Summary: Courtney Peterson, the Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer, and Chief HR Officer at Edison Electric Institute, discusses the importance of employee engagement and leadership in building elite teams. She emphasizes the need for organizations to clearly state and demonstrate their values, create positive work environments, and foster trust and collaboration. Courtney also highlights the evolving nature of diversity and inclusion conversations and the role of leaders in driving change. She shares insights on how to exercise soft power as an HR leader and lays the foundation for employee engagement. Courtney emphasizes the importance of building relationships, understanding the mission and work of the organization, and being a listener and partner to employees. She also discusses the role of coaching in leadership development and shares the GROW coaching model as a framework for conversations.

Key Takeaways:

• Employee engagement starts with organizations clearly stating and demonstrating their values and creating positive work environments.
• Leaders should build relationships, understand the mission and work of the organization, and be listeners and partners to employees.
• Coaching conversations should focus on setting clear goals, understanding the current reality, exploring options, and defining the way forward.
• The GROW coaching model (Goals, Reality, Options, Way Forward) is a useful framework for coaching conversations.

Chapters:

00:02:00 Evolution of diversity conversations in HR

00:05:00 Importance of employee engagement and values alignment

00:08:00 Tone at the top and leaders' influence on engagement

00:12:00 Importance of understanding the organization's mission and work.

00:15:00 Exploring a 3rd way to address conflicting leadership preferences.

00:18:00 Adapting leadership styles to meet the expectations of different generations.

00:20:00 Using the GROW coaching model to guide coaching conversations.

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I'm CT from Engage Rocket and I'm your host for today. And today we're going to be talking about honoring the service. Engagement strategies and leadership competencies to build elite teams. To help us explore this topic is Courtney Peterson. Courtney Peterson is the Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer, and Chief HR Officer at Edison Electric Institute.

Welcome to the show, Courtney.

Courtney Peterson: Thank you, CT. I'm really glad to be here. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you with us. Now, for those who don't know what Edison Electric Institute does, do you mind just walking through what it is that you do?

They operate in all 50 states as well as the district of Columbia. As a trade association, we provide public policy leadership. We engage in convening. We provide essential conferences and forms and thought leadership and really bring our industry together. So we're very proud. Our motto is power by association.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: I love that. And that's very close to my heart as well. I do believe the transition towards cleaner energy sources is such an important one. I'm so glad that that you guys are championing that across the industry.

So how did diversity get a seat at the table at C suite and it's great that you're representing both sides.

When I first started in the field, it was very much a conversation about diversity, about representation and just getting people into spaces where they perhaps were not represented. Those conversations have evolved in a beautiful, nuanced way over the last 2 decades, and especially over the last decade to talk about the intersectionality of diversity, to talk about equity and inclusion and belonging.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: I love how is it's carved out its own space next to HR, which sometimes just gets lumped together and you're expected to drive outcomes that way. Is this something that you drive across the industry as well? Or is this mostly for E E I, and then you influence how diversity looks like for the rest of the industry.

Courtney Peterson: I think 1st, I would probably try to unpack what I'm doing internally, as a leader within an organization. And chief diversity officers and chief HR officers have a number of important things in their portfolio that they're doing in service to the mission of an organization and in partnership with the employees and the leaders of the organization.

So I can't by any means claim to be leading the industry, but I would say definitely using the platform that is EEI, which is an incredible platform to bring people together and to do so in a proactive way, around issues that are important and timely for our membership.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: We know that diversity and inclusion and equity have quite a large bearing on employee engagement. What does employee engagement mean to you?

Courtney Peterson: This is the area of HR where I could just go on forever and talk about because I think what we're trying to create and design is an employee experience that is connected between the employee and the employer and the work.

First and foremost, that starts with an organization being able to clearly state and demonstrate what its values are, so that the right employees can find you, right? So that values alignment is incredibly important. What is the organization about? Obviously organizations want to be profitable and they want to achieve their mission.

They want to work in environments that value human beings. And I'm not a person though. I work in HR. I don't view humans as resources. The talent is a gift to the organization and the organization should be working in partnership to research shared outcomes.

So I think being clear about. What the expectations are in the role is important and will help foster employee engagement. And so employees need to understand what their role is, what their purposes for being there, what their responsibilities are, and how that contributes to the overall goals of the organization.

I tell my team, and I oversee large teams now, at this point in my career, my role is to be here. To be able to ensure that you have the resources that you need and to remove the obstacles that are in your way so that you can be successful. And so I really view myself as a leader who is in service to the folks that I am leading and I tell them all the time. It's not about me. It's about you guys. I try to take a holistic approach to this employee engagement conversation. I try to look at the teams that I'm leading as individual human beings and those human beings are bringing a whole lot to work. They're bringing the totality of who they are in their lives.

So taking the time to get to know and build relationships is foundational. Whenever I start any new position as a chief of HR, I spend a lot of time listening and just getting to know people and understanding, what are the things that led you to end up here? And why do you choose to work here and not someplace else?

CheeTung (CT) Leong: In our experience, one of the things that is most challenging is as HR leaders, we believe this. We know this to be true. The data shows it qualitatively. The fundamental piece that nurtures that connected tissue is actually leaders and managers, and you can have all the data in the world to show how climate change is happening, but everyone believes it's not my problem, it's someone else's problem. Or sometimes you just deny that it's happening as well. It's not that important, there are lots of other things.

And, to a certain extent employee engagement's a little bit like that. There's tons of data around that. Everyone knows having a great engaged team is fantastic. But, you tell them, put aside half an hour a week, go talk to your people. They're like, oh, man, I got no time.

There are people out there who maybe don't necessarily want to be people leaders, but they want to be individual contributors. And there's a need for individuals like that, but if an individual is not sold on this idea of wanting to create safe and inclusive work environments, or wanting to foster a culture of collaboration, or wanting to recognize and appreciate the contributions of people across the team, or more importantly, I think most importantly, leading by example.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: Yeah, absolutely. And, in HR, sometimes it's difficult to be the one that decides who's a leader and who's not.

You sit in a privileged position to be able to influence those conversations. So how do you go about exercising that soft power and laying that foundation for the connective tissue that builds up employee engagement, which is leaders and managers that are selected within an organization?

Courtney Peterson: I think it goes back to the power of building relationships. When you're sitting in the position of chief of HR or chief diversity officer, you more than likely have access to some of the most powerful people in the organization. You have their ear. As it said, right?

I try to be thoughtful and think about the advice I want to provide. I make sure that I do my homework my research and I'm able to provide data informed recommendations whenever possible. The data informed recommendations are just as important as some of the things that are my intuition or my sense of things too.

Because I'm a highly intuitive person. I'm a relational leader. So sometimes I would say to my CEO my sense of this is a, B, C, 1, 2, 3, or my observation of this is A, B, C, 1, 2, 3. And that combined with perhaps any data informed guidance I can provide, you build trust with people one interaction at a time.

Those are some of the things that I rely on day to day.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: Let's take a concrete example where, there are two people who are in line for a leadership job, one who's really strong individual contributor, doesn't really work with that well with the team, but you know that this person can get the job done. And then there's someone else who's, a little bit less technically competent but he's got that ability to rally people around them.

Courtney Peterson: It's a really great example of situations that I'm confronted with on any given day and. It's interesting, during the pandemic, my children got to get a little bit of a sense it's like what I do for work because I was on zoom calls all day. And they're like, this is what you do all day? You just help people solve their problems all day. This is what I do all day.

I would look for the 3rd way. So 1 of the things in my career I really lean on a lot is having become a leadership coach.

When you're a leadership coach, you begin to learn how to resist binary thinking, right? That there's just an on or off switch that there's just a 1 or the other way of doing things. I'm not saying that sometimes you don't have to make those kind of decisions in life. You do, but there are times in leadership where I say let me think of a 3rd way.

I would look for opportunities to open up that kind of a conversation with whoever the ultimate decision maker was to see, because I think every individual, every human deserves to have whatever their potential unleashed to the greatest possibility. And not everybody wants to lead people, it could be possible that 1 of the 2 people in that scenario I really don't want to lead the team, it's not my thing. If someone tells me that they don't want to lead a team, I would not force them to lead a team. I think that's a good point. Ask this, and though I try to use some of my coaching, tricks on them to unpack what's going on there. Is it, do you really not want to do it? Or is that fear? Because I was one of those reluctant leaders who was like, I don't want to do it. Get somebody else to do it. And then ultimately I had the kind of mentors around me who were just like, no, like you have that thing. We need you to lead this team or lead this project.

So if you're if I'm being offered that job, I'm like, no, thank you. So you have to honor. That people know what's best for them, and that's another key premise of coaching is that, people generally know what's best for them. And my job as coach is not to tell you or be directive about what you should do, but it's to help you dig deep to unpack what, is best for you.

That requires some really good conversations and powerful questions to help people get to what's really happening under the surface.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: What do you think of all these talent management frameworks out there, we have these high potentials in our organization based on A, B and C criteria and we want to push them up for leadership and this person then becomes a better leader because of this particular framework that we're using or there are certain competencies that you track. Is this something that you lean on heavily or do you find that these are really just guideposts and ultimately it's still a decision that you're going to make with your gut?

So the difference is, before, as a leader, I would just run around and solve people's problems for them. I would say, oh, bring me your hardest problem. I'll tell you what to do. But I think when you apply a coaching style, you become more of a listener and you become more of a partner to help that person figure out how to solve their own problem, because they have the answer.

When I say art and science, I think that there is great science in leadership. There are things to understand, like models and frameworks that you can look to. The art of it is a lot of the intuition and a lot of the interpersonal skills that you need to develop to be able to be a human centric leader.

It also is incumbent upon a leader to continue to grow in their practice and to remain curious, to listen to podcasts, to read books, to look at ways of how am I going to manage this hybrid workforce? I've never done this before. The conversations that we see every day about return to office and the fights around return to office. I wonder if some of those conversations have to do with leaders who maybe just don't want to evolve the way that they lead and [00:19:00] manage. Maybe if they had a willingness to do that, they could meet employees halfway and maybe they could retain people as opposed to this constant revolving door, people leaving organizations.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do remain infinitely curious. And I try to ask the right questions.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: So when you approach a coaching conversation whether it's with a leader or with someone in your team, is there some kind of framework that you use in approaching that conversation?

Courtney Peterson: The model that I think I go to most often. A model that's been around for a long time. It is a coaching model is the grow model G R O W. It's just like a tried and true framework to work through a conversation. And starting off by getting clarity on what the goal is, right?

What is the current situation that you're facing? What's happening? What have you already tried so far? What are the obstacles that you're facing? That's the next layer of how I would move through a conversation with someone that I was endeavoring to coach on my team, and that really helps to unpack what's potentially getting in the way.

Classic coaching question, like what's getting in the way, because a lot of times when we feel stuck, it's because we think that something's not possible because there's some sort of obstacle in front of us. So what would it look like if that obstacle were removed? What's possible? Then I think, you move into the conversation about what the options are.

So you could ask things like what would you do if you had no constraints, in a 1 on 1 coaching session, this looks like if you had a magic wand, what would you do? Because you can sometimes get some of those most creative ideas from people if they just feel like, okay let me just be creative here.

Then the final step is the way forward, so how are we going to move forward? What's the action plan based on what we just discussed and helping that individual to define the clear steps forward? What's the next thing that you need to do? Is something I often say to when I have my direct reports in front of me, and maybe they're feeling overwhelmed. Oh, my goodness, Courtney, this thing is so big. Like, how am I going to do it? I don't know what to do. I'm so overwhelmed. Helping them think about. What's the very next thing you're going to do? Because sometimes you just need some forward momentum.

So the way forward is an important part to cap off the conversation, to help them understand and remind themselves that, I can take 1 step forward. I'm not stuck. My feet are not stuck in the mud and I can move forward. It's a simple model. It's a tried and true model.

No one was ever curious about what I wanted to do here. That's not good leadership. We have to do better.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: The grow model is such an oldie, but it's a goodie because it survived the test of time. It forces you as a coach and as a leader, not to be prescriptive about a solution.

It forces you to ask questions so that it's generative and then the conversation becomes generative rather than dictative. If I could summarize it's goals. So cover what the goals are, look at what the reality is, what are the options that we have, and then work on the way forward.

Such a strong model, something I was introduced to 15 years ago, it's still relevant today and I love that you're using it.

Courtney Peterson: Sure. So I'm on LinkedIn. Courtney Chisholm Peterson. And I also have a small coaching practice. I have a full time job, so I can't do a lot with coaching clients privately, but I do have a couple and so my coaching business is called Lotus leadership coaching and I chose the Lotus flower because the Lotus flower rose up through the mud and the dirt and to become this beautiful flower in the sunlight.

To me, I think that is so much like the human journey. Sometimes we have to go through the mud and the muck. But gosh, it's so beautiful too, so Lotus leadership coaching. com is my website. You can find me on LinkedIn. I also am on Instagram as Lotus leadership coaching and I would love to connect with your listeners.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: That's wonderful. Thank you so much for hanging with us today, Courtney. For those of you listening, hope you enjoyed the show. Head on over to www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact, all one word. And catch this episode and more . So thanks so much for listening. My name is CT and I hope to see you again soon.