The Culture Code – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Culture Code

Kevin Kruse

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/4d. Total Eps: 56

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.

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🇨🇦 Canada - management
15/03/2025
#81
🇨🇦 Canada - management
01/02/2025
#72
🇨🇦 Canada - management
30/12/2024
#64

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https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx
2 shares
http://swf2030.org/
1 share
http://swf2030.org
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/karanvsingh/
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Score global : 64%

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What Being A CPO Looks Like At A Small Company with the CPO of Aperian

Episode 56

Friday, February 23, 2024 • Duration 18:57

The CPO of Aperian, Addie Johnsen talks about what it's like to be CPO at a 65-employee organization. We discuss:

how she uses the smaller company size to personally coach every leader.
how she indexes company values team by team
her book recommendations for HR professionals

Enjoy! ☕️ 🎧

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RANT: My Problem with the Kirkpatrick Model

Episode 55

Friday, February 16, 2024 • Duration 07:51

I break down my problem with the Kirkpatrick model and what you should do about it!

COMMUNITY: How to Design and Deliver Your Aspiring Leaders Program with the Sr. Mgr of Leader Dev at OLYMPUS

Episode 47

Thursday, December 14, 2023 • Duration 44:54

This episode is a LEAKED event from our private, members-only Community of Practice for Leadership Development Professionals.

We covered how to design and deliver an aspiring leaders program with the Sr. Manager of Sales Training at OLYMPUS.

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The Case For Intertwining Company Culture And Product with NerdWallet's CPO

Episode 45

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 • Duration 30:40

An unexpected sign of a thriving company culture is when the culture and product go hand in hand.

Here are a few examples:

At Headspace, a mindfulness and wellness app, company culture is fostered with guided meditations, “MINDays” devoted to letting employees unplug, and peer-to-peer gratitude.
At Collectors, a collectible authentication company, employees are recognized with custom collectible cards that display their information, pictures, and stories.
At Twilio, a platform for developers, employees receive custom track jackets for coding an app on their platform.

When I met with Chief People Officer (CPO) of NerdWallet Lynee Luque, I was pleased to have found another brilliant example. NerdWallet culture revolves around the very things that the platform is built for: “transparency, accuracy, and responsibility.”

NerdWallet is a platform that provides financial guidance and information to consumers as well as small and medium businesses.

Below are a couple highlights from our interview:

1. A creative approach to feedback: live AMA's with execs

“Once a quarter, we do an open Ask Me Anything. We dedicate an hour when all the executives are on Slack, and we encourage, solicit, and ask employees to ask us anything. Then, we answer the questions in real-time. We're sitting there giving responses, regardless of the questions.”

2. Her clever low-budget approach to first-line leadership development

“We want to ensure that our managers receive the feedback they need, so twice per year we conduct an engagement survey that's anonymous and confidential.” What makes her approach so clever is that Luque and her team deliver timely manager training twice per year following the evaluation period. That way, leaders know exactly which skills and behaviors they’d like to work on during the training.

3. How she plans to empower frontline managers to make local decisions

The Case For Putting Your Mission At The Heart Of Your Strategy with Waymo's CPO

Episode 44

Monday, December 11, 2023 • Duration 27:50

In the HBR article, “Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy,” the authors describe an intensive study that they conducted to understand the strategies high-growth companies use to drive growth.

The authors were surprised to discover one strategy that kept surfacing: putting purpose at the core of your company strategy.

Across my thirty plus interviews with chief people officers (CPOs), Waymo serves as one of the best examples of how a strong sense of purpose can drive culture and ultimately growth strategy. In this interview with CPO Becky Bucich, she does a brilliant job of breaking down Waymo’s culture and the work her team does to foster it.

A few highlights from this conversation include:

1. A culture built around Waymo's mission to "make roads safer."

The self-driving car company strives to make the world safer, and this mission bleeds into everything that employees think, do, and say.

“I still remember my first day at Waymo more than four years ago. During my orientation, we each shared why we joined Waymo, and the stories were so touching. People spoke about family members who were unable to get behind the wheel and the tragic loss of loved ones,” Becky said.

2. Becky shared three unique ways she fosters culture.

- A monthly newsletter and live showcase of a story of a "Waymonaut" who demonstrated a core value.
- Setting aside time to volunteer in the community.
- Accessibility to their product. When launching in San Francisco, Waymo launched in all micro-publications around the city to reach as many segments of the population as possible.

3. Why she leverages just-in-time learning to develop first-line managers

“We offer quite a bit of just-in-time training. For example, after conducting our employee engagement survey, we train based on the results.” Bucich and her team also hold manager circles, where newer managers can learn from another manager who has more wisdom or experience in a relevant skill."

An Authentic Culture Is The Ultimate Moat with the CPO of Dave

Episode 43

Wednesday, December 6, 2023 • Duration 27:15

"Building a real authentic culture is a moat because it's hard to replicate," said Shannon Sullivan the CPO of Dave.

In this episode, Shannon shares how she built her moat at Dave.

Here are a few highlights:

1. Two Ways she fosters authenticity in Dave's culture

She injects all-hands meetings with 1) live interviews with customers, and 2) a highly transparent update (i.e., deep diving into employee engagement results).
Including a culture-specific OKR that's company-wide.

2. How she reverse-engineered great leadership

When Shannon joined Dave three years ago, she was blown away by how high their manager effectiveness ratings were: 80–90% favorability on all of the questions around people’s experience with their direct manager.

Most CPOs would be content “leaving leadership be” with such strong results, but Shannon decided to capitalize on their high scores to decode great leadership at Dave.

“Some people call me a control freak. I call it intentional,” Sullivan said. “I decided to spend some time defining great leadership because that becomes the foundation of everything that we build. How we train managers, how we hire, and more.”

3. Her podcast recommednation: How I Built This with Guy Raz

“It's a podcast that interviews founders and shares their stories about building companies. It's a really good reminder that success, whether you're building a business, your career, or whatever, is often not linear. There are going to be setbacks. When I listen to the podcast, I can't help but reflect on the journey I've had here at Dave, which has not been linear and has included setbacks.”

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We covered all of the above and much more. This one is a MUST-LISTEN! Great stuff from Shannon.

The Secret To Great Company Culture Is ‘Less But Better’ with the CPO of Headspace

Episode 42

Monday, December 4, 2023 • Duration 21:40

Culture isn't magic. It's the product of thoughtful effort.

As Josh Bersin puts it, “To change the culture, don’t start with the culture. Start with the problem that you are trying to solve, what success looks like, and why it matters to your company.”

Nowhere is this mentality more present than at Headspace, where Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief People Officer (CPO) Karan Singh fittingly operates under the mantra “less but better.”

Here are a few highlights from our interview:

how he creates a culture that reflects the company mission

“Culture certainly doesn't happen magically,” Singh pointed out. “You need to create it.”

Here are three ways (of many) that he does so:

- Beginning every all-hands meeting with a guided meditation

- Flexible time off for employees to catch up on life, recharge, and get away from laptops

- peer-to-peer recognition where employees express gratitude for each other’s contributions and adherence to company values

2. how a team’s engagement and workload capacity go hand-in-hand

As a dual COO and CPO, Singh shared the following unique perspective:

“Wearing my operational hat, I think a lot about capacity planning and how much a team can take on. I think those areas are directly related to employee engagement scores. As engagement decreases, so will the load that your team can handle. If you wait every six or 12 months to measure team engagement, you clearly can't plan effectively.”

3. how he develops “superhuman” leaders

A recent example of “less but better” in action:

The “Superhuman” Program—In collaboration with a team of neuroscientists and faculty members from UC Berkeley, Headspace created a program centered around this question: “How do you create a workplace that is remote-first and creates space for people to work smarter, not harder?”

The Key To A Thriving Culture? Develop Your Emerging Leaders with the CPO of DocuSign

Episode 41

Friday, December 1, 2023 • Duration 18:02

Leadership development is the lever for a thriving culture. Gallup research indicates that 70% of engagement can be traced back to an employee’s relationship with their manager.

At DocuSign, employees actively love their leaders. In fact, year after year, one of the company’s highest-scoring items on its employee engagement score is “How likely would you recommend your manager?”

When I asked Chief People Officer (CPO) of DocuSign Jennifer Christie about the success of her leadership development team, she said she attributed it to the proper preparation of emerging leaders.

In this interview, Jennifer covers:

1. How she prepares her emerging leaders.

She prepares people to lead early - Christie’s leadership development team works with aspiring leaders before they actually manage people. “If we've identified someone as being on track to become a manager, we put them through training to help them experience what it’s like."

Emerging leaders can then opt out of leadership roles - Based on their experience during training, emerging leaders then have the ability to opt in or out of leadership.

2. Her advice for CPOs: Ingrain yourself in the business

“When I first took the stage at a different company, I thought everyone expected me to be perfect and the best HR expert. I chose to focus less on being an expert in the business. If you focus on understanding the business, it will make you a better partner to your chief executive officer (CEO) and your peers.”

3. Jennifer's top book recs (both help drive a culture of effective feedback)

Thanks for the Feedback and Difficult Conversations. Both books were written by the Harvard Negotiation Project with Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone.

“These are two books that everyone can benefit from. I don't care what job you have or what level you are, these kinds of conversations are difficult. Giving feedback that's going to land the right way or receiving feedback in a productive way are fundamental skills for everything we do.”

Think Of Your First-Line Leaders As Player-Coaches with the CPO of Box

Episode 40

Tuesday, November 21, 2023 • Duration 18:10

With their deep involvement “on-the-floor” frontline managers are a lot like player-coaches.

That’s how the CPO of Box Jess Swank likes to think of them. And I think it makes a lot of sense!

Jess shared five critical ways she develops her frontline leaders

Monthly manager power hours on timely skills
A bi-weekly manager newsletter
A Slack channel for Q&A
Focused development programs and coaching
New manager training

She also shared that moving in 2024, she’s focusing on locally tailored training: “We're working on understanding the commonalities across locations and how we can support local managers with local issues in a customized way.”

In addition to the above, she dived into what culture looks like at Box, how they scale and sustain their culture, and her number one book recommendation.

Hope you enjoy this one

📦

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How To Reverse-Engineer Highly Impactful Leadership with the CPO of CEI

Episode 39

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 • Duration 23:23

At Cupertino Electric Inc. (CEI), the company grew so fast that they’ve found themselves at an inflection point. Now, CEI is attempting to slow down to observe its most effective leaders and determine what makes them great.

To learn more, I met with CEI’s CPO Estrella Parker.

A few highlights from our conversation include:

1. How she decoded the mindset behind great leadership at CEI

She called the mentality "one team" and explained three main tenets:
There are three tenets of the one team mentality:
- CEI leaders are connected on a human level.
- CEI leaders are accountable. “We pride ourselves on our projects, and we deliver. We do what we say. We do it on time and on budget,” Parker highlighted
- CEI leaders have an adaptable mindset. “Resiliency is how this company grew,” Parker explained.

2. Her podcast recommendation for people & culture pros

Wisdom from the Top” with Guy Raz.

“Guy interviews different leaders from different sectors to hear their stories. You learn a lot about leadership and the authentic struggles, successes, and hard lessons that people have learned.”

3. Her advice for CPOs

"Think with your heart and love with your brain."

“You're dealing with people, and people need love. But you are also a strategist for people, so you have to think with your heart. You have to be rational about how you approach the softer side of organizations, and at the same time, you must solidly ground your thinking."

Estrella offers a ton of great insights for people and culture leaders at companies in phases of rapid growth. Hope you enjoy 🤓

The Culture Code – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Culture Code – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other3

LinkedIn2

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other3

LinkedIn2