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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.
Kruse: Hello, everyone! I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome to Culture Code. Our guest for today is the Chief People Officer of Twilio, Christy Lake. Christy, welcome! Where are you joining us from today?
Christy Lake: Thank you so much for having me. I'm joining you from the Peninsula just south of San Francisco, over the Zoom web.
Kruse: Wonderful! Now, anybody in the tech industry knows of Twilio. It's a very well-known, well-respected company, of course. A great success story. In fact, my company, LEADx, uses Twilio. So thank you very much for that. But for our listeners who might not be familiar with Twilio, who are you guys? What do you do? Tell us about you?
Lake: So, I would say, there are two parts to the business. One, which is sort of a Twilio classic, is a communications platform that enables, you know, developers and companies to directly communicate with their customers. The example I like to give that's very user-friendly and relatable is, you know, perhaps if you're signing into a bank account, and they're sending you a text message to authenticate that it's you, that's probably coming through Twilio to get to you. Or if you've ordered, you know, an Uber or DoorDash, and you're getting that text message that your driver is approaching, that's coming through the Twilio communications platform. The other part of the business is really a customer engagement platform. This is a CP that houses lots of really cool customer data and allows brands and companies to more accurately engage with their customers. We're super excited. Obviously, in this year of all things AI, we've launched some really cool new products and have a lot of stuff ahead. We're calling it Customer AI, which leverages that engagement platform to create a really cool flywheel for our customers and their customers to stay closer.
Kruse: Yeah, it sounds great. So, where are you guys located? Where's your headquarters? How big is the company?
Lake: Oh, this is an interesting question. We are headquartered in San Francisco, but we are a remote-first employer, so we are located all over the place. We've got about 6,000 people globally, mostly US-anchored. But, you know, we're also in the APJ region. We're highly distributed.
Kruse: This is going to be fascinating. Obviously, you're a fast-growing, successful company that has embraced the remote-first workplace. There are lots of challenges to scaling and maintaining a great culture. But let's start by asking: what kind of culture do you have? How would you describe it to an outsider?
Lake: If you were to constrain me to a few words, I would describe us as being a company full of humble, customer-focused builders. That builder ethos really permeates the culture, which is cool for a startup. But we're definitely a startup at scale. You know, we're 15 years out at this point, and we've still maintained that founder-led feel. It's a very lovely culture.
Kruse: So that obviously humble, you know, builder culture customer-focused doesn't happen by accident. Even if it happened by accident, you don't maintain that with 6,000 employees by accident. So, what are you doing to teach those values? How do you foster this culture, especially in a remote-first environment?
Lake: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, when I started here some 3 and a half years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, we were about 3,300 employees. We have grown a ton in this virtual and distributed world. Obviously, culture was one of the focus areas for us. It's like, how do we continue to scale this? In all candor, we weren't doing a good job of it. I think from a hiring perspective, we were bringing in intrinsically motivated individuals. That builder ethos has permeated, and we've managed to find that persona. But the actual bones and infrastructure of the culture were confusing as heck. We had this pyramid that had, I don't know, 9, 13, some number of values. They worked when you heard the story of how they all connected, but I, you know, honestly, could not have named all the values for you or explained the interplay of all of them. It was just too confusing as a system. So, we actually did a lot of work in 2021 to evolve our value set upon which the culture is built and developed. The team was incredible. They developed, in my humble opinion, one of the most elegant values representations I've seen. I think it starts there. You have to have that foundation built from which you can scale and ensure that you have shared language, understanding, and expectations. It all starts in that value system. So, we did a lot of work on that.
Kruse: Well, you've piqued my curiosity. It's one of the most elegant value systems you've seen. What is it? You have a handful of values, and you mentioned the pyramid. I assume the pyramid's gone. Is it now a wheel? What did you come up with?
Lake: Yes. You're welcome to visit our website if you'd like to see it visually. But yes, we retired from the pyramid. We thanked it for its service and set it free. Now, we have a system with four values. It's a number you can easily remember. We're builders. We're owners. We're curious. And we're positrons. It's four concentric circles. The elegance of the system acknowledges and recognizes that our most ideal, the ideal Twilian, lives right in the center, where all four circles come together, and you're living and demonstrating, you know, reflecting each of these values in perfect harmony. But the reality is, our system recognizes that in any one day, period, or quarter, you might be a little light in one or some of those values. So it becomes a framework for coaching. When you think about giving feedback or performance conversations, and you're discussing how you showed up relative to the values, it's not just an acknowledgement like "you're not living the values." It's more like, "I'm seeing you really spike in these areas, but this one section seems to be missing or light for you. What's going on? Let's talk about that." It's cool how you can use them. What I really like is the very realistic recognition that, in our everyday lives, we're not always our best selves. It can help you identify areas for opportunity, recognizing that we're all human.
Kruse: Did I hear you say Positron was one of them?
Lake: You did.
Kruse: You've gotta tell me about that, because I've not heard that as a value anywhere before, you know it.
Lake: Yes, it's very unique. And it's funny, because it's the one that we were. The way we worked the value system is our founder, Jeff Lawson. We were like, "You hold the pen, you know. This is a founder-led company, and really the DNA of our culture is yours. And so we need to make sure that wherever we land you are a thousand percent, you know, like the owner of these, and really are going to be the champion of them. So you hold the pen on these." We had behaviors that ladder up to the value. But the nomenclature just wasn't sticking.
I remember the meeting we showed up at and we were, kinda you know, hammering out this last one. We had brainstormed all the ideas, and we're like, "It could be this. It could be that. It could be the other thing." And Jeff was like, "I've got it," and you could literally see the flicker in his eyes. He said, "Positron." And I'm gonna mess this up so you can fact-check me after, but it's like the positively charged portion of an electron. Or something is a positron. And in his sort of engineering mind, he's like, "That's what this is." And it is the nomenclature that is so uniquely his. It does not mean that you are, you know, fake happy all the time. That is not the implication of this one. It's like we're really genuine. We lean in, we help. We believe that, you know, people are good, and that we're here to do good work.
And you know, if I were to boil it down, it's this spirit of "How can I help?" It's wild because it exists in our culture. But now that we've put a name on it, the number of times now in meetings when you're working through just a really funky business problem, or you're just hitting a wall on something, you hear people regularly saying, "How can I help? What do you need at this moment?" And that, if I were to crystallize it, is the ethos of this positron. It's like, "I'm here for you. How can I help?" It's very cool.
Kruse: It is very cool. And Christy, I just want to add, for our listeners, I want to highlight a couple of things. First of all, I always say that I can always hear a sign of great, unique culture, because usually these organizations have a unique word for their colleagues, and you revealed "Twilian" at about the 10-minute mark of our interview, which is very, very cool. I also want to emphasize just how important the "keep it simple" principle is. I literally just got off another phone call before we started this interview. Someone was sharing the model that they have: the 5 business drivers, something like 4 or 5 principles, and then the 20 competencies. Values weren't even on this list. So I'm just thinking, "My guy, can you imagine being a manager in this organization? If you can't remember the 20 plus 4 plus 5 things, how likely are you going to apply it, do it, live it, be it, right?" The simple... There's genius in that simplicity. And then again, the values that are horrible are the ones that everybody has or should have, like integrity, and it becomes their number one value on your poster, and that's the end of it. So all of a sudden, things like "positron" people will do what I just did day one: an employee or a candidate being interviewed will ask, "What the heck is this positron? Let me look into that. Let me get curious." And so it's just so unique, and that makes it sticky. That makes it sticky and, therefore, livable. So much great stuff there. But let me shift gears, Kristy. Probably the thing I'm most passionate about is leadership development as an enabler of engagement and culture. LEADx Research, Gallup research, and others suggest that about 70% of the variance in engagement comes from who our boss is. They're the filter of everything. So no disrespect to Jeff, but everybody can have a great CEO, great vision, mission, values, and all that. But if I'm reporting to a bad manager or a manager that's negative, the opposite of a positron, I'm not gonna be too happy in my role. So, you've gone through so much growth in just a few years during a tumultuous time. And now, in a remote-first environment, how are you training, developing, supporting, say, your frontline managers who are touching 80% of the team?
Lake: Yeah, great question. It's definitely a challenge. When I joined in 2020, we had a flagged budget at the beginning of the year to really, in earnest, do people manage development. I completely agree with you that managers are the multipliers. They're making or breaking the experience. They're carrying the vast majority of the workload. They're either moving it in the right direction or alternatively. So it really is the cohort that we wanted to focus on. If I'm gonna be real with you, before we even get to the higher-value development, we had some building blocks. My first couple of weeks joining, even as a C-level leader, I must have gotten 20 odd emails that were like, "You need to do this, compliance wants you to do that." And oh, by the way, you've got to take this training. So we started thinking of them as a cohort. There's a weekly email that goes out, "Here's what you need to know. Here's what you need to pass down to your team. Here's what you need to do this week." We're creating more experience and thinking about the workload of managers. Beyond that, we did invest in people leaders. Gone were the days in 2020 where we could bring 400 people per region together to do a big thing because everybody was working from home. So we made a big bet, and we invested in a partnership with BetterUp. All of our managers got dedicated coaches so that they on their own journey could be up-leveling their leadership and navigating challenges that they had with leading their team, difficult conversations, performance coaching, etc. In addition to that, we started some core manager training, like manager foundations. If you're earlier in your manager journey, we have a partnership with LinkedIn Learning. We're providing a lot of content through that. Over the course of 2 years, we saw a 20 point jump in our people manager effectiveness score through the surveys that we do. Their direct team members assess their leader and say, "Is your leader effective?" We saw a 20 point jump in that, which was pretty incredible.
Kruse: So, let me - I love that you're doing manager effectiveness surveys. A lot of companies will do higher-level engagement and corporate things, but not so much the manager's behaviors. Tell me more about that. How are you getting feedback on the managers and the culture overall when it comes to manager effectiveness surveys? I'm curious. Are those annual? Are you doing them as pulse surveys? Tell me more.
Lake: Yes, so, yes and yes. We're actually migrating this year to a different kind of cadence. We were doing twice a year surveys that would be both full company engagement and inclusion, as well as a manager index, a manager effectiveness index. And now we're moving to a once-a-year big shebang on the company level stuff and quarterly pulses for managers. Our belief is that the unit of a team is where the magic happens. So as much information as we can give the team leader, as well as the folks on those teams, the ability to just monitor the org health of their team, the better off we'll be. That's how we're keeping a pulse on things.
Kruse: Yeah, and again, for the listeners, I often find I love a quarterly cadence and usually get a tremendous amount of pushback on that. People say, "We're going to oversurvey our people," or "they're not going to respond." But I often say that organizations have to report financials quarterly, but that's kind of like looking in the rearview mirror: "How did we perform in the previous quarter?" People and culture drive those results. By doing pulse surveys, you kind of get a glimpse out the windshield of what's to come. If you've got low scores or even one manager that's not performing well, once people decide they're looking for a job, they're going to have a new job within 12 weeks. So if you're only surveying twice a year or once a year, you're going to lose a lot of people before correcting or supporting that manager. Just to sync up, this idea that the people part drives performance, and knowing that you want to support struggling leaders more frequently, I think that quarterly cadence is great. It'll be interesting to see how that works out for you next year.
Lake: Yeah, likewise. The reality is there are so many dynamics that change. One new team member equals a new team dynamic. So if you're waiting a long time to figure out, "How are people doing?" it's just a snapshot in time. Three weeks from now, there could be a totally different vibe. So, I like the idea of having a more regular cadence. It is new for us this year, so I'm looking forward to it.
Kruse: Yeah, well, you've already talked about a lot of really cool programs and their unique values. But is there any particular initiative that has gotten really good results? Or just you're most proud of and want to talk more about?
Lake: You know, I think the thing that's uniquely Twilio, that's pretty cool, because it had gone dormant for a little bit there, and we brought it back, is our track jacket program. It goes back to our roots as the core Twilio product was a developer-facing product. The notion is that we're all developers. So, in order to earn your Twilio track jacket, which is this red track jacket that's got the company colors and logo, you actually have to code an app on our communications platform. Every single person at every level, like we've run the board of directors through this, in order to earn your jacket, you have to be hands-on keyboard, using Twilio products, and building an actual app. And so that is really cool because it's both a tradition or ritual, if you will, but you also get this symbol, which is the jacket. People wear it proudly, like "I've earned this." It's just a really cool way to remind us who we are and how the company started.
Kruse: I love that. It reminds me of how, you know, some organizations, no matter what level you're being hired for, spend the first days answering customer support calls or something. It's kind of a hazing ritual with a purpose.
Lake: I worked at Home Depot for five years, and I spent a week in the paint department when I started, you know, in my local store mixing colors and color matching. It was very fun.
Kevin Kruse - LEADx: I bet that offers some special benefits to your friends. They're like, "Hey, what about this or this?" And you've got some insight into that. So, do you have your jacket? Did you earn it yet?
Lake: I do. I earned it, I don't know, my first quarter here.
Kruse: What kind of app did you create?
Lake: I built an app. At the time, it was early days into the pandemic, and we were one of the companies that said, "Look, meetings are out of control. People have zoom fatigue. We need to do something different." We moved to Focus Friday where on Fridays you were intended to have time to do your focus work, you know, one on ones or things of that nature, but not scheduled meetings. So, I created an app to solicit feedback on how these Focus Fridays were going for folks. I put it on the company-wide Slack channel with a phone number that was like, "Text your feedback here," and then literally got all the texts to my phone so I could gather people's feedback. It was kind of a novelty, but it was timely, and I got feedback. So, it was great.
Kruse: Yeah, no, that's super cool. You actually made use of it. I love that. So, this is unfortunately a short format podcast. We only have a few minutes left. But I do want to hit you with a few more quick ones. Let's do it. So, imagine you could wave a magic wand and send any book or podcast or something to every Twilion, and they were guaranteed to read it, watch it, or whatever it is, or listen to it. So, what would you send everyone?
Lake: Oh, I mean, this is probably going to be dated. But I am such a big believer in a growth mindset. I think it's a book that has not gotten old, as new theories and practices have come around. I just think there's so much power in really harnessing the lifelong learner mindset. As a parent, I use it with my kids regularly. So, I just think there's so much power in that. That's a book I would definitely recommend for folks.
Kruse: That's great. Yeah, that's a powerful one. And what's something that you know now that maybe you wish you knew back when you first became a chief people officer? What would be some advice you'd send to a younger version of yourself?
Lake: Gosh! So, I mean, I guess I would say two things. One, I've never gone into any job that did not come with its own version of tech debt. And that could be literal, like people systems that aren't scaled with the company. But I just think of it as organizational debt of all kinds. And so, I would say two things. One, just know that you're going to have a backlog of requests from the business. They want everything, they want it at full maturity, they want it at full scale, automated,
streamlined, systematized. So, ruthless, rigorous prioritization is such an important skill that unfortunately, I think, becomes battle tested and earned. But, my gosh, if I could go back several years and just be like, you don't have to do it all. We all come into this organizational debt. You just have to ruthlessly prioritize. And then my sneaky number two, which is actually two things, so let's call it three. And I'm not pandering to the audience here, but I think investing in people management capability, like day two of the company, if you could rewind the tapes and start with a leadership philosophy and developing people, would be fantastic. And building your DEI strategy and operationalizing it, again, get your funding and then start these programs on day two. If you could rewind the tapes, that's what I would do.
Kruse: So you talk about ruthless prioritization. What might be your priorities for the year ahead for you and your team?
Lake: We actually just met about this last week, getting started on what 2024 looks like for us. And I mean, there are probably three or four big ticket items. But the headline is, many companies are calling people back to the offices and making people relocate, and show up X days of week, or whatever. Twilio has committed to being a remote first company. And so, we really want to make remote work for people. And so, investments in remote and in particular, if I were to fine-tune it, I would say supporting connection, like intentional connection strategies for folks, because the tools, the systems, the meetings, all that works. But it's like, how do you continue to foster these interpersonal connections that make teams go? And then the second would be, really exploring ways that we can bring AI into the people's space responsibly. And so, I think there's some exciting stuff that's on the horizon there. Some of it's still hype, but we want to see what we could do with that.
Kruse: That's great. So final question, just about Twilio: what are you most excited about for the organization right now?
Lake: I mean, I'm excited that it feels like there's some really cool new innovation ahead with Customer AI. We're never happier than when we're building, and when we're thinking of new things that we can do to help our customers engage with their customers. I'm also really excited about this connection strategy. Can we be the one? We did this headline exercise and multiple groups came up with some version of the same headline, which was, "Is Twilio the company that's going to crack the code on remote work? And will other companies follow and not just follow the trend of productivity rules that day, like everybody's got to turn up to the office so we can see you?" So I'm excited at the opportunity for the people team to do some innovation as well.
Kruse: I'm excited to hear about how all of that plays out as well. Christy, you had a million things you could be doing other than giving me your time today, but I'm so grateful for it. Thanks again for all that your company is doing, and thanks for spending time sharing some of your wisdom.
Lake: It's a pleasure, and thanks for being a customer.