Summary:

Chad Thompson, the Chief People Officer at LanzaTech, joins the HR Impact show to discuss the importance of being authentic yet adaptable when leading cross-cultural teams. He emphasizes the role of HR in attracting and retaining talent, nurturing company culture, and supporting leaders in a rapidly changing environment. Chad shares his proudest achievement of developing people and building resilience within the workforce. He also debunks HR myths related to talent attraction, talent development, and diversity. Chad highlights the need for leaders to be open-minded, curious, and culturally sensitive when leading diverse teams. He shares his leadership framework, which focuses on leveraging the team, equipping the team, aligning the team, and delivering results. Chad encourages leaders to be authentic, understand their strengths and weaknesses, seek mentorship, and be open to learning. He also emphasizes the importance of creating a competitive process that allows employees to compete and showcase their abilities.

Key Takeaways:

Authenticity and adaptability are crucial when leading cross-cultural teams.

HR plays a vital role in attracting and retaining talent, nurturing company culture, and supporting leaders in a rapidly changing environment.

Developing people and building resilience within the workforce is a significant achievement for HR leaders.

HR myths related to talent attraction, talent development, and diversity need to be debunked.

Leaders need to be open-minded, curious, and culturally sensitive when leading diverse teams.

The leadership framework should focus on leveraging the team, equipping the team, aligning the team, and delivering results.

Leaders should be authentic, understand their strengths and weaknesses, seek mentorship, and be open to learning.

Creating a competitive process allows employees to compete and showcase their abilities.

Chapters:

0:00:34 Introduction of Chad Thompson, CPO of LanzaTech

0:00:43 Overview of LanzaTech's work in converting waste into alternate products

0:02:04 Chad's key roles as CPO: talent attraction, culture stewardship, strategic support, and HR basics

0:05:21 Possibility of turning extractive leaders into those who invest in their people

0:09:16 HR myths: misalignment between reducing workforce and talent attraction, discarding talent, and reliance on preferred schools

0:14:41 Challenges of dealing with people from different backgrounds and cultures

0:18:22 Balanced approach to defining leadership and measuring success

0:22:15 Helping employees navigate the dissonance between work and personal life

0:28:11 Humbling oneself and seeking information from non-conventional sources

0:31:45 Leaders need to know themselves, be humble, and aware of biases

0:36:47 Valuing local knowledge and innovation

0:39:30 Allowing diverse candidates to compete and succeed

0:40:05 Conclusion and closing remarks

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Chad Thompson: linkedin.com/in/chad-thompson-b200028

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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And particularly, how do you be authentic yet adaptable to be able to lead cross cultural teams? So with us in the studio today to talk about this topic is Chad Thompson. Chad is the Chief People Officer at Lanza Tech. Welcome to the show, Chad.

Chad Thompson: Hey, thanks, CT.

CheeTung Leong: So Chad, for those of us who may not know, could you walk us through what Lanzatech does and what you do at the

company?

We've developed a proprietary fermentation process that are converts that waste into gases and then turns those gases into our alternative products. We are able to produce, fibers and chemicals that are used in the production of our clothing as well as isopropyl alcohols, which are used in.

Things like chemicals, such as perfumes, and we have a wide application base for our technology,. We operate around the world, primarily in Europe, Asia, and and we are hoping to transform, the carbon economy with an alternative method of, reusing carbon and converting it into something that reduces pollution and keeps our planet

safe.

Chad Thompson: I think the chief people officer in any company has, I, in my estimation, has about three to four primary roles, number one. We have to attract and retain talent to help the company grow because, the technology is there, but people always are enable the technology.

Secondly, we have to create and nurture and steward the culture of the company that allows us to, perform and optimize in terms of the performance of our employees. We have a role to assist their leaders and be a strategic and helping to envision. The future, how we grow intelligently, where we grow.

Some of these recent things really requires companies to pivot quickly and to figure out in the space of a lot of uncertainty what's the path forward or to best adapt to a rapidly changing environment.

CheeTung Leong: That last point is really important one. And then across all of these five different dimensions.

What would you say is your proudest, achievement, which of these do you feel like you've done the best job in?

Chad Thompson: I think for me, the thing I probably reflect on most, and I'm not thinking just in the context of Lanzatec, but I've worked, internationally. Previously worked at Chevron for almost 24 years.

As I think about my career, what I really take away always is. Have I made the environment better than I found it? And have we developed people as a result of my leadership? And that's what I take a lot of credit for. In my mind, there's different types of leaders. There's what I call the extractive leader who takes all the capacity from the team and leverages it obviously for the benefits of the company.

CheeTung Leong: I like that distinction. In your experience, actually, have you seen it possible to turn an extractive leader into one who's more willing to invest in their people?

Chad Thompson: I have seen that. And The challenge is how to have those kind of conversations with those leaders to help them. I'll give you an example. I think Corvid actually was very helpful in that regard. Many leaders had a outdated, archaic philosophy that. People were only productive in the context of the four walls of the office, and initially everyone was demanding people needed to come back to work, or when are we going to get people back to work?

So I have seen it. It does require, some strategic engagement and coaching, but I think leaders start to realize that. If, they're only extracting and not reinvesting in employees and developing them, that is a very short relationship. And now, because of the amount of churn in the economy, employees are much more.

CheeTung Leong: and obviously, I think H.

R. And the people function plays an important role in supporting leaders. Through this sort of transformation for themselves, when you think about the next 12 months. What is your personal moonshot goal for your function?

Chad Thompson: For me, I want, one is to be met as measured objectively by, industry standards to ensure that the service and the.

Kind of quality that the HR team at Lanzatec is producing is demonstrably world class. And I look at that in three dimensions. Are we executing against known standards? Secondly, are we innovating and creating an employee experience that's validated by, the employees themselves, giving us, data and our feedback?

Our ability to execute on key priorities and definitely support the business in terms of growth and efficiency. So we're focused on technology and trying to enhance their, we're looking into things like AI and trying to see, does it have any application that can add value? To the way we support and engage with our employees and then making sure that we also enhance our strategic partnership with our leaders where we can be thought leaders coaching them and definitely more visible and present to help them as they try to [00:09:00] tackle some of these problems that they're facing.

Very

CheeTung Leong: cool. I love how structured you are about thinking through the next 12 months and, maybe on a slightly lighter note, is there a leadership or HR myth that you've encountered that you wish would just go away?

Chad Thompson: If you ask a lot of HR leaders, they would comment on this.

The misalignment between the need to take dramatic action and reducing workforces, which normally quickly becomes an issue of talent. Attraction. So companies go through these cycles of difficulty, they pivot quickly to reducing the workforce to what they think they can afford, and then very quickly find themselves in the net deficit.

I wish I could again solve the problem. Of how to transform employees with a core competence of knowledge into new areas of opportunity and whole value level. It would be if we could do that. And so we go through this churn. And, employees like, could we retrain people and could we get more productivity from employees that are retrained versus the discard and trying to compete in the marketplace for the new talent.

Quality candidates, and I just think that's a big myth. I think talent is talent, and I think companies have to be more creative at finding talent versus being lazy and just going to particular schools, because that's where they have always hunted. I really think that's a big myth, and it actually limits companies from attracting diverse talent, because in this global age, we live talent is plentiful.

We just have to adapt our models.

Without giving out any secret sauce, like what is How does your approach to that?

Chad Thompson: If you look at what companies traditionally do, they go to a particular space or place or locale to find talent. So the concept is I have to go and hunt for talent in a certain place. I think the good companies have created processes where talent finds them versus they're finding talent.

And so do I have an infrastructure that allows me to first of all, Publicize my company and get it widely known. Secondly, how do I show up in the marketplace for talent? And can I attract passive talent just because, what people are hearing about my company? I really get a lot of pride when I hear employers or employees.

You have great values and that you have a culture that cures. And in our recent employee engagement survey was very heartened to hear that. That's what our employees think. They love our mission and our mission is so strong that it has an attractive and a retentive capacity to it. We can't take it for granted.

We do have to supplement it with world class benefits and processes, but working for a company with a mission they can get behind. The leaders that care and for a company that lives its values, that's what we're really focused on trying to ensure that Lazotek becomes a great place to work, and most importantly, we can compete for talent.

Because it's the traditional model of hiring has, if I'm from an Ivy League university, if I've Gone to McKinsey. I'm just going to hire a bunch of people who look a lot like me. And that's just the nature of things. So if we're shaking things up, like what you're saying, then leaders are going to have to deal with people from vastly different backgrounds from themselves, vastly different cultures.

What are the challenges that you think they're going to face?

The best talent, I would say, from my vantage point of being in corporate America, many companies, particularly fortune 500 have great processes. The problem that always is, though, is that talent identification. It's filtered through very narrow framework or lenses. And what typically happens is there's a profile or a modality of what a leader looks like, and it typically follows the most conventional successful.

The other intangibles and for example, if you're looking for leaders that look just like you and think like you, then you're going to end up with a group of a team that doesn't really have the capacity to anticipate all the possible scenarios that you would run into. So I'm in Asia and I'm trying to figure out how to compete in Asia, but all my folks have a Western mindset.

You as a leader have to start to understand, not only who is smart because they have verbal cues or skills, but also who might be very intelligent, but doesn't show up in a way that's typical. And that's where leadership is starting to be redefined .

Let's not get overcome by external trappings, but let's also value different kind of cultural profiles that guarantee success. And for me, as a leader. Helping leaders evaluate talent and build succession plans for the future. I've always tried to challenge those assumptions, like, why are you comfortable with X or Y?

It cannot be just the company adapt and the employee has to also adapt and show up a little bit differently as well. If they're going to be successful, so it's a balanced approach to that really defining what leadership is. How to measure success and then making sure that, you are culturally open and sensitive to different leadership styles so that you're really picking the best folks for the

job.

Different, even political ways of thinking. But at the same time you're also saying that there's a responsibility on individuals where they too need to figure out the culture that they're entering and find a way to effectively operate within that culture. In principle this makes a lot of sense.

How do you think, Chief People Officers and HR leaders need to operationalize this?

Chad Thompson: My last company Chevron, we had a really good leadership framework philosophy, and I have leveraged that. Philosophy in my new company to develop something that is consistent that we can communicate to employees. What is our expectation of leadership?

And what does leverage the team mean? It means draw on the strengths and the capabilities of the entire team. It means to create an environment where people can show up and they can compete. Tribute, equip the team? Do or do they have the skills? Do they have the capabilities, and do they have the cultural techniques to be able to succeed?

Everyone has a voice, making sure that those that are quiet are heard and encouraged into the conversation and then ultimately delivering results. One of the things I learned as growing up in the Caribbean, being born in the UK, but my parents are from the Caribbean, I had a way of seeing success that was more humble.

challenges prevented you from doing that because you had conflict and dissonance between how I show up at work and who I am as an individual. And one of the things I use is the, The Academy Award that people get, which is, that kind of model, I said, every day you come to work, you put that on your desk and you realize that you are an actor because you can be a great salesman who has to be extroverted and deliver and convince people, but in your private life, you could be a very reserved person that loves peace and quiet, how we show up for work does not have to equally match who we are, as individuals and creating comfort with that dissonance, the need to show up one way for effective results in the area of work, but show up in a different way in your [00:23:00] personal life.

And so when you help employees to understand that. How I show up to do my job is different than how I show up to be who I am, and I can be those two persons without being a fraud, then people, the a ha goes off, yes, I'm coming to work, and I'm bringing a different, personality to be effective in this job, just like an actor does.

Many people meet actors in real life and are shocked that are not the characters that they saw in the movie or whatever, because they've done a good job of conveying meaning through this role, but they're not, they're, they're not becoming someone new just to do the role. And we have to help our employees a lot.

CheeTung Leong: That's such an interesting. Way of looking at it and as I reflect on my own career, I think you're absolutely right, whether we're conscious of it or not, we are bringing a different self to work and most of the time, right? For most people, I think there are a few people that I've seen that are pretty consistent, between work at home, but that's not always true.

The question is how did you discover this? For yourself and then how do you go about helping other leaders discover this and hone the self that they bring to work and the self that they choose to show up with at work, more deliberately and

intentionally.

And so I've always had the confidence to say what I think and to say how I think. What I lacked early was I didn't understand the game and I called Corporate America again because like in every other game there are rules, there's ways you win, there are ways you lose, and you need to understand the rules of the game that you're playing.

Not showing up is not valued when people are looking for a solution. So you can't blame the leader that. Because you didn't give the idea, and you sat quietly by it. And so first is being authentic to who I am. Secondly is understanding what role and how I need to show up to be successful. And thirdly is seeking guidance and mentorship.

I think, lastly, for a leader is very important to have. The context of humbling yourself to understand things that are not natural. So I give this example when I lived in Indonesia, I went there. I have my own stereotypes and biases and I realized very quickly. I needed to hang out with the locals because hanging out with the expats wouldn't teach me the nuances of the culture or Thailand.

And I learned that. If I just said what I wanted to say, people would nod their head, but they may not even do it. And they, because I needed to learn those cultural cues. And I think that's where leaders who are managing globally need to pick up those cues and humble themselves and realize that you can appear to be successful at getting your way.

CheeTung Leong: So if I'm hearing you correctly you're saying that on one hand, we do need to be deliberate and conscious about how we're showing up at work. But on the other hand, we also need to be true to ourselves to be authentic with what we're trying to do with what we're trying to do and who we're trying to be. How do you go about coaching leaders with this? Because it sounds like your experience is. is very unique and idiosyncratic to your upbringing, to your personal journey. And [00:29:00] I think this is a really useful gem of insight that can be really powerful if scaled across multiple leaders, but these leaders, not all of them would have had the same exposure.

that you would have. So how do you work with leaders to build this kind of cross cultural adaptation while staying authentic?

Chad Thompson: I think a couple of things are right is number one is, you need to understand who you are as an individual. And what I mean by that is There's certain things that you gravitate to, there's certain things you like, there's certain things you're good at, and then there's some things you're not, and if you understand that, it will help you because you won't try to be something you're not.

And if you're thinking in a win loss way I'm here competing because I want my idea to win, then that's where things fall apart. One of the greatest leaders I ever worked for, he had a process that I use to this day and it was, here's an issue. What are the options we have? And let's debate them.

And we would just, each of us would give our view. We talk about the merits of our perspective. And then when we felt that was fully tested, we looked at him and said, you've heard everything. Yeah. What are we doing? And he said, we're going left and we all went left happily because everyone was hurt.

Why should he? Why shouldn't he have picked the idea that he felt comfortable or she felt comfortable making? Haven't earned the right to make that call. And so even within the context of, egalitarian team oriented, there has to be the context of an ultimate decision maker and the best optimal decision.

And he says, this is what I'm trying to do. I think this would work. I don't have it all, but this is my vision and allow others to actually make it dramatically better than you envision. So it'd be like, Chad, what you tried to do, it's not going to work, but we can do X or Y and I'm like, sure, I'm good with that or can't do it.

And for these reasons, I think leaders create that context. Now, culturally, leaders have to be curious. And I remember an example where I was trying to, in the age of diversity, empower a female direct reporter of mine in Malaysia to do something that was culturally very important. Difficult for her was to challenge hierarchical, older gentlemen in a context that would not be accepted.

Emotionally challenging for her. It was my curiosity with culture that helped me to pick that up. Names, how to pronounce them properly. What are the common things that we need to have among ourselves? Those were the kinds of things that helped me do better culturally. Every leader doesn't have that, but it's something I highly encourage.

CheeTung Leong: I really love that so much, Chad, because this idea of being authentic to yourself, but at the same time, understanding your own, strengths, your own weaknesses, how you can compliment them with the people around you. In fact, I was just thinking through the lead framework that you talked about, that idea of leveraging.

The diversity within the team, the partnerships that you have, at the same time also being very conscious about equipping people to be more of who they are and aligning everybody ultimately to a single objective, a single goal, and that leads to being able to deliver results. And this thread seems common pretty much across all of the examples that you're giving.

Chad Thompson: I think a couple of things, I think are on the leveraging the team.

I think you just hit the nail on the head. We're in a global world where companies are dependent on all, global countries and for revenue and having valuing the insights of folks. Or who may not, you may not be aware of how much insight they have. You look at companies today that have four paths on certain ads or commercials that could have been avoided if they had just simply even said, Hey, let me run this by this group of my internal constituents that reflect that customer group that I'm after.

It is that's common. We still have group think we need that diversity of thought. So that is agree with you. That is critical for companies today to value diversity, not in a superficial external look at us. We look, but really understand how to harness. The power of that local knowledge to innovate and to design our technologies.

I lived in Indonesia and I looked at that go jek kind of environment of, hopping on a motorcycle through the magic traffic. And, but again, you just see so much creativity because. People who come from poverty have such innovative ways of surviving and seeing problems as opportunities.

And I think the third thing you need to have as a leader is that people can learn because you, if you came from an Ivy League school, you came from any university, you have a capacity to learn. And I think so many times what frustrates me is I've seen. The anomalies being supported when the company wants to develop certain people, but then those same anomalies are uses as limits.

And I would say that would be the last thing. I think so much of our systems today that identify talent don't do it on the basis of competition. And I believe in a model that within companies, we should be competing. And it's not a destructive competition, but it's a competitive nature of saying, let people compete, no diverse candidate wants to get a job because they're diverse.

How do we create more competition? I think if people compete and lose they're a lot better for it than just knowing that X or Y doesn't have to compete. They're just, they know who to know, and that's the basis of their success.

CheeTung Leong: I love that. And thank you so much for hanging with us today, Chad, and sharing all of your insights.

My name has been CT. Thank you so much for listening today.