Turning Culture into Cash Flow - Transformative Leadership with Lindsay Guzowski

Can a strongly aligned culture and focused financial performance drive sustainable growth at your organization?

In this episode of Leadership Levers, we explore this with Lindsay Guzowski, CEO and founder of The Crucible.

Lindsay highlights her journey from private equity deal-making to developing a leadership assessment tool tailored for the Private Equity (PE) sector, drawing on her background in quantitative sociology.

Her data-driven approach clarifies leadership strengths and gaps, meeting a crucial need in performance evaluation for PE-backed companies.

Lindsay shares the challenges of balancing cultural values with financial and performance goals at her company - where fostering curiosity, precision, and innovation can sometimes compete with the demands of a growing business. 

She spotlights how her team navigates a 'double-edged sword' of prioritizing culture and research initiatives without sacrificing financial results by aligning their values with strategic objectives.

With practical advice and real-world examples, Lindsay emphasizes the power of intentional culture-building as a foundation for profitable, high-performing businesses.

Tune in to learn how proactive, balanced culture-building can drive organizational performance and financial success in a competitive landscape.

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Transcript

William Gladhart: 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership L Podcast. I'm your host, will Gladheart, cmo at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Our guest today is Lindsay Gazowski, ceo and founder of the Crucible. Thanks so much for taking time to join us.

Lindsay Guzowski: 0:31

Well, thanks for having me on.

William Gladhart: 0:33

Excellent. Well, let's start by having you share with our audience a little bit about yourself, your background and your organization.

Lindsay Guzowski: 0:41

Yeah, as noted, I'm the CEO of the Crucible, which is a leadership development tool designed to assess and highlight strengths, opportunities for improvement and synergies between C-suite leaders in private equity and venture capital-backed organizations.

Lindsay Guzowski: 1:00

We came to The Crucible because I was working initially on the deal side of private equity and then in executive search, finding leaders for these organizations, and discovered that the tools that were being used to understand who the leaders were tended to be inaccurate, invalid or simply just not measure what people were hoping to find out about their leaders. And one day, after a somewhat frustrating discussion with a client where they were using a tool that, frankly, just did not help them, I said you know what? I think I can do this better myself. My academic background is in quantitative sociology, which basically means you take a lot of big data and you put it together and come out with, hopefully, predictive models. And so, given that background, thought you know we could go build something, and so I put together a team and spent several years validating, testing and building what we find to be a truly fantastic tool.

William Gladhart: 2:00

Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. I love that. I love the work that you do, because you really help identify not only the traits but also the gaps in leadership. But also it can work for any marketplace, but it's a very unique marketplace that has a very different demand on leaders. So we'll be discussing three questions today. As a warm-up to our conversation, would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?

Lindsay Guzowski: 2:25

Culture is going to emerge in any organization, whether you're intentional about it or not. Creating and cultivating a healthy culture helps to create businesses that are not just sustainable and profitable and places where you can see a future, but also places that can develop and foster the dreams of those people working in those companies. A healthy culture is often an aspirational culture, a culture where people see themselves and see their organizations as better than they currently are. Having a healthy culture where people feel connected and feel like they can truly be a part of things can lead to not just better business outcomes but a better business environment and to the point of intentionality. If a culture isn't consciously created, a culture will emerge. There are subcultures in every organization.

Lindsay Guzowski: 3:16

There are cultures, whether people want them or not, and because of that, leaders have to be very thoughtful about ensuring that they're not just developing positive cultural elements, but embracing those that emerge organically.

William Gladhart: 3:30

Yeah, I think that's really sage advice for other leaders because, as you well pointed out, you have a culture, whether you intended to have one or not, and sometimes it can turn into a really positive force for your company. Other times it can turn into a negative force and that's impacting your bottom line as well as the other elements from recruitment, retention, attracting the right leaders, etc. This leads kind of into our next question. It's been our experience that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas people, process or profits. In your role as CEO, could you identify one of these three areas that represented a cultural challenge in your organization or one of the clients that you've worked with?

Lindsay Guzowski: 4:11

Sure, I'd be happy to talk about clients, but it's probably more interesting for me to be self-reflective here. One of the things that the Crucible struggled with somewhat early was that profit piece, because we are all very passionate about the work, the research, the curiosity and engagement. Curiosity is actually one of our core cultural values. Everyone who works at the Crucible are great, big giant nerds and we love that. We get very passionate about diving into the minutia and understanding what the implications are of various elements of our model. But when that gets taken too far, then we're focused on the research and the excitement of what is a very academic part of a business and not the business itself. We culturally had to think through that because everyone wanted to see the business succeed and grow and become honestly, a better version of itself, which could facilitate more products and more research and engagement and items like that. That inspired people.

Lindsay Guzowski: 5:12

But on a day-to-day basis people weren't focused on how to generate that profitable component that would get us to that place. What we had to do was really work at two ends of the spectrum. I had to take a hard look at myself and say how, as the CEO, can I inspire a profit mentality without destroying any of this beautiful intellectual inspiration that people were bringing to their day-to-day jobs and, at the same time, work from the people that, on a day-to-day basis, were diving into this data and have them understand how what they did connected to the profitability of the organization, and not just the short-term profitability but the long-term vision and plans. We created really an information flow and an ability to talk about things and talk about our goals, our profit levels, what our even just revenue targets were, and sharing that broadly across the organization and not just within the small leadership group at the top.

William Gladhart: 6:15

Yeah, I think that's a really great observation, that sometimes that information becomes siloed and it doesn't become the vision of the entire organization, or sometimes because you're really amazing at producing one particular aspect or there's a piece you love, because none of us love to sit down and be like, oh, it's the P&L this month. We're all so excited, like you know. Let's do our happy dance.

William Gladhart: 6:36

But having that element and that forward thinking process you kind of touched on a little bit. But obviously that was a challenge and obviously could have negatively impacted your organization. But what was the one thing that helped you identify or move that needle on that particular challenge and then shift your culture and performance positively?

Lindsay Guzowski: 6:56

On that particular challenge and then shift your culture and performance positively. We took a look at the fact that well, as a startup organization, we were starting to run out of money early on and had to take a hard look at what did that mean? Where did we have to focus our time? And all of our meetings were really focused on what people were finding in the data and what the exciting pieces were, and there was no discussion of metrics or numbers outside of the metrics that were inherent to our model, our algorithmic model, not our financial model.

William Gladhart: 7:23

Right.

Lindsay Guzowski: 7:24

And so we had to start integrating those components culturally into how people thought about things that we could still celebrate this research-based, this new profitability target or this new milestone in our ability to have tested and sold X number of crucibles. It's not. It wasn't enough to say, look, we've tested all these people and look what a great data set we have, which was our prior cultural orientation. We had to then combine that with okay, but we're also a business cultural orientation. We had to then combine that with okay, but we're also a business. And here's what that means for us as in terms of hitting our profitability targets. And so, culturally, it was really about starting to integrate the business acumen that a lot of us possessed, but integrate that into the excitement around the research driven insights.

William Gladhart: 8:30

Yeah, I think that's an AHa. That's an interesting kind of repositioning and rethinking that you had to shift as a leader and think of how do we celebrate the wins on the things we really love, but then how do we celebrate the wins on the things that actually help us do what we really love, which is the money side of things.

Lindsay Guzowski: 8:48

Exactly.

William Gladhart: 8:48

Yeah. So, as we kind of wrap up today, lindsay, is there anything else you'd like to share with fellow leaders?

Lindsay Guzowski: 8:54

Well, one of the items that made that cultural shift sustainable was that it wasn't just coming from me. It's one thing to have you know, top down, your leader, say yep. This is why things are important and this is what I'm excited about, and you all should do it too. We really got other members of the team to embrace this, in part because I added a long-term profit sharing element to their compensation. Not a short-term one Everyone already had bonuses but the idea that our long-term success can facilitate their long-term success, and that helped, I think, people anchor in that new cultural mindset while not losing any of the great things that we cultivated over time. Trying to think through how to create the appropriate incentives to have a lasting and sticky component to any cultural shift is really important when you're trying to getting back to the intentionality thing.

Lindsay Guzowski: 9:56

Intentionally craft that change from what could be a phenomenal culture into one that can address some of these people process or profitability problems.

William Gladhart: 10:00

Wow, that's really cool. Thank you so much for sharing that. So, Lindsay, thank you for joining us. I've enjoyed having you on the Leadership Lovers podcast. Really appreciate your insights.

Lindsay Guzowski: 10:11

Well, thank you very much.

William Gladhart: 10:13

Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. Find all our Leadership Levers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculturethinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.