This is a collection of additional insights from industry leaders to Part 3 of an eight-part series featuring conversations from the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit.
Leadership in the Age of Personalization
Today’s age of personalization needs a fresh approach to diversity and inclusion – one that’s focused on strengthening and accelerating the enterprise growth strategy.
That’s rare. Here’s how I know.
My organization assessed hundreds of Fortune 500 and healthcare leaders across 30+ metrics in four key areas:
- Enterprise Leadership: Solidify the right inclusion-based performance metrics to drive better outcomes across the enterprise to ensure the organization is solving for the most sustainable growth opportunities.
- Workforce Representation: Create an inclusive culture to attract top talent, strengthen your employer brand and build high-performance teams to generate growth.
- Consumer Experience: Build connection and trust with your customers by allowing them to share their feedback and develop systems to act on that feedback to accelerate growth.
- Population Health: Be proactive in getting to know and addressing the unique health needs of your employees, customers and their communities in ways to drive growth.
As reported in this position paper, “Inclusion is a Growth Strategy,” these areas of focus are interconnected and interdependent upon each other. As you can see from the table, preparedness levels (represented as percentages) are low.
Inclusion as a Growth Strategy
It is clear from the analytics that organizations are not leading inclusion as a growth strategy. Without inclusion, diversity is powerless. And when diversity is powerless, enterprise growth is at risk. Are you and your organization ready to lead inclusion as a growth strategy? Click here to find out.
Inclusion solves for individuality, and individuality solves for inclusion. Together, they solve for diversity. This fact should remind us that we must start solving for a more evolved way of thinking: Leadership in the Age of Personalization.
I open with those stats simply to set the stage: inclusion takes deliberate effort across all major areas of an organization. That’s why I’m glad that people want to respond and engage in this conversation throughout this article series.
Here are latest insights from industry leaders as they reflect upon Part 3 of the series:
Josh Connors, Senior Director, Asset Analytics & Insights at CVS Health
“74% of leaders said they are always or sometimes mindful of those (unique) differences while 80% of their employees said these leaders are rarely aware of those (unique) differences.”
When I see that statistic, there is an overlap of some population of leaders who in fact are aware and their employees are cognizant of their manager’s awareness. This is an opportunity to grow. The article highlights that inclusion is a learned skill. It is. As leaders, we visit summits, participate in trainings, and capture the spirit of what we need to know to lead in the age of personalization. Now what?
I am reminded of the movie The Breakfast Club. On Saturday, five individuals from different backgrounds learned about each other. The setting they were in enabled this learning, and fostered what made each of them human. Toward the end of the day, they were faced with the reality of What is going to happen on Monday? The group realized they would be back to their usual worlds and old ways.
As the article noted, “Inclusion becomes a skill, one that needs to be learned.” As we learn the skills for leading in the age of personalization, continuing the momentum is most critical. If we don’t commit to learning those skills, we are at risk of losing these skilled Millennials and Gen Z-ers if we are unprepared to answer the question, “What happens on Monday?” and return to our usual worlds and old ways.
Glenn Llopis
In today’s environment of rapid change, the question “What happens on Monday?” will be a constant occurrence. In fact, we don’t have to wait until Monday, it will be a daily question.
Everyone accepts and adapts to change at a difference pace. Many choose not to accept and adapt to change at all. Because of this fact, leaders must be more self-aware and self-directed to know those they lead – as individuals – and give them the room to be contribute on their own terms. Let go – as long as those you lead respect the needs of the organization.
That’s why we are all at risk of losing top talent today more than ever before. It’s about knowing the individual well enough, to know how to best lead them. This is why personalization threatens standardization. If you consider that most of today’s Fortune 500 executives learned how to lead in the age of standardization, perhaps we are beginning to understand why enterprise growth is at risk. For them it’s not about inclusion (personalization), it’s about command and control (standardization).
Kristin Gwinner, Chief Human Resources Officer, Chico’s
There is a simplicity and magnitude to Dr. Lacy’s first metric: “Did you go say hello? Whatever you are going to do or did is it going to spread love?” This a practical metric that one can utilize immediately to bring the inclusion experience to life. Saying hello to another, this simple gesture can open up door to opportunities that you didn’t know existed. It is my belief that - one conversation at a time – together, we can make a difference.
The sincerity of learning about another, realizing our unique differences and shared similarities is valuable. It is in these moments that eyes are opened and relationships form. There are distinct benefits, both quantitative and qualitative. Inclusion is a growth strategy. When we start with kindness and good intentions, and layer in the time to get to know your associates - trust builds, ideas are shared freely, communication flows faster, stronger decisions are made – the organization becomes more agile and associates feel valued for their contributions.
I am personally growing more by taking the time to say hello, especially in those situations I may not have felt I had the time or courage. For example, I may have missed meeting my new friend Amad, who immigrated from Iraq. I may have stayed on my phone or stayed quiet as he drove me to the airport. Instead, I practiced Dr Lacy’s advice. Amad was surprised and delighted. He shared personal stories of what he and his family have been through in his journey to get to the United States – and how incredibly proud he is to be an American. We met as strangers and left as friends – and I may never see him again. But as left me at the airport, he sent me off with a special blessing in Arabic. He shared his appreciation of our conversation. Although we come from significantly different backgrounds and cultures, we both believed that kindness matters.
Llopis
Do you trust yourself enough to open your heart and lead with kindness? Before you answer this question, consider this statement: The wiseman forfeits his fortune when he does not trust himself.
We lose a lot of momentum in our work and in life when we are not personal with one another. With all of the tribal boundaries and political correctness that has limited our ability to authentically engage with people, we have lost our sense of self. We have lost our sense of belonging.
Kindness costs nothing, yet the lack of kindness cost organizations and society millions of dollars when we don’t 1) make the efforts to engage with one another, 2) identify the opportunities to respect each other’s differences, 3) invest in relationships the right way and 4) have each other’s best interests at heart (just to name a few).
Annette M. Walker, President, City of Hope Orange County
I’m struck by what Woman’s Hospital CEO Emeritus Teri Fontenot had to say about building a new replacement campus that was developed around the concept of inclusion. As she said, patients, community leaders, politicians, doctors, donors, board members, and other caregivers were all consulted. The finished product was a design that worked for everyone, not just one specific group.
City of Hope is also taking the concept of inclusion to heart as we develop a new campus that will be focused on many aspects of cancer care – prevention, diagnosis, treatment and research. Our new campus is going to be located in Irvine, California, a community where 72 languages are presently spoken in the local school district. This statistic helps emphasize the opportunity we have to embrace and include the community, our future patients, clinicians, and workers, into the design of our facility and the manner in which our services will be delivered. This type of activity both in the planning and execution calls for a higher level of leadership. It calls for leaders who are humble enough to listen well and inspiring enough to build a community of collective voices. Our goal is to be extraordinarily relevant and touch more lives. This is after all how we fulfill our mission.
Llopis
Leading inclusion as a growth strategy requires us all to listen, be humble and inspire a greater sense of community. Let’s break this down through the lens of leading in the age of personalization:
- Listening requires us to create feedback loop systems to continuously improve what we do in real time.
- Being humble requires leaders to accept and express that they don’t have all of the answers. They must create the room that welcomes others in.
- Inspiring a greater sense of community requires leaders to breakdown silos both within their organizations and throughout the communities they serve.
Listening, being humble and inspiring a greater sense of community is a leadership requirement. If you are not ready to practice these three things, you no longer have the privilege to lead.
Brian Garish, President, Banfield Pet Hospital
I was drawn to Teri Fontenot’s comments about offering a guiding principle for inviting cognitive diversity into a management practice when she said, “It’s about having the people who are going to be most affected by a decision involved in the decision.” Fontenot continued by saying, “What I have found is when the front-line staff comes up with the change, it’s going to work. And they’re going to support it, so it’s easier to make the change.”
At Banfield we are focused on making positive societal impact every day and that centers on how we treat our associates. Strategy is wasted without empathy. People are starving for transparent, compassionate leadership. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if your people aren’t committed, you’ve wasted your time. Investing in your people is essential to building an empathetic culture. For example, as demographics shift, we are putting increased investment in our inclusion and diversity efforts to ensure all our associates have the support needed to be their authentic selves in and outside of work. This includes launching new diversity resource groups to drive connectivity and change across our organization.
Our goal is to be a beacon for how companies ought to behave and that includes going further to include our associates in decisions and developing solutions. When people have an opinion and express that opinion, enlisting them to be part of the solution gives them agency to exert their own influence on the organization. The power in having a voice is the power of being part of changing and improving the business and ultimately broader society. Making investments like these have helped lead to our lowest turnover ever while also growing 4X faster than the industry. If you take care of your people, everything else will follow.
Llopis
Watch the following video interview that was featured at the summit.
As you reflect upon ways to operationalize inclusion to ensure enterprise growth is not at risk in today’s age of personalization - ask yourself, your team, and your organization the following questions:
- Where do you see outdated standards in your industry and/or area of functional expertise now being influenced by personalization? What do you believe are the most evident areas of opportunity?
- Why do organizations continuously find themselves stuck in the traps of standardization? Why are leaders having difficulty respecting the need to embrace today’s age of personalization? Why do you believe this is a vicious cycle? How can organizations and their leaders start to find the right balance between standardization and personalization?
Take a moment to be inclusive with your leaders, employees and the communities you serve to explore and address these questions. As you do, you will begin to see things about inclusion that others don’t, do what others won’t and keep pushing when prudence says quit.
