The Culture Code

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! ☕️ 🎧 

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

If L&D wants to evolve from "order-taking" into a strategic entity, a significant mindset and behavior shift is required. In comes Dr. Keith Keating, author of The Trusted Learning Advisor and CLO at BDO Canada. He covers:  1. The most common stumbling block L&D professionals run into as they adopt a strategic mindset.  2. How to leap over this stumbling block.  3. The critical traits of a...

In this interview, CPO of Consensus Cloud Solutions, Lynn Johnson, explains how she scales and sustains company culture to 600 hybrid and remote employees.  A few highlights include:  1. How she sustains culture with "an iron fist but a velvet glove."  2. How despite being a 600-employee company, she scales executive coaching to all of her first-line leaders.  3. Lynn's favorite books and advice f...

In this episode, we sit down with Heather Laychak, the CPO at The Aerospace Corporation. She covers everything from her best-in-class approach to aspiring leadership programs to an industry-shifting diversity initiative and her top three book recommendations. Key topics include: The Aspirational Manager Program: How and why Heather and her team take an “open to all” approach to her aspiring leader...

Five years ago, I wrote a check for $1 million to launch an AI-powered coach using IBM Watson. We then created the world’s first executive coach bot (long before Chat GPT). And it DID NOT work. Here’s why: Even though the leaders liked the tool… The BUYERS—CPOs, CHROs, CLOs—DID NOT. The issue was this: Occasionally the bot would make a mistake. And this put the Buyers at risk. Sure, the mistakes w...

Abbie Buck, CPO of Collective Health, breaks down her scrappy approach to leadership dev. This one's full of creative and stealable ideas!  Key Topics Covered: Her scrappy approach to develop frontline leaders: Abbie designed and delivered in-house development programs and recorded them for future use.  Cultivating a customer-centric culture: The company uses "love letters" from customers to reinf...

In this conversation with Courtney Panik, CPO of Symphony, we cover : How she helped Symphony scale its culture as it grew from a startup to a scale-up How Symphony's flat organizational structure and an open-door policy foster accessibility and trust. The role of people managers as "culture carriers" at Symphony. Leadership Development Tactics: Panik's "secret weapon" for cultivating effective le...

This episode explores the innovative way the CHRO of SugarCRM reduced employee turnover from 23% to 9% after joining the company. In addition to reducing turnover, CHRO Shana Sweeney shares:  How she cultivates a unique company culture: She unveils the core values that make SugarCRM’s culture stand out, including the transformative "Yes, if" approach to problem-solving. How she tackles learner ove...

LEADx and Gallup research on employee experience shows that “your manager cares” is now a top five driver of employee engagement. One great example of “caring” in action is at One Medical, where “manager care” is a top-scoring item on their engagement survey year over year. To learn more, I had the chance to meet with CPO Christine Morehead.  Here are three highlights from our conversation.  1. Ch...

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. 

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 collectibl...

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 se...

"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 empl...

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...

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...

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 coachi...

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...

As I approach 40 podcast episodes with CPOs, an interesting theme has emerged: Companies that lean into quirky values stand out as especially creative and authentic environments.  At Virta Health, employees operate around the value: "Evidence based." To learn more about what this looks like in action, I met with Dr. Lucia Guillory, the CPO.  A couple highlights from this interview include:  1. Wha...

Gallup research indicates that 70% of engagement can be traced back to an employee’s relationship with their manager. This just goes to show that at the heart of any thriving culture is thriving leadership. Bristlecone is no exception. When the company attrition rate grew to 27% nearly two years ago, Chief People Officer (CPO) Lisa Lesko knew she needed to take action. After designing and deliveri...

When a company experiences rapid growth, growing pains are inevitable. Original employees find themselves in a sea of new employees. The way things are done shifts. The culture evolves. So what can a company do to ease its growing pains? One of the more creative approaches I’ve heard is at Neo4j where employees adopted a company-wide mentality of radical candor. Two key  highlights from this inter...

A tricky challenge many companies face as they grow: The high-touch, personalized approach to culture is tough to scale. At Seismic, the company’s founder-led culture revolves around caring. So much so that many employees were former customers. Despite rapid growth to 1600 employees, Seismic has managed to hold onto its culture of caring. CPO Linda Ho has played a big role in that success. Linda c...

It’s not so often you get to hear from a CPO who was a company’s first hire. CPO at Denali Therapeutics, Cindy Dunkle, is exactly that. She’s done a stunning job of scaling culture on the company’s growth path to 450 employees. The biotech company injects science into its culture at every turn. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: 1. Culture as the result of “inputs” and “outputs.” Dun...

Josh Bersin wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “the single main driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture.” But how do you go about creating one? At Alto Pharmacy, the initiatives to scale a culture of learning are uniquely creative, action-oriented, and practical. To learn more about Alto’s approach, I met with CPO Shannon Wilson. We covered: 1. Two ke...

Research shows that recognition is the eighth-strongest driver of employee engagement.  But how can a company go about fostering recognition at scale without being disingenuous or forced? One great example is at the company Collectors, where recognition ranges from Slack shout-outs to custom-made, collectible-style cards of the person being awarded. To learn about how Collectors put together such...