Treat Culture Like a P&L Line

Every leader now agrees culture matters, yet few have documented, funded plans to do anything meaningful about it. Elissa sits down with Marshall Bergmann, SVP of Consulting Services at i4cp, to close that gap. They get into why culture belongs on the same dashboard as revenue and margin, what separates the organizations that see real returns from the ones that don't, and why the smartest companies renovate their culture instead of transforming it.

Marshall and Elissa unpack the i4cp research linking culture health to revenue, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction, then get practical: how to build a culture scorecard a board will use, why the four highest-impact culture activities are all about leader behavior, and how organizational network analysis surfaces the hidden people who move culture more than any executive on the org chart. Elissa also draws on her own i4cp Culture Renovation case study and the Human ROI model of talent capacity, leaders as leverage, and ecosystem design.

What you'll take away:

• Culture is measurable and financial. i4cp's research ties culture health directly to revenue, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
• Leaders are the lever. The four activities with the biggest impact per dollar are all about how leaders behave, not how employees are trained.
• Renovate, don't transform. Assess what still serves the strategy, keep it, and change what doesn't, rather than tearing everything down.
• Listening is activation. Bringing the front lines into the process is a behavior change strategy, not just a data exercise.
• Boards want a scorecard. Tie culture metrics to business outcomes, build indexes, and never let a red metric leave the room without a plan.
• Influence isn't positional. Organizational network analysis surfaces the high-social-capital people who move culture regardless of title.

🔗 EXPLORE MORE

Connect with Marshall Bergmann
 → LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marshallbergmann/
→ Website: https://www.i4cp.com/

Free resources mentioned in this episode:
 → Latest i4cp research, Building a Future-Ready Organization with a Change-Ready Culture: https://www.i4cp.com/survey-analyses/building-a-future-ready-organization-with-a-change-ready-culture
→ Free Change-Ready Culture assessment (i4cp will provide a free results debrief for organizations over 1,000 employees): https://surveys.i4cp.com/r/0TnBgA

Connect with Elissa Mahendra
 → LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emahendra/
→ LinkedIn Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-human-roi-7396293873473523713
→ The Human ROI Podcast: https://thehumanroi.buzzsprout.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Culture needs to be owned by the CEO. I mentioned Sachin Adela, but if you read Kevin Oak's book, Culture Innovation, you read any of our research, if the CEO is not on board with this culture innovation, it's going to fail. So if you are an HR practitioner sitting here thinking, wow, I really want to do a culture innovation, number one activity for you should be make sure your CEO's on board, make sure that you are bringing to life your CEO's vision, and make sure that you have a really strong partnership with the CEO as well.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Welcome back to the Human ROI podcast. I'm your host, Elisa Mahendra. I created this space around a simple but often overlooked idea. People aren't separate from ROI and organizations. They're how ROI is created. I spent more than 20 years in talent, leadership, and organizational transformation, and I'll tell you, I've seen what happens when companies invest in their people the right way and what it costs them when they don't. So on this podcast, we explore leadership, culture, and talent systems and how they either compound your value or erode it over time. You'll hear conversations with leaders, builders, thinkers, and change makers who are shaping the future of work. And we'll share some practical insights that you can apply right away. Because whether you're leading a company or you're building your own career, understanding human ROI is everything. And when you invest wisely, it pays dividends. If you don't yet know what I4CP is, stick around, you're in for a treat. Welcome, Marshall.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, I am really excited to dig into this conversation because we've you know known each other for a couple of years now. We have a lot to share around culture transformation, but I like to start every episode with an origin story. The moment where you decided that this was where you were going to invest the balance of your career. So you've spent, you know, two decades plus helping leaders navigate change, culture, performance. Take us back to a moment or maybe uh a moment that you can recall that really shaped your direction.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Yeah, I love this question because um in preparation I started to think back on this. And there is actually a moment. I don't think I knew it was the moment at the time it happened, but I'll share that with you. So um, first of all, I didn't start off in culture or leadership or strategy at all. I started off in technology. So I was a uh part of Internet 1.0 in the 1990s. I was a software developer. I eventually became a chief technology officer of a venture-backed company that was creating electronic medical records, and they were going to be in the cloud. So, right now, that sounds like, of course, that's the way everyone does medicine now. But back then, medicine was done by doctors on paper. There were no computers in people's offices, and we had this crazy idea to put these servers up in the cloud and start to collect electronic medical record data and use that to get better reimbursement rates for healthcare providers based on them following certain processes and procedures. My job was to develop that software platform. And we developed a great software platform. It was terrific. And we had this amazing technology, we had these thin clients in the offices that the doctors could use. But, you know, to cut a long story short, the company failed and we went bankrupt. Now, the question was why? And what was really interesting was it wasn't about the technology, it wasn't about the strategy, it was really about getting people to change their behaviors. So what happened for us is it was really the people and the cultures that they that they were operating in was not conducive to the change that we were trying to accomplish. And so, you know, ultimately, we didn't fail because of a bad strategy, we didn't fail because of the bad technology, we failed because we didn't put a culture around the people that we needed to change, give them clear direction, and give them sort of the impotence, impetus, and motivation to make those changes. And because of that, it failed. And I think that, you know, you and I, who've been in this space for a long time, have seen that many an organizational transformation fails for just that same reason. So based on that, I decided to uh go get my MBA at NYU. And instead of uh focusing on finance classes, like all of my classmates who wanted to go work for Goldman Sachs, I went to all the leadership classes. They were kind of empty, to be honest with you, Alyssa. Uh studying uh leadership at NYU Stern in the 1990s, whenever I wanted to work in finance and investment banking, was a lonely pursuit, but it was one that I think I was really pleased and excited about. And after that, moved into consulting and started off the career that you just described now for the last 25 years.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Well, I'd say it was a worthwhile investment, Marshall, because look at you now, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Well, I so I would say I love the work I do, but I then didn't actually know how hard the work was that I was signing up to do. Let's say that.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yeah, because uh I think I've seen things on LinkedIn and other places, and we've known this for many years, people calling it soft skills, or when you hear culture and leadership, it's kind of nebulous. How do you measure it? How do you measure the return on the investment there? So I want to put a pin in that because we're gonna come back to it. You described having a crazy idea and going for it with your last organization. And what I love about I4CP is the thought leadership that you all put out around next practices, right? Not best practices, because those are things that high-performing companies are doing, but next practices really sets you apart. And in the culture research, you have a healthy culture index. And organizations who score high on that index outperform virtually every financial metric. So it's clear that it's not the soft stuff. It is revenue, it's market share, it's profitability, and it's customer satisfaction. All the things that our executive teams and our boards, and possibly PE owners or other shareholders are are interested in. So can you talk a little bit about why most organizations seem to have such a disconnect between leadership and culture and those financial metrics? Because you've proven it out time and time again.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Yeah. So I think my perspective on this has changed over time. But, you know, again, let's go back to 25 years ago, I start off in this space, you start off in this space. And I think you and I would both agree that we probably spent a lot of our time convincing leaders that culture mattered, right? That leadership mattered. And I would say that, you know, as of you know, 10, 15 years ago, that battle's won. Every you went into any executive team offsite right now, and you asked them point blank, is culture going to help us achieve our business objectives, our goals, et cetera, they would all say yes, right? So, first of all, I think that the research that i4CP is doing to show the direct correlation between culture health, culture fitness, and financial performance has been very valuable. And there's other organizations that have done that great research as well. But I think that battle's won. I would say maybe the checkmate of that battle was when Sacha Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft and went to his board of directors and said, culture is the leading indicator of my success as a CEO. And I think that once Satcha said that, and once boards recognized that, there was a huge sea change. Okay, so I think that was a really important moment. But so now what I think is really interesting, going back to your point here, is that leaders are all bought into the idea that um culture matters, but honestly, they don't know what to do about it. So if you think back to my story about going to NYU and no one being in those leadership classes, when you go to get your MBA, every leader's got their MBA or whatever their master's degree is, you learn the language of finance, you learn the language of operations. It becomes a way of communicating. If I'm sitting in a leadership team meeting and I say, our gross margins are down, every leader knows what could cause that and what steps you could take to improve your gross margins. If I say our employee engagement numbers are down, leaders go, hmm, Alyssa, can you help me with that? Right? They look to HR to solve that problem. And so I think what I've noticed now is that we're shifting from that notion of having to convince leaders that culture matters to now teaching them what do you need to do as a leader in order to enable a high-performing culture that's aligned with your strategy to allow you to achieve your business results. And so, again, going back to the idea of next practices, what I4CP Research does is we identify the people practices that correlate with high performance across, like you said, revenue growth, market share, profitability, customer satisfaction. And then those next practices are the ones that are not being used by many other organizations. So those are like kind of the hidden ones that if you're a leader and you want to get an extra edge over your competition, you want to use the next practices because they're not in practice in other organizations and going to give you that extra lift from a performance. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Yeah. I love that. And of course, I'm a fan of the work that you do at I4CP, having been an internal practitioner and partnering with your team on the work and seeing the results and seeing the more than the results, the process by which we got there. And what I loved about the methodology is built on Kevin Oak's book, The Culture Renovation. We talk about culture transformation, but I like the distinction of the renovation because it's not saying tear down what you have, it's all terrible, get rid of it, and we're completely transforming it. But it's doing an assessment to understand what should we intentionally keep and what is no longer serving us. Because as organizations mature over time, they may need to change certain things that did serve them in the past. So can you talk a little bit about that fundamental difference between renovation and transformation?

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yeah. So I think the analogy is great. I think it's one that really works because you're right. Transformation implies tearing down things and starting over. Most cultures don't need that. In fact, if you were to do that, you might lose a lot of people in the process. You might lose their engagement, you might lose their connection to the business, you might lose the connection to the history of the business, et cetera. I'm working with uh an insurance company right now. They're, I think, 160 plus years old. They have a history not just tied to their policyholders, but tied to this country. And for the CEO to say, hey, we need to change our culture, that's a very fraught conversation to have with those employees, the shareholders, board members, et cetera. But what you said is so important. Using the word culture renovation means we're going to assess what is working now based on the strategy that we have and what's not working, and what are the things that we need to change? In fact, again, just going back to the business analogy, any review of a line of business is going to involve what's working in our business, what's not working in our business. The same rule should apply to culture. If I have a strategy now where I'm trying to grow into new markets as opposed to preserve against competition, I need a different culture in order to do that. I need a culture that encourages people to experiment, take risks, innovate. If I'm in a if I'm in a situation where I need to protect, I need a culture that focuses on process, operational excellence, et cetera. For the CEO and the leadership team to clearly define what their strategy is and the culture they need to support it is critical for their overall success. And so, you know, uh the final analogy I'll use for the culture renovation is I I'm sitting in a house right now that was built in 1911. It has a really great kitchen. It had this thing called a butler's pantry. I don't know about you, Alyssa, but I don't have a butler. Do you have a butler?

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Right here. This is the butler.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Exactly. So that butler's pantry doesn't really serve much use anymore in my kitchen. But you know what could be really useful? Another sink so that I can uh have more room when we're doing the dishes, right? And so we renovated the house. We still kept the great things of this house that was built in 1911, but we got rid of some of the things that are no longer that no longer serve our needs as a modern family in 2026. And so again, organizations need to do the same thing with their culture, constantly reassess, make sure it's aligned with their current strategy and focus on the things that you want to keep and focus on the things you want to improve.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Yeah, and that analogy of the house, the butler pantry is funny. It helps to put something clear in people's minds around what you're really talking about when you talk about culture of innovation. And as a practitioner, again, partnering with I4CP and your team around implementing what that looks like and really taking the organization through it and the leaders through it was just such a powerful moment in my career, an example of work. So I'm I'm certainly a fan. And you've worked with so many organizations, hundreds of organizations on this. And I can speak from an end of one, which is because of the work that we did, we were featured in the case study by I4CP. We saw outsized results in terms of engagement, in terms of manager capabilities, in terms of organizational alignment. And those things pay dividends in organizations. So, in your work, supporting hundreds of organizations doing this, what are the differences between the organizations who do this really well and see those kinds of results and ones that might stall out or not really get the return on investment that is available to them in the process?

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Sure. Uh, I think there's a few sort of key insights there. Number one is culture needs to be owned by the CEO. I mentioned Sachin Adela, but if you read Kevin Oak's book, Culture Innovation, you read any of our research, if the CEO is not on board with this culture innovation, it's going to fail. So if you are an HR practitioner sitting here thinking, wow, I really want to do a culture innovation, number one activity for you should be make sure your CEO's on board, make sure that you are bringing to life your CEO's vision for what she or he wants from the business, um, and make sure that you have a really strong partnership with the CEO as well. So that's number one. Number two is that the leaders need to be aligned with that vision as well. So we talked about most leaders understand the uh impact of culture on uh business performance. Not all do. And so one of the things that we'll do is we'll use our research, we'll do briefings, we'll have uh come in, we'll have people come in and talk and do workshops to really make sure the leadership not only understands the business case for culture, but also what their role is in leading the culture. We have a one piece of research that I probably show pretty much in every conversation I have with a with a member or a prospective member, which basically shows the activities that are gonna get you give you the biggest impact per dollar or time spent. The top four of those things all have to do with leaders' behaviors. So leaders consistently demonstrating organizational values, leaders being held accountable for not just what results they get, but how they get them from a people perspective, leaders stopping bad behaviors that go against your company's culture immediately. Um, and last but not least, it was leaders um uh demonstrating the values in day-to-day work. Right. So those are the four. Now, there's four other ones on there, and they have to do with training your employees on the culture you want. But those are much less impactful than those leadership behaviors. And what we'll tend to see leaders again say is, oh, great, I'm on board with this culture thing. HR, can you go teach my people how to be more innovative? Solve that for me, please. But we've done that before. We know that if I teach you to behave in one way, but you see leaders behaving in another way and being rewarded, you're gonna start mimicking what those leaders are doing. So that's one of the things. So again, CEO, leaders aligned. And I'd say the number three thing that I would point out, which is really critical, is making sure that it's not just a top-down exercise. While I do talk about leaders, you really need to engage people on the front lines in the organization and make them a part of shaping the culture. There's a lot of different ways you can do that, but starting off the project by actually saying, we want to renovate our culture, but we want to listen to you and find out what you like and what you think needs to be changed, critical. Once you come up with your new leadership behaviors or values or mission statement, share that with your employees, get their feedback on it. So then when it comes time to roll it out, you can say, and they can say, We've been a part of this process. You know, the the joke that we always use at I4ZP is there's nothing worse than a bunch of leaders getting together in a room for two days and coming out and saying, We've got our new culture. That will fail.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Yes, yes. And I'm laughing because I recall working with the team and and just some of those kind of isms that we came up with and sayings within the our collective team around moving things forward. And the listening strategy is so important and really activated the organization around the culture and and around the movement of the whole.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

I want to try to double down on that. People think listening is about listening, but you use the word activating, it's just as much about activating. So people who say, oh, we've got survey fatigue, we don't want to run another survey, think of it as part of your behavior change strategy, not part only part of your listening strategy. So I'm really glad you brought that up.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Yeah. And I think, you know, to add to that is it's activation because you're bringing people in and now they see themselves part of the change. When a survey could very well be give us information and we may or may not do something with it, is how it's perceived to the organization or to employees. And so how are you building trust? How are you activating your employees? And I think one of the challenges that most organizations have, or I shouldn't say challenges, questions that they have entering into something like this is I know intellectually that culture matters. I see the research that it matters in financial outcomes, but how do we measure culture itself? So I4CP has built tools and assessments that actually quantify culture and the health of the culture. So, how do you take something that feels intangible and make it measurable, but not just measurable for your internal team, measurable enough for board conversations?

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Yeah, so the board is really interesting. Again, uh, I do think there's been a change in sort of board's recognition of the importance of culture. So I'll just point out a couple of key pieces of research or documents that, you know, or pieces that I recommend people read. Number one, if you're not familiar with the NACD, the National Association of Corporate Directors, you should definitely get familiar with that. If you're an executive leader in an organization, this is an organization that's defining how board members should be behave, how they should act, what they should watch, what they should monitor, et cetera. So they're really guiding the behavior of your board of directors. And not too long ago, they put out a uh a blue ribbon study called Culture as a Corporate Asset, which they define the importance of boards focusing on culture. And it was in response to some uh, you know, pretty high visibility failures of culture. So you think about Boeing, you think about Wells Fargo, you think about Uber, those were stories where billions of dollars were lost in value because of culture challenges in organizations. So boards care about risk, and so they saw this risk and they said, hey, we need to focus on this risk. So boards do care more about culture. And one of the things from that report is that they said that boards should set up regular quarterly reviews of culture scorecards. And so now you've got a lot of board members hearing that, but within the report, it didn't say what should a culture scorecard be. And so at I4CP, we've done a bunch of research both with board members and executives to define what should a good culture scorecard look like. And what I'll say is there's no one size fits all, but there's some best practices that I'd like to share. So number one is we believe that a culture scorecard should be focused on business outcomes. So again, thinking back to our story about culture drives business results, let's use an example. I want a culture that we're trying to grow our market share as a business by selling more of our products and services to our customers. So we want to sell multiple SKUs to our customers, or we want to have multiple product lines sold to our customers. That's a business objective that we have from a strategic perspective. What's the culture that we need to have for that? We need a culture where we're more collaborative. Okay, great. So we're gonna go and teach people to be more collaborative. Leaders are gonna encourage collaboration. We're gonna move people around the organization, we're gonna incentivize people on collaboration metrics versus individual performance metrics. So let's make a business outcome related to the culture around that. So, what would a business outcome we'd put in our culture scorecard be around collaboration? Well, it might be the average number of products sold to our customers. If that number is going up, then that's an indicator that our strategy is working. It's also an indicator that our culture is working. If that number is going down, then we might want to look at what are the cultural drivers of that that are causing that problem. So, what we encourage is creating culture scorecards based on business outcomes, suggest creating what we call indexes. So a lot of times HR folks have lots of data and they just throw it all at the wall in front of the leaders and say, look at all this stuff. Engagement's up, uh retention's up, um, use of EAP programs is down, et cetera, but people don't know what to do with it. Instead, take an index, let's call it uh index. Employee well-being and choose the three most important metrics that you think drive employee well-being. Put that in a scorecard, review that on a monthly basis at regular management meetings, and give people a very simple traffic light. Red, it's gone down, yellow, it's okay, green, it's moving up. And then make sure that you've got a leadership routine in place where leaders actually do something. Again, going back to my example around gross margin. Gross margins are going down, does not leave the leadership team meeting unless there's a plan. Employee well-being is going down, should not leave the leadership team meeting until there's a plan and some actions being taken. And so that's what we're encouraging. So, again, defining that the culture scorecard based on business outcomes, creating indexes, and then having regular processes as part of management team reviews to review those metrics and make plans to take action.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

All right, let's take a quick pause here. Because if you're listening to this and thinking, you know, I'm dealing with something just like this, you're probably not alone. Behind the scenes, I'm having tons of conversations with leaders navigating this right now. So I'd love to connect on LinkedIn. Tell me what resonated. Tell me what challenged you. Tell us what you want us to dig into next. I'm always open to conversation. All right, let's get back to it. Something that you said earlier around the leader's behavior and they having to model the behavior. And that really is the difference between the organizations who are getting those outsized financial results and not the same case here, right? A leader would not leave a meeting talking about a problem with gross margin, but why are we accepting that we're leaving meetings when employee well-being down is down? Or we know 66% of employees are currently burned out in organizations and managers even more so. So as you think about leaders, and something that we believe in kind of the human ROI model is that human ROI in organizations is a function of talent capacity, leaders as leverage. So I think that's what you're talking about, and ecosystem design. So what I love is we're touching on two of those. We're touching on the leaders as leverage, because you can train employees, but if you don't have leaders modeling the behavior, you're not going to get the results you see. Similarly, when we talk about ecosystem design, it's that cultural piece. So I'd love your thoughts as we're as individuals maybe listening here around our talent capacity. How have you seen talent play a role in the larger conversation about culture and uh the health of the culture, the people that you have inside the organization?

SPEAKER_00 24:50

So I4CP's latest research on what we're calling the future-ready organization really lays out three key pillars that we've identified, if worked on together, can lead to two X more likely high performance organizations. So organizations focus on getting AI right, focusing on skills and talent, and creating a change-ready culture. Maybe that's an environment piece you're talking about, yes, are more likely to be high performing or two times more likely to be high performing. And so when the skills part, I think, gets that talent piece. What we're seeing, and in fact, going back to that culture scorecard, a great index would be health of talent. And so you'd be looking at things like um ability to fill critical roles. Have we defined critical roles? Do we have the skills we need in order to achieve our goals over the next few years? What are the retention rates of our critical roles? So taking a look at not just the so I guess the combination of talent, let's call it talent supply. So do we have the talent in-house and can we get the talent from externally that we need? Talent health, is the talent happy, healthy, engaged, and are they working well? And then I'd ask, add the third one would be talent deployment. Are we moving it where it's needed in the organization? And those are some really kind of high, I'm guessing a high level, but high-leverage actions that many leaders are not focused on, right? So if you just think about if if talent is the number one asset of your organization and you think about it as like that supply chain, you'd be making some very different decisions as a leadership team if you're thinking about that. And I loved how you said too, like we would never leave a meeting if our gross margins are down without a plan. How can you leave a meeting when knowing that your talent supply, we can't get the right talent in the door, or the talent we have is leaving or they're unhappy, or we can't move them around the organization because people are hoarding talent because they don't want, you know, those can be disastrous to your performance. But again, those are conversations that aren't happening happening enough at the at the leadership level.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah, and it's uh I think to your point earlier, and a credit to I4CP is organizations are recognizing now the impact that culture has on organizational health, which they're by the financial health of the organization. But those financial implications are keeping people up at night. The talent decisions should be keeping people up at night. And so, you know, people know now that culture matters because we have enough body of knowledge and research to back that up. And that's what I4CP is focused on, right? Your business and the consulting services practice is the catalyst for that in so many organizations. So if an organization wanted to work with you and really get intentional about culture, what is that? I I know because I've done it, but I'd love for our listeners to hear because again, it was such a powerful experience and again, outsized results that no other lever achieved. So, how does an organization think about partnership with you? And can you walk folks what an engagement would look like?

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Sure. So you mentioned earlier the book by Kevin Oakes, Culture Renovation, and our research paper, Culture Renovation. So the origin of that research in that book was the largest study ever done on culture. So we looked at over a thousand organizations, we looked at the ones who had experienced a culture transformation, and we looked at which ones were successful. So, first of all, the most sobering statistic is only 15% of culture renovations or transformations are successful. So most of them fail. So then again, our wizards in the research team did their correlation analysis and they said, what we looked at those 15% of the organization were successful, and we said, what were the things that they did that led them to success? And we came up with 18 steps. So I'm not going to go through all 18 steps. We can get copies of the report to uh our listeners, but I'll break it down in kind of three high-level chunks. The first step is plan. So first you need to understand what your current culture is. You talked about listening earlier. You need to clearly define what the culture is you want. Think about like a culture placemat, what are our values, what are our behaviors, what are the leadership competences we want, et cetera. And then how are you going to measure success of the culture, right? So that's the plan phase. And typically we'll work with organizations, take them through that whole process. You can do that in maybe three, four, five months, taking through that. And it's it's very much at the at the leadership level, there's a lot of work getting done defining it, but also as you mentioned earlier, doing listening, focus groups, et cetera, making sure that you're testing the thinking of the leadership team. So that'd be phase one. Phase two is uh build. And so this is really, you and I have been in this space long enough. This is actually where like the hard work happens. It's really nice in phase one to write all that great stuff up on the wall that you want to happen. Now we got to make it walk down the halls, right? And so this is where the change management comes in. This is where the behavior change and the training comes in. This is where we activate culture champions across the organization so that you've got people deeply embedded in the organization, not just leaders helping translate and encourage people to make the change. And this part takes a while. I mean, this is like a good nine to 12 month process. You know, um, you're going to be in the build phase for a significant amount of time. Um, and again, from I4CP's perspective, we can come in, we can help you design culture playbooks, we can help you at find those culture champions using organizational network analysis, and we can help you use best practices to define a culture change campaign. We like to talk about focusing on one behavior or habit at a time. Don't try to tell everyone to change everything at once. But if you want people to enable a growth mindset, let's make Q1 the growth mindset quarter. And everyone in the organization is focused on growth mindset. Q2 can be about collaboration, whatever the case may be. So you got plan, build. So now we've created our North Star, we've got it walking down the halls, but then there's this other part that you and I know runs into things, which is the systems of the company. So your promotion systems, your performance management, your onboarding, et cetera. You could have a great culture in theory and you could tell people how you want them to behave. But if you tell me to experiment and I experiment and fail, and then I don't get a raise or promotion because I experiment and fail, I'm gonna stop experimenting and failing. So you got to make sure your performance management system is aligned with the culture that you want. And so what we'll help organizations do there is audit their talent practices, audit their operating practices to make sure they're aligned with the culture as well. So that would be sort of the three chapters of the culture renovation story.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Yeah. And it's uh as you were going through it, I just started thinking about what we did with you and just again can't say enough about the experience and really change the way I think about things. And my hope for listeners is that they take away what it really means to do culture well, because it isn't words on the wall. And the completing the project is not having a new set of values or even a culture playbook, right? It's that third step, which is how do you operationalize the culture into the ecosystem, into the ways of working, into the rhythm of the business and the behaviors of your people, both leadership and employees. I have so many questions still ruminating for you. But if we could take a few extra minutes, I think there's a couple things that I want to touch on that are really unique to I4CP. And until you said it just now, I wasn't going to bring it up. Okay. Which is OA, the organizational network analysis. Because I think this was an unlock as well for me in the process, which is it's really hard to do an organizational network analysis manually, but the way that you're able to do it is so powerful. And I just think we would do a disservice to the listeners, not expanding on that. So, Marshall, can you share a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_00 32:46

Sure. Um, and so organizational network analysis is one of these um amazing tools that is an enigma to me, I'll be honest with you, because everyone I talk to, you know, you included, you hear this idea, and I'll explain it in just a moment. People say, that's great, we want to do it. But when it comes to actually getting it done, just as you described, it seems overly complicated, it seems too hard. And so I'll try to bridge that gap for you. But for those who don't know, organizational network analysis, we have a gentleman who's on our team, Rob Cross, who's kind of the godfather of the research there. And basically the theory is that there are people hidden in your organization that have high levels of social capital that you don't know about that can be massive change agents in your organization. You might be able to name one or two. In fact, if the listeners probably think right now, if you think of someone, you know, who do I go to when I really need to understand what's happening in the organization, or who do I go to that gives me a lot of energy, or who do I go to that always solves problems? Probably a couple names come up. Those are those people who have high levels of social capital. And in fact, what's interesting is not just me and Alyssa who are going to those people. There's probably 50 people in your organization who are going to those people. And they are critical to your organization's success. Number one, they actually help work get done. And number two, they actually connect diverse groups, diverse departments, diverse teams together. And they're like a glue that you don't understand happens in your organization. And so finding those people can be, can be difficult. Uh, there's two processes there's you know active and passive OA. So the one way is that you can sort of put AI agents on your email, on your Slack, on different communication tools. You could see who are the people that are always getting emails, who are people CC'd on that? That's a really interesting way to analyze people. Another way is, like you just said, you just ask them a few questions. And so I try to really simplify this stuff, Alyssa. I say, you know, I've got a tool. IFRCP has a tool. We can use it. We can run a survey for you. We can do all these great network maps that'll tell you who all the critical people are in your organization. But if you just add a few smart questions to your regular customer employee engagement survey, you're gonna get that information. And I described those before, but so simple questions like who do you go for when you need answers to questions, who solves problems for you, who gives you energy, and I'm the opposite, who takes energy away from you, who's that energy vampire, et cetera. You're gonna come up with a list of people that you can not only leverage in any sort of change process, but specifically in that change and the culture renovation process as well. And so we had an example of we working, we were working with the hospital, and the person who showed up on the organizational network analysis as one of the most influential was a very low-level person on the maintenance team who delivered like light bulbs and equipment to all the different departments. But the reason why he was so important is because he went to every department every day and he got the vibe of what was going on. And if you know people in the NICU were stressed out because of so-and-so, you'd find out when he went over to the security team. And then the security team, and so that person, armed with just a little bit of information to share a message or to talk about a particular story, to talk about the culture journey, can be immensely powerful. And I'm pretty sure if you asked anyone in the organization at the senior level who's gonna have the biggest influence on culture, no one would have named that particular individual.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

That's that's a great example to bring this home, Marshall, which is exactly why I wanted to bring it up because there are those hidden change makers in organizations. And without a tool like this or without an honest conversation like this, it often goes overlooked because your point is there's an off-site, you're planning, and you haven't yet operationalized it. And those folks can make your life so much easier and the results so much better if you engage them in the process. We're seeing so much in the market on LinkedIn, in news publications around the state of organizations today, burnout, layoffs, AI implementation that hasn't been fully thought through yet, mergers and acquisitions, right? Those are all catalysts for large-scale transformation, large-scale change inside organizations. And they're high stakes. So if someone is sitting there listening to this thinking, our culture needs attention and I don't know where to start, or we've started on our own and we're not sure where to go from here. What can they do this week to start seeing the human ROI of the culture they have today and what is possible in the future?

SPEAKER_00 37:15

I love that question. Um, and I love that it's just getting down to the individual level. So let's make it real simple. Let's start with that concept that we start off earlier around listening. I would say go to your team and ask them a simple question. What makes it hard to execute right now? Listen, shut up and listen. And then go do something about it and get back to them next week. That's it. That's all you need to do. And you'll find some really surprising answers. You'll find some, you'll find that when you actually take action, it will drive all sorts of engagement and support from your team, and it's gonna make you more effective as an organization. Because that's fundamentally cultural renovation in a microcosm, right? We're gonna do that at an organizational level. What are the big cultural levers we need to move? But at each team level, there's something you can do right now. And so that's how what I suggest you do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

So it's how do you bring so that's how you can have it locally, and if you need support scaling that across the organization, we're gonna put your information in the show notes, Marshall, because I think if people want to follow your work, follow I4CP's work. I'll ask if you have any of the research that you mentioned today. We'll put that in the show notes for folks if it's accessible beyond membership.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Yeah, what I was thinking too, what we could offer is um we'd have a new report. It's about change ready culture. So you you talked about the state of change, and we've got a simple free assessment that we're offering for folks. So uh we can we can let them take it, and then I'll even do a like a quick 30-minute debrief of their results.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

Amazing. Well, wonderful offer. Thank you so much. Hey, listeners, look at bonus content. Uh so we're gonna go ahead and uh get that from you. We'll put that in the show notes. And thank you so much for your generosity and sharing the information, making sure that at scale, we're continuing to see the ROI on our human capital. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

Thanks for having me on. Uh, this was great. I really enjoyed the conversation and uh congrats on the new podcast. It's terrific. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

Thank you. Thank you so much for investing your time with us here on the Human ROI podcast. If this episode gave you a new perspective, something to take back into your work, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone in your network. Because this show doesn't grow by the algorithm, it grows through real dialogue. And if you want to keep the conversation going, I'd love to. You can find me on LinkedIn or follow along on my newsletter, The Human ROI. So until next time, remember, your people are not a cost center. They are your greatest source for value creation.