What does the future hold for your organization? And what are you doing to define that legacy? Tumultuous times are a challenge all their own. But, in preparing for them and navigating through them, it’s important to remember that, thanks to where we’ve been, we’re more prepared to handle them than ever before. This week on Your Brain at Work LIVE, Dr. David Rock (NLI CEO and co-founder) and Tina Drews (Salt River Project Director of Talent), discuss how, through an illuminating partnership with the NeuroLeadership Institute, Salt River Project focused on supporting the needs of their teams to develop the psychologically safe climate that equipped them even further to face crisis head-on in the present and through the future.
Tina Drews- Salt River Project
U1
0:00
What does the future hold for your organization, and what are you doing to define that legacy? Tumultuous times are a challenge all their own, but in preparing for them and navigating through them, it's important to remember, thanks to where we've been, we're more prepared to handle them than ever before. In this week's episode of Your Brain at Work Live, Dr. David Rock and Tina Drews discuss how, through an illuminating partnership with a NeuroLeadership Institute Salt River Project focused on supporting the needs of their teams to develop a psychologically safe climate that equipped them to even further face crisis head on in the present and through the future.
U2
0:37
I'm Shelby Wilburn, and you're listening to your brain at work from the NeuroLeadership Institute. We continue to draw episodes from our weekly Friday webinar series. This week, our show is a conversation between Dr. David Rock, co founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, alyssa Abkowitz, vice president of global product and content at the NeuroLeadership Institute, and Tina Drews, director of talent at Salt River Project. Enjoy.
U1
1:03
It's really powerful when we're able to hear stories about companies that have created lasting behavior change, especially in the world that we're in right now, with everything always dramatically changing. And Tina, Salt River Project has really been able to do this and has been doing it for several years now, through the pandemic, through wars, through lots of different things. So let's talk a little bit about our partnership together. Can you describe sort of the journey so far and how you started partnering with us? 2s Yeah, I would be happy to thank you for that. So I would imagine most of the folks on this call, unless you're from Arizona, don't know. Salt river projectors. We like to call ourselves SRP. So we are over 117 years old. We are a water and power utility, and we are also community based and not for profit it. So, as you can imagine, our organization has a long tenure within the community, and we have been doing things in a similar way over the last 100 years. There hasn't been a whole lot of technology or change in our type of business. And I'll also say that our employees are very tenured. Many of them you'll see retire after 2030, sometimes even 40 or 50 years of being with our organization. 1s So change can be a little scary. 3s We embarked a number of years ago in thinking up more about diversity, equity, and inclusion within our organization. Being community based, it was really important for us to be reflective of that community that we serve every day. And I had seen Dr. Rock speak at a conference a number of years before and was just really intrigued by this concept of NeuroLeadership and neuroscience. My background is in education and so very familiar with neuroscience as it relates to learners, but really thinking about how that transfers to an organization. So we partnered with NLI, and they came in and kind of did a holistic assessment of our organization and partnered with us to develop a roadmap for us to become a more inclusive, equitable, and innovative organization. We decided to actually start our journey focusing on Growth Mindset and Growth. We used Growth Mindset as a primer to dei, to really prepare people for a new way of thinking. We knew that if we wanted to make lasting change within our organization, we would have to change some of our behaviors, and so really settled on starting with Growth Mindset before we started to dive more deeply into some of those really meaty issues around dei. And what was the reception to that starting with Growth Mindset? How did employees, how did leaders at SRP react to that? 1s Yeah, we started with leaders. 1s Our leaders are we have about 700 of them, close to, and they range from our executives to our frontline leaders. But we really knew that in order to have that lasting change, we needed our leaders to be exhibiting the behaviors around growth mindset. And at that time in our organization. Now, this was all pre pandemic. The utility industry, while I said before it hadn't changed a lot in 100 years, it's actually changing very rapidly and has been now over the last, I would say, ten to 20 years, especially with new innovations coming in around clean energy, grid modernization and things like that. So we have started talking quite a bit about operational excellence and how we could be. And if you're on the podcast, you can't see me, but I'm doing my air quotes here. We need to be more innovative, right? And so people will hear that and say, well, how do I do that? How can I just be more innovative? And in focusing our work in the behaviors of grow, we were able to give folks tangible ways that they could begin to apply growth mindset and in turn, become have more innovative conversations, solutions to problems. 2s Yeah, that's really wonderful. David, did you want to chime in?
U3
5:55
Yeah, I mean, just high level. I think there's a couple of comments to make and then I'd love Tina to hear any stories you might have about kind of what people did differently as they started to have a growth mindset. But as we've been building these kind of roadmaps, as you call them, or we call them sometimes, pathways to really change an organization properly. Over a few years, as we've been building these, we've definitely noticed the power of having Growth Mindset as a starting point. And we found a number of organizations kind of wanting to do that anyway. And then we started to put this forward and started to think about the rationale of why it's so helpful. And it's sort of like you're planting a garden and this is the soil. Like everything's going to grow in this. Everything starts in this. And if you have really good soil, got a really you got a much better chance of a good garden. Doesn't mean you have it for sure. But if you have bad soil, it's not going to work. And Growth mindset is a lot like that. It's like the openness in some ways to new ideas. So it's a fantastic place to start with dei, but also with leadership more broadly and with change more broadly. It's where we started with Microsoft and HP and a number of others. And I think what it does, it just creates this acceptance that we only have a piece of the story. 1s It opens people's minds to being curious about other people's perspectives 2s cognitively. It gets people willing to take risks and kind of try things and really focus on progress over perfection. So I think it's a great foundation for dei, as you guys have found, but bring some of those things alive for us, maybe in some of the stories. I know we collected some data about kind of how often people noticed and shift their mindset. I think it was a really high number about it was north of 90%, I think the group when we studied it, we're doing this weekly, but can you share some of the things that either you did or others got involved in as they kind of integrated this skill?
U1
7:54
Sure, yeah. One of the things being in a utility, it's a dangerous business and we are highly engaged with safety. And so when we first introduced Growth Mindset and the idea of learning from mistakes, there was a little bit of pushback saying well, we cannot make a mistake, a mistake could be costly and potentially even deadly. And so what we talked about and we really had to embrace as an organization is there are some areas that we do not have to see everything in black and white. And there are areas for improvement within the way that we approach our work and 2s in the way that we approach how we think about making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. So our field organizations 1s really were probably the most challenged in initially embracing our concepts within grow. However, one of our power groups began an annual showcase and they called it the Growth Mindset Showcase. And so there were departments that would come together and almost do like a poster session, if you will, and all employees were invited and they really were able to actually share things that they had tried that didn't work. Now, this is not common for us, right? But the really the highlight was to start to socialize and culturally expand how we think about making mistakes are opportunities for us to continue to grow and do better. And rather than hiding those things and putting them away on a shelf, that group really used those highlightings of things that didn't work as what we learned from it and how we're going to move forward. That's incredible. That's really great that you were able to sort of start that showcase and I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit about I mean, obviously our partnership started before the pandemic but then you're in the pandemic and you're going through it. How did that mindset help you get through the pandemic? And even since where we are now but. Yeah, I feel so grateful that we had planted that seed and it started to water it, and it was beginning to flourish around having a growth mindset, because when the Pandemic hit, 1s we were not a remote organization in any way, shape, or form. We're very on site, and so essentially, 2s half of our employees needed to leave the workplace and go home. Now, of course, for our onsite field employees, we needed to continue to deliver that water and power, and so they remained out in the field. 1s It was a tough situation for our organization and really, I think, for leaders to think about, how do I lead in this entirely new realm of work? Because work looked very different. And it's not just for the people that needed to remote work from home, for the people who were still in the office to not have those familiar faces, not have that support structure that they would have on a regular basis. So we really leaned into the behaviors of grow during the Pandemic. A lot of our highest executive, our CEO and general manager, would do video messages to all employees and encourage them to think about how we could activate not only growth mindset, but we also really were activating behaviors around inclusion and ensuring that we were displaying very purposeful inclusion during that time. Because for many folks, 1s they felt very isolated, very alone. And so with having leaders and teams really thinking about ensuring that we were lowering those threats and engaging with purposeful inclusion with all of our teams, that helped us to get through those very tough times of the Pandemic. Great. So once you had that Grow foundation, talk to us a little bit about what came next. You then moved into Include, correct? We did. So we had developed a roadmap or a journey 1s with NLI in partnership. And so we knew that we wanted to start with Growth mindset, move to inclusion, and that work was really. 2s Starting to kick off as the pandemic began to come through. And so the third part of our roadmap was actually at that time around mitigating bias, but we had a little bit of a shift in our understanding of our own culture and what was really important to our organization and found through some surveying and some discussions with employees, especially through the pandemic, that we needed to find ways to elevate employee voices. And that was really critical to our business. And so we did a little bit of a shift in our plan and actually launched voice to all of our organization. We started with lead leaders, but we decided that was important enough that we wanted to ensure every employee at SRP understood the importance of their own voice building, psychological safety and how that would improve us and improve our culture long term.
U3
14:13
Yeah, it's interesting. Tina just reflecting on something you said, and I've seen this in lots of organizations. There's kind of a bleed between the mindset you need to have for sort of the day to day work and the way that you manage people in all kinds of organizations and in particular organizations where there's a critical safety factor, right? Like, you guys, things can go wrong, the whole state can lose power and people can die. You know, so so you you don't you know, it's not really room for mistakes when you're laying a power line, right, and the same in a hospital. Right. There's not really room for mistakes in the surgery. Like, there was an article in The New Yorker years ago how surgeons never have coaches because they will never admit to ever being able to be any better right, because of liability and how upset people get if they ever admit they did anything wrong, right? And so surgeons linesmen who lay down the power, 1s but also, like police, there's a number of kind of kinds of work where mistakes are really bad. And so what happens is they apply 2s this kind of 100% accuracy mindset to then who they hire and whether to promote someone or not and how to give people feedback and how to get the team motivated, and it just doesn't work. You got to sort of separate the two. And I think that's that sort of shift from black and white thinking that to that sort of more gray thinking where you can say, look, we must keep an obsession about safety over here, but we actually need to take risks over here on people. And we shouldn't always hire the person who's done absolutely everything that the job needs many times before because that feels safer because that person might not be anywhere near as engaged as someone who hasn't done the job before but is really, really passionate and engaged about learning it. Right? So it's about separating sort of the work versus 3s the culture approach. And it's just an interesting observation. We've definitely seen a lot. So grow, include and voice. And for those who don't know Voice, the work we did on Speaking Up before we launched Team a few months ago and Voice looks very much about empowering everyone. It's for the individual employee. It's great you rolled that out to everyone. 3s What did you see around include and Voice? What was the impact of those kind of sitting on top of grow? What did you notice change? How did the habits change? How did the sort of fabric change as a result of include and Voice? What did you see?
U1
16:48
Yeah, 1s I think that's a great question. And 1s I like to highlight, really, what changed within our field organization, because when you think about speaking up, for us, it was natural to speak up about safety, specifically. And our employees did feel comfortable around speaking up around safety because it really is a concept of one SRP. And we want to ensure that 2s our fellow employees are going home to their families safe every night. So if they see something that's not right, they really are willing and in many ways are obligated to say something so that no one gets hurt. And as a result of that, we do have a fantastic safety record and something we're very proud of. But really what we found is that. 1s In other areas of speaking up, there seemed to be some hesitancy. There was some fear, frankly, around some of that, that there would be retribution, or would my idea not be appreciated? Would it be glossed over? And so we really started to highlight the correlation between speaking up and strong performance and translating that to all areas of our business. So if it's cost effectiveness or quality or production, environmental compliance, it could be anything 1s that speaking up does contribute to an organization's bottom line. But not only that, it builds that culture of connection, and that's really important to us. Yeah, that's wonderful. I want to go to an audience question real quick before we move on Jury wonderful question of what our grow include and voice. David, do you want to take that one on? Yeah. I
U3
18:53
suddenly feel incredibly embarrassed because we've been using Jargon and not I know, just really cruel. And I promise we didn't plant Jury's question. That was a real question. But I'll just give a very high level. 2s So grow include and voice. Each of them are a 30 day experience that you can put ten people or 10 million people through all at the same time. And the power of it is actually everyone doing it roughly at the same time. And basically what it is is over that month, we've broken out the the most important habits in each domain. So, say, league include, for example, we've looked at what are the three most important habits that if everyone moved even a little bit on these, you'd get a big impact on inclusion. And we do that based on science. And then this goes out to an audience lots of different ways. But ultimately, what you're trying to do is give everyone an insight. About each of the habits one at a time and do that in a social setting so they can really share the insights and get this positive pressure. So for include, for example, it's like the first week is find common ground, there's a whole lot of research and then skills around how do you create shared goals. So you really are in an in group with people and then it's how do you lift people up? And then how do you create clarity? Help create clarity. So this is three different habits over three weeks, then a fourth week where it all comes together and practice. But these things scale to any size because we do them in different digital forms, but essentially each one of them are a 30 day experience to really build habits one at a time over a month on the things that matter most. And what we found over the years is we've built about a dozen of these, as you can kind of put these together in interesting formats and build a pathway, or as Tina said, a roadmap. 1s What's unusual about this approach is it's giving a little bit to a whole company really quickly. And what we saw with Boeing, for example, is we were able to get to 140,000 people in a really short time, and we got 96% of people engaged in the journey over nine months and largely in one month. And my team can share that. So anyway, that's the concept. It's a lot of people learning a few key habits all at once and then seeing that change to really expand across the business.
U1
21:12
Thanks, David. Go ahead. I just want to double click on something that David said is for an organization that has so many competing priorities, it can be difficult to say, okay, everyone, we're going to focus on whatever it is. Part of what really made our work and our partnership with NLI effective is exactly the brain science behind it that makes it effective. It's those small bite size to the most essential and important components of some of these critical things like growth, mindset, inclusion and voice. For us that said, okay, we're asking you to spend a targeted small amount of time, but really the change came when we started to see people behaving differently. And that's really what this is about, is behavior change. I also will say that we provide. 1s Part of what's helped us to be so successful is just a very targeted approach to continuing to use the language that we learned to have leaders practice these things with their teams that has been so effective to create long lasting change within the organization. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for sharing that, Tina. And thank you, Jerry, for your question. Folks, please keep your questions coming in. We definitely want to get to them. So I wanted to go back to Tina to what you were saying about speaking up, particularly in 1s the world that we live in now. I mean, we're seeing right now layoffs in tech, murmurs of the economy souring. I want to ask you both sort of what's the Zeitgeist like out there for employees, for leaders? We've seen the Twitter layoff, which I want to touch on in a second, but what are you feeling? What are you hearing? What are you seeing out there? Tina, let's start with you. Yeah. We are fortunate that we're in an industry that's particularly stable. However, we have colleagues within other spheres and see what's happening out there. And I think for leaders in particular, it's important to 1s have that sense of psychological safety, to build that within their teams, because whether you have a stable workplace or not, where that's not necessarily something that's eminent. We have the impeding recession, things are changing, inflation 1s and just a lot of global unrest. And so people employees are looking to their leaders for some of that sense of normalcy security 1s and really a focus on employee well being. And that's something that we have really focused on as an organization, is how do we ensure that our employees know about all of not only the resources that we have for them, but that they are in an organization that truly cares about them, their family and the community in which we live. So finding those ways to continually reinforce that I think is important for any leader, no matter what industry. Yeah, those are great points. Tina, David, what are your thoughts? What are you seeing? What are you seeing out there?
U3
24:50
Yeah, I know. We've just been doing some writing on this and 1s we wrote a piece months and months ago in HBR called We're All Still in Rehab and talking about kind of the three stages of the pandemic shock and pain and rehab. And unfortunately, I think we're still all in rehab. It's just we've kind of gone back in and out and in and out, and some of the sort of craziness in the world has risen its head. It's like there's such a base of trauma still from the pandemic for so many people. Not just the pandemic, the social crises that happened, the political things that happened, 1s which some people felt very acutely. 1s And I think now we've got this question of are we devolving into a war? Is there a massive recession around the corners? All sorts of things that kind of are coming back up for people? And on the basis of a lot of sort of base trauma, it's very activating to use that word. Right? And so I think people are super sensitive and it's a time to really show a lot of care. One of the ways to do that is with a lot of flexibility 1s and giving people a huge amount of autonomy or control over, obviously, where they work, when they work, how they work. All those things are really helpful, continue to be really helpful, as we've been saying, I think really showing people how to have empathy, really specifically. So we launched a solution called Care, which is around the very, very specific habits that managers, even engineers, can have to really show that they care and people feel that they care. And we've really broken that out into some very tactical, science based skills. And then the other thing, I think we sort of thought we were done with this, with the voice solution, which has had incredible results, but we realized there's just even more demand for psych safety. And the team solution we've built is a bit more focused on what the manager and leader needs to do, although. 1s It can be, it can be, can go to everyone. But the team solution looks at the specific skills that you have to create really active psychological safety. 1s And if you think of psychological safety as people absolutely feel like they can speak up about anything and with no repercussions, right? So voice gives people the practice around actually speaking up. But team gives managers the skills to create they can and the climate for that. 1s So we've seen a huge demand for that and 1s we teach like how do you really set the stage so people do speak up? How do you really invite participation so people actually do then speak up, but then how do you respond thoughtfully to what people do say and how do you keep people in what we call a toward state even if what they say is wrong? So one of the habits there is we call it challenge kindly. It's like absolutely be candid, but how can you be candid while being as kind as possible about it? How can you be super candid but also minimize how much threat might be involved as opposed to some other work out? There was just like be candid, be candid, be candid. It's like whoa, you create a lot of threat when you do that, right? So we've seen a lot of interest out there in how do we teach people even more tactical skills, particularly managers, for really creating that psychological safety on top of teaching all the employees the value of speaking up and getting to the habit of doing it. So it's been surprising people sort of coming at it from two angles now because it continues to be such an issue, the psychological safety thing. And so I'll come back to in a SEC. But it was amazing. The Surgeon General mentioned it. There was a Surgeon General's report that came out and I know we've just started writing about it and the Surgeon General's report actually stated that we need to care for psychological safety, not just physical safety, which was amazing. Tina, do you wanted to comment on any of that?
U1
28:55
I actually do because I really 2s am connecting with what you're saying around challenging kindly versus challenging productively. So we as an organization have talked a lot about challenging, productively, but bringing in this concept of kindness within there, I think, is something that organizations don't always think about and within recognizing where our employees and leaders are right now and that there is definitely 2s a residual impact of what has happened within the world over the last few years. And I just want to point out, we're actually and I might talk a little bit more about this later, but we're working on some new traits for our leaders, really honing in on what are the essential traits that we value as an organization for leadership. And I was so proud to say these weren't things that us folks in HR came up with. We went out and talked to leaders, did focus groups, talked to employees, and empathy is one of those traits that is moving forward for our organization. And as an engineering heavy organization, that was very different for us and something that I was really proud to see as an outcome of what we've experienced over the last few years. Yeah, that's amazing. And you guys have mentioned so many wonderful things about flexibility, about psychological safety, about being able to speak up. I'm curious 2s to hear what both of your takes are on on the way Elon Musk has handled the Twitter layoff. Because a lot of the things that we've been talking about here, I'm just curious, has he been role modeling this if he hasn't, and apologies to Twitter and to Elon Musk, but Tina, let's start with you. What are your thoughts? 3s That's an interesting question as well. I'm not really sure. I guess that my opinion is to really think about. 2s It is our duty as leaders and as a society to respect and lift each other up. And that's one of those things that I continually think about. And it's actually a behavior that we teach our people. It doesn't mean you don't have tough decisions to make, but it is about the way in which you approach it. 2s I think that perhaps there's some lessons for other folks to learn about how things have been handled in that organization. 1s David, what about you? Yeah,
U3
31:37
lift people up is actually one of the three habits and include find common ground, lift people up, help create clarity. It's great that you've taken that to heart across the business. 1s Look, I don't know anyone alive who really wants to make an enemy 1s of Elon. It really does. Maybe they pretend you for the media but I don't really think that's a healthy thing to do. But I do know that there's so much research on how power makes you miss really important things. We published a bunch of pieces on this. Like power makes you miss kind of people's perspective on your decisions. So you focus on concepts instead of people when you have more power. And so it's really harder to mentalize. How a decision might be imagined by humans because you're thinking of humans as concepts, not as people. And also the way you think about risk is really different when you have a bit more power. We have a lot. More power, even more so. The way you think about risk, you're thinking much more optimistically than most people do. And then even the level at which you think with a bit of power, you're thinking much more high level, much less in the weeds. So we think of this as people risk and details as sort of the three things that your brain is doing differently with a bit of power, with a lot of power more. So 2s it happens a lot. You see people with a lot of power just kind of doing stuff that everyone says, well, why couldn't they have imagined that this would happen? 1s And you could easily say, maybe he did imagine, he just didn't care. Possible. Don't think anyone's excited about the amount of negative press they've got and 1s the number of really good people they've lost. I think that was accidental. I think just hadn't thought through or really understood the amount of pain that people are in. We've seen this a lot. I mean, the whole issue is sort of bringing people back to the office. We talk about this a lot, you know, over the last six months, and it sort of feels intuitively, right, that people are back in. But unfortunately, that's because the leader making that decision feels more certainty, feels more in control, which autonomy, right, feels more connectedness, relatedness. So they feel positives, but for the employees being forced in, they get a big drop in their sense of status and their sense of autonomy and their sense of fairness. And the negatives are bigger than the positives, much bigger. So if you feel like someone's not respecting you and you treat them unfairly and you're losing control, that's a lot of negative emotion that those people are experiencing. So someone who feels intuitively, this must be positive because they'll feel better, might miss how negatively others will feel. And I think that's what has happened here. If I'm sort of to pull it apart, and he has a lot to think about and probably just didn't care enough to give enough time to really, really thinking deeply through this to see the implications that happen
U1
34:30
there. So we have an example of maybe what's not the best practice to do. Tina, I want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier about the importance of role modeling, certain things. I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit and give us some examples of leaders at SRP really role modeling, how to be a good leader, how to not maybe do what Twitter has done in some ways. 2s Yeah, well, I would say that part of our DNA as an organization is really about caring. And so when I mentioned empathy, I don't think it's going to be a huge jump for our leaders. We've just never really articulated it in that way. And I'd love to just share a brief story, 1s as folks may be, where 1s coal fired power generation is certainly something that is evolving and changing within our country. And so SRP operated a 1s coal generated plant on the Navajo Nation, northern Arizona. It's called NGS Navajo Generating Station. And as the operators of that plant, one of the owners, one of five owners, the time came and the decision that was a tough decision was made to close that plant. And so we knew, though, that that was going to have a huge impact not only on the employees at that plant, but also with the community of Page. And part of our leadership's commitment, though, was to offer any employee who wanted to stay with SRP to have a job with SRP. But most of the folks that worked up there were plant operators. 1s And it's not that there are a lot of those jobs. That's not a flourishing job now in a coal industry and. So I like to hearken back to how these things connect. We really activated growth mindset to think about how could we potentially reskill and upskill some of our employees from that plant and provide them new and different opportunities in our organization? So we actually launched I lead our apprenticeship programs, and as SRP has a long history of apprenticeships, and most apprenticeships in the United States have been focused around field and craft and new technology. Apprenticeships are just starting to emerge, and the Department of labor has put a lot of funding backing these types of things. But we decided as an organization to really leverage what we do well, which are apprenticeships, and provide these opportunities in a new field for some of our employees at NGS. So we launched our first It apprenticeship in conjunction with that. And I'll tell you, 1s the folks who came into our apprenticeship, they were coming in with a growth mindset, knowing that they had to do something differently. Where I really had to ask challenge folks and to think about doing things differently was actually in our It organization, because what do you mean you're going to take someone who was a plant operator or 2s working on the railroad or something like that and bring them into it? How is that going to work? 1s However, we got there as an organization focused on the fact that we know that people change and they grow and they learn. And that is the foundation, I think, really, of being a human and ensuring that we provided the right supports and mechanisms, which is what apprenticeship does. It doesn't just throw you into something, it helps you learn. As you are on the job, it partners you with a mentor who you walk side by side with through this process. And I'm really proud to say that all of our apprentices were successful in their program. They're working in our organization, in It departments, and they really bring a new perspective to the It apartment that It never had before. Most folks who are in It don't know how a power plant works, but that's our core business, right? So it was really a reciprocal positive relationship 1s that we were able to explore through an apprenticeship option. That's incredible. Tina so tell us a little bit more. I mean, how many people went through this apprenticeship? 1s So this one was ten people. 3s We kind of scanned our business and looked at where were we actually contracting out a lot of work. So it was a real win for the organization as well, because we were able to lessen some of our reliance on contractors by reskilling folks that had already been invested and were great performers and we knew we wanted to keep as an organization. 1s There were a lot of folks at MGS that were also retirement eligible, so some of them chose to take that path. But many of our folks who weren't even in that apprenticeship went into other field and craft apprenticeships. And we also relocated many folks to work at some of the natural gas fired plants that we have more locally. Yeah, that's wonderful. It's amazing that the growth mindset had the underpinning for this. As we're talking through this, though, I'm thinking there's an element of psychological safety here too, because if the environment wasn't psychologically safe, people wouldn't feel okay with learning new skills. And conversely, on the It side, the It department, while there was some resistance, wouldn't have been willing to sort of open up and bring those new perspectives. Tell us a little bit more about how that works. 1s I think for the component that was really essential around building the psychological safety was ensuring that 1s our employees really know that the organization cares for them. And so when you have care and you have kindness, you're able to build on psychological safety. So if there were, of course, 1s when folks found out that that plant was shutting down, there was a very heightened threat. Right? And that uncertainty led to a lot of fear within the organization. But as we as an organization were able to lay out pathways for our employees and ensure to them that their leadership at that plant and then the leadership of the rest of the organization understood how important it was to be very clear and transparent when we could be to ensure that questions were answered and support was provided. So that's maybe I go to some of the differences behind how some organizations handle shuttering of plants or downsizing. In the end, it was really good for SRP and it was really good for our employees. 2s Thanks. David, what are your thoughts on hearing this?
U3
42:21
Yeah, it's a really fantastic case study and an example of really embedding growth mindset into your systems as well. Like, this is something you'll repeat. This will be something that you do when you hit the same kind of situation again. It'll be part of the culture. So it's a system level theme, which is great to see. And as you're trying to make change, you make something a priority, you build the habits and you work on systems. So it's a really great example of that and an inspiring one, because you can really picture these people imagining losing their careers and then actually being a contribution back to the business in some really creative ways. So it's a great growth mindset example. What I was thinking about is actually what Gene just put in the chat. I was thinking about, oh, so what's the ideal kind of roadmap or pathway? And we to learn these different skills. And we've been thinking about this a lot, and I don't know that there is one perfect kind of ideal way. These pieces, it's somewhat interchangeable. There's some things that work better early, there's some things that work better late, but we don't know that. There's one kind of perfect pathway. But starting with grow seems to be a wonderful thing to do. But if you missed that, you can come back to it. It's not a tragedy if you don't start with grow, but it seems to be just a little bit extra helpful to start with. Grow include is a fantastic foundational solution for getting people just in the practice of reducing scarf threats, which is status certain geotonomy related to Spanish. So Include is really great for kind of getting people more conscious of the effect they're having on others. And care in some ways builds on that. Now it's like from the perspective of really trying to include people, how do you now really show empathy? 2s And then how do you then create psychological safety 1s with team? And then how do you get everyone speaking up with Voice? So if you said what's probably the ideal pathway that focuses on empathy and psych safety, I'd say it's probably grow, include, care, team and voice in that order. And you could do that over two years, three years at any scale. But we don't live in a perfect world. Not everyone can do five things. And what Tina's done, the organization has done, has been fantastic with Grow, Include and Voice. And if you just to pick three, that's a great three as well. So we've been sort of trying to work out the principles and rules of these different modules, and the main thing is they're woven together really well and can kind of work in different ways.
U1
44:53
Martina, go ahead. No, I was just going to say I think that my reflection on it was really the importance of reflecting on our own organization and just acknowledging that 4s having the length of tenure that we have of many of our employees and how the work may not change significantly over time, we really knew for us that we had to activate a growth mindset. But that may not be the case for every organization. Right. So I think it really takes some time to just reflect on where you are and where it is that you want to go, what's important to you. 1s Yeah, definitely 2s compounding on that a little bit. I'm curious. So you've made this wonderful journey. What's next for people practices at SRP? Yeah, I feel like there's never a shortage of new and exciting things that we're really focusing on from a leadership perspective. We're really looking at the traits and the capabilities that are essential for our leaders. If the Pandemic taught us nothing else, it's that more is not necessarily better. Right. So we need to continue to get to those essential things, and that's part of what NLI has taught us as well. So we're launching 1s some new traits and capabilities and development around those things, particularly within our organization. And we're now really focusing on reinforcing some of those behaviors that we learned and include and reinforcing what we see in voice. Because, as David mentioned earlier. 2s You know, our our leaders are definitely some of them are very interested in having folks come back to the office and feeling like, okay, if we're together, I can have a better handle on what the work looks like or how we're progressing. And we need to understand that if employees are coming in, it needs to be purposeful. We need to be building inclusion and those opportunities for connection when people are physically together. And so we as an organization, have been finding more opportunities to communicate that importance to our leaders and to our employees, because it's no fun to come into an office and then just sit on a zoom call all day. Right. Right. We want to be there. I will say our teams have also really focused on building relational activities. We have very 1s active employee resource groups, and so we just had a wonderful food truck festival that just got everybody together and have been bringing in some really inspiring speakers and things of that nature. So just finding opportunities for a little bit of healing and connection as we move into 2023. That's great. I want to get some Q and A in here so people start popping your questions in. In the meantime, we've got a poll for you that has just come up. Please take a second to go ahead and answer it and be answering questions that come up in the chat momentarily.
U3
48:39
Yeah, fantastic. 1s You can click any number of those things in the chat so we know how to follow up with you. We normally have one there that says nothing for now, so we know not to follow up with you. We must have missed that one. We've got so many options, but 1s we'll follow up with you about these specific things. If you put that in there. I'm just thinking about 1s Psych Safe and 1s the role of it right now as the questions come in. 1s I think it's such a big thing because people are partially because people are really still kind of scarred by this experience. 3s The flip side of that is that whether we go into a big recession or not, we're actually going to need a lot of innovation in this next few years. There's incredible technology changes. And I think Psych safety has such an important role right now because if you're doing knowledge work and people are not actually really speaking up, it's like buying four incredible, powerful computers that are supposed to work together, and they only half work together. They share half the information. Right. And so I think for the level of innovation that's going to be necessary going forward, I think Psych safety is such a critical piece for managers to create, and then the voice solution gives the skill to everyone to actually speak up really well. So I think probably both of those are going to be increasingly important. But yeah. Any questions in the chat from folks? We'll wrap up in a couple of minutes. Anything you'd like to dig deeper that you'd like to ask Tina or myself 1s before we wrap up?
U1
50:17
Yeah, and I'll ask a question while we're waiting, waiting for folks to put stuff in. I'm curious if both of you could answer. Tina, go first. 1s What really inspires you about the work that you're doing right now? 3s It. I think what I find most inspiring is are the stories of impact that I hear from both employees and leaders and 1s knowing that we are doing truly meaningful work and helping employees to recognize their place within us, within organization. So I've had a number of new employees join SRP and they'll talk to others and say, I hear this is a really great place to work and I don't know if that's really the reality that I'm going to experience. And six months later they'll come back and say, oh my gosh, I've never worked in an organization where I felt so cared for or that I had such great connections with my coworkers. And that's something that really makes me proud and that I hope that others will 2s kind of hear our story and see those practices and those behaviors that we are really working to exhibit. And I am by no means saying we are perfect, we still have a long way to grow. Right? But ensuring that we hold our employees as close to our hearts as an organization is just what I would hope others would take away from our story. That's great. And I love how you said a long way to grow instead of a long way to go, which we usually hear. That's wonderful. David, what about you? What's inspiring you these days?
U3
52:05
It's just really great to hear the impact. When we follow the science, we create things that have never been done before, which to be honest, is terrifying a lot of the time because we really don't know if we're going to fail dismally and sometimes we do, but we really, really follow the science. We obsess about it. It's how we ended up building the whole approach to learning that we have. It's the way we build these different habits. So it's just great to hear kind of on the other end. And it's been a few years, we've been working with you for how many years now? It's like five years.
U1
52:37
Yeah, close too. Yeah,
U3
52:39
close to five years. So it's just wonderful to hear on the other end, just how embedded the habits still are day to day and how helpful they've been and how much of a foundation they can be to good people practices. And I think I remember go back to the roadmap we created. We said, here's a roadmap to help you really embed the right habits across the business. And while there's no silver bullet that changes everything, it sounds like we've really meaningfully made a difference there. And that's what's really inspiring. Tina, thank you so much for coming back to talk with us.
U2
53:10
Your brain at work is produced by the NeuroLeadership Institute. You can help us make organizations more human by rating, reviewing and subscribing wherever you listen to your podcast. Our producers are the NLI marketing and brand team. Original music is by Bell and logo design is by Catchware.