. And then likewise, the behaviors that people, the behaviors that people are likely to exhibit in the workplace that are negative things, like ignoring safety protocols or, or protesting against a company, you know, warning a candidate away or posting something negative about the company online.

00:13:58:03 - 00:14:29:12
Ethan McCarty
Those go through the roof equally, and even 17% of people, around 17, 18% of people who have that low values alignment say they would outright sabotage the company, which is I mean, to me, that's just like mind blowing. I mean, we put that in almost as a lark, like, oh, I wonder if, like anybody would say they'd sabotage the company or say a colleague would sabotage the company and, and fully 17% in the first, you know, the first year that we did that study and that's where, you know, when you see things online, you know, when you see these videos of people, you know, like Chuck in a box or, you know, putting something

00:14:29:12 - 00:14:51:16
Ethan McCarty
weird in somebody's food or, you know, you hear about somebody doing something like horrible in health care or, you know, whatever those, those behaviors, it didn't come out of nowhere. They didn't come. That's not like a bad seed necessarily. There's probably some really big disconnect in between what's going on inside that person's mind and that person's life and what's going inside that person's employer like that company.

00:14:51:18 - 00:15:09:07
Anne Green
It's interesting to think about this, and I love that research. That's one of the reasons why I reached out to I want to speak to you because you were doing some interesting posts on LinkedIn about some dimensions of this, which we're going to get into in a minute, where that values alignment or dis alignment is in great tension, I think.

00:15:09:09 - 00:15:30:10
Anne Green
Yeah, as much tension as ever right now. Right. But you're reminding me of how we represent corporate life and culture. So for example, on the more benign side, there's the cartoon Dilbert, for those who don't know Google, but it's Dilbert. To me, the whole vibe of Dilbert is in management. You know, it's like poor Dilbert is, powerless.

00:15:30:10 - 00:15:57:13
Anne Green
And in the, you know, the more of, you know, dumb managers, there's also office space and there's the office. And then if you go up the chain to stuff that's a bit more intense, there's severance now, which is a very literal metaphorical representation, literal and metaphorical representation of the inside and outside person, that person that is in cognitive dissonance between their organizational self and their private self.

00:15:57:15 - 00:16:18:02
Anne Green
And so, you know, one of my first questions to I think I personally feel this is probably irresolvable like you're never going to get complete alignment because it's just there's people have many dimensions to them. You know, a company is not going to be all things. And I don't personally believe in the bring your whole self to work as something that can be fully fulfilled.

00:16:18:02 - 00:16:38:14
Anne Green
Nor should it be to me. But, how do you see what are the practices that companies start to and act to assess that they have a values gap between themselves and their staff, and then start to figure out how they bring that Venn diagram, those two circles into closer alignment so they don't have those terrible outcomes that you're talking about.

00:16:38:16 - 00:16:57:06
Ethan McCarty
Yeah. Well, I mean, I love the examples and I'm kind of obsessed with severance. I think it's, I think it's an amazing social critique because it does it basically is asserting that it's irreconcilable, you know, this this difference between, like, my internal self and like, who I have to be in order to be a successful professional.

00:16:57:10 - 00:17:06:15
Ethan McCarty
And the only way that we could possibly navigate that would be, you know, like separating the hemispheres of our brains or something like really radical, you know, like a super.

00:17:06:17 - 00:17:10:05
Anne Green
I neither of us believe it to that degree. But it is a interesting concept.

00:17:10:05 - 00:17:35:13
Ethan McCarty
It's I mean, it's totally fascinating. And I tend to agree with you like the idea of having total overlap, you know, the like the opposite of severance, like having total confluence or whatever the opposite would be, would be that would be equally nightmarish. You know, it's like you don't want I don't think I mean, I certainly don't want my employees to submit their entire personalities to the integral brand.

00:17:35:16 - 00:17:54:00
Ethan McCarty
And, you know, and I'm a found I mean, like, it's like, really intense for a founder, you know, I mean, like, this whole thing, like, the name of the company came to me in a dream. I mean, like this. It's like, very personal for me, you know? And even so, like, when I leave work, like, I really want to spend time with my kids and put the phone away and, you know, like, I have a very separate life outside of work.

00:17:54:00 - 00:18:26:13
Ethan McCarty
And I think that that should be cherished and honored. I think where most companies sort of miss the opportunity to at least tighten up that Venn diagram a bit on around the most important issues is to gain an understanding of what those issues are to the employees who work in your organization. And so I mean, like very, very early, my point of view of this is, is highly, highly shaped by Mike Wing and John, a lot of IBM who were my, you know, my leaders when I was early in my career.

00:18:26:13 - 00:18:46:22
Ethan McCarty
And we did this whole practice called the Values Jam. And we were doing these sort of like giant online dialogs. There's a great HBR piece. I think it's under it's authored by the CEO at the time, Sam Palmisano, that describes what happened in values jam. But essentially we said, all right, there's about 400,000 of us here.

00:18:47:00 - 00:19:07:08
Ethan McCarty
What do we believe in? And we had this I mean, it was very, very early. So the technology was like really wonky concept. But we had this massive online conversation and then distilled that down into a new set of values that endure to this day. And the preceding set were articulated by the founders of the company, by the Watson family.

00:19:07:08 - 00:19:30:03
Ethan McCarty
You know, 100 years earlier. So it was time to check in with a contemporary workforce on what a contemporary set of values would look like for, you know, like if we wanted that company to last another hundred years. And even though that was I think that's like 20 years ago now at this point. But I think that at the heart of it, what's so correct about that is listening first.

00:19:30:05 - 00:20:05:02
Ethan McCarty
And so if you're able to do that, and I'm not saying I mean leaders should lead. Right. But leaders should lead the, the people that are following them with some real high, you know, emotional sensitivity, intellectual curiosity and compassion for the folks that they're leading. And how can you possibly do that if you haven't gained through really intentional, large scale, frequent check ins, listening and not the, you know, once every other year employee engagement survey, you know, I mean, those have their place.

00:20:05:02 - 00:20:23:20
Ethan McCarty
Those are good and also not enough. And so I mean, like if you think about any relationship that you have in your life, if that, that's meaningful to you, if that person only checked in with you once every two years, like, what would you think of that relationship? You would not feel valued, right? And so be very hard to share values with that person.

00:20:23:20 - 00:20:42:01
Ethan McCarty
Well, same thing goes here. And so I mean this is this is again it's not some like back 20 years ago for IBM. It was enormously expensive to kind of pull that kind of thing off. I mean, you can swipe a credit card and do that, like with some SAS software tomorrow at pretty much any company. So that's a that's really the point of departure.

00:20:42:01 - 00:21:05:04
Ethan McCarty
If you can understand what the sensibilities are. And then ultimately you may need to shift those. And that may become, as you articulate, a set of values that inform your culture, your business strategy. You know, how you show up as a company, how those individual employees show up to each other? That's that may end up being a passive filter.

00:21:05:04 - 00:21:22:05
Ethan McCarty
Like there may be a lot of people who are like, yeah, actually, that's not for me. And that's okay. That's cool. There's probably a great place for them to go work. And that has, you know, some values that are more concomitant with their own and harmonious with their own worldview and so on. And that's great. That's probably going to be a good thing.

00:21:22:05 - 00:21:40:01
Ethan McCarty
And then it's going to be an attractor for people who see those values in action in your everything from your marketing and your website to how you actually show up to your customers, what kind of products you produce and so on. And that's I mean, that's I think the opportunity, which is enormous.

00:21:40:03 - 00:22:02:16
Anne Green
I love this conversation about rerouting ourselves and this practice of listening, compassion, being open to dialog and then leaders leading to I had to learn some hard lessons, people who worked with me when I was a CEO and a CEO of the first time watch me sort of learn in lifetime the difference between creating consensus and deciding when it's time to lead.

00:22:02:16 - 00:22:22:17
Anne Green
Where do we figure out, and how do we figure out as leaders, but both as individual contributors, employees, you know, how we define our own values. What is value based living for us? That's something I've learned in therapy. What's the value based approach to my life? How do I look at that as a leader? How do we understand where we come together and where we are apart?

00:22:22:17 - 00:22:29:16
Anne Green
And you're right. How is that? Individuals make a choice to say, this is not my set of values. I want to move on. I say leave with love.

00:22:29:16 - 00:22:49:16
Ethan McCarty
At that point, leaders need to respect that too, and not, you know, see that as, worthy of punishment. You know, that's a that's a great choice. And you should support people and, you know, and like and ensure that I love that idea of leave with love and, you know, separate with some dignity there and it will speak well like there's nothing you can do better.

00:22:49:16 - 00:23:07:01
Ethan McCarty
I think there's nothing you could do to attract great talent. Then be respectful in all phases of it with your current talent, you know? And so if people see like, oh, okay, that person has had like a great tenure there. And then they went on to go do something else. That's awesome. You know, that's probably going to be a real big attractor for talent.

00:23:07:03 - 00:23:33:00
Anne Green
I think it's interesting what you're saying. Ethan and I've reflected on this a lot in terms of the grace with which folks leave an organization, whether they're making that choice or whether they're not, which is even harder, something I've experienced many times as a leader, having to make that kind of decision. But I do feel that dynamic tension between the organization and the individual is often on display in very negative ways with leaders, when they treat folks that are leaving as if they've been personally affronted.

00:23:33:02 - 00:23:41:07
Anne Green
And it's just, such a bad situation. So I think you're right. That whole life cycle of the relationship is so critical.

00:23:41:07 - 00:24:08:12
Ethan McCarty
For while I ran IBM's alumni program. And what was kind of interesting about the choice that my, my boss made was like, you're going to run the intranet and you're going to run the alumni program at the same time, which I which was fascinating because, you know, here we have two networks of people who have a lot in common having, you know, especially, you know, with IBM, which is a brand that does such important in printing, you know, like the identity in the culture.

00:24:08:12 - 00:24:26:01
Ethan McCarty
It's like so heavy, you know, like you when you're in IBM or it's like that's a thing, you know, it's like that's a that's it's almost like, invention of IBM. It's like this identity of the IBM or and, you know, when you leave IBM and IBM is, you know, somebody who's left IBM. We were trying to choose a language.

00:24:26:03 - 00:25:02:13
Ethan McCarty
They're not an IBM or they're an IBM alumni. And, because there were so there's such a positive, you know, sort of rotating door there where people would go out of IBM, gain some industry experience and new contacts, and then come back or also or just become clients of IBM customers. And, you know, and so I think if you think about the, you know, like in terms of the identity vector here, like you have come and identify especially, you know, in North America, I mean, it's not the same for everyone, but, you know, in North America, there's a high association with your profession and your identity.

00:25:02:13 - 00:25:26:13
Ethan McCarty
You know, you have somebody what they do in North America, and chances are they're going to tell you what they do for a living. They're not going to say like, oh, I'm like, I make candles. And you know, I like to go jogging. They're probably going to lead with their profession. And, you know, and so if you honor that, that, that level that where people really integrate a brand into their personal identity, that can be very powerful just in terms of the meaning of their work and their lives.

00:25:26:13 - 00:25:57:13
Ethan McCarty
And also it's incredibly strategically valuable for organization to maintain that kind of bond with people. And, you know, as you were saying earlier about these kind of like tops down, you know, command and control, you know, that kind of management system really has its place. Like that is a very valuable that's not like a dumb management system. It just doesn't tend to it doesn't tend to build those kind of deep hooks into people's souls in a way, and people's, you know, individual identities.

00:25:57:15 - 00:26:24:02
Ethan McCarty
And it also doesn't scale very well. It's really, really hard to do that kind of command and control thing at scale. And so, like what I see happening in government right now is almost like a scaling that's happening. Whereas if you can I mean, I just remember you know, thinking about the values. And I ended up when I was at the New School for Social Research, I ended up writing my master's thesis about this idea of values and culture as a management system.

00:26:24:04 - 00:26:50:07
Ethan McCarty
And, you know, because I had experienced it firsthand at IBM and I and I think that, you know, if you can set up those right, you know, values and sort of cultural assumptions that people will make, you know, in the day to day work that is going to free leaders to do so much more. You don't have to be there checking everything because you know that on principle, the decisions will be made in a way that aligns with your strategy, how you would do it.

00:26:50:08 - 00:27:21:01
Ethan McCarty
You know the why is understood by everybody, and so values and culture are to me, they're not a nice to have, you know, foosball tables and whatever. It's that's a strategic asset that should be cultivated and managed and I think the savvy CEOs who really want to scale, who really want to do something big and empower people who want to come and do something big, you know, like that's going to be that's the way to get there, as opposed to come work at this job that's super well defined.

00:27:21:01 - 00:27:30:05
Ethan McCarty
Do x, y, z in that order, because that's what I've said. And then if you haven't done it right, they'll, you know, there's a punitive sort of consequence.

00:27:30:07 - 00:27:49:10
Anne Green
Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think that for many organizations, the values equation, you're talking about is more effective. I agree with you. The command and control, I mean obviously military operations and things like that need that chain of command, and they function very well. And if they didn't have it, that would have dire consequences. So I think that's a really good point.

00:27:49:12 - 00:28:06:13
Anne Green
You know, in terms of this discussion again about organizational values, personal values, the delta, the distance of the delta between them, I just want to talk about a few things that are going on to sort of real time test of this. You maybe it's like not a speed round, but we'll go through a couple. One of them is politics in the workplace.

00:28:06:15 - 00:28:25:20
Anne Green
And I wrote in my notes, yikes. This one is tough. True. Indirectly over the past year, but certainly today. So the conventional wisdom and this is something we talk about in the circles we run in all the time, there's a conventional wisdom not to bring or allow politics in the workplace, but to me that's really not helpful nor realistic.

00:28:25:22 - 00:28:39:16
Anne Green
And you posted a great short commentary on this on LinkedIn, which is literally, well, it was like, I have to reach out to Ethan to talk about this. Give me your take on this. And I know you have some data on it too, but what's your take on that question? Which is real profound right now?

00:28:39:18 - 00:28:59:23
Ethan McCarty
Yeah, I think I mean, like we found in our research that pretty consistently about half of the employed, population would like to be able to speak about politics and social issues in the workplace. They feel like they should be able to do that. About half, believe that they're, that they have the right to do it.

00:28:59:23 - 00:29:27:08
Ethan McCarty
And they, you know, they're empowered to do that. However, it gets kind of more interesting when you look at both positionally and generationally. It will probably not surprise anybody that, that rather, millennial roles, are way higher. They're pulling that number, that 50% number way up. And boomers are bringing it down to, you know, to some degree, as our, Gen Xers, Gen Z, also tends to be a little bit lower.

00:29:27:08 - 00:29:52:03
Ethan McCarty
We think that's positional. We think that's like because they might be in more junior positions, they might feel a little bit less empowered in the workplace just because of where they are in the organization. But the, the sort of tldr is get ready for a workforce. That is much more, interested in talking about social and political issues at work and feel that they have the right to do so.

00:29:52:05 - 00:30:18:16
Ethan McCarty
And so that is coming. That's already here. It's already here, but it's also it's coming more and then also the, and so, so before I go on to another sort of dimension that I would say the approach needs to be is depending on what kinds of spaces that you operate in, you know, like a retail, you know, a retail organization is going to be different from one that's manufacturing or a pharmaceutical organization.

00:30:18:16 - 00:30:38:09
Ethan McCarty
And even within those, like, you're going to have an itinerant sales force and you're going to have people who are manufacturing, you know, so there's a wide variety of sort of spaces, whether they're digital spaces like a chat room or physical spaces like a break room or a town hall meeting with whatever. Those spaces are where people gather in your organization.

00:30:38:11 - 00:30:57:07
Ethan McCarty
You just need to be very, very prescriptive about what the rules of the road are. And I think that's a really good a really good way to start is just like, even if you just say you know, look, we are not going to, we're not going to use any language that is, you know, hostile or denigrating, you know, like, that's a great start.

00:30:57:07 - 00:31:17:06
Ethan McCarty
And most organizations have those kind of things in place already. But you need to signal that again and again and again. So if you have a slack channel that says, you know, I always I find it so funny, you know, like when you go by slack or deploy slack, the it comes preloaded with this general, you know, less category where it's like just general, like anybody can talk about anything.

00:31:17:08 - 00:31:37:12
Ethan McCarty
The first thing you should do is rename that and put somebody in there. It's like general, but also you're not racist or like, but also not about, you know, your political affiliation or, you know, like put something in there that helps people understand, like, okay. Yeah, we actually we're interested we this is a place where we can talk, but we're also like, here's what we think.

00:31:37:14 - 00:31:57:09
Ethan McCarty
You know, the appropriate kind of discourse is in this venue. So being really clear about the rules of the road, I think is, is the first step. And then and then also, you know, the other thing is, is to really reward and lionize people who do it. Well, there were there are people who are going to be natural conveners and community leaders.

00:31:57:11 - 00:32:16:04
Ethan McCarty
And if those people if you can lionize that behavior, if you can, like, make those folks the star of the show, give them some mechanism for convening people I know, like $50 budget to buy donuts and coffee. I mean, like, that can be that can be huge because they're doing it in a way that is really pro-social and that could be around.

00:32:16:04 - 00:32:45:17
Ethan McCarty
Okay, well, you know, this issue, I'm going to make this up. This issue of homelessness is really important in a particular area. Great. We want to talk about that. Let's fund the ability for that team who really cares about it to go do a volunteer project. And they can talk about homelessness all the time there because they're really engaged in doing some solution around it as opposed to, sort of getting into the political sphere and talking about policy issues, which the company may not have any, you know, like impact on at all.

00:32:45:19 - 00:33:07:20
Anne Green
Yeah, it's interesting too, because another piece of this is what do companies speak out about or not speak out about? And I think these are also very symbiotic. And, you know, one of the things I've been trying to reflect on as a CEO is what is the foundational context or the lens? I can offer stuff that I've been thinking about that we can share a language and also share a set of values about how we engage.

00:33:07:20 - 00:33:26:06
Anne Green
Right? So a value of engagement and a value of connection and communication, but also values of respect. One of the things I tried to do last year was reflect on what does it mean to be in a pluralistic society, what does it mean to stay in community and tough conversations? What does it mean to hold someone's humanity even when you're very upset about something?

00:33:26:06 - 00:33:49:05
Anne Green
What does it mean to grapple with the idea that someone's vote may land differently for them than for you? And also to say to folks you may not understand your vote feel is annihilating to another person. So how do we stand community in those moments, and how do we create those guardrails? And how do I gently or my other leaders step in to say, hey, we're moving into an area that's less productive?

00:33:49:07 - 00:34:12:16
Anne Green
And also, how do we counsel our clients on these pieces knowing that staffs are not a monolith? People have different views. And that issues of recharge and the media landscape, which we all are deeply engaged in, is highly polarized. So I think you're bringing up some of the things I've been concerned about, especially when people say, oh, well, companies just stick with your values, speak out in your values.

00:34:12:16 - 00:34:35:13
Anne Green
And like, I think it's a lot more complicated than that in this context right now. But I do think this idea of the values, meaning how do we how are we with each other? How are we with our clients, how are we in the world and in community to reflect on that openly, for leadership to articulate that and then allow other leaders to bring that to life in their spaces.

00:34:35:13 - 00:34:41:14
Anne Green
And who are those positive, optimistic, caring conveners? I like a lot of what you're saying there.

00:34:41:16 - 00:35:06:10
Ethan McCarty
You know, I think one of the things as well is to really look, not just where your organization or your organization's leaders are speaking out, but where your organization and your organization's leaders are having impact. And, you know, I think there's a lot of hand-wringing around what statements should we make. And, you know, and all that. And, and that's not nothing.

00:35:06:10 - 00:35:41:00
Ethan McCarty
I mean, it is important. And it is also very risky, particularly in a political environment where you're seeing, you know, retribution happening for things that people said, you know, and that is scary and it's real. And also at the end of the day, you know, I mean, like, you can reflect on your own experience. And I will also reflect on the research that we do that, you know, we ask, you know, we give this sort of pick list of 28 different issues, everything from Israel and Palestine to, you know, handgun ownership to homelessness, pay equity, you know, all these, you know, a whole range of topics.

00:35:41:02 - 00:36:13:11
Ethan McCarty
And we ask people to pick five that they think their company should make a difference on, make an impact on like actually, you know, through policies or giving through product design and so on. And very, very, very, very consistently, we've seen the top five dominated by my health and well-being, job security and job creation, equitable pay, and diverse, you know, issues related to diversity and fairness and, data privacy as well.

00:36:13:11 - 00:36:38:03
Ethan McCarty
And, those top five dominate. And if you think about those, those are all things that most companies are already doing stuff about. And you can you can look at the policies, you can make sure that those are really, really people first policies and that you are really correct to your employer these desires on those and, you know, and just really sort of drive those on even with something like job stability.

00:36:38:03 - 00:37:00:21
Ethan McCarty
Yeah. You know, you might need to lay off people. That is real. And you can still have policies that support those with whom you've parted ways, you know, and do that, as you said, leaving with love. And, you know, like doing that, you know, doing that kind of action with some dignity. But what's interesting as well is that when you look at that, again, generationally, the top five issues change significantly.

00:37:00:23 - 00:37:25:22
Ethan McCarty
And, gen Z and millennials are much more, much more likely to rank, LGBTQ plus. And, you know, right, you know, basically trans and you know, like, you know, these, these populations rights and privileges and, you know, ability to operate, they're much more likely to, rank, gun control, higher up. They're much more likely to rank education higher up.

00:37:26:00 - 00:37:53:03
Ethan McCarty
And so these things are and it may be about like, just stage in life, where people are, you know, who they're surrounded by, what they're seeing in the media. And it's also true that the leaders of organizations need to think of employee populations not as, like, monolithic, but rather as a group of individuals who have agency in their life, who are making choices, who can either choose you or they can choose someone else.

00:37:53:05 - 00:38:18:03
Ethan McCarty
They could choose to do something great with and for you, or they can choose to do something great with and for someone else. And, and the negative is true too. They can choose to do something mean and nasty to you and mean and assessable. So all those things are in play. And again, it's like the more we can recognize that, you know, this individuation of experience is, you know, in is like really forgiving you integral to your work experience.

00:38:18:05 - 00:38:29:16
Ethan McCarty
That is, you know, that is going to be a key lever. And what you do through policy is going to be have so much more impact. And what you say through a press release.

00:38:29:18 - 00:38:53:10
Anne Green
Yeah, actually, I know my colleague Steve Halsey is going to be doing a upcoming podcast to talk with Rob, at Harris Poll about some of the recent research they did and this idea of words or context have some trust building, characteristics, actual impact has more trust building characteristics, but combining context and impact is the real hockey stick up to build trust in.

00:38:53:12 - 00:39:20:09
Anne Green
You know, as we as we wrap up our conversation, because there's a million more things we could talk about. But one of the things you're making me think of is in terms of going back to that question of how to help organizations and people that work for them understand where their values align or where they don't. One of the things I think is extraordinarily important now, especially, say, in a client service contexts like ours, but I think all organizations, is for leadership to really transparently narrate where they're facing their own dynamic tensions.

00:39:20:11 - 00:39:51:02
Anne Green
So where is it that, and where is it the we're very clear on what we believe. So, for example, when I can ladder things up to the level to the 100,000ft level of basic human rights, respect for people in their different celebration of difference, what it means to have a free press, what it means, what our what our democratic ideals, aside from these ways that we're fighting with each other about, you know, what does it mean to have free flowing business but also have compassion in that?

00:39:51:02 - 00:40:13:22
Anne Green
Right. So, you know, but also being very clear of, hey, this is an environment where it's going to be hard for our clients to speak out on certain things. They need to lay a little bit more low here, but see how they're still practicing and creating impact here. If I feel, if I can narrate that for my own stakeholders and also for my clients stakeholders, then we can understand that the values alignment is not so off.

00:40:13:22 - 00:40:32:09
Anne Green
Because without that narration or without that context of like why we are speaking or not speaking, doing or not doing, why a client may be doing this, but not saying that it's very hard to, to translate, it's not legible, you know, and that's one of the things I'm thinking about a lot too.

00:40:32:11 - 00:40:58:04
Ethan McCarty
Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the day, we're talking about, you know, translating these ideas and principles into action. And does everybody understand what that translation process is? You know, so if you have a business strategy and you just put the deck out there and you're like, okay, here's our business strategy, and then, you know, 37 layers deeper in your organization or in the remote office or whatever.

00:40:58:10 - 00:41:20:17
Ethan McCarty
You ask people what the business strategies are not going to understand that, you know, they have to, you know, like people have to like, learn things and, you know, and internalize things in ways in multiple ways and be able to experience it, in order to actually then go and do those things. And there's some great theory on this, like, Bloom's Taxonomy, Bloom's taxonomy.

00:41:20:17 - 00:41:50:02
Ethan McCarty
It's like this hierarchy of how people learn things. It's very interesting and how you do course design. And that kind of stuff. But, integral we have this kind of employee experience formula that is it's very high level, but it can be really helpful tool. You know, if you're trying to trans, if you're trying to create an employee experience that then ultimately drive some business value or some business outcome or societal value or societal outcome, there is just a few components.

00:41:50:02 - 00:42:12:22
Ethan McCarty
And the, you know, the first one is listening, you know, big surprise like, how are you do how are you? Quantitatively and qualitatively understanding what the actual drivers are for perceptions and behaviors amongst this population. You know, whether you have 20 employees or, you know, 200,000 employees, you know, can you get as nuanced and understanding of that population as possible?

00:42:13:00 - 00:42:43:21
Ethan McCarty
And then you introduce things like content, and, you know, like content might be something as pithy as your, you know, and high level as your values or something is, you know, sort of, you know, salt of the earth as like help text on a, you know, on a H.R. Website or something like that. You have all these interactions, which again, it could be something as sort of day to day as like the stand up that you have in the dispatch center before you head off to your shift or, you know, the board meeting or the town hall with the CEO.

00:42:43:23 - 00:43:31:10
Ethan McCarty
And that's all driven by, you know, whatever the strategic intentions are, that, you know, it's a, you know, is it a cultural intention, is a business expansion intention, is it a talent acquisition or intention? So you put those things together listening, strategic intention, content interactions that if you bring your real thoughtful, you know, like very, very strategic self into, interrogating the level of commitment you've made to those elements, you will be able to produce an employee experience that is, you know, potentially incredibly scalable because people understand what's going on and they can make decisions independently and operate independently and also incredibly durable because it's going to be sort of like self-correcting by, you know,

00:43:31:10 - 00:43:58:00
Ethan McCarty
by this constant listening adjusts iterating, you know, you can that is achievable, and it may be achievable at the whole enterprise level. I think that would be very audacious and ambitious. And I'm sure there are companies out there that are close. But I think, you know, starting at a smaller level, like, okay, well, can we do this in one business unit, or can we do this in one team, or can we do this for one topic, a whole area like how we're managing customer experience.

00:43:58:06 - 00:44:16:02
Ethan McCarty
You might be able to create an employee experience that then radiates like that, that that employee experience is reified in the customer experience and the products that you make in your corporate reputation, like the best brands are just totally built from the inside out. And you see that again and again and again.

00:44:16:04 - 00:44:31:16
Anne Green
Well, I think that's an amazing place to end is and I love it. I love that rubric. And this podcast is called Building Brand Gravity. So, I always like to ask what has you in its gravity today. An idea, a book, a podcast, something in the culture.

00:44:31:18 - 00:45:01:21
Ethan McCarty
Yeah. You know, I've, recently been going into back issues of The New Yorker and yeah, I've really enjoyed it. I, I've read some pieces by and about James Baldwin and, like, the ferocity of his intellect and his courage has really inspired me. And, honestly, I mean, maybe this is just, you know, growing up in the Midwest in the 80s, but I didn't really encounter much of his writing.

00:45:01:23 - 00:45:19:15
Ethan McCarty
You know, and so now I'm kind of getting into it now, and, it led me to go watch a debate that he held in, at Oxford. You know, you can it's on YouTube. But anyway, just looking into James Baldwin has been amazing and inspiring. It was so, ironic, I think about this morning. I knew you're going to ask this question.

00:45:19:15 - 00:45:38:11
Ethan McCarty
You were kind enough to tell me, and I as I was, coming in on the subway with my dog, I looked down to pet her, and this guy's got a backpack on, and it's got this big button of a profile of James Baldwin. And I was like, oh my God. Okay, so this is there's like, I know, kismet or karma or synergy or I don't know, cosmic vibes are happening.

00:45:38:11 - 00:45:43:10
Ethan McCarty
But anyway, I highly recommend dipping into what James Baldwin had to say.

00:45:43:12 - 00:45:51:22
Anne Green
That's a magnificent recommendation. I cosign that so much. And Ethan, thank you for your time today. It's been a joy to receive privilege.

00:45:51:23 - 00:45:53:17
Ethan McCarty
Thank you very much for inviting me on.

00:45:53:19 - 00:46:01:16
Anne Green
Everybody. There's more building brand gravity wherever you get your podcasts, and we always appreciate your feedback. Thanks for joining us today.

00:46:01:18 - 00:46:02:06
Ethan McCarty
Thank you.

00:00:04:12 - 00:00:23:23
Steve
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Building Brand Gravity. We have an exciting episode for you where we're a couple of us. Co-host that are going to talk about our trends and predictions for 2025. So hello and welcome. I'm Steve Halsey, principal and chief growth officer of the Integrated Marketing Communications Group.

00:00:24:01 - 00:00:30:00
Anne
And I'm Anne Greene, the principal and CEO at the NSE Integrated Marketing Communications Group. Hi, Steve.

00:00:30:02 - 00:00:51:04
Steve
Hello. We're going to have fun today. We're going to we're going to get out our magic eight balls. Cauldron. Whatever it is, we're going to look ahead and we're going to talk about the trends and strategies that businesses and brands need to thrive in 2025. So there's just been a little bit of of things going on and in the world and society in business.

00:00:51:06 - 00:01:09:23
Steve
And we're just going to distill those all down and we're going to end up leaving everybody with a quick checklist of what they need to do to be successful in 2025. So what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about a variety of topics leadership, culture, innovation, how we're communicators and the C-suite that they're serving.

00:01:09:23 - 00:01:21:05
Steve
How are they navigating uncertainty and basically leveraging the opportunities. So we call this episode navigating 2025 Essential Trends, Insights and Checklists.

00:01:21:09 - 00:01:43:02
Anne
Yeah, 2025 is going to be pretty pivotal. I think you're right. Steve and I brought my reindeer with me to be festive and also to be resilient emotionally. Resilience. My emotional resilience reindeer because it's a heavy year coming at us. And so I think looking at the role of leadership, the role of communications and and the field that we're in, and how are we adaptable and nimble to whatever's coming at us?

00:01:43:04 - 00:02:02:08
Steve
Yeah. And I think I think that's going to be key. And and I'm really interested. You just got off a, road show, visiting a bunch of clients, coaches and, and their and their CEOs and their executives. And I'm going to be really interested to hear what they're saying about resiliency. Adaptive ability, how you structure your team and then how you win.

00:02:02:08 - 00:02:11:03
Steve
Because it's really interesting, as you say, for 2025 is kind of soft power. Hard power. How do you find that that balance as we get going?

00:02:11:08 - 00:02:37:03
Anne
Yeah. And I mean, nobody has a crystal ball, but we've all been living in this world for quite a while. You know, Steve knows one of my least favorite acronyms is Vuca volatility uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity. It's just such a huge Vuca. It's not the best acronym, but it continues to be persistent. So I don't know that we need, you know, the most perfect crystal ball to understand that we're going to be in a landscape that's still quite tumultuous.

00:02:37:05 - 00:03:00:07
Anne
And now with the US election decided and some of the moves being made there, you know, we have more visibility into what may be coming, but still a lot of questions too. And I think that, I was just with a senior leader and I was doing a high level media training, and we were talking about the CEO agenda, because this is also an entity that advises companies of all sizes, especially fortune 50 and fortune 500.

00:03:00:09 - 00:03:17:09
Anne
And he made a comment to me as part of the mock interview that, you know, CEOs need to be optimists. So I'm going to adopt that mantle, and I tend to be glass half full. I call myself an optimist realist. And I think Steve, you share a lot of that personality with me. But, the other thing is, is that he's stressed.

00:03:17:09 - 00:03:43:14
Anne
Something else I really took away, which is we need to focus on the areas we can control and I think going into it, you know, there are potentially some really rapid changes coming, especially in the regulatory environment. Whenever there's a regime change, you know, an administration change, especially there's some potentially stark differences in what may be looked at from a regulatory perspective, climate, you know, environment, policy, tariff, etc..

00:03:43:16 - 00:04:17:14
Anne
So, you know, from my perspective and I and I'm sure yours too, when I'm speaking to executives and also talking to myself as an organizational leader, I'm thinking about adaptability, about resilience, about creating that culture of readiness, focusing on the things you can do. And also that old adage, don't let a crisis go to waste. You know, there's a chance to make real change when there's big changes afoot around you and, and also to, to avoid getting to, down in the dumps to getting to glass empty because that's not going to help us take the action we need to take.

00:04:17:16 - 00:04:40:19
Steve
Absolutely. And I had a conversation with a chief communications officer a few weeks ago. Not us space works for, for, for a large, business out of the Middle East. And he made the comment to me. He said CEOs now want to appear more strategic than ever before, and they want their senior communications councils to help them show up more strategic.

00:04:40:21 - 00:05:02:06
Steve
So, you know, it's it's no longer do you have a seat at the table? It's no longer just a question of, hey, is it about, you know, our reputation and brand now? It's helped me show up more strategic, which means you need to show up to help me manage not just these publics, but how do we move the organization and how do we move the business forward.

00:05:02:06 - 00:05:28:15
Steve
And and I think what's interesting there is, you know, as senior communicators and counselors, we're kind of crossing this nexus of how do you really be a true business advisor and really think ahead with all these challenges? And then how do you make sure that you stay authentic as an enterprise and aligned with the values that you're creating, that you're created about and particularly with, with with what you were talking about?

00:05:28:15 - 00:05:48:10
Steve
I'd be interested in your take with all these changes or kind of I like the term whipsaw effect that somebody says, which basically shows, hey, we've done a rapid move. I think it could get easy to lose sight of your values in that and react in the moment, versus how do you balance that short term, mid-term long term strategy.

00:05:48:10 - 00:05:50:17
Steve
So what are you hearing from leaders about that. Yeah.

00:05:50:17 - 00:06:10:15
Anne
And there's a couple dimensions to that. There's the actual operational strategy. And what is the business model and what are we driving towards. So what are the new growth avenues. What is our core business? How does that change with emerging technology or changing geo political factors or, you know, just just the normal kind of questions that crossing the chasm question that's been out there forever.

00:06:10:17 - 00:06:31:10
Anne
But there's also, an emotional and a cultural and a communication side to it too. So, and that that goes into questions about some of the challenges around things like T&E or even ESG. And what is it employees expect you to speak on? And there's been a lot of intensity and change. Our culture is changing. And that talk about a whipsaw effect.

00:06:31:12 - 00:06:56:16
Anne
So I think this question and you've rooted it, in the values for brand strategy, for operational strategy, for culture strategy. For every point on the compass, you need to ask yourself, why are we here? What is the core value of what we're creating? How are we serving our stakeholders? What is this business meant to do? And then to me, you and I have both been in the business, you know, over 30 years.

00:06:56:16 - 00:07:23:10
Anne
So we've known how undervalued internal communications used to be. So now I think we all understand across this field and across the executive in the C-suite, internal communications is as important as external. And they are almost parallel. And so we need to bring intense strategy, thoughtfulness and precision to how we communicate about why we're doing things and about what the purpose is and how it ties back to our core mission and values.

00:07:23:12 - 00:07:28:15
Anne
So, I mean, there's so much there, but you have to look at it in a holistic way. I think.

00:07:28:17 - 00:07:55:00
Steve
Yeah. And one of my podcast guests, in 2024, is the managing director of the Harris Poll and one of the, one of the interesting findings that they had to the point that you were talking about is where strategy often falls off is the lack of making those internal connections and getting that internal buy in. And really kind of, again, rooting it in, celebrating the culture and the value in terms of where things are at.

00:07:55:01 - 00:08:16:07
Steve
And so when I, when I, from where I sit and, and from where I'm thinking about all the changes that are coming, certainly there's a lot of opportunity. Certainly there's a lot of things that are going to be significant challenges. But but I guess I kind of see, you know, I guess I'll start this isn't my checklist, but but three of my tips are really about setting the context.

00:08:16:07 - 00:08:47:13
Steve
Right. And I think it's important that with the complexities that are involved in all these different regulatory and policy decisions are coming, how do you still distill the complex challenge into relatable stories that relate to your business and the impact you're having on real people, humans, all of that? How do you maintain consistency with past commitments? Because I think we're going to see in the news those companies that pivot with a pivot and kind of forget who they were yesterday, their publics are going to call them out on that.

00:08:47:13 - 00:09:00:18
Steve
They'll probably lose business out of that. And end of the day, how do you continue to think about how do I build trust, not just because something's easier or regulation has been gone? Now, I could do something that I wouldn't do last year.

00:09:00:20 - 00:09:04:23
Anne
Yeah, I like that. I think those are great things to keep top of mind.

00:09:05:01 - 00:09:28:15
Steve
So how about we switch topics a little bit and talk about, get out of the regulatory policy world and talk a little bit about what are some of the key trends to watch in 2025. And, and as our, and none of these should probably be surprise to our listeners, but as we kind of think about where we're at, there's a lot of things out there hybrid work, culture, resiliency, AI.

00:09:28:17 - 00:09:35:18
Steve
Just those are just three to start. I mean, what's kind of your take on what are the key trends for us to watch in 2025?

00:09:35:23 - 00:10:08:08
Anne
Yeah, and both of us could expound on a lot of these. I think, one is just continuing to understand business model reinvention, constant business model reinvention, constantly interrogating how you're operating and being really open to making changes and to not be afraid to shift, but do it with great purpose and thoughtfulness and make sure you're communicating it very well, because everyone's workforce is completely overwhelmed with the amount of change and uncertainty that surrounds us.

00:10:08:10 - 00:10:29:08
Anne
You know? And it's funny, there's a lot of psychological noise. So the weather patterns and the concerns around climate change, you know, you have no water in the northeast for half of the fall, or you have a category four hurricane in the mountains of North Carolina. This stuff is anxiety producing for human beings, and there's a constant hum of that.

00:10:29:08 - 00:10:46:20
Anne
So the more that we can be clear about, we're going to change and force business reinvention, and we're going to look to the future, but we're going to do it. There's a reason why we're going to communicate with you that's critical. I don't feel the future of work is settled yet. This navigating the hybrid work thing, I mean, all of us, us included, are looking at it.

00:10:46:22 - 00:11:05:03
Anne
I think that's going to continue to change. And one thing we know is that there's going to still be more choice for workforce, and we have to figure out how to work through that and still create cultures that are meaningful. While allowing that level of autonomy and independence and understand like that. It's just not settled yet. It's it hasn't settled down still.

00:11:05:03 - 00:11:28:17
Anne
And we have to be very engaged with it. And then that question of resilience, how do we cultivate resilience in ourselves individually, as leaders or as employees? Wherever you're situated in the organization, how do you cultivate leaders, resilience as an organization as a whole? And then how do we, as professional services firm, help our clients tap into and cultivate that resilience, combined with nimbleness and creativity?

00:11:28:22 - 00:11:32:09
Anne
So those are those are some of mine. What are the ones on your list?

00:11:32:15 - 00:11:49:09
Steve
You know, for, for for me, a lot of a lot of discussions I'm having you hit on it with like this business model evolution and reinvention. And I think we're going to see a lot of that. I, I'm at least based on what I'm reading and from what I'm hearing and from what I'm seeing, I think we're going to see a lot more M&A is coming.

00:11:49:09 - 00:12:16:22
Steve
And with M&A comes a lot of change, a lot of evolution, a lot of business model things. But but I'm also seeing that business model evolution and reinvention within the communications function itself. I mean, we've certainly certainly seeing that on, the agency front. We're certainly seeing that even with, with in-house teams and that desire of I want it all, but how do I have it all without a lot of budget?

00:12:16:22 - 00:12:35:17
Steve
I want really, really senior counsel, but I don't want the senior counselors grinding things out on a daily basis. I want to have access to specialists, but I don't want to pay for those specialists to be on the tap all the time. And then on the flip side, on the agency side, it's okay. How do we provide that senior level counsel?

00:12:35:17 - 00:13:01:06
Steve
And then how do we create nimble, flexible models that that really make sense? That's that's creating value for everybody. So that's where it's interesting to me. The whole topic of reinvention has been driven pretty heavily by AI and you may see the same things, but with my conversations, just thinking back to January 2024, it was about, okay, this is going to be a reality.

00:13:01:06 - 00:13:21:15
Steve
What are the guardrails? What are the rules? What are the ethics? How do we make sure that, you know, we're doing copyright and doing everything great. And then somewhere around September or October, there is this massive shift which it was no longer about if but how are you using it for efficiency? How are you using it to create value?

00:13:21:15 - 00:13:39:23
Steve
How are you creating it for innovation and the expectation on both the client and agency side that you're using it to be better, to be better counsel, to deliver better product? And I think for me, 2025 is going to hopefully it's going to be a settling of that into business models.

00:13:40:01 - 00:14:08:20
Anne
Oh my gosh, that I couldn't agree more. You and I talk all the time and we have our feelers out everywhere. You know I love circulating and connecting with people. I'm reading voraciously, especially, you know, having been through some major tech shifts before, from the internet to the advent of social media web2 Web3. For me that it's a constant education process and curiosity and just gathering data everywhere, like a light bulb coming on in the fall.

00:14:08:20 - 00:14:25:19
Anne
And it's not that there's a lot being done prior to that. I mean, we've been in a experimentation and implementation mode for a while, but, you know, the rapid increase in that and I think, we still have to be thoughtful and measured about it. And that's what clients need from us, is really being counselors about what's hype and what's reality.

00:14:25:19 - 00:14:45:13
Anne
And usually it's a mix of both, but it's it's been a dramatic change. And this question you ask about, especially the sort of needing it all, but how do you put budget against it? I think that's true for all operations now client side, agency side, figuring out where you invest and then where you cut and where you are smart about it.

00:14:45:15 - 00:14:54:11
Anne
There's a lot of dynamic tensions out there in the marketplace, and that's going to persist. And that's where for ourselves and for our clients, we need to really lean into figuring out how to thread that needle.

00:14:54:12 - 00:15:22:20
Steve
Yeah, in a couple of areas I think are going to be interesting to see how they play out. And and it's no surprise. I mean, we've talked about it at nauseum in the industry and even on some of, some of our building brand gravity's of the negative around the acronym DSG, all of that. But what's interesting is when you look at the research and you peel back the label, people still want and expect purpose driven branding from companies.

00:15:22:22 - 00:15:49:13
Steve
People still expect and want what you're doing to be more sustainable as you move forward. So I think it's going to be really interesting to see how some of those core undercurrents continue to play out, maybe sans acronym or not, but but I still believe when you look at the research public still have high expectations of brand and corporations and purpose and sustainability.

00:15:49:15 - 00:16:05:12
Steve
And it will be interesting to see just the maturity of that in the conversation and in 2025. And I don't know, based on your executive conversations, are you are you hearing the same thing, which is I yeah, I may not like the label, but I'm no less committed to what we're doing.

00:16:05:13 - 00:16:24:23
Anne
Yeah. I'm glad. I'd love to comment on that, because I'm about to give a talk to one of our clients and all the comms folks across one client, across different brands within an entity on AI. And one of the first slides I'm going to have, we'll have three acronyms ESG, DTI, and I. On the screen. I'm going to ask everyone to say, hey, we're smart communicators.

00:16:24:23 - 00:16:55:22
Anne
What is the relationship between these three? And there's maybe many answers, but my answer is that all of these are acronyms that contain a universe and have been very ill defined, and a lot of the issues that we're facing, I think, regarding the pushback, I mean, not entirely. There's ideology here too, right? But the pushback against some of these issues is that we've crammed together massively distinct worlds within environmental, social governance, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging.

00:16:56:03 - 00:17:19:23
Anne
And now I, I in what context? Cognitive predictive generative. You know the lack of precision in the terms. And this is where my plea to communications professionals this is our world. This is our ball to run down the field, help bring more precision to these terms. Because the fact is, I agree with you. Executives around the globe are still pursuing climate goals.

00:17:20:01 - 00:17:58:17
Anne
They still understand the business disruption of climate, for example, to supply chain and to their their existence to their people. They still need good governance in the boardroom and in the corporation. We know, I'd say the vast majority of executives I speak to understand that greater representation within our companies, more diverse points of view across all points. I just talked with this business executive on Monday during the training is a superpower and is required in a more diverse world, and that bringing more sense of belonging and psychological safety removes friction and lets you fly so what I want to see for AI and all of these areas is more precision around the strategy and the

00:17:58:17 - 00:18:11:09
Anne
language, and I think that that's that's a big, as you can tell, a soapbox for me, I'm up on the soapbox talking about this to everybody. And when I talk about this people are like, yes. Nodding quite emphatically.

00:18:11:11 - 00:18:31:12
Steve
Yeah. And it it kind of leads us to, to the like the next topic I would like to talk about, you know we've talked about the big pivot. We've, we've talked about the key trends to watch which is. So how can businesses really navigate this landscape and what what are what are they need to do. And and you know I always like looking over the horizon.

00:18:31:14 - 00:18:56:14
Steve
And as I look over the horizon, I'm kind of seeing that as we get into 2025, it's as you talk about the reinvention, the evolution, whatever term you want to do. I think brands and communicators and marketers and their executives really need to focus on innovation driven strategies for their brand in kind of like three areas that we've been talking about.

00:18:56:16 - 00:19:27:10
Steve
How do you leverage AI responsibly to drive engagement, not just as an efficiency tool, but really leverage it responsibly and define what that means? How do you align your purpose driven measures with our messaging, with measurable business outcomes? So it's not just purpose for purpose sake, but it's really yes, this delivers tangible goals, tangible values. These are the metrics we find are important, and simplifying complex topics in a way that we can really build trust through storytelling.

00:19:27:10 - 00:19:50:22
Steve
So kind of like what you said, rather than throwing everything in a lump sum box and say, we've got it covered, we've got to think about what are those topics, how do we talk about how it's relevant to our customers, to our communities, to our employees and that old fashioned thing? Like I've always joked, you know, the first infographic was on the cave wall, which is Bear Bad River.

00:19:50:22 - 00:20:04:17
Steve
Good. You know, but but how do how do we simplify really complex topics through storytelling is going to be key. So as you look ahead, what advice do you have for how businesses can navigate through this uncertainty?

00:20:04:22 - 00:20:21:12
Anne
And by the way, I love that last one you have, because that's really core to what we're trying to do here every day. We've got some very complex industries and clients we serve. But you got to make it clear. Yeah, I would add. So the stuff, that I'm thinking about in terms of navigating this landscape, how do businesses do that and including ours?

00:20:21:12 - 00:20:44:14
Anne
I mean, we have a double consciousness. We have to lead our own business to how do you empower teams to innovate? And this is really in the pocket with AI and other many emerging things. How do you empower folks to innovate while staying aligned with what they need to deliver today? You know, as well as the organizational values and that also how do you invest but also know where you're generating your revenue?

00:20:44:14 - 00:21:07:06
Anne
These things are intention sometimes. So that's the first one. Another one is that culture of agility, embracing the fact that it will stay uncertain. I think during Covid, ourselves and many other organizations came to the conclusion that what you do is you plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, scenario, plan and then use, oh well, I'm going to hold less tightly and see what happens.

00:21:07:06 - 00:21:34:07
Anne
But I've got ideas. I've got a portfolio. It's like a fan. It opens up. I got a portfolio of options because I planned and that, that scenario planning is, is really that sort of cultural agility. But then that scenario planning, how do you make sure that adaptability is an option? It's a given. And that you do a lot of proactive communication to help internal and external stakeholders understand that you are both planning, but you are also nimble and flexible.

00:21:34:09 - 00:21:53:22
Steve
So so that that requires us to be on all the time. So how do you how do you how do you coach executives, clients even just just, our own agency members on this resiliency and agility and, not getting burned out in the process?

00:21:54:00 - 00:22:14:20
Anne
Well, and it's hard, you know, maybe, like, you could come to my sessions with my therapist on this. Like, all joking aside, you need a strategy and a team as a leader. And I think even within there's so much more talk about mental health now, which I think is really healthy, because we can understand more of the totality of our lives and flow that in and out of work.

00:22:14:20 - 00:22:34:08
Anne
I don't believe in the old sort of work life balance because it implies like a perfect it's just it's just doesn't exist. Right. So in terms of what I'm counseling to myself and others is how are you intentional about what is worth your time to be doing? How do you ask yourself every day, am I spinning and directions I don't need to be?

00:22:34:10 - 00:22:56:01
Anne
Am I making mountain, you know, a mountain out of a molehill? Am I? Am I heightened in my approach? Everything. How do I take a breath, calm down, get another point of view and say, hey, little by little, focus on what's important because you can get pulled in so many directions. You know, every week I have to ask myself, did I spend my time in a really helpful way, whether for clients or our own agency?

00:22:56:01 - 00:23:16:14
Anne
So I think being mindful about your time, being mindful about what is happening in your body and your mind. So like, how are you reacting to things, how are you triggered by things and how do you de-escalate? Like what are the things in with colleagues or personally, can you do to get yourself in a place where you have that sense of resilience because it's not a perfect linear thing.

00:23:16:14 - 00:23:26:20
Anne
You don't get there and stay there. You know, this is a triggering time. You're going to go up and down a lot, but if you're mindful about it, I think you have a chance to be much more effective and feel more in control. Right?

00:23:26:22 - 00:23:45:14
Steve
Yeah. Well, it's interesting that that you hit on the work life balance. I think a think about some conversation. I remember the first time, K3 with Sue's, fellow principal and our Chro, she said, Steve, it's not work life balance, it's work life integrations. And at first I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just like H.R. speak. What a shocker.

00:23:45:16 - 00:24:04:16
Steve
But then the more I got to think about it, it is it is true. It really is about work life integration and I think one of the things about this profession, that I've always said is that it's not a job, it's a lifestyle. Yeah, right. And if you really want to be good at it, you've got to embrace.

00:24:04:16 - 00:24:29:09
Steve
And like you said, learn how to turn on and turn off. When to be mindful. When tonight, when when things are breaking, particularly in crisis. When to take certain parts of your your world and have them sit in the corner for a little bit so that you can focus and compartmentalize, I think are are some interesting things. But but I also think, you know, that should be a source of pride that this is a lifestyle, not a job.

00:24:29:09 - 00:24:53:08
Steve
You know, as we think about our fellow agency leaders here at Ganz and elsewhere, as we think about, you know, all our professional contacts in, large multinationals or academic settings, or not for profits. I mean, people do this profession because they love it. And I also think I, I'm a big fan, say every once in a while we need some spot celebration.

00:24:53:08 - 00:24:59:08
Steve
I think we need to celebrate. What an awesome, dynamic, not boring industry and career.

00:24:59:08 - 00:25:20:06
Anne
This is where you talk about resilience and I look at our client sectors. And again, every sector has its ups and downs, right. There's a number of them under tremendous pressure. But you look at the integrated marketing communications field, even agency types beyond what we do. I'm amazed at our resilience over the past years. I'm amazed at the resilience of our society.

00:25:20:06 - 00:25:42:18
Anne
So again, how do we take that opportunity as leaders to I love this part, celebration. You know, I do to say, well, we can do remarkable things when under pressure and we can be remarkably creative. And how do we say that's not just something that comes up in a crisis when you're like, oh my gosh, we have to do something because we're being sent home with lockdown or something like that during Covid.

00:25:42:20 - 00:26:04:12
Anne
But more of that. How do we harness that confidence that comes from looking back and saying, look what we managed through, and business reinvention. Look at what our field was 30 years ago when you and I both started, and look what it is today and look at how leaders of all ages, all generations, we have four generations now in our agencies and in our companies.

00:26:04:14 - 00:26:16:02
Anne
How much I see everybody keeping up and changing and evolving. Not every single person, but for the vast majority. Everyone's like, bring it on. I want to learn this, I want to, I want to know how we're going to operate in the future.

00:26:16:04 - 00:26:27:21
Steve
So I'd like to go off that. The point that you're just just talking about is the at the individuals, and maybe you can talk a little bit about the opportunities and challenges for leaders, leaders and brands.

00:26:28:00 - 00:26:48:21
Anne
Despite how hard the business environment comes, I think we still have seen the benefit of leadership that is more transparent, is a bit more empathetic, and creates an environment that's a bit more inclusive where people do feel not not these old size. I bring your whole self to work, which I believe in, but I think they fall short.

00:26:48:21 - 00:27:19:03
Anne
For folks. It's more about this question of when people feel more empowered, when you create an environment that is more inclusive, where people really feel they can speak and are valued for speaking, then you can innovate more, then people feel safer to do so. And it's not that everything's perfect all the time, but more empathy, more transparency and more sense of inclusivity within all of our organizations can fuel human potential and human flourishing and can fuel the flourishing of our organizations.

00:27:19:05 - 00:27:40:08
Anne
And then I think a challenge that we're going to have to face is maintaining that team engagement and resilience amid a lot of turmoil and amid an environment that will never be back to five days a week in person. We are distributed. We are remote, we are hybrid. So how do we create cultures and engagement and meaningful engagement?

00:27:40:08 - 00:27:48:06
Anne
Not I'm sitting somewhere on a screen, all the time and not, you know, finding those moments for in-person engagement, too.

00:27:48:08 - 00:28:09:17
Steve
Okay. So I think I think from my, my standpoint as we think about opportunities and challenge, you know, one of the big opportunities is really how do we integrate technology seamlessly into our strategies while staying authentic. And I think that authentic piece is key. And I'd mentioned to you that I was talking to somebody and it was the most straightforward statement, but it's just like, hit me like a sledgehammer.

00:28:09:17 - 00:28:38:22
Steve
And boom, they said, well, but whatever you do with technology, you can't lose focus on what do you do best, where are you best? And as straightforward, as simple as that is, I think we forget that sometimes we get so focused in trying to solve or which tool or the application or the implication that I think it's important for us as, as brands, as leaders to stay authentic to who are we and what do we do best?

00:28:38:22 - 00:29:07:05
Steve
And to the point that you said, always know where that like North Star is. So that that we're really driving towards that I think is an opportunity. The challenges, I think then become, how do you balance the rapid innovation and the rapid innovation needed to stay competitive while still maintaining that that trust of relevance? Right. So as you shift, as you create new models, how do you instill that trust and relevance?

00:29:07:07 - 00:29:10:12
Steve
For the mid-term and for the long term? So those are big challenges.

00:29:10:15 - 00:29:39:12
Anne
I think that's a great pairing, that opportunity and challenge. And I think with the rapid pace of tech and like if we take AI as the apotheosis of that right now, right, in all of its forms, change was rapid before. Change is insanely rapid now. There's no person that can keep up with every advancement that's happening across the broad spectrum of what's going on with AI right now, where it's being baked into enterprise tools, how not new things through the large language models.

00:29:39:12 - 00:30:07:02
Anne
It's absolutely insane. And it I can see how overwhelmed everyone is. I can feel it myself. So part of it is, in one of my earlier podcast interviews from this year, I interviewed Natalie Nixon, who's an author and a speaker and a consultant about creativity and unlocking that. But she has a rubric called Wonder and Rigor. How do you have the wonder of exploration, the newness of a child, the beginner's mind, and the idea of play.

00:30:07:04 - 00:30:33:15
Anne
But then how do you bring the rigor to it in the discipline of figuring out, what do I pursue or what is valuable to my goals, my business schools, my, you know, the strategic value I bring not getting caught up in, oh, this tool can do this today and tomorrow. Another tool can do that. And so I'm trying to reroute myself in this idea of wonder and rigor because we have to have play, but we also have to have tremendous discipline and how we're going to start to ingest more of these technologies.

00:30:33:15 - 00:30:37:09
Anne
Otherwise ourselves and our people will be completely overwhelmed at all times.

00:30:37:11 - 00:31:05:22
Steve
I like that, I like that and wonder, wonder and rigor. And when you said that, it reminded me of another, I don't know if it's binary or duality or what you want to call it, but of magic and logic, right? You go you go back to that question of where are you best? You know, the magic is that deep expertise, that understanding, that insight that that that magic little spark that's within the DNA of a leader of an organization that is uniquely them.

00:31:06:00 - 00:31:30:10
Steve
And how do you protect them? And how do you use technology to make that magic even more powerful? And then what is that logic element? So again, if you think about, you know, you were talking about the large language model, you know, talking to other senior agency leaders and how they're trying to capture their own IP and their expertise so that they can make that magic better, cooler, neater at scale.

00:31:30:12 - 00:31:46:18
Steve
But but then where is that logic? Because come up with a cool idea. You still got to execute it. So how do you really lay in technology, AI, whatever that is, to really execute that in a very logical way. That's sufficient, that's that's powerful. So I like that.

00:31:46:20 - 00:31:54:06
Anne
And that and that's the promise of augmented intelligence. That's really the promise of augmenting humans, not replacing us, because that's our magic to.

00:31:54:12 - 00:32:17:09
Steve
Wonder and rigor and magic and logic. So, so, so I guess I guess that that's kind of setting us up for, you know, what what what our listeners are probably waiting to hear, which is. So what is that what does that checklist and, and Steve look like as you think about about 2025. So I'll let you go. First you have to have a checklist for five priorities.

00:32:17:11 - 00:32:47:03
Anne
I did my homework. Okay. So three leadership priorities for success in 2025. Number one, the culture of agility and inclusivity. Number two, equip teams with tools and the knowledge to adapt to this new environment, including technology. Learn, learn, learn. And the last one is just try to lead with empathy, but also clarity of vision and how you communicate that vision inside your walls and outside your walls.

00:32:47:03 - 00:32:48:01
Anne
So those are my three.

00:32:48:05 - 00:33:16:16
Steve
Those are your three. Okay. Well, you you said a high bar. So I'm going to have three branding strategies. My three actionable branding strategies are as follows. How do we use AI and data analytics to power really personalized, meaningful customer experiences. So again tying that back to that magic, how do you make that be actionable at scale? How do we really prioritize those value driven stories and build long term trust?

00:33:16:16 - 00:33:43:22
Steve
I think we cannot forget that foundation of the importance of simplify the complex into easy to understand stories that have emotion and relate. And then finally, how do we focus on using emerging technologies and integrating them seamlessly into our branding efforts? So. So those are my three actionable branding strategies for for for 2025. And, and I would say, you know, with this podcast, it's available.

00:33:43:22 - 00:33:59:06
Steve
It's on our channels. I would really love to hear from our listeners. You know what what they're seeing, you know what their top three are. So I really encourage you to, to go to our chat and put in your three top, checklist items for 2025.

00:33:59:08 - 00:34:16:01
Anne
Yeah, I just did a mailbag episode. That's sort of a roundup of questions that we've gotten both internally and from externally from some of our different episodes. And that was very fun, and I'd love to have more of that kind of interaction, more questions for us for sure.

00:34:16:03 - 00:34:46:21
Steve
Yeah. And and I would also say for those of those listeners out here, if you would like to engage us as part of being on building brand gravity, don't be shy to reach out to Ann or myself. We would would love to have a dialog. Talk about what you're facing in 2025. The challenges, the opportunities, the inspiration. I think would be great because I, I do think going back to where we started, I definitely think there's going to be a lot of challenges for companies, brands and individuals to navigate in 2025.

00:34:46:21 - 00:34:56:00
Steve
But but for your optimist realist, I do think there could be tremendous opportunity. And it can be really exciting to think about how we shape the future.

00:34:56:02 - 00:35:28:03
Anne
Yeah, there's so many big, challenges to solve, you know, individually as an organization, but also for companies like ours in connection with our clients. And so that's where for me and as you said, it's Steve. You have to the work we do here, there's a lot of passion and love in it. And one of the things that keeps it fresh for me is continual learning is applying, you know, that lens of what we know to new challenges is creating those tailored solutions and figuring out what does this business challenge require.

00:35:28:05 - 00:35:48:22
Anne
And as communications has become more obviously important, more than 30 years ago, more than 20 years ago, to the C-suite of all organizations. More chance to apply that skillset where it's really needed. So I'm I'm very optimistic about the future. I don't think anyone has to fact check us about uncertainty coming next year. I think we're going to get that one right.

00:35:48:22 - 00:35:56:06
Anne
But I think if we focus on the upside, you know, there's there's a lot of, exciting work ahead for us, frankly.

00:35:56:08 - 00:36:23:08
Steve
I agree. Exciting, exciting times, exciting lifestyle. Certainly not. Certainly not a boring time. So so again, we invite you, if you have thoughts, please reach out. Share with us. We're looking forward to another exciting year, building brand gravity. As we go into 2025, we'll have some exciting guests and conversations. And anything else for us as we kick off 2025.

00:36:23:13 - 00:36:36:13
Anne
No, just happy end of year and happy holidays to, for me and the reindeer. And, you know, Steve and I look forward to hosting a lot more conversations, and we look forward to continuing to listen in 2025.

00:36:36:15 - 00:36:44:03
Steve
Well, great, great conversation. And and thank you all for listening and tune in soon for our next episode of Building Brand Gravity.

00:36:44:07 - 00:36:45:02
Anne
Bye, everybody.

 

Anne 0:00
Hello and welcome to building brand gravity. My name is Anne green. I'm CEO at the GNS Integrated Marketing Communications Group, and it's such a treat today because I get to talk to a very, very old friend. I guess we're getting older now, Eric, so, but we're also old friends, both Eric I'll and we go back to college days, but the conversation we're going to have today is very much core to my work as an organizational leader, and something that Eric's been involved in for a long time. But Eric, welcome.

Eryc 0:29
Thanks. Anne. I'm so excited to do this. This is going to be fun.

ANNE 0:33
Yeah, so I know a lot about you, and it's been fun catching up, but tell our listeners a little bit about your background and the work that you do today, and that'll be a good entree into the conversation we're going to have, which has a lot to do with the idea of engagement and the pros of it and the challenges of it too. Yeah,

Eryc 0:51
Absolutely, yeah. So yeah. So today, what I do is I help heart driven leaders, heart led leaders, to cultivate more human centric workplaces, so that people can become the best version of themselves and we can get better results. And I do that primarily now through speaking and writing and advising. So that's pretty much what I'm doing. I got here through, as many of us, a very circuitous route, but I began really my career working in General Electric, so huge multinational corporation back in the Jack Welch days, back in the both highs and lows of the Jack Welch days. And through that, I really got to develop a lot of different skills. We were encouraged to work in multiple different parts of the business during that time. They invested very heavily in employee development at the time. So for my early career, that was really valuable. So I got to get involved in things like six sigma, which was really key, because I got interested in all of this sort of data driven Statistical Process Improvement, and then realized that none of it mattered if you didn't manage the people side of things. So then I got really interested in the in the people side, in things like change management and through that employee engagement, workplace culture, leadership development. So that's how I ended up here doing what I'm doing today. And

ANNE 2:10
It's it's so funny because my earliest work at Burson Marsteller, one of my first clients was GE Appliances. So you and I have a strange intersection there, also during the Jack Welsh days, the roaring days of the nine days. So I have a and the idea of the process improvement philosophies around six sigma. You know, it's something that you don't hear talked about a lot today, but it's certainly something I remember from my past.

Eryc 2:34
Yeah, it was, it was sort of a religion at the time, GE, and it was believed to be the way and, and I think, you know, time has shown that that's a it's a pretty industrial kind of mindset. It's not to say that there aren't things to be learned from it, but it's, but it works in industrial businesses like appliances, and it's harder to make work in a business like yours or not.

ANNE 2:57
Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's interesting. So before we get into sort of your view and what you've been bringing to the table in your speaking and also writing, I know you just recently published a book that I've been taking a look at called stop engaging employees, which is a very provocative title. I enjoy that. What are the different areas within employee engagement? How have you seen the idea and the practice of employee engagement sort of change over time, and it really only came into the fore as a language and a practice only within the past couple decades. I feel like, Yeah,

Eryc 3:31
That's right, yeah, yeah. It comes out of it's come to life in, really our working lives. It started off in the early 90s, this whole notion of of employee engagement, and there was language used at the time to talk about people being harnessed to their work and and some of that still remains in the way that we talk about employee engagement. But I think, you know, yeah, definitely prior to the 90s, the notion of of, really what employees are experiencing at work at all was really not really relevant to the to the business conversation. And I think in the 90s it became, and really, through the through the early 2000s very much about how do we get people to do stuff right? And as you know, like that is a key part of managing a business, is sometimes people have to do stuff they don't want to do. And how do we accomplish that but, but I think the idea of employee engagement has shifted a bit from from how do we get people to do stuff to how do we make this a positive experience for everyone? And I think where I'm trying to push it as even further, which is to say that the whole purpose of work is for us to become the best versions of ourselves and to flourish as humans, and that's why organizations exist. So I'm trying to push us even further in that human centric direction and start stop looking at it as something that's something we do to people.

ANNE 4:55
Yeah, I was really intrigued in some of your writing when you and I had a catch up conversation and prep. Conversation for this conversation, you talked about having a bit of a personal epiphany, and there's so much discussion about what is the outcome of what we're trying to do in business, both as individuals and collective, as organizations. So I have that double consciousness. I am a worker and I am an organizational leader, right? So I'm trying to look at it from both sides. But for many years, the idea of stake, of shareholder value, was the outcome of business, or, you know, maybe obviously revenue, profit and things like that. But what Tell me a little bit about the epiphany you had regarding what the actual end goal might be of the work we do?

Eryc 5:35
Yeah, so, so I think, I think what you're talking about is really important, right? Because I think just to get us there, so we talk about Milton Friedman, and that was the the purpose of the organization is to maximize shareholder value. That was, that was sort of taken out of context, but also he meant it. And then we get to, you know, I think it was 2018 if the Business Roundtable comes out and says, actually, the purpose of a business is to maximize outcomes for all of its stakeholders. So that means communities and suppliers and employees and customers, right and and that shift was pre pandemic. I think, as you and I discussed, like during the pandemic, things shifted even more. And I think there was a there was a real awakening for a lot of folks, myself included, about what the role of work is, what the role of my job is, and and how I think about my contribution there. So that's where we got to this really abysmal term, quiet, quitting, right? Which was, which was really just a way of trying to understand that people were recalibrating the role that their job had in their lives, how much space it occupied, because, because for a lot of us, and again, speaking from a position of privilege, where I could work from here in my home, a lot of us were able to reevaluate and and think about how much we were willing to give, how much we were getting, and think about that mutually beneficial relationship between employer and employee. So I think that shifted, and for me, personally, a part of that shift was really realizing, you know, you and I have liberal arts backgrounds, philosophy is sort of in us. And I like to sort of think about the philosophy of business, and I was and I was really thinking about the fact that we going way back sociologically, we organized as groups of humans to be able to accomplish more, and frankly, just live longer. And so organizations exist to serve us, and we don't exist to serve organizations. That's not to say that there's not a role in our lives for being of service, but that, you know, I think this mindset shift of people come to work every day to serve the organization, I think, is really key for leaders, right? And I'm sure you have experience with this of saying, No, that's not true, because they're actually whole people with whole lives behind and ahead of them, and and I need to sort of find ways for this work experience that we're having together to be a part of that.

ANNE 8:10
Yeah I love this. It's a really interesting question of, like, the business flourishing, organizational flourishing, and also human flourishing, yeah? And that question, I mean, we this is not to be a detour, and something we can talk more about that there's also much more question about mental health and wellness and engagement in the workplace in ways that would be inconceivable when we had both graduated college and enter the workforce, especially into those kinds of organizations, just absolutely not on the table. But I wanted to, want to put a pin in that, because I want to this quiet quitting phrase, and I feel a little triggered by it, because 2021, was quite an intense year, I think for anybody, whether you're a worker, manager, organizational leader, and in, you know, we I work in the media, so I recognize that trends have to have names. You know, I have great respect for the press in this country, and it's roiling and messy and chaotic at times, but boy, sometimes people get their teeth into a trend and they just won't let it go. And I think a lot of us are trying to understand great resignation, one thing, quiet, quitting another. But what does this actually mean? And I really enjoyed, and I want you to unpack it a little bit more that the name quiet quitting was really a misnomer for what was actually happening. How do you see of what that dynamic actually was at that time?

Eryc 9:31
Yeah, and I think that's really, it's really insightful of you to home in on that, because I do think that there's, it's, it's easy to grasp onto that, as you say, just as it's easy to grasp onto notions of generations, which we can talk about later, but these terms really matter, and the words that we choose matter, and quiet quitting was a way of sort of, I think blaming people of putting the putting the onus on the people in the, frankly, with the least amount of power in any organization. Or in society and saying, Oh, they're they're quietly not doing their jobs, and sort of shaming. And I think what I encountered an article, and I wish I could remember the name of the author to give proper credit, but Sloan Management Review article in which the author referred to it as calibrated contribution, and I found that term really helpful, actually, right? Because it's about calibration, right? It's not about just stopping doing something. It's about saying, what's the right level of me to give to this effort, and that's going to vary by the person, by the situation, by the organization, by the mission, and so. So I think this idea of how we calibrate our contribution to our jobs, and I've I always like to distinguish between jobs and work, because I think that those are those can get messy. And I think a job, the thing that we do to pay our bills, is a different thing from our work, which, which may be something like our purpose. And I think calibrating how much we give of ourselves to our jobs is really key to that, to our mental health, to our physical health. And I think obviously what we have to recognize too is that there's such an interdependence here that we know that what we experience in the workplace doesn't just sort of stay in the workplace, right, and so and vice versa. That's right, exactly. And so if we're if we're burning out in our work, in our jobs, then what impact is that having on our on our friends, our families, our loved ones, our neighbors, our communities. That really matters too. So I think that this idea of calibration really becomes a sort of social imperative.

ANNE 11:42
Yeah, you know, I do want to pick on up on something you just said, and you can let me know if you have an opinion on it, which is these just dialogs about generations in the workforce. And right now, at my firm, and at many firms, we have four generations. We have boomers, millennials, Gen Xers, don't forget us. We're still here. And also Gen Z, I laugh because there are many articles that just ignore us. We're smaller generation. What can you do? But you know, I've been around enough long enough, and you have to, and I'm particularly interested from your lens, given the kinds of work you've done in, you know, organizational leadership, employee engagement and things like that, over the years. But there are these ongoing discussions and debates about what can be attributed to a generation and then versus, like, what might be a life stage, or what might be some other kind of dynamic that's at play between groups and communities of people within an organization. What is your take on where generational thinking is helpful and where it might not be helpful?

Eryc 12:40
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for, thank you for the nuanced question. Because I think that that's the key to this, is nuance, right? And I think, I think that there's, it's generations are a useful shortcut, right there. There's certainly that we can, we can use it as a shortcut for a group of people who were born around a certain period of time and may have a certain shared experience. And that's especially helpful when you have, you know, something major that happens in a in a period of time, you can say, Oh, these people went through that thing. And I think that that can be really useful. You know, I think if you look at, if we're going to look at Gen Z, for example, these are, these are folks who were, in some cases, in high school during the peak of the pandemic. What did that experience do to them? What lasting impacts is that going to have for them? That's important and that's helpful, but like any shortcut, if we don't recognize that it's a shortcut and that shortcuts have limitations, then we're in danger. I think of stereotyping, caricaturing, and we go down, we go down a path of, I think, potentially fascistic path of saying, you know, this this is better, this is worse kind of thing. And so I think, I think the important thing is to balance out the generational shortcut with the individual human so, you know, I think, like you and I were born around the same time, we experienced a lot of the same things. Growing up, we were children of 12 years of the Reagan Bush administration. And you know, what did that mean for us? How has that impacted us? It that's that is true, but you and I also grew up in very different circumstances, and we that matters too. So you know what I think, and I think you'll agree that this, that the sociological findings are that things like, like socio economic status, and unfortunately, in this country, race, have way bigger of an impact than when you were born. And then I think also, if we, if we're to take an idea like Like generations and make it and take it global, it starts to really fall apart quickly, because the experiences I might have had growing up in India would be very different from the experiences I had growing up in the US at the same time.

ANNE 14:57
So it's great to pick apart these constructs, especially. To blow it out like that and say, like, Where does this actually hold? And I think you're right. The idea of a shortcut, I do think, to understand each other in a workplace, whether it's management looking at a wider staff, or the staff looking at management. We're trying to use these shortcuts to understand each other and also create explanations for things because and this will get into the core of I'd love to start talking a little bit about some of the core premises of the book that that you put out this year, which is why we're talking today, because I caught my attention and I checked it out, and it's aligned with a lot of the things I'm thinking about. But it's not easy being in a human community to begin with, and then when it's in a business setting and there's work and compensation involved, and different levels of hierarchy. I mean, it's like, it sounds like no duh, but this stuff is complicated, yes, and I've had a long time joke I've shared with members of my management team for many years, which is, you will be talking about X, Y issue, and I'll just say it's the humans. If it wasn't for the humans, it'll be easy, which means all of us. It doesn't mean them, it doesn't mean us. And I always say there's no us versus them, and that's true internally to me too, but this is why I think there's so much energy around this question of engagement and what it means to be a worker, and what is that relationship. So you titled your book very directly, stop engaging employees, and the subtitle is, start making work more human. Start by explaining that title to me.

Eryc 16:24
Yeah, yeah. Thank you so, so, you know, and I admit that part of the purpose is, is to provoke, to get the wait. What do you mean? Stop engaging in books now. So, so I think you know, just, just to clear it up, is employee engagement important? It absolutely is. What I meant to say with stop engaging employees, is that it's not something we do to someone that I always say. I don't believe we can make someone be engaged any more than we can make someone fall in love with us. And if you try to make someone fall in love with you, it's creepy. And so I think, I think similarly, trying to make someone become engaged, because I, you know, I define engagement as this emotional connection and commitment, and I think, you know, and I recognize, like a lot of your audiences, are communicators. And sometimes that word engagement can mean something different to communicators. Often it means we want people to actually read and understand a message that we're sending right. But I think the idea of being emotionally connected and committed to what I'm doing is what I think about when I think about engagement. And so that's not something you can do to me. What you can do as a leader, and I think you know this well, is cultivate the conditions in which that's more likely. So the metaphor I always like to use is that leadership is a lot more like gardening than it is like carpentry. So you know the carpenter mindset, which is what a lot of folks get taught in business school, which is that you can design and build a workplace culture is not how humans work, right? But what you can do is practice consistently over time a key set of disciplines, like a gardener does to create the conditions in which it's more likely that people are going to flourish and become, become engaged, develop that condition of engagement. So stopping engaging employees is really about stop stopping to seeing it, doing something we do to someone, but also that start making work more human. Piece which goes, which goes hand in hand. It's really also about, how do we think about individual human dignity in these, often profit driven, hierarchical, as you mentioned, organizations, how do we preserve dignity for all in that process?

ANNE 18:37
So I think that's a big part of what that's about as well. It's great. You know, it's funny in business development was sometimes people talk about gardening or versus hunting. You know the cultivation piece, which is really about, again, cultivating human connection, versus, like, I want to sell something to you now, but the carpentry piece reminded me of the the old phrase, um, you can say it many different ways, but if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? And it's and that does feel like that rigidity or that structure that organizations can sometimes have. It's like, I need to put everybody in this very specific place and kind of hammer it all into place. And it's hard, it's hard to avoid that, but it's an interesting concept that you're getting to the heart of, which is engagement is something we do with versus to Am I understanding that correct exactly your perspective?

Eryc 19:26
Yeah, that's exactly I think. I think we are all together cultivating engaging workplaces. We all want that feeling of emotional connection and commitment and excitement about what we're doing, but we're all creating that together. It's not something that you as a leader, design and build and then plug humans into all those humans contribute.

ANNE 19:45
Yeah, it's true. And you know what? One of the things I was thinking about a lot is that organizational leadership and a relationship between organization and employees is both very collective and. Yet also very individual. So I feel this dynamic tension very strongly in my role and have so leaders want and need to engage with each person as the individual human being they are, or they should want to, at least I do, but they also necessarily need to regard the full staff or the full organism as a collective entity. And sometimes the needs of the many are not aligned with the needs of the one. You know, there's ups and downs and business cycles. Sometimes there's hard times or easier times. How do you think about that tension point between the collective and the individual, and that relationship between organizations and staff?

Eryc 20:36
Oh, gosh, I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because I've been thinking about it at the sort of larger sociological context of the that tension between independence and interdependence and yeah, you know, we are, we are both of those. We are both individuals having individual experiences. No one else knows what's going on in this messed up brain right now, right? But at the same time, we accomplish nothing solitarily, right? We, we are all interconnected and interdependent, and so I think, within an organization, I think that shows up exactly as you say, as this tension. You know, when I look at things like performance management systems and that sort of thing, they're all very individualistic, right? We're evaluating this individuals and this individual employees performance over time, and we're trying to isolate that somehow from the interactions that they have with their colleagues and co workers. And that's really hard to do, especially as organizations are more and more creating value through collaboration, right? Like what you accomplish in your in your business only happens among people. It doesn't happen because one person does one thing, and so I think this tension is very real, and there's a couple of different things that I think about that are implications of this. So on the one hand, I think there is the individual who has their own unique needs and aspirations and fears and motivations, and they're unique to them, and they have their own sort of life behind and ahead of them, and they come to work with all of that and and then we want them to, we want to create the conditions in which they become engaged with what we're all trying to do together. And sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn't. And I think this is something that I've been that I've been having a conversation with leaders a lot, which is that I think we've developed this notion that for someone to disengage is inherently bad, and sometimes it's just the way it's going to go, that if, if, if, what you want me to engage with is something that I don't find engaging, it might be better for us not to work together. And that's that's a human centric outcome as well. So I don't think the goal is for everyone in the organization to be engaged necessarily. Because I think over time, as the clarity of the mission develops, as we get clearer on what's important to us and what we're trying to accomplish together, there are going to be some of us that are going to say, yeah, that's not really aligned with where I'm headed as an individual. And so that's how I think about that, that independence, interdependence within the context of an organization. But I do think it's, it's, it's not simple, and I think it's, it's necessary, you know, I want to, I want to sort of acknowledge that, that these, the categorization, the affinitization, coming back to like generations, for example, is necessary and helpful. And so I think within the organization, I think when we talk about, you know, segmentation, or personas, right, or avatars we are, we are kind of creating these fictions, and they're necessary and helpful. And I think within the organization, that's part of how we how we reconcile individual and and collective experience, is by sort of figuring out what who are we, and what are we up to together. And you mentioned this earlier, that there is no us them, it's all us. And I think that's so critical in an organization to have that big, broad sense of when we say we we mean us all, you're touching on some really important things.

ANNE 24:07
I think that I see a lot of leaders struggling with, and it's the post pandemic. Are we post now? I don't know if we are not, but let's call it post pandemic. I feel that it's the pandemic. Really put got the highlighter out, and just like highlighted everything in bright, bright, bright color, which is, what the heck does it mean to be engaged, and how does one signal or perform? That is it, and how it looks different for different people. And I'll give you another example. So you take an institution that I volunteer for, that you know, well as well our alma mater, we both went to the same college, and one of the discussions we were having about volunteering is that love for an institution might look different for different people. For some love might be critique. As an I care about this place, so I actually want to speak out and make it better for us. Others love may look like, I love it. I'm this is great, like, I'm all in, and it's and I feel that over time, it was that kind of, I don't want to diminish it by saying, rah, rah. Like, if it's authentic, it's, you know, I'm a very hyped person. I'm very enthusiastic. I get very into things. So when I really care about something, I'm into it, right? But, yeah, it's a lot easier to see engagement through that lens than someone who a a may just perform their engagement in different way, like may not be the one who wants to join everything, may need more time to recharge their battery, doesn't want to come to all the things. Or it could be someone who's like, I want us to do better. I care about this place enough to want to do better. Do you feel that? And I feel people really trying to understand this more now to say what, especially in a hybrid environment or remote environment, what does engagement look like, and can it look different for different people? Do you have opinions on this? Because to me, I think it's a really important set of questions.

Eryc 25:59
Yeah, it really, it really is. And I think, I think the way that you've stated it is is so respectful of that, that spectrum of what does exist and what and what engagement might look like. And I love the idea of, how am I performing my engagement? I think that's a really good way to describe it. Because I think, I think that the the the tendency is to say an engaged employee looks like this, and if, and if a person doesn't look like this, then they're not engaged. And and there's sort of good reasons why we go there, right? We do. It is something that we want to keep track of. It's, it's often a KPI in the organization to keep track of employee engagement scores and what have you. And so we are trying to, trying to establish some kind of standard or measurement of what, what it means to be engaged. But I think engaged can look a lot of different ways. And so I think this gets into, I think, really complex areas. So, you know, there have been experiments over the years with with sort of how to deal with this. One of the most interesting experiments, I think, is started at Best Buy. It was called the results only work environment, R, R, O, W, E, and it was essentially this effort to say, We don't care when you work, how you work, what you do, as long as you get the results that we've agreed to. And so it was this attempt to offer folks flexibility, autonomy, to to create just enough structure based on just the outcomes the results, and sort of not worry about trying to manage the rest. And that was an interesting attempt, and it didn't really work out. It was a worthy experiment, for sure. It didn't work out for a number of reasons, and I'm not qualified to digest it all, but I will say that one of the things that was really a limitation there was that it actually does matter how we do our work. It does matter how we get things done to most organizations right? That there are that we have a certain set of values. We have a certain set of of ethics, whether those are imposed upon us or come from within that we want to operate under. And so how we get things done actually does matter, and that results only can end up looking like the ends justify the means kind of approach to work, which is, of course, not the goal, but it's either, you know, unintended consequences are kind of the name of the game. So, so I think that when I think about this idea of of who is engaged and who isn't. So I have a really interesting, weird kind of setup. I am both an independent, you know, consultant and speaker, and I also have a part time job. I work for an employer, and working for that employer, I love what I do. I get to do great work. I get to help people, help people, which is really what I'm all about, and I get to do that all day the organization, I sometimes agree with, and I sometimes don't, and I sometimes feel more or less harnessed to the organization, to use that old word, but my level of engagement shows up in how I show up with clients, how the work that I get done, and how I interact with my colleagues, and so it can, it can be tricky to try to say, is that person engaged or not just from sort of observation of energy. And I think part of, part of trying to be an inclusive workplace is trying to recognize too that that people can show up in a lot of different ways, and we don't know what the internal state is.

ANNE 29:26
Yeah, no, I think that's a really interesting observations and helpful to just think through you, as you said earlier, calibrating. How are Cali people calibrating work and life? For years, this phrase work life balance has, I think, been such a joke, you know, let's call it what it is. I mean, don't mean to be rude, but the idea, as you said, Eric, Words matter. So work life balance implies there is a perfection, that there's a balance. Balance means that you found the point where it's going to be fixed and stay you. Will stay perfectly balanced there. And we all know that that's not how life is or work is. And so the idea that there may be a calibration relative to your enjoyment of your work, or the bonding or the alignment with the organization, or what's happening in your life, I mean, I think these are very realistic and thoughtful things that leaders need to understand and and be open to and continue to contemplate. Because I also don't find it to be a fixed medium. I think it's shifting all the time. Individuals are shifting. We as people are evolving all the time. I mean, would you agree with that? It's, it's changes constantly.

Eryc 30:36
Well, I think that's exactly what you what, what I love about what you just hit on, which is that, is that these are, these are ongoing actions. And so I actually used to, used to write and speak quite a bit about work life balance, but I would always say it's a verb, it's not a state of being, yeah, that we are work life balancing all the time, right? That's, that's kind of how things work. You know, if you're on a balance beam, you know that you're constantly making micro adjustments right to stay balanced. And I think that's what we're actually doing when we're trying to maintain work life balance. We don't maintain it at all. We're just sort of constantly adjustments. We're actively doing it right and so and I think that's also, you know, acknowledging the sort of macro environment in which organizations are operating today, which is, you know, as people like to say, VUCA, right? Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. I like to add to that emergent that there are outcomes that come out of organizations that we didn't even know were coming, right? So, so operating in that environment versus operating in a stable, predictable environment of maybe 50 100 years ago, it's just going to look different. And so so there is a nimbleness, an activeness, to how we all are trying to navigate these things, and that means we can show up differently every day. Yeah,

ANNE 32:02
it's funny. I we, I was just speaking about my least favorite acronym, VUCA, earlier today in a town hall meeting. So now I can call it VUCA E, the emergent I like that. No, it's, we're in a VUCA world. It's, it's the VUCA world. We just live in it. I think that's very true, and it that has huge implications for organizations and their workforce, as people, as a community, lack of that constant instability, or the question, the uncertainty, you know, it infuses the atmosphere. So in your book, you have a number of ease. Was it six E's, Yep, yeah. But tell me a little bit about I mean, obviously I encourage folks to check you out. Find you look, find the book. I think there's a lot of good thinking in here, as they're hearing already. But what are some of the most critical lenses or Takeaways or pieces that you'd want to share as you summarize this work for others?

Eryc 32:57
Yeah, so I think the, and appreciate the question. I think these, these 6e are intended not to make a leader's job harder, because I, because I recognize that your job is already hard enough, but they're intended to to bring to consciousness disciplines that you're that you're weaving through, how you're doing your work and so and the most important one, I think, if I had to pick one of the six, is the first one, which is empathize, and this is what a lot of our discussion has been about today, right? Which is, which is really about understanding who people are in the workplace, what their needs and aspirations and fears and motivations are, what they're excited about, what they're scared of, and and, and understanding that at a very that individual level, is a necessary precondition to anything else we try to do to create a human centric workplace. If we don't start with understanding who our fellow humans are in the workplace, we don't stand to work together to cultivate that human centric workplace. And it's, it's very similar to, you know, when you look outside the organization and you look at understanding your clients, right, or look at understanding the recipient of a message, right, if we don't understand them, then we're just pushing things as opposed to, as opposed to doing things together. So empathize, definitely the place where I recommend starting, and it's also, it's also not as hard as I think I make it sound, because it's really just about one of the, one of the pieces of advice I give at the end of a lot of my talks is just start to adjust your speaking to listening ratio. Just start to think about that I love. I use a tool online called fathom, have you? Have you used fathom? No, I haven't. I'm not an endorsement. It's just, it's a tool that I use, and it records conversations and then generates AI notes and follow up items. Oh, yes. But another thing that it does for the person who's running it is it tells me what percentage of the time I'm speaking now, yeah. This context, I'm supposed to be speaking most of the time, and that's fine, but in a conversation, it's really useful. And I think as a leader, it would be great if we had this sort of meter to keep an eye on how much are we dominating the conversation versus how much are we listening. And again, that's not to shame anyone, but it's just really to say, like a lot of what leaders are expected to do is have the answers and and say all the things. But as we, as we start to adjust that ratio to where we're listening more, then our level of empathy goes up, which enables us to then do things like enable people to do their jobs, make sure that they're that's one of the that's one of those sixes, is enable. Make sure people have the knowledge, the tools, the skills, the resources they need to do what we're asking them to do. And the thing that I always like to say about enable is every organization wants to raise the bar, but I think we also need to raise the floor and raise the floor by just equipping people, right? Yeah. So, so that's enable and then empower. Follows that Right? Which is, which is really, how do we make sure that we're getting obstacles out of the way, removing friction, things that are preventing or making it harder for folks to do what we want them to do and to become who they want to become. So all of that with we can't do any of that if we haven't done the listening and the empathizing first, I

ANNE 36:21
love the listening piece and that tool. It'd be a very, yeah, very eye opening situation for me, especially and others. I mean, all of us who love to who are excited and love to chat and talk and have ideas, and it can come from a good place, but I love what you're saying, though, about empathy and how to build that and empathize as an active you know you could, you could have said empathy, but you said empathize. And I assume that that's very deliberate on your part, but it reminds me, you know, as we have our own process here of trying to be more inclusive, of looking at diversity and equity and inclusion and thinking about that very deeply, and not, not moving away from that at all but inclusivity, creating that sense of belonging, creating more psychological safety, I think the idea of empathy, we talk about building trust. You know, when one builds trust, you can remove friction. People don't spend as much time being like, what are they actually saying behind the words that are coming out of their mouths and wondering about things, so it's just a helpful reminder of simple ways to raise that empathy quotient and be more engaged with folks. Yeah,

Eryc 37:29
I'm glad well, and I think just just just adding to that, I think there's a couple of things that that come up for me. So a lot of times in organizations that I speak to, want their employees to be more empathetic toward their clients, right? Want to, want them to exhibit empathy for their clients. And so, you know, I get folks coming to me for advice on, how do we, how do we make our employees be more empathetic, right? And my, my first question back is, how are you showing them empathy? How are you creating this environment in which empathy is an expectation, in which trying to meet others needs is an expectation, because if it's not there internally, it's not going to show up externally either. And the other thing I want to that, I want to pick up on that you said that, you know, during the pandemic, a lot of a lot of folks were trying to figure out how they could keep tabs on employees. That makes you know that part of the shift to remote and hybrid work was was, how do we track what folks are doing? My my sister in law, literally had a had a alarm that would go off on her supervisors computer if her mouse didn't move in a 10 minute period of time. Wow. It's absurd, right? It doesn't actually demonstrate any kind of value. It was just, it was just a crutch that folks developed. And I think when we think about how do we equip and enable folks to be successful, we shift to this idea of backing them instead of tracking them, right, to really saying these people that we've invited into our organization, how do we make sure they have what they need, versus how do we? How do we really create this atmosphere of distrust, where we where we think, well, you're probably not working. So what tools can we put in place to keep track of you? So I think that that shift, and you highlighted that, but I think that that shift is really a key mindset shift that shows empathy well, and

ANNE 39:20
it reminds me, over the years, because our work career life has spanned a lot of organizational change, just going back to the idea that would have been impossible to wear jeans, you know, in the first 10 years of my career, but the.com boom kind of changed that one but one of the things that I remember saying over Time is we have to distinguish between a policy issue and a personnel issue, meaning that, okay, we're going to maybe put even before the pandemic, remote work opportunities becoming more norm, a norm certainly was for us. And the question of, okay, you get this fear, a fear based. Mindset that that can happen in business and management of well, what are people doing right? But you know one thing, and sometimes you put policies in place that are just aren't good, or they don't work, or they're not right for everybody, and you feel that the anxiety rises like you just see their issues right? So then it's a policy issue. But if you believe in the policy My My attitude is like, watch for the individual issues. And that's a personnel thing, where you're working one on one, with a person who may be struggling in their own way, or may not be a fit, or something like that. So I think those are sort of these normal push and pulls of management, especially from and that's maybe where the generations fit, where other ways of working from earlier times kind of pull at your set of norms and expectations, and it's been a real change and challenge these past five to 10 years, for sure. Yeah, absolutely

Eryc 40:48
well and that, I think you're absolutely right, because I think there is the the what we see in generations. First of all, we see age and stage right, we just see where somebody is in their life with that, but, but we also do see how society changes over time. And I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, I had a boss back in my GE days. I had a boss who was of an older generation. And every time I came with him, came to him with a, you know, having identified something that wasn't working, you know, something that was harder than it needed to be. Or he would say that's why they call it work. It's an oldie and a baddie. But it really conveys this notion that, like, well, work is hard and bad, so let's, let's, let's, let's just, let's just deal with that, right? And I think where we are now is not at that assumption at all, right? The assumption is not at all that work is hard and bad, right? It's rather that that work is a human activity. Work is something that we do as part of our expression of who we are. And I think that that is a shift that we see and we and we can look to the younger generations as bellwethers, right of the shift that is happening, it's not because of them, but they are but they are indicators.

ANNE 42:08
Well, I always joke that I try not to live in a Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert was written just like the movie Office Space under the assumption that all management is the worst, all work is terrible, all organizations are dysfunctional. I'm like, Well, it all depends on how we all show up, and we have to make a lot of choices and good choices in management. But I'm also, I try to avoid having a Dilbert lens, like on my work. I want to feel more empowered than that, but I want to switch gears for a little bit. I know you're doing a lot of keynoting, and that's exciting, and a lot of speaking, and one of the things, speaking of engagement that you're doing that's a bit different is you've told me that you're combining a couple of your passions, one of which is DJing with speaking. And as someone who does a lot of presentation and speech coaching and presentation skills, I really love that concept. So what made you think of this and what did it unlock for your audience, and combining those two modes, yeah,

Eryc 43:01
yeah, thanks for asking about that. Yeah. So, so, DJing is something that I've done for a lot of years. It was something that I that I dreamed of doing when I was younger, and then came to quite, you know, relatively late in life for being a DJ but I've been doing it for a couple decades now, and and it's something that I just, I have come to love the experience of helping to cultivate, again, an experience for people. And you know, when I can help to facilitate a party as the DJ, it's, it's incredibly rewarding. And it's, it's, I also have that same sort of sense of fulfillment when I'm speaking and I feel like the message is really connecting and helping people. And when I see a face light up, when I see an AHA happen in the room, I get that same sense of fulfillment. And so bringing those two things together was was both an attempt to to feel more whole myself, right, just to integrate myself, but also to find a way to convey these messages about leadership in a way that disrupts the way that people are used to receiving those kinds of messages, and that creates a collective experience that's different from the experience we often have when we're all sitting in a hotel ballroom together and So so what I'm doing, I call this I call this talk be a party rocking leader. And what I've done is I've gone through these six E's. We've discussed a few of the E's today. I've gone through these 6e and said, how do those show up for me as a DJ? And it turns out, a lot being being a really, being a DJ who really gets a party going requires great empathy. It requires knowing what kind of party is this? Is this a quiet after work happy hour, or is this an after hours rager? You know, what are the kinds of songs that get people on the dance floor? What are the songs that clear the dance floor, taking requests from people, noting what people are responding to? These are things that I. Great DJ does to get the party going. And as you know, these are also things that a great leader does. As a great leader does not show up and sort of inflict their mission on the organization and on the people in it. And a great DJ doesn't show up and play just the music that they want to play. So so now I'm doing this thing where I'm speaking about these, essentially these same six E's, but at the same time DJing to kind of illustrate and and create a dance party. So it's about two, two parts keynote, one part dance party. I

ANNE 45:30
would say, what's, what's the reaction from the audience or from the listeners? Because you're right. I've been in many a ballroom listening to keynotes I have given. Been the keynote in the ballroom. What's been the reaction when you've done this? Yeah,

Eryc 45:43
well, you know, the my first time doing it, I was, I was aware of what I was up against. You know, that folks had been in the room all day, actually, in a two day event, you know, they were tired. They'd been talked at for quite a bit, even though it was a pretty well run event. And to get up in this, you know, fluorescently lit hotel ballroom and try to transform it into a dance club for a minute. I knew I was, I was up against it, so I just, I just recruited the folks in the audience to be a part of it with me. So, so I got up there and I said, Look, I know where we are. I know what this room looks like. What can we do together to transform this into a into a dance club for a minute, and somebody got up and turned off the lights, and folks got up out of their seats. And to be clear, not everyone you know this is, this is not everybody's vibe, but, but the majority of the room was up out of their seats when I, when I put on the first song, before I even started speaking, I just put on a song and got folks dancing. And they were up, they formed a spontaneous conga line around the ballroom. Folks jumped up on the platform with me, you know, sort of completely violating the the sanctity of that space. And got there and were dancing with me and and when the song was over, they went back to their seats, and, you know, I started speaking, and they were with me, you know. And so the response has been overwhelmingly positive. My best, my best, and favorite piece of negative feedback was he did a great job. It just wasn't my thing. Yeah, hey, which is great, which is great, it's not for everybody.

ANNE 47:19
Which is gonna be a percentage of the audience anyway, no matter what,

Eryc 47:23
no matter what. But I feel like what it does for the audience is it, is it not only creates, I was reminded of this term collective effervescence, right? It creates this, this experience of collective effervescence that we're all having an experience together, that's that's outside of our usual, that is outside of even what we've come to expect in the past two days in this room and and it hopefully, my hope, is that it then enables people to not only just take what they've heard and learn from me, but actually to remember it and start to integrate it be be more energized, to start to integrate it into their lives, because they're thinking about that, that feeling that they had when They well, and

ANNE 48:01
that feeling it brings it back to what does it mean to feel attached to work or an organization, or to feel a mission or to feel a part of something, to enjoy moments with colleagues, whether they're virtual or right in front of you? I mean, I think that's a beautiful way to put it, to kind of come full circle. But I'll ask you my final question of the podcast, which I always like to ask. So it's called building brand gravity, core theme. So what is a business or brand or some aspect of culture that has you in its gravity right now? Eric,

Eryc 48:34
oh, gosh, it's a great question. Wow. We might have to do some editing here, because that's okay. I'm ill prepared. I think, I think one thing that I'm that I'm really excited about right now is is actually relating to DJing. So there's a, there's a, there's a company out there actually don't know who the parent company is, but they own a couple of different DJ sort of equipment companies, and part of what they're trying to do is really democratize DJing. So they're creating DJ controllers and things that are really meant for people who just want to do it as a hobby. And obviously I do it as more than a hobby, but I love that what they are doing is saying everyone can be a DJ, and we're going to equip you to DJ in your living room, to DJ in your bedroom, to DJ for your friends you know, at your little New Year's Eve party, in your in your apartment. And and I just, I love so they called Newmark and and what, what they do really speaks to me, because it's really, it's really enabling people and empowering people to pursue a thing that they may have thought was out of reach.

ANNE 49:45
I love it. I love it. That's a great answer. Well, Eric Isle, thank you so much for joining us on building brain gravity. I appreciate your time today. Thanks,

Eryc 49:52
Anne. This has been really fun, and let's talk soon. All right. You.

ANNE 0:04
Hi there. This is Ann green. I’m CEO G&S business communications. Welcome to a special episode of building brand gravity. It’s our first ask me anything, and I’m going to be answering some questions that we received from listeners and also that were curated by our team in response to episodes that I’ve hosted across the second season of our podcast. And I’m very excited to be joined by our producer, John LeMay. Hey John, who’s going to help me address these questions. How are you today?

Jon 0:54
I’m doing well. How are you happy to be here?

ANNE 0:57
I’m very good. I’m very good. So yeah, so it’s our mailbag. Let’s get to it.

Jon 1:03
So we have a handful of questions that have been submitted. Some of them have to do with particular episodes from the past season, or particular guests and conversations that you’ve had. And then some have to do with kind of, more like big picture, you know, recurring questions that have, that have come up, or topics that have come up, or things about you and your career. So if you’re ready to get started, we can do that.

ANNE 1:42
Let’s do it. Go ahead. Fire it off. First question.

Jon 1:46
All right, so in July, you had a conversation with Peter Goodritz, who is the Global Director of Business and Marketing Communications at Dow, and that conversation involved the necessity of multi stakeholder engagement and solving complex issues in areas like energy, climate or waste reduction. And we received this question, "How are you seeing the impact of multi<span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> stakeholder engagement in leadership across industries?"

ANNE 2:15
Yeah, that’s a great that that issue of multi stakeholder engagement, that’s a lot of words, like a lot of multi syllable words. But to me, I think it just respects the fact that our landscape is so much more interconnected now. You think about all the stakeholders of a brand or an issue or a company. Back in the day, you know, not that many years ago, things were a bit more siloed and disconnected. And the other thing I would say is that internal communications, like which is your own employees, your own people, your own organization, was a little bit divorced, at times, from external communications. And I’ve very much felt over the years in this field, because it’s been over 30 years now, that internal communications was often not seen as as important as external and now to me, thinking about engagement from a multi stakeholder way, the world is small. It’s very connected. Interconnected. News travels fast, and I think a lot of people have realized first and foremost, that your internal audience is your employee. It’s like I talk about a drop falling in a pond, and the rings radiating outward. The first ring after that drop in the pond falls are your own people, and it radiates outward from there. So what’s internal is often external too. So to me, it’s more connections, less silos, shared responsibility of looking across that whole stakeholder landscape, no matter where people are, and also recognizing that internal audiences are as critical, if not more critical than those external stakeholders.

Jon 4:26
So a follow up to that when it comes to multi stakeholder engagement, what are some common pitfalls to avoid, particularly when addressing big areas or big issues like climate change or waste reduction,

ANNE 4:38
Yeah and I know those are big issues that Peter and his team at Dow are looking at all the time. Climate change being a very multifaceted one. The pitfalls for me in this world of stakeholder engagement is assuming but not knowing your audiences. Audiences are not monoliths. We see that demonstrated for us every day. It’s complex how people react. What they think they’re more than whatever name they’re given on a spreadsheet. You know, they can’t be really reduced in that way. So I also think another sidebar to that is, in this world of information overflow, especially in social media or all these channels of communications, it can be easy to receive certain communications that feel very intense or very big, but they’re actually quite small or narrow. So you’re hearing something that sounds like, you know, a fire, but it’s maybe a candle, but you you need to dig into it to know so really, respecting the idea that you need to dig deep with your audiences. You need to do real research. You need to get out there in the field and meet and know people and not assume, because with something as multi layered and multi faceted, to say, climate change or waste reduction, or any of the really huge issues that we’re facing as a global community, there’s going to be so many perspectives. It’s really like a prism, and you need to keep turning that so you can see all the faces of it.

Jon 6:03
And then last follow up question on this, there is pressure for organizations and leaders to speak to so many things in the public sphere today, but not all are relevant or appropriate. How do organizations make these kinds of judgments?

ANNE 6:16
Yeah, that’s a great follow up and that that came through in the conversation with Peter, but in other places too, I feel Marta, I know, and we might talk about her in a moment. Marta Ranko, new heart. I know we talked about that as well, that it’s such an important truth, although it sounds like very surface, this idea of go back to your values as a company, and if you don’t really understand what they are and how they manifest in terms of external communications. You got to get clear on that. There’s many organizations. Of course, they have values and they’re stated, but it’s a different thing to have a list of values and then understand how when there are difficult, sometimes contentious issues out in the marketplace that affect various of your stakeholders in different ways, often opposing ways. Is very different to understand how those values translate into when you do or do not speak. So each company you know and we happen to be an agency, so we advise clients on this, but we have to look at it ourselves too. Every organization has to really reflect on that and say, How am I consistent and what we want to speak to, how are our values tied to a given issue and how it impacts our stakeholders, and when should we be really confident in speaking out and using our voice? And then, when should we maybe this is not our story, and maybe it’s time for us to be quiet, but you need a consistent set of questions, an assessment tool, a rubric of some kind, so you can be consistent, and you need to get folks in leadership talking about this so there’s agreement before stuff is out there, and there’s a pressure to speak and that because that’s when people get in trouble, when they feel this pressure to say something and they put it out there, but it’s not really rooted in what they do as an organization, or who they are

Jon 7:58
great and then obviously, with this particular question, or any of the questions we’re gonna we’re gonna talk about, people should feel free to go back and listen to, you know, Peter’s episode if you want to hear more about this, and kind of hear the, you know, where the question, the question came from. So shifting gears, our next question. So you had a conversation with Marta Ron keou new heart, and that covered how chief communications roles are evolving to be ever more integral and matrix leadership positions and there that involves responsibilities across many facets of organizations, including driving revenue and aligning with corporate growth strategies. You know, in addition to more traditional responsibilities, question is, how have you as a communications professional, seen your own evolution into a business leader and the impact you’ve seen of comms over these additional concerns, like revenue?

ANNE 8:51
Yeah, it’s funny how I’m going back to what I said in an earlier question about multi stakeholder environment, which is the idea of connection versus being disconnected and siloed. And, you know, when I entered the field in the early 90s, there was a sense of communications, not for all companies. I knew some companies that really put it at the C suite level, at the table, you know, with executives. But there was a time that communications was more almost like a service function, like, oh, well, you know, these are the people that put out the press release or tell them afterwards what it is we want to say, and they go say it that is very disconnected from the core of the business. And I think for me, what I’ve seen over the course of my career, and I’ve certainly felt it as a business leader, is the deeper and deeper and deeper connection with what is really driving the business, what, and that includes revenue, sales, and the connection with marketing and comms and that whole piece. Now for me, I’m an agency leader, so I’m both running a business, but also serving clients. So I’ve been able to understand that connection to the heart of the business, the business. Subjectives, the outcomes, how those businesses are performing, how integrated marketing and communications tactics tie into that. I’ve seen it for many, many industries, many, many companies, but I’ve also had to look at it for my own companies. You know that I’m a partner in but it’s a good evolution, and I feel like communications leaders are more at the center of that discussion than they have been in the past, which is great.

Jon 10:24
Why do you think there is still this disconnect at times in seeing communications as being a part of the revenue generating activities of an of an organization? And would you say that some of this is self inflicted, or does it come from somewhere else?

ANNE 10:38
You know, one of the things Marta talked about in the episode, it was a really excellent episode for those who are interested in leading in these areas. You know, she came out of before she really focused in communications, she was at Boeing in a sales role, you know, selling jet airplanes in China. So she really knew the business from the inside out, from the start of her career. But you know, she talked a lot about, and this resonated for me, how are you how are we spending our time? And do we understand how the time we are spending is generating equity, building equity in the organization? She talked about, the example of mergers and acquisitions, the role of communications to build a reputation and equity in the brand of that organization has real monetary value in a merger acquisition situation, in terms of increasing the value of that entity or increasing the power and stature in order to acquire so that’s just one example of where it can be tough for people To say, Well, what is brand worth? There’s been innumerable efforts to put a calculation against, you know, brand equity, etc, reputation. Some of these things feel loose and hard to define, and they will be. They’re more qualitative. They’re not the same as a, you know, a sales made that’s captured on a spreadsheet. But I do love Marta’s idea about we have to be very clear about activities that build equity, and talk about how that equity is being built, because that equity translates into capital in different ways, and that can also help communications leaders and even agencies and others understand, wow, we’re doing all these activities, but some of them feel more central to the business outcomes of the organization than others, and more important to the reputation of the organization and the equity of the organization. This is building brand gravity, the gravity of that brand, than others, and that’s a good litmus test to say we should be doing more of this and less of that, if you know what I mean.

Jon 13:10
That is true. Yes, yeah, both are better for worse, but I actually am the one who has to, has to sit with all of this. There you go. So in our second episode of this past season, and you sat down with Natalie Nixon, who is the creativity strategist and CEO of figure eight thinking, and you discussed as the episode is titled, the idea that, yes, we are all creative. You touched specifically on being a translator of perspectives to foster collaboration. So could you share advice on how to effectively navigate and merge different creative lenses within a team?

ANNE 13:44
That’s a big question. First of all, I love the episode with Natalie. Natalie Nixon is such a force, and she’s out there, you know, writing and speaking and sharing so many different perspectives on unlocking creativity and innovation and understanding ourselves differently in those ways. So I think it’s really fun episode. I know it was one that a lot of people enjoyed. So check it out. As you said, when we talked about being a translator, it was something I brought up with Natalie, which is that I’ve had the joy of working in a really integrated way across my career. So when I was at a smaller agency. Years ago, I started at a huge agency, one of the largest in the world at the time, that was naturally integrated creative and all the pieces digital came online, advertising, communications, and then at a smaller firm, we also had a creative shop from the beginning, because our founders were very invested in that. So what I got to do is work very closely my whole career with those in the you know, very specifically in the creative field, you know, graphic designers and creative directors, etc, and those who are what we call G&amp;S, market communicators, but those who are communication specialists, often interfacing very deeply with clients, owning those client relationships along with their creative counterparts. Yes, and what I found is that people just have different lenses. And part of the success of working in a truly integrated way, which is a lot easier to say than to do, is to understand how you have to translate one perspective from the other. And I would always, I would always talk to people about when you are a creative professional, say, a graphic designer, and there’s an assignment in front of you. It’s literally a blank page, and it’s actually interesting to see how our teams are using AI now to kind of CO create and ideate together and bring something to that blank, blank page, and use technology merge with human creativity. But they’re wrestling with a blank page, a blank slide, you know, a blank canvas. Now they don’t know how long it’s going to take, right in those early moments, because they’ve got to create it. Meanwhile, you have very intense account people who are very type A as we I was one of them, I get it, who want to know when’s it going to be done. This is my timeline. Here’s the deadline. And so part of that translation is understanding that there is a magic to the creative process that requires some freedom and breath and lack of knowing and exploration, and then you get to the point where you’re like, Okay, now I see where I’m going to make this deadline, right? And so that’s what I feel, is the translation. Part of our role as communicators, and in an integrated setting is to help translate between those different disciplines and different views, but know that that process, that of creativity, takes time and space

Jon 16:31
on a personal level. How do you, as the CEO of G&amp;S Integrated Marketing Communications Group, how do you find room for creativity in your day to day life?

ANNE 16:42
It’s a good question, and talking to Natalie really made me reflect on that. You know, growing up, I was always a singer, and my husband is a professional musician, he’s a drummer, so I have a very obvious form of creativity surrounding me at home, but in a more corporate setting. And the work I do, you could sometimes feel sort of penned in by the must do, like I must do this, and I must do that, and I have a to do list, right? So for me, creativity comes in a couple different ways. One is constantly learning and absorbing information. I have just a voracious desire to accumulate knowledge and learn things. High culture, low culture, technical stuff, fluffy stuff, like whatever it is, and engaging that and connecting those dots, and looking at something in one side and something that seems really alien, and finding the relationship, the symbiotic nature of those topics, and connecting the dots, which I bring, then bring to my work and my clients that feels immensely creative. And then also for me, the act of communication, and I do a lot of presentation skills training, speech coaching, media training. So for me, this act of communicating with another person and understanding how I create something between us, or I create an understanding in them that doesn’t exist now. Or I build something that has emotion to it and creates that connection is immensely creative, and I really, really love that part of what I do.

Jon 18:09
So last question on this note, you and Natalie also discussed that everyone is creative, but that this involves this interplay between play and process, or as Natalie phrases, it wonder and rigor. So how can leaders practically create space for both wonder and rigor, play and process in high pressure corporate environments?

ANNE 18:30
Isn’t that a great pair wonder and rigor? I love the words. I love even saying them. But the reason I love this, this idea that Natalie has put out in the world, and the way that she frames it, is that wonder is on an equal footing, is rigor. You know, they they both have a space, right? Because I think that in corporate settings, again, whether it’s one of our many, many client sectors, or an organization like ours, or any number of others out there. You know, I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of organizations across my career, and so many different people in different roles, but there tends to be a focus on the rigor, on the discipline, on the Get It Done, on the timeline, on the What are you trying to achieve? I do think in connecting with the fact that everyone is and can be creative and can unlock more of that themselves. You need to create space for curiosity. And I think that’s embedded in what Natalie’s talking about, the wonder of something, the exploration, curiosity, exploration, play, discovery, mistake making, you know, dead ends. You try a dead end, but then suddenly, maybe a door opens in it in a place you didn’t expect. So. And that’s an interesting question relative to AI, because this question now that causes a lot of angst, I think, especially for those who are focused in communications, is on that is this issue of. Authorship. And you know whether Claude or chat GPT or pick any of the large language models, Gemini as they’re manifesting now, their ability to create content, you know, and to create and I think what’s interesting about the written piece is that oftentimes it’s that iteration and editing and discovery you go through that you actually don’t know what you want to write when you start and you find it by writing it. So this is what is particularly interesting to me about human creativity and machine creativity and how they’re merging. Because there’s two different ways to it. One, I give you a prompt and we iterate. The other, especially in the human side, it’s like I find it by doing it and doing it and editing it and failing and creating it so and I don’t think those are in opposition. I think they’re we’re gonna see more and more, but that’s why I love this idea of wonder and rigor.

Jon 21:22
Yeah, I love that. I love that idea of wonder and rigor, and feel like it’s really applicable to people in, you know, various various industries. So moving on to a new, new topic. So recently, you interviewed Howard handler, who is the president of 313, presents in Detroit, and he’s also had key roles across plenty of different industries. He spoke about this idea of relationships being treasures, and he advised us that we should view and treat them as such. You also spoke advice from your father about not traveling, quote, too light in your life. So what does this mean to you, and how should this apply to younger professionals in the field?

ANNE 22:00
Oh, the coward conversation was another I just love talk about treasures. That’s a relationship that I’ve had for many years. You know, came through business setting a client relationship, but somebody who really understands what it means to keep a network and to build people up and stay connected and and also a really exciting role in Detroit now, having all these amazing venues and seeing being part of that incredible energy that Detroit has right now. But Howard talked about relationships as treasures, which I really that lit me up such a beautiful way to think about it. And it did remind me of something my father, Norman green, had said about, you know, Anne Elizabeth, don’t travel too light in your life, meaning, don’t leave relationships behind. Try to stay connected to people. And I was so worried growing up that I would, I just, for some reason, I felt like it was a prophecy or a warning, that somehow I would. And what I’ve discovered over time, and it really relates to things one feels that they have to do as an adult, which is like network and stay connected. But to me, it was more about the joy of knowing that I have stayed connected to people in my life I care about and that that I’m also really excited to meet more people and create relationships with them. So I think that for younger professionals in the field, what’s interesting is that we are in this hybrid landscape now, where, you know pre COVID, there were a lot of structures in place, like being in office, more, more chance to travel, being in person, more, some of that has come back, right? But we all know that it’s not what it was before. And so for younger professionals, they’re going to have to be more, I think, intentional and thoughtful about maintaining relationships, building them, but also staying connected and saying, How is it that I prioritize this and make sure that I touch base with people and I figure out those you can’t stay in touch with everyone by figuring out those relationships that matter, and especially in the business sense. How do they identify? Wow, I’ve really enjoyed working with this person or that person. I want to make a decision to try to follow along with them and be in touch from time to time. It’s going to have to be more intentional now, and I will say, as Howard said, it’s something to be treasured. When you get to later stages in your career, it becomes quite special. So kind

Jon 24:23
of on that note. So we live in a world of continuous networking. So how do you find authenticity and how you maintain connections with those that you’ve met or worked with, while you’re also like addressing the immediate needs that each day presents?

ANNE 24:40
Yeah, authentic. And authenticity is those very tricky concepts that can feel hollow sometimes, if it’s overused, but it’s also very, very real, which is, how do you bring yourself to these interactions? I think, for me, and this is really how I see. Working now is just finding the joy and connecting with other people, really enjoying that kind of letting my letting it go. And you know, there are times when you’re tired and you don’t want to interact, and you’re just like, I’m not really fit for human consumption. And friends of mine know that I’ll joke about like, end of the week. I’m like, I just I’m not fit for humans, but I think that taking it away from I have to perform authenticity. I have to be a networker. I have to do something. I have to, like, create some or make a sale or make a connection, or get whatever it is in the world that I live in. Can you get it back to the enjoyment of learning about other people, asking them questions, connecting with them and also seeing if you can be of service to them. Is there something you can do to help, or can you share a story or a smile or support them in some way that makes things better for them and that brings you enjoyment that, to me, is the heart of it all. Yeah,

Jon 25:59
makes sense. So we’re going to shift gears into sort of more general questions that aren’t necessarily tied to specific episodes, but once again, definitely encourage people to go back and listen to all the episodes that we’ve we’ve talked about so far. So you’ve mentioned in a couple different episodes, I think that you have sort of an unconventional path to communications and marketing. How did that experience prepare you for being the CEO of an agency? Yeah,

ANNE 26:29
it’s a it’s a good question. I was definitely the liberal arts young person and did not see myself as a business person in high school or college, but wanted work experience, and so that’s when it was really an internship that brought me into integrated marketing communications at Burson Marsteller, which, through many iterations, is now known just as Burson, named after the legendary Harold Burson who I would see in the elevator. It was really overwhelming, you know, an amazing, lovely man, and I got to know him and a lot of other people who helped build that firm in the 70s and 80s into the powerhouse it was when I joined. So that’s a legacy I’m proud of. But I think for me, right now, there’s a lot of articles about and just insights and discussions about this world today, the level of volatility, of uncertainty, some people talk about permits, permacrisis. It’s a lot and a lot of things that one might have counted on in a business context. It’s just very different now, and sometimes it’s hard to gage, is it completely different? Are there just aspects of it? They’re different, but it does feel different. And I think for me personally, I can’t speak for others in my role, but for me personally, my path, which was very much about zooming out to the big picture and and, as I said, being very curious about many, many, many, many things, and being a learner, and just being interested in collecting data and talking to people and layering learning and learning and learning that’s you need that wide view right now, and I’m, I’m, you know, the CEO, but I have seven partners, and we have many other leaders here who are really engaged. But we have to zoom out and see the big picture of what’s happening in the world, in society and in fields that may or may not directly impact our clients every day. And that helps me connect the dots. We have to be curious about technology. We have to throw ourselves into new things. We have to not get too caught up in the hype and yet not ignore the hype either. So this, to me, is a very much that kind of broad mindset that you get from an education that lets you be a little bit broader and connect the dots and get excited about learning on a macro level. So I think that that would summarize, you know, how I prepared myself for this role, to the extent that I did

Jon 28:49
That makes sense and as a liberal arts kid myself, it very much resonates, resonates with me. So in a few episodes from both this season and last season, you’ve spoke with some guests such as Howard Pyle Kyle Turner, Kim sample and Mark McLennan about AI and the impact that it’s going to have on brands in the near future. Gonna try that again? Yep. So in a couple episodes from both this season and last season, you talked with guests like Howard Pyle, Kyle, Turner, Kim sample and Mark McLennan about AI and the impact that it’s going to have on brands in the near future across disciplines. You’ve talked about both the ethical and practical perspectives and considerations in this area. So how are you using AI as an agency leader, and what are you impressed with or not impressed with when it comes to the tools that are currently available?

ANNE 29:45
Yeah, absolutely. Ai everyone’s favorite topic. I just spoke on this recently at an industry panel. And you know, for me, I really want to invite everybody to be thinking about it at a very ground level in terms of, how is it changing day to day, work? How is it being built into our tools, both personal and business? Then at that mid level, which is like, what are those purposeful pilots? How do we start to be very intentional about how we’re using it for us and our clients? And then at that 100,000 foot level, which is, what does it mean to be human? What is augmented intelligence? What is authorship? IP, you know, all that stuff. So for me, I’m thinking about it at all those levels, in terms of how I’m using AI, you know, I’m looking deeply at a lot of different applications and testing them, you know, from playing with different large language models to seeing how Microsoft has baked, you know, is baking and continuing to evolve co pilot within the Microsoft 365 environment, to how, you know Gemini, Google, Gemini is appearing in search, and just how I’m using search. You know, how much am I using those AI results that Gemini is aggregating at the top of a search page, versus how much am I drilling down into traditional search results? And how does it feel? And what is the sourcing? And the other thing I’m trying to do is look at the tools and really ask myself, what are the killer apps for me? And what I mean by that is, killer app was a nomenclature kind of of the rise of the iPhone and the mobile world, and it’s those apps that’s a killer app, right? The app that, you know, runs away with popularity. But my first killer app was in the 80s with IBM clone, you know, DOS based computers, which I was very skeptical about, until I realized there was something called spell check. And when I saw that there was spell check, I was like, I need a computer now. And it’s the same thing with Google Maps, when they added live traffic data to the map, that that spurred a lot of people to get a phone, finally. So these are the kinds of moments where you where the your personal life or your business life, and the application and the utility of it really light up. So what I’m trying to do is find those killer apps for me that help me work smarter, not harder, and also things that are going to help me ideate, because we have to, per our discussion about creativity, you need the wonder and the rigor. So I think that AI, especially if we’re treating it like an agent, not a tool, and we’re iterating back and forth with the large language models, asking questions, exploring, that’s the kind of way in which we can, you know, figure out how to unlock our own creativity through augmented intelligence. So those are some of the ways understanding it, looking deeply at those killer apps, and understanding what applications our people are using and that they should be using.

Jon 32:36
Makes sense. So we have two more questions. So when you talk about the importance of human connections with brands, especially in the world of B to B. What is it that good brands do to connect better on a human level?

ANNE 32:49
Yeah, and it’s interesting. Obviously, there’s always a sense that business to consumer brands have an edge in connecting versus business to business brands. We do a lot of work. We just B to C work too, but we do a lot of work in the B to B space. I think that it goes back to something I mentioned earlier in the episode regarding really knowing your audiences, really knowing them, not assuming things, but using research and talking and being on the ground and getting more connected and trying not to shortcut that knowledge, because it’s the knowledge of what who those stakeholders are, not a monolith, not just a fancy name that somebody in marketing gave them like for their demographic, but to try to dig deeper and say, what are the threads and the interests and the desires and the concerns that really fuel these individuals as people, as well as buyers of services or clients customers. And I think that that is what is the foundation for good brand connection, because that helps then inform strategies and channels that are going to be meaningful and not just more noise. Because I tell you, the other thing about AI is it is pumping a lot of noise into the ecosystem. There’s been a lot of coverage about, you know, we can market at scale now, and you can have a whole bunch of what some people are calling AI slop, created to push out via email, push out on the web, etc. So it’s only going to get noisier. That means a deeper knowledge and more care about the channels and the tactics used is going to be more critical than ever to connect on. You know, as you ask that human level

Jon 34:27
makes sense. And last question is, in a general sense, what should brands focus on in their communications through the year’s end? And what do you think is most important for any brand to share widely.

ANNE 34:41
Yeah, you know, it’s, I think the first thing that comes to mind to me is just the ongoing volatility and intensity of the landscape. And that’s true. If it’s B to B, B to C is distracting. It’s overwhelming. The news cycle is very intense. There’s things happening domestically, globally. Absolutely, there’s weather events, there’s it’s just a lot, you know, recently had an election, etc. That’s just a lot of noise. And then there’s a lot of pressure about what is valuable, you know, and AI, or technology, or, you know, and what people should be paying attention to. So I do think there’s a lot of folks that are tired and overwhelmed and information overload. So I think recognizing that the landscape is going to remain volatile, and it’s going to be a difficult up and down kind of news cycle for a long time to come is important. I think it’s really important, first and foremost, end of year, but throughout is to stay very close, first and foremost, to your own people as an organization, really take the temperature and understand where they’re at and how they’re feeling is going to be a proxy for how the customer is feeling often, you know, how are they able to describe Do they feel the value in what they’re doing? Do they understand the value of what they’re selling or offering the services, and how are they translating that through? And I think, you know, trying to be as transparent as you can be, to the extent you can be, and really keeping your eye and your team’s eye, not just in the trench of today. It’s like you’re down in the trenches of today, but how do you lift your eyes up and out toward that next horizon? That’s a little bit of a magic trick, but I think that’s what we’re going to have to keep doing as leaders in whatever industry we’re in. You know, stay close to your people. Understand the landscape is volatile and noisy. Try to be transparent and keep your eyes not just down at today, but also up at tomorrow.

Jon 36:38
I love all that. I love all that. So that brings us to the end of our slated questions.

ANNE 36:44
Well, this is a lot of fun. I’m glad we could do it. We always want people to share questions and comments. And as you said earlier, John, there’s a lot of great episodes here. I love revisiting them, you know, check them out. If there’s more information that people want, you know, reach out, let us know, but a great place to start is by going back and revisiting some of those episodes.

Jon 37:05
Yeah, agreed, yeah. And I thought, you know, I think you tapped into a lot of the really great insights and topics that were covered in those episodes, but also we forge into some, some new territory that is more more timely than ever. So awesome job on that front.

ANNE 37:18
Great. Well, thank you, John, I appreciate it.

Jon 37:21
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