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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 - LEADx: Hello, everyone. I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome back to another episode of The Culture Code. Our guest today? I'm very excited for this one: Chief People Officer at Symphony, Courtney Panik. Courtney, welcome! And where are you joining from today?
Courtney Panik: Thank you for having me, Kevin. I've been so looking forward to this conversation since you reached out. I'm joining from my apartment in New York City.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: New York City. I have a daughter that lives in New York City and works in Brooklyn. I don't get in as often as I should. You're making me feel guilty as a dad, but I haven't visited her in a while.
Courtney Panik: Come on, you could come visit her. You can come visit me; swing by Symphony anytime.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I love it. Tell us, you're in Manhattan. For those who might not be familiar with Symphony, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Courtney Panik: Sure. So, Symphony is a communications platform for financial services. The platform we offer to our clients is secure and compliance-enabling. Some of the features and product solutions we offer are things like chat, file sharing, video calls, markets, voice and video data, analytics, and business intelligence. One of the things that makes Symphony unique is that our product was created by the industry for the industry. All of our investors are from the top banking institutions around the world, and they chose to come together to create this common platform to use and to do business together.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Wow! That kind of guarantees the old product-market fit when the investors, the founders are actually like, this is what we want. So they just built it themselves.
Courtney Panik: It sounds like they built what they needed, and the symphony practice was the result of it. But as a company, we're about 500 employees located in 10 cities around the globe. And you know, growing every year.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: That's great. We're here to talk about culture, of course, and a lot of people, you know, think culture's kind of a squishy thing. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Courtney Panik: Yeah, even as a Chief People Officer, I do find this question hard and squishy. The way I describe culture is, culture is not what you do, but how you do it. It's how things get done. It's never static. It's constantly evolving as the company evolves, as the environment evolves, as the company changes and matures, your culture changes and matures with it. And Symphony's culture is really driven by who we want to be for our customers. We really strive to be a trusted solution for our customers. And in order to do that, we have to reflect that level of trust that we want our customers to have in us with each other internally. So when I think about our culture and reflecting that trust and building a culture of trust, it's things like transparency, accessibility, being inclusive, holding each other accountable. But the question you've asked is so timely because we actually just finished our employee engagement survey, our annual survey, and we just recently got the results a couple of weeks ago. And we have a question on that survey about culture. So I think the most accurate description of Symphony's culture would come directly from our employees and what they said in the survey. Our employees overwhelmingly use words to describe our culture as inclusive and open, where they feel their opinions are listened to, and people feel heard. They used words like supportive. There were a lot of comments around helping each other. Great teammates, I feel supported by my colleagues and my managers. There's a sense of community within Symphony. And then passion really shone through as well. We're passionate about our product and the expertise that we bring and the impact that we have in the broader community and with our customers. Reading that and reading through the results, and yes, I read through all of the comments and I've combed through the results many times, is really encouraging. What is truly encouraging when I read that feedback from our employees and see how I'm tracking informally if we're moving in the right direction for culture is that a lot of those words are actually our company values. So that is a really nice check and balance. Words like community, passion, expertise, trust – those are our values. So it's great to see that our employees see that in our culture.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Did your engagement report include a nice, pretty word cloud without a word cloud? What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Courtney Panik: Sure. So Symphony is a relatively young company. We're just starting our tenth year. And we have, over the past, let's say, three years, made an intentional effort to shift from startup mode to scale-up mode, which is exactly where we need to be in our business maturity model. So we are still in that scale-up mode. And so, a lot of the work that we're doing is just now. It started off a little bit like block and tackling, and now it's becoming more and more sophisticated and creating higher impact and has been evolving. And that goes along with culture. So it is definitely something that's going to be ongoing. We do think about our culture and the evolution of it. We spend a lot of time upfront building the foundational blocks to allow us to scale and build upward. And we really needed this transition from a business perspective. So, if I think about the majority of our cultural drivers, it's really a combination of informal things that have come through the employees or through specific leaders or different locations around the world, as well as probably an equal number of formalized programs that are deliberately put in place.
Some of the things that we did in the past three years, when we started this journey to shift to a more scalable business framework is... We looked at how we were structured, we looked at how we communicate with each other, and we really... And we looked at what was needed. We needed to move fast. We needed to be flexible. We needed to be and wanted to be transparent with our employees. It... To foster that trust that's so important to us. And so we looked at things like organizational structure, made sure that it was flat, that allowed communication to flow, that allowed us to be nimble and to be able to react if we needed. We also have an open-door policy. So, everyone, from an intern to the most senior person, has access to each other, including our CEO, Brad Levy. And we trust that people use their judgment and discretion in that level of accessibility to everyone through the company.
We also... As I said earlier, transparency is really key, and that's a big block in building trust. So, sharing information at the firm-wide level with our employees at quarterly all-hands and in team meetings is something that we really believe in. So, we trust our employees with our financial information and our competitive data and our strategy. And we do this so they can be informed and they can do their best work. Of course, with that level of transparency, there is... That is, I would say, higher than most. We're doing it in a very responsible way, and I think our employees appreciate that. They appreciate us trusting them with that information.
They think about some of the things around that are a little bit more around community, which is one of our values. Building community is an internal priority. But it's also really important because we foster community externally. Our product is a collaboration solution for a lot of companies, and that, in itself, forms a community in financial markets. So, internally, we've spent a lot of time on building an inclusive environment. And we've started, in the past few years, employee resource groups, and those are established by employees and run by employees. We try to celebrate various diversity initiatives and efforts, and to be more inclusive in our offices. So, things like International Women's Day, Black History Month, Diwali (which is right around the corner, they're looking forward to that celebration), and we also partner with community organizations that are creating opportunities for underrepresented groups. So, we have some DEIB partnerships with external organizations, such as Streetwise, which is based out of New York City, Urban Synergy in London, Women in Banking and Finance, Coding Black Females, and we set up events with them to provide mentorship and career advancement, exposure to professional settings. And it has really become a mutually rewarding relationship and a big piece of culture within Symphony because not only do the participants of these organizations get access and coaching and this experience, but our employees also get the opportunity to volunteer, to share their knowledge, to be a part of the community. And the fact that we make this easier and accessible for our employees to do that, I think, really does it. It has become a key part of our culture.
Those are some of the more formalized things. If I think about the things that have happened informally, which are equally as powerful and maybe even more powerful in some instances... Everything from weekly office lunches to Thursday night drop-in happy hours. And this really does depend on the office. So, every office does its own thing that makes sense for the people in that office, and, you know, what resonates with them and would bring them together. We have team events. We have a fierce pickleball team in New York City. Look out! They're going for the gold. There was a hiking trip today, which I was unable to attend, and I just saw some pictures, and I don't even know if I'd be able to do the hike that they did, so, again, I'm incredibly impressed by our employee base and their athletic prowess. And we do simple things like... This is going to sound so basic, and it costs almost nothing. And this was started by the employees. But employees brought in puzzles, and they set them up in the office, and they started to do puzzles in between meetings or while they were eating lunch, and it is incredibly powerful. I just happened to have one of the puzzle tables outside my office, not because I put it there, that's just where the puzzle landed. I can sort of see the evolution of the puzzles and the teamwork and problem-solving to complete a puzzle. If you just think about the point of a puzzle. So, the metaphor there is spot on, and it's also creating some mental capacity for our employees. They step away from their computers, they've been staring at Excel spreadsheets all day. It gives them some rest, and I've seen some of the more reserved employees who really didn't interact with anyone sit down at the puzzle table, start to talk to somebody else. And now they're bringing in the puzzles, and now these employees are the starters on the pickleball team and planning the happy hours. And it was a different way in, and it sounds so basic, but it was... It's so powerful.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Courtney, I'm glad you mentioned puzzles because I was thinking about pickleball, hikes, and I thought, "Oh, this sounds exhausting and sweaty." And then you mentioned puzzles, and I'm like, "Okay, I could be part of this culture."
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?
Courtney Panik: Yeah, I completely agree, Kevin. Being a people manager is an incredibly important role to me. People managers are culture carriers, cultural enablers, and they are driving the majority of the work being done at the company and interacting with more employees at scale and more frequently than leaders. So they really do set the tone, and the role of a people manager is critical to the success of the business. So some of the things that we're doing, we do have a couple of programs in place. We have an early, like an aspiring people manager or new to people management career program that is about four months. It's a couple of hours every week that employees can opt into, and that happens every year. We do one or two cycles of those a year. We bring in an external vendor, and then we supplement with some of our internal content.
We've also just started – we made an investment in our systems as part of building the foundation. So now that we have systems in place, we can push out content at scale. We've started to create, to curate content specific to people managers: how to hire effectively, understanding and having compensation conversations, how do you assess performance, how do you differentiate performance? How do you manage performance, difficult conversations? So more than just the block and tackling, approving time cards or distributing and delegating work – this is the stuff of developing teams and creating high-impact teams. So we've started to create these on-demand resources, written as well as mini-videos, five to ten minutes, that we're organizing and pushing out through our HR system.
Then we just kicked off – well, we are going to kick off next week – a monthly Manager Forum, which is a one-hour session in which, as we launch the content, the on-demand content, the following week or two later will be the Manager Forum. That will be a live session where we take that content and we apply it. So there's a Q&A, there are breakout sessions, maybe there's a little role-play. Can't have an HR session without a little role-play, but we really want to make it digestible and relevant to our managers because it's one thing to read it; it's a completely different game to actually do it. And I think that's the piece that sticks. So we are coming to the end of the year right now, our end-of-year process, we're doing performance assessments and thinking about talent reviews, promotions, and compensation. So the first two sessions and the first two blocks of content are around performance assessment, how to write an assessment, how to differentiate talent. Then we're going into compensation, which is really tough for some people to talk about – to understand compensation, kind of demystify how it works and why it is the way it is, and then to have those conversations and really own that. And we're going to keep doing that throughout the year.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Well, so much good stuff there, Courtney. I have an ear for language, I write books and everything, so I like it. And you use this phrase, "culture carriers" for the frontline leaders, and you know that'll never become their official name. But I really love that phrase and that concept, and I'm going to steal it from you. If you see some LinkedIn posts or rants about frontline leaders as culture carriers, you know I was thinking of you when I wrote it, but also, great minds think alike.
I'm glad you talked about what you're doing, and the fact that you're able to do that as a small organization, because my company, LEADx – and I never talk about LEADx on this show, so I'll keep it brief – that's our whole thing. Like, look, the old school way of sending everyone to a boot camp, they don't remember it, they don't apply it. You know, the knowing-doing gap is fatal. So whether you do it yourself, whether you work with LEADx or something like that, the idea of like, "Wait a minute, every month can be a separate topic, whether it's your competency, whether it's timely connected to what you're trying to deliver." This idea of a flipped classroom, learning in the flow of work. No, it's not this giant course, it's 5-minute videos, right? That's accessible, digital, we can do it in the palm of our hand or through Teams or Slack. And then you're using that live time, not as death by PowerPoint, not as sage on the stage, not as a boring webinar. We call them group coaching sessions, you know? It's like, "Okay, sure, maybe there's 5 minutes of reviewing the feedback model that you want to use or our performance plan or whatever it is." But then it's like conversations and breakouts. And people love it. Managers want to talk to peers. It's like, "Okay, I get it, but I'm still having a problem in this scenario. What do you want to do?" You know? And there's the knowledge transfer part that's valuable. And then it's that social glue that makes it even more powerful. And we've got clients that call these the leadership power hour and all that, and they're wildly popular if you do them right. If you do them right, and you've just shown like, "Hey, we can pull that. You don't need to be a Fortune 500 company to deliver this the right way."
Courtney Panik: Yup, yeah. And there is a secret weapon that we have that every company has. We're definitely going to leverage it, and it is expected if you're a manager of managers. So if you are a manager of people, managers, and a lot of our leaders who have big organizations or executive teams or leadership teams, they're all great leaders and people managers. They did not get to the level that they are by not being. And so I think it's really powerful, and we are definitely going to engage them to co-facilitate with other leaders and managers on these topics. Because HR could talk with people or talk at people, or, you know, we're still HR in the end. But if you see your leader, if you see another manager, your peer, and they're sharing advice, I think that just amplifies it and creates a more sticky environment for learning. So that is something that, as a small company, my team, we don't have one resource dedicated to learning and development, it's kind of spread between me and another person, and pretty much all of HR in some aspect. But if we're able to partner with really successful people, managers and leaders on these topics, and they could help carry some of the load and share their experience and advice, I think it goes even further than just the HR team doing it.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: So LEADx research shows exactly what we said. The number one – everyone says, "Oh, people aren't participating, they don't show up." This is so darn good. You just dropped gold.
How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Courtney Panik: We do an annual survey right now, but we are looking at doing some pulses now that we have our system set up. It's on our tech roadmap and our engagement roadmap to do more frequent, shorter pulses on specific topics. We also have a regular cadence, and we really leave it up to the business and the managers to do their regular team meetings check-ins. And our HR team is involved in that. We have HR business partner teams, so they're gathering feedback from that. We'll also do, if we find that there is either an upcoming topic, something that's kind of hot in the market, or maybe something that is becoming a challenge for our employees or results from the engagement survey that need development, we have done focus groups from time to time. We don't like to overflex that because it does require time, and we want people to feel safe, and we want to do it on things that we know we can move the needle on. But we will hold focus groups to get a little bit deeper into the employee sentiment on things. We're also a pretty small company, around 500 employees, and everyone pretty much knows everyone. So the accessibility to have informal touch bases, bump into somebody in the hallway, skip levels, or even catch up on the pickleball court and take a pulse. So we try to use more formalized as well as informal ways of collecting feedback.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Great! You've already shared so many cool projects and initiatives that you're doing, formal and informal. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Courtney Panik: Oh, my goodness, I feel like we're doing so much. I think that I'm very excited for this rollout of the manager content. We have a fantastic group of managers at Symphony. I think that even if you're a well-seasoned people manager and you think you've got it nailed, I think the value in coming into a session, whether it's a monthly session or you're facilitating, is you may learn something. And I still learn stuff as I'm reading through the content, or it's a really good reminder. It's also that you'll understand where you could help others, you could help your peers. So I'm really excited about that.
And then the other thing that I'm really excited about, and I talked about it, so I won't spend too much time on it, is even though we are small and quite lean, our executive team, our company, our HR team, is really focused on creating an inclusive environment for our employees. And I was really great to see that we seem to be doing a pretty good job on it. It was one of our highest scores in our engagement survey. So being able to create a space where employees feel like they can own and drive their own initiatives related to culture, that they're heard, and they have accessibility to their managers or others, as well as investments and relationships and partnerships with these external organizations for volunteer opportunities. I'm really proud of the work we've done there. We weren't doing much prior, or we were doing some things, but it wasn't in a connected way that was really moving things forward. And I think we have a much more focused approach to driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and there's so much more to do. We haven't even scratched the surface. But I'm really proud of everybody at Symphony for their commitment, support, and being a part of that journey.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Courtney Panik: Oh, my goodness! Well, you just hit on one of my personal development goals because I definitely need to read more and spend more time on myself and stop giving so much to others. I'm going to break the rules and give you two. I think anything that Brené Brown writes or hosts in her podcasts is so thoughtful. I found her work. I haven't read all of it, but "Daring Greatly" is one of my favorites. It stands out, and I find that it's helpful for me as a person to think about my relationships with people, how I may filter myself, or structure my day in a way that may be limiting myself. But also as an HR professional, as a leader, as a citizen in a community. You don't need to be in HR to really learn something from her work. It's very helpful to think about what others may be going through and what challenges other people may be facing. The way she structures her content is quite digestible, realistic, and relatable.
The other book that I quite enjoy, and my husband recommended to me a long time ago, is "The 5 AM Club" by Robin Sharma. This shows a little bit of my own personal development that I need to work on. We all have a million things coming into our lives: workload, media, family, all these obligations. That book, for me, helped me think about how to set myself up in a routine that allows me to make the highest impact. It's about tapping into the best version of yourself by changing how you structure your day and how you think about your day. I know there are many books about the power of habit and similar topics, but that one, in particular, resonated with me.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, I'm all about structuring the day, the habits, that's my jam. And then plus one on Brené Brown, especially "Daring Greatly." Like, I have found anecdotally that Brene Brown's readers tend to skew very female. But that's one of the top 10 books on my list that changed me. I think I was 40 years old, a former worker, someone on my team recommended it, "Daring Greatly." And I can't remember the page number, but I was reading it, and then something just hit, and it was like there was a before and after moment around self-worth, value, and external validation. I was like, "Oh, that's why I am the way I am." It was like a before and after moment happened with that book. So, yeah, I think those are great recommendations.
What's something that you know now that maybe you wish you knew on the first day? If you could send a Slack message to the younger version of Courtney, what would you tell her?
Courtney Panik: I think what I, when I came into this role, and I've been in my CPO role for just over a year and a half, so still fairly new to the role. And one of the things that I think I know in the back of my head, but I didn't leverage it enough, is that I am supported, and I don't have to carry the responsibility and the workload on my shoulders. So one of the things that my manager recently told me was, "Learn how to distribute the risk." If somebody comes to you with something, you don't have to solve it alone. Tell me, tell legal advice, talk about it with the leadership team, as long as that's appropriate, 'cause sometimes in HR, we can't do that all the time. But bring other people in and let's solve it together. And I thought throughout my career that I had to at least have a recommendation or come with some sort of solution, and I would toil over things unnecessarily when I could have just brought support in a lot earlier and come to a conclusion a lot faster.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: "Distribute the risk." I like that phrase a lot. So we're talking here at the very end of October 2023. So the New Year's almost here, and by the time the holidays roll around, it's like we're practically there. What do you plan to focus on in the year ahead?
Courtney Panik: Yeah, we're just having an HR offsite next week, and we're talking about how we set up for next year. We're reflecting on the last offsite, and we've spent so much time in the past two years on really blocking and tackling, building the foundation so we can build on top of it. And we've now turned that corner. Not that we've ever taken our eye off diversity or learning and development, but we just haven't had the capacity to go full on because we had to get some of the foundation in place, fix it, or fill some gaps. So now we do. I'm very excited to put more time and effort into our D&I program, our manager capabilities, which we just talked about us launching, and really spending more time there to help them grow in their career and make sure they're successful. And then general career development for our employees. We may not have the ability to do a lot of formalized programs, but because we are a small company, we have a lot of opportunity for mobility, to move around, stretch projects, and do rotations into different teams. So I'm really excited to start planning and launching some things around career mobility.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: What excites you the most about your company right now?
Courtney Panik: It's always an exciting time at Symphony. What I find most exciting about Symphony right now is that we are more relevant than ever in the market. We know it, and our customers are recognizing it too. Regulation, compliance, and security are at the forefront, and there are millions of dollars in fines occurring at some of the largest financial institutions. These fines result in employee terminations due to non-compliant messaging or communication methods, which brings risk to their employers. The SEC and the CFTC are intensifying their focus in this area, and there's no other collaboration platform in the market that's as secure and compliance-enabling as Symphony. So Symphony is the solution, and we've known it for quite some time. Now, the market is realizing it as well. We can be a great partner and solution for those facing challenges in compliance and regulation.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: You've got me excited about the opportunity, so I hope you call me the next time you guys are looking for additional outside investors. I want to get in on a round.
Courtney Panik: Alright, put you on speed dial.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Courtney, big thanks. Incredible programs, initiatives, and structure for a company of your size. Small but mighty. Thanks for the work that you're doing. Thanks for spending time sharing some of your wisdom today. And I want you to come back a year from now when you've gone from that startup to scale-up so we can learn about the lessons you've learned in the year ahead. I want to have you back.
Courtney Panik: I'd love to do that. Let's put it in the books. Sounds good. Thank you, Kevin.