Your Guide to Top Down Culture Alignment w/Megan Galloway
Episode Overview
Join us on Making Better as host Matt Gjertsen sits down with Megan Galloway, a seasoned expert in learning and development. Megan shares her insights from transitioning HR strategies to the frontlines of fast-paced companies. We delve into the critical role of culture strategic planning in cultivating real behavioral change within organizations. Discover Megan's tactics for earning executive buy-in, the significance of aligning learning programs with company goals, and the importance of adaptability in today's dynamic business environments. Learn why Megan advocates for sharing ROI metrics, fostering relationships, and customizing training to fit each unique organization. Whether you're navigating a startup or steering a well-established team, this episode is a treasure trove of practical wisdom for fostering a culture of continuous improvement and exceptional leadership.
About Megan Galloway
Megan Galloway is on a mission to make our workplace a more authentic and human place for current and future generations to thrive. Megan has specialized in building award-winning learning programs and communities for teams and fast-growing companies. Megan’s thought leadership has been featured in podcasts, articles, and international conferences, and her LinkedIn-based coffee chat community has hosted thousands of participants from six of the seven continents around the world.
Make sure to check out Megan’s book recommendation:
Unreasonable Hospitality: https://amzn.to/47iIkpU
Learn more about her on LinkedIn and through her website: https://www.everleaderconsulting.com/
Full Transcript
-
Megan Galloway [00:00:00]:
If we want to want to make real behavioral change inside of our cultures and inside of our leadership in our organizations, we can't just talk about theory of it and put people in, you know, a boot camp for two days every year. We have to build things inside of our businesses that support that real change and, and give people true direction, and especially in like, remote and hybrid environments. If you're not around people on a day to day physically, then it becomes even more crucial to have those types know agreements and operating models that make us look at culture in a slightly different way.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:36]:
Hello and welcome to the making Better podcast, where we talk about making ourselves, our teams, and our organizations better. My name is Matt Jurtson, the founder of Better Everyday Studios, and I promise you that whether you are a business leader, a talent development professional, or an individual contributor, this show will give you actionable insights to help improve your own performance and the performance of those around you. Our guest today is Megan Galloway. Megan is on a mission to make our workplace a more authentic and human place for current and future generations to thrive. She specializes in building award winning learning programs and communities for teams and fast growing companies. And Megan's thought leadership has been featured in podcasts, articles, and international conferences. Her LinkedIn based coffee chat community has hosted thousands of participants from six of the seven continents around the world. I had the privilege of meeting Megan recently, so I'm really excited for this discussion.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:33]:
But before we get into it, I just want to say that if this is your first time listening to the show, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a future episode. And if you're already subscribed, then I would ask that you share this show with at least one other person, because that, after all, is how we grow. I can't tell you how much it would mean to me. So with that, let's get into the discussion. Megan, how are you doing today?
Megan Galloway [00:01:58]:
I am wonderful. How are you, Matt?
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:01]:
I'm doing fantastic. It's a gorgeous day today. We're recording on a Friday, so it's nice to do these chats at the end of the week. I'm really excited that we got connected on LinkedIn recently because I think you have had a really interesting career in learning and development in that you have multiple times gotten to kind of build something from scratch, which is something that I don't think a lot of people get to do. A lot of people, they come into an organization and there's already this groundwork that kind of exists. There's all these programs that they're inheriting and they're always wishing, oh, what if I could do it a different way? What if I could start from scratch? And you've gotten that opportunity. So I think I'd love to start there. If you could tell us a little bit about what that career journey has been like of building those learning programs from scratch.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:52]:
And then as we get to kind of the end of that, I would love if when you come into an organization, what is the low hanging fruit that you usually see when you're getting started?
Megan Galloway [00:03:02]:
Yeah, that's a great question. So I kind of fell into L. D. By accident, really. So after I graduated with my undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas, my degree was in Spanish with a minor in business, and I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my.
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:16]:
So, good thing you got the minor in business.
Megan Galloway [00:03:19]:
I was smart a little bit at that time. Yeah. But it was really great because I ended up landing into HR, and I have always been, like, a people person. My main driver is helping other people. And so it seemed like a really natural fit. And so I kind of started with a construction company where I was using my Spanish to help hiring folks into the trades. And so I was with this construction company, and during that time, it was coming out of the recession and the company was growing quickly, and they realized that they had this strategic need for building training and a leadership development program and some of those pieces that as they were growing, they noticed that they needed more than they did previously when they were a much smaller kind of family led organization.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:02]:
Sure.
Megan Galloway [00:04:03]:
So they tapped me on the shoulder and said, megan, you've never done this before, but what would you think about growing this training and development program from scratch? And I learned very quickly, I love building things. I love starting things from scratch and building something new. And so it was just an absolute treat. I got to kind of do that needs analysis organization wide, take a look at where the strategic plan was going for the organization over the next several years and then match the training initiatives and kind of that foundation for the training programs based on those needs. So it was an absolute blast. We built out those learning and development programs for several years while I was there. And then, yeah, at that organization, actually, we were ranked as number 19 training organization in the world. Number 20 was IBM.
Megan Galloway [00:04:51]:
So it was a super fun kind of ceremony in Washington, DC, where we got to accept that award, and we were this tiny little construction company at number 19. So it was a really fun experience.
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:04]:
That's awesome. I want to focus on something you said there, because I would imagine a lot of getting to number 19, getting that ranking had to do with something that you said where as you were building, you matched what you were building. The first thing you did is match it with kind of the strategic initiatives and direction of the organization, which I think is such an important piece in all this and something that often gets missed. How did you make sure that when you were tasked with learning, did it seem obvious to you, oh, I need to match the learning programs with what we're trying to achieve. How did that whole process happen? How did you make sure that what you were building mapped to what the company needed as it grew?
Megan Galloway [00:05:46]:
Yeah, I mean, I think one of my core philosophies is that whatever you're building should be for the people that you're building it for. So it's not just like, I have good ideas and I think we should do these things. And so a lot of it was talking to the people that were in the day to day of the business and all the way from frontline workers all the way up to the executives to say, what are you seeing are the biggest needs right now that we need to be fixing inside of our organization? And also, where can we get proactive? And that's when it started to bleed into, okay, as we're doing strategic planning, we're noticing that these are like, major things that we already know. We're taking the business in these areas now, how can we support with the initiatives that we have in our learning and development programs so that they just dovetail along with those really well and give people real support and resources needed with the change management that we already know we're going to be doing to grow strategically in the next several years. So that's kind of where that came from. And I think it served us really well because it was like people were asking us for the things that we were already ready to deliver. And so it felt like we were on pace with what people were wanting and needing. And so it wasn't as much trying to get people to buy into the idea of like, oh, you have to go to this training.
Megan Galloway [00:06:56]:
It was like, I wish I had training on this. And we were like, perfect. We've been working on that. Here you go.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:03]:
That's fantastic. It's great when you can get ahead like that. How much was saying no a part of that? Because I'm guessing, and maybe this wasn't true, maybe it was a growing organization that had been existing for a long time. But I think a lot of people, what they find is at least what I've found in my career is sometimes there's disconnects between whether it's people on the ground think is needed versus what the executive team is needed, or it's today's need versus tomorrow's need. Did you have to do any kind of stakeholder management to stay focused so that you weren't going after the training issue of the day and instead staying focused on the strategic stuff so that when real needs arose, you were in front of it rather than behind it because you were just, like, fighting fires all the time?
Megan Galloway [00:07:53]:
Yeah, I mean, I think that's where my HR background came in handy, because the reality is that a lot of the time when people are coming to you and saying, I need training for this thing, 90% of the time, they don't actually need training. What they need is to have, like, a performance conversation, or they need to reallocate resources, or they need to be structuring things in a different way or have a crucial conversation. There's so many different things that I think that we use training as, like, a band aid for these issues. And so that's where I had close partnerships in all the organizations that I worked with, with the people operations teams, and it was frequently like, all right, maybe this is an issue that needs to be dealt with, with training. The more likely solution was that it was solved with coaching the manager that was coming to me for things or was looking at it from a more holistic perspective and saying, all right, we're hearing this same thing over and over again from multiple departments. Now, that's indicating to us that this is a more widespread problem, that we now need to think about what development is needed for this specific area. So I really did it more based on trends versus individual needs, if that makes sense.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:04]:
That totally makes sense. I think at one point in time, I kind of made a little flowchart of the common reasons why a training issue wasn't a training issue. And I think the first question on it was exactly that of, like, how many people are experiencing this problem? And if it's one or two people, then it's not a training issue. It's like a performance management issue. So that trends piece really makes a lot of sense on that idea of trends. Since you did this at a couple of companies, are there trends that you saw when standing up training for the first time? And when you're looking at these different companies, did you find yourself kind of starting at a similar place everywhere or creating similar programs off the bat that everyone needed?
Megan Galloway [00:09:50]:
Yes. Leadership development, that was always the biggest, which is kind of where I've taken my path over time here. So I've done this at three different organizations, being internal with them, and then I've consulted with a lot of different organizations after that 30 plus in the last few years. And I think that the thing that I noticed the most is that people think that they need more technical training and not that they don't need that. I do think that it is important to get those resources to folks if they don't have those. So building an infrastructure so that it's easy to scale those is important. But I don't think that LND needs to be the only one delivering those technical resources. I think that LND is like an enabler because there's so much knowledge internally already around these topics that LND needs to help other people share their knowledge and or find external knowledge to bring in if it's missing, once you've done that gap analysis.
Megan Galloway [00:10:43]:
But those side of things are like your quick and easy wins to get people to see, oh, wow, lnd knows what they're doing here, and they know how to help us fix our problems. And so frequently I would start with a small technical project first or onboarding or something that people could see tangible results from quickly. And then it was almost always then, okay. Our managers have never had resources to learn how to be actual managers. Can you help us with that? So then it frequently moved into the leadership development space.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:15]:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I love that you highlighted that idea of getting that quick win, having something relatively small so you can show, because I think that's the other thing that can often derail whether it's you're starting in a new team or you're coming in as a new leader. In LNd, in an existing organization is you start by trying to bite off too big a chunk, and it's three months in. It's six months in. You haven't even really delivered anything yet. And that can raise a lot of questions for sure. How did you think go about developing manager training? Did you primarily bring people from outside, bring in outside experts? Did you bake something that was kind of native to the culture? Where were you starting with that? Because leadership, even though you're saying we start with leadership training, that can mean a lot of things.
Megan Galloway [00:12:05]:
Yeah, it can. And I am a huge believer that off the shelf leadership development does not work. I think it's great for learning theory, but theory is really hard to apply in a day to day job when so many working managers are in a coach player model. So not only are they leading a team, but they also have a tremendous amount of responsibility on their plate from a technical perspective as well. And so when you share theories with people, I do think that it's important that they learn them, but I do think that it's hard for them then to go take that back and find real places to make application in their day to day jobs. And that is so organization specific. So I have a really big belief that each leadership development program inside of an organization should be closely matched with their values. I think that there needs to be executive alignment and true behavioral alignment to those values, which is a huge gap that frequently occurs inside of organizations.
Megan Galloway [00:13:03]:
So that's like a really huge starting point is if there are people on the executive leadership team that are not practicing what you're going to be preaching in your leadership development programs, then that has to be solved before you can tackle anything else inside of your organization with manager training. And then it goes down to, okay, so we have real skills that need to be developed. Like, how do you have a one on one with someone? The amount of people that have never had great one on ones is like, even in some of the companies I worked with, they never had one on ones period before. So it's like, okay, so how do you have a one on one? So it's not as much about, let's take you to a training about this topic about how to have conversations. It's more, okay, here's a template for you to utilize in your one on one, and here's some of the things that you should be trying. Go give it a shot. To me, that's so much more successful than just talking about the theory.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:57]:
Yeah, I think if it's okay with you, I'm going to have to take your whole answer to that and turn it into a commercial because you just summarized my whole thesis for better everyday studios, the importance of one customization of that. It needs to be real to the organization. It needs to be native to the organization. It needs to be from, like you said, their core values, and it needs to focus on those actual behaviors, the actual things that you're going to be doing. Yeah. Because so much can get lost without that. If you're just talking, as you said, kind of. Kind of theory based.
Matt Gjertsen [00:14:41]:
That's awesome. Thank you for that. So you spent a bunch of time building in construction and banking and some more established companies. Then you moved into kind of more of a startup role. How was that transition and did your view of kind of what was required in organizations evolve at all during that transition?
Megan Galloway [00:15:03]:
Drastically, yeah. Well, the first thing that was just hardest for me personally is I am a type a high achiever, recovering perfectionist, who wants to do a really phenomenal job in every single role I've had. So if I wasn't getting exceeding expectations on performance reviews, I was devastated. And when I launched into entrepreneurship and then quickly after joined a startup, that was my biggest personal challenge, was that there is no right or wrong in a lot of that world and there's no possible way to be perfect. Like, failing is just part of the journey, but it was a very challenging part for me personally. But I really appreciated my time in startup world because I led almost every single function of the business during my time with the startup that I worked at. So started in sales and marketing and did a lot of the growth efforts and then transitioned into more of like the customer success operations, managing the book of business consulting directly with clients, doing renewals, doing expansions, doing operations. That is not my fourth do not want to hire me to do your financial statements.
Megan Galloway [00:16:20]:
And then got into the world of product and what it was looking like inside of the business. And super appreciative for the lessons that I learned from so many great people that I got to work with inside of that organization. But the thing that it taught me, I think that was so different is when I was in LND, like four organizations, as all of us do, I think I believed my job was just so critically important to the organization. And I think that it was so I don't want to make it sound like it wasn't. But then once I got this outside perspective of being inside of so many other functions of the business, I witnessed firsthand why L and D professionals have such trouble getting buy in on their learning and development initiatives. Because once you get into the day to day job of having outside deliverables that have nothing to do with learning and development, your brain does something different. It's like, I don't need to make space and time for development. I just need to get my stuff done and thinking about how I make these things better.
Megan Galloway [00:17:22]:
You get into a reactive place when you're overloaded with technical tasks that just need to get done. And I was an executive, I was managing a team of people as well. And so I felt firsthand that push and pull of a never ending to do list, working 80 hours a week, plus managing a team of people. And so I kind of feel like I developed so much more empathy for why some of the supporting functions like HR lnd even accounting for that matter, like inside of organizations, like those support functions, why they struggle to get buy in inside of the organization, but also why those parts and operations and sales should have so much more appreciation and be so much more open to the value that lnd and those support functions do provide. But you feel like you're on separate islands, and I don't know how to say it outside of that. So it kind of like I got a taste of both, I guess is a good way to say that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:22]:
It's such a great point, and I do think it's really important for, and I love that you gave it kind of that big picture of all the support functions. It's so important for any support function folks to get those experiences, I think, in the rest of the business. And I think the last time we chatted, I mentioned my metaphor for the foundation of a house and using that to describe it. And I think I didn't mention this part because the other thing I think about is whenever you're coming up with talking about some kind of change initiative, whether it's learning HR, whatever it is, it really is exactly like fixing the foundation of a house where it's really expensive, it's really noisy, causes tons of disruption, and if everything goes well, at the end of the day, everything looks the same. Right? Because that's always our goal. We are trying to make improvements, but they're not the kind of improvements that somebody's necessarily going to see day to day. You have to step back, big picture, and realize, oh, my house isn't going to fall down now. Well, did you really think it was like you probably hadn't fully realized that it was in danger of falling down to begin with.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:30]:
And I think a successful learning initiative in leadership or something, the result is going to be over the long term, you have a 50% reduction in attrition or a 15% increase in productivity. And those are just hard things. Like you said, when you're in the role day to day with all these fires, all these to dos, you're working 8 hours a week, it's really hard to even notice that kind of change. So I do think it's critical that you have that understanding after post that. As you got that understanding, what did that do? Did that do anything or has it done anything to kind of change your approach or change the way you think about approaching the business with these kind of support initiatives? It sounds like you were already kind of trying to talk in the business language, of talking about figuring out those learning initiatives. But has any of that language or the way you approach people out in the business changed as a result of having those experiences?
Megan Galloway [00:20:37]:
Yeah, I think it's drastically changing the relaunch of my business, in all honesty, because I think that traditional leadership development firms approach it from the perspective that they have to launch these large initiatives. They're doing things to people in the business. And so what I think is drastically missing is the ability to work with people in the business to help reinforce real human skill development throughout their day to day jobs. So it's not about pulling everyone out of their jobs for a whole day to be able to learn these skills that then they're supposed to go try to transfer back somehow into their day jobs. It's more about, okay, what are the real things that we can do inside of team meetings, other interactions, the places where we're meeting the slack communities that we have internally, our one on ones, the ways that people talk to each other and the languages that they use. So that's a large part of where I'm going next, is I am launching a culture strategy agency that's going to help organizations really define their culture operating manual that goes inside of their businesses, not necessarily to just pull people out for training, but to give that kind of development inside of people's day to days by helping them just actually do it and try things and experiment with the ways in which they want to grow, because that's how we all learn best anyway, right? One of the other things I learned from startup land is I learned so much more. Like even the difference between getting an MBA, which I went to a phenomenal school, University of Colorado, for my MBA, learned a ton and was there for two years, and then I was in a startup for two years and I learned like 18,000 times more in the startup environment. Because it's practical knowledge, right? Like, you're doing it, you're forced to figure things out and you're making mistakes, and it impacts you intellectually and emotionally in a different way when you're making mistakes and wanting to make changes in your life.
Megan Galloway [00:22:29]:
And so that's what triggers true behavioral change. So if we want to make real behavioral change inside of our cultures and inside of our leadership in our organizations, we can't just talk about theory of it and put people in a boot camp for two days every year. We have to build things inside of our businesses that support that real change and give people true direction. And especially in remote and hybrid environments, if you're not around people on a day to day physically, then it becomes even more crucial to have those types of agreements and operating models that make us look at culture in a slightly different way.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:08]:
Yeah, absolutely. I know you're just relaunching this, you're just getting started, but I don't know. Let's get practical with what you just said. So how are you seeing the actual interventions being different? Obviously you said we're not taking people away for the week and putting them through a boot camp or anything like that. But when you say day to day, when you say like getting in the business and applying it practically in the workplace, that can still mean a lot of different things. And I'm sure people who are coming from a traditional Lnd background, it can almost be difficult to imagine what that might look like. So how are you seeing yourself and your company actually working with organizations to make these programs differently?
Megan Galloway [00:23:53]:
Yeah, so I've done a lot of thinking about this as I'm like relaunching. There's four parts, but the first part is, I believe that there are so many organizations that put so much of their time, energy and resources into defining an external brand for their organization, like who do we want the world to see us as? And many times, even though a company is growing and booming and looks amazing, their glass door reviews are extremely poor and what they have is their internal brand does not match their external brand. So the first thing is doing analysis on why are those two things different. Because at the end of the day, the people that are actually talking to your customers are the people inside of your company, your team members. So those are the people that are going to be your best brand advocates and representatives and the referrals for your organization. So getting those things to match, at least in theory, is important to get started with. So that's the first thing that we're going to be doing is analysis on that brand mapping. The second thing then is executive alignment to that.
Megan Galloway [00:24:54]:
So I think so many organizations spend days planning their strategic, doing their strategic planning for what's going to happen inside of their business and what they're going to be doing. I know very few companies that spend time doing culture strategic planning, like not just what do we want to be doing, but how do we want to do this in the next year to best match the people and to get proactive about who we want to be as a company. So then once you know what that looks like, the third thing is that executive alignment, which is the people on your executive team have to be practicing those things. And with most organizations, I see that is not the case. And so then what happens is trust breaks down throughout the organization. Organizations get siloed as a result, they have trouble getting consistency across communications. So there's a lot of rework and things like that. So giving that executive team support to practice what they preach is really important through sessions for them to talk through things, through one on one executive coaching, that type of thing, that's number three.
Megan Galloway [00:25:57]:
And then the last thing is then, now that you have those things all aligned and the actual business leadership is aligned around the things that they want to be doing for a culture, now we look at how we integrate that throughout the business. So in my mind, that looks like saying, okay, how do we talk about conflict inside of our companies? Like, is it important that we bring up conflict? If a team member brings feedback to their manager, how do we expect managers respond? So maybe that's a conversation starter guide for an employee to be able to bring up something challenging to their manager. And maybe that also gives managers response options or ideas. It's not like a script, right? But it's like when someone comes to you with hard feedback as an employee, how do we expect that you respond to that as a leader? So here's some ideas for the ways in which we expect our values to show out in real life around these things. And then more than that, inside of their meetings, like, let's say team meetings now, you build in five minutes for upward feedback or some sort of a retro, so that that becomes common for people to be able to have space to voice concerns, questions, thoughts, ideas. And it's not just always like the loudest people in the room that are getting the voices, because they're the ones that are brave enough to speak up. So we're creating more equality around the ability to be able to speak up and give feedback in those environments. So doing the same thing for one on ones.
Megan Galloway [00:27:23]:
But it's like actually changing the dna of how we do things with specific expectations, templates, operating models inside of the business. And the thing that I believe most about this is that lnd cannot be the person to deploy these things. I think that you have to get executives to be the ones to deploy these initiatives, which they are so busy. The expectation is not that they're making all of these things, but they have to be practicing it themselves, and then they have to be the actual implementers of these initiatives for it to be successful.
Matt Gjertsen [00:27:56]:
That makes a lot of sense, and I think I've seen in a lot of places is basically talk about, if you want to know what a company's culture is just look at why they hire, promote and terminate people. That's long term. Whatever you write down, long term, that's going to be your culture. And so if you have, once you do all the work, I love that of the four stages, it wasn't until stage four that you're out in the business doing stuff. It really shows the importance of that alignment, which I totally agree with. Once you get that alignment, if all of the executives do nothing but start having, ending every meeting with five minutes of upward feedback time, eventually the level below them is just going to start doing that, and then the level below them is just going to start doing that. And it will not, because that's setting the tone of, oh, this is a thing that causes us to hire and promote people, and so then people just start doing it. And there's no big change initiative, there's no big announcement.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:59]:
It's just going to happen. As someone who has tried in organizations to do the reverse of kind of create culture from the bottom up and seen how that goes, it makes a lot of sense.
Megan Galloway [00:29:13]:
Well, and I think that when you do it that way, when you approach middle managers first or frontline managers first, they just get even more frustrated because then they're taught best practices, and then they see the people that are in levels above them in an organization not practicing those things, and they just become more disengaged because they're like, wait a second. I don't see people in our company actually doing these things, but I'm supposed to do them. This feels like just a lot of hypocrisy, and I think that creates a lot of, even though it's the right thing to do, we want to give these people these resources. It has to come from both directions. It can't just come from the bottom up.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:54]:
I completely agree with you. And I can already hear a bunch of talent development professionals saying, that sounds great, Megan, but I can't talk to my executives or I can't get the directors to do this stuff or whatever it all my remit is to. I can talk to the frontline managers and they want to do stuff, and I see the frustration. But what advice would you have for those professionals out there of how to start getting buy in or how to start approaching executives if they can't have those conversations currently?
Megan Galloway [00:30:31]:
I mean, I think that one of the biggest things, in my opinion, is those relationships are absolutely critical to deploying any sort of change initiatives. Because I think that a lot of times when we're looking at our organizations at change initiatives and we get an order to do something inside of the LND team, the decisions have been made in a room that we're not in, and we may not always agree completely with what even is being done. And where I've been most successful inside of organizations have been places where I have been brave enough to walk into even the CEO's office and say, can I give you some feedback about what I'm thinking on some of these things? And it was really hard to do that. It takes a lot of courage and bravery because there are potential consequences to getting brave enough to walk into someone in the C suite's office to talk to them about these things. But I think that that is one thing that happens a lot of the times is orders come down throughout the organization and we just feel frustrated with them. But then we don't actually do anything about them because we think that we can't. But in reality, I think that we see so much more inside of our organizations from those support level functions because we're interacting with everyone inside of the organization. So we do have a more holistic view on the business and the strategy of where some of those things are going.
Megan Galloway [00:31:51]:
And what I would always say is, you don't have to take my ideas and go implement them, but I just want to be heard, just kind of hear them and see if any of them make any sense, and then I can keep going about the way I was doing things. But I think that the biggest lesson that I learned through doing that is when I had a true business case associated with that thing. Like, hey, this department is really suffering and their engagement scores stink. And here's what I think is going on in that group, and here's what I think we should be doing about that. If I had all of those things already lined out and took that into an executive, a lot of the time they were like, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I've already been worrying about this, but wasn't sure what to do about it. And so I think that a lot of the times, it really does just start with having those conversations. And maybe that means just starting with the chief people officer that you report into or the COO if you report in through that area.
Megan Galloway [00:32:48]:
Right. But yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things is think about what are the true business functions and results being affected by the challenges that we're seeing. We know they exist. They are hard to measure. But I do think that there are frequently more things associated. Like, for example, I think that you could associate really, like a bad team environment and a customer success team directly to customer churn. Because if those people are grumpy all the time and they get on calls and they're grumpy with people on the phone, then I think that does change the ways that our business retains revenue over time. Right?
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:28]:
Sure.
Megan Galloway [00:33:28]:
And so we might not be seeing the immediate impacts of it, but I do think that's there. And so it's like, what experiment could we run in this space to see if we can increase NRR by changing things inside of this team that's got really poor engagement or that doesn't feel like they have the right resources or whatever it is.
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:47]:
That makes sense. So if I step back and kind of think about all the things that you've said throughout this, it sounds like when it comes to building those relationships with key stakeholders and executives, it kind of comes down to three things that you've mentioned, or from what I've heard, it starts with, one of the first things you said is quick wins, which I think translates to being seen as someone who can get things done. Like, first you have to be able to deliver things in the business. Then you have to have the courage to have these conversations, and then you have to have the ability to have the conversations in the language that the person you're talking to cares about. If you can do those three things, that's how you start to build those relationships up.
Megan Galloway [00:34:32]:
Sound think you? I think you got it spot on, because that's what our jobs are here for in L D. Is to make work better for everybody inside of the company. And so even though there are so many great best practices out there, every company is different. And the best way to figure out the ways to help people, I think, is just through talking to people inside the business that have ideas about how to fix things inside the company, but just don't have the time or resources to be able to do it themselves. That's where the biggest quick wins come from, in my opinion.
Matt Gjertsen [00:35:05]:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Amazing. This has been great. I want to bring us to a close with three questions that I ask every guest. The first one is, what is one book or podcast that everyone should listen to and why or read?
Megan Galloway [00:35:24]:
The one that's top of mind for me right now is a book that I actually listen to on audible, narrated by the author called unreasonable hospitality by Will Guidara. It is all about this restaurant tour who is set out to make the number one restaurant in the world. But he's doing it not just because their food is the greatest, but because they're creating the best experience. And to do that, he has to build an incredible team inside of his restaurant. So his leadership recommendations are truly a treat to read through. But it's a great example of where you can be in so many different industries and implement so many different leadership development philosophies in different ways. That makes a huge difference on the actual business results that you're getting.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:12]:
That makes sense. I love that you mentioned that. That book is actually sitting on my bookshelf unread right now. I'll have to make sure to give it a try. Now that's a great recommendation.
Megan Galloway [00:36:23]:
Hit me up after you read it. I want to know what you think.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:26]:
I will. Yeah, absolutely. Having spent a little bit of time in the restaurant industry, sort of in the food industry, yeah, I'm really interested to read it. Okay. Now, for you personally, when you look back on your life and the amazing career that you've had, what is the one skill that's most helped you be successful?
Megan Galloway [00:36:48]:
I think the answer that I would say for this one is adaptability. I think that one of the things that I've noticed about myself recently, I've gone through a lot of changes in the last two years, having left corporate life and becoming an entrepreneur, joining a startup. And sometimes people will say to me like, you've just changed so much in the last couple of years. And sometimes that kind of triggers me. And I'm like, well, I was great before, wasn't I? Why do people like me so much more now? But then I think, no, I like me more too. It's interesting how much things will change if you let them. And change is the only constant in our lives anyway, right? Like, things are always changing around us. And I'm a control enthusiast.
Megan Galloway [00:37:34]:
So I always had this belief that I had to control the things in my life and be on the corporate ladder and climb to higher rungs and do things in a way that were by the book to be able to be successful. And the more that I've kind of thrown all of that into the wind a bit and embraced change and embrace the idea that I'm forever growing and not perfect at anything, the more that I find that I like myself and that I'm more fulfilled in my life, too.
Matt Gjertsen [00:38:02]:
That's awesome. I love that. That's a great one. Okay. And then finally, I'm guessing we've touched on the answer to this a couple of times in this podcast already, but you've worked with a lot of organizations. What is the most common opportunity you see for organizations to improve their talent development function.
Megan Galloway [00:38:23]:
I'm actually going to come out of left field here just a little bit.
Matt Gjertsen [00:38:27]:
I love it.
Megan Galloway [00:38:28]:
I think that so many talent development teams are already doing incredible work, so I think that they should get closer to the business, and I also think that they should be really thoughtful about how they're sharing metrics around ROI on the things that they're already doing. One of the best things that I feel like I've implemented previously is having like a quarterly report that I would share with executives about the things that were being done and the tangible metrics that were happening as a result of them. And a lot of times that was looking at things that are already being measured in the business. So looking at things that are already related, you can do things from HR, like engagement scores, time to promotion, retention, those types of things. And then also inside of each individual department, they're already measuring things, too. So how can you tie the initiatives that you're doing to those things and just be more intentional about those metrics? Because I think that's part of what really legitimate, makes it more legitimate, is what I'm trying to say. And then also, I think continues to get that buy in from the folks throughout an organization.
Matt Gjertsen [00:39:35]:
That's such an important point because I think when people hear most people, when they hear, hey, we're going to do a quarterly roundup of learning metrics. They're thinking utilization, time spent learning, number of completions, and nobody cares about it. And if you want to know what metrics to use, look at the metrics of the business. Chances are, as exactly as you said, they're already measuring something and they're measuring it because they think it matters. And so the hard part isn't figuring out what to measure. The hard part is drawing that connection between what we're doing and what they're doing. Such an important point.
Megan Galloway [00:40:16]:
Definitely.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:17]:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Megan. I know. So you're just re standing up your business, you're getting out, like, you know, listen to you. I'm sure there's lots of people that are like, that sounds interesting. I'd really love to learn more about that. How can people learn more?
Megan Galloway [00:40:32]:
Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. I post pretty regularly about all of these things there. And also you can find me on my website, everleaderconsulting.com.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:41]:
Perfect. And we will make sure to put that in the show notes so that everybody can easily find it. This has been great, Megan. I'm so glad we got connected super quickly. So glad you were able to come on the podcast. I got a lot out of this discussion, so I'm sure our listeners did too. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day.
Megan Galloway [00:40:59]:
Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Thanks for Listening!
It means so much to me and the guests that you chose to spend your time with us. If you enjoyed listening, make sure you subscribe using your favorite player using the links below.
