The Ripple Effect: How Strong Leadership Cultivates a Thriving Workplace

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Jahnavi Brenner with The Vivid Leader. Welcome.

Jahnavi Brenner: Thanks, Lee. Good to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about The Vivid Leader. How are you serving folks?

Jahnavi Brenner: We support organizations that want to create resilient, follow anywhere leaders and award winning workplace cultures. So, we are basically a coaching and leadership development, talent development consultancy firm.

Lee Kantor: So, what’s your backstory? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Jahnavi Brenner: Oh, gosh. Lee, I have spent about 20 some years in corporate organizations as an individual contributor, and then a people manager in research and development, and then I moved into sales, and then I moved into HR. So, I made all of these moves because I got interested in aligning people’s interests as well as their passion with what the company was trying to accomplish.

Jahnavi Brenner: And, you know, I found when we were able to do that really well, we’re able to unlock their excitement to be at work, and they’re able to deliver the work they want to deliver, they’re able to contribute at their highest level. And then, the company, the organization can benefit because they’re creating their work product for their consumer, their ultimate consumer, to the best of their capabilities.

Jahnavi Brenner: So, to me, that’s really exciting. And sometimes you see challenges where people don’t get along at work or they feel like we have differences that can’t be resolved. But yet, you know, we’re all in the same company, we are an organization, we should find a way to be able to work together better so that we can do the work that the organization is here to do.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you believe after working with so many people that leaders are born? Or can they be made? Is everybody kind of a prospective leader if they are in the right ecosystem?

Jahnavi Brenner: I firmly believe that leaders can be built. So, leadership skills are things that we’re not born with. They are learned, and they’re learned just by swimming in the water. And it’s what someone did to you when they were your leader, they behaved a certain way, or they shared certain information with you, or explained things in a certain way to you. And you watched and learned and listened, and now when you step into a leadership role, you kind of mimic that.

Jahnavi Brenner: However, I believe that organizations need to be really deliberate in their development of their leaders, and not simply rely on what they might have learned at other organizations, and make a conscious effort to define what they want to develop their leaders in, what skills are important to lead at this company, and then put in leadership development programing or supports or structures to make sure that that happens.

Jahnavi Brenner: Leaders are definitely built, not born. And it is the responsibility of HR leaders and business leaders, organizational leaders, to invest and build and grow them.

Lee Kantor: I remember something somebody told me a long time ago and it’s really stayed with me. They said, “Why should I invest money and resources into developing these people and then they leave?” And then, the person said, “Well, what if you don’t invest money and resources into their leadership skills and they stay?”

Jahnavi Brenner: Right. Right. And then, you have a leader in your organization who’s relying on old skills or old methodologies, and they’re not working. I think that’s totally true, Lee. A lot of organizations don’t invest because they’re worried about the leader or their learner leaving.

Jahnavi Brenner: But what we find is that when you do invest, that person is watching and listening and absorbing everything they can about this company and really feel valued, and they feel seen, and they want to do a better job at that company. So, I think it actually builds loyalty. I’m sure there’s data to support that. I can’t quote it right this second here – well, actually, I think we know.

Jahnavi Brenner: We do know that investing in our employees drives loyalty of them because they feel like they’re part of this company and an irreplaceable part of this company, and not just a cog in a wheel or some unknown number on an org chart. They are actually a real human that can give to this organization in a really powerful way.

Lee Kantor: Now, it seems like you’re very passionate about this, and it feels like you have learned some lessons along the way that maybe left a mark. Can you talk about some of your past experiences where you saw maybe organizations get it right and benefit from this type of investment, and then maybe share some examples of them getting it wrong when they didn’t develop their leaders?

Jahnavi Brenner: You know, I was really fortunate to spend the first 17 years of my career at Procter and Gamble. And they’re a company, it’s a big CPG, Consumer Packaged Goods company, global company, and has been around for over 100 years. You can’t stick around for over 100 years if you’re not developing your future leaders to take your place, and take the company in a new direction and respond to new competitive challenges and new market forces, et cetera.

Jahnavi Brenner: Procter and Gamble invests a lot in their leadership development. When I was a new hire, this was back in 1995, I probably went to a three-day class every month that was about developing my skills to be an employee, not even a leader in the company, but an employee. Time management, presentation skills, critical thinking, all sorts of things were trainings that I went to, along with 25 other new hires in research and development. Then, when I became a people manager, and even before then, there were other training and offerings that were available to me to build my leadership skills.

Jahnavi Brenner: I learned how to lead people. I learned how to give feedback. I learned how to coach someone, so that’s a different skill than directing them and telling them what to do. They invested so much in developing their employees, and it really pays off in terms of giving people the skills and the experience they need to do more when they advance to those higher levels.

Jahnavi Brenner: On the flip side, I’ve been in other organizations that have been a little bit cash-strapped and not invested in leadership development. You know, unfortunately – I’d have to say this like coming clean here – I’ve been the HR leader at organizations where we put people into leadership roles, but we don’t equip them with the skills. And what ends up happening is they don’t have the skills, so they don’t do a great job. They come upon a situation where they have to give some difficult feedback to their direct report, and they might avoid it for a while. And then the problem, the issue grows and gets bigger and bigger and is left unattended causing even more ripple effects, or they do it but they do it poorly, and it doesn’t support the organization in making the change that they’re looking for in the employee or in retaining either the leader or the direct report.

Jahnavi Brenner: And then, the leader actually starts to feel less competent at their job. And it’s not any fault of their own. We shouldn’t expect these skills to just come from the heavens into them when they’re bestowed upon, you know, when they get the title of becoming a manager. Nobody just learns these skills or they don’t just come from the heavens. They need to be taught and they need to be practiced, and that’s where the company plays a really important role.

Lee Kantor: Now, what are kind of the symptoms that a company might be feeling that is really at the heart of a leadership development problem? Like, are there some clues that the organization C-suite could see and say, hey, maybe this signal is really about we’re not doing a great job developing our leaders, then that’s the problem we have to fix?

Jahnavi Brenner: Yeah, there are. This is when people call us, and so a few times come to mind. One is when they’re charging their next level leaders. So, maybe they’re in the C-suite and they look at their directors or their VPs, and they’re asking them to go do something together and they are not getting it done. What’s happening is there’s infighting, there’s finger pointing, there’s lack of understanding of the real goal. And they’re not finding they’re getting the results that they want from these people, and it’s because they haven’t developed them to be able to deliver those results.

Jahnavi Brenner: Another situation is when they’re not seeing the outcomes, the results. Like we want to meet the sales forecast, or we want to meet the product forecast, or we want to make sure our service levels are at a certain level and we’re winning awards, or we’re getting XYZ score on our NPS, and they’re not achieving that. They’re losing customers. Their product is number two or number three in the market.

Jahnavi Brenner: They’re not maintaining or able to get to that number one status in the marketplace for whatever they’re providing often is a leadership development issue. We might fall into the trap that it’s an innovation issue, but it’s usually a leadership development issue. The leaders aren’t developed well enough to unlock the brilliance and potential of all the people in the company, and that needs to be addressed.

Lee Kantor: Is also a situation where maybe this one role has high turnover and they’re blaming the individual, and maybe at the heart of it is a leadership issue or a lack of clarity?

Jahnavi Brenner: Yeah, absolutely. Turnover, lack of engagement and employee surveys, these are all things that need to be addressed with leadership development. Now, I feel like I’m saying everything’s a leadership development problem, not totally true. But in many situations, when we look at how employees think about staying in a company and why they stay in a company, it’s because of their relationship with their manager. And if managers are well-equipped to connect with employees and then set goals with them, give clear expectations, give good feedback, they often are finding that experience to be really rewarding. Both the employee and the manager are finding that experience, that cycle to be really rewarding.

Jahnavi Brenner: In the absence of clear direction, employees do the best they can. They come with the best intent, but you can’t bank everything on intent. That’s not all there is. You have to have some expectations as well.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned coaching a little earlier, is coaching something that is more spread out throughout an organization? Because back in the day, coaching was only, you know, at the highest levels. Are you seeing coaching being delivered throughout the organizations more often nowadays?

Jahnavi Brenner: Yeah, absolutely. Our firm coaches C-level executives all the way down to first line managers, and even some individual contributors that are promising. And what coaching is, is it’s an individualized development experience. So, in our coaching engagements, we start by getting feedback from the stakeholders of the coachee and doing some assessments, helping them become a bit more self-aware of how they show up at work, and what’s driving their success, and what some blind spots might be. And then, we have the coachee create a development plan that says here are the three things I’m going to work on during this coaching engagement. They’re usually about seven months long. And then, with their coach, they work on those three things.

Jahnavi Brenner: And so, we find that the structure of our engagements with the feedback and the development plan and each coaching session tied to something on the development plan, is really a powerful way to make sure the organization gets what they’re expecting from the coaching engagement and what the coachee needs to grow in, in the coaching engagement. And we’re seeing a lot of success. A lot of the companies that we do work with are providing coaching to director level employees or manager level employees, and they’re often doing it because they’re seeing that they haven’t spent the time or energy to invest in that person as much as they could have or should have.

Jahnavi Brenner: The manager of that person doesn’t have time to spend with them to help them understand how the new role is different than the old role. And the HR leader also doesn’t have time to give them that one-on-one individual support. And often, when they give that one-on-one individual support, they’re just telling them what to do. They tell the person what to do.

Jahnavi Brenner: And in coaching, we as coaches ask questions so that individual is figuring out what to do. They’re not being told. They’re coming up with the plan themselves. And it’s in that creation process that they then have more interest in executing on the plan, more buy-in into the options that are ideated, and really are excited and energized to take action and feel like they’re building their own confidence in being a leader as well, addressing the challenges that they need to address.

Jahnavi Brenner: We’ve seen clients get a 7 to 10X return on their financial investment in coaching with us, which is really exciting to see. And the return is showing up in retained employees, innovation to the marketplace, speed of collaboration, and also retention of critical customers. You know, that’s what we’ve seen with our clients when we’ve measured the ROI of coaching.

Lee Kantor: Can you share some tips for our listener when it comes to getting started or putting a program like this into place? Is there some do’s and don’ts?

Jahnavi Brenner: Yeah, absolutely. When you’re starting to think about leadership development, it’s always important to think about the organization’s strategy. What’s our business strategy and where is this organization going in the future? And that will and should inform the skills you want to build in your leaders. In the absence of that, you would likely build a program that’s simply going to get them a little bit better from where they are, and what you need to do is think about where is the future going to be and develop them to get to that point in the future.

Jahnavi Brenner: So, we usually start by talking with senior leaders in the organization about what’s going on currently and what are their visions and plans for the future, and kind of use that as our North Star to guide us in developing their leaders in terms of the content. And then, when we think about the methodology, we are often understanding the constraints of the organization. Do they have time for a week long in-person experience? Is this a half-day experience once a quarter that they go through with work that they do outside of the training class or group coaching sessions that they go to outside the training class to support them in the application of the new concepts?

Jahnavi Brenner: So, the first thing is aligning your development to the business strategy. And then, the second thing is making sure you understand the constraints and context of the learner so that you build the experience that it’s easy for them to engage in.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for your firm to become part of the WBEC- West community? What were you hoping to get out of that?

Jahnavi Brenner: What the WBEC-West community provides for us is connection to other women-owned businesses and the camaraderie that comes with being a small business enterprise. You know, we really like connecting with fellow owners to understand and kind of share best practices. We also have been able to meet large corporate companies through our connections with WBENC. We just recently went to the National Conference that was in Denver just earlier this year, in March of this year, and met many representatives from companies that we wouldn’t have been in touch with earlier. And so, it’s just kind of opening doors in terms of meeting peers and also in terms of meeting prospective clients.

Lee Kantor: Now, speaking of prospective clients, what does the ideal client profile look for you?

Jahnavi Brenner: Our ideal client is someone who cares about building resilient leaders in their company and wants to have an award winning culture. So, if you care about building leaders in your company and you really want them to be 100 percent equipped for their job, we’re probably a good partner for you. We work in the nonprofit and for-profit areas, and we work across the industry. I personally have deep experience in consumer packaged goods, in healthcare, and in tech and software and hardware companies. But our team has even broader experience across education, manufacturing, banking, multiple other industries, and so we are able to serve clients across a variety of industries.

Lee Kantor: What about sizes? Is there a sweet spot when it comes to a number of employees or size of the organization?

Jahnavi Brenner: When we’re doing a leadership development program, usually it’s a 300 person or more organization. Or even a program for career sponsorship or career mentorship, those types of things are usually done in larger organizations where you have at least 20 people managers that you think are in this target audience. We’ve done coaching for people in organizations that have been as small as 10 to 15 employees, where they needed a coach for their senior executive and wanted to get that support, that leadership development support in a highly individualized way. So, we work with anyone, really, but it depends on the situation, but obviously the offerings are a little bit different depending on the size of the organization.

Lee Kantor: So, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what is the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Jahnavi Brenner: The best way to connect is to go to our website, which is www.vividleader.com. And on there, you can learn a lot about our services, our speaking that we do, and also book a consult. We can have an initial chat to talk about what’s going on in your organization and what might be a good solution and how we might be able to help.

Lee Kantor: Now, before we wrap, is there a story you can share about maybe a successful engagement where you helped a company get to a new level?

Jahnavi Brenner: Yeah, there is. We’re working with an organization, a nonprofit that was struggling actually to justify the funding they needed to support the development of the leader that we coached in the organization. And so, we started the coaching engagement, and I worked with the HR leader, and I assured her that they would get a really high ROI on this engagement. And they had a person in a role, and before that person was in the role, it was kind of a revolving door. There were people coming in, coming out, coming in, coming out, and they really were worried about the current person in the role.

Jahnavi Brenner: And so, we engaged with them and we provided a leadership coach for this employee. And she was new to level, new to role, and was kind of struggling with the responsibilities of the job. And struggling in the way of like not thinking big, not thinking as a function leader, but really kind of thinking as an individual contributor. And so, through our coaching, she focused on leading her team more directly, leading her team and stepping into that leadership role, and instead of thinking and responding to what’s happening in the organization, she started leading more proactively. She also learned how to communicate better with her manager.

Jahnavi Brenner: And one of the things that happened in this engagement is she had a new hire on her team who came to her with a new idea on how to run the warehouse. Warehouse is a key part of their operations and it’s a pretty big, important part of their operations. The new hire had an idea to change how they do something in the warehouse. And the manager came to a coaching session and was like, “Ah, I probably should tell my boss about this.” And, you know, wasn’t very excited about it.

Jahnavi Brenner: And so, in the coaching conversation, she worked with her coach to create a new way to pitch this idea to the manager. And it might sound simple, but the way she had pitched ideas in the past just didn’t land right with the manager. And so, what they did in this coaching conversation was come up with a completely different way to pitch the idea, and one that was really tailored to the things that the manager cared about.

Jahnavi Brenner: “What do you think the manager cares about?” “Well, cares about efficiency, cares about saving money, cares about saving time.” “Well, what do you know about this idea and how it might save time, money, or create efficiency?” “Well, I’m not sure.” “Well, how could you test that? How could you create some data, like come up with some data that you can give to her to make her a little more excited about that idea?”

Jahnavi Brenner: She revamped her pitch, got a little bit of data, and pitched it to her manager with a new sense of confidence. And the manager said,
“Yeah, let’s go do it.” They implemented that idea in the warehouse, and we estimate that they got an ROI of probably over $250,000 from just one idea being pitched to the manager in a different way based on what she experienced in just one coaching session.

Jahnavi Brenner: I think that comes to like 1000X on the return. It’s big because it’s about seeing a situation in a new light. It’s about building new skills. And it’s about building confidence as a leader. And that’s something that comes with practice. And we were able to give her that opportunity in the coaching session and help them get that result. And I’m really excited about that, because when we went back to the HR leader who was worried about how much they were going to spend on this, we were able to show them that ROI, they were just blown away. Just blown away by it.

Lee Kantor: The impact is real, and then not only do you have engaged people, you have savings for the organization that hits their bottom line directly. The ripple effects are real.

Jahnavi Brenner: Yes, absolutely. We have a retained new hire who is like, “Wow. I just walked into a really great organization because they hear my ideas and they implement them and they work.” We have a retained manager. We have a VP who thinks even more highly of her direct report and team. And then, like you said, the change in the warehouse improved the efficiency and the operations there pretty dramatically.

Lee Kantor: Well, one more time before we wrap, the website?

Jahnavi Brenner: The website is vividleader.com, and people are able to book an appointment, also see our services and what we offer, and learn a little bit more about our philosophy on coaching and leadership development there.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Jahnavi Brenner: Thank you, Lee. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor, we’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.