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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 what I know is going to be a fun episode of the Culture Code. Our guest today is the Chief People Officer at Consensus Cloud Solutions, Lynn Johnson. Lynn, welcome.
Lynn Johnson: Kevin! Thank you so much. It is such a treat and such an honor and a privilege to be joining you today. So thank you for the invitation, and I'm super excited. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. And so I'm really excited to kind of get into the weeds with you on culture. So thank you.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Thank you, Lynn. I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, today. At least, that's where I'm sitting. Tell the listeners, where are you coming to us from?
Lynn Johnson: I live in a suburb of Los Angeles in Tarzana, California. I work out of our downtown Los Angeles office a couple of days a week. So, beautiful Southern California, where right now it's probably sunny and 70 with a little breeze. So, sorry to kind of get you on that.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I know we do have lovely leaves changing color here in the northeast. But I was born in Redondo Beach, grew up in Orange County, so I've got a lot of friends and family in Southern California. Still, I miss…
Lynn Johnson: So, you're still a Southern California native at heart, and I will tell you, I do miss the 4 seasons. But we do have a Japanese maple tree outside of my home office window that changes colors, probably around February. So, we do have, like, one day, maybe, where we have a difference in the falling leaves. I am jealous of the different seasons that you're in.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: For those who might not be familiar with Consensus Cloud Solutions, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Lynn Johnson: Well, Consensus Cloud Solutions is a mid-size global organization. We are focused on the transformation, enhancement, and secure exchange of digital information. Now, what does that mean? Basically, we help get your documents securely from point A to point B. One of our great flagship products is called eFax. It's electronic faxing. So, it's an opportunity for a small office, a home office, a mid-size business, a large-scale business, or an individual to be able to safely and securely fax documents from one location to another.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I was going to say, maybe people haven't heard of Consensus, but I bet most people have heard of eFax, either using it or having received an eFax. It's a very popular tool. When you say mid-market, how many employees do you have?
Lynn Johnson: We have right around 600 employees, and we're worldwide. We have offices in Japan, Ireland, Canada, in both Ottawa and the British Columbia area, Australia, and all across the United States.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, that's incredible. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Lynn Johnson: Great question. If I were to share with you that at every town hall and every employee communication, we remind our employees of our six core values, part of what culture means to me is, what does it look like to live out your core values? Our core values include striving for excellence, demonstrating empathy, embracing innovation, focusing on solutions, communicating openly, and being driven by data. Our culture looks at having a culture of productivity, accountability, and a layer of kindness, which is about making a difference in other people's lives and enjoying what we do together as a community. I want to work with individuals who are like-minded, sharing the same attitude of making a difference. How can I help solve problems, guide, lead, and direct? So, I would say, our culture is steeped in community, productivity, accountability, and living out these core values on a daily basis.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, a lot of great stuff. It's and it reminds me, I think you know, great leaders. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Lynn Johnson: It's super challenging. And I think what makes it even more challenging is we are virtual, we're remote, right? Like you're coming to me from Philadelphia, I'm coming from the Pennsylvania area. I'm in my home office today. And we have employees that are worldwide as I shared earlier. And so if right now we have 52% of our employees who are not attached to any office whatsoever.
And so part of what we do is a very robust onboarding program, where we go through our onboarding orientation for probably a good 3, 4 hours. It's virtual. We have our service desk come on, and our service desk works directly with those that we're bringing on, and we do this every week. And so then we have our HR team that comes on, and we have a great presentation. Where we share the history of the company, our philosophy, our mission and vision, and our values. And we go through some great employee programs. And what we do to stay connected in a virtual world.
And every new employee is given a position of focus. Here's what we're expected to do. Here's how we're going to review you. Here's how we're going to be able to say this is what accountability looks like, and that commitment coming in of this is what we've hired you to do. This is the job that we expect you to do. And here are the results that we're expecting from that. And we want to be able to partner with you because we believe that you're right for the organization. And how can you move forward? And it's also wanting to be able to talk about our benefits.
And as we look at this, I'm a firm believer, as we marry both sides right? We marry the hard business results with the soft swishiness. I learned from a mentor long ago, it's that you guide with an iron fist, but with a velvet glove. Yeah. And so it's setting firm boundaries, clear expectations, and then holding people accountable to those expectations.
I think it's really wise that if we find that an employee's not doing their job well, we have to take a step back for a moment and say. Why have we not provided the right training? Have we not provided the right toolkit? Have we not provided the right guidance or mentorship? But then, in the next breath, if they have all the tools, but they're not able to do their job. Then we have to have a different conversation. And we have to say, Here's what we look at, and something that I subscribe to every day as even as we're looking at who we bring on board as an employee, you can train a skill, but you can't train an attitude.
And so what does it look like to have a good attitude in the course of chaos? It's like, okay, how do we resolve this? How do we solve it? How do we be resilient to be able to find the right solution to help us move forward, to bring forth what our goals are and what our objectives are.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah. And you mentioned training. I'm sort of passionate about training and support for managers. 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?
Lynn Johnson: You know what? We throw them in a pond and we say, "Go, try it. Swim! Can you make it work?" No, I'm kidding. That's not how we do it. That's not what we do with a shallow pond. I'm gonna see, can you swim or sink or swim, right? No, we, I promise we don't do that.
What we look at, Kevin, is we have a lot of different tools. So we've created an employee resource portal overall for all employees because, at the end of the day, employees want to know: Where do I find something? What should I do? How do I? What do I need? How do I look at this? So not only do we look at training managers, but we also look at training employees. Let's just say our tools that we use as well as our products. So we want employees to know: Here's what our products look like. Here's how we're doing this.
And so even with our sales organization and all of our customer support, we've now created a robust training as part of their onboarding to be able to learn because what does it look like to teach, train, and develop? As we look at our managers, we have partnered with a company called Growth Space, and Growth Space is super innovative. They have different programs where we have an opportunity to do specialized individual, one-on-one coaching. It's 5 sessions with an executive coach, and we may say we want somebody to focus on communication or focus on creating ROIs for their team, and they are matched and paired with an executive consultant that has that background and experience. They get individual, customized, confidential, one-on-one training for literally that executive leadership. But we're doing it across all of our manager levels.
We then also are doing virtual management webinars where we have our managers sign up. We have, let's just say, the same session runs 5 times, and you're in one of the sessions. And you're with all levels of managers. And we just had one manager essential. It was all about providing feedback. We had everyone joining from our CEO to the youngest manager in the organization in terms of tenure, and it was so much fun. Because you heard from this valued trainer, but then, what you also did is you heard how others within the organization did it? So we really look at priding ourselves by making sure that we're providing the right tools so that our managers are aware of how to have a hard conversation.
Because I don't know about you, but in my family, we grew up. There were some conversations we had, but others we just kind of swept under the rug, and then we walked around them. I'll tell you that hasn't necessarily served me well in my career when I was like, "Oh, I just want to avoid that topic." It's like, No, you can't. So how do I make sure that we are giving our managers the proper tools to be able to have the hard conversations and to be able to say, "Here's what it's gonna look like for me to give you the right toolkit. But here's what I need to see from you."
I really look at it, we've done pulse surveys. We've done engagement surveys. We're getting good marks. And one of our questions is, "Would you continue working for the manager that you have today?" The scores were fairly high, and you know some managers are set in their ways, right? I have been doing this for 30 years. And I'm gonna continue to manage this way. But I think that through the pandemic, we've had to learn how to manage differently.
I'm just gonna anticipate your next question because when we also look at our managers, we have to look at both our managers and our employee workforce, and something that we have that is absolutely interesting is we have 5 generations in the workforce. And so how you manage a Gen. Z is very different from how you manage a Gen. X. Versus how you manage the greatest generation, right, the. So. So you look at all the differences. You look at all the different generations. And you say, "How do I help manage my employees to the results that I need given their style, or their innovation, or their reliance on what it looks like to get better?"
And so I think that we have to be willing as a manager to say, "I may have always managed XYZ. But how can I manage differently now? What do I need to do? How do I enhance the productivity of my employees?" And it may be that we need to have 5 min of small talk before we go into something. I think that good managers create a relationship with employees, and a relationship doesn't mean I need to go deep and know everything about you from a personal basis. But you have to be able to trust me. And if you don't know me, you can't trust me. So what would it look like to develop trust? And I think that goes even back to something that you asked me at the very beginning. How would you define our culture? I think one is we're layering a foundation of trust.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, I want to jump in because there are lots of good things there. What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Lynn Johnson: So many choices. But I would say, one of my favorite business books is by Patrick Lencioni, and it's called "The Ideal Team Player," and it talks about when you look at individuals on your team, you want them to be humble, hungry, and smart. And so what does it look like for all of us to be humble, hungry, and smart? So if I had my magic wand, I would send that book to all of our employees and say, "Let's read this together. Let's do a book study together, and from there, let's make sure that we're all striving to be the ideal team player." So as a management company, right now, as a leadership team, we are reading "Multipliers" by Liz Wiseman. And so as our executive leadership team, we are reading that. And I'm also reading that with my HR team, and we have a couple of different function groups within our org that are reading it as well. So it's important to us what it looks like to multiply individuals on our team and be a manager that multiplies?
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, Liz did a great job. I've had her on the program in the past with that book. I think she was able to put some language around employee engagement drivers that other people have not. You know, other people, including myself, have been too academic with it. And that's another great one. "Multipliers" is a great one as well. So let me ask Lynn, like, I'm sure today, you know, things you've learned. You've grown in your role in your career. So imagine that you could send a letter, a Slack message, or a Teams message, whatever platform used to a younger version of yourself. It's day one as Chief People Officer, and all of a sudden, it's like, "Whoa! I just got this piece of advice from future Lynn Johnson." What kind of message would you send? What have you learned?
Lynn Johnson: I would share with my younger self to be curious, unpack trends, look at the why. Ask, ask why a lot to understand what's really going on because I think so many times people give you a surface answer, but that's not really the root. So for me, I would tell my younger self, and I tell my older self this, be curious, always ask questions, and really seek. And I think this also goes with demonstrating empathy, to seek to understand before you want to be understood because you want to be able. And I think this is also, as I think about it, it's telling my younger self, realize that there are multiple ways to get your message across. There are multiple ways to be able to communicate and deliver news for people to absorb and ingest.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: There was a phenomenal executive I met decades ago, and he taught me, you just talked about being curious and asking questions, and he taught me that the power of when you're in a meeting, someone says something, whether they're on your team or whatever the situation, someone has put forth their situation, problem, viewpoint, etc. Instead of immediately responding with your side, he said the most powerful question is, "Tell me more." He said, "If you can pause and ask them, "Tell me more," he said, you'll be amazed at what comes next. They thought they got everything out and shared it, but it's often that second chance for them to tell you more that real interesting things come out, and I've tried to remember that as well.
So we're talking here, it's almost Thanksgiving 2023, end of the year. So you're already thinking about you and your team next year. The Chief People Officer role is so important, involved in so many decisions and things these days. What's your focus for 2024? What are you going to sort of lean into as a CPO?
Lynn Johnson: I think it's taking what we're doing now and enhancing it. It's looking at the journey that we're on and really understanding, do we have the right tools to be able to help our employees be engaged? Can we track engagement? How are we looking at employee development, professional development, and also really looking at mental health and the mental well-being of our employees? Because I'm a firm believer that as we make sure that we're doing the proper training, that our employees have the right resources at their fingertips, they will be engaged, and they will look at their productivity through their lens of what can I do to continue to further our mission? What can I do to further what we're doing to enhance and create balance for other people within their lives?
And so a big push for us going into next year is training development and also prioritization. Everyone, how many priorities do you have in your own individual life? And you gotta realize, okay, I can't do everything, but what I wanna do is I wanna focus on one thing. Let's get that task completed. So then we can go to the next task and the next task and the next task. And then I would say, another big goal that we have overall as a company and also for our employees, and also for me within my department, is how do we enhance communication in a virtual world? How do we build community in a virtual world? And how, as we're bringing people back, we're strongly encouraging our people to come back to the office if you're local enough to be at an office. And we're not saying come in five days a week, we're saying come in two to three days a week because we believe that enhances collaboration and in turn, that provides mentorship opportunities that don't exist right now.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, yeah, that's the part that I worry about, especially so. Yeah, I've got two of my kids out of college and now adulting in their twenties, and they both have remote success. Cheers to that. But I think about when I was in my twenties, how much I learned just by being in an office. And it wasn't always the meeting I was in. It was the conversation that happened in the hallway when the meeting was done. It was an executive who wasn't my boss grabbing me by my elbow and saying, "Hey, Kevin, I don't know if you noticed, but you did this, and you shouldn't have," or whatever that might be, or just overhearing things and asking to be involved. So, especially for young people, I think there's... I mean, I know everybody likes the remote, no commute, and all of that. But I do worry about career advancement disparities and career lag for the remote folks. It's an important issue.
Lynn Johnson: And, Kevin, it's... I will be honest. I wrestle with that. It keeps me up at night because I think we're doing a disservice. It's interesting that we're talking about it right now because I had a meeting with someone yesterday. It was a vendor who was trying to sell me a product, and it was a young man early in his career. And we talked about that very thing. And I said, "You know, I'm old. I've been in my career for quite a while, but I always love that engagement, that interaction, and that calibration, as it were." I'm a verbal processor, so it helps me to synthesize my thoughts at times. And I said, "I'm hurting for you because this is probably your first job." And he just told me that his company is 94% remote. And he said, "You know, it's a disadvantage." He said, "I really want to learn from the person to the right and to the left of me and be able to overhear how they do something or what they do and how that works." And so I think we have to find a happy medium. What does it look like to provide good mentor opportunities to allow people to grow and develop? Because we're stunting the growth and the potential of our employees when we're not investing in them, and sometimes investing means face-to-face meetings.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: That's right, that's right. What excites you the most about your company right now?
Lynn Johnson: Well, you know, I can share with you a couple of things. And this is something that is super near and dear to me. When we look at our values and we say, "Embrace innovation, focus on solutions," one of the big things that we have, which I'm super excited about, is we have won the government contract for the Veterans Affairs office. So the VA, we're implementing a specialized product. It is high-trust certified. We're in the process of getting our FedRAMP authorization, where we're implementing Ecfax. It's basically a customized version of Efax. And we're rolling that out to all of our VA facilities. So, for me, I'm super excited because we have an opportunity to partner with the government to provide an innovative and very effective and efficient solution to help expedite that communication exchange and to be able to support and enhance the healthcare for our veterans. So, for me, it's a win-win. It's helping to send secure document transmission via Efax, but it's a very customized solution for the Veterans Affairs office. And it's actually rolling out into all of their different offices, which then also helps streamline and enhance the care. So, it's really, to me, breaking barriers. And we have the ability to also use our digital solutions in more rural settings within areas of the country that may not have as sophisticated access to healthcare. And so, for me, I believe that we're breaking down these barriers for inclusion and equity as it relates to providing the proper tools for healthcare, including electronic health records, etc. So, for me, I'm super excited. And for us to be on the cutting edge of that, to be able to look at some of our products, working through preauthorization, etc., and utilizing tools of AI, we're on the cusp of really being able to help transform healthcare technology. And for us to be a part of that, I'm excited because we're the ones who don't want to help impact healthcare in our country.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, the most important and big challenge that there is. It's great, the work you're doing for the VA. On that note, Lynn Johnson, thanks for being humble, hungry, and smart. Thanks for joining the Culture Code Podcast. We appreciate it.
Lynn Johnson: Kevin, thank you. It has been an absolute pleasure, and I really appreciate the time that we spent today. Thank you for letting me just share my heart. Clearly, it's a topic that I'm passionate about. So thank you for your time.