Learn the top findings from one of the largest studies ever conducted on company culture and how it applies to the arts.

Best-selling author Kevin Oakes is the CEO and founder of the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the leading human capital research company in the world, and he shares how high-performance organizations we’ve all heard of have successfully changed organizational culture.

We don’t have to be giant behemoth orgs or flush with cash to make inroads on culture. A point Kevin emphasizes with actionable advice on how we can keep pushing forward to make our workplace culture better for all of us.

His book: Culture Renovation

Podcast Season 2 Episode 1

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Sending it along to others posting online. So I decided to bring it back because it seems like you all like it and find it helpful. So again, I'm just, I'm really grateful and, uh, honored by your response. So this season features interviews with some of my favorite experts. I've learned from both inside the arts as well as from other sectors whose work directly applies to what we.

And these interviews were all captured over recent months. At the time of recording, they were exclusive to LinkedIn as part of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator program, but now I'm able to share this content more broadly. So I've chosen my favorite conversations, which I'll be sharing with you here.

And at the time she was a senior consultant, eventually VP there. And she was saying she had never heard an arts organization talk about company. And she was right. And now though it is part of the day-to-day conversation, we talk about values, we talk about who do we want to be, do we do research on company culture?

It's, it's quite remarkable in my opinion, that just in the last five years or so, this really has come to the forefront. So this whole season is about how the narrative is changing for the arts, and this is a big area in which that is true. And I'm so happy it's. So today I am joined by Kevin Oaks to talk about this very topic, and I first came across Kevin Oaks, oh gosh, I don't know, a year and a half or so ago maybe.

The question was, what is the most important aspect of company culture? It received hundreds of votes, and just to share the results, the number one response was feeling like work has purpose. That was the most important aspect of company culture. The number two voted by you all on LinkedIn was psychological safety, the number two most important thing to you.

Season two of the Offstage Mic starts right.

Hey everyone. I'm Aubrey Berger and welcome to my podcast. If we haven't met, I'm known in the arts world for being customer-centric, data obsessed, and for growing revenue. The arts are my vehicle to make the change I wanna see in this world. Like creating places of belonging, pursuing gender and racial equality, developing high performing teams and leaders, and leveraging technology to elevate our work.

In this season, I'm bringing new conversations with some of my favorite experts from both inside and outside the arts, all to help build the vibrant future we know is possible for our institutions and for ourselves as offstage administrators and leaders. You are listening to the Offstage mic.

So today we're hearing from Kevin Oaks. Kevin is the c e o and co-founder of the Institute for Corporate Productivity. They go by I four cp. They are the leading authority on next practices and human capital. Kevin, I mentioned this before, as also an author. His book is called Culture Renovation, and when it first came out, it was a number one new release in a dozen Amazon book categories.

I saw another run has been printed. Again, what that means is that this is very popular and the book draws on data from one of the largest studies ever conducted on corporate. , it really gets into how high performance organizations, organizations we've all heard of, like Microsoft T-Mobile, 3m, MasterCard, and many others, how they have successfully changed their organizational culture.

And what I like about this is a few things. First is if these massive corporations can make company-wide culture change, then arts organizations absolutely can. Even the largest organizations, or the slowest or the most entrenched, because all these big companies are all those things and more as we know.

So if they can do it, we can do it. The second thing I liked about this book is that the way he writes about each principle feels very applicable. I could see myself applying this work if and when I'm back leading an orchestra or another organization. It felt like it wasn't too distant, even though he was primarily working with larger for-profit companies.

So I really appreciated that. And then lastly, I love that the whole point of culture renovation is that change is possible. So that completely matches my brand changing the narrative. The whole series is, the narrative is changing. And it definitely matches what we're seeing play out in our field right before our eyes.

So let's bring in Kevin. Welcome

Real life situations and companies that have undergone culture change both on the good side and the bad side. And in fact, I write a monthly newsletter where each month I have a culture fail of the month. So I talk about some companies that probably could change one company that I did profile in the book that I think has been slow to change.

It probably won't come as a big shock as Boeing. Boeing. Anytime you have a large organization, it's gonna be hard to change. But Boeing in particular has had some issues, you know, around their overall culture that has manifested itself into some real tragedies. And we all know the 7 37 max tragedies and the US House representatives blamed that on a culture of concealment in their investigation of those tragedies.

And what they meant by that was there wasn't psychological safety, as you mentioned earlier in the company at the time. Where engineers and others felt comfortable sharing some of their concerns, and that was one of the factors that led to those tragedies, unfortunately. Now, obviously they're doing a lot to try to change that and I think they're making some good progress, but they're one that I profiled in the book around, you know, the slowness to change the culture and some of the ramifications of it.

Despite that, you know, I think when you look at some of the big companies that you mentioned that have been very successful in, in changing their culture, Microsoft was one that I featured early in the book. I think there's lessons there for any size company in any industry to take away and use within their own organization.

I talk to a lot of smaller startups or nonprofits, and the lessons that I highlight from some of those larger companies are completely applicable to those smaller organiz.

My ex worked there. I mean, so I feel like I saw this culture. Almost firsthand. And then reading about the change and now seeing everything Satya's done has just been really amazing. Yeah. But my question out of this is to pick up on what you just said, that there are so many things that you don't have to be a massive institution like Microsoft.

There are things that smaller organizations can do to bring about this change. So how to start is really the question where to start. Does this answer vary by organization size or is it really sort of the same process? No matter who you are or where

I didn't set out to write a book. We set out to do a research study on culture change cuz we recognize that most companies who set out to change their culture, they fail and many fail miserably at trying to do so. and only about 15% actually succeed in changing their culture. And I've seen other research studies that have similar success metrics.

What we were very curious about was that 15%, was there some kind of blueprint that other organizations could follow if they want to change culture? There are a lot of books on culture out there, but they tend to stay very ethereal and high level. Yes. And what I was trying to create was a manual that CEOs and organizations could use to enact that.

And so it's organized into three phases, plan, build, and maintain. And the reason we chose those phases is because as we got into doing this research, we were using the term culture transformation, which most people, uh, use when they talk about culture change. , but we recognized that none of those successful companies really transformed their cultures.

What they did was renovate and that became a better term to use and a almost a safer term to use cuz those successful companies kept what made them great to begin with. Um, you know, kept what was unique and hard to replace, but like an old house they renovated to improve the future value of that house going forward.

Now, like in an old house, you wouldn't just go in if you're gonna renovate that and start knocking down walls without having a plan. Because you're gonna knock down a load bearing wall and bring the whole thing down. And the same metaphor holds true for companies. And so I think those successful companies did a very good job at first listening to the workforce, really gauging employee sentiment, really understanding what some of the underlying issues are.

By the time things get up to the senior team, it gets filtered and I see it happen all the time. You know, I tell executives the worst thing you can do is lock yourselves in a conference room and decide what the culture is today, cuz you we'll get it wrong, right? You've gotta really understand what the employee sentiment is.

And Microsoft did this well, they understood the employee sentiment and Satia was. Did a fantastic job at embracing the HR team and the head of HR in this effort to plan how they wanted to change the culture, cuz he knew it had to change going forward and he set out some tenets. I think creating a very simple rallying cry inside the organization is an important one.

At Microsoft, it was all around growth mindset and the ability to constantly be. One of Microsoft's problems that you probably recognize very well, Aubrey, from the past was that people used knowledge as power and they were very reticent to share their knowledge and they used knowledge to protect themselves, protect their fiefdoms.

And what Satia said right out of the gate is, I want a culture of learned. It alls not a culture of know it. and I want knowledge sharing to be power, not knowledge, to be power, and that's the mantra that they've really incorporated throughout the organization. It's very much a learning culture and growth mindset is something that everybody in the organization understands and knows and can recite.

And so that's all part of, you know, this planning process. How are we going to roll out, you know, a very consistent message to the organization and set our cultural path and how are we gonna define behaviors that we wanna see from our leaders, et cetera, before we really enact the culture change we wanna see.

You say that 57% of successful culture change organizations, so 57% of the success stories focused on what to keep of the past culture and not ignore. The parts of who they were that they want to carry forward. I think for arts organizations, this is potentially our biggest fear. We're an art form and industry based on tradition.

How do we keep what we do wanna keep and maintain and yet do renovate and do things differently going forward? So can you speak more to this? How do we grapple with finding that balance?

From there, there's a lot of focus on trying to make sure that you've got the right sentiment and the right people inside the organization to help with that change. While this needs to be leader led, it can't be a hundred percent done by leaders. You've gotta get the cooperation of the workforce and there's gotta be a, uh, mentality around co-creation of the culture change.

Early on, we talk about this concept of organizational network analysis, which is really understanding who are the influencers and who are the energizers inside the organization. In any organization, any department division, there are these go-to people that everybody seems to turn to. For information, for expertise, but a lot of times just for energy, right?

And then there are people in your life, Aubrey, that you, you talk to and they fire you up after you talk to them. And then there are others who after you talk to them, they just kind of suck the life outta you. You know, they're like Darth Vader. Uh, you wanna really understand who those influences are, cuz ultimately they'll become your culture champions.

People call 'em different things. Ambassadors, Microsoft called it a culture. But those people are the ones that are gonna make it happen at the ground level. And so I think identifying those people is the hardest part. Many times they're introverts, they're not extroverts, and most of the time they're buried in the hierarchy.

So leadership doesn't really understand who they are, and that's why doing a a thorough analysis can help illuminate who those energizers are. I

I have to, which is not wrong, but it's not complete. . And so this section of the O N A organizational network analysis, identifying these cultural influencers within, I was like, right, right. And I've been on this personal quest over the last few years, I would say, of just really trying to learn how to better empower others so that everybody feels powerful no matter their level of seniority.

Okay, so this all started coming together for me in this light bulb moment as I was reading. I guess my question is, can you talk more about how to identify these cultural influencers and then this is also coming in from the chat from Sunshine. Hi, sunshine. She's saying I recall from previous feedback to Aubrey's blogs is that there's fear from middle management to push for this type of change.

And suggest that this type of renovation needs to come from the top. So anyways, a different way to say the same question, but how do we identify these people? And for anybody on this, that's not a C e O role, like this question is for you. Like, what do we do with this? These important

Mm-hmm. . So I'll just say that as a blanket statement. Mm-hmm. , it's not that it's impossible, but it's pretty hard to make that happen. And the way you get support from the top is to lead with data and back it up with stories from organizations that leadership either respects or maybe even fears, so that you can get some of that.

But the hard work is really done in the middle. So that organizational network analysis is typically conducted through a survey process where you're asking employees who influences you, who do you need more time from going forward? It's really, it's kind of a triangulation exercise. To see who those indispensable people are.

And we use this technique for a lot of things, not just for culture change. Right now, it's being used heavily to identify people who might be on the brink of burnout because everybody's coming to them and they're at the center of the beehive and. It's very likely that they're just feeling overloaded, and those are the people you can least afford to lose, and you wanna make sure that you are, are making it safe for them to speak up and say, Hey, I'm overloaded, or try to offload some of that.

But they're also the ones that are the most influential. And so that's why you want to understand who they are so that you can address them. You can use different techniques to also get at the same answer. Some people are monitoring teams or Slack or email. I find that to be a little invasive as a normal process.

So I, we prefer the survey method of o a critically important. Uh, if you're trying to change culture going

It's Right. More organic and obvious. Okay. Got it. Um, okay. So. If somebody's not the chief executive, but they do wanna push for change, do you have, you're right, it has to be leadership from the top. There has to be buy-in. But I do hear a lot, to be blunt, from people all over who are just frustrated with their leadership.

Is there anything, somebody not in a position of traditional power can do to try to help her or the renovation We.

But, you know, I, I do see there are a number of organizations where it's been a bit of a ground root effort, you know, where people have filtered up some things that need to be changed inside the organization and have convinced leadership of that. I would counsel anybody to just continue to push if it's a company you care about.

You know, make sure leaders understand that and understand what could change going forward. Because typically if you fix the culture, the performance follows. That's really the, you know, the number one thing that I think is highlighted in the book and in the original research that every company that has had significant culture change.

Has typically seen their performance improve over time. It's very, very rare that you have this wildly successful organization and the culture is horrible, right? Usually that doesn't happen and it's much easier to fix the culture first. Love it. You're

I know we just met, but I, I like eat this stuff for breakfast. I love it. Okay, so kind of switching gears a little bit here, have you done any work with a company or their culture? Among unionized employees, and I say this because so many arts and culture organization do work with, in classical music, it's the musicians union, it's our stage hands union.

You know, the opera companies have agma, the Actors Guild, you know, all these things. So, Unionized culture has its own set of challenges, I would say. Right, right. And I don't mean to speak with in too many generals or too part of a brush, but it does have its own set of challenges. , I'm curious, can you

So I've never been part of a union, uh, personally, but I, uh, understand the challenges and we certainly work with a lot of companies that are unionized and have powerful unions. And so it adds a. Of complexity to the whole process, but not unlike, um, where you have different offices in different parts of the world.

Mm-hmm. or different divisions. You're always gonna have microcultures inside the organization. And sometimes that happens in, you know, what you just described from a union perspective, from an overall organization perspective. You want to. A purpose, and I talk a lot about this in the book, the importance of an overarching purpose that those different factions can rally to that purpose, should cascade down into the behaviors within those departments, divisions, the unions, and have values that also cascade down into those groups so that even though you do have some microculture nuances within each.

Everybody is very clear on what the broader culture should be and what the broader purpose is. And I think that's part of painting that vision for the future that I talk about in the book. And there's some good examples about companies that did not do a good job of painting a vision for the future.

Usually it was a c e o or a new leader who came in and blamed the past, you know, and blamed the predecessor as opposed to, let's ignore all that. Yeah, it happened, but we're gonna focus on what we want to see for a brighter future tomorrow. So that to me is what some of the best leaders do and some of the best organizations have done in order to rally all those microcultures towards their vision.

But some parts of our job don't require us to be on site. So does any of your research shed light on how company culture intersects this changing nature of our workplaces?

We do more HR research than just about any other organization on the planet. And so you can imagine that during the pandemic, we've just done a ton of research on hybrid work situations, flexible work situations. We have a brand new study coming out that has examined that in depth. We really feel like we will never go back to the way it was.

You know, we are in an era now that people have to accept that employees will work remotely. Employees are demanding that of their current companies. They're demanding that when they go look for new jobs to have that flexibility. But there's a big difference between hybrid and flexible work, in my opinion.

Meaning that a lot of companies are saying, okay, we'll we'll allow hybrid work, but you gotta be here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and you know, certain hours in the day. That typically is not what employees are looking for. And anytime you put a blanket policy across a whole group, you're immediately creating exceptions.

You're immediately creating a situation where that doesn't work for everybody. And what several organizations are moving to is truly flexible, which means. The manager and the employee work out what's gonna be best for the organization and best for the individual. And truly flexible work might mean I'm working remotely all the time, or I am coming in when I need to, to the organization.

Or the flip side is there are a number of employees who really want to get back to the office. They have better bandwidth there. It's more quiet than their home situation, what have you. So you give them that flexibility as. True flexibility is something that we're seeing being embraced by more and more organizations versus this sort of forced hybrid that I keep seeing in some companies.

And yeah, it's, it's changing things for sure. It's also changing the way leaders lead. I think we have to spend a lot more time training leaders. How do I manage a virtual workforce? How do I manage a hybrid workforce, you know, in-office and. Uh, workforce and the better managers are understanding that and grasping that

Amen. All right. I have only about 5,000 more questions I could ask you, but, uh, we have come to the end of our half hour together. I just wanna say as we are wrapping up, first and foremost. Thank you, Kevin. Like I said, I'm just a fan of the book One more time. The book is Culture Renovation by Kevin Oaks.

It's been out for a year. I just learned it's in its fifth reprint and I just, I really enjoyed it because it does feel so applicable and just hearing you speak here just reinforces that, that these really, it's not just pontification, it's really talking about how do we apply these principles and research to our own organizations.

Thank you Kevin. Uh, we're gonna call it for today. You appreciate it, . You're so welcome. All right, everybody. Take care and we'll see you next week. Take care. Hey, off Stagers. One of the top things I hear from individuals all over, something people are increasingly wanting is people who say, I want more connection with like-minded colleagues.

If that resonates, I created a new community and you're invited to. It's an online gathering place for arts and culture professionals wanting a different, stronger paradigm for the industry. It's a place for those not satisfied with the status quo for arts and culture who believe there is a better way forward, and that the future of the field doesn't have to be all doom and gloom.

It's a place of people trying to navigate the ins and outs of careers in the arts and want smart growth mindset type people alongside. It's a place called the changing the narrative community. I'm so excited by the folks who've already joined, and no matter your artistic discipline, geographic location, role, or years in the field, you are welcome and invited as well.

Visit aubrey berger.com/community. The narrative is changing, and I hope to see you there. And we're back today on Top Tunes. The music prediction, is it

Well, what are we waiting for today? On top Tunes the music. Now that's better. Novo Music. Conducting your creative vision. Find out. At Novo music.co. That's all for today, folks. Thanks so much for listening, and keep up with more content like this by following me on LinkedIn or Instagram at Aubrey Berg hour.

Definitely hit that follow button to subscribe to this podcast. And if you liked what you heard here, will you consider leaving a review or rating? I'd be so grateful for your help and support in that. Thanks again. See you next time on the Offstage Mic. The Offstage Mic was produced by me, Aubrey Berger, and edited by Novo Music, a studio of all women audio engineers and.

The narrative is changing for arts and culture, and I'm so glad you're here to be a part of it. This is a production of changing the narrative.