In this episode of The SAFE Leader Podcast, Dr. Mark McBride-Wright is joined by Linda Carlisle, a seasoned communications and culture strategist with over 30 years of experience helping organisations navigate moments that matter. From her early career in brand strategy to her deep dive into internal communications, Linda shares powerful insights into how culture is shaped by the behaviours we model, the messages we send, and the stories we choose to tell. Together, they explore the vital link between internal culture and external brand, the role of communication in fostering psychological safety, and why diversity and inclusion are essential business fundamentals, not just moral imperatives.
Linda also shares her perspective on how leadership styles are evolving, why empathy must sit at the heart of communication, and what organisations often get wrong during times of change. Whether it’s onboarding new employees or managing cultural integration during mergers, she emphasises the need for listening, care, and deliberate messaging. This episode is a must-listen for leaders, HR professionals, and culture builders seeking to create environments where people feel seen, heard, and empowered to thrive.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, welcome to the next podcast episode. I’m your host. Dr Mark McBride-Wright of the safe leader podcast, I’m delighted today to be joined by Linda Carlisle, who is a communications and culture strategist with over 30 years of experience guiding organizations through transformative change as founder of com dot, ext, she serves as a fractional communications advisor and culture building partner, specializing in moments that matter, times of significant disruption, such as mergers, restructures and leadership transitions. Her mission is to help leaders keep people informed, engaged and aligned through high impact internal messaging employee experience strategy and brand aligned cultural transformation, previously as Associate Vice President of employee experience Culture and Communications at the Federal Reserve financial services, Linda has shaped corporate Identity and performance at industry leading firms through thoughtful messaging, storytelling and values based strategy, based in Brookfield, Illinois, with an agility dog and tree cat by her side. Linda brings warmth, precision and resilience to every client challenge. Her work bridges the two worlds of strategy, humanity and storytelling. Linda, welcome. How are you doing? Hello here. I’m good. I’m so pleased to have you joining us. I’m actually over in London today, not in my usual location of Brooklyn, New York, where I where I record this from. So really, really good to that we can, that we can make this work. So tell us a bit more about your your your story, you know, storytelling and what you do, sure.
Linda Carlisle 1:52
Um, so you know so much as we didn’t think, my dog has decided to make herself heard. So everyone meet Coco. She’s calling out for you. So I started my business a little over a year ago, coming up on a year and a half, and I, I, I wanted to reach out to a segment of the market that I was becoming increasingly aware did not have internal comms all figured out, all nailed down, and that sector is the mid market space. It seems to me that those folks who are going through perhaps the highest degree of growth also do not have internal comms people. And so that was my mission as I started this business, and that’s really the focus that that I home in on my my longer term story is my degree, in my training in my early career was all on the brand front. So I was very much interested in corporate branding. I have a master’s in integrated marketing communications, with an emphasis on how all of the communications that you do to build your brand are all of equal importance, and you have to integrate them and tell a holistic story. And I first started to realize that this had an impact on internal communications when I was doing brand for a division that was highly acquisitive, and the leadership of that particular organization felt that when you acquired a company, in order to reduce the conflict between the two cultures, was that you had to just, like, outright kill the culture of company. And I was like, Okay, well, that just makes your brand look terrible, right? Yes, yes. So, so that was when I first started to think about, well, what, what is the internal component of how one builds a brand? Because it is very holistic. And so anyways, roughly 20 years in the external branding space, and then we had an economic downturn. I think it was a global downturn in the 2008 area, and I was living in another state, and I had relocated back here to the Chicago area and took a job that my network served up to me, that was internal comms. And I was kind of kicking and screaming, because I was like, Oh, I’m a brand girl. I’m a brand girl. And took the internal job and just completely fell in love with this work. Because really, what you’re doing is using the same skill set that you would use for external marketing. You’re selling your you know, you’re selling things, but what you’re selling internally is culture and psychological safety and understanding and helping people grok your why. And I just really fell in love with that kind of work in that aspect of the work, because it really seemed to have much more impact than just selling another widget or or another. You know, in. Distribution space I’d been in another shipment or another,
Mark McBride-Wright 5:04
and how much do you find then, with internal communications? What? What split is it between the individuals who create the culture? It’s almost like your individual brand identity within your employer or the corporate where you work, and then you’ve got the corporate brand identity that is the external side from where you used to be. But there’s a there’s a behind the scenes background to that as well, isn’t it behind the stage almost, which is the internal culture. So how do you see the similarities and differences between the two and how much of it is made up by the people.
Linda Carlisle 5:44
You know, there’s really kind of two metaphors, I guess. I guess I’m going to bring to the front, first of all, on the internal versus external. I sort of think of it as a yin yang, right? Like you can’t really keep that nice holistic circle going that feeds to itself if your internal efforts and your internal culture does not shore up and match and align with what you’re trying to serve outside, right? So customer experience is very much locked up with internal culture, and I view those as you know you don’t get that nice synergy if you don’t, if you don’t have a good internal culture. Internal culture is an interesting animal, because I kind of view that level of the brand as being like an onion, right? You do have that who is the individual, and how do they? How do they think, and how, more importantly, how do they act? Because, at the end of the day, I view brand as a promise, but I view culture as a series of behaviors, right? And so what behaviors are you as an individual bringing to the table within the organization? What are the behaviors with which that is met? Are those behaviors being met with openness and acceptance and collaboration? Or is there, you know, are we? Are we hoarding our information and not sharing? Or, you know, all these behaviors kind of add up to what is the culture, and so you need to internally be promoting those behaviors that you want to reward and that do serve that customer experience that you desire.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:21
Yeah, and you meant, you mentioned in your previous work with internal comms like mid market size companies that are sort of seeing the growth. So how do you define mid market, like, what? What company size?
Linda Carlisle 7:35
That’s a great question, because mid market kind of has a whole lot of different ways that that is interpreted for me. The target audience that I feel I can best serve is, you know, usually there’s at least 250 employees, because below that, you have more of a management by walking around capability, you can manage that size of organization without really having a structured communication, you could have more dialog. And you start to get above 250 and you’ve got change going on that you’re already trying to manage, and it’s taking up your attention. You can’t get around to everybody with the regularity and the depth that you need to and that’s when you need much more planful communication. Not that you shouldn’t be planning your communication when you’re smaller, but you can deliver it in a different way, but you get above 250 and especially with things like mergers and acquisitions, where there’s complexity and there’s different, yes, and they have different viewpoints, you really need to start having more planful approach to how you’re going to communicate and how you’re going to view culture. And so I say, I say, for me, mid market is that 250 and then I kind of top it out at 1000 and really, the reason is, I, you could go beyond 1000 in in terms of what is mid market, but at 1000 people, they tend to bring a person like me in house, that’s that’s really where they need to have that they start to realize they need to Have it.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:00
So you see, do you offer fractional internal communications support, where you’re on a retainer or and then you you help, and where do you find in the current climate that we’re in politically and culturally? Where do you find the pressure points, the hotspots of when it comes to diversity X and inclusion, for example, where do you see a clap? Are you seeing clashes of values happen in M and A’s that you’re supporting? So you know, I
Linda Carlisle 9:35
will say in this current climate that we’re having one of the side effects, which I think are unintended consequences, but nonetheless, it’s impacting a part of our economy that is very wealth generating, part of our economy that’s being impacted, but that is that we are not seeing as many mergers and acquisitions. I mean, imagine if you were sitting on, you know, half a billion dollars that you. We’re going to spend on acquiring companies to bolt onto other companies. You can’t quite trust their numbers if you don’t know what’s going to happen to their supply chain. And so, you know, on the one hand, I’ve sat in meetings where there’s been a panel discussion about, you know, how to navigate this time, and some firms are out there with a team of strategists trying to, on the day to day, figure out how they’re going to flex if this happens to their supply chain, and then having to turn on a dime and say, Here’s Plan B, if this is what happens. And you know, if you’re about to spend tremendous amounts of money in acquisitions, you’re just not going to do it. You’re going to keep your powder dry until and there’s a lot of that happening. There’s just not as much the M and A market is not as robust as it was. So that’s one interest in this marketplace. A lot of the people that I partner with right. So a lot of times I find my clients through referrals from other people who are like, hey, this company needs a little help, or what have you. And you talk about Dei, I think another unintended consequence here in America. I’m sure it’s kind of a global thing, but you could tell me that, but we, we are, a lot of our employment, of our entire population, is managed by this small to mid sized business, right? Large corporations employ large amounts of people, but they do not employ the mass
Mark McBride-Wright 11:28
of the people. Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Linda Carlisle 11:32
Of those people are are employed by small to mid sized companies. And so one of the things that helps small to mid size companies thrive is, you know, there’s, there’s a whole sector where it is women owned businesses and minority owned businesses, yes, and a lot of those folks, because of the climate in the country, are seeing their contracts being canceled. And so, you know, because larger companies that might employ them as a subcontractor are saying, well, I might actually be punished for helping these companies stay afloat. And so you’re seeing those sorts of small to mid size companies really struggle in this environment. So it’s another thing that we’re seeing happen. Oh, by the way, those small to mid sized companies are just as impacted as the PE firms are around this uncertainty around tariffs, right? They just can’t afford to have the extra staff to form Plan B and Plan C and Plan D supply chain. So, so that’s going on, you know, just in terms of hitting the revenue. And then the third thing is really more directly in this culture and dei space, is that companies are kind of like freezing, not knowing what to do around diversity, equity and inclusion. Yeah, you know. And I have some thoughts around that, but like that aside, I think there’s just almost like a fear factor seems to get too robust behind it, because they’re afraid somebody there’s gonna be a backlash and and so that’s happening, and I also seeing, and it’s not everywhere, but there is a little bit of a re emergence of the whole command and control mentality coming into how, how leadership happens at some companies, not all companies, but some companies, and that equates to a lack of empathy, or, like a lessening of empathy when you’re in it. Because I said, So mode. So it’s almost mirror.
Mark McBride-Wright 13:39
Yeah, that’s, that’s, it’s like it’s mirroring the leadership that they’re seeing in government, and so by just reflecting that, then it means there, it’s less risky from a PR and perception standpoint, I interested in your what thoughts on how dei is, then there for landing and showing up. You mentioned there you had a whole other raft of thoughts. What was that little thoughts? Thought stream you had a little
Linda Carlisle 14:15
side road I didn’t go down. Was I really feel like people need to think about diverse diversity, equity and inclusion are really sort of business fundamentals that I think are very important just to have, right? We are a diverse country where, traditionally, I mean, from very early days, we’ve been a melting pot. We’ve not always melted very gracefully, but eventually the melting has happened, and we have been a melting pot of many, many cultures and many, many different kinds of people. And in a diverse country, the market is diverse, and to address a diverse market, you need to have diverse ideas within your company, right? And. So diversity is really, in my mind, a marketing essential. You have to be able to tap into different thoughts that are capable of understanding different things going on in the marketplace that you serve right and so diversity, to me, is the survival technique, a competitive power kind of a technique just to make sure that you’ve got different points of view that are coming together and hashing it out and saying, This is how we can go forward and address the market. Is it as it
Mark McBride-Wright 15:29
exists? And do you see that in companies where you’ve worked that have had employee networks, employee resource groups, business resource groups, whatever you want to call them. I mean, maybe in the 250 size, it’s still too small to have formalized networks, I’m not so sure. But have you ever worked in employers that in organizations that have had that, and therefore they’ve leveraged that for the benefit of their internal comms engagement and helped inform what the product the services they design and deliver, and the products they design deliver and sell.
Linda Carlisle 16:04
Yeah. So I’ve been a little bit fortunate, I think, in that I have worked with firms that have had the instinct of having diverse people at the table before even the whole dei initiative, you know, was more formalized. They already had that diversity it, you know, in the room at the table, giving their opinions, and I mean, that respect, it was a beautiful thing. But yes, I mean, I think from a cultural standpoint, being able to tap into those employee resource groups and utilize them in order to almost as ambassadors of culture, to provide input in, but also input out, right? So I can talk a little bit about culture forming, but, but, you know, and the need to the role that listening plays in that process, right? But they’re employee resource groups are a great way, a great way to get at the heartbeat of what’s really going on in the culture. And you you can’t, like form a culture that’s your ideal culture if you’re not aware of what’s actually happening out there. So, so from a cultural standpoint, I want to also say that equity. I feel like equity is just something that you should be doing to attract and retain the right, that talent, that top tier talent, right? So if you’re not an accurate, equitable employer, I do feel like there’s more equity than, from a pure pay standpoint, than there have been in the past, because it seems like most companies are subscribing to or testing the market. From a pay standpoint, well, then get any of the same kinds of tools across the board. So and then third, from an inclusion standpoint, that’s really the place that I play right internal communication is all about inclusion. Are you keeping people informed? Are you doing outbound communication so people understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, what the strategy is all, all of that is inclusion. And then do they have a seat at a table to give their opinion on how things should be shaped and the like
Mark McBride-Wright 18:20
so well, top, top. So you’ve just secured a new client. They’ve signed a contract with you. They need your help on internal comms. I see that you’ve got moments that matter. TM, and talk us through your methodology, your approach, your strategy. How do you first get going with with a new client? Yeah,
Linda Carlisle 18:41
I think one of the first things that you do is just, it’s, I guess it’s an audit, if you really want to, Okay, put a fine word to it. I’ve, I’ve toyed with the idea of making it very formalized and actually using it as a as a tool to allow people to self assess whether they could use some help. But at this point, it’s really about a dialog and understanding, what are they doing in certain buckets, right? So what, first of all, is there anything going on right now that is causing them to reach out? Because usually there’s a pain point. So it might be a cultural pain point. It might be a merger and acquisition. It might be they’re about to do a layoff, and they don’t really know how to navigate that in a way that keeps their people from being out on a ledge, right? So, yeah, so usually there’s something that triggers, so I want to make sure that I’m serving their needs from a trigger standpoint. But it’s about understanding what’s all going on at the company. What is the history media history been? You know, have you done any assessment of wherever people are coming from, or should I just assume that the baseline, you know, American engagement level, which is not so great, is what’s going on with the company. So just really asking those questions about environmentally, what’s going on in the communications environment? Do they have Dei? Do they have, you know, have they are. Are they spending a lot of time dealing with interpersonal problems within the company, which gives me a sense of how scratchy the culture might be. And then if, if there’s something going on, like a merger, obviously, we go deep dive on that, and there’s usually a process of what happens in a merger and acquisition situation. And so I’ll kind of go off onto that branch and help with that, but otherwise, I’m going to be assessing what’s their employment brand look like. Do they have an employee value proposition? Do they, you know, how well is that articulated in their recruiting materials, on their website and the careers page, that sort of thing? Then I’m going to look at all of those touch points that happen around the employee, right? How visible is the executive? Is the executive out there walking around? Is the executive? Do the executives, you know, get out there and talk to their people, but also, do the executives get out there in the marketplace, and are they visible and and representative of what the company’s about and the company culture and how they think. And then it’s really about, how do you onboard people so that they understand what it’s like to be at the company and how they are an ambassador of the company, and what behaviors are going to be rewarded, and where to find things and all that. Then it’s like, well, how are you communicating your strategy to people on the day to day. How are you communicating strategy to those new people? So what are you doing to make sure that everybody’s well aligned and excited and sees how they play into what strategy means, and that sort of thing I mentioned, you know, things like layoffs. So then the next is, how are you managing change, right? I you know, have there been reorganizations? Have you had, do you have new leadership? How are you doing a new strategy, launch, that sort of sort of thing. Then there’s culture building, right, which is, how very deliberately are you defining your mission, vision, values, obviously. Do you have purpose? Do you have higher purpose? Right? Are you and I make the distinction? Purpose is maybe what you promise to do as an organization through your products and services, higher purpose is, if taken to their best and most high impact imaginable, extreme. How could they make society better? And what are, what are you doing as an organization to make society better in that category, right? So, I once worked for a company that was involved in water delivery, and, you know, what? What could you do to help with water delivery issues, you know? And they often did from a charitable giving standpoint. They would go into, say, a Detroit situation, or the the organ, the I’m trying to remember, the town that was so impacted by the really poor water quality and and going in there and really helping with water during that no emergency access, yeah. So, anyhow, yeah. So what are you doing from purpose standpoint, and then the cultural behaviors that you want to reward, and do you have systems for rewarding and recognizing people for for those behaviors? And how are you communicating that? Are you? Are you systemically communicating that around culture? And then, just like, you know, um, leadership messaging, are the leaders out there and regularly trying to keep people engaged and excited in where, where the company is going. So, so, like, there’s pockets of work that I will try and understand before I create a strategy. And
Mark McBride-Wright 23:39
of course, that’s overall global cult or just culture without any words before it. And of course, I I work in safety. I’m a safety engineer by background, and this is the safe leader podcast. And so a lot of our listeners and guests sometimes look at that subset of culture, the safety culture. And I heard you when you did your intro. I think you peppered in some sectors within which you’ve worked or organizations, and it sounded like there were some high risk industries in there as well, some engineering, kind of engineering where safety is usually a more part of the dominant culture than, say, other sectors. So we’d be really keen to get your perspective from your experience on safety culture and how good or bad that shows up within organizations that you’ve that you’ve been at.
Linda Carlisle 24:30
Yeah, so one of the things that I like to think about when I when I talk about what kind of cultures you want to aim towards, is, you know, when you think about a high performance team, trusting and caring for each other is central to being a high performance team. If you don’t have those two things, is sort of a baseline. This is who we are, then you’re not going to ever be a high performance team and part of a safe. Safety culture is also dependent on having trust and care, right? Are your people looking out for each other? Do they have each other’s back? And whenever I’ve been involved in helping to roll out and sort of reinforce that safety culture, so much of it is, are we helping each other to learn to do things right? When we see something, do we say something? Not, hey, I’m going to go tattle on you, but no, I’m going to say something to you because I’m worried that you did that in a way that could put your fingers at risk, right? And talk to you a little bit about how to do that a little differently, and so you don’t get to that level of looking out for each other and having each other’s back if you don’t have trust and care care in that. I noticed it, and I stopped. And I’m, I’m gonna do something to help you, and you trusting that I intend, I am well intentioned, yes, with my advancement to you. And so that trust and care piece is really essential to get to that safety culture. And so it’s a big cultural thing, but it, you know, you can’t get to just basic safety on the floor if you’re not instilling that
Mark McBride-Wright 26:11
without trusting care and how and that that’s very much from a sort of physical safety perspective. But how are you finding things play out from a mental health and well being, our psychological safety, psychosocial
Linda Carlisle 26:23
Well, I peace, I think that trust and care are really central to that as well. Right? We have an environment where people can come to work and be themselves and not feel judged by their colleagues, and where there’s good conversation on the team and good support for each other on the team, and where leadership is allowing people the flexibility to do what they need to do, and that leadership is sort of tuned in as well into what’s going on with their people. And, you know, having open dialog around what’s going on, and do you need a little time, or do you need a little support? Or, you know, how’s the workload? One of the, you know, I’ve actually left roles where there was a separation between how leadership looked at workload and how people looked at workload and when it became, you know, so great with no relief in sight. It’s like, well, this is just unbearable. Yeah, it’s not a sustainable way to run your business. So,
Mark McBride-Wright 27:24
yeah, yeah, you need that. You can have the the deep, intense periods, but leadership needs to be mindful that this is a temporary phase, and saying that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s, it’s, it’s going to get lighter
Linda Carlisle 27:41
load on the next, next. And the thing is, I think, like, middle management gets crushed in the middle, right? Yeah, totally, totally, because they’re getting these instructions. And now we’re going to do this as well, and now we’re going to do this as well, and we’re going to do this as well, and they’re not empowered to say, Well, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re Yeah, yeah.
Linda Carlisle 28:13
Yeah, yeah. I think all the way up the food chain. I think the notion that too much is too much has to has to happen. So we’re
Mark McBride-Wright 28:24
going to take you through
Linda Carlisle 28:25
values as being an outside consultant is you can make those suggestions to
Mark McBride-Wright 28:29
leaders? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I always say to my, you know, champ internal champions, I guess that want to get me in to help work. I always say that’s like a three legged race. We’re in it together, you know. And I need to know what your pain points are, because you are inherently limited by virtue of your level on the org chart. Unfortunately, you’re an employee. You’re a number, whereas outside counsel coming in to give advice that premium service, that ability to have worked across many organizations and then seen seeing trends and themes that come up helps satiate the executive to think, oh, it’s not just unique to us. This is actually a common problem or opportunity even, and therefore you can help us solve this somehow.
Linda Carlisle 29:24
And I will say that, you know, a lot of times the psychological safety issues lead to either quality issues or, you know, what they lead to, what they can lead to is just mistakes, and then those mistakes can lead to not only product quality, customer facing quality or but it could actually be physical quality issues or, like endangering each other, because the psychological safety has made you less careful.
Mark McBride-Wright 29:52
So I mean the the classic example in the most recent times is people who knew what was happening at Boeing. Um. And on the production lines, and the unsafe practices were being allowed to continue, and things being cut, or, you know, shortcuts being made, and then you end up with extreme events that happen because no one had the ability to whistle blow, or if they did ring the alarm, then they were dealt with in a in a way that they shouldn’t have been. They were removed from the organization.
Linda Carlisle 30:30
I’m not. I’m not, I mean, but as an internal advocate for leadership, it shouldn’t have to come to whistle. You should be listening to your people absolutely, two way storytelling. And I think that that’s the challenge. When you have leadership, that’s not that is so removed from what the people are saying. Or, you know, when they hear something coming up from the floor around, hey, there’s too much work. We’re overworked. This is not sustainable. Blah, blah, blah, and, or there’s too many things going on at once, and you can’t just have this level of change all at once. And when that’s resonating up, and what the mentality is is, well, just deal with it. You’ll get used to it like you just have to make these things. You just have to make it happen, right? And that not listening is what causes a situation where somebody has to whistle blow, and then now you’ve got a PR problem, right? Or yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:29
yeah, within lawsuits with them. How do you find so in my in my safe leader framework, safe stands for share, act, feel empower. And I plot it out that way because it’s a circle four quadrants. And we start off and share, we go into act want to feel, going to empower. And one thing I found from running networks based on underrepresented groups was this lack of connection from the everyday male majority engineer, they felt ironically excluded in the push for diversity, equity and inclusion, and yet, at the same time, engineering construction has a very high suicide rate. And so I had this aha moment where I was like, Well, hang on, if we were doing well at our inclusion and belonging strategies, then everyone, including the white straight man, would feel like they belonged. He belonged at the organization, and would be able to be open. So I always I was gifted. I don’t have it on me. Just now, I was gifted this beautiful little prop from my speaking coach, which is a lighthouse. And we use that analogy. When you think about a lighthouse being anchored, it can weather the storm, and it shines its light out to help boats and vessels and ships see their way through the night. That light is a metaphor for one’s story. So with the safe leader, I’m hoping to try and activate more people, and especially men, being open about their stories, open about what’s going on in their mind, what’s going on in their lives, that makes them a bit more personal, approachable, vulnerable, lowers their guard a bit. And I think we saw a bit of that in the pandemic, when we were all forced to work at home. We saw a window into people’s lives. So with your with the leadership teams that you work at in these organizations of 250 to 1000 how, um, what sort of leadership style are you seeing? Are you still seeing it being very founder led and familial, family type feeling with the people that they’ve raised and grown the organization. Or are you, are you seeing sort of leadership that is a bit more impersonal and less less connected and less vulnerable as a collective?
Linda Carlisle 33:54
You know, I think, as with anything, there’s a bit of a bell shaped curve there. It kind of runs the gamut. I can say that to the extent to which I’m working with firms that are going through growth, through acquisition, there tends to be a little bit more of a polished leadership, you know, okay, educated lots of have lots of roles in their background where they have really built a sense of how to move through that kind of exponential growth, and that’s because, I think, you know, that’s the kind of leadership that that the private equity firms are looking for to make sure that that exponential growth actually delivers. But I don’t believe that just because you’re a seasoned leader that you off to be cut off from your people. I think the best leaders have experience and have learned from that, that you know, being connected to your people, you’re working through them, not you know, they’re not automatons, they’re not machines. You’re working through them, how they’re feeling, how they’re engaging, and that it’s. Two way street that you know you’re going to succeed because they’re giving you feedback and giving you this isn’t working. That isn’t working. This new line isn’t working. How we thought these two companies coming together was going to happen isn’t happening. The way we thought something needs to change. How can we address that? That dialog that happens. The best leaders are having that dialog. They’re they’re leaning into hearing that and knowing that that’s an early sign that they need to pivot a little bit and make changes in organization. So it runs the gamut. There are, I think there are still leaders in the world who are, you know, they know what their marching orders and expectations are, and they’re just going to push through until, you know, you know that command and control mindset that I that I mentioned, but I, you know, I do, if life is a bell shaped curve, I view them out here on the extreme, I think there’s some pressure in society right now to make that a bigger portion, but the hopefully that’s
Mark McBride-Wright 36:04
temporary. Hopefully that’s temporary. Exactly the bulk that’s coming through is the emerging leaders that have a different value set. And what we’re seeing right now is just a final kinda push back like a final blow to try and keep things that way. And actually, there’s it’s in the middle that we need to be a bit, you know, because there’s benefits from both approaches, right? You know, some approaches get things focused and get things done, but at the expense, but that shouldn’t be happening at the expense of one’s well being and ability to be and an opportunity so and not so divisive, and that’s fundamentally what psychological safety is. It’s about being able to be open about things that you don’t agree with without the fear of retribution and pushback or negative consequences?
Linda Carlisle 37:02
Can I? Can I ask a question back? Yeah, sure. So. So, you know, I’ve been struggling a little bit with, like, the pushback on Dei. I do, you know, I’m, I’m a leftist center girl, and I do see the spaces in the in the world where, let’s call it the movement focus more on things like, what words are you using? Or, you know, are you using your pronouns or the like, whatever, oh, that word’s no longer how we refer to this group or that group. Now we use this word and, like, now we have this extra initial and, you know, I think that the the packaging, in some respects, became more important than the what is it that we’re trying to solve at an emotional level, and and some of that emotional piece got lost in the mix. And the problem is that, had that emotional piece been the piece that led you might have seen more receptivity, I believe, in in the audience they were trying to reach, but because they went with the packaging approach instead, it alienated people. And so I say that to say I’ve noticed, like, you know, they talk about the sort of plight or the place that young men find themselves in, for example, right? Because we’ve done so much to help women feel like you can do it. You can have you can be good at math. You can be an engineer. We’ve done so much to build up young women because there was a deficit, because the women were experiencing something emotional and sad and limiting and and instead of staying focused on those things that we were trying to solve, we focused on women, women and these young men are like, what about me? So can you talk a little bit more about that, like the emotional component? Because I do feel like it’s the bridge.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:56
Absolutely. So one of the largest groups now that are most underprivileged are young, white, working class boys and it and therefore, in the push for equality and equity, in the aspiration to try and find one’s tribe, once you find it and you Find your community, it’s like a drug. It’s addictive, and you then feel included for every action there is a reaction, and if our structures of creating that inclusion have ironically been exclusionary, and we have it then tuned into the discomfort that’s maybe being caused on the other side of that bridge, and not spoken about it, not giving air to it, then those on the other side of that bridge have become resentful and felt like and that’s what I could sort of see when building out my network groups. I could sense this resentment, and to your point, because the strategies that have been deployed have often. Times become quite superficial. You know, what we’re calling things and what we’re doing, and lost sight of the bigger picture. It’s driven this very divisive, them and us, polarized binary. I always use the metaphor of Beauty and the Beast, the villagers with the pitchforks coming to find the beast. You know, that’s the energy that activism has kind of taken on in some respects, and that’s just made that the other side of the bridge completely shut down to it say it’s gone too far. We need to cancel, stop. So that is what’s happened, in my view, and I could sense it happening six or seven years ago, and that was why it was. It was in this experience of discovering the suicide rates in the engineering, construction, manufacturing sectors that were so high. And so the sort of Venn Diagram of myself being a safety engineer, but also a diversity practitioner. I was like, Well, how can this be? How is this happening? The whole point of inclusion and belonging is being able to be yourself, bring your whole self to work? Well, that also means the white straight man being able to be open about the miscarriage that he’s going through with his wife when they’re struggling to conceive, and so they’re thinking about, yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So that is that this is really the this is the crux of my work, my thought leadership. It’s to try and find this middle path, um, because it’s also not about making it easier for the other side, like there has been historical inequity and inequality, and women that have had to like that are underpaid for doing equal work, etc, etc. So all that does need to this isn’t getting people off the hook to not do the good work of creating a more equitable society. My My framing of coming at it through linking it to safety for engineering and construction in particular, is the fact that we are losing people at work due to a lack of uninclusive culture where they can show up and be their whole selves. And that’s everyone that, and that’s particularly the white straight man that makes up the majority of that particular employment segment, so and when, when we lead with that, it immediately quenches any pushback that you’re going to get about talking about pronouns and about what gender people are and whether we should be playing this flag or that flag, or Whatever. You know, it’s a, it’s a, it allows that kind of, it circumnavigate, circumvents that. Yeah, it does, it does. It does. It does. And, you know, look, you know, I’ve only just moved to the states in a year when the election happened, it went to become in a small hill to mount, Everest to climb, you know. So I’m not trying to like rebuild in the United States, my organization from the UK, which focuses very much on Dei, but I do think that the safe leader, safe leadership framing, provides a middle path for these conversations to happen because we need, we need if, and that doesn’t apply just to men. It applies to everyone. If we’ve got more people being open about their stories, things that we can’t see from looking at someone, and then then it, it helps to your point, build better internal communications, because there’s more um moments of empathy, more more stories of authenticity that we can latch on to. We can find one another’s kindred spirits within our organization. And guess what those people actually might look and sound different to us and be of a different background. So yeah, I get I get really excited about this work. I love it.
Linda Carlisle 44:01
I’m so passionate empathy, because that is like the word that I lead with, right? I mean, I think if, if you can do your job as a leader, or just as a person within an organization, if you can do your job with that empathy on your shoulder, like looking at the people that you’re ranking with, you’re gonna, you’re going to comment your job from a whole different perspective. You’re going to offer that help when you see something going wrong, you’re going to, you know, you’re going to ask that person how they’re doing when you see that their face is a certain way. And so, you know, I just think, well, frankly, I mean, work aside, if we just were going through our world a little bit more deliberately leaning into empathy, this country would be in a whole different place right now. So
Mark McBride-Wright 44:50
there we’ll get there. Okay, quick fire question round. All right. You ready? Okay, yes, what? Some. Community, what is a must have communication principle every leader should know,
Linda Carlisle 45:06
oh, I just said it right, that empathy has to be front and center in how you’re thinking about what you need to communicate and when and why and how, deep
Mark McBride-Wright 45:17
email slack face to face, or some other online communication tool,
Linda Carlisle 45:23
all of the above. I’m an integrated marketing communications girl. You reach all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it takes up to six seven repeats for a message to get through. So use all of them.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:37
What’s a story you’re especially proud of helping tell?
Linda Carlisle 45:44
I have, I have been involved in putting corporate social responsibility at the heart of a culture, and I think that that process of building a program that people were highly engaged with, that raised large sums of money, that got people out in the street doing volunteering together, which helped form relationships, which came back and delivered on building a really caring culture. I think being involved in that dynamic of building a corporate social responsibility program at the heart of a culture. It was very fulfilling, and I just take a lot of pride in all the nonprofits that we helped, but also what it did to the people within the organization and the and the relationships. And you know, you you came to the point where people were like this company really cares about the world and its constituents, its stakeholders, from employees to the community around us, and that was very fulfilling. So, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:47
ability, dog or tree cat, who’s really the boss?
Linda Carlisle 46:54
You know? They all take their special moment, you know, I’ll tell you one, one really quick thing, let’s clip in my cat’s claws, and usually I reward her for this experience of having her claws clipped. So I go into the kitchen and I put out some treats for her, and she puts her nose up in the air and turns towards my coffee counter, where I use these little coffee cups to put creamer in my coffee. And she liked those coffee cups. She turned and asked for a creamer, right? So they all have their moment where they’re like, you know, this is what I want, and I am very well trained, so I am the one who’s been trained.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:37
What’s your favorite book or resource on leadership or change?
Linda Carlisle 47:41
Let’s see, you know, I think, Oh, that’s a great question. I think I’m just really involved in any right now, I’m reading a whole number of books. I’ve been reading a lot of Bob Berg type books where, I’m I’m really working right now on my my business development chops, because I spent all this time in my life building my professional, know how, as a communicator, but not as a salesperson, and so that sort of notion of givers gain and paying it forward and and the interesting thing is that fits very well with my, you know, my whole philosophy around how one leads and how one communicates and so, so it’s really kind of bringing it down to the individual level with this Bob Berg work around, you know, paying it forward and that sort of thing.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:34
Okay, what’s one thing more companies should do after a reorg?
Linda Carlisle 48:42
Oh, that’s a great question. Um, I think that when all the pieces have finally stopped, um, moving, listening, right, like put in some effort. You know, people, when they’ve gone through disruptive change, are not always really willing to be open and honest, and they’re they’re sometimes very unwilling to answer an anonymous survey, because they’re afraid that you’re going to track it to their individual computer, which like nobody’s doing that. But there’s this perception that you’re going to pinpoint that I was the one who said I was unhappy with how things are going, but if you can bring in an impartial person in who can do some focus groups and create some generalized feedback, and just really get that feedback to leadership and listen to what people are experiencing, then then you can respond with how you lead and how you communicate and what you communicate. And maybe you need to communicate more. Maybe you need to tell your you need to tell your why a different way, or just answer some questions. Have have that. Maybe you need to have some dialog, but focus groups and listening in a way that is maybe beyond just the employee survey. Yes, very important.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:57
What’s your goal to. For managing complexity.
Linda Carlisle 50:04
You know, at the end of the day, I think I use Excel for managing things more than you’d think, and not necessarily just as a quantitative tool, but as an organization tool, like creating a process flow or whatever. I mean, you know, you can open a really complex process mapping kind of technology, but then you’re taking spending more time with the intricacies of the tool. Sometimes, just opening something as simple as Excel and getting things mapped out, I use that more than you’d think.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:38
Good advice, what? What’s the most underrated moment that matters?
Linda Carlisle 50:49
I think, how you onboard people, right? I think I’ve seen companies. I’ve seen leaders. I’ve had it happen to me where the leader wasn’t present on my first day of work, right? I mean, I think you know being there and making sure that the onboarding experience for the employee is everything it should be, that you’re helping them build relationships right out of the gate. You’re helping them connect with their peers. You’re taking them to lunch, you’re talking to them like a person. You’re being vulnerable like you were talking earlier, right? All of those things help them say, Yeah, I’m glad I made this decision and that that first impression, that first felt, Feeling that carries with them throughout their entire stage. You
Mark McBride-Wright 51:46
Yeah, onboarding and finally, then what would you? What would you tell your younger self, starting out in comms, I
Mark McBride-Wright 52:13
Yep, fabulous, fabulous. Thank you so much, Linda. I’ve really enjoyed the chat. If, if people want to get in touch with you or find out more about your business and your work, how should they do that?
Linda Carlisle 52:39
Fabulous. Well,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:41
we’ll put a link as well in the in the show notes as well. Thank you so much. Linda. Really enjoyed it. See you soon. Thanks. Bye.
E030: Building Culture from the Inside Out
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, welcome to the next podcast episode. I’m your host. Dr Mark McBride-Wright of the safe leader podcast, I’m delighted today to be joined by Linda Carlisle, who is a communications and culture strategist with over 30 years of experience guiding organizations through transformative change as founder of com dot, ext, she serves as a fractional communications advisor and culture building partner, specializing in moments that matter, times of significant disruption, such as mergers, restructures and leadership transitions. Her mission is to help leaders keep people informed, engaged and aligned through high impact internal messaging employee experience strategy and brand aligned cultural transformation, previously as Associate Vice President of employee experience Culture and Communications at the Federal Reserve financial services, Linda has shaped corporate Identity and performance at industry leading firms through thoughtful messaging, storytelling and values based strategy, based in Brookfield, Illinois, with an agility dog and tree cat by her side. Linda brings warmth, precision and resilience to every client challenge. Her work bridges the two worlds of strategy, humanity and storytelling. Linda, welcome. How are you doing? Hello here. I’m good. I’m so pleased to have you joining us. I’m actually over in London today, not in my usual location of Brooklyn, New York, where I where I record this from. So really, really good to that we can, that we can make this work. So tell us a bit more about your your your story, you know, storytelling and what you do, sure.
Linda Carlisle 1:52
Um, so you know so much as we didn’t think, my dog has decided to make herself heard. So everyone meet Coco. She’s calling out for you. So I started my business a little over a year ago, coming up on a year and a half, and I, I, I wanted to reach out to a segment of the market that I was becoming increasingly aware did not have internal comms all figured out, all nailed down, and that sector is the mid market space. It seems to me that those folks who are going through perhaps the highest degree of growth also do not have internal comms people. And so that was my mission as I started this business, and that’s really the focus that that I home in on my my longer term story is my degree, in my training in my early career was all on the brand front. So I was very much interested in corporate branding. I have a master’s in integrated marketing communications, with an emphasis on how all of the communications that you do to build your brand are all of equal importance, and you have to integrate them and tell a holistic story. And I first started to realize that this had an impact on internal communications when I was doing brand for a division that was highly acquisitive, and the leadership of that particular organization felt that when you acquired a company, in order to reduce the conflict between the two cultures, was that you had to just, like, outright kill the culture of company. And I was like, Okay, well, that just makes your brand look terrible, right? Yes, yes. So, so that was when I first started to think about, well, what, what is the internal component of how one builds a brand? Because it is very holistic. And so anyways, roughly 20 years in the external branding space, and then we had an economic downturn. I think it was a global downturn in the 2008 area, and I was living in another state, and I had relocated back here to the Chicago area and took a job that my network served up to me, that was internal comms. And I was kind of kicking and screaming, because I was like, Oh, I’m a brand girl. I’m a brand girl. And took the internal job and just completely fell in love with this work. Because really, what you’re doing is using the same skill set that you would use for external marketing. You’re selling your you know, you’re selling things, but what you’re selling internally is culture and psychological safety and understanding and helping people grok your why. And I just really fell in love with that kind of work in that aspect of the work, because it really seemed to have much more impact than just selling another widget or or another. You know, in. Distribution space I’d been in another shipment or another,
Mark McBride-Wright 5:04
and how much do you find then, with internal communications? What? What split is it between the individuals who create the culture? It’s almost like your individual brand identity within your employer or the corporate where you work, and then you’ve got the corporate brand identity that is the external side from where you used to be. But there’s a there’s a behind the scenes background to that as well, isn’t it behind the stage almost, which is the internal culture. So how do you see the similarities and differences between the two and how much of it is made up by the people.
Linda Carlisle 5:44
You know, there’s really kind of two metaphors, I guess. I guess I’m going to bring to the front, first of all, on the internal versus external. I sort of think of it as a yin yang, right? Like you can’t really keep that nice holistic circle going that feeds to itself if your internal efforts and your internal culture does not shore up and match and align with what you’re trying to serve outside, right? So customer experience is very much locked up with internal culture, and I view those as you know you don’t get that nice synergy if you don’t, if you don’t have a good internal culture. Internal culture is an interesting animal, because I kind of view that level of the brand as being like an onion, right? You do have that who is the individual, and how do they? How do they think, and how, more importantly, how do they act? Because, at the end of the day, I view brand as a promise, but I view culture as a series of behaviors, right? And so what behaviors are you as an individual bringing to the table within the organization? What are the behaviors with which that is met? Are those behaviors being met with openness and acceptance and collaboration? Or is there, you know, are we? Are we hoarding our information and not sharing? Or, you know, all these behaviors kind of add up to what is the culture, and so you need to internally be promoting those behaviors that you want to reward and that do serve that customer experience that you desire.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:21
Yeah, and you meant, you mentioned in your previous work with internal comms like mid market size companies that are sort of seeing the growth. So how do you define mid market, like, what? What company size?
Linda Carlisle 7:35
That’s a great question, because mid market kind of has a whole lot of different ways that that is interpreted for me. The target audience that I feel I can best serve is, you know, usually there’s at least 250 employees, because below that, you have more of a management by walking around capability, you can manage that size of organization without really having a structured communication, you could have more dialog. And you start to get above 250 and you’ve got change going on that you’re already trying to manage, and it’s taking up your attention. You can’t get around to everybody with the regularity and the depth that you need to and that’s when you need much more planful communication. Not that you shouldn’t be planning your communication when you’re smaller, but you can deliver it in a different way, but you get above 250 and especially with things like mergers and acquisitions, where there’s complexity and there’s different, yes, and they have different viewpoints, you really need to start having more planful approach to how you’re going to communicate and how you’re going to view culture. And so I say, I say, for me, mid market is that 250 and then I kind of top it out at 1000 and really, the reason is, I, you could go beyond 1000 in in terms of what is mid market, but at 1000 people, they tend to bring a person like me in house, that’s that’s really where they need to have that they start to realize they need to Have it.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:00
So you see, do you offer fractional internal communications support, where you’re on a retainer or and then you you help, and where do you find in the current climate that we’re in politically and culturally? Where do you find the pressure points, the hotspots of when it comes to diversity X and inclusion, for example, where do you see a clap? Are you seeing clashes of values happen in M and A’s that you’re supporting? So you know, I
Linda Carlisle 9:35
will say in this current climate that we’re having one of the side effects, which I think are unintended consequences, but nonetheless, it’s impacting a part of our economy that is very wealth generating, part of our economy that’s being impacted, but that is that we are not seeing as many mergers and acquisitions. I mean, imagine if you were sitting on, you know, half a billion dollars that you. We’re going to spend on acquiring companies to bolt onto other companies. You can’t quite trust their numbers if you don’t know what’s going to happen to their supply chain. And so, you know, on the one hand, I’ve sat in meetings where there’s been a panel discussion about, you know, how to navigate this time, and some firms are out there with a team of strategists trying to, on the day to day, figure out how they’re going to flex if this happens to their supply chain, and then having to turn on a dime and say, Here’s Plan B, if this is what happens. And you know, if you’re about to spend tremendous amounts of money in acquisitions, you’re just not going to do it. You’re going to keep your powder dry until and there’s a lot of that happening. There’s just not as much the M and A market is not as robust as it was. So that’s one interest in this marketplace. A lot of the people that I partner with right. So a lot of times I find my clients through referrals from other people who are like, hey, this company needs a little help, or what have you. And you talk about Dei, I think another unintended consequence here in America. I’m sure it’s kind of a global thing, but you could tell me that, but we, we are, a lot of our employment, of our entire population, is managed by this small to mid sized business, right? Large corporations employ large amounts of people, but they do not employ the mass
Mark McBride-Wright 11:28
of the people. Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Linda Carlisle 11:32
Of those people are are employed by small to mid sized companies. And so one of the things that helps small to mid size companies thrive is, you know, there’s, there’s a whole sector where it is women owned businesses and minority owned businesses, yes, and a lot of those folks, because of the climate in the country, are seeing their contracts being canceled. And so, you know, because larger companies that might employ them as a subcontractor are saying, well, I might actually be punished for helping these companies stay afloat. And so you’re seeing those sorts of small to mid size companies really struggle in this environment. So it’s another thing that we’re seeing happen. Oh, by the way, those small to mid sized companies are just as impacted as the PE firms are around this uncertainty around tariffs, right? They just can’t afford to have the extra staff to form Plan B and Plan C and Plan D supply chain. So, so that’s going on, you know, just in terms of hitting the revenue. And then the third thing is really more directly in this culture and dei space, is that companies are kind of like freezing, not knowing what to do around diversity, equity and inclusion. Yeah, you know. And I have some thoughts around that, but like that aside, I think there’s just almost like a fear factor seems to get too robust behind it, because they’re afraid somebody there’s gonna be a backlash and and so that’s happening, and I also seeing, and it’s not everywhere, but there is a little bit of a re emergence of the whole command and control mentality coming into how, how leadership happens at some companies, not all companies, but some companies, and that equates to a lack of empathy, or, like a lessening of empathy when you’re in it. Because I said, So mode. So it’s almost mirror.
Mark McBride-Wright 13:39
Yeah, that’s, that’s, it’s like it’s mirroring the leadership that they’re seeing in government, and so by just reflecting that, then it means there, it’s less risky from a PR and perception standpoint, I interested in your what thoughts on how dei is, then there for landing and showing up. You mentioned there you had a whole other raft of thoughts. What was that little thoughts? Thought stream you had a little
Linda Carlisle 14:15
side road I didn’t go down. Was I really feel like people need to think about diverse diversity, equity and inclusion are really sort of business fundamentals that I think are very important just to have, right? We are a diverse country where, traditionally, I mean, from very early days, we’ve been a melting pot. We’ve not always melted very gracefully, but eventually the melting has happened, and we have been a melting pot of many, many cultures and many, many different kinds of people. And in a diverse country, the market is diverse, and to address a diverse market, you need to have diverse ideas within your company, right? And. So diversity is really, in my mind, a marketing essential. You have to be able to tap into different thoughts that are capable of understanding different things going on in the marketplace that you serve right and so diversity, to me, is the survival technique, a competitive power kind of a technique just to make sure that you’ve got different points of view that are coming together and hashing it out and saying, This is how we can go forward and address the market. Is it as it
Mark McBride-Wright 15:29
exists? And do you see that in companies where you’ve worked that have had employee networks, employee resource groups, business resource groups, whatever you want to call them. I mean, maybe in the 250 size, it’s still too small to have formalized networks, I’m not so sure. But have you ever worked in employers that in organizations that have had that, and therefore they’ve leveraged that for the benefit of their internal comms engagement and helped inform what the product the services they design and deliver, and the products they design deliver and sell.
Linda Carlisle 16:04
Yeah. So I’ve been a little bit fortunate, I think, in that I have worked with firms that have had the instinct of having diverse people at the table before even the whole dei initiative, you know, was more formalized. They already had that diversity it, you know, in the room at the table, giving their opinions, and I mean, that respect, it was a beautiful thing. But yes, I mean, I think from a cultural standpoint, being able to tap into those employee resource groups and utilize them in order to almost as ambassadors of culture, to provide input in, but also input out, right? So I can talk a little bit about culture forming, but, but, you know, and the need to the role that listening plays in that process, right? But they’re employee resource groups are a great way, a great way to get at the heartbeat of what’s really going on in the culture. And you you can’t, like form a culture that’s your ideal culture if you’re not aware of what’s actually happening out there. So, so from a cultural standpoint, I want to also say that equity. I feel like equity is just something that you should be doing to attract and retain the right, that talent, that top tier talent, right? So if you’re not an accurate, equitable employer, I do feel like there’s more equity than, from a pure pay standpoint, than there have been in the past, because it seems like most companies are subscribing to or testing the market. From a pay standpoint, well, then get any of the same kinds of tools across the board. So and then third, from an inclusion standpoint, that’s really the place that I play right internal communication is all about inclusion. Are you keeping people informed? Are you doing outbound communication so people understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, what the strategy is all, all of that is inclusion. And then do they have a seat at a table to give their opinion on how things should be shaped and the like
Mark McBride-Wright 18:20
so well, top, top. So you’ve just secured a new client. They’ve signed a contract with you. They need your help on internal comms. I see that you’ve got moments that matter. TM, and talk us through your methodology, your approach, your strategy. How do you first get going with with a new client? Yeah,
Linda Carlisle 18:41
I think one of the first things that you do is just, it’s, I guess it’s an audit, if you really want to, Okay, put a fine word to it. I’ve, I’ve toyed with the idea of making it very formalized and actually using it as a as a tool to allow people to self assess whether they could use some help. But at this point, it’s really about a dialog and understanding, what are they doing in certain buckets, right? So what, first of all, is there anything going on right now that is causing them to reach out? Because usually there’s a pain point. So it might be a cultural pain point. It might be a merger and acquisition. It might be they’re about to do a layoff, and they don’t really know how to navigate that in a way that keeps their people from being out on a ledge, right? So, yeah, so usually there’s something that triggers, so I want to make sure that I’m serving their needs from a trigger standpoint. But it’s about understanding what’s all going on at the company. What is the history media history been? You know, have you done any assessment of wherever people are coming from, or should I just assume that the baseline, you know, American engagement level, which is not so great, is what’s going on with the company. So just really asking those questions about environmentally, what’s going on in the communications environment? Do they have Dei? Do they have, you know, have they are. Are they spending a lot of time dealing with interpersonal problems within the company, which gives me a sense of how scratchy the culture might be. And then if, if there’s something going on, like a merger, obviously, we go deep dive on that, and there’s usually a process of what happens in a merger and acquisition situation. And so I’ll kind of go off onto that branch and help with that, but otherwise, I’m going to be assessing what’s their employment brand look like. Do they have an employee value proposition? Do they, you know, how well is that articulated in their recruiting materials, on their website and the careers page, that sort of thing? Then I’m going to look at all of those touch points that happen around the employee, right? How visible is the executive? Is the executive out there walking around? Is the executive? Do the executives, you know, get out there and talk to their people, but also, do the executives get out there in the marketplace, and are they visible and and representative of what the company’s about and the company culture and how they think. And then it’s really about, how do you onboard people so that they understand what it’s like to be at the company and how they are an ambassador of the company, and what behaviors are going to be rewarded, and where to find things and all that. Then it’s like, well, how are you communicating your strategy to people on the day to day. How are you communicating strategy to those new people? So what are you doing to make sure that everybody’s well aligned and excited and sees how they play into what strategy means, and that sort of thing I mentioned, you know, things like layoffs. So then the next is, how are you managing change, right? I you know, have there been reorganizations? Have you had, do you have new leadership? How are you doing a new strategy, launch, that sort of sort of thing. Then there’s culture building, right, which is, how very deliberately are you defining your mission, vision, values, obviously. Do you have purpose? Do you have higher purpose? Right? Are you and I make the distinction? Purpose is maybe what you promise to do as an organization through your products and services, higher purpose is, if taken to their best and most high impact imaginable, extreme. How could they make society better? And what are, what are you doing as an organization to make society better in that category, right? So, I once worked for a company that was involved in water delivery, and, you know, what? What could you do to help with water delivery issues, you know? And they often did from a charitable giving standpoint. They would go into, say, a Detroit situation, or the the organ, the I’m trying to remember, the town that was so impacted by the really poor water quality and and going in there and really helping with water during that no emergency access, yeah. So, anyhow, yeah. So what are you doing from purpose standpoint, and then the cultural behaviors that you want to reward, and do you have systems for rewarding and recognizing people for for those behaviors? And how are you communicating that? Are you? Are you systemically communicating that around culture? And then, just like, you know, um, leadership messaging, are the leaders out there and regularly trying to keep people engaged and excited in where, where the company is going. So, so, like, there’s pockets of work that I will try and understand before I create a strategy. And
Mark McBride-Wright 23:39
of course, that’s overall global cult or just culture without any words before it. And of course, I I work in safety. I’m a safety engineer by background, and this is the safe leader podcast. And so a lot of our listeners and guests sometimes look at that subset of culture, the safety culture. And I heard you when you did your intro. I think you peppered in some sectors within which you’ve worked or organizations, and it sounded like there were some high risk industries in there as well, some engineering, kind of engineering where safety is usually a more part of the dominant culture than, say, other sectors. So we’d be really keen to get your perspective from your experience on safety culture and how good or bad that shows up within organizations that you’ve that you’ve been at.
Linda Carlisle 24:30
Yeah, so one of the things that I like to think about when I when I talk about what kind of cultures you want to aim towards, is, you know, when you think about a high performance team, trusting and caring for each other is central to being a high performance team. If you don’t have those two things, is sort of a baseline. This is who we are, then you’re not going to ever be a high performance team and part of a safe. Safety culture is also dependent on having trust and care, right? Are your people looking out for each other? Do they have each other’s back? And whenever I’ve been involved in helping to roll out and sort of reinforce that safety culture, so much of it is, are we helping each other to learn to do things right? When we see something, do we say something? Not, hey, I’m going to go tattle on you, but no, I’m going to say something to you because I’m worried that you did that in a way that could put your fingers at risk, right? And talk to you a little bit about how to do that a little differently, and so you don’t get to that level of looking out for each other and having each other’s back if you don’t have trust and care care in that. I noticed it, and I stopped. And I’m, I’m gonna do something to help you, and you trusting that I intend, I am well intentioned, yes, with my advancement to you. And so that trust and care piece is really essential to get to that safety culture. And so it’s a big cultural thing, but it, you know, you can’t get to just basic safety on the floor if you’re not instilling that
Mark McBride-Wright 26:11
without trusting care and how and that that’s very much from a sort of physical safety perspective. But how are you finding things play out from a mental health and well being, our psychological safety, psychosocial
Linda Carlisle 26:23
Well, I peace, I think that trust and care are really central to that as well. Right? We have an environment where people can come to work and be themselves and not feel judged by their colleagues, and where there’s good conversation on the team and good support for each other on the team, and where leadership is allowing people the flexibility to do what they need to do, and that leadership is sort of tuned in as well into what’s going on with their people. And, you know, having open dialog around what’s going on, and do you need a little time, or do you need a little support? Or, you know, how’s the workload? One of the, you know, I’ve actually left roles where there was a separation between how leadership looked at workload and how people looked at workload and when it became, you know, so great with no relief in sight. It’s like, well, this is just unbearable. Yeah, it’s not a sustainable way to run your business. So,
Mark McBride-Wright 27:24
yeah, yeah, you need that. You can have the the deep, intense periods, but leadership needs to be mindful that this is a temporary phase, and saying that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s, it’s, it’s going to get lighter
Linda Carlisle 27:41
load on the next, next. And the thing is, I think, like, middle management gets crushed in the middle, right? Yeah, totally, totally, because they’re getting these instructions. And now we’re going to do this as well, and now we’re going to do this as well, and we’re going to do this as well, and they’re not empowered to say, Well, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re Yeah, yeah.
Linda Carlisle 28:13
Yeah, yeah. I think all the way up the food chain. I think the notion that too much is too much has to has to happen. So we’re
Mark McBride-Wright 28:24
going to take you through
Linda Carlisle 28:25
values as being an outside consultant is you can make those suggestions to
Mark McBride-Wright 28:29
leaders? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I always say to my, you know, champ internal champions, I guess that want to get me in to help work. I always say that’s like a three legged race. We’re in it together, you know. And I need to know what your pain points are, because you are inherently limited by virtue of your level on the org chart. Unfortunately, you’re an employee. You’re a number, whereas outside counsel coming in to give advice that premium service, that ability to have worked across many organizations and then seen seeing trends and themes that come up helps satiate the executive to think, oh, it’s not just unique to us. This is actually a common problem or opportunity even, and therefore you can help us solve this somehow.
Linda Carlisle 29:24
And I will say that, you know, a lot of times the psychological safety issues lead to either quality issues or, you know, what they lead to, what they can lead to is just mistakes, and then those mistakes can lead to not only product quality, customer facing quality or but it could actually be physical quality issues or, like endangering each other, because the psychological safety has made you less careful.
Mark McBride-Wright 29:52
So I mean the the classic example in the most recent times is people who knew what was happening at Boeing. Um. And on the production lines, and the unsafe practices were being allowed to continue, and things being cut, or, you know, shortcuts being made, and then you end up with extreme events that happen because no one had the ability to whistle blow, or if they did ring the alarm, then they were dealt with in a in a way that they shouldn’t have been. They were removed from the organization.
Linda Carlisle 30:30
I’m not. I’m not, I mean, but as an internal advocate for leadership, it shouldn’t have to come to whistle. You should be listening to your people absolutely, two way storytelling. And I think that that’s the challenge. When you have leadership, that’s not that is so removed from what the people are saying. Or, you know, when they hear something coming up from the floor around, hey, there’s too much work. We’re overworked. This is not sustainable. Blah, blah, blah, and, or there’s too many things going on at once, and you can’t just have this level of change all at once. And when that’s resonating up, and what the mentality is is, well, just deal with it. You’ll get used to it like you just have to make these things. You just have to make it happen, right? And that not listening is what causes a situation where somebody has to whistle blow, and then now you’ve got a PR problem, right? Or yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:29
yeah, within lawsuits with them. How do you find so in my in my safe leader framework, safe stands for share, act, feel empower. And I plot it out that way because it’s a circle four quadrants. And we start off and share, we go into act want to feel, going to empower. And one thing I found from running networks based on underrepresented groups was this lack of connection from the everyday male majority engineer, they felt ironically excluded in the push for diversity, equity and inclusion, and yet, at the same time, engineering construction has a very high suicide rate. And so I had this aha moment where I was like, Well, hang on, if we were doing well at our inclusion and belonging strategies, then everyone, including the white straight man, would feel like they belonged. He belonged at the organization, and would be able to be open. So I always I was gifted. I don’t have it on me. Just now, I was gifted this beautiful little prop from my speaking coach, which is a lighthouse. And we use that analogy. When you think about a lighthouse being anchored, it can weather the storm, and it shines its light out to help boats and vessels and ships see their way through the night. That light is a metaphor for one’s story. So with the safe leader, I’m hoping to try and activate more people, and especially men, being open about their stories, open about what’s going on in their mind, what’s going on in their lives, that makes them a bit more personal, approachable, vulnerable, lowers their guard a bit. And I think we saw a bit of that in the pandemic, when we were all forced to work at home. We saw a window into people’s lives. So with your with the leadership teams that you work at in these organizations of 250 to 1000 how, um, what sort of leadership style are you seeing? Are you still seeing it being very founder led and familial, family type feeling with the people that they’ve raised and grown the organization. Or are you, are you seeing sort of leadership that is a bit more impersonal and less less connected and less vulnerable as a collective?
Linda Carlisle 33:54
You know, I think, as with anything, there’s a bit of a bell shaped curve there. It kind of runs the gamut. I can say that to the extent to which I’m working with firms that are going through growth, through acquisition, there tends to be a little bit more of a polished leadership, you know, okay, educated lots of have lots of roles in their background where they have really built a sense of how to move through that kind of exponential growth, and that’s because, I think, you know, that’s the kind of leadership that that the private equity firms are looking for to make sure that that exponential growth actually delivers. But I don’t believe that just because you’re a seasoned leader that you off to be cut off from your people. I think the best leaders have experience and have learned from that, that you know, being connected to your people, you’re working through them, not you know, they’re not automatons, they’re not machines. You’re working through them, how they’re feeling, how they’re engaging, and that it’s. Two way street that you know you’re going to succeed because they’re giving you feedback and giving you this isn’t working. That isn’t working. This new line isn’t working. How we thought these two companies coming together was going to happen isn’t happening. The way we thought something needs to change. How can we address that? That dialog that happens. The best leaders are having that dialog. They’re they’re leaning into hearing that and knowing that that’s an early sign that they need to pivot a little bit and make changes in organization. So it runs the gamut. There are, I think there are still leaders in the world who are, you know, they know what their marching orders and expectations are, and they’re just going to push through until, you know, you know that command and control mindset that I that I mentioned, but I, you know, I do, if life is a bell shaped curve, I view them out here on the extreme, I think there’s some pressure in society right now to make that a bigger portion, but the hopefully that’s
Mark McBride-Wright 36:04
temporary. Hopefully that’s temporary. Exactly the bulk that’s coming through is the emerging leaders that have a different value set. And what we’re seeing right now is just a final kinda push back like a final blow to try and keep things that way. And actually, there’s it’s in the middle that we need to be a bit, you know, because there’s benefits from both approaches, right? You know, some approaches get things focused and get things done, but at the expense, but that shouldn’t be happening at the expense of one’s well being and ability to be and an opportunity so and not so divisive, and that’s fundamentally what psychological safety is. It’s about being able to be open about things that you don’t agree with without the fear of retribution and pushback or negative consequences?
Linda Carlisle 37:02
Can I? Can I ask a question back? Yeah, sure. So. So, you know, I’ve been struggling a little bit with, like, the pushback on Dei. I do, you know, I’m, I’m a leftist center girl, and I do see the spaces in the in the world where, let’s call it the movement focus more on things like, what words are you using? Or, you know, are you using your pronouns or the like, whatever, oh, that word’s no longer how we refer to this group or that group. Now we use this word and, like, now we have this extra initial and, you know, I think that the the packaging, in some respects, became more important than the what is it that we’re trying to solve at an emotional level, and and some of that emotional piece got lost in the mix. And the problem is that, had that emotional piece been the piece that led you might have seen more receptivity, I believe, in in the audience they were trying to reach, but because they went with the packaging approach instead, it alienated people. And so I say that to say I’ve noticed, like, you know, they talk about the sort of plight or the place that young men find themselves in, for example, right? Because we’ve done so much to help women feel like you can do it. You can have you can be good at math. You can be an engineer. We’ve done so much to build up young women because there was a deficit, because the women were experiencing something emotional and sad and limiting and and instead of staying focused on those things that we were trying to solve, we focused on women, women and these young men are like, what about me? So can you talk a little bit more about that, like the emotional component? Because I do feel like it’s the bridge.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:56
Absolutely. So one of the largest groups now that are most underprivileged are young, white, working class boys and it and therefore, in the push for equality and equity, in the aspiration to try and find one’s tribe, once you find it and you Find your community, it’s like a drug. It’s addictive, and you then feel included for every action there is a reaction, and if our structures of creating that inclusion have ironically been exclusionary, and we have it then tuned into the discomfort that’s maybe being caused on the other side of that bridge, and not spoken about it, not giving air to it, then those on the other side of that bridge have become resentful and felt like and that’s what I could sort of see when building out my network groups. I could sense this resentment, and to your point, because the strategies that have been deployed have often. Times become quite superficial. You know, what we’re calling things and what we’re doing, and lost sight of the bigger picture. It’s driven this very divisive, them and us, polarized binary. I always use the metaphor of Beauty and the Beast, the villagers with the pitchforks coming to find the beast. You know, that’s the energy that activism has kind of taken on in some respects, and that’s just made that the other side of the bridge completely shut down to it say it’s gone too far. We need to cancel, stop. So that is what’s happened, in my view, and I could sense it happening six or seven years ago, and that was why it was. It was in this experience of discovering the suicide rates in the engineering, construction, manufacturing sectors that were so high. And so the sort of Venn Diagram of myself being a safety engineer, but also a diversity practitioner. I was like, Well, how can this be? How is this happening? The whole point of inclusion and belonging is being able to be yourself, bring your whole self to work? Well, that also means the white straight man being able to be open about the miscarriage that he’s going through with his wife when they’re struggling to conceive, and so they’re thinking about, yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So that is that this is really the this is the crux of my work, my thought leadership. It’s to try and find this middle path, um, because it’s also not about making it easier for the other side, like there has been historical inequity and inequality, and women that have had to like that are underpaid for doing equal work, etc, etc. So all that does need to this isn’t getting people off the hook to not do the good work of creating a more equitable society. My My framing of coming at it through linking it to safety for engineering and construction in particular, is the fact that we are losing people at work due to a lack of uninclusive culture where they can show up and be their whole selves. And that’s everyone that, and that’s particularly the white straight man that makes up the majority of that particular employment segment, so and when, when we lead with that, it immediately quenches any pushback that you’re going to get about talking about pronouns and about what gender people are and whether we should be playing this flag or that flag, or Whatever. You know, it’s a, it’s a, it allows that kind of, it circumnavigate, circumvents that. Yeah, it does, it does. It does. It does. And, you know, look, you know, I’ve only just moved to the states in a year when the election happened, it went to become in a small hill to mount, Everest to climb, you know. So I’m not trying to like rebuild in the United States, my organization from the UK, which focuses very much on Dei, but I do think that the safe leader, safe leadership framing, provides a middle path for these conversations to happen because we need, we need if, and that doesn’t apply just to men. It applies to everyone. If we’ve got more people being open about their stories, things that we can’t see from looking at someone, and then then it, it helps to your point, build better internal communications, because there’s more um moments of empathy, more more stories of authenticity that we can latch on to. We can find one another’s kindred spirits within our organization. And guess what those people actually might look and sound different to us and be of a different background. So yeah, I get I get really excited about this work. I love it.
Linda Carlisle 44:01
I’m so passionate empathy, because that is like the word that I lead with, right? I mean, I think if, if you can do your job as a leader, or just as a person within an organization, if you can do your job with that empathy on your shoulder, like looking at the people that you’re ranking with, you’re gonna, you’re going to comment your job from a whole different perspective. You’re going to offer that help when you see something going wrong, you’re going to, you know, you’re going to ask that person how they’re doing when you see that their face is a certain way. And so, you know, I just think, well, frankly, I mean, work aside, if we just were going through our world a little bit more deliberately leaning into empathy, this country would be in a whole different place right now. So
Mark McBride-Wright 44:50
there we’ll get there. Okay, quick fire question round. All right. You ready? Okay, yes, what? Some. Community, what is a must have communication principle every leader should know,
Linda Carlisle 45:06
oh, I just said it right, that empathy has to be front and center in how you’re thinking about what you need to communicate and when and why and how, deep
Mark McBride-Wright 45:17
email slack face to face, or some other online communication tool,
Linda Carlisle 45:23
all of the above. I’m an integrated marketing communications girl. You reach all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it takes up to six seven repeats for a message to get through. So use all of them.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:37
What’s a story you’re especially proud of helping tell?
Linda Carlisle 45:44
I have, I have been involved in putting corporate social responsibility at the heart of a culture, and I think that that process of building a program that people were highly engaged with, that raised large sums of money, that got people out in the street doing volunteering together, which helped form relationships, which came back and delivered on building a really caring culture. I think being involved in that dynamic of building a corporate social responsibility program at the heart of a culture. It was very fulfilling, and I just take a lot of pride in all the nonprofits that we helped, but also what it did to the people within the organization and the and the relationships. And you know, you you came to the point where people were like this company really cares about the world and its constituents, its stakeholders, from employees to the community around us, and that was very fulfilling. So, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:47
ability, dog or tree cat, who’s really the boss?
Linda Carlisle 46:54
You know? They all take their special moment, you know, I’ll tell you one, one really quick thing, let’s clip in my cat’s claws, and usually I reward her for this experience of having her claws clipped. So I go into the kitchen and I put out some treats for her, and she puts her nose up in the air and turns towards my coffee counter, where I use these little coffee cups to put creamer in my coffee. And she liked those coffee cups. She turned and asked for a creamer, right? So they all have their moment where they’re like, you know, this is what I want, and I am very well trained, so I am the one who’s been trained.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:37
What’s your favorite book or resource on leadership or change?
Linda Carlisle 47:41
Let’s see, you know, I think, Oh, that’s a great question. I think I’m just really involved in any right now, I’m reading a whole number of books. I’ve been reading a lot of Bob Berg type books where, I’m I’m really working right now on my my business development chops, because I spent all this time in my life building my professional, know how, as a communicator, but not as a salesperson, and so that sort of notion of givers gain and paying it forward and and the interesting thing is that fits very well with my, you know, my whole philosophy around how one leads and how one communicates and so, so it’s really kind of bringing it down to the individual level with this Bob Berg work around, you know, paying it forward and that sort of thing.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:34
Okay, what’s one thing more companies should do after a reorg?
Linda Carlisle 48:42
Oh, that’s a great question. Um, I think that when all the pieces have finally stopped, um, moving, listening, right, like put in some effort. You know, people, when they’ve gone through disruptive change, are not always really willing to be open and honest, and they’re they’re sometimes very unwilling to answer an anonymous survey, because they’re afraid that you’re going to track it to their individual computer, which like nobody’s doing that. But there’s this perception that you’re going to pinpoint that I was the one who said I was unhappy with how things are going, but if you can bring in an impartial person in who can do some focus groups and create some generalized feedback, and just really get that feedback to leadership and listen to what people are experiencing, then then you can respond with how you lead and how you communicate and what you communicate. And maybe you need to communicate more. Maybe you need to tell your you need to tell your why a different way, or just answer some questions. Have have that. Maybe you need to have some dialog, but focus groups and listening in a way that is maybe beyond just the employee survey. Yes, very important.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:57
What’s your goal to. For managing complexity.
Linda Carlisle 50:04
You know, at the end of the day, I think I use Excel for managing things more than you’d think, and not necessarily just as a quantitative tool, but as an organization tool, like creating a process flow or whatever. I mean, you know, you can open a really complex process mapping kind of technology, but then you’re taking spending more time with the intricacies of the tool. Sometimes, just opening something as simple as Excel and getting things mapped out, I use that more than you’d think.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:38
Good advice, what? What’s the most underrated moment that matters?
Linda Carlisle 50:49
I think, how you onboard people, right? I think I’ve seen companies. I’ve seen leaders. I’ve had it happen to me where the leader wasn’t present on my first day of work, right? I mean, I think you know being there and making sure that the onboarding experience for the employee is everything it should be, that you’re helping them build relationships right out of the gate. You’re helping them connect with their peers. You’re taking them to lunch, you’re talking to them like a person. You’re being vulnerable like you were talking earlier, right? All of those things help them say, Yeah, I’m glad I made this decision and that that first impression, that first felt, Feeling that carries with them throughout their entire stage. You
Mark McBride-Wright 51:46
Yeah, onboarding and finally, then what would you? What would you tell your younger self, starting out in comms, I
Mark McBride-Wright 52:13
Yep, fabulous, fabulous. Thank you so much, Linda. I’ve really enjoyed the chat. If, if people want to get in touch with you or find out more about your business and your work, how should they do that?
Linda Carlisle 52:39
Fabulous. Well,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:41
we’ll put a link as well in the in the show notes as well. Thank you so much. Linda. Really enjoyed it. See you soon. Thanks. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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