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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.
Kevin Kruse: Hello, everyone. I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome to Culture Code. Our guest today is the VP of Talent and Organizational Development at Collectors, Dr. Eliza Witcher. Eliza, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on.
Eliza Wicher: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Great to see you, too, Kevin.
Kruse: We met years ago at, I think, it was like a CLL forum or event, and you were presenting. You presented back then a model for leadership development that blew me away. And to this day, even though that article that I wrote about your leadership development model is several years old now, I still send people to it because I think it was such a simple, logical, impactful model. We're talking about broader cultural things here today. But I just - you really have impacted a lot of people over the last years just by sharing that work from that COO event. So thanks for that.
Wicher: Yeah, thank you so much. It was. You know, we were really proud of that work. And I definitely view it as very much tied to culture. Because, you know, at the end of the day, you're just trying to achieve behavior change at scale, and getting a whole lot of people to make some tweaks in their behavior is never easy, but I think it's always really impactful if you can pull it off. So, yeah, we were very proud of that work, and I'm really glad that that piece has been helpful for people, you know.
Kruse: Yeah, great minds think alike. For those who might not be familiar with Collecgtors, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Wicher: Yeah, it is a really neat space. Collectors helps collectors pursue their passion by providing industry-leading authentication and grading, among other offerings. So basically, what we want to do is inspire the world to collect by making it safe, easy, and fun. We currently have close to 2,000 employees across our locations in and outside of the US.
Kruse: Now, I think I understand you. But let's make it even more basic. So who is your customer? Is it someone who wants to verify an autograph, or is it the professionals that are dealing in collectibles? Tell me a little bit more about that.
Wicher: Yeah, all of those people, and more. Our customers are everything from a person who wants to verify an autograph, to someone with an extensive baseball card collection, who wants us to authenticate and grade their cards so that they can sell that card for what it is worth. It could be a coin collector or coin dealer who has a number of really exciting coins that they send to us to authenticate and grade. One thing I didn't realize was big in the coin world is that you do get a lot of fakes. And so the authentication piece becomes really, really important. We have some amazing experts in the company who are really skilled and know this stuff in a way that's incredibly rare. So it's really cool to see, incredibly cool just to see some of the stuff that comes through our doors. We do have a vault tied to our PSA part of the business. PSA is the card authentication and grading part of the business, so they do autographs and other memorabilia as well. And so with that PSA business, we have this vault where people will actually vault really expensive, incredible items with us. So it's just a really neat business to get to see some of the cool stuff that is out there in people's collections.
Kruse: I feel like if you don't already have it, you need to launch, you know, a Sunday cable show or something, showing all the people who are excited by the authenticated collectible and all those people whose dreams are dashed when they find out they bought a fake; it would be exciting TV, it would be.
Wicher: And you know, it's funny you should mention it. We actually have a Netflix series. One of our brands, Golden, is really like a high-end auction service. So it's truly a platform where people can buy and sell incredible items. And so that Netflix show has definitely been a big hit out there because people are able to see some of the cool stuff and cool collections that are out there.
Kruse: And set the context, 2,000 employees, a little bit bigger than I realized. Where's the headquarters? Everyone's curious these days. Are you hybrid? Are you remote versus everyone back to work? Where have you fallen on that?
Wicher: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Santa Ana, California. We also have a relatively new office in Jersey City, New Jersey. We have a small office in Seattle. We are soon to open an office in the Bay area. We have operations in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and a small operation in France, and we just established a very small entity in Canada. So we're expanding there as well.
Kruse: Great culture, you can see it, sometimes hard to describe what it is. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Wicher: Yeah, I would say, our culture is very friendly. It's informal. There's a ton of passion around the hobby, and it's a really fun culture. It's a place where people are very passionate about the hobby, very passionate about items and making sure we treat things with care. But we also are, you know, able to have a lot of fun with each other and just get really into some of the cool stuff that comes through the door.
Kruse: Did you quickly have to come up with a collecting hobby once you joined the company?
Wicher: I did not. You know, I am not a collector, but it's been absolutely fascinating to learn about collecting. So, it's definitely a business that has not been boring to learn about.
Kruse: Yeah, I'm sort of a minimalist. I don't get attached to too many things, but I have some first edition books, autographed books that I enjoy. So, I've got a little bit of it in me. So, you've got 2,000 employees, super cool company, global. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Wicher: Yeah, it's a really interesting company because in a lot of ways, we are like a 40-year-old startup. So, that headquarters is in Santa Ana, we've had people working there for decades, and a lot of the folks working there have family members and friends working side by side. So, we want to strive to maintain those relationships, the deep expertise, and the passion that have made us successful over the long term. But at the same time, the last couple of years, we've seen growth and change. And as I mentioned, we've got a lot of global things happening as well. So, in between global offices, global operations, and a number of people who do work remotely—although we are encouraging employees to come back to the office who are within a reasonable distance of an office. When we think about all that, we really want to build on the strong foundation that we have, which is a unique culture and a unique place, given what we do. So, we are on a multi-year journey to evolve the culture to drive a more innovative, more customer-centric, more effective business. We will do that by building on what we already have. So many of our employees collect everything from Pokémon cards to Super Bowl tickets and everything you can imagine. We have events like trade nights and game nights, as well as very active Slack channels where employees share just about every collectible you can imagine. So, it's very important for us to maintain that passion for the hobby. So even though we are striving to be more innovative, more customer-centric, more effective as a business, we still want to maintain just that passion, the fun, and the relationships that we have in the company.
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?
Wicher: Yeah, absolutely. And fundamentally, I absolutely agree; it is critical to have good, effective managers. It's absolutely critical. And I do think it's the single most important factor in a person's engagement. Now, there are going to be other things, even just like the personality of the person. Like some people are going to be just more happy with things, some people are going to be less happy with things just by nature of who they are. So there's a lot going on there. But we absolutely recognize how critical the role of the manager is because that's really the way that most people experience their organization, through that manager. One of our company values is "bring out the best in everyone." And certainly, managers are absolutely essential to doing that, and to building an engaged and high-performing workforce.
So many of our tenured managers have never received education on how to manage well, and we're still building out many of the processes and practices that guide strong people management. So last year, we revamped our performance review process to be more consistent, more in line with best practice, and really, just, I think, more so driving what the company's trying to do. The company really, prior to like 2, 3 years ago, was a much smaller company. And so a lot of those processes, tools, or programs, we're very much in the process of building out and scaling.
So that's been just a phenomenal journey because our employees and our managers are just hungry for stuff like they are just so willing and so ready to really try anything that we put in place for them, which has been just an amazing way to work. Much like what you and I talked about a few years ago in terms of putting in place a big picture approach to how we develop managers, but really kind of achieve that behavior change at scale.
We've got a few things that we're working on. First thing is that we are setting clear expectations with our managers. As I mentioned, a lot of our managers, they've never received any training, any guidance. They were promoted into their job because they were good at what they were doing. But there wasn't a lot of scaffolding to help them out. And so what we're hoping to do with setting those expectations with all of our managers is just get everybody on the same page about what it looks like day to day to be an effective manager. So, things like having regular one-on-ones, things like giving effective feedback—you know, those table stakes behaviors of good managers.
We want all of our managers to understand, "Here is the small list of things that everyone really should be doing." And so we've really simplified that to 6 behaviors we're asking everybody to focus on. We're in the process of educating our managers on those behaviors through a workshop that goes through what we're looking for from managers as well as the existing resources that we have available. Like, we launched a really great one-on-one tool just a couple of weeks ago. And so that syncs really nicely with this, in that we're not just saying, "Please do these things," but we're also helping people understand, "Here's some tools available to help you. And by the way, we're going to be rolling out a lot more."
Our plan for next year is a lot of modular training on these skills, so things like giving effective feedback, for example. We are planning to do a feeding up assessment, a way for managers to get feedback directly from their team members on how they're doing in these areas, and we'll be launching that early next year. And of course, the long-term goal is to really make this a part of how we assess performance, how we make decisions about promotions.
So, we really want to be looking at the whole big picture in terms of setting expectations, giving people the skills and the tools to meet those expectations, providing that continuous feedback, and then holding ourselves accountable to make sure that we are living what we want people to do. We're very much in the early days of that process. But we are super excited to see the impact of our focus on manager development.
Kruse: How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Wicher: Yeah, this is actually a great example of, you know, culturally, we already have just a really good culture of listening to our employees. For example, our employees often email our CEO directly with their ideas, with their feedback, and he's very engaged with our employees. So that's just part of how we do things. We have a monthly ask anything session with our CEO where employees truly can ask our CEO, Nat, any question that's on their mind, and he'll answer it. So it's very much already baked into what we do. But what us in HR are able to do is really take that a step further, formalize it, put a little bit more data around these things. We recently launched an employee engagement survey through Culture Amp that will run twice a year and be really our standard employee listening tool. We're also in the process of developing and updating employee life cycle surveys like onboarding and offboarding surveys. Of course, that manager effectiveness survey is going to be a key part of employee listening. Through those survey tools, we're looking to make things a bit more rigorous and have data that's more crisp. But a lot of these really great practices are already happening.
Kruse: You've talked about these practices. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Wicher: Yeah. One thing that's actually really recent is when we launched the new employee engagement survey. One of our top opportunity areas is around employee recognition. So employees told us, loud and clear, that they want more recognition for the good work that they're doing every day. Our leadership team was very much focused on that, and we knew we needed to take action. We quickly launched a tool called "shout outs" through Culture Amp. Culture Amp is who we use for the employee survey, and they have this recognition tool on their platform. It was super easy to implement, a very simple tool. Basically, people just go into Slack and shout out the good behavior they see from one of their colleagues. The response to this has utterly exceeded my expectations. I have to be honest; I went in thinking, well, you know, this is a simple tool, and if we're really good about driving people to the tool, we'll hopefully get good adoption. But it just blew up, and I think it really taught us a lot about just how much pent-up demand there was for a way for people to pat each other on the back and say, "Thank you, good job. That was great," because there is so much really good work happening in the company. So that's been a really phenomenal experience for us.
We do have emojis that people can select that represent the company's values, so it's another way that if somebody does a shout-out in Slack, you can add your emoji. It's just another way to recognize the things that are important to us as a company. Another really cool benefit that we really did not expect is that, based on the descriptions people are putting into the shout-outs of what they've seen from their colleagues, it's actually a great tool to learn about what other people are doing, and what's going on in the rest of the company. So we have really seen great recognition, positivity, and really good learning and awareness come out of that tool. So that's been, I think, a really easy way to not only reinforce what we want to be seeing but also really enhance the culture. People are not just calling out a good work practice, but they're also saying, "Hey, this item was so important or so special to someone, and you took extra great care of that," or "The way you resolved a customer issue." So it's really connecting people to the bigger picture of our business and our mission.
Kruse: So, the shout-out tool, I'm curious, is the reward pretty much the recognition itself? Or are you tying any other kind of points, lottery tickets, or other ways so that people get something extra out of that? What are you doing with that motivation?
Wicher: You know, it's definitely a question that has come up and a conversation we're having. I think, as a first step, we really just want to encourage the behavior. And I think this is important for us because we have evolved from a much smaller company. We're still pretty small, but we were even smaller before. And that evolution happened pretty quickly. So there are a lot of behaviors and practices that we really want to instill in our employees. So I think that getting there with the behavior is key, even as we're training our managers to give more effective feedback. There's so much overlap with the recognition piece because, like, you don't want to just say, "You know, good job." You want that recognition to be specific. You want to reference a behavior that ideally, you'd like to see happen again and again. So these things are so linked because we want feedback from managers to follow similar guidelines, which should be specific. It should be based on behavior that sometimes you want to see more of and sometimes you want to see less of, right? So I think that there are just a lot of these behaviors we really want to get people comfortable with. Eventually, it's possible we could evolve to something where there are awards or rewards tied to recognition. But right now, there's so much energy with just doing the behavior that we're really focusing on that piece.
We are also looking at other sources of recognition. So, thinking through department awards or awards for special projects. Historically, teams have just handled that on their own, but we're working on bringing together a group of people from different parts of the business who can help advise on what different parts of the business are doing. How are they handling things? So we can be consistent about how we do the awards, especially when they are tied to a reward of some sort. But also, for idea sharing. We've been able to do really cool stuff internally. For example, there's an award that we give for special cross-functional projects where the winners of the award get an actual baseball card or sports card made of them, sealed in one of our containers. It's meaningful to our people. So I think there's even more we can do in that space.
Kruse: Yeah. And Eliza, I ask because recognition is another major driver of engagement that I've done a lot of research on, and it's fascinating. What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Wicher: Yeah, there's this book called "The Trusted Advisor" by David Maister, and I think his name is pronounced Maister. This is a book that a mentor recommended to me early in my career, and it really shaped how I think about my role and being part of an organization. What I loved about that book is that it addresses what I think a lot of people spend a lot of time doing at work, which is influencing others. And I think a lot of times when people think about influencing others, they think from their own perspective, like, "I'm going to make a really strong argument and highlight what I can do in this situation." But what the book really talks about is that understanding others' needs is essential to earning trust and influence.
I found in my career that the more I focus on others' needs, the more impactful I am. That's one of those things that I think may not be relevant to every single person, but it's a book that I got tremendous value out of. I think for a lot of people, putting the pressure off of themselves as the influencer and really thinking about, "What do you, as my partner or my client, need?" It brings about a lot more creativity, trust, and better partnership. In any organization, relationships and collaboration are so important. So that book is just a winner for me.
Kruse: Eliza, I love this recommendation. "The Trusted Advisor" because very few people these days talk about that book, so it's sort of a secret gem. I think I read it 25 years ago. It was originally written for professional service firms, consultants, and such, and yet, exactly like I said, it applies to any of us. If we want to be viewed as a trusted confidant and advisor to our boss, to our peers, to our internal customers, it's so valuable. It's one of the few hardcover books I keep on my bookshelf as something to go back to over and over again. I love that book.
Wicher: It's a good one, and you know, when I've coached leaders, one thing I've heard is this kind of statement or feeling like, "I just want people to listen to me more. Why aren't people listening to me?" And this book kind of gets at that. Ultimately, we all want other people to listen to us, and if we reframe what it takes to get there, it might help us get there a little bit better, easier, or faster. So it's one I've recommended in coaching settings as well.
Kruse: Yes, great. What skill or behavior do you wish your employees did more of?
Wicher: Oh, you know, I think for us, it's really stakeholder management, slash the people side of change management. I think that every organization could use improvement in this area. I've never worked in an organization that didn't need some improvement in this area. But for us, you know, we've seen tremendous growth in the last couple of years. We are getting exponentially more complex, more sophisticated as a company. There's just a lot going on. And basically, what it took to navigate this organization a couple of years ago is very different from what it takes to navigate the organization today. So I think that for us, it's particularly important because the scale has changed, the complexity has changed. We're in a business that is ever-evolving, an industry that is, in some ways, mature-ish, but in many other ways, it's really not. Given our focus on technology and how we can drive this industry forward through technology, we really have to be very nimble and adaptive. So I think having that mindset of who are my key stakeholders? What do they need to know? What do they need to do? What do they need from me? Having that kind of outward view of who these individuals or groups are? How do I navigate them? How do I, in a systematic way, drive change through others and with others? That is something that I think we could all get better at, but especially for us at Collectors right now, it's something that is really critically important.
Kruse: Now, I usually always end with a wrap-up question. But before I go there, I'm gonna hit you with something off-script. Buckle up, here goes. So something I'm curious about is you have your Ph.D., and you are an I/O psychologist, which I think is a perfect background for anyone in leadership, culture, employee experience, CHRO, CPO, all these roles. It's incredibly rare, very, very rare. So why do you think that is? And do you think, with your rigorous academic background, has that been a help or has it been a frustration at times being a practitioner now in the real world?
Wicher: It's a great question, and I'll address that help or hindrance piece. It's been both at different times. I think probably the most helpful thing is just the knowledge that a lot of the questions that people have about people-related stuff in business or organizations, you're not the first person to ask that question. And oftentimes, there's a reasonable amount of data out there that can help you make a decision that's more than just my opinion. So I think that kind of rigor of, "Is there evidence on this that I can take a look at to guide my judgment?" I think that's super helpful.
A hindrance at times, you know, I think sometimes people have perceptions about what a person's educational background can or cannot bring to a situation. So there's some of that. I think I am honestly surprised there aren't more of us in these types of roles because we are very well suited to them. I think probably one thing that holds people up a little bit, especially earlier in their careers, is they want to use what they went to school for. In my job today, there's not that much that I use that I went to school for. There are general things that I will forever use, like theories of human motivation, for example, that I use every single day. I can see that theory in my head, and I know where to troubleshoot to get the right result from someone I'm managing, for example. So those things are there. But I'm not running regression analyses on stuff. I haven't done that in years, which is both good and bad.
There are people who can do that way better than I can, using tools I have no idea even exist. But I think that sometimes people want to use what they went to school for. So part of my journey was really letting go of what I went to school for and embracing that there are all these other challenges out there where you can still apply excellent critical thinking, look at data and evidence to guide your judgments. I've actually found that probably the roles where I've had the most impact and influence have not been the roles where I'm flexing those technical skills as much. So that's been my journey. But I'd be interested to see what other I/O psychologists have seen.
Kruse: Well, and it's interesting.
What excites you the most about your company right now?
Wicher: Yeah, I mean, I think just the growth and the change. We just launched our first-ever company-wide innovation initiative. It's open to everyone in the company, and we know there are going to be some really cool, creative ideas coming forward. I've already heard a few of them. So that's just so exciting to me that we're getting to do this, and it's not, you know, a company's 20th round of doing it. This is our first one, and we are really writing the playbook as we're playing the game.
We are constantly doing new things, trying new things. When I look at the people team, we have been doing a lot to improve our employee data and data accessibility. But our next step is going to be to start pulling insights out of that data and thinking through how we can use that data to inform our people's strategy and our practices going forward. So there's just so much space for creative ideas and creative solutions, and I'm just very excited about all of it.
Kruse: That's great. Congratulations on all the work that you're doing, and it's such a fun and passionate company. It was great to reconnect and geek out, especially on leadership stuff again. Dr. Eliza Wicher, thanks for your time today.
Wicher: Thank you so much. Great to be here.