Ep. 108 | Customer-centric Culture Transformation with Dr. Rachel Headley
This week Dr. Rachel MK Headley, CEO of Rose Group International joins Allison Hartsoe in the Accelerator. Rachel is a leader in the cultural change and innovation, especially when it comes to figure out what makes change stick. Her process sorts out four personality types for change. See if you can identify your type and that of your co-workers and learn how they move through cultural transformation.
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Allison Hartsoe: 00:00 This is the customer equity accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom line impact by identifying and connecting with your revenue generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of ambition data. Every other week I bring you the leaders behind the customer centric revolution who share their expert advice. If you are ready to accelerate, then let’s go. Welcome everybody. Today’s show is about creating a customer-centric culture transformation, and to help me discuss this topic is doctor Rachel Headley. Rachel is the CEO of Rose group international. She is a TEDx speaker and co-founder of the IX leadership, which is also the transformational change concept that I think you will find very valuable. It’s also the name of her book. If you don’t have it, I highly recommend it. Rachel, welcome to the show.
Rachel Headley: 00:57 Well, thanks, Allison. It’s great to be here.
Allison Hartsoe: 01:00 So tell us a little bit more about your very interesting background and how you landed in this culture change spot.
Rachel Headley: 01:07 It’s always a fascinating journey. The cliff notes version probably is that I was out of college. I love science, and I was as an image analyst or the federal government where I actually looked at satellite images of the earth and kind of figured out the stories of what was going on on the planet, which was super exciting until I realized that that sort of routine focused work that’s committed every day was really not probably going to be very satisfying for me as just how I like to work and behave and the kind of chaos I like. So about a year and a half after that, went off to my master’s degree, worked internationally, went back, worked at the United Nations environmental program, helping them, I work with environmental ministers around the world on disaster relief and how to fund them. And then, I went back and got my Ph.D. at Penn State, and then I went back and was invited to become the operational science officer of the Landsat satellite mission, which is a US GF NASA operated mission.
Rachel Headley: 02:05 And so I have three degrees in geography and earth science and human impacts on the planet. So that all is sort of linear. But when I got into my Landsat role as the operational science officer, I was working with 150 engineers, all of whom distrusted me hugely. And I was the first operational science officer on the operational side of the house. So for many, many years, there’s been amazing and incredible Ph.D. research scientists who have been pushing the limit of how we use the data and directing that sort of effort. That wasn’t me. I was sort of in the middle of the implementation side of it so that I wasn’t unusual sort of person being there. But during that time, I really had to sort of navigate things like how do you get people through changes? And one of the big changes we made was we used to charge for data to the tune of about $5 million every year.
Rachel Headley: 03:00 And then we were tasked to give away the data because the whole world was giving away their satellite data, Brazil and Japan and India and France and a bunch of other countries that are spacefaring. And we were the ones that were charging. And so we thought, well, the federal government asked us to go figure out how to make this happen. And it was really a panic moment. I mean, imagine trying to give up $5 million of revenue while rearchitecting your entire systems while knowing you’re going to have to give up people. It was a really heavy time.
Allison Hartsoe: 03:30 And this made the engineer’s nervous.
Rachel Headley: 03:31 Yeah, well pretty much everybody.
Allison Hartsoe: 03:34 Yeah.
Rachel Headley: 03:35 Well, in the way that the satellite mission running, ranging from, how big is our pipe to disseminate data through all the way down to or up to or have their health and safety of the spacecraft is just a project objective. And so it’s just a massive and vibe major systems. They all have to work together, and it would be a massive overhaul of almost everything. And so not that they were scared of it, it’s just that overwhelmed. We had a project manager or head person, she thought the mission would end, she thought would be a mission ending decision and she actually resigned her job and went and worked for another mission. And so that left sort of the three of us to really sort it out. And the new person that took her role, I have to give her huge credit, her name is Christie Klein, and she was able to help navigate the option and support the engineers. So I really had to figure out like how do we navigate this? And I got to see this team go kind of immediate panic of Oh my God, how are we going to survive to like developing into this incredibly, but kicking we can pull off anything we see the harder the problem, the more we step up kind of team. And it was like this magical thing to watch. And so that’s what kinda got me nerdy about the change stuff.
Allison Hartsoe: 04:48 So you really spent some time thinking about how did this change come through and what was it? It was almost like a little microcosm like a little experiment.
Rachel Headley: 04:56 Yeah, really accidentally. And we also saw at other teams in our organization, outside of Landsat, we’re also going through massive changes just due to some other bureaucratic stuff. And they were like collapsing. We saw teams like just completely miserable. And we spent all of our time in other people’s offices complaining about what the hell is going on and cause we didn’t really know or what’s going to happen and raging against the people that we’re putting this horrible stuff on us. And so we saw that going on all around us. But because we kind of accidentally did things right with our team, they were really thriving and becoming this amazing powerhouse. And so that piece of it actually, not only watching our team go through it but that juxtaposition of watching other teams not working, it made me really start thinking about what we were accidentally doing. Right. Could we rep technique or that flow for other teams that clearly, cause we’re not knowing, teaches you about how to do this stuff. So how could we support other leaders doing that? So that’s kinda how I got started.
Allison Hartsoe: 05:57 Yes. And this reminds me of so many companies that I chat with that have put a stake in the ground and declared that they’re customer-centric, and then they have different teams that dig into customer experience, and they kick off a digital transformation technology, and they ignite loyalty programs and wham, instant customer-centricity fueled by data and process what’s not to love. Right. So what is it that these teams are missing that you discovered in your previous time with NASA?
Rachel Headley: 06:28 Well, we started really seeing was that people react very differently to those sorts of initiatives. So if we think about people in our lives probably come immediately to mind when you start thinking about, some people clearly jump into change and embrace it and like run away and you’re like so too fast, you’re like, wait, wait, come back. We’ve got all these other people. And then you have other people that are like literally digging their heels in. No matter how hard you pull them along, they will like feel to be dragging them along behind you if you just force it. And so that’s the real tension that I think most organizations don’t really understand how to strategize for. Who is on our team? You might have three different teams that are supposed to be implementing this new process. Maybe it’s products, maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s analytics, but those different teams have totally different kinds of people in them as far as how they react to change.
Rachel Headley: 07:19 And if you don’t recognize that and have sort of a strategic rollout initiative and it’s going to be really painful, and we’ve all lived through that, the painful, expensive take way longer than we think. And often initiatives are kind of just, you’ve sort of alluded to sort of, they say that they’re working, but no one’s really doing it, or they’re partially implemented, and people think, well at least we got that done. They don’t really strategize but have a goal of these initiatives out. And it’s more than just developing the process because there are a thousand things that we can look at about sort of change management and how you roll things out and project management theory and agile development. So there’s a lot of technology or technical terminology and process-based, but very few people actually understand how humans respond to that process and how can get them onboard faster and more effectively.
Allison Hartsoe: 08:08 So let’s talk about that because it’s like the concept of strategizing for change. I mean, like you said, it’s very much like, Oh, it’s a process. You just walk people through the process, but you don’t consider the variable of the human and how people react to that. So what have you discovered, and how does it work when you want to strategize more effectively?
Rachel Headley: 08:28 You know, when you think about humans and trying to understand behavior, a lot of the times the things that we’ve all done, I mean, I don’t know if I’ve talked to anybody that’s been anytime in corporate for very long that hasn’t done things like Myers-Briggs, strength finders, all of the variety of those sort of personality assessment. And those can be very helpful and very self-reflective. But the challenge that we really saw is the pieces that we felt were the most critical to understand about people were people’s ability to tolerate chaos or their need for order. And that spectrum varies widely between people. And we really feel like that is something that no one really measures right now, no current assessment. And then on the other side, we also see that some people desperately need to be embedded in a team. And then we have people that are desperately want to avoid meetings and other humans as much as possible. And so what we did is we created an assessment that measures those two gradients. So we’ve kind of created a typing system that can, you can look an entire team, even if you have a thousand people on your team, we can look at that result and know immediately what the different strategies may be for your team versus another team in your organization.
Allison Hartsoe: 09:41 Oh, that’s so cool. I love this idea. So can you walk us through some of the different types, and I assume it’s like a quadrant system. So cause what you laid out is basically X, Y-axis.
Rachel Headley: 09:51 Yes, that’s right. I’m smiling because we a lot of times with people that don’t speak an X, Y-axis terms. So a lot of times.
Allison Hartsoe: 10:00 Did I just type myself there?
Rachel Headley: 10:00 Not necessarily, but you did tell me how much about analytics that you know and Math. And so yes, that horizontal axis, that X-axis is really the team to sell. And so on the left side, you think team, and on the right side, you think, think self and the vertical axis, that Y-axis is at the very top of the chaos. And at the very bottom is order. So for you visual learner, she can kind of sketch it out. And so we have four types. And in some ways that feels very simplistic because of course, we’re very complicated creatures and lots of likes and dislikes. But what we’re really trying to capture, the way you like to work and typically how you like to work under stressful circumstances.
Rachel Headley: 10:37 So that’s really our focus. And so the people that love chaos, and when we say chaos, we don’t mean drama. We mean changing all the time. We think of it as freedom, right? But everyone else in the world. So the people that love chaos and the people that love team, we’re called fixers. I’m a fixer, and so I love to help people. In fact, if you put me in a meeting where they’re trying to solve a problem, even if I have zero to do with anything, I cannot help but jump in and try to float ideas and co-create solutions, right? So those of you out there who love whiteboards and groups of humans that you’re probably a fixer. Then we have the other chaos type we have is independent, which they’re the self-driven chaos lovers. And so self-driven doesn’t necessarily, doesn’t mean that you don’t like people or don’t value your team, but it often means that if there’s a problem, you’d rather sit in your office with your own whiteboard and try to solve the problem or think about all the options before you roll it out to your team and talk about it.
Rachel Headley: 11:34 You like to do things sort of internally first, and then you’d like to engage your team. So that’s my cofounder Meg. She’s an independent. So we have this fixer independent challenge down Pat because day in and day out and then on the Southside of the graph and two are the team-driven order tolerant people and they really love to know what the heck is going on. So for those people who want to plan, when does that affect me, how soon do I have before it’s chaotic or if it’s already chaotic when is going to be over? They’re very embedded in team. A lot of people don’t even like to be promoted because that separates them from their team structure, certainly not into any kind of position that removes them from their technical role, and they can do it. Of course, we can all do anything we want, but they prefer that T embedded in a team.
Rachel Headley: 12:22 And that could be anything from a Nobel scientist to a welder. So there are highly intellectual, highly tactical people, good bad rockstar, worst employee in all categories. And then in the organizer is our last one. Some of your listeners might be an organizer, tends to be very logic-driven cause they don’t have this like need to be surrounded with people. And to make people happy like this, they don’t really care. I mean, they care, but they don’t think it’s their ability to make you happy. So organizers are self-driven in order tolerance, so they don’t mind the chaos in essence if they can or organize it. Right? So they want to take some crazy squirrel, and your company throws out seven new ideas every week, and you want to take it and actually rack and stack them in priority. And then the schedule. So that’s kind of our organizer group. So there are our four types.
Allison Hartsoe: 13:08 Okay. So though, so on the top of the chart, fixers versus independence. And then if you go back to fixers, fixers versus organizers and independence versus stabilizers and in terms of the team dimension, did I get that right? So chaos left, right. Team top, bottom.
Rachel Headley: 13:26 The team side is fixer is in the upper left and stabilizers in the lower left.
Allison Hartsoe: 13:32 Oh, sorry, I got it backwards. Okay, so team left, right? Chaos, top, bottom. Got it. Fixers and independence on the top. Stabilizers and organizers on the bottom. Got it. Okay. So we’ve got these four types. So, and you’ve given us a little taste about the different types. How do they react to change?
Rachel Headley: 13:51 Yeah, so that’s the funniest part to me because if you Google change models or how organizations deal with change, you see this sort of standard use occur, which basically means you Institute a change. Everyone’s morale, energy doozy, ASM productivity completely falls off a cliff. Everyone’s miserable for a while, and then magically, they come out the other side over time, and you probably lost some good people, and no one really knows how to gut it out, and no one knows how to do anything but gut it out. I was talking to an owner of a rather large insurance conglomerate the other day. He said, yeah, well, it’s going to suck for three years, but we’ll get through it.
Allison Hartsoe: 14:30 I’m sorry. Anyone who is chaos tolerant would be like, okay, I can deal with this for a while. But the other is like the stabilizers would just be like, no!
Rachel Headley: 14:39 Yeah, right. And so that’s the secret. So we have sort of a generic how people go through change models, which kind of updates this sort of older idea about this U shaped curve. And we really look at, because what excites me is that what I saw in the team, that’s the Lancet engineering team, was that after they accepted that we were moving forward. So after they let go of what, how they’ve always done everything, then they got into this innovation phase where they were just firing, they got excited about ideas and options and because they weren’t really sure what that future looked like, but they knew, they kind of had some parameters about where they wanted to go. And so then they were just really open to exploring lots of options and well not all of them, but most of them. Then they try something, and it would decide that wasn’t the right idea, or they bring seven different technical solutions into a bigger team, and we’d all scrub it.
Rachel Headley: 15:31 So I really saw that there was an opportunity through this crucible of change to create a much more connected and get an engaged team. So that’s the piece that people give up, which is really a tragedy when they just got out change. So if you do it well and you strategize about it, you can actually build your team into even stronger and more powerful. Instead of just going, well, we’re going to lose our best people, but that’s okay. We’ll hire some others in a few years when they leave. So we start with that sort of generic change model, and then that includes that innovation phase. And also, we can talk a whole other episode about how big companies try to be innovative, and this is probably why they fail because they don’t have this basic sort of thing embedded. So then we take that change model, and we filter it into a remodify it for every type. So then for every type of group that you might have, you have your own change model that you can look at and think about and figure out how to move people along it.
Allison Hartsoe: 16:25 I love the benefits of this because if I’m hearing you correctly, it sounds like it’s not just a more connected team, but it’s a happier, positive team that just feels like they’re part of something big.
Rachel Headley: 16:38 Yeah. And that’s the biggest most exciting part is that you as a leader or as a part of the leadership team with other leaders, really figure out in a very real way how you can create that feeling in your teams. So many people act like it’s some kind of magic wand or some special super charismatic executives. I mean, think Richard Branson, right? Like I prioritize my people over my profit and then all of a sudden it’s profits, ridiculous. Well, it’s because people are happy, but in theory, so, but it’s more than just a charismatic front guy or a woman. It’s more about how you think about how people deal with all the things you’re throwing at them and how to help them thrive in your organization. Because of course happy, thriving people enrolled that make them excited and proud and feel valued, mean they’re gonna like blow up all of the good things, all of your customer service, all of your profitability, all of the things that you worry about a lot, usually away from your human really are driven that resource that you have at your disposal.
Allison Hartsoe: 17:41 Oh, that’s wonderful. Let’s talk about some examples of where you’ve seen this maybe succeed and maybe where you’ve seen it not succeed.
Rachel Headley: 17:50 Well, I think we all have lots of examples in our mind where this hasn’t worked right or for the or we haven’t known about it. The other great thing about it is you have. There’s a lot of personal examples that you can think of, so even if you haven’t had an opportunity to see this happen in real-time, in a role in your career, in a workplace, think about when you were dating somebody, and maybe you were the one that broke up with the other person. You have already done all of that mental gymnastics about should I stay with this person? Should I break up with them? What is my life going to be like if I leave? How am I going to manage our financial living together? We have a dog or whatever, right? The person that leaves the relationship has already gone through all of this mental gymnastic.
Rachel Headley: 18:32 And so you’re already past that. Like I’m going to let go of what was, and then you just have to tell the person. And of course, when you tell that person, and they start that process that you’ve already gone through. And so this is why a lot of times when we see friends, they might be ready to date somebody immediately when they break up with somebody, and the other person doesn’t date anybody for a year. Well, it’s because we move through change differently, and we’ve been started the process at different points. So from that simplistic idea, we can lay that over companies. So we had one company that I love to tell the story about cause, and we go in with the assumption that everyone’s working hard to do the right thing. Yes, you get bad actors sometimes, but we go in with the assumption that it’s not about someone being malicious, like when you have dysfunction or conflicts.
Rachel Headley: 19:18 So one of the things that we worked within a team in Atlanta was we had what an operations team and we had a marketing team, and in November they sat down, and they put together, they’re gonna have a new product, and they put together the product line. The marketing with the marketing should look like when they agreed on a timeline. So this was, the marketing was supposed to kick off in March. They created the schedule in November. So then the ops team could do whatever testing they needed and then away we’d go. Well, so March came around, or February really before launch. And the marketing team started taking the pictures and getting the copy ready and all the magic things that marketing does and figuring out their demographics and all the things. Well. So then they had a meeting in March, and so the marketing department was ready to launch, and they had sort of update executive team and the marketing like, okay, we’re ready to launch on Monday, and we’re super excited.
Rachel Headley: 20:08 And the ops team said, the ops VP said, well, wait a minute, we’re not launching that. We totally changed the product in January because the testing showed that it wouldn’t work. And the marketing person was totally pissed because she had spent time, money, effort, of course, energy to get this thing ready and it’s not even the right thing. And the operations guy was upset because the marketing person didn’t touch base with him. And so at the core of what was going on is that our marketing person is a stabilizer and she had a schedule, and in her mind, the schedule is what it is, and if that changes, you better tell me I’m following schedule. And the ops guy was a fixer, very high chaos, tolerant fixer, and he figured that of course, everything changes all the time. So wouldn’t the marketing person touch base with him before she launched on this expensive marketing campaign?
Allison Hartsoe: 20:56 Ooh,
Rachel Headley: 20:57 Right. And so the one person had a schedule and said, well, schedule doesn’t stick, so we’ll clearly talk. And the other ones like scheduled are a thing, and I live by schedule. And so it wasn’t that anyone intentionally wasted money, time, energy, and the team time and energy. But at the end of the day, both teams ended up not being able to stand each other. Well. This was among many other similar problems that happened, but that was at the crux of what was going on. It wasn’t that Bill hated Sarah or vice versa. It was that they just see the world differently and operate in different ways, especially around how chaos and order tolerant they both are. That’s often at the root of a lot of these challenges at work.
Allison Hartsoe: 21:34 I think it’s interesting that the marketing person is the stabilizer, and I want to get back to this story in terms of like what they should’ve done, but I have to ask before that, did different types gravitate to different departments?
Rachel Headley: 21:46 They can, but that’s very complicated often because if you think of marketing today, you have the range of the creative that might be very chaotic. They’re walking around with the purple hair, and they’re drawing sketchbooks, right? And then you have the analytics team or the people that worry about segmentation or the ones that are touching the technology teams and gathering information and the information people. So marketing has this huge range of skillsets that are required. So I would say that in a very large team, you’re more likely to have like those, if you have a creative role, you might attract a more chaos person or maybe not if they’re one of those creative people that sits in their room and just sketches all day by themselves, maybe they’re not that like chaos tolerant. So sometimes, yes. What we find actually is that people are often also drawn to the kind of company you are.
Rachel Headley: 22:40 So if you have an engineer, they a propulsion engineer on from aerospace, right? So if you are a propulsion engineer and you are cast tolerant, you’re going to be drawn to space X because they’re sexy and launching cars into space. And doing crazy stuff. But if you are a very ordered, tolerant person, you might be drawn to the NASA’s of the world better, very stable. You’re going to have a good paycheck and good health benefits, and you’re going to have a job forever. And so we see a lot of that, that people are drawn to the business. So that’s why in startup you get all these chaos people. And that’s why a lot of startups don’t actually gain traction and move forward because they’re so chaotic that there’s no one embedded in the team that actually makes sure things get. And so we see that a lot, and it’s sometimes role, but it’s also often the kinds of job, the kind of company that’s too. So it’s, that’s an interesting aspect.
Allison Hartsoe: 23:28 You know, that’s so true because there’s a philosophy in startups that there’s a point where you need to bring in the adults to stabilize the operation. Once you get the really good ideas flowing and you get traction in the market then and I saw it with my own startup, we got to be about 200 people, and then they brought in three adults to manage us.
Rachel Headley: 23:49 Right. And that’s hard. A lot of people don’t stay right cause a lot of people are self-aware enough to know that. I like the excitement of the startup phase.
Allison Hartsoe: 23:57 Exactly. And it changed the culture because one of the first things they insisted on was you can’t bring your dog to work anymore. And it was like, of course, I can bring my dog to work, which today we almost take for granted. But back then was like only done in startups. That was one of the innovative things that pissed everybody off.
Rachel Headley: 24:15 But that’s a great example though where it goes overboard, right? Like your performance and your stability as an organization has zero to do with whether you have a dog at your feet. Right. And so this is kind of the interesting balance that if those adults in the room that show up and are supposed to know where on the company, if they don’t value and understand the people in the room, they often go too far and that chases away the very talent that created that company. And so that’s even that piece. You can really insert this strategy into that. Just to get a sense of how to even do that kind of cultural.
Allison Hartsoe: 24:49 So I want to get back to your example. If they had known that the marketing person was a stabilizer and the ops guy was a fixer, what would they have done differently in order to not cause this unhappy, chaotic situation?
Rachel Headley: 25:05 Miserable tension. Awkward. Oh, so when I walked in the room, I was brought in to do an executive one day retreat and in partnership with another consultant who was kind of loving and caring for this company. And she recognized that it was the team dynamic that was the problem. And we were working with them. And by the end, when we first started that meeting, they could hardly stand to be in the same room. They couldn’t even stand to look at each other like dude did not like respect any of that. It was awful. And we’ve probably all been in some meetings to some degree like that. And the only reason they were there was because they were required to be there. Otherwise, someone, probably the ops guy would have blown it off. Right? Cause he’s a chaos guy. So really what it takes is to not recognize that this is the reason that we drive each other crazy.
Rachel Headley: 25:54 Because over time, you start really believing that this person is doing it on purpose or they don’t care. And then you start taking that personally, and it’s very personal as you know, we like to think that businesses all numbers and processes, but at the end of the day, it is very personal for us. And so what has to happen is you have to recognize that you’re different. And that’s the fun thing about the culture type assessment, and the IOCs leadership philosophy, in general, is that it allows you to see each other through a new lens. So it can take away that sort of unknown or the ego or the assumptions and actually let you see what the root causes. And that is powerful in itself. But the next thing that has to happen is you both have to acknowledge that you had something to do with it and that you both are going to work on how can we do things together?
Rachel Headley: 26:41 Because of course if somebody in the room is thinking, yeah, I knew that Sarah was driving me crazy and I don’t give a shit about it, well then all of a sudden you still have that negative dynamic. So what has to happen is you have to recognize that you’re different and then both commit and often putting your heads together and saying, what are we committing to? How are we going to commit to working? So we can both do what we do. We’re not going to change anybody. We can both do what we do best and how we thrive. But we also can find a way to work together and often it’s little things like, okay, well let’s have one owner of this project. Instead of throwing over the wall from ops to marketing, we’re going to have one person in my team whether either side that’s going to stay in touch with someone on your team to make sure that we have one owner from start to finish so that somebody knows what’s going on in the team all the time�simple things like that. We don’t want to see like you burning down your whole way of working. It’s often just these little tiny changes that can change the way that you worked together and acknowledged that yup, you’re right. We don’t work well together, but it’s not because you’re a jerk or I mean to you; it’s because we just see the world differently, and how are we going to tweak what we do to make that less obnoxious and frankly a detriment to the organization.
Allison Hartsoe: 27:55 Just reminds me a little bit of NPS scores, and I wonder if you’ve ever had like a misery meter where you measure the misery of the organization before you come in, and then you measure it six months after you apply your magic,
Rachel Headley: 28:09 Right. We sometimes do surveys before and after engagement surveys is big in the HR space, but that’s so subjective, and I’m not sure it gives us any more insight, but it is what we can actually measure is some kind of productivity KPI or schedule, you know, a schedule on-time deliveries or it’s amazing how when you have people that are excited because if you have a miserable environment, dysfunctional or even slightly unhappy or unhealthy, you give people a door to walk through that says, Hey, we’re not gonna fix anybody here, but we’re going to give you an opportunity to make this think less, they will run through that door. And so that means that everything works better. So your profitability is going to go up because your costs are going to go down, your customer service numbers will probably go up. And so it is amazing how we can track human happiness through, and we don’t really focus on happiness because we’re all about getting things done. And yes, that often is happiness is involved in that, but a lot of executives don’t want to measure your people’s happiness. They figure, you know, it’s not part of their job description.
Allison Hartsoe: 29:17 It’s an indirect measure.
Rachel Headley: 29:19 Exactly. But the direct stuff is profitability, cost reduction, turnover reduction like we’ve actually been able to do some analysis of, we’ve done a lot of research about how much productivity suffers when there’s disengagement in the workplace. And it ranges anywhere from say 5% kind of on the low end to 18% kind of on the high end. So super stressful, you know, space or people are afraid that company’s gonna close or whatever. And so if you do the math on that, it becomes very obvious very quickly how much it’s costing you. So nobody has a cost and their costs you, nobody has employee misery is costing us X amount of money. Right?
Allison Hartsoe: 30:00 Maybe they should.
Rachel Headley: 30:01 Oh yeah, we can tell you. Because if you, let’s say you have a thousand people and you have an 18% productivity hit because people are miserable, well that means that you’re the analytics person, but that means that you’re paying for a thousand people, but you’re only getting 815 people worth of work.
Allison Hartsoe: 30:16 Yeah, exactly.
Rachel Headley: 30:17 So, and if your average salary is $50,000, you take $50,000 times 190 people, that is millions of dollars that you are losing. It’s not on any tie. It’s not aligned on any spreadsheet, but it is a tangible thing that we can feel we see in our deadline misses, in our customer service and our turnover.
Allison Hartsoe: 30:39 Oh, all the customer-centric measures.
Rachel Headley: 30:41 All of those things. We see it all of the customer-centric measures.
Allison Hartsoe: 30:44 Yeah, I see that a lot. I think you make a really good point for, if you’re going to be customer-centric, you really can’t do it without making sure that your people feel like they have enough gas in the tank, that they can reach out to the customers and feel good about the problems that they’re solving for them.
Rachel Headley: 31:02 Right. Because of course, the people that interface with your customers are nurturing your company because without your customers, of course, you don’t exist. So there it’s very difficult for somebody to nurture the health of your company if they themselves feel miserable about how their experiences in your firm. So it’s not, people can do it because some people love people and they want to take care of them, but most people cannot pretend that much, or for that, they might be able to do it for a while but not for very long.
Allison Hartsoe: 31:32 Oh, that’s good. Rachel, are there any other quick examples you want to share?
Rachel Headley: 31:36 Yeah, well one of the ways I’ll share really quick, is this is very specific, sort of at the customer end of the customer experience and all of that, how it gets executed, which is we were working with the big technology call center down in Phoenix, and they were expressing their frustration about how poor their feedback was from customers and how they were losing customers because of poor supports. And they did not really understand it. They’d spent all this time and money with all the analytics building, all of this amazing training for all of their call center people. But the problem really was at the same time, because they hadn’t made the connection, it accidentally complained about how high their turnover is, and so they have such high turnover that they can’t ever get people in and train them on this very complicated customer experience platform and process.
Rachel Headley: 32:20 Do you actually get good at it and stay with it? And so it became very clear that they’d spend so much time energy on their customer experience, but if they would have just taken a fraction of that time and money and applied it to the quality of their employee experience or their internal experience of their people, then that probably do vastly more to support their customers. Then all of this time and money and process that would develop about how to actually speak to customers. And so that was a huge light bulb moment for us about people tend to focus on that customer experience in without addressing the health and wellness of the people actually doing engaging.
Allison Hartsoe: 32:59 And I want to call out that iX leadership is about internal experience. That’s where the iX comes from, right?
Rachel Headley: 33:07 Yeah. Cause we started with CX, and we actually migrated it. We said, well, let’s flip that 180 and talk about internal experience. So yeah, that’s where it came from.
Allison Hartsoe: 33:14 Well, and this is just a perfect example, right? Here’s all the money that you’re spending on customer experience, but you haven’t addressed internal experience.
Rachel Headley: 33:21 Exactly. And it doesn’t matter how amazing the process as you develop, how magnificent, you still have to have humans that actually pull it off. And that’s where a lot of people don’t invest enough.
Allison Hartsoe: 33:31 Very true. At least today, we still need humans. Okay. So let’s say I’m convinced, and I really want to think about applying IX leadership and these techniques. What should I do first?
Rachel Headley: 33:44 Well, the first thing probably is to think about the way that we start every engagement is to A, have a goal in mind, right? Because you probably are feeling the stress of something not working. So make sure you understand what you actually want because that’s the thing that you would think people know, but it doesn’t actually happen sometimes. But then really what we do is we start by doing this culture type assessment for everybody in the organization that’s immediately affected, and then often it cascades down into the organization. But we have a free assessment on our website where Rose group international is our Rosegroupintl.com our URL. We have a free version of the assessment there where you can take and just get a sense and then on our concepts page, and of course, in the book, we go into what it really is and you can kind of figure it out as far as I get a sense of what kind of organization you think you have or what kind of team you might have.
Rachel Headley: 34:34 And then it’s really fun to get them all assessed and start really comparing that to what you expected, which can, they can surprise you because I’ve been doing a long time and for a lot of people, and I’m still surprised sometimes, and that’s how you really get started is once you kind of know that, okay I have a stabilizer team and then in the book, there are some strategies about what does that mean and how do they deal with change. And then you can apply your level of knowledge of your people and your organization, what you’re trying to accomplish and sort of layer that along with this. Okay, they’re going to change, they’re going to want to move together, they’re going to want me to show them that I’m committed to this initiative too and how can I do that? And so it kind of gives you a starting place to start seeing things slightly differently and how to get them where you want them to go.
Allison Hartsoe: 35:17 So in our show notes, we’ll make sure to both link to the quiz, and I also want to link to the book in case people want to check it out and try typing themselves. I know I’ve done it and it’s very interesting, and I was reading it, I’m like, yeah, so me.
Rachel Headley: 35:33 I know it’s really kind of terrifying how much we can type ourselves, and I’m just going to warn the independence in the listening that you will not like to be pigeonholed. And so independence load any kind of idea that they’re predictable because they love that chaos. And so every time I give a big keynote, and I’ve got six people come up to me afterwards, and they say, can you really pigeonhole people like this? And I’m like, let me guess. You’re an independent. Right? And they’re like, how did you know? So even your reaction to your results tells me a lot about where you are.
Allison Hartsoe: 36:08 Got it. And then Rachel, if people want to reach out to you directly or reach out to Rose group, how should they get in touch with you?
Rachel Headley: 36:15 The best way is I’m all over LinkedIn. So there are lots of Rachel Hedley’s out there, so Dr. Rachel MK had leaves my LinkedIn, and I can send you that link to include, and I think I have my phone number and my email address or the way you can reach me so.
Allison Hartsoe: 36:29 Great. So we will include that as well. I highly recommend giving Rachel a call if you’re struggling with this kind of customer-centric challenge. I have not seen anyone in the analytics space per se address it in this way from the human side because I guess we’re just also geeky and quanti and deeply involved in our own little Wells that we just feel like, and I hear this and show after show, people are like, Oh, I come trotting out with the insights. I’ve done all this work to find the answer, and then no one wants to use it. And it strikes me as such a cultural problem of how we communicate because it’s about change. Right? Here’s an insight that requires you to change, and that’s a difficult concept that you’ve hit the nail on.
Rachel Headley: 37:17 Yeah. The other little nugget I will tell the analytics people out there that are feeling that pain is one of the secrets is to figure out how the analytics will help the person you’re giving them to. So you have the analytics because you’ve worked so hard and you’ve done all of the work, and here you come with this amazing number or particular insight that you’re like, Oh my God, this is the one. But most people cannot make the connection about why that’s important for them and their work. And that’s one of the key things you can do just yourself when you’re handing off this amazing little thing. Tell the people, figure out why they would think it’s exciting and that will help you a lot.
Allison Hartsoe: 37:55 Perfect. So as always, links to everything we discussed are at ambitiondata.com/podcast. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been just a really fascinating discussion.
Rachel Headley: 38:07 Well, thanks, Allison. I just love the kind of work you guys do as a science nerd I love and respect it, so it’s really a pleasure to have the opportunity to chat.
Allison Hartsoe: 38:16 Thank you. Remember everyone, when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It’s not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. See you next time on the customer equity accelerator.