ROI on Company Culture - A Return from Retirement Story with Cynthia Kyriazis

Tired of being on the Leadership Training hamster wheel - constantly throwing dollars at Learning & Development and not getting an ROI on Culture? Seeking a fresh approach?

In this conversation with Cynthia Kyriazis, The Culture Think Tank's Chief Experience Officer, we discuss leadership behaviors' role in creating a workplace culture that focuses on strengthening performance and creating a Return On Culture (ROC)!

In today's competitive landscape, where attracting and retaining top talent is a constant challenge, the sense of connectivity employees feel within an organization can make or break its success; hence our dive into the crucial elements of crafting a resilient organizational culture.

Cynthia doesn't just talk the talk; she shares her journey of stepping out of retirement to work for The Culture Think Tank - to answer leaders' tough questions on how to define and prove ROC and the benefits it delivers in terms of productivity, performance, recruitment/ retention and to the company bottom line.

We touch on the challenges leaders encounter when working on cultural change and the importance of a strategic, continuous approach that includes the art of listening, empathy, and taking immediate action on employee feedback & staff expressed needs.

If you're ready to elevate your culture game and are curious how your leadership efforts can contribute to ROC and a vibrant workplace culture, let this episode be your jumping-off point.

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Seeking to discover additional insights on how to strengthen your company culture, improve performance & impact your company's bottom line? Book a time to chat with us.
No sales, no strings...just a candid conversation about company culture.

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Transcript

William Gladhart: 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership Levers podcast. I'm your host, will Gladhart, CMO at the Culture Think Tank. Our Culture Think Tank Community is committed to advancing workplace culture and well-being. We're a virtual hub for authors, investors, leaders, managers and employees worldwide to connect, engage in candid discussions, share ideas and explore resources for cultivating a healthy work environment. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address cultural change. Our guest today is Cynthia Kyriazis, the Chief Experience Officer at the Culture Think Tank. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 0:40

My pleasure, happy to be here.

William Gladhart: 0:41

I thought we would start by having you share with our audience a bit about yourself and your background.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 0:46

Well, I graduated from college and went off to make my fortune and basically for the first 20 years of my life, I worked for a corporation that worked within hospitals. They sold to hospitals. And then one day, in my early 40s, I decided that I've had enough of this and I'm going to try a change. I'm going to go to work for myself. So that's what I did. I started my own business at the ripe age of 42 and, for 35 years or so, had it until I attempted to retire in 2019, I think the end of 2019. And then here I am now.

William Gladhart: 1:20

So we will be discussing three questions today as a warm up to start our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?

Cynthia Kyriazis: 1:28

Well, a healthy culture is critical, because performance and productivity, recruitment and retention depends upon that, and a healthy culture depends upon the behavior of their leaders, because what I've learned is optimal performance within an organization basically rests in two areas that join how confident is the employee and how challenged is the employee within that organization. That's what drives optimal performance and that requires input from leaders, the right.

William Gladhart: 1:59

So what do you see as the biggest challenge leaders face when addressing cultural change within an organization?

Cynthia Kyriazis: 2:04

I think if I really had to pick only one, I would say the biggest challenge is for leaders to remember that this is a process and not a one time event or a two time event. It is something that continues to grow as new things are thrown in, as old things require addressing. It's not a let's do two or three of these check-ins and we'll be all good and set no. It's a commitment to creating a culture that thrives over time and over obstacles and keeps on dropping.

William Gladhart: 2:36

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up, but we always refer to it as a marathon, not a sprint, and doing one or two things is probably not the fix and requires consistent collaborative work over time.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 2:49

Absolutely.

William Gladhart: 2:49

So what do you think that leaders can do to address the challenges that they are facing?

Cynthia Kyriazis: 2:53

I think the most important thing they need to do is to get some input from employees about what they're needing or what they want. And I know that our assessment does that, our C5 does that. But it's really important to receive that information from the mouths of people who are experiencing it, and those voices need to be anonymous, they need to be paid attention to, because I've said this before and I'll say it again Employees want to know three things. They want to know did leadership listen to what it was I needed to say and had to share? I spent my time answering this. Please listen.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 3:28

Do leaders care about what it was that I said? Are they addressing it? And if they are addressing it, what exactly are they doing about it? What action, specific action, are they taking or beginning to take? If an employee doesn't feel that those three questions were satisfied, the chances of them continuing to stick with the organization or stick with the check-ins diminishes greatly, and when we start having unhappiness within the organization, that can spread like a wildfire and cause a lot of issues. So that's what I would say.

William Gladhart: 4:01

Yeah, thanks for bringing up that listen, care and act element, because I think if, when it comes to decision making, but also when it comes to organizational culture, if those three components are things that leaders can lean into and think about with every decision or every feedback from employees and managers, it's a great way to think about next steps. You know you've shared some really interesting insights and ideas. Is there anything else you'd like to share or add for leaders?

Cynthia Kyriazis: 4:28

Well, yes, there is. There's something interesting happened three or four weeks ago and I thought it might be interesting to share it. I have been doing some work at the Think Tank on working with investors and demonstrating our product and our solution to investors. Most investors have one or two questions, but this gentleman was kind of refreshing. He had interesting questions and he had four, five, six of them. So after I finished the demonstration and answered his questions, one of his final questions to me was something I have never been asked before, and the question was what is it about this product that caused you to come out of retirement? And I said well, I'll tell you the story.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 5:09

Before I started working for the Think Tank and before I retired, I had my own business. It included executive coaching, speaking, training, consulting, writing books and writing, creating products. But the thing that really resonated with me was, every time I would try to go and do a training, especially in global organizations or larger organizations, the question of the ROI came in, and anybody who trains or who has trained knows that that question, even if it wasn't asked explicitly, there was concern about am I really going to get my money back from hiring you to do this training. Those of us who grew up I would say most of the Boomers, and even the Millennials who have their own businesses and do this type of work are probably still faced with that question, especially since it seems so easy to pull these statistics out of technology. But at that time it was very, very hard. So I was always looking for a way to prove this particular training or product works. And when you will introduce me to our other will, our will Lynstron, the CEO and founder of the think tank. He came to me in March of 2020 on the week that we all got put in lockdown for the pandemic.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 6:19

It was in the latter part the fourth quarter of the year before 2019, that I decided I don't need to travel like this anymore. I can relax and unknowing to me, once in my life I had great timing. I was going to retire and not travel, and nobody was going to travel because we had a pandemic. But then, when I met Will and I started to hear his story, he vetted me in several different ways to see would I be a good fit for the team? I wasn't even totally sure I understood what he did, so at the end of this interview, he said I think you'd be a good fit for the team and I would appreciate it if you would consider coming on with the team.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 6:55

I said I'm happy to do that Will, but I just need to know something. We are in the beginning stages of something that will last a very long time and I would just like to know why it is that you want to start this now. Why do you want to take the knowledge and experience that you have and have been testing with proof of concepts? And why do you want to do it now, at this point? And he says if you think that there was a change in Culture, because employees are being sent to their home to work, wait till you see what happens, until they are being told to go back to the office. And here we are, three, three and a half years later, and the truer words were never spoken.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 7:28

But the thing that really got me was I could use this product to prove that leadership behaviors change outcomes. Of course, they include many steps. You have to be a leader, you have to be proactive, you have to be compassionate and you have to measure. But the thing that really resonated with me is ah, here's something where you can show what, directly, what behaviors impact had on creating a confident and challenged workforce. And it's because of that specific thing that the measurements were so clear and I felt like the C5 was so elegant that that was something I could get behind, mostly because I had passion around the fact that I never had it for all the years that I worked with companies. It was just a breath of fresh air.

William Gladhart: 8:13

Cynthia, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thank you so much for your insights.

Cynthia Kyriazis: 8:17

Well, thanks for having me Will and thanks for introducing me to Will Lindstrum.

William Gladhart: 8:21

Of course, thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. You may find all our Leadership Levers episodes in our Culture Think Tank Community at www. culturethinktank. ai. Join the community at no charge and tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experience in strengthening culture, one action at a time.