Claudette Rowley

234: Claudette Rowley: I was born believing in potential

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we uncover the leadership life hacks that help you to experience breakout performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach. 

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Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who’s finally going to give us some clarity in a system to creating a culture that is brilliant. Claudette Rowley was born in Indiana and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. She grew up with two younger sisters and attended the University of Michigan. Growing up she was a keen observer of human dynamics and how those dynamics influenced people. In her 20s she had two jobs that set the stage for much of her career. The first organization had a great culture and she noticed how her creativity, innovation and competence increased in this culture. Then she moved to another organization with a toxic culture there she noticed how her confidence dipped and how much time she spent handling office politics. Claudette’s background includes experience working with technology companies such as Medtronic, cell signaling technology Reveal Imaging and educational institution such as Boston University School of Law and MIT as well as nonprofit organizations and small businesses. 

For almost 20 years she has consulted trained and coached executive leaders and teams at Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, higher education and startups to create a proactive and innovative workplace culture that delivers outstanding results throughout all areas of an organization. Claudette is the creator of the cultural brilliance system and hosts a globally syndicated radio show. She also teaches a course on culture and communication at Northeastern University and is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, Cultural Brilliance–The DNA of Organizational Excellence.  She lives in the Greater Boston area and is married with a 16 year old son, 17 year old stepdaughter and 21 year old stepson. Claudette Rowley are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Claudette Rowley:   Absolutely, absolutely Jim. 

Jim Rembach:    I’m glad you’re here. 

Claudette Rowley:   Thanks.

Jim Rembach:    I’m given my Legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better? 

Claudette Rowley:   My current passion is culture. My book, Cultural Brilliance, the love I have for putting that—those ideas out into the world sharing them with listeners sharing them with organizations and leaders and talking about culture. I get to be in that sweet spot of loving what I do.

Jim Rembach:    Well, okay that is a sweet spot. Culture for me oftentimes that isn’t a sweet spot because there’s just so much ambiguity there’s so much—and you and I were talking off mic I said it’s kind of like describing smoke. What do mean by that? A lot of people really just don’t know how to define it to understand it, we’ll talk about that in a second but I think it’s really most important to say how people are actually experiencing the symptoms when they don’t have a brilliant culture. What are some of the symptoms? 

Claudette Rowley:   It’s a great question. Culture is interesting because it’s really—when you  start to be able to observe your own culture you can start to see the symptoms and you start seeing how there’s a whole set of beliefs that are driving behaviors and results. There is a way to actually observe your own culture, we’ll talk about later. Symptoms are things like you have really low trust. It usually takes the form of blaming, gossip, those are pretty easy things to spot because that will come up in communication. You’ll notice things like it’s hard to move projects forward, low productivity, if you’re in an environment where you’re building and shipping a product for example, your shipments are late, delayed customers are getting upset anything like that. There’s an aspect to the organization that’s just not working that well you could have a cultural issue, so those are early symptoms. Of course, if you have bullying or people are being belittled or put down in some way that’s a clear sign you’re having a cultural issue for sure, yeah  that one’s clear. 

Jim Rembach:    In addition, a couple other things you mentioned in the book are feedback, so what about feedback?

Claudette Rowley:   Yeah, feedback. If you’re in a culture words it’s not safe to give feedback no one gets feedback its feedback free. Which isn’t good because you’re not getting positive feedback which most of us need to feel motivated and appreciated. If we’re not getting feedback on how we can improve you’re missing out. The other thing about feedback I think it’s important is a lot of companies and any organization makes a mistake of only giving critical feedback and they miss out on actually appreciating people. When people are surveyed when we talk to people in organizations they almost always will say to me, we don’t feel valued and appreciated. And here we are killing ourselves to get something done and all we hear is what we didn’t do well, so that’s another symptom. 

Jim Rembach:    I think that’s a really important point. If you don’t give any feedback more than likely if you give if it’s not in a distant manner more than likely it’s going to be the negative.

Claudette Rowley:   It’s going to be the negative. 

Jim Rembach:    You also talked about the different types of leadership tactics or methods. When you start talking about a culture that isn’t so brilliant, what kind of management tactics would you see present?

Claudette Rowley:   When leaders aren’t doing a great job or impacting their culture in ways that aren’t really helpful we’re going to see that they’re not listening very well, that’s a key thing. People don’t feel heard maybe they feel shut down or there’s an interesting behavior. I see a lot of leaders I work with engaging where they say they’re going to move forward on solving a problem but they don’t. So people got really frustrated, they get very disengaged. Someone coming to a leader and having enough courage to say, we have an issue here we can’t solve it because we don’t have the authority or resources or we don’t know maybe we tried but we can’t do it we really need help. The leader doesn’t listen and the leader doesn’t do anything or get somebody else to do something you’ve just disengaged a group of people there’s no way around that. And that’s really common, unfortunately, and it’s so avoidable it’s a really avoidable thing. 

The other behavior I’ve seen as a leader who just really—we all have blind spots as people. We all have blind spots to cultures because no one can see everything including leaders. And so see organizations thru the leader really is blind to parts of the culture and no one feels they can say anything and that leader continues to be blind to it and it wreaks a lot of havoc. Those are some of the things we would be seeing in a culture where things aren’t working that well.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so in the book you talk about that culture blindness. To me though as you were explaining it almost seems like—and you might find there’s more than just two flavors but it seems like there’s two flavors of this cultural blindness. Some of it is intentional, I just choose not to look. The other is I just don’t recognize it. That could fall from a potentially a competency issue a competence issue or an experience issue. So what other facets of that blindness do you see? 

Claudette Rowley:   Sometimes there are leaders that I’ve worked with who, or potentially worked with I went in and talked to them initially and we didn’t work together, and that’s usually because their ego of a nature that prevents them from actually seeing which would mean they’d have to admit that there’s something they should maybe improve. And so sometimes it’s really that sense of—this person does not want to go there they do not want to look at this they do not want to admit it they would view it as a sign of weakness and they need to keep their perception of themselves intact. That’s actually a big one. If I’m giving some, even gentle feedback—this is what I’ve observed kind of feedback and that person really can’t hear it then we’re not going to be working together that’s definitely an area of blindness. 

We all do have blind spots so what we want leaders to be modeling is when someone brings it to their attention they’re willing to hear it and consider it. We ask people to consider. Could you consider that this might be an issue? Can you observe yourself over the next week and see what you notice? It could be something like somebody cuts—leaders cutting people off in meetings and you bring it to that person’s attention, no I don’t. Real example, no I don’t, they’re unconscious about it they’re just unaware of it. Okay, what about in every meeting over the next week you just notice if you are doing this, you’re engaging this behavior. Oh, my gosh, wow I really cut people off, no idea. 

I sometimes really feel for leaders from that perspective because sometimes everybody in the organization knows this about them and talks about it, they don’t know and we assume that they do know, we assumed. This women is cutting people off in meetings and the person has no idea. There’s so much value in creating a relationship as a leader where people can give you feedback just in case. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s one of the things that you do you’re constantly about people in certain positions of powers that they don’t have anybody who could actually give them that feedback. So the peer issue and so many different other aspects that go along with that. When you’re talking though I started thinking about one other way that there may be a selected cultural blindness. When you start thinking about the workplaces of today, and let’s be frank the effort to create a brilliant culture if you don’t have one and in fact is that most don’t, it’s a big undertaking this is no small feat. Going through it the returns are pretty significant. Do you also run into a situation that I call tomorrow guys problem? In other words somebody starts looking at and said, oh, this is going to take a lot longer and I only have like 18 months left here I’m not touching this.

Claudette Rowley:    Yeah. I’ve definitely seen that. This is going to be so much more work than we thought. I’m very with companies in saying, here’s the reality of this road map. There will be great rewards or we wouldn’t bother putting all this effort into it but there’ll be great changes and rewards. We’re talking about changing an organizational system which means we’re helping people change individually and we know that that is never fast. Unless you’re just looking at one aspect of a culture. Companies sometimes can have something going on but they just need a tweak and that could be—that would not take you long. But I have had people back off of it, we’ve done the assessment work. And even though I’ve told them we’re looking at X number of months for each phase, this is what I think is going to happen, implementation is often the most challenging, this is what you need to be looking at, it’s really when the rubber hits the road. I don’t know, I’m afraid when I do this. 

Jim Rembach:    The realistic smack in the face.

Claudette Rowley:   Yeah, this is hard or I might have to look at myself. 

Jim Rembach:    Exactly, I have to bare my realities. Okay, so when you start talking about the actual system in the process there are like you said—and in the book you create that roadmap,   you lay it all out. Of course, the finer details and all that, you just can’t put in here, because I think a lot of those things become unique to the organization. 

Claudette Rowley:   Definitely, yeah. 

Jim Rembach:    I would dare to say, just kind of a percentage perspective, that may be 60 to 70 percent you can kind of follow a framework but then the rest is your uniqueness, would that be about it, right?

Claudette Rowley:   It’s an excellent point ‘cuz sometimes what happens is that people in an organization or set of leaders reads a book, like mine or any sort of road map, and they think—oh, we can just apply this but there isn’t necessarily the recognition that you just brought up that they’re going to be, especially something like a culture. Culture is like a fingerprint every culture is unique. And so what works for Google or what works for Apple or whatever probably won’t work for your company so there may be some elements of it, facets of it so it will be unique to you and that’s part of the discovery process, absolutely. 

Jim Rembach:    Talking about the process, I guess six core phases process and needless to say they all interrelate and overlapping and there’s some synergistic benefits to all of it. But if you could just kind of walk through the cultural brilliance system.

Claudette Rowley:    Hmm-hmm, yeah, I’m happy to. So, the cultural blade system itself is the road map for understanding—can your culture where it is now to where you’d like it to be essentially? And the first just at a very high level, we start with understanding it’s called authenticity it’s the assessment piece. What kind of culture do you have now and how does it really operate? It’s amazing to me how many organizations try to make changes without understanding their baseline and of course they don’t work. Sometimes massive failures because they didn’t understand what they had to begin with. So you have to understand what you’re working with. The second piece of it is really saying, okay, now that we know what we’re working with what kind of culture do we really need? What’s our profile look like? And what’s the profile we need to have? Which is called contextual emergence which just means, what’s the context for what’s emerging? That’s your profile. 

And then we move into this design phase. Where we’re really working with people, and I try to work with as many people in a company as possible. I’m not just working with leaders or kind of people and all folks of all levels all different teams and departments, if it’s a bigger organization. We want people to buy in and we also want people to share their viewpoints and feedback. Because we know that the best people to tell you about their part of the culture is the people that work in it. It’s actually really fun and so we do a design process where we’re helping an organization is designing its own change from point A where they are now to point B where they want to be. And then we move into something called design integrity which is simply prototyping. Now that you have a design you have a plan let’s try it out with one department or a couple of teams let’s make sure this actually works we know just because somebody’s on paper it doesn’t mean it’s going to work in reality so we do that prototyping. 

And then we move into what I call integration, which is about the implementation piece. That’s often one of the longest pieces of course because we’re making it real. We need to have a plan we need to decide how the plan is going to be integrated how the changes are going to take place. One of the really important points in this integration process is that we have to have identified the new mindsets or beliefs and behaviors that will be part of the new culture. People themselves in the organization will have—I won’t be deciding this they’ll have decided this. And then when we’re starting this implementation integration phase we need to do it from the perspective of new behaviors and beliefs new mindsets. And I bring this up because I’ve seen so many organizations start to get integrated change that like if they’re improving communication they’ll start implementing a communication change plan using all the old ways of communicating, that doesn’t make sense that won’t work that’s a blind spot so we point that out. You need to use your new ways of communicating to implement the plan. And then at the end we do some—it’s called social capital. We’re essentially saying, what changed in the organization? What did you learn? How did your business improve? What do you take from this entire process that you’ve been through? 

Jim Rembach:    There’s one thing that I think is important to point out, you talk about it in the book, you talk about having some of that blindness and not knowing what you have. You also talk about the people really focusing in sometimes on the negative things and things they need to fix but you really put an emphasis on a lot of the positives. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Claudette Rowley:   I think almost all cultures and organizations have brilliance. So when I talk about brilliance I’m talking about potential. Really understanding the potential in your culture understanding what’s working what’s brilliant about it now what works really well. Usually what I find is that in organizations, I’m not brought into an organization that’s working really well, so I’m speaking to the cultures I’m going into that are ones that decided they need to change. Usually you see—it could be in the form of innovation it could be in the form of people engagement it could be in the form of ideas or whatever. But you’ll see all of a sudden seemingly all these this potential start to pop up that’s been kind of repressed or hidden by dysfunction by people not feeling safe or whatever as trust starts to build you see that brilliance or potentials surface and so I’m harnessing that. 

Of course we’re fixing problems because we have to we have to address the reality but you want to harness what’s going well. I’m the person running around looking for the initial seemingly small success what’s changing positively even if it’s minor. I’m usually having to convince leaders because sometimes they’re like, (18:10 inaudible) that little thing—just got someone spoke up in a meeting that doesn’t mean anything. What are you talking about? No, no, no this person never speaks up and they did and they had a really great comment and a great idea. So we need to we need to pull together all these threads of what’s going well and harness them because that’s how the change starts.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, you talk about the potential piece. You talk about many of the aspects from a framework, a roadmap, a timeline, I started thinking about cultural brilliance for me and also from a customer experience perspective. When you start talking about a lot of the work that you’re doing with organizations, how much of it actually involves the customer? 

Claudette Rowley:   Hmm-hmm. I think the customer’s very much impacted by the positive changes. We may reach out to customers for feedback and things like that that could be part of it we may not it just depends on the company. But what I see is that, I’m thinking of a company I’m working with now and I’ve been helping with implementation because they didn’t have a lot of infrastructure to do that on their own, I’m more involved than I have—that sometimes am but it’s actually really fun to have boots on the ground and really be in there see what’s happening. What we’ve been doing culturally has very much impacted their customers. Interestingly, at times usually not for too long a little bit negatively, because as change happens people start to change they don’t do certain things as well temporarily and then they build back up, so we’ve seen a little bit of that. But ultimately the customers are going to be much better served overall.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so you’ve mentioned something really interesting that I’ve seen as something that comes out as a result of change of any type that you have fall out. We have certain people that realize that, hey, this is no longer a place where I want to be I started thinking about going through a cultural brilliance change, do you much follow up? Because to me I’m seeing like, okay, we went from a place that was kind of lackluster something that’s a little bit brilliant, really fall out? 

Claudette Rowley:   There can be fallout, yeah, it’s interesting because there are people who don’t—or to get to the brilliance you have to as we know you’re making some changes. It may require people to be more accountable it may require more ownership. You may not, if you’ve been gossiping at a company for 20 years. Gossips not going to be part of this culture there’s no circumstance in which I’ve ever seen gossip is a good thing. I have a lot of empathy for them because you’re asking them to change their behavior and their mindset and they simply may not want to and that’s their choice and so that can be the fallout. I’ve never had a situation where droves of people have left but you would expect there’s going to be a few folks that would leave and that’s usually really a good thing for them and for the company. 

Jim Rembach:    When you start talking about change, is I’ve seen some studies associated with the different viewpoints and aspects of change that you have side out change and outside-in change the inside-out is changing and helping the individual to change their behaviors. And the outside in is the organization changing some of their behaviors so that ultimately it will also affects the individuals. So, when you start talking about cultural brilliance, does it affect one more than the other or is it really a hybrid and does both?

Claudette Rowley:   I think it’s a hybrid. I think it presents as more of an outside-in because we’re talking about changing a system we’re talking of culture assist them. We’re talking about that we’re talking about changing certainly behaviors and mindsets and structures in the organization but we know that that does require an internal change individuals have to make in some cases. In most cases somebody realizes that the mindset they have about something isn’t working anymore they need to change it. So they’re either consciously making that decision or they kind of go along with the crowd and change their behaviors and the behavior changes their mindset. Sometimes even something as simple as reconfiguring a meeting can change people to the positive. It doesn’t always have to be that they have to drill this hard internal work I view it as very symbiotic. The outside pushes on the end the some people have to change they may not want to they may leave they may be asked to leave and that impacts what we’re doing in the system.

Jim Rembach:    When I started thinking about really just change and going through this cultural brilliance focusing positive and all that I started thinking about something that we really like at the show are quotes. So is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?

Claudette Rowley:   Oh, yeah, of course the one that’s coming to mind is the very famous one is—culture eats strategy for breakfast. Because I think it used a ton it’s so true it is so true and it’s one thing I talked to companies about you have to have your strategy and culture aligned the culture will not allow a strategy that’s not aligned it won’t happen it’s going to fail. So I think that is a hugely important one, hugely important concept.

Jim Rembach:    Well, and I would dare to say that also probably for you talking about your work and all of that is really come out to play talking about those two different organizations that you explain within your bio. Sometimes there’s humps and things that we have to get over in order for us to come to these brilliant conclusions. Is there a time where you’ve gotten over the hump that happened to you that you can share?

Claudette Rowley:   The second company that I talked about working for, this was a long time ago 20 years ago, it actually led me to a career transition I made that led me to what I do now. Because it was so toxic there and they also didn’t really like what I was doing either professionally. It actually led to a lot of soul-searching. I hired a coach I went through a career transition I went to all of this and that’s how I got over the hump, I became a coach and open the coaching business. That is the beginning of what is now Cultural Brilliance/

Jim Rembach:    One of the things that we talk about a lot and keeps kept coming over and over, I have the Call Center Coach Leader Academy that really focuses in on developing the skills of frontline supervisors in contact centers is that frontline leader is so critical. I was talking to a leadership expert the other day and he said, yeah, that’s kind of like we have to be able to connect the head and the feet. So fit’s the frontline leaders that are helping the organization walk and the top are helping from the intellectual perspective from a business. But when you start talking about being able to move an organization forward how often does the different levels of leadership come into play to impacting these cultural brilliance?

Claudette Rowley:   The different levels of leadership—I think it’s hugely important. You need the commitment and the buy-in of the top level leaders. My initial main clients is the CEO because if the CEO’s not on board this isn’t happening that’s just a basic bottom line of all this. But then it’s the folks, the middle, if it’s a hierarchy with the traditional middle managers etc. whatever the organizational design is but the folks in the middle of the folks in the front line they’re the implementers of this. I’m coaching the leaders, the senior leadership team to be role modeling whatever the behaviors are. For the change have the messaging the communication really leading through that through their communication and through their behavior but the rest of the people in the organization are the ones actually implementing a lot of the changes. I think people at all levels are incredibly important and you can’t skip a part of the organization in this process.

Jim Rembach:    For you actually got a coach in order to help you get where you are now. When we start talking about all aspects of the organization is that everybody needs a coach. 

Claudette Rowley:   Yeah, people do. Sometimes it can be an informal coach, a co-worker where people are just kind of naturally skilled at coaching you don’t need to be trained. I agree people do need—they need someone to reflect back and be a sounding board and have those kinds of conversations with them so I do a lot of yes I would say in a formal coaching. 

Jim Rembach:    So when you start talking about with the system that you’ve created that you’re working on we talked about, of course these being your passion, but when you think about one of your goals, what would it be? 

Claudette Rowley:   My vision for the book in the body of work, right in the book it’s not just a book, it’s really this idea that if we can change the culture of business we can make a huge impact on the world. And I think that—I used to be a social worker so I’m going to change the world kind of person, and this is for me about looking at business—business has so much potential business has a lot of responsibility and it can make, while it’s still making plenty of money and having good profit, it can still positively impact the world. And my vision is to continue to take that message out. 

Jim Rembach:    And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor:

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Okay Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Claudette, the Hump Day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster Claudette Rowley, are you ready to hoedown? 

Claudette Rowley:   Yeah, absolutely.

Jim Rembach:    Alright. What is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Claudette Rowley:   I am spread a bit too thin, definitely spread a bit too thin.

Claudette Rowley:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received? 

Claudette Rowley:   Trust yourself.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life? 

Claudette Rowley:   Listening very carefully and closely. 

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success? 

Claudette Rowley:   Tell the truth. 

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion, it could be from any genre of course we’re going to put a link to Cultural Brilliance, on your show notes page as well.

Claudette Rowley:   A book that was really transformational for me about 15 years ago is called, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. That is an amazing book for anybody going through a transition by someone named Greg Lavoie.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader Legion, you can find links to that and other notes and bonuses on our show notes page at fastleader.net/Claudette Rowley. Okay, Claudette, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you’ve given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take it all back you can only choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why? 

Claudette Rowley:   Trusting myself, really, really trusting myself. Because if you trust yourself you can do almost anything that’s the key to confidence it’s the key to a lot of different things so I’d say trusting myself.

Jim Rembach:    Claudette, it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Claudette Rowley:   Absolutely, it was it was really fun thanks so much Jim. My website is culturalbrilliance.com. You can find everything about me my services and my book right on the website. 

Jim Rembach:    Claudette Rowley, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Claudette Rowley:   Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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