Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to The Culture Code podcast. On this podcast, you’ll learn how to grow, shape, and sustain a high-performance culture with the CEO of LEADx, Kevin Kruse. From designing and delivering highly effective leadership development programs, to measuring and improving the employee experience, you will understand what it takes to cultivate a thriving company culture. Through interviews with Chief People Officers, deep dives into key topics, and recordings of our invite-only community sessions, we bring you cutting-edge, data-backed insights from the most desirable companies to work for in the world.
Kruse: Hello, everyone. I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome back to Culture Code. I'm excited for our guest today. She is the Chief People Officer at Resilience, Mara Strandlund. Mara, welcome! Where are you joining us from today?
Mara Strandlund: Oh, good to meet you, Kevin. Thanks for letting me join. I'm based in San Diego.
Kruse: San Diego. Normally, I'm from the beautiful city of Philadelphia, but I'm in California, up north of you, on business. I'm enjoying some better weather for sure.
Mara Strandlund: Not quite as sunny as San Diego, but it's.
Kruse: That's right. For those who might not be familiar with Resilience, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Strandlund: Well, I'll probably sound a little corporate, but at Resilience, we're a technology-focused bio-manufacturing company. Fundamentally, we believe we can be the first of its kind in transforming the way in which complex medicines are made. We were founded in 2022 because of what we believe we can achieve. Since then, we've grown to almost 2,000 employees across the US and Canada, with significant investor support who also believes in our mission. Our customers are up-and-coming biotech, established pharmaceutical organizations, and academic institutions like the Mayo Clinic and MD Anderson.
Fundamentally, we all share the same purpose: advancing drug development and supply chain solutions to withstand bottlenecks and to leverage rapidly changing technologies.
Kruse: Now, I want to make sure I heard that right. You said you started in 2022?
Strandlund: Mid 2020.
Kruse: My gosh! This is incredible growth. And shaping culture anywhere at any time is never easy. So, tell me, what kind of culture do you have? And how has it emerged?
Mara Strandlund: The most commonly used phrase that many people have said as they join us has been, "We're building the plane while flying it." At one point, we even had a little plane. "Walk and chip" is another phrase. We've been moving fast to build our business, which means we've had to make adjustments all along the way, including our culture. We've come together through a combination of organic and acquisitive activity during the worst health crisis of our time. It's been a rocket ship. But at the end of the day, I believe our mission to make life-saving medications available is what sparks us. In building a culture, we wanted to connect all these builders from different avenues. We aim not just to manufacture the recipes handed to us by our customers but to help them optimize those recipes over time, providing value-added supply chain solutions.
Kruse: How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Strandlund: That's a great question. I think, you know, leaders always come in with certain opinions and ways of working that you have to consider: is that something we want to adopt or not? As part of what we did early on, we set up company values that we call phenotypes. We have seven of them, and they serve now as a key component to our culture. In other words, our mission attracts employees who seek purpose in what they do, and our phenotypes, we believe, help foster a mindset of collaboration, of innovation, and managing the inherent tensions that exist whenever you have a bunch of people coming together for the first time amidst change and ambiguity. So, examples of the phenotypes that stand out most to employees: we hear a lot about the phenotypes around velocity, service orientation. We have phenotypes that hit the inherent tensions head on, like we combine resilience and grit, we combine quality and rigor, and of course, there is the builder mentality. If I summarize it, you know, one employee's voice kind of comes into my head where they said, "We don't need to jockey for space here because there's a lot to be done. And if you want to build something, the sky's the limit." So, between our mission and our phenotypes, that's kind of coming to life.
Kruse: Mara, I love this. I mean, I love that you've called them phenotypes. This idea of paired things is intriguing. I do a lot of work in goal setting, and often, you know, if you only have one goal, you can lean too far into a thing where strength can become a limitation. So, the idea of thinking about pairs and balance is very unique. I hadn't heard that before. So, kudos on that approach.
Strandlund: The one that comes up the most is the tension between velocity, quality, and rigor. We have to deliver the highest product; we have to do it at the fastest speed possible. At the end of the day, we talk about velocity being speed with direction. So, how are we ensuring we have the right data points and rigor, you know, to ensure we're moving in the right direction?
Kruse: What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Strandlund: Oh, I wish I had words of wisdom. I mean, at the end of the day, we're 3 years old. That means we're in the toddler stage. We're building every day, hitting our head on the coffee table as we're running around and figuring things out. What we do know is we don't just want to put posters on our walls. Not least because over 20% of our employees work remotely or in a hybrid mode, and they don't want posters on their home walls. But we try to ensure we keep phenotypes, mission, and aspects important to us from the customer angle continuously discussed, whether it's through Slack channels, new hire onboarding, people management sessions, interactive employee workshops, live Q&A in our town halls, or 15-minute CEO stand-up meetings on a monthly basis. These sessions aim to address top of mind issues and invite Q&A. I wouldn't say any of these are particularly unique or traditional. We also began the good practice of starting team meetings with a phenotype reflection. This is a moment for the team to highlight a specific employee or team that exemplified a phenotype and to take a moment to celebrate it. In such a fast-paced startup environment, we sometimes forget to celebrate our achievements, focusing instead on pending tasks and issues. We expanded this concept with a recognition program called "Grit the R", which stands for recognizing phenotypes, to celebrate these everyday moments.
Kruse: 70% of engagement is correlated to the manager, and front-line managers touch more employees than any other leadership group. What are some of the ways you develop your front-line managers?
Strandlund: Fortunately, I can answer that. Yes, because we did some pilots last year. So we went into full launch on some programs just six months ago, that are showing some really strong early outcomes. But you're right, that first year it was more about building things and making sure that people had the right basic guardrails. What we're really trying to do now is align managers from all walks of life, however they join us, into the challenges that we face as a business today, right? So our challenge was really, how do we build a surgically focused, just-in-time management series that approaches topics not just from that IQ perspective—because we can all read articles and do things like that—but from that EQ perspective? How do you really make it come to life in your own mind, so that when you leave the session, you're thinking about and applying it? Most importantly, I think it connects our new managers with each other so they can take the learning forward themselves, right, without having an intervention or a formal class. So, these are voluntary sessions, and what we've set up that's working well is a half-hour info session on a specific set of topic areas that has no more than three key takeaways, and then an hour where managers talk and learn from each other. We space them apart and supplement them with some tools and some additional e-learning options and different ways in which they can help make it come to life for themselves. A recent example; we had about 150 managers participating in one that we called Excelling Together, and that was simply, "How do you coach your employees? What are some tips to develop your employees?" in this type of build culture where there are not a lot of standard ways of doing things or standard career paths.
Kruse: How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Strandlund: First of all, don't hire shy employees. Most employees aren't shy these days, which is, you're not waiting around for that feedback, huh? And sometimes it's like, "Oh, we asked for hard-hitting feedback, and you gave it to us." But it's good, continuously listening to and not just listening to, but actually hearing the voices. It's non-negotiable. We have to do it right. So then it becomes, what are the best ways in which you can do it? Early in 2021, we put in a quarterly engagement survey; we run it ourselves. It's an in-house program but it's tied to really our first and kind of lingering objective in our people team, which is shaping our culture and connectivity. To do that, you've got to understand where we're progressing, where we are not progressing. What are real-time hotspots that we might not surface through other ways, etc.? So basically, how do we build out an alert system? Now quarterly, you can say, is too slow. You can say it's not thorough enough, but at the end of the day, it's driving awareness. We're getting some quick data; we're able to respond quickly and iterate and improve without being administrative. Like most of our programs, you put it in, you test, you iterate. You'll be fine, and you keep moving forward. So we just try and make sure we're pivoting on topics that are important, with deep diving where important and at the same time running that baseline series of questions to measure progress over time on some of our cultural elements.
Kruse: Yeah, Mara, again for our listeners, I think you're talking about quarterly pulse type surveys, and that seems to be a hot topic of just how infrequent is too infrequent. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Strandlund: Thanks for that question. Because the team put together a foundational talent and cultural platform that we call our RPP. But yeah, I'd love to brag about it. So it stands for Resilience, Performance, Planning process. And I just stumbled on it. So you know, it's a mouthful, and it's kind of useless in isolation. Side joke there is, every team has areas to improve. Ours is on branding our platforms. So if you have an idea for a better name, we're all about it. But we put it in, it's been holding for the moment. And why it's been holding, is it starts with the belief that everybody wants to be great at something. No employee comes in and says, "Let me figure out how I can be inadequate today." Similar to what I mentioned earlier, we design our programs and our talent programs to drive conversations to drive action, not to administer something. Okay? So it's, how do we relieve that administrative burden wherever possible? And what we came up with this platform is what we call a “freedom in a framework” approach in which employees and managers co-own the performance process. They manage the cadence, they manage the content, they manage the format. What we do is, we provide the framework and the prompts for discussion and for actions, and we do that via what you can call a survey or a questionnaire, but every quarter we ask certain questions, we check in, we do pulse moments. And this is a guardrail to just ensure that every employee has the opportunity to answer the question, "Do you know what is expected of you? Do you have the support you need to accomplish your goals?" So we ask some of those questions very consistently. And then we ask a few unique questions on team health topics such as, "Do we have the right people in the right meetings at the right time?" and again the employee can answer. However, they want it to be fully transparent, not only to the manager but to the more senior managers. The intended outcome is that value-added discussion. If we don't have the right people in the right meetings at the right time, which one of those is not right, or are all three not right? What team are you referring to? How can we make it better? All of those types of discussions between employees and managers are so valuable. And then, at the end of the day, to help us identify broader trends and potential problem areas that we may want to address more systematically. If we don't have the right meetings going on, do we need to look at our operational rhythms differently, for example? And so it's voluntary. We have four cycles, three of them are voluntary. One is that HR wall, an involuntary process. But in our most recent voluntary cycle this past quarter, we had a completion rate of 96% from our employees. And that tells me something's working well in this. And we've had some really good anecdotal feedback. So yeah, I'm super proud of where this is going, and we're using it as the platform for which we'll continue to build out talent activities, succession planning, performance-based compensation, all of those types of things.
Kruse: Congratulations for a non-mandatory program to get that kind of participation.
What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Strandlund: Well, there is this awesome podcast by this guy named Kevin.
Kruse: You're just trying to get preferential treatment. You just want us to put this at the top of the list.
Strandlund: Look, I'm a huge reader. I would actually start with a fictional series. So, I got sucked into a six-book series called the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. It's high action science fiction. Now, why would I call it out here? Because it incorporates mental health, personal growth, corporate politics, and then it has this really nice bent on robotics and AI, and just actually humor that made me laugh out loud. So that's been high on my recommendation list. If you want a serious read, I can recommend books that help you better understand yourself. And the one I've been recommending lately, it was recommended to me, and I'm feeding it forward, is a book by Richard Schwartz, called No Bad Parts. It's a different model for understanding and listening to our inner voices and using them as allies for ourselves.
Kruse: Both suggestions sound incredible and are new to me. What skill or behavior do you wish your employees did more of?
Strandlund: Well, you know what's stuck in my brain right now, so this is an easy answer. It is to 'assume positive intent.' Anytime there's the unknown—and we have so many unknowns in our world right now, and bad things happening out of our control—people look for the 'evil why.' If you just assume positive intent and believe that people are fundamentally trying to help other people in some way, shape, or form, and try to do a good job, I think we can all go a long way.
Kruse: It's great. You've been generous here, sharing some of your experiences, and what's been working, which is a soft form of giving advice to colleagues and others out there. What's maybe a piece of advice you would give a younger version of yourself? What's something you wish you knew on day one when you became a Chief People Officer, that you now know today? You've earned it; you've learned it the hard way. What would it be?
Strandlund: Even the most senior leader is not perfect. And they learn things. And you know things. So, I think it's that combination of believing in your knowledge and helping people understand the perspective you're coming from.
Kruse: What excites you the most about your company right now?
Strandlund: Oh, it is the mission. I truly did join Resilience because of the mission. My father received advanced therapeutic treatment that, I have no doubt, helped extend his life and maintain the quality of life through some pretty harsh treatments until the end. He was lucky because he had a doctor who researched grant programs, and he met very specific eligibility requirements for those grant programs. Otherwise, he just wouldn't have gotten the treatment. I'm just super proud and excited about the brilliant minds we have at Resilience, helping think about how to make these medicines more quickly, more safely, and at scale, so everybody can have the treatments that are out there for them.
Kruse: It's powerful, Mara. Thanks so much for the great work your company is doing, and thanks for spending some precious time with us today to share what makes your culture great and giving others some ideas for things they can blend into their own culture recipes in their organizations. Thanks.
Strandlund: Thank you. It's been a delightful conversation.