Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode on the culture prophet. Today’s question, have you ever been told culture is just fluffy and doesn’t actually affect the bottom line? If so, this episode is for you. Today we’re chatting with Lena Mc See, there we go.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Perfect.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): You just said it and now I’m like Mcder McDerman.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Too much pressure.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Sorry.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Perfect.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Okay, here we go.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): You want to do it again.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yep. Hello everyone and welcome to today’s episode on the culture profit. Today’s question, have you ever been told culture is just fluffy and actually doesn’t affect the bottom line? If so, this episode is for you. Today we’re chatting with Lena McDearmid (Guest),founder and CEO of Wyvern about how culture shows up on your P&L statement and how to fix it. So, thanks for being with us today, Lena.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Thanks for having me. I’m so excited.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): I am too. We talked earlier and we’re both from Georgia, different parts, but you can tell more by her accent than mine. Um,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): That’s all right.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): but a little bit Yes.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It’ll come out. It’ll Yours will come out,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Let it flow like a river.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): right?
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Um,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): That’s right.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): a little bit about Lena. So Lena McDearmid (Guest)is the founder and CEO of Wryver,as Matt said, an advisory firm that helps leaders address underperformance by redesigning their culture and decision architecture. She partners with executive teams to build clear systems for communication, decision-making, and accountability, helping organizations resolve conflict, align around shared goals, and navigate critical inflection points with clarity and cohesion. We’re going to dive more into this, but tell us a little bit about how you got to this point. And um Matt, when he spoke with you earlier, I wasn’t there, but he and you guys talked about your purpose on the planet.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): I love you’re going to need to tell me about this,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah, for sure.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): but how did you arrive on this concept?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah. Well, I love it. The purpose on the planet is sort of what reminds me what my center is when I need to kind of be like, what am I doing? Um, so I became really aligned with culture as an architecture, as a strategy in the business world.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Gosh, unintentionally, honestly, I’ve probably, it probably goes back more than 10 years. And it really sort of started because I had the opportunity through my entire career to lead really interesting diverse teams, different skill sets, whether it was through product management, project management, operating large teams, all of the normal kind of interactions of leader experiences. But I started to clock pretty quickly, probably in the middle of my career, that the performance of the teams that I worked with, the output of those teams really depended largely on the trust that sat inside of the team. Whether it was psychological safety, accountability, transparency, the ability to disagree. And I started to notice when I would acquire teams in certain organizations because I had a way of sort of stabilizing. And I used to be like, “Give me your dumpster fires. I’ll take them over.” I thought I was like the hero. Um, and so I wouldn’t do that now. But I will say the lessons I learned is I would come into teams that had been underperforming or been qualified as underperformers and they weren’t.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): All of them were amazing, brilliant, intelligent people who had not really been taught how to team and communicate and to uncover the friction and
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): just hold it and say like, okay, why are we all angry? Why aren’t we communicating? Everyone wants to do well. No one shows up and says, I want to be a bad employee. And so I started to kind of work through that over my career in the different organizations that I was an
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Heat.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): employee at. And then after I left one of the companies, it was so great startups and went to help another company kind of rebuild and I walked in the doors and everything that had been promised was kind of smoke and mirror and the culture was so toxic and they had been trying to launch this product for a long time and it became very apparent to me why they had not been successful and it was the culture was strangling the people and so I was like I this is what it is. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I can see it pretty quickly. I can have uncomfortable conversations.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And if I can mirror it back to leaders and and owners and you know suite members and help them understand like you can have all the right people, all the right funding, all the right strategy, but if the environment is not conducive for that that team to be successful, it will not work. It will not work.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Hello.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so my purpose on the planet became the conversation I started having with myself. I’m like, what are people who come out to me and reach out to me for the most? What do I find myself running towards? And then when I started kind of aligning on those things, I’m like, oh, well, here’s my vin diagram. I like to go to where there’s a little bit of conflict and friction and tension and be like, it’s really not what we think it is. It’s really the environment and it’s really the culture. And we can architect it and we can collaborate on it.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): So that’s how Wyrver was born about a year and a half ago, but she was about 10 years of gestation coming to life and to be born.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Oh, I love how you phrased that and how Yeah. how you were able to identify that passion in yourself as you had those experiences firsthand. And I think identifying the contrast between those two scenarios and then having that be kind of the light bulb moment of oh wow like this this is a thing like this is something
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It’s tangible.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): that I see and can be addressed and I think that’s incredible.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. What stood out to me is you realized you had an eye for something like that’s that’s a unique everyone needs to find that experience of like what do I have an eye for? What am I drawn to?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Right.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): What problem am I drawn to fix? Right.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Right.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): And so the fact that you identified that Sorry.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It No,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Go ahead.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It’s okay. I think it’s with every person. It’s exactly right. It’s like mine happens to be. I’m really a team person. I’m not an individual contributor.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Stick me in a room by myself and I will shrivel. I’m a plant that needs community and I grow best in environments where my soil is tended to. I’m sitting in the right light. I have the right nutrients, etc., etc., which is also an environment, which is also a culture. And some people can walk into a kitchen and they can taste a food and be like, it’s missing salt. It’s missing. I don’t have that skill set. So, all of us are born in my opinion with unique data attention. Like we know what clocks for us and we can we attune to it and then we if we start to listen to ourselves we’ll find what our superpowers are and our purpose can then be pulled from that and then when we pay attention to what our purpose is it continues to show up and give you opportunity to use it.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah, we’re helping our middle schoolers kind of in that phase where she’s like, “What do I do? What’s interesting to me?” You know, so this is what’s on my mind right now.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Well,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): But yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I and the thing is give them permission to be like you’ll go through so many chapters of interest just because of what
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. Totally.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): You’re interested at 11 because I was an archaeologist at 11 is not what I am at, you know, at the age now. So, I love that they’re interested and I would just say that alone is like the fact that you’re curious is powerful.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good outside perspective to everyone listening. I think you know I think it’s important to give yourself permission to learn new things outside of your lane.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Oh my gosh.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): And it’s okay to maybe you’re not great at it, right?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Maybe but your career it’s okay to have hobbies and not be exceptional at it.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): just because you want to try running doesn’t mean you have to be doing a marathon,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Hobby supposed to be fun. You don’t have to win.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): you know,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): like I think it applies to adults, too. So I think that’s kind of a side note to your journey that I think is really powerful for everyone listening
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): that you know, learn it grow.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): when you’ll yeah I think hobbies are everybody should have a hobby for sure and I think it creates that creative outlet because for me at least in my journey when I kind of left my last company I gave myself a good proper break which is what I needed to do after being in corporate America for 20 years and I got really great advice from one of my mentors who was like say no to everything for the first like six months at least he said a year I cut it to six and he’s like and and lean into creativity lean lean into things that seem wasteful, that seem like I’m not being productive, great.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Lean into that. And that is the message I can if you are stuck,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): What?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you don’t know what you need to do next, my strongest advice is go be creative and take the pressure off of being productive and it
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Oh,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): will find it will find its way.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): he needs assistance.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Oh, I only speak it because I live it.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): We all do. I think that’s awesome. I was going to say one other thing. You mentioned earlier that the product wasn’t getting launched because of the culture and you know on this podcast we we try to drive home that investing in
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Mhm. Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): your people are actually investing in your profitability.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Absolutely.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): And so that’s like such a great example of that. And so we want to dive more into that about when a business is
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yep.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): struggling,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Mhm.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): what are the signs that the root issue could be a culture strategy and not you know something else.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Absolutely.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): But
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Oh, so many great questions. Um, the easiest way for me to tell people because I get this question probably the second the first one is what is culture? The second is how do I know when I have a culture problem? And my answer is pretty simple. When you’ve tried everything else, when you’ve tried all the normal fixes, replaced the CEO or changed your org chart or created a new strategy or done a pivot or brought in a consultant and used a framework and it’s still not working and you don’t understand what to do and you can’t agree on what the problem is, it’s most likely a culture problem. And what I mean by culture is the environment with which you’re creating your business, your product, your team, your environment is not calibrated for the outcome that you’re trying to accomplish. And it’s okay. It is absolutely okay if your culture is not right yet. We can fix the pH levels of your organization.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): What the hell?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): You know, when you’ve tried everything and you can’t agree on what the problem is, I normally get the phone call and they’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, our revenue is down. We’re stalled. We think that we have the wrong technology and the wrong leaders. I’m like, awesome. Thank you for your feedback. However, often when I go in, it is rarely what they believe the problem to be.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): What
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And when we’ve come in and we’ve done our diagnostic, everything must start with the diagnostic. I cannot measure,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): do you think?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): but I cannot quantify.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so I don’t want to take the feedback and let it bias my decision. So we will always start with a diagnostic first. But it really shows up for me and I’ll sit in on conversations. I’ll sit in meetings as a fly on the wall. That’s my favorite. And I will notice the conversations that are not happening right. I’ll notice the tension not being spoken.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I will not just be me.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): M.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): There’ll be infighting. We’ll be relitigating decisions that have already been set. And what we’re losing is time and trust and accountability and transparency because we are just accepting the status quo as these are just the way things are. and it feels heavy and burdensome and a slog.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): So when I walked into that organization who had been trying to be a successful startup, launching a product and it had been very very slow and I walked into the environment. Everybody was literally stuck at their desk. There was no light coming into that office building.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Oh man, you’re like,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Nobody left,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): “Okay, we need a window.” Oh,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): right? Nobody left to go to lunch. There was no laughter in that space.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): wow.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): There wasn’t friendly chat chatter. There wasn’t banter. And you certainly certainly were not safe to disagree with the CEO. And if you as a CEO, as a leader, as a manager, as an employee are unable to collect and get feedback, that is my largest um you’re not ready to be led.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Mhm.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): You’re not ready to receive feedback. You’re not really ready to grow.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so it often in organizations comes I I see it in to bring it back to center when there’s conflict that doesn’t make sense when tension is existing and nobody’s naming it in the room and you slowly start to get quieter on raising your hand to say I disagree. When you’re when creativity gets really muted and you’re not seeing collaboration and innovation, that to me are the signs that we’ve got a problem here that people don’t feel psychologically safe. And the most important ingredient of any organization to be successful, the single largest important ingredient is psychological safety being present in your workforce.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): I would agree.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It and it was tested like Google tested it on their most successful team. Some teams are successful, some teams are not. Why under the same CEO with access to the same funding, the same tools, the same access, but some teams were more successful than others.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Right.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so after looking at thousands and thousands of team members over 10 years, the single most important ingredient people thought was going to be the pedigree of their college, the age or the experience of the people.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And it had nothing to do with that and had every had something to do with it, but the most important was psychological safety. Psychological safety, which when I heard that years ago, it unlocked for me. like yes, thank you for validating what we know to be true.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Mhm.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so that’s why River is so diagnostic and analytic based because you have to give people permission to believe that culture is real and can be measured. And so when quants and stats are available, we really like to share that with people and help them understand that culture can be
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): measured.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Have you ever told a CEO like you’re not you’re not ready for this change? Have you ever had a conversation like that?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I’ve had several conversations with many CEOs, many founders. Um, I have been a founder,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): so I’ve also received feedback like that.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Right.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): So, I’ve sat on both sides of the conversation. Absolutely. And sometimes it’s not like you’re not ready for the seat.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): The seat may have surpassed you or be prepared that it may outgrow you, especially if you’re a founder.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): less than 1% of all founders stay with the organization through like final success, right?
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so that’s something that you have to kind of know early that it the seat will leave you and you want it to like sit from the sidelines, clap for it,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): get really great investment, you know, align your package.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): But when I work with CEOs or leaders or chairmans of boards, I’ll walk in pretty transparently. I’m not a sugar coder. I probably was in my earlier career because I had a little bit of fear and imposter syndrome. Now I’ve made enough mistakes of my own to be like, “Hey, I’m just going to save you time and money.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): You’re confident.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I’m going to need to be able to tell you sometimes the baby’s ugly, right? I’m going to need to be able to say and sometimes you’re the problem.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And if you’re not ready to hear it, that’s okay. Call me or come back to us when you are. And nine out of 10 times, if I can sit across from a leader who’s ready for the truth, we’re going to have such a much more successful interaction, such a more successful engagement.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And if they’re open to feedback, which is one of the most important reasons I invest in companies, is if I can’t manage or give feedback to the the founding team members or leaders,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I’m not interested normally in investing in the company.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. She has the best metaphors. Yeah. Seriously. the ph the baby is ugly and
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It’s southern. Oh, yeah. I use that one. Or lipstick on a pig. I use that one a lot, too. Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): oh that’s we want to dive into these the
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah. I’ve done it a few times. Sure.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): diagnostics the measuring so where do you start with a culture transformation how do you translate that
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): into a measurable line item proving that culture can be measured and this is how we do it
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): There
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Absolutely. So, every company’s different, right? Their issues, what their problems are can vary. And so, we always start with a diagnostic. Whether you’re a law firm, a tech company, or a marketing firm, we always kind of go in with a short diagnostic period where we’re capturing information across your organization, meeting with your leaders, meeting with your employees, checking out your tools, your processes. Like we really try to immerse ourselves into the environment so that we can take our own data
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): heat.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): and try to kind of block out the bias of what everybody thinks the problem is. So we do start with that because we’re data and analytics first. And then after that period of time, what we start to look at is well, I’ll give you an example.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): We just finished. We had one company that’s really frustrated because they’ve stalled in their revenue and they’ve stalled in their growth. They’re starting to see clients attract and they can’t quite understand why they’re leaving. And so we started to look at all right. Well, let’s talk about what’s happening. Like let’s look at decision cycle time. So that’s one thing we can measure. So decision cycle time is how long it takes to go from we have a problem to we’ve identified what the problem is and we’ve committed to the fix and we started it. And so that duration of time which could be days to weeks to months has a cost on it because it’s carrying what I call a culture drag. Um rework and repeat issues. So I picked up this when we were in operations when you would have you ever called first call resolution? Have any of you ever worked in a call center?
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Um,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): The goal of So,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): yeah, I’ve heard it. Now,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): as a CSR, when you’re on the phone, somebody’s calling, they’re like, “I have a problem.” Your job is to get off the phone quickly with quality, but also to resolve the issue. If that same customer calls back with the same problem because it didn’t resolve it,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): that’s not a first call resolution, and that costs money.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): That call now costs twice as much.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Mhm.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Similar issues in any other department, not just operations. We work on repeat issues that have an operational expense. And so every time that we’re fixing the same problem, going back to the board and redrawing a new map, a new solution is pay time that you never get back. And you can put that on a P&L. You can track it by the people working on it, the hours logged, the the blended rate of the individuals involved in that and then the test or the quality of erosion performance. And so with this particular case where these individuals like we’ve stalled, we’ve we’ve lost our revenue customers are trying trading.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): We kind of looked at their entire strategy and their network. And what we recognized is they were delivering products. They were hitting the delivery, but they weren’t meeting what the customer was actually requesting. They weren’t clear on the brief from the customer. The requirements that were coming back from their sales team were ambitious at best, but didn’t really drive to what we are actually solving here. And so it came through a lot of conversation and the amount of time they had spent delivering the wrong product for quarters on quarters on quarters to not have adoption. They had flagged adoption. They were hoping for a 25% adoption rate. They were hovering around seven.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Oh,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And then some of the customers who would they had friendlies that were practicing it were saying,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): well.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): “You guys don’t get it at all.” and they kept trying to fix the thing that they never wanted. And I’m like, we are pointing the arrow in the wrong direction.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): They really just want this, they don’t want this. And so it really taught the team members how to collaborate between product and sales. And then the product started sitting in on those customer um discovery journeys with the sales team members. So they could hear firsthand. There was no telephone game. And then they also started sharing language, common language between sales and product so that they could have the right lexicon for how we describe what we offer, how we can understand and hear what the customer is saying they want and then we can build for them based on clear requirements where clarity was not currently existing. So we reduced the decision cycle time. We reduced the rework and repeat issues. And then we also had this new level of engagement and partnership between two teams who normally are oil and water. Sales and products normally are like breaks and gas, right?
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Mhm.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Like and then in my world that’s I was product and sales was always not friendly to us and we weren’t friendly to them and it was unhealthy.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It was unhealthy and unsuccessful.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so we closed the gap on that. We created a collaborative culture and an innovative culture where we were now teaming on the same solution and then the customers were part of it. that they felt heard, seen and valued. And so it really created a new ecosystem and a new culture within that pod which has become quite successful for
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Wow.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Did that answer the questions?
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Oh, yeah. It does. It does a lot. I mean,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): thinking about some of these metrics and as you’re talking about them, they feel very intuitive, but I feel like sometimes you don’t think about some of those things, you know, right off the top of your head, like time to decide. I mean,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): That makes so much sense. And I think tracking that is very strategic. But yeah, the first call resolution, tracking productivity. I’ve also heard, you know, stats around um customer satisfaction going up and down correlating with employee satisfaction.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah, it leaks out.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): And so measuring those two in tandem makes a lot of sense.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yep. Manager level engagement that has to do with 70% of most team culture has to do with the engagement level of the manager. And so you can have again the same company,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Mhm.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): same access, but different managers perform and have engagement levels different on their team. And so it’s a direct correlation to how involved, how engaged that manager is with their team members on how well the output of that team is. And so you can manage, you can manage and measure engagement. You can manage regrettable attrition.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Shut
Lena McDearmid (Guest): So regrettable attrition is you’ve got a superstar on your team, but they leave and go to another organization. That’s going to cost you time. You just lost IP out the door. ramping back up to find another one. The cost is about 1.25x the rehire or reamp of a regrettable attrition. And so there’s so many measurable opportunities that you can put in a P&L statement.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It is intuitive, but it’s intuitive up to a point that people then have to take it a little bit further and put a mathematical quantity on it so that then you can argue your opinion.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yep.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): as being a product for 10 years,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Mhm.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): we would constantly have what I called like our priorities would shift. We would build these large features for this solution and then we’d be ready to push it out into the market and then someone would come and say, “We’re not ready. The customer’s not ready or we need to hold on to that.” And we’d hide it behind the feature flag. So, we built this great thing and then shoved it. And so we would just argue and gripe about it knowing now I would have gone back and been like hey let me tell you how much this cost us to build it the fact that it’s sitting on the shelf and if
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): you can put a dollar measure on it those shifts of priority those they put it on a shelf ideas become a whole lot less attractive when they’ve got a monetary value sitting in the negative column and that
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Right. Right.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): helps influence your decision makers. Even if you’re not a decision maker yourself, you can influence your manager who can influence the up up. And money always, unfortunately, wins in those conversations.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. I mean, really, if you think about it, you’re talking about line items on the cost of goods sold.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): and also on your operating expenses. it.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): down.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): They they go on both sides when you talk about like that that um
Lena McDearmid (Guest): you.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): conflict between product development and sales and then l you know lower rates of first call
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): resolution.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yes.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Those are exceptional examples. You know I think we could probably do multiple hour episodes with how much you have here.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): How to do the math. You could almost bring one example and we could walk through like unplanned pivot time hours of rework or wasted bill times your blended hourly rate equals X.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yep.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And so this idea that we built and spent six weeks to six months doing that cost us $750,000 that we’re going to shelf because something shiny got our attention and we don’t have a numeric value to assign it. So it just feels like a flippant switch, but it’s not. And I love s***. I love change. I like trying things. I really do. But if you’re just flipping your direction and your priorities, that’s not strategic.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It’s messy.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And it demoralizes your team.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. Mhm.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And there’s I haven’t yet figured out the quantification of demoralizing a team yet, but it feels a lot like disengagement.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. No,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And that mathematically can be tried back.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): absolutely. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s going to happen the next time we develop a product?” Like,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah. You get less excited.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): yeah. Why should I put my, you know, my discretionary effort, my best effort towards the next thing?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yes. Yes.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): And so, it actually could take your quality down.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): When Oh,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): I said, it’s innovation.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): and that person is halfway out the door. They’re updating their LinkedIn,
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): they’re submitting their resume and it’s just that I’ve lived in the environment. I’ve been a part of six to seven different startups and so part of the new growth of a startup is fast. It is fast-paced and you are kind of pivoting and switching your head and I recognize and I give a little bit of guidance and leniency there but to a point and then we have to bring in a bit of structure stability and we have to do what we say and say what we do and if we make any changes it has to be transparent. It has to be a why and it has to be mathematically footed to the decision of why we’re doing it.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Is it a risk? Is it money? Is it an opportunity?
Lena McDearmid (Guest): If we’re just doing it because of gut and feelings, that’s not strategic. That’s not leadership. It’s messy and it’s immature.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a good point that there are times when a CEO or whatever can say, you know, we’re actually not going to launch this product and this is why. You know,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Mhm.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): there there might be a good transparent way to go about that and and still not
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Absolutely.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): demoralize the team. So,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): That’s right.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): I like that you pointed that out, too. But,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): but definitely not if it’s a pattern because that’s Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Right.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): That’s showing that it’s not strategic at that time.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): It’s just you’re not Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It’s just It’s Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): That’s flippant.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): You’re not Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I’ve been a part of the conversations where we’ve built something and we’ve had to sit it down because the time wasn’t right.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It wasn’t going to land well. We misread the opportunity, etc., etc. And sometimes you’re just wrong. You bet wrong. And that’s okay, too.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): But the opportunity as a leader is to come in and speak the truth of the conversation. Take accountability where you need to. Pointing fingers never works. It’s one of the most toxic things I can see inside of an organization. And then most of the time when we’ve always led with truth in any of the organizations that I’ve let her run, the employees are okay with a hard truth. What they don’t understand is when you don’t give them all the information, they’ll create the narrative themselves.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): And normally it’s 10 times worse than what the truth really is.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): So invite them into the conversation or the problem and allow them to be a part of the solution and the narrative. And then you will get alignment and you’ll get a lot more partnership from those employees and those team members than you ever would have had you just like handled it all behind your ivory glass doors and not participated with the
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): team.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): It’s amazing what transparency does to to the trust of of a employee leader relationship,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Absolutely. Absolutely.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): you know.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): It’s the most important. Trust, accountability, and psychological safety are the holy trinity.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s amazing. And when it’s communicated efficiently, then everyone has everything they need to do their best work. I think that’s awesome.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): I think um as we’re kind of wrapping up here for everyone listening, make sure that you’re checking out um Lena’s resources on the Wyrver website. We’re going to link to that. There’s a lot more that you can dive into,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Yeah.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): especially as you um get to know Lena. We’ll link to her LinkedIn because she’s definitely a person to follow. Um, but as we’re ending here, any final words of advice.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): I would say the best way that I can kind of give advice to leaders doing the work is if you’re leading people, it’s such a great responsibility and the hardest thing to do is be vulnerable, but is the most important thing that you can have as part of your leadership. So little steps to kind of show who you are and be transparent about how you lead and ask for help is always going to go longer with your employees and team members.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Love that. That’s the perfect note to end on. Great advice. I’m I’m so impressed with you and yeah,
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Oh, thanks
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): please reach out to Lena. Keep the conversation going and like she said, she’s ready to play hard ball and be very straightforward with you on what the issues are and that’s the only way you can truly get better and progress. And so that’s what every organization really needs. But thank you so much for your time today, Lena. And everyone, tune in for next time. Yep.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Thanks, Matt.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): We’ll see you guys.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Thanks, Christa.
Matt & Crista Vance (Co-Hosts): Thanks. Okay, I’ll turn the recording off here.
Lena McDearmid (Guest): Perfect.
