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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 to the LEADx Show. I'm excited for our guest today. She is the Chief People Officer at NerdWallet, Linnae Luque. Linnae, welcome! And where are you joining us from today?
Linnae Luque: I'm from a small town in California called Lodi.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Lodi. So tell us, where is Lodi? California's a big state. Where's Lodi?
Linnae Luque: Lodi is about 90 minutes east of San Francisco. It sits atop what we call our kind of breadbasket of California. So, lots of agricultural work happens here, and I always say that we grow my favorite thing, which is wine grapes. We're one of the largest producers in the United States of wine grapes, and Zinfandel is the specialty.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Very nice, very nice. I'm more of a red myself, but I appreciate all of that. There's another thing. A lot of people don't know that beyond the Bay Area, in that part of California, the agriculture is so strong. And I remember the first time I drove through Gilroy. The odor I smelled was what, Linnae? What did it smell like?
Linnae Luque: I think it's the garlic capital of the world, and you literally could smell it in the air. There is just a different and rich, you know, kind of farm and agricultural scene.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I love it, I love it. So let's start at the very beginning, NerdWallet. For those who might not be familiar with NerdWallet, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Linnae Luque: Yeah, so NerdWallet is a platform where we provide financial guidance and information to consumers—people like you and me—as well as small and medium businesses. Our mission is to provide clarity for all of life's financial decisions. And, as you can imagine, that is very important right now. In oversimplified terms, this is like, if you're looking for a credit card with a really good balance transfer rate, or if you're looking for that home equity line of credit because nobody could move anymore and you just want to make your house really nice, you could find information on our platform around those topics. We're about 750 employees. Most of our employees really do center in the United States. A few years ago, we turned to a remote-first company. So answering the question around headquarters is a little bit trickier than it used to be. We consider San Francisco still our headquarters. However, over 50% of our folks are working from home, working from smaller towns like Lodi, and not the big city like San Francisco.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I'm glad you shared the remote-first part because we're talking about culture, and I think among chief people officers and everyone at HR, it's just such a hot topic right now, and there's no one right answer, right? How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Lynee Luque: So for this one, I always say first, how do I define culture? And to me, I took this from an article many years ago. A simple definition for me is how we do things around here, and that shows up in how we behave, the processes and programs that we build, as well as our day-to-day interactions or practices. And when I think about what our mission is and what we provide to consumers, I'm not surprised about how I describe the culture internally at NerdWallet. I consider us extraordinarily thoughtful and responsible because we are trying to help consumers with some of the most, you know, overwhelming topics—financial topics in their lives. I also think that we push for transparency as well as accuracy. This really is the foundation of why we do this: these financial topics are always so opaque and confusing, and when you try to open up an article and understand something, it feels like, you know, that people are designing this so you don't understand the topic. And really, when Tim started the company, it's like, "Whoa, let's try to take that away so that everyone can have a chance to make really great decisions." And that is just like it permeates throughout our culture, that transparency, that accuracy, that responsibility that we have.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah. And even from the outside, I mean, I didn't know those particular traits, but that transparency—and I think what NerdWallet, what I've seen for many years now, is such a trusted advisor and simplifies things, right? What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Lynee Luque: Yeah. So luckily, even when I joined, which was about three years ago, the values were so strong here. I really consider us a values-driven company, and that underpins how we behave, whether people are watching or not, how we build programs and processes, how we interact, and have those practices. And so one of the things that we've done is to look at the end-to-end employee lifecycle and say, "How do we infuse our values into everything that we're doing for folks?" So if you are a new joiner trying to become a nerd, we have a values-based interview guide. So our managers, anyone that is sitting on the interview panel, has not only a set of questions that they can ask to assess your functional expertise but also has a set of questions to uncover, you know, how aligned you are and how you can add to our values, and ultimately our culture. This goes into performance reviews as well. It goes into our development curriculum. And it also goes into the fun stuff that we do. So one of my favorite programs that we have is twice a year we celebrate people for living our values. It's called "What Good Looks Like," and so employees nominate each other for living the values. And we have winners at the team level, and then we have one ultimate winner at the company level that's celebrated by Tim and everyone. And it's not just a celebration; we describe exactly what they did living the values. And we try to tell people that these could be role models, right? And repeated. So it's really just like an informal fun thing we do. And you'll hear that around NerdWallet all the time, even in a tense situation, we'll come back to, and we'll be like, "What does good look like? What's good look like?" and come back to our values, right? One of our five values is like that guiding light.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: So, "What Good Looks Like"—twice a year you hold it. I'm just curious, what does the winner get? Sort of bragging rights? A little certificate? What does the winner get?
Lynee Luque: Well, it's definitely bragging rights. If you scroll through our LinkedIn, I—you know, I was so proud and a big smile came on my face—one of our winners posted on LinkedIn how they won this, and we set it up so their peers have to create a business case of value. And so, they're able to just copy-paste like, "This is the value. This is what my peers thought that I was doing." And I'm so proud, so definitely bragging rights and they get a ton of visibility. And we do have a small prize that people win. It's not a trophy, although I'm starting to think about how do we formalize that? What good looks like—maybe a trophy, or a stuffed animal, or something?
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I'm scribbling all kinds of notes lately because people listening probably think I'm just, you know, having fun. But I'm fascinated by recognition, because one of the most popular pieces of advice when I'm doing talks and stuff is when I talk about strategic recognition, where obviously recognition always feels good. But it's an opportunity. I say, with what you call your program, it shows others what good looks like. There are results, but then also how you get results. And so, anytime you can thank someone for a behavior and achievement and link it back to a core value, you just turned regular recognition into even more powerful strategic recognition. And of course, the real reward—it's never a gift certificate, or it's not about money or any of that—it's just knowing that people noticed and care about you, and what you did. But increasingly, I've been kind of anti-like the trophy idea, whether it's a trophy or whatever. But increasingly, I've realized that those kinds of physical artifacts, especially if they're left in the office, become powerful symbols for others to see. "Oh, we recognize values twice a year. Oh, Lynee did this great job." It's a great icebreaker for new joiners. "How'd you get that trophy?" And so, as I'm thinking about our own work in recognition, and the process is always going to be the biggest reward, but it's kind of like, "Hmm! There could be some stuffed animal, weird prize thing that gets handed out." That becomes legendary throughout. Now, most of us don't hang out in a physical office, but if I got something, if you gave me something, it'd be right behind me on my bookshelf. So, people would know that I'm a champion of the culture, you know.
Lynee Luque: Yeah. And we have to think about that for the remote, just as you said. Like, I have an end—I don't know if you can see it—and it was, you know, given to me for something when I first joined. But our team's constantly thinking about that. How do we translate all of our awards and recognition to that remote-friendly environment? Stickers—I don't know if you saw that—but it used to be that you put stickers on your laptop running from meeting to meeting, and you could see all the really cool stickers. It's like, how do we recreate that concept?
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: That's right. 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?
Lynee Luque: Yeah, well, first things first is, we want to make sure that our managers are getting the feedback that they need, and they deserve the right to do their job. So two times a year, we do an engagement survey and the engagement survey results will be given to managers, anyone with four or more direct reports, because it's anonymous and confidential. But even if they don't get their own report, they can look at the ladder-up reports. So that's one way without a big budget, right? Is like, how do we consistently give you the feedback that you need?
But we also do invest in manager training. So we have a new manager training as well as just a general manager training that we conduct two times a year. So, you know, it's not conducted seven or eight times like it was when I was at a really huge company like Intel, but we do it strategically right after our evaluation period, our company evaluation period, so that people know, like, "What do I need to work on? Okay, now, in this class, manager training and work on those skills." So we do that. It's homegrown, right? So we're conducting it ourselves. And we're taking the topics based on that Your Voice feedback and any feedback we're getting from managers, and the largest part is our just-in-time offerings that we have. So we put together homegrown training for facilitated sessions that align exactly with what's going on right now. So if we're asking you to do feedback, here's a feedback module. If we're asking you to take these NerdVoice results and action plan, we're gonna do a module on how you act and how you set goals. So really, that's where a lot of the informal day-to-day, I'm in the trenches. That's where a lot of the manager training comes from. Is that really just-in-time aligned with whatever's going on in the business.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, that's great. How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Lynee Luque: Yeah. So we have some informal mechanisms that, you know, I'll be honest with you, sometimes keep me on my toes. So we use Slack, like many other companies, and about once a quarter we do an open Ask Me Anything. So we dedicate an hour where all the executives will be on Slack, and we're encouraging, soliciting, asking employees to ask us anything, and we answer real-time. So we're sitting there giving responses, no matter what the questions are, super simple questions to really complex, difficult decisions that we're making. And so that happens informally, as well as we have town halls that are on about a monthly cadence. As part of our town hall, we open up a Q&A. And we open it up about an hour before the town hall, and we start to collect questions, and we answer those questions real-time, right? When we're done with the town hall content. So as you can imagine, I think so much rich, real-time feedback comes from these open Q&A sessions, and it just supplements what we start hearing in NerdVoice, which are more of the two times, six months, every six months, feedback. Of course, you know, we have five values like I said, one of our values is open, candid, and constructive, and we call each other out on that all the time, you know, how can we be more OCC? So we do everything as an acronym here, right? And it's just like, are they being OCC? So it can show up as well in just our everyday interactions. When I go back to that simple version of culture, right? How do you do around here? How we interact with each other, how we behave? So we really lean on our values again to bring out that feedback.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I love it. Values are taken seriously when they become part of the jargon. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Lynee Luque: Yeah, one of the things that I personally love doing and bring with me to every company, every organization that I'm a part of is, you know, really weaving our diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging into everything that we do. So often, I think it's easy for organizations to keep it as a separate thing, as you mentioned before, with some other stuff. And here, I really believe that the way that we can be effective is if we just weave it into all our day-to-day, all our day-to-day practices. So we take that to heart here. We have a really great ESG report that is out there, and our DEIB efforts are one of the highlights, one of the highlights that we're proud of here, as well as we do a special development program for our mid-level employees. So usually, like you said, managers and leaders get the training that is available. Even if you had a really small budget, the budget usually goes to that cohort, and sometimes we forget about those folks that are in the middle, who haven't quite reached management. They're not on the cusp of leadership, but we want them to be prepared for when those opportunities come up, and that's where we find a lot of our drop-off in diversity. So we decided to target an effort. We don't want drop-off. We want retention. We want you to be developed and ready for that big position. So we run a career advancement program that has historically been about a year long. We're going to do it six months now, shorten it a bit, make it more efficient, but really just having that investment in that spotlight on that cohort of employees is something that I'm personally proud of.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: That's great, thanks for sharing that. What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Lynee Luque: You included podcasts in there, and I always think that's fun. But book-wise, I do have books, kind of books behind me and moving aside for those on the podcast. And all the books that I have behind me are related to work—one of my favorites that I think is really relevant right now because of the macro environment, as well as what we're doing here at NerdWallet, is the classic "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. So it's really the fixed mindset versus growth mindset. And why that's relevant to nerds right now is because there is so much uncertainty out there. What skills are relevant? What is that new thing we're talking about, AI, how's that going to change my job? How's that going to change everything that I'm doing? How the economy is reacting, how our services and offerings and products need to look different, based on what's going on. And I think it's so easy for people to fall into that fixed mindset, right? And right now, if we want to continue to build a really great company and have a great offering for our consumers, it's about embracing the growth mindset and seeing these things as challenges that we can adapt to.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, very timely. I mean, it's... I can't remember what year that book came out, but it feels so fresh, more fresh and relevant today than when it first came out, right? Incredible. You're coming off as cool, calm, and collected, Linnae, like you've got this culture stuff all figured out. What's something that you know now that maybe you wish you knew when you first became a chief people officer? I want you to send a Slack message to the younger version of yourself. What would you say?
Lynee Luque: Well, I think one of the things that is, maybe a misnomer is we call this role chief People Officer, which makes it seem that our contribution and our day-to-day is mostly going to be around the people agenda, and I would say it's been opposite for me the two times that I've been in this role. I very much find myself in more of a general manager mindset, and you know, kind of skill set that I'm leaning on way more than just the stuff that I learned when I was growing up as a people partner, or in HR. So we have to go, you know, toe to toe with the CFO, with the Compensation Committee because most chief people officers have purview over salary expense, real estate expense, and workplace expenses are huge line items, and it's not enough to just go in and say, I think this is right for people, or this is right for the values. No, we have to do the dollars and cents. What's right for us as an organization or a culture? And what's also business feasible? So, you know, that is a totally different thought than I thought, you know. Then getting into this role, I didn't know I'd have to be, you know, just as good with the numbers as the CFO at times as well as like assessing risk, thinking about our compliance, needing to go toe to toe with general counsel, and having enough, you know, just skill set there as well as communications. You know, all of these things that are coming through the external world, our employees really expect us to have a point of view and have a sense of communication. You know, that's something that's like... I have to sit side by side with our head of comms and have a really strong opinion based on business. So less about chief People Officer and more just this chief, like General Manager around everything that can happen in a company. And it's fun. I love variety. It's what keeps me in this role, but not necessarily the direction I thought it was going to go in when I first, you know, took the role.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: You're the first to give that kind of an answer. I really respect it because even CPOs I hear a lot will talk about, "Oh, you know, I don't have a voice," or "I have the C-level title, but it's not at that level," and whether it's their organization, or they haven't earned it yet... Like, you clearly, you're a C-level leader and forget about the people part—not that that's not important, but it's like that's the secondary. The 'C' is the primary, right? And you've obviously learned, you know, embraced that, and grown into that, and are, you know, a value partner at that C-level, and I think that's great advice for others is like, if you're not there yet, that's where you should be getting to. If you're not being invited into these conversations, if you're not having a challenging conversation with legal or Comms or others... Okay, why not? Why aren't they bringing you in on that? And I think you're going to motivate some people to think about their role and their level of contribution. We're talking here, it just turned November. I can't believe it. Where is this year going? So next year is going to be here any day now. So in your role, like, what are you and your team going to focus on next year? What's sort of a priority?
Lynee Luque: And so, for us, we just landed on some of our big rock priorities for 2024. It goes back to something you said earlier; we're going to keep our foot on the gas around manager development. We have a new org structure here, and I'll give the headline: It really relies on local decision-making more so than we have in the past. And I believe many managers have been successful because they are given the answer, or they're given, "Here's the cascaded message, say this, manager," and we're pushing more towards "Understand what's going on and make a local decision because you are best equipped; you're closest to the problem or to the opportunity." And so, we're going to approach manager development from that lens for 2024. How do we equip them? How do we give them the information so they can make more local decisions? The other thing is, we just want to get more flexible in our staffing. As I said, we're mostly US-centric right now, and how do we... You know, leverage other workforces outside of the US for our goals. So that's going to be a big, you know, conversation—whether that's outsourced or vendor, or, you know, an actual full-time employee in another region or area. And as you can imagine, that's a whole different skill set. We're remote, but it's like now, the complexity of time zones potentially of culture, of language. So there's going to be a really cool opportunity there. And our third one—we always do three—our third one is, how do we continue to make sure that all of our practices are aligned to a performance-based culture? And a big area, a big way that companies can do this is: How do you design your total rewards to reinforce whatever performance you want from a company? And we've been on that journey for about three years. But we're going to take some bigger swings around to make that more obvious for people in 2024.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: That's great. What excites you the most about your company right now?
Lynee Luque: Yeah, I didn't mention this at the top, but I'm a new mom, and I have a 9-month-old. Yeah, thank you. And so, I had a bit of a break when I was on leave. A bit of a break from NerdWallet, and it was about 5 months, and I shared with the organization when I came back I was like, it's almost like a chance to see things with fresh eyes, like as a new employee. And one of the things that I was most excited about is how many new things we're pushing out for consumers. So most recently, we just launched a credit card. That wasn't—it was barely a concept before I went on leave. And so the speed of just what we're shipping for consumers is just incredible. And I think it's really great. So I'm excited about that. What more? We have a lot of stuff that's in the wings and stuff just to make everything in finances easier for folks. So that's like number one. And then I—you know, I would just say, continuing to do what you said at the top of the call, which is just anything we offer, how do we make it trustworthy? How do we make sure that it's accurate? How do we make sure that data—like you know, our saying, "Yeah, read this article, not this other article," because we trust the information there. So having speed around offerings, offering more, but not losing that trustworthiness, you know, kind of advice and guidance that we're giving.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Yeah, a lot of exciting new things. You mentioned that so much of your culture is about transparency, and I feel like you've been super transparent with all of us and the listeners today. I've just learned in the last few interviews that I've done, Linnae, that, like what I—what I should even put this in the prep notes—what I'm really doing is I'm listening for ideas that other people can steal from you. You gave us a bunch of stealable practices, stealable ideas. So that's good. That's a good chat. So thank you for being so transparent with all that you're working on, congratulations on the success that your team has had, and NerdWallet, and we'll check in on you, probably in about a year. I want to hear about some of these top 3 priorities. Your top 3 rocks. How's that sound?
Lynee Luque: Yup, sounds good to me.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: Awesome. Thank you again.
Lynee Luque: Thank you. Thanks, Kevin.