Strategic Alignment & Illustrating Paths to Better Mental Wellbeing with Cat Lewis
Speaker 1: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human- centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. This week's guest is Cat Lewis, founder and director of Culture and Transformation, an organization that is bridging the gap between leaders and people, breeding positive and productive work culture through expert guidance when delivering strategic change. Tune in to hear Dane and Cat discuss, first, this episode highlights the significance of developing a strong company narrative. This narrative is essential for helping employees grasp their individual and collective value in the organization fostering a sense of purpose and belonging. Secondly, they'll discuss Cat's MAP method for mission communication. The episode introduces Cat's unique MAP method, a strategy of employees visual illustrations to effectively communicate the company's mission, actions, and plans for success. This method aids in aligning team efforts and ensuring everyone understands the company's direction. Last, they'll discuss why it's important to foster empathy through sharing mental health stories. They'll discuss the impact of sharing personal stories related to mental health and wellbeing. This practice can cultivate deeper empathy and understanding within workplace relationships contributing to a more supportive and compassionate work environment. So, teamwork makes the dream work, and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones, and let's dive in together.
Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group. And today, I'm joined from London by Cat Lewis. Cat is the founder and director of Culture and Transformation, which is her new business, which we'll be talking about today. She's also an author of three different pieces of work. My favorite is the one I came across just recently, which is The Monster in the Office, but also The Little Unicorn, which I think was the first piece, and then Culture Vulture. So, welcome to the show, Cat.
Catrin Lewis: Thank you so much for having me, Dane. It's lovely to be here.
Dane Groeneveld: You bet. So, we were just before the show talking about what it is to be a founder and building identity and doing work that you're passionate about, but before we jump into all of that, maybe you could give the listeners a little bit more of your story about how you came to be at this point in time in building what you're building.
Catrin Lewis: Sure. Yeah, 2023 has been such an interesting year for me and it's funny that I've ended up founding a company called Culture and Transformation because it's been a year of transformation for me and to get me to this point has been 11 years working in a company which really helped to establish culture as an important strategic tool within any business. So, I worked for 11 years in an employee engagement company called Reward Gateway and started there when employee engagement wasn't a term that many people even knew. Many of my friends thought I worked in weddings when I mentioned the word engagement, and it was much more around salary sacrifice benefits, which is something we have in the UK, but it went on to grow from more than just salary sacrifice and discounts to over a decade of experience in that area, understanding the 10 key elements that really contribute towards an engaging place to work. There was the book that was published on the engagement bridge and I learned a lot in that whole time just working for a really incredible founder, great CEO, and helping to build the platform that has helped thousands of employees drive engagement within their businesses and create these amazing cultures. So, having been there for that period, I wanted to use all of that knowledge and really get to the point where I could make the most impact and seeing different strategies come out to play. I could always see that really a lot of the success sat with the CEO and the leadership team, which is when I knew it was my time to break away from the company and become a consultant myself and work directly with the leaders to get them engaged with their employees as much as the HR teams that were striving to engage the employees with the business. So, that's where I got to and yeah, it was this year, which I founded my company and starting to practice that now, which has been really great, but a very different year for me compared to what I've been used to for the last 11 years.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, very different and it is always exciting and daunting I guess in equal measures when you go out and start something brand new, particularly when you've already got a lot of the experience, but you're starting to lean into a slightly different customer group in terms of working with all of those leaders and how they show up.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah. Experiencing different types of leaders and different types of companies has been really interesting. I think it's understanding the different people put leaders very much on a pedestal and just expect them to know everything, have the ultimate confidence, understand exactly where the business is going, whilst also bearing responsibility for any number of employees that they have. And I think it's becoming more and more evident that leadership is actually a very vulnerable place, not that anybody would probably describe it in that way. You always have to say it's strong, we know where we're going, but actually it's a very vulnerable place. It can be quite isolating and there is a shift that happens in your relationships once you go into that position, you were just seen differently. So, helping to support people in that role I think is really critical to ensuring the success of any strategy and making sure that they have also got the backup that they need to deliver on all of that. It's just a critical part of strategic success.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because you've very intentionally used the word strategy or strategic three or four times just since we've started the conversation.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: And it's real because you see a lot of noise out there in the market, particularly with what we saw happen in Silicon Valley where people talked about engagement as ping- pong tables and pizza parties. But you are talking about strategy, you are talking about how a leader is setting a strategy for the company and then how they're asking the employees to get behind the company strategy, but then at the same time their personal roles in showing up for the employees. And that's a lens that we don't see spoken about or intentionally addressed when often we run into all of these culture initiatives and we're not thinking about that holistic framework.
Catrin Lewis: Hundred percent. Yeah, that's sort of why I started what I'm doing as well because there is so much you can do. There is so much in terms of benefits that you can put out there, and they're all fantastic. Love them. They're a big part of talent and attraction, and they're going to make fantastic USPs for your company, and recruitment's hard. So, do as much as you can treat your employees well. But the vital part of retaining your employees, I think, comes down to leadership a lot of the time. So, what type of leadership culture are you delivering to your employees, and also, on the basis of what do humans enjoy. We love stories. We love being part of stories. We love seeing ourselves in the narrative. We love the recognition and that social empowerment when it's shared that you're doing a great job, it makes your work purposeful, it gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Those for me are really the core part of engagement and what it really means to give good wellbeing at work. The rest of it at all really nice perks that you can have, but where are you fitting into this company's narrative and their strategy and the achievements that they have along the way. That's what I believe comes as job satisfaction.
Dane Groeneveld: Yes. No, I like the way that you bring the purpose. Dan Pink, who I love, talks about purpose with a small piece. So, there's big P purpose, what the company's purpose is, and then there's small p purpose, what your purpose is within your role in the company. And I love the way you tie that because it's just simple, right? A lot of people will push back when they're told, " Oh, well, I need to subscribe to the company's purpose." And to your point earlier, sometimes leaders haven't really defined a great purpose for their company, but if they can at least know what their small p purpose is in their role in their team, then that does drive wellbeing and job satisfaction. There's no doubt.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah. It absolutely does, especially now when we're asking employees to perhaps work remotely or in a hybrid world, how do you keep them focused on what they should be doing day to day or ensuring everybody stays on the same page, that everybody is moving the company forward. That reminder of here is your own goal that you'll set, here is how it's plugged into a bigger vision of the whole company succeeding and regularly communicating those through. It is just what people need just generally. It's the same across our mental fitness as it is in our physical fitness. It keeps you on track very much like having a personal trainer would at the gym. This would be your goal setting, your purpose, your why are you here, what do you want to achieve? Yeah, it is what keeps everybody on track and moving forward.
Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. So, when you come into a team, whether it was in your past at RG or more recently since you've started your own business? Where do you start? Is it going in and doing a discovery process to understand what the steady state is or are there certain exercises that you can do that just get people thinking in the right way? I mean, it's a vast landscape to be venturing into.
Catrin Lewis: It's quite vast. It's vast and I am always beginning, well, wanting to do a little bit of a top and tail. So, interviewing with the top leadership level and understanding how each of those see the company. It's interesting because many CEOs will have their own vision of what the company is and what the direction is and what their leadership team looks like, and they don't necessarily get the same conversation from their team as I will, so I can go in and have an interview with them and understand where their weaknesses are. I find with majority of the leaders I'm talking to, they'll have those qualities for doing an excellent job and getting the results, but perhaps they haven't exactly developed the soft skills that would go with leadership and being community leaders as well. And that can bring a lot of worry or anxiety for them as well, thinking about public speaking or about being somebody that everybody looks up to. So, that would be a part of that and then doing the same with employees, whether through focus groups or through surveys, whatever is the most scalable across the business, but understanding what voices and key trends can be of filtered out there to underpin the build of a really effective company strategy. And then, the first piece that I believe is really important to any successful change management is putting all the ideas to paper first. If it doesn't make sense on paper, how is it going to make sense in real life? So, before acting, you would be taking people through a workshop there to define and design the strategy, and that would be all the anecdotal and analytical feedback that you've got, and then the leaders in the room being able to contribute to that as well, understanding what the aspirations are of the company, the needs of the business, goal setting, which is such a critical part of that, and then how you're going to engage people going forward. So that kind of gives the content then to kick off a really great communication training plan across the business, starting with leadership level and then through to managers as well so that everybody has got the skillset to really keep driving and talking around the strategy that's needed to achieve the company goals going forward. I think it would be, it's a shame because so many leaders would get together anyway and think, " Right, we've got this now, we've talked about it," but then they don't share it openly or it's gone. I was reading earlier today about Oatly who have done such an incredible job with their company strategy. It's beautiful, and it hasn't changed since 2012. It stays true to what it was, and they still give the same beautiful book that they created for their employees at the time of going through the change management of their complete brand, Refresh. It's still given now to new employees. Now for me, that is a sign of a really, really strong company strategy. They know their identity, know exactly what they need to do, and they understand how to drive a revolution in their industry to get people bought into a narrative that they can tell over and over and over. It becomes repeatable, scalable, exactly in the same way that their product would, they're doing it with their strategy as well. If anybody hasn't seen that, you can go and have a look at it. It's a fantastic look at how Oatly changed the non- dairy industry completely and just, yeah, it's a beautiful story.
Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. And I love the way that you use story there because a lot of companies have often considered strategy as a document and then some spreadsheets and a lot of very granular, heavy detail. " In year one, we're going to do this. By year three, we're going to do that." And maybe it's somewhat paternalistic. A lot of leadership teams will often keep that strategy tucked away for the senior layers and they'll only communicate what's important when it's important down through the teams, which I think is where there's a lot of slippage and leakage. But if you make it a story, I haven't seen the Oatly strategy, but I'll jump into that after this. That story is so much more easy to access and associate with for team members and even for customers and vendors,
Catrin Lewis: Yeah. People read in different ways. So, there's some people that are fantastic at reading spreadsheets and numbers. I'm not one of them. So, I think that's part of why I've always been interested in turning it into a story, but also because stories are our natural instinct. We've been telling them since time began for us. I think if you are able to make it into a memorable story that people can remember, starting with the why, explaining the future vision that people can hope for and aspire to, that's what's going to keep people engaged. The numbers are important. I think the spreadsheets have their time and place, but it doesn't translate into a way that is really accessible for every learning style is memorable for everybody, and there's just different ways and so many different creative materials out there that we can use to bring a strategy to life rather than just, " Here's how it works in numbers on the spreadsheet, let's get going with this." It's just not how people buy into strategy.
Dane Groeneveld: No. And there's always a way to financially engineer the numbers. Smart people can get into a business and they can be like, " Well, we said we wanted to be a high growth business," but nowhere in here did it say we want to be a high quality business. So, you see a business all of a sudden lose track because they're chasing revenue or chasing margin...
Catrin Lewis: inaudible.
Dane Groeneveld: And they lose their way. Where a story where it's like, " We want to be high growth, but we will never concede on this value in our product." That's easier for people to come back to.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, I think numbers are good to make targets and measurement, but they do not drive behaviors, and that's what you need to deliver on a strategy, a behavior change. So, it doesn't really give me much instruction if it says, " Oh, we need to increase this by 27%. That's what you need to do." But more importantly to many people in their role is how do you want me to do that? And that's exactly why written strategy shared in the most creative way that you can is going to be the vital point of making you different and making you somebody that I'm going to engage with rather than just 50% increase, please.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I actually heard that connection that you just made. That story is actually better at driving behaviors, but that makes total sense too. I mean, so often, you'll get caught up in compensation plans, particularly for sales teams, and how do we set the compensation plan against certain sizes of accounts or length of contracts or whatever it might be to drive the right behavior. And it seems like that's a never- ending process because you build a plan and then it works for these people, it doesn't work for those people. You overlooked something here, so you have to change it in the next year where actually, if you can come away from the metrics driven incentives and you drive behaviors through story, you're probably, it sounds like you're going to land a much more consistent and evolving pathway for the wider team.
Catrin Lewis: Exactly. And I think we were talking before about The Little Monster, for instance, that I created The Monster in the Office. That is part of a wellbeing strategy if we talk about it in that respect. So, having there is a story to then initiate behavior change. It's done in a format that is shareable, that will make people smile, that is relatable. The point of the story is behavior needs to change here, we need to talk about it differently. And the nicest thing that you said was, " Oh yeah, I went and shared it straight away," and you showed other people. I don't know if you'd do the same if it was just a standard, we need to talk, have two more conversations or open up this much in a much more formulaic way where it was using something with creative language and imagery that's there and it's NVIDIA and it's also in a book format that you can engage with depending on what your learning style is. It's a lot more shareable and something you're excited about rather than just sharing the vision through numbers.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, actually that's a great point too, because imagine, I could see myself at a barbecue this weekend telling everyone about The Little Monster in the Office. I'd be like, " Hey, I was talking to Cat. She built this and this is what I took away from it, and this is how it applies." Like I shared with you for my son in the classroom versus for the kids on the football pitch. It's very universal.
Catrin Lewis: Exactly, yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: But I can't see myself walking out to the barbecue and sharing the new sales incentive plan that we just drafted this week with my buddies and saying, " Try your kid on this. He might do his homework better." That's just not going to happen.
Catrin Lewis: Not at all. And I think in his other example, and I said, "Oatly, they have done such a great job there. It's something that I will think of when I see their brand in the stores. It's something I would share with other people to say this is fantastic." I did a strategy project previously and we wanted to create a company strategy that everybody could follow and align with and understand their purpose, but also make it seem that it had been made with a human approach to it. So, we used an illustrator to sort of bring it to life and we called it a strategy MAP meaning mission, actions, and plans to get there. So, it worked with giving direction and then also touching on all of those points there. And it was so nice when it was handed out and one of the employees came back to me and they had framed it and put it on their wall at their home office because they loved it so much. And I don't think it would've had the same effect if we'd had a fantastic spreadsheet to then be framed at home and be something that the person is proud of and shares and talks about with their friends and family to be like, " Oh, I've got this here." There's a great, great bonus in engaging creative people and just looking at the mind in the ways that it likes to engage with things outside of the office and how you can use those benefits to attract them to things that you are doing within the office.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I want to dig in a little bit deeper to that MAP acronym. I hadn't come across that before. So, mission, actions and plans. I'm a very visual person. I love whiteboards.
Catrin Lewis: Oh, yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: So, that just excites me the way you explained it. So, what does that look like?
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, sure.
Dane Groeneveld: So, it's one big poster with lots of drawings on it, words, how do you build it?
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, interesting. So, maybe some people will resonate with this. When people talk about strategy, I was told for a long time, " You are going to be looking after strategy, Cat. That's going to be your responsibility." I had no clue what they were talking about because I'm a very visual person. I just wanted to know, " Well, what does this look like?" And I don't think anybody, there's no one size fits all for strategy at all. But for me, as soon as we had feedback from employees saying, " We feel lost, there's no direction here." It looks like they need a MAP. And for me, I was then thinking about how can I make this work in terms of strategic concept as well and all the things that they're going to be needing for company direction and leadership, and it just worked. I was like, well, everybody needs the MAP and this illustration's going to need to include the company mission, the actions that we need to take, and then the plans to get there. It was done on paper first of all, so just top section, middle section, and third, but the company is largely millennial and I wanted to make it more visual and exciting for them to engage with. So, I happens to know a MAP illustrator and I worked with them to sort of bring it to life in a completely different way to just a typed- out piece of paper. So, we created this beautiful illustration which had the different office locations around the globe and brought together the recognition in the stars that were illustrated in the sky and have all those different components as part of a drawing that people go, " Hey, what's that? I want to look at that. It looks great."
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, cool.
Catrin Lewis: Rather than just a front page, which was just a little bit, I mean it had the information there, but was it visually pleasing for everybody and something that they were just turning around and touching and feeling and all of those things., you know?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, that sounds like a great project and a fun one too.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, I think it was really nice. One of the best things was taking it back to the CEO and seeing how proud they were to present something so different. I don't think they had ever considered working with an illustrator before to sort of bring the vision to life, and you can use templates and slides of course, but when they were doing the all company updates and having it so that it was something people had never seen before. It was completely unexpected what was going to be next, and it just made it extremely personal. You're not going to see this anywhere else, was something they're really, really proud of. And I just loved seeing how much they enjoyed it.
Dane Groeneveld: That's really fun. And specifically, the difference between an action in that context and a plan, is there a more concrete example that you could share that shows how that flows?
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, of course. So, the company mission would be the overarching strategy that everybody aligns to, and then you have the actions, which would be the headlines of what are the company pieces that you need to get there and then the plans to achieve them, which would probably be going down to what you said there about the little p, like how does everybody get involved in these different parts there? So, the plans to get there, the plans to achieve the action.
Dane Groeneveld: Got it. So, say for example, one of our actions was to open four new offices across the US, so we're now coast to coast. Then the plan might involve building a graduate training center so we can develop our own talent to seed into the offices.
Catrin Lewis: Exactly.
Dane Groeneveld: Got it.
Catrin Lewis: Plans and who's going to be involved in that responsibilities, just breaking down what those actions really are, and then each of those would have a subset of plans to achieve it.
Dane Groeneveld: That's really cool. That's another thing I'm going to look at.
Catrin Lewis: I made it quite simple. And anybody that would then come to me and say, " I need to do this project." And they'd probably get sick of me saying it, I'll be saying, " Well, you need to create a MAP, mission, action, plans there." And it was just a nice way of making the strategy less scary for people to say, " It really doesn't have to be any more difficult than this." If you can define those, then you're onto a winner.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, absolutely. And I would imagine when it comes to, we've talked about leaders and leader's roles in the, I guess, the top tier of leadership setting, which is the CEO or the general manager or the MD. But once you start really affecting transformative change, you've got multiple departments, so you almost need those department leaders to know how they help each other. Maybe it's finance and sales, maybe it's marketing and R& D. So, I'd imagine that MAP helps translate across some of those departmental silos.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, you'd hope so, right? I'd hope so.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
Catrin Lewis: I was reading earlier around how, so I've always used the iceberg of ignorance to illustrate the importance of feedback to business leaders. So, that's where it says that business leaders would only know 4% of the problems and then at the bottom of the iceberg underneath the water, you've got the frontline employees knowing 100% of the issues, but they just don't filter up to the top. And then, I always thought, I wonder how many employees actually are measured to know the strategy in the company. It's completely flipped. So, the research that was there was saying that 5% of employees understand company strategy. It's just not filtered down. They don't understand it, and it just seems absolutely bizarre to me that those two data sets have stayed for such a long time in those two complete opposites when it could be as simple as giving people a MAP to understand each other's worlds and then all of the challenges would disappear.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's a great way. I love the iceberg of ignorance, by the way.
Catrin Lewis: It's a classic.
Dane Groeneveld: But yeah, I'm seeing, it is a classic, and when you invert that and start to ask why are we suffering with so much challenge with employees being engaged in their jobs, in their teams and their companies. If you're not inviting them to understand the strategy and to contribute in their own way, whether that's an idea or doing something differently or coaching someone on something like a blind spot, if you're not inviting them, then that's a lot of wasted intellect right across a large organization.
Catrin Lewis: It sure is. One of my first managers always said, " If you want employees to make the same decisions as you do and understand your business decisions, you have got to give them the same information as you've had available to you because if it's a logical decision that you've made, they will then be able to come to that decision themselves." So, that has really stuck with me through the last 10 years of my career is open source, sharing of information with people so that they can come to the same conclusions as you and also massively help them on their professional development, their understanding of just how businesses work and working on inclusivity as well. It just touches on so many different aspects of experience.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, definitely. The inclusivity one's real too, because the word that actually came up this morning when I was listening to your podcast with Ollie Henderson was rigidity, and there was something that you said, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but so many organizations suffer from this sense of rigidity, which is, " Hey Dane, the company does this. We use these systems, and your role is that." And so, you get stuck. And actually, I know that it was you guys were talking about, startups and how founders will often just grab who they've got and promote them into new roles because they rely on them. There's trust there. So, that in itself is another form of rigidity where if you're inviting people to act like an owner, employee, and ownership mindset, know the strategy, it has to be far more inclusive because now you've got a much wider cross section within the organization and outside of the organization that might come in and contribute an idea, " Hey, I see you're trying to get here. Have you ever thought of this?"
Catrin Lewis: I think you're completely right. It needs to be removed. Having that just works so much better in terms of being an agile company that can react to change better. You can reduce the need for recruitment because if you have been keeping somebody informed on your strategy, you are already doing succession planning into roles straight away and have it really nice so that people are staying for you longer within the company, less onboarding for senior roles because you've been able to figure out and drive leadership qualities by remaining inclusive across everybody to say, " They're right, they get this, this you see is next." So, yeah, it's just a complete no-brainer for me.
Dane Groeneveld: No, that's neat. So, we've talked a lot about how you engage and some of the tools that you'll bring to a leadership team when they're driving that strategy definition. You said design definition and then communication. Once it's communicated, obviously, the work has only just started. How are you seeing some of the best teams out there come back around to these communication strategy documents, opportunities to revisit or refresh?
Catrin Lewis: Sure.
Dane Groeneveld: Is there a cadence that you see or an exercise that tends to be helpful for these teams?
Catrin Lewis: Yeah. So, I try my best to inspire and drive a high cadence of content throughout a company because you are up against fierce competition for getting people's attention. There's a lot going on in the world and it's important that you are able to remind people week on week why they're here, what their purpose is, what's been happening in your world and how you might need to adapt or change and just keeping a connection with your people, a sense of community. Because something could happen one week at work, finished for the week and they leave on a Friday thinking, " I'm not sure if this is for me." They come back in on the Monday and they've got another announcement from their CEO, which I always try and inspire is a weekly communication from a leadership team and they can be reminded of, " Actually, this is what I'm here for." It's like, " Just move on and refocus on the reasons that I joined this company. I am engaged, I'm ready, I'm motivated." So, I personally have a pattern of communication, which I try to drive with the clients that I work with, and it would be starting the week off with leadership communications on the Monday, which relates to their mission and purpose, space for talking about other strategic or change initiatives would be happening on the Tuesday, and then space four every Wednesday talking around what's happening in the product that they're working with world.
Dane Groeneveld: Oh, interesting.
Catrin Lewis: And then, at the end of the week, softening the communications while people are getting a little bit more tired and thinking about the weekend, to recognition on Thursdays, and then end of week would be people news and also encouraging managers to do a sort of reflection of the week to say, " Thank you for all of this. Here's what our goals are going to be next week." So, it's daily communications. It might seem a lot, but now people are working hybrid. You have to remember, you could be the only person that they speak to that day. I mean, I work at home on my own. You are one of the only people I've spoken to today because I haven't been out with clients or anything like that. And that could be the same for anyone that you are hiring. So, how are you ensuring that you've got that connection with them on a daily basis in the same way that so many other online medias do?
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's cool. I guess that drives a lot of front of mind awareness. How does it then lead to people, going back to inclusivity, how does that then bring out behaviors in the team, that high cadence, that consistency of messaging?
Catrin Lewis: Sure. I think it does take a while to embed this. I know I've seen it with companies that the increase in content can be, or sometimes for clients actually working on a decrease of content now, which is interesting. It helps to set the energy for the week. So, you know when you get in what the expectation is, you're creating habits for people. Teams love habits. There's no need for uncertainty or worry or Sunday scaries as people call it, because when you get there on a Monday, you're going to be told exactly what's happening in the company that week. You can remove anxiety for people when you need to do big change announcements because they already know your tone of voice about your character. They've already built so much trust with you. So, in terms of team behaviors, say it is habit-forming, it's reassuring, it is setting the energy for the week and it is just generally keeping them on track of what to focus on rather than perhaps sticking to old habits or old ways or talking about the work the company was a year ago because no one has spoken to them since then and told them about the change. You are keeping them engaged with the narrative and the company story as it unfolds, as it's happening like real time.
Dane Groeneveld: Very cool. I like that. I hadn't thought about removing the uncertainty or creating more familiarity and trust, but...
Catrin Lewis: I think that's a huge part, especially now when, I mean LinkedIn's been a horrible place to go in and see how difficult it's been for recruiters at the moment, all of the talk of the war on talent and all of this, and people's first thoughts would generally be, " There's change. Am I going to lose my job? The economy is a complete mess right now. What does that mean for me?" That's just where your survival instinct goes through and your fear and all your worry. So, it's critical really for the first layer of your wellbeing strategy before jumping to gym discounts and financial wellbeing and all of those things. Make sure people understand the security of their role by telling them exactly what's happening in your company, the position that they are in, educating them about the market and what's happening there, and you will be relieving a huge amount of worry and anxiety for them on a weekly basis.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's right. Because a former mentor of mine was great. She said to me, " Don't protect your team from the bad news if the market's getting tough or anything else because if you don't talk about the challenges you're facing, they're just going to make them up and they may make up a worse reality, and that actually may become a bit of a self- fulfilling prophecy." Now, the team's saying, " Well, the bosses aren't talking about leadership, not talking about this challenge and how safe are we?" And they're not doing their best work and you lose another customer or two or proposal doesn't land and now you're just compounding.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, exactly. It's just worry upon worry upon worry. Whereas, I just think so much is open source now. It's weird to think of an environment where you wouldn't have access to information or I could go on and find pretty much what I wanted online about the company. I can go on and see things, so it'd be weird if it wasn't the same internally. If I'm a customer and I can access all that information, internally, your employees are customers as well, so they should be having that same experience internally.
Dane Groeneveld: And I guess that's even more so in a publicly traded company because they've got so much more of their results and performance out there.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, indeed.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.
Catrin Lewis: Indeed.
Dane Groeneveld: Wellbeing. I mean I think that's a great point for us to be sort of wrapping up the conversation on. It's a big reason I love The Little Monster, and you've mentioned it a few times here in the conversation around being not responsible for, but supporting an environment where the wellbeing of employees is held as important and time and space and language is created for it. And I think that's why I love The Little Monster story because it goes a little bit of a retrospective for those who haven't seen it and it suggests, " Hey, we stop talking about our feelings. It's mental health, it's not mental illness." If someone's having a tough time, why can't they share it? If someone's having a good time, why can't they share it? And we start to all be a bit more aware of each other's agency as individuals and within the teams that we're in. Can you tell me a little bit more about what it is that's really captivated your attention in wellbeing and what it looks like in great teams?
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, sure. I have worked with a great group that really changed my mindset towards mental health and talking about it within the workplace. So, I was approached by five employees originally and they wanted to see a shift in how our leadership were approaching wellbeing. There's a lot of focus on physical wellbeing and doing workshops and things, having guest speakers come in to raise awareness around mental health and these different aspects, but it still felt like it wasn't quite hitting on their personal experiences at work. And what their initial group wanted to do with me was write open letters to the company about their experience of depression, postnatal depression, and all sorts of different things that they were experiencing in terms of their own mental health. And we created a campaign around it. I also took part in it. I believe by you should get involved yourself and talked about living with grief. And I remember at the time CEOs, I don't understand how this relates to business, but I said, " It's not going to cost anything. Just let me go with it. We've got all the tools, it's a campaign, I'm going to run it." And as soon as we put the first one out, everything changed, just showing and letting that person have space to talk around the experience that they'd had. We had more views on that article, I think, than we'd had on any that month or maybe even that quarter. People really wanted to start talking about this. The next four went up after that. And then, I had 20 more come back to me of stories that people wanted to share and then even more.
Dane Groeneveld: Wow.
Catrin Lewis: We had been doing wellbeing surveys for years, having the analytical data come through, but those are just numbers in a box, which is why I've used the box analogy at the start of the story. Those had just been scores out of one to 10, which are a good guide, but they hadn't really given leadership team chance to build empathy and understanding for the experiences of others because they'd just be looking at it. As we said at the start, this is coming around nicely as numbers on a spreadsheet and how they can impact change. This was going into actual details of, okay, here's what I'm experienced at work and here's how I self- manage it and here's how you can be more aware. I didn't have any of the leaders say they'd never experienced or seen anything so open like this before, but it just changed the whole shift of the company and it was a very enlightening experience, I think, for a lot of them. They changed talking about it themselves to the point where the person who had said to me, " I'm not sure what this does for business." Actually, months later, decided to put their own story out there...
Dane Groeneveld: Wow.
Catrin Lewis: And talk about their vulnerability and the experience they'd had. It just embedded the trust so much deeper and the empathy so much deeper in that company than anything that I'd really tried to drive change with before. So, having that there is just like, here's our basis for sharing our mental health stories would then be able to have more meaningful conversations I suppose, about, well, who wants to champion this in the workplace? Why are we doing this mental health campaigns? We've got real stories here by people that have lived it and be able to support each other so much more. That's what changed it for me, like that initial one. So, after that, I've just been inspired by companies such as in the UK we have Sanctus and the Self Space. We've now got walk- in places where you can go and get mental health support on the high street in London, which is just amazing rather than it being tucked away. There's a real shift that's happening and it's just a shame that companies are losing such great talent and employees because they're not brave enough to have these conversations of just make it accessible to people. So, all of the stories that I've written are just my way of trying to make those conversations easier for businesses to have because I know the first one is always the most difficult and the intention with The Little Monster in the Office is like, take it, share it, publish it on your internet and just see who speaks up and who says what will come from it. I am more than happy for people to use it and try and inspire those open conversations more because it makes a really nice tool for people to be able to then use The Monster as a way of talking about it rather than having to say me. It can be used as a great tool for conversation.
Dane Groeneveld: It's fantastic. I love the way that you've personified that monster or the anxiety or whatever form of mental health it is, grief, stress. It's real.
Catrin Lewis: I try to make it inclusive as possible. Yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. It's cool. And I love the fact that even in the story you touch on the real science behind anxiety in some of these feelings is that it's a check. It's telling us, " Hey, a lion just walked into the campsite. I should be anxious." Some of these feelings, I think because people have been told to put them in the box and not talk about them. They're not listening to what is telling our bodies or our teams about customers. So, I think it's a very constructive way of framing it.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, it's an important way. I think sometimes people can switch off, if you went into all the scientific details as you've just said, I love reading all about that stuff just because I'm a passionate people person. But if I was then to start talking about brain chemistry and why your body's doing this, they would just switch off.
Dane Groeneveld: They're done.
Catrin Lewis: So, trying to put it into a format that anybody can understand, even children would be able to get that and just understand exactly what it is we're talking about here. It is an important part of making that story as inclusive as possible for everybody and making it so they're not going to be overwhelmed with pages and pages of scientific research and explanation or these big business books or wellbeing books that people struggle to read or any of that. It's a nice five- minute story, I think, that you can listen to in your break with your team, and then just have a really cool conversation about what did you get from that.
Dane Groeneveld: No, that's neat. We'll make sure we add a link in the podcast when we release it, and obviously, people can find that on your LinkedIn profile too. I mean, as I look back over the conversation, Cat, it's been awesome talking about importance of strategy story. Obviously, the Oatly example, I'm going to chase up on a look at how that story is a conduit for driving real behavior through organizations over time. I'm definitely going to follow up with you on the MAP. Being a visual person, I want to build one of these MAPs.
Catrin Lewis: Oh, cool. That'd be great.
Dane Groeneveld: That'd be a fun project to collaborate on. And then, some of these pieces as you go into the high cadence and the inversion of the iceberg of ignorance, so more than 5% of your teams know the strategy. It's all super powerful, and I think you tie it up well on wellbeing. If we can create a way to invite our teams to live the experience of not only where we're going, but how we're getting there on a weekly basis, that's a great place for The Future of Teamwork.
Catrin Lewis: It sure is.
Dane Groeneveld: So, if any of our guests want to find you to do some work with their organizations, what's the best way to connect?
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, sure. So, I think LinkedIn's probably my favorite way to connect with people. You can find me on there, Catherine Lewis. And I do have a website as well, cultureandtransformation. co. uk. It's in the process of being built at the moment because I am a one woman show, so yeah.
Dane Groeneveld: One woman wrecking crew.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah, there's a lot to build when you start founding your own things.
Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's it.
Catrin Lewis: So, LinkedIn's great, and I always do my best to share everything on there that's inspired me or things that I'm creating that I think can help others and stories I'm hearing that I think could inspire others. So yeah, find me there.
Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. Well, I'm definitely inspired and thank you for doing the work you are doing and sharing this time with us and the audience.
Catrin Lewis: Yeah. Thank you very much for having me.
Dane Groeneveld: Thanks, Cat.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition, and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to the futureofteamwork. com. There, you can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together, we can build the future of teamwork. Until next time.
DESCRIPTION
Cat Lewis joins The Future of Teamwork host and HUDDL3 CEO Dane Groeneveld for a spirited conversation on helping companies adopt change management techniques that can align employees to a business strategy, while emphasizing the incentives for improving mental wellbeing, employee purpose, and inclusivity. Cat is the Founder and Director of Culture and Transformation, a company that helps leaders breed positive and productive work cultures through practices like strategic focus on how narrative impacts vision and purpose, the MAPs framework, and more.