In this episode, Springworks' Head of Marketing, Abhash Kumar talks to Yvonne Wolf, Founder and Chief Collaborator, TalentMatters LLC.
Yvonne has 25+ years of broad industry experience, partnering with boards and executive teams, influencing strategy, governance, talent, and culture decisions.
She is a graduate of Northern Illinois University and holds a degree of Bachelor of Science in Advertising from the School of Business and Journalism.
Yvonne crafted the board-approved HR strategy at Bill & Melinda Gates, Medical Research Institute for the 2020-2024 Strategic Plan. This strengthened the HR practices and team of this growing non-profit, biotech start-up.
In the episode, she talks about how organizations made changes in their management strategies due to the pandemic. She also throws light on the topics of diversity and inclusion, and how organizations should go about taking democratic decisions while drawing the line.
Organizational change management principles
Yvonne shares the three important principles she learned about change management while working at Partners in Health.
Democratic decision-making vs drawing the line
Yvonne has worked in organizations varying from 100 employees to 100,000 employees. She suggests that the practice of asking people what they need should happen in all organizations. It does not take away the leaders’ responsibility to make decisions. However, decision-making should be done differently in a small organization versus a large organization. For example, an organization with 180 people might have 6 to 7 middle managers who can influence the team. Here the decision-making process is short. However, with a large company with 1,000,000 employees, the number of middle managers has to be more.
A curious and open-minded listening leader is the core of a successful decision-making process irrespective of the size of the organization. Hence, a leader’s responsibility is to decide after getting opinions and ideas from multiple people.
People manager’s role in influencing leaders for the transformation
“It is incumbent upon leadership to create an environment that says. All lives matter, all opinions matter, all talent matters. And I think it's incumbent upon HR to create systems and processes that produce that outcome.”
Back in the day, people were a little more mindful of hierarchy. If someone in the team was 12 layers below, they wouldn't dare approach the CEO. Yvonne loves today's social media culture and how people feel they have every right to send a note right to the CEO about things that bother them. CEOs and leaders need to ensure that kind of openness everywhere in order to avoid affecting the employer brand.
Thoughts on banning employees’ political thoughts at work
The highest place for trust is in the workplace. Thus to ban conversations would be to ask people to leave a part of themselves. And it is also a missed opportunity to have some necessary and insightful conversations. According to Yvonne, the actual challenge is to promote civility in the conversation.
Yvonne suggests teaching employees how to have conversations. They need to build that curiosity for the conversation while having some ground rules at the same time.
Traits of a good leader
Inclusion, curiosity, empathy, and compassion- are the qualities of a good leader. Regardless of what's happening in the world, Yvonne believes that these qualities are the factors that are going to be the difference between organizations that can both predict or navigate.
Follow Yvonne on LinkedIn
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: Abhash Kumar