Amy Stengel

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. People Podcast. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:47GuestThanks, Dave. I'm thrilled to be here. So thank you for the invite. So I have had somewhat of a nontraditional path into HR, and I would say that The journey for me has always been about trying to get closer and closer to the things that really interest me, ignite my passions, and align with my skill set. So I actually started out as a high school English teacher out of college and then transitioned into working in corporate law, which was a very unexpected twist, but one that again allowed me to pursue different interests. Got recruited into banking, which again, something I never would've imagined doing, and had a great opportunity working for a bank to lead different business lines, and be part of a pretty significant merger. And through that work, really got to delve into things like employee engagement, doing a lot of work around culture and diversity, equity, and inclusion. And that's where I think this really ignited for me, this love of all the things really focused on people and culture. I then decided after a good run at the bank that I wanted to focus more on human resources functions. And made a leap from the bank into a program director role in higher ed, running programs, developing executive ed programs and student programs. And then that led me to Vestegg where I am today. I started here as the director of learning and development, which was a new role for the company at the time, and had a great opportunity to build something pretty much from the ground up. And as of January 1st, was offered the opportunity for the chief people officer role, which has been amazing and really bringing the voice of the people within the organization to the executive level.

▶2:26HostAmy, can you tell us about a specific challenge you faced while implementing inclusive leadership practices and how you overcame it to create lasting change?

▶2:37GuestAbsolutely. I think whenever you're talking about things that involve the word inclusion and you think about diversity, equity, and inclusion, one of the biggest challenges is acknowledging that there is a challenge in the organization that you'd like to work on. And then creating understanding around how those challenges lead to business results. And so we first started to think about what does diversity, equity, and inclusion look like for Best Egg? Really wanted to lean into the idea of inclusive culture because I believe very strongly that if you don't have the culture that allows people to show up and do their best and see opportunity for their own success, anything you're doing on the diversity front is not likely to succeed. So trying to pull in those diverse employees who bring a wealth of experience and background to enrich your business focus is not going to work if people don't feel they can be successful. So I'm very proud that we've always really focused on that first. And I think beginning with the leadership team and having a CEO who really understands and believes in this approach was something that I was fortunate to be able to work from. But from there, we really focused on making sure that the operating committee was aligned around why inclusive culture is important and how it drives business outcomes. And that was our big focus first. But then there are some things after aligning that, that executive team, because I think that's always the biggest challenge any company faces is do the leaders of the company believe in this focus? Do they believe that there is a real business reason for driving inclusive culture? We've done a few things that I think have been really important. We really tried to bring that in— idea of inclusion and culture together. And so we created what we call our Executive Inclusive Culture Council. And this was a way for us to expand this work beyond just the HR team and bring in leaders across the company who were also bought into why this was important for driving business outcomes and understanding what inclusive culture looks like in our organization. And that also really helps us scale the work. So it's not just a small team of people trying to steer the company in this direction. And then as we thought about our leadership training, we really wanted to drive home what inclusive leadership looks like, and we focused on 4 key traits. And so those are empathy, curiosity, courage, and humility. And when you look at those attributes, they really drive what we think of as inclusive culture, but they're honestly also just good leadership traits. And I think the studies coming out of the COVID pandemic really pointed to the fact that empathy in particular is a leadership trait and skill that is hugely important in driving healthy cultures and helping employees not succumb to burnout and helping leaders make sure that their teams are engaged as much as possible. So I think those are some of the key things that we've done just in the last 12 to 18 months that have helped us drive inclusive culture for the organization.

▶5:38HostAmy, can you tell us about a time when you had to transform traditional leadership practices to better suit the hybrid work environment and what specific strategies proved most effective?

▶5:50GuestYeah, so I think first and foremost, the hybrid world is here to stay, and we see that employees across the country, certainly across the globe, but our business is focused on the United States, employees really are finding that being able to work remotely has given them flexibility and a lifestyle that's much easier for them to balance. So I think it's first and foremost, we have to acknowledge it's not going away, even though some of the large companies have brought return-to-office demands into place. I think we also need to acknowledge that making hybrid work successful is not about replicating the in-person experience online. It just doesn't work. And so what we're trying to do is rethink the approach to work to make it work in a hybrid environment. And I think that's a real struggle for managers who have that kind of old-school management by walking around kind of style. They worry about, are my employees being productive? And so we had to really work with managers to get past that, how do I know people are working and how do I make sure that they're doing what I need them to do? So I think a few ways that we've focused on that and tried to help managers become more effective in this world is first, just thinking about the way we work and redesigning the work. Instead of thinking about the hours we work, it's what are the outcomes that we are trying to drive? And so let's make sure that as we design work, we're thinking, what are those outcomes that are important to us? And then how we work should drive towards those outcomes. It's not as important if somebody's there between 8 and 5, if we're getting to the outcomes that we want to achieve. Unlike a lot of companies, I think we've focused on the different tools that are available. So we've leaned into things like Slack, where we have a lot of people engaging, both for business reasons, and then we have Slack channels that are set up more for employees just to chat about different topics and engage more on a human level. It's also how we push out a lot of our information. We also have now 7 employee resource groups that have been a huge driver of connectedness for our employees. And have helped managers identify, you know, when there are issues or themes coming through our employee resource group conversations, we can then go back to managers and say, here's what we're hearing. For example, we might be seeing that certain managers are applying policies very inconsistently. And so it shows to us we have to go back and do some training to say, hey, our policy around volunteer time is not being handled consistently from one team to another. So let's go back and do some training. We also have done some work to create quarterly in-office engagement opportunities so that when employees do come in larger groups, they feel that there's value. It's a better experience than what they would have sitting at home. We've also really leaned into this set of tools called the Atlassian Suite that allows us to put all of our company goals, all of our projects, and all of the milestones in one place, and we've really democratized access to all of that. So anyone in the company at any time can go in and see how we're doing and how we're tracking towards our goals, which I think has helped create this better sense of shared ownership and the ability to understand what's happening, even though we might not be in front of people all the time talking about what's going on or what we might need to focus on. And I think people have really adopted that as a way to Tried to also be more careful about meetings. We tried to eliminate meetings that are really just those status update meetings and use meeting time more judiciously. So it's about team building and connection and collaboration opportunities and not just the status update type meetings. But I think a couple of things that really stand out to me specifically, one is we have really adopted the work of Patrick Lencioni. He wrote The Advantage and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And so he has a framework around team health. And so what we will do for managers is run team health sessions, and this allows them to see how is the team feeling in general on the scale of attributes that Patrick Lencioni would say are important. So things like trust, which is just foundational. And then we're able to use that feedback in the session to work with the team and understand where do they need to focus. So maybe it's really going back to team norms. Are we all abiding by the norms that we've created to work by together? Or maybe it's about, do we really need to revisit our team mission and make sure that is still applicable to what we're doing today? And I think the last thing is really powerful in those sessions is the team feedback. So you literally will go around person by person and give both positive and constructive feedback in person, live, in the moment, and I've seen some pretty powerful things come from those sessions. And then the other specific thing that we've done is we took an opportunity to refresh our core values. And in doing that, we wanted it to be more than just something that lived on a page that people could point to and make it something that really people connected to. And we created toolkits for managers to have conversations with their teams specifically. We went and created personas for each of those core values so people could relate to them a little bit more easily. We also are big fans of using the DiSC tool, and we created guidance around which core values might resonate more strongly for certain DiSC profiles and the like. So really trying to bring those core values to life so that in a remote environment, people can lean into the core values as the ways we should show up working together.

▶11:26HostAmy, can you share with us a story about how you've successfully developed future leaders with the right skill sets for inclusive leadership? And what was your approach and what were the outcomes?

▶11:38GuestSo I think one of the most successful things that we've done is implementing the DiSC tool. And so if you're not familiar with it, it's an assessment tool that is really accessible, I think, for people within organizations. It's easy to remember and really actionable. And so we have started to incorporate DiSC in all of our trainings and team meetings. And we leverage Wiley's tool, which actually allows us to store every DiSC profile for anyone in the company who's taken it. And those sessions always start with creating some self-awareness. I think it's always really important for leaders to have self-awareness. How do I show up? What are the preferences that I tend to have? What are the signals that I send to people when I'm working with them? And then we move into how do you use the DiSC profile to work more effectively with others? We talk about the Platinum Rule. If the Golden Rule is treat others how you'd want to be treated, the Platinum Rule is treat others how they'd like to be treated. And then you could be much more effective because you're adapting your style to what their preferences are. And so we've had a lot of great ahas in those meetings where you see teams start to really realize, okay, this is why I have tension with this person naturally, because we're at opposite sides of the DiSC profile, and it's not because this person's trying to be difficult, it's just that we think differently and we come at it differently. And in the spirit of inclusive culture, we need all of those profiles to be successful. We want each of the 4 profiles to show up within the company and on a team. And so this helps us especially help managers who are the very extroverted, comfortable with speaking and being in front of people, draw out and recognize that some people on their team are not naturally comfortable with those things. And the best part, I think, is always at the end of the session when we put the team view of the DiSC profile up on the board and they chuckle and they'll see, oh, maybe we all land in the same part of the pie chart. And it just creates a lot of, oh, this— now I get it. Now I see why we are struggling with this one particular thing. And so it's a very comfortable, accessible tool that naturally leads us into conversations about creating inclusive environments and recognizing that people come to their work environment with different preferences, different styles, and that's okay, and that's what we want. And so now we're working on developing a toolkit using the DiSC profile to help managers with giving feedback and helping to coach their employees if they understand what that DiSC profile looks like.

▶14:14HostAmy, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶14:18GuestI think especially as we continue to embrace working in a hybrid environment, I would say in my experience, creating a common language for the employees really helps people, especially across hybrid environments, to connect. So for us, that's been our core values, the team health sessions and DiSC profiles. It just creates this common language that people understand And when we talk to each other, it almost becomes like a shorthand for us to communicate. And so when there are ways to find those things that are common language, they really resonate for people. I know having worked for a company that used Aubrey Daniels' Precision Leadership across the company, I still remember it 20 years later. It's those types of things that I think help employees really figure out how to connect, not only with the company, but also with each other.

▶15:06HostAmy, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶15:11GuestThanks so much for having me, Dave.