From Risk To Reinvention How Executive Behavior Becomes Brand Risk—and How To Flip The Script

(0:00 – 4:05)

Hi everyone, I’m Laraine McKinnon, Talent and Culture Strategist here at Emtrain. We are going to start in just a moment. With me, I’ve got Elizabeth Bohannon, who’s Founder and Principal of CoLab Coaching and Consulting.

We’re very excited to get the chance to talk today, and we’re curious to know who’s here. So as you’re coming into the room, please drop us a note in chat, let us know where you’re logging in from. We’ll also be using chat throughout our talk to get some more input from you all, to hear what you’re seeing in your workplaces, so go ahead and get familiar with that chat feature if you’re not in it already.

Welcome, welcome. All right, we’re going to start in one minute. We’re also happy to take any Q&A throughout the session, so if folks have a burning question that they have, you can drop it in chat or you can drop it in Q&A.

We will take them as we go. It’s just easier sometimes for us to do it in the flow of the content, and instead of trying to save time at the end, we’ll try to answer your questions as we go. Hello, Carrie from Carrie.

Love it. I went to college in North Carolina, so I know where you live, Carrie. Yay, so many connections.

I think we find that across, you know, you get a great group of people together and lots of connections. Yeah. All right, it is time for us to go ahead and get started, so we’ll do so.

Officially, I’m Laraine McKinnon, Talent and Culture Strategist here at Emtrain. With me is Elizabeth Bohannon, Founder and Principal of CoLab Coaching and Consulting. Thanks for being here, Elizabeth.

I’m thrilled to be here, Laraine. Hey, we are glad to have you. Everyone’s joining.

Thank you, Kristen, Carrie, Lisa, Rocky. Go ahead and drop in chat there where you’re from. Let me give you just a little bit of background on Elizabeth.

She is an executive coach. She’s a former employment lawyer at several different companies, including Airbnb, so we’ve got the real deal with us here. She is one of the sharpest risk spotters that I know.

She sees what most of us miss and helps executives turn it into gold, and who wouldn’t want that? Today’s topic is risk into reputation, how executive behavior becomes brand risk, and how to flip the script. So, Elizabeth, we are so thrilled to have you start us off. Why this topic and why now? Well, let’s face it, guys.

Everybody here knows that DEI is under fire. The administrative agencies that typically respond to complaints of discrimination, harassment, pay equity issues, they’ve been gutted and or hogtied. So, it’s a really confusing time to be a people leader.

It’s hard to assess risk today, and it’s hard to figure out how do you intervene, how do you respond before things explode, because explosions are still happening. It just looks very different than it did even two years ago. Yeah, for sure.

We see also on the business compliance side, all the changes in regulations, new rules, new regulations. All of these organizations, including our own, are in the AI transformation, right? How can we be more efficient, work faster? So, I think this time is kind of ripe for us. What does risk look like when it’s not just theoretical, though? What is the reputational concern? Yeah, well, let’s face one reality.

AI cannot replace culture. So, culture matters, and there’s no recent story that more emphasized this than what happened at Astronomer. You may remember, folks, probably everybody remembers that the Kiss Cam issue where an executive was caught kissing his people leader on camera at an event, and they weren’t a couple, at least not in the eyes of the law.

(4:06 – 4:12)

And the backlash was immediate. There was terrible press. There was internal outrage.

(4:12 – 5:55)

There were calls for accountability. And what was interesting, and what continues to be interesting, is it wasn’t really about the behavior itself. It was about what that behavior exposed within Astronomer, which is a culture where people already didn’t trust leadership.

It was where employees knew this thing was going on, but were too afraid to speak up, and that’s the danger that we’re here to talk about. It’s really when trust erodes, you’re not just facing exposure, you’re facing cultural collapse. So, there was the very public, all the memes, all the social media and swirling, but you just feel for the people inside the company, right, who probably knew this was going on because it was very public, and it’s the head of HR, and it’s the CEO.

So, now, as an employee or a senior leader, how do I bring a concern? Who can I go to? What’s on and off limits? The whole dynamic has changed within the organization, which makes it really challenging, that trust just erodes at every level. So true, Laraine, and I’ve seen this time and time again, really, in my years as an employment lawyer. I saw this very same issue play out over and over again, and so often, I would have some executive pushback or even employee pushback saying, well, this is a consensual relationship, what’s the problem? But, you know, like you said, Laraine, it’s the blurring of the power dynamics that makes behavior, particularly executive behavior, so toxic to culture, and the risk at the executive level always cascades down, always.

(5:56 – 6:24)

Great point. Let’s go ahead and have folks put into chat, what’s the riskiest leadership behavior that you’ve seen or worried about in your current organization or past organizations? We know these sorts of things happen all the time. Curious to know what you all might be, you know, managing yourselves, and, you know, Elizabeth, you are one of the people who brings these concerns to leaders, so tell us a little bit about how you do that as an executive coach.

(6:25 – 7:35)

Yeah, so here’s what I can tell you. When things explode, and let’s just put it that way, you know, forget about lawsuits and that sort of thing, but when things explode internally, and I sit down with an executive who’s in the crosshairs, 99% of them are shocked. They’re shocked because they see themselves differently than they are seen.

Every executive I’ve ever worked with has blind spots, and they don’t realize how their behavior affects people. Yep, for sure, and we’re seeing this in the chat, blatant favoritism, retaliation, shielding known misconduct, and penalizing people who speak out, so I’m going to turn around this in data. We actually have some Emtrain data, and it’s right along these lines, folks, so that’s always interesting, and just in case you don’t know who Emtrain is or what we do, we do online training, and in that online training, we’re dropping a series of polling questions, so we’re asking employees as they train what sort of behaviors they’re seeing in their organization.

(7:35 – 9:07)

We get very rich data because it’s in that flow of learning, and we’re able to take that out into our analytics and do big calculations. We aggregate that data, and we calculate a respect score, as well as others, but respect is really a measure of that psychological safety, the cultural health, the proper processes that are in line to have respect in the organization. I’m going to go ahead and ask John to pop up our slides.

We’re going to show you real data from the M-Train system, a live data set. I will go ahead and flip it over here. It’s going to be a little bit small on your screen, but it’s okay.

Just bear with me. I’ll walk you all through it. It’s a real example of a global company.

This is from a technology department. It is led by Jay Smith, who’s a VP of technology. This technology department is a critical contributor to business success during an AI business transformation.

On the right-hand side in the bar charts, we’re measuring respect. Bars that go to the right are positive. Bars that go to the left are negative.

This is employee sentiment, and what you’ve got circled there in pink is pretty negative sentiment around respect. These people are not experiencing a respectful workplace. They are in the data insights team, the IT team, and the artificial intelligence team.

(9:08 – 18:12)

Guess who’s super important to the success of this business in the future? Elizabeth, what do you see when you look at this? Look, this is alarming, folks. This is alarming because what you’re seeing here in this data are that the employees, the rank and file, are giving pretty good scores, which means their managers are doing a pretty good job of shielding them from Mr. Smith or Ms. Smith. Bottom line is, Smith is causing problems with his or her leaders.

What you can see here is that the trust between the leader of that organization and their people has eroded, and that’s a big red flag because for such mission-critical teams, you’re going to start losing those managers because no one wants to report to someone when they don’t trust them, they don’t feel respected by them, and bottom line, you can’t build great things when you’re afraid. That’s right, and not only that, in these transformations, you need to bring your full self, you need to be able to speak up, tell people when something’s wrong, and when we dug further into the data here, we asked a question of the learner, I’m confident I won’t experience retaliation because I’ve reported a concern or incident, so if you see hot pink on this page, those are people who are concerned about retaliation, and again, we see that there is a lot of deep dark pink here in the artificial intelligence team, IT team, they are very much saying that we fear retaliation here, and I saw that in chat, like everybody’s concerned about retaliation, so Elizabeth, help us put our minds around this, what do you see here? Yeah, I mean, think about it this way, managers are usually perceived as enjoying more power and access, they have access to the C-suite, they have access to leadership, so when those people fear retaliation, something’s seriously off, and what you see here in your data is that this isn’t an isolated issue, it’s a systemic problem, and it points to breakdowns in the very things that make culture robust, trust, accountability, and safety, so Laraine and I were curious, after seeing data like this, pop in the chat how you think you might be able to use this kind of data in your own organization? Yeah, what was so remarkable about this is, you know, we’re breaking it down by individual contributor and by manager, and it’s the managers in these groups that are reporting the greatest concerns around retaliation, and to Elizabeth’s point, it is systemic, this is really pointing to Jay Smith and their leadership style, and I’m sure Jay Smith is under a ridiculous amount of pressure bringing this company forward in transformation, moving very fast, may or may not even know that they’ve created this culture that’s causing this amount of concern, so yeah, we’re happy to take thoughts in chat there, are you monitoring this somehow within your organization, are there other ways that you’re collecting this type of information? How do you keep on the pulse of it? Yeah, for sure, and then, you know, as an HR leader, this is leading indicator type data, we see in the Emtrain data, and you would see if you’re a client and this happened to be, you know, your organization, like there’s a concern here, but as an HR leader, you know, it’s not that easy to go to Jay Smith and say, hey, can I get a moment of your time, your managers are really fearing that you’re going to retaliate, so please don’t retaliate, right, like what do you do, how do you help this executive internalize the information, how do you say it to Jay Smith, and what work would you do as an executive coach, Elizabeth, to help Jay Smith kind of unlock and break down some of this issue? Well, this is where coaching becomes a lever, Laraine, when data like this surfaces, just like you said, it’s really difficult, particularly for the people team to know what to do, because it’s difficult to go to the problem person and say, hey, you need to change your behavior, that’s rarely going to work, but when you can bring in a resource like a coach, that’s where you have an opportunity to intervene, and coaching can target these very cultural fault lines, like trust, power awareness, feedback resilience, so we’re not guessing, we’re responding to data. And skills, right, like this is a skill, this leader needs upskilling in this area, there are sort of exercises, there’s measurements that we could do that to help, precisely, and you’ve built a model for this type of like observation and skill development, right? Yeah, so I call it the risk to reinvention pathway, and it really, what’s really interesting about where Emtrain is right now, with the data, the robust data that you’re able to provide customers, is that I could sit down with that data in front of it, in front of a leader, and say, look, this is what the people are saying, here it is, where are we going to go from there? And so with risk to reinvention, we’re basically looking at auditing first, so taking the data and speaking to executives in language that’s aligned with Emtrain’s language, so it’s plug and play, it’s not another generic survey that I’m recommending, and then we do the deep work of coaching, so we work on wherever the problems may lie, or wherever the skills need to be up leveled, like it could be emotional intelligence work, or learning how to give and receive feedback, a big blind spot for a lot of people, how to create an environment where people feel safe, so the notion of psychological safety, we use the words, but a lot of leaders don’t really understand how to move from the term to making it happen, and then there’s awareness of your own power, so power dynamics is a big part of a lot of coaching that I do, and then after the coaching, whether it’s six months, four months, whatever it is, we go back and we can map it again, and we can reassess, have we seen progress? So it can be very powerful, both for the leader and for the culture.

Yeah, so help us Elizabeth, Kristen asks, how do you change, how do you address this with leaders who will not change, do not want to change, and literally terminate anyone who speaks out, so retaliation, sort of at its worst. Yeah, so that’s a real issue, yeah, I’ve worked a lot of leaders, I will say a very high percentage, at least 75% of them are willing to look in the mirror, particularly if we can establish trust in the relationship, which, you know, we do, but there are those people who won’t look in the mirror, who won’t address the elephant in the And that’s where the leadership of, you know, where the HR leadership can really have a big impact on the executive team, and saying, look, we’ve brought in a coach, the coach has made an assessment that this person isn’t willing to take the feedback, isn’t willing to do the work, isn’t coachable, and we have to make decisions as to whether this individual is worth hanging on to, you know, but at least you’re doing it from a place of data, right? For sure. I think the other thing is for the broader organization, for the board of the organization, when you have numbers like this, you are going to have, you know, transformations that won’t work, because there are failures that these people, leaders know about, and they don’t feel like they can speak up and say, hey, this isn’t going to work, or, you know, I have this concern, and it doesn’t get addressed, and that might actually be the thing that throws you into this bad reputation, right, that becomes an alarming thing that gets picked up in social media, so the overarching organization really needs to have that psychological safety in order to have a successful, you know, implementation, or, you know, whatever, whatever the top line work is happening, so it’s not just like that one leader getting away with things, it’s like the implications for the whole organization and the success of the organization’s business.

(18:12 – 26:55)

That’s absolutely right, and, you know, Janine asked how do you address this with the with the Jay Smiths of the world, and I will say directly, you know, you have to sit down, and you have, and what’s really great is when you have the data, and you can sit down, and you can show them the data, and you can say, look, I know you don’t feel like these are issues for you, but your people see you differently, so do you want to engage? Do you want to try to be the kind of leader? I often say this to folks, I say, do you want to be the kind of leader that people line up behind and want to follow, whether they’re following you into a storm, or up a mountain, or pick the metaphor you like, you know, into the gale, gale force winds, but almost every leader I know who leads people wants to be the kind of leader that people want to follow, and so I frame it that way, so let’s get there, let’s do that, it’s, it could be fun, it’s practice. Yeah, yep, I see Jessica and Kristen in the chat, both, like, really feeling it, they’re living this right now, Jessica, who has a director in the training we’re speaking about right now, and then Kristen, who says, you know, there’s an owner and CEO that’s driving that culture, which is, of course, the most challenging, especially if it’s privately held, and there’s sort of, you know, not some, not a board, or another check and balance, but, you know, a lot of this is, as Janine says here, you know, it’s skills to learn, it’s thinking about efficiencies of business, so the managers are spending a lot of time, you know, helping make sure that their individual contributors are shielded from this retaliation, they are both trying to manage down, at the same time, managing up, that takes a phenomenal amount of energy that’s not being spent on the core business, so there are probably a number of different sort of themes that you might pursue, depending on what’s important to that CEO, or that director, and find the one that’s going to, like, light that light bulb for them, and say, oh, this is important, because I can’t achieve this without that, and then take that path forward with them. That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right, and let’s, here’s the other thing, not every red flag is a call for coaching.

In Jay Smith’s situation, that bright pink is a significant red flag, and may very well be a call for coaching, but you’ve got to assess two things. Number one, is it serious enough to warrant the investment in coaching? And two, is this individual coachable? In other words, are they willing to look at their own behavior, and do the skill building that might be required to change? So, you know, so those were the two things, and then I would say to all of you who are in this situation, number one, don’t go it alone. Partner with someone who can help you, whether it’s at Emtrain, or an external resource, an employment lawyer, who can help you translate that data into a plan.

You know, I do this work with people all the time, helping them develop a coaching plan for an individual. Set a time-bound reinvention strategy, a reinvention plan, make sure there’s agreement both at the top with the individual, and with the resource, the coach that you’re hiring, and then ask for metrics. If you can measure risk, then you can measure the progress, and push for ownership.

This isn’t just HR’s responsibility. If you don’t have executive buy-in, it’s going to be very hard to navigate and push for the changes that must happen to improve the culture. Yeah, I think one of the things that people get concerned about with coaching is sort of the time, and the amount of, you know, work that they need to put into it, which on the one hand is fair, but the way coaching can just unlock something for people, like for J. Smith, could it be as simple as saying, do you have any concerns? You know, like sometimes the work, you know, is the aha moment that the coach can bring to someone outside of the organization, you know, looking at this type of data, brings the aha moment, talks through a few different ways and techniques, well-known techniques, which can make a huge, a huge difference, and I know, Elizabeth, you’ve worked with a number of different executives, really had great successes, so I appreciate all of your background.

Help us think through, you know, the last bit, like you see the leading indicators, you act on it early, you use the data to drive human change, what’s sort of the overarching message here? So a couple of things, number one, you pointed out something that’s really important for everyone to understand, coaching is not a check the box activity, it just isn’t, and you know, in a coaching relationship, the coachee has to develop trust in their coach, and that will take whatever time it takes, there’s no magic formula for that, and then once they trust, then they’re capable of having insight, but as we all know, insight alone isn’t enough, insight plus action equals reinvention, so it is a process, it is an investment, but when you have executives at the highest level, they’re influencing the success or failure of the whole organization, and so it’s an investment, it’s a lever you can pull that can make tremendous difference, difference that other interventions won’t make, but understand this, and this is the messaging I want to leave you with, that risky leaders aren’t always bad leaders, but they’re always misaligned, and that misalignment is fixable, this is skill building, as Janine mentioned in the chat, it’s skill building, if we want to build trust, both internally and externally, we have to invest in more than basic compliance, and here we’re looking at a process where diagnostic precision can meet coaching depth, and then you’re not just preventing fires, but you’re building leaders who can confidently lead the organization forward, and isn’t that what we’re all looking for? Absolutely, we’ve got one minute here, there’s some hunger in chat for a turnaround story, I know you have one Elizabeth, I do, and actually I have many, but there was for instance one executive where all the data showed that this person’s intensity was so much that people didn’t feel safe to raise issues, they didn’t want to tell the truth, they were super avoidant, they did that thing that we’ve all seen, which is where folks will put a gloss over things, everything’s fine, we’re fine, everything’s going fine, but when we looked at the data, the truth was they were terrified of this person, and so sitting down with that person and showing them the data, which is you’re amazing, you’re brilliant, you’re great at execution, you make things happen, but your people are terrified of you, what do you want to do about that? And getting buy-in and seeing this individual start changing the way they showed up for their one-on-ones and for their team was profound, and we moved the needle, most of the time we move the needle, it’s not magic fairy dust, it’s skill building, but it helps, it works, it makes a difference, I’ve seen it. Amazing, you’ve done it, you’ve made it happen, appreciate that Elizabeth, thank you so much for sharing all of your background and expertise, thank you for the risk to reinvention pathway model, great concepts, if anyone would like to learn more, please feel free to reach out to me or Elizabeth, we’re both on LinkedIn, and our client relationship team or our sales team can help you get in touch with us too, thank you Elizabeth. Thank you so much Laraine, this was great, really fun.

All right, thank you both, just want to direct folks over to our next session, starts in about five minutes, it is Proactive Employer Relations, Turning Conflict into Insight with Allison Hubbard Colgin and Janine Yancey. Again Elizabeth, thank you for joining us. My pleasure, thanks John.

Thanks everyone.