Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
This week on Culture Leaders Daily, we bring you my conversation with Monique Robertson Gunter, the Chief Experience Officer at Wellbe Financial. Wellbe is a great case study for a company that took the plunge with culture partners and they made huge changes as they allied their company culture behind very ambitious goals and a strong purpose. Monique explains how Wellbe reshaped its culture, starting with the key results they wanted to achieve, and developing a culture of feedback, continuous improvement and shared accountability where it’s the responsibility of leaders to make Wellbe a great place for members and employees. We also talk about what it means to be a chief experience officer, combining culture and brand in a way that’s authentic and also results driven. Plus the importance of purpose fit over the myth of culture, fit the value of humility in leadership and Monique’s advocacy for women in leadership. So please welcome to the podcast Monique Robertson Gunter. Monique, thank you for joining us. So let us start with is why

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Our Wellbe? Why is to help people prosper. It’s really become our rally cry in a very unique and very organic way. And so one of the things that we think about when we talk about prosperity is we think about families in Houston and what resiliency looks like for a family that is living there every day in a city that’s growing in a city that is very diverse and a city and just challenges that families and individuals are going to naturally have. And so we’ve looked at prosperity in a very unique way. We call it our path to prosperity with three unique experiences. You’re either building, growing or thriving. And so we’ve been able to create solutions and services and education. And so it’s really from the very beginning been more than just a vision or something we put on the wall or on the shelf and kind of touch once a year at strategic planning.
It is instead the thread and the fabric of everything we do. And it has been incredibly unique when we talk about attracting and retaining talent because now we’re talking about not only people that have the technical skills but that shared heart mission and does this really resonate with you and is a culture where people being first and their journey and their resiliency being first, is that something that really resonates in how you want to get work done? And so it’s been really cool to anchor who we are culturally, not only around the fantastic partnership with Culture partners and the way they’ve helped us frame delivering on our purpose with a culture of accountability, but starting with our culture of helping people prosper, building resiliency, building that readiness for the emergency that we all know is always going to come, and then almost kind of setting everything else up around it.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Love this because we talk a lot about purpose fit over culture fit. I think culture fit is a sham. I mean the idea that you fit in here culturally, so therefore you belong is really just a breeding ground for bad decision making and unconscious bias. But purpose fit, which it sounds like you’ve committed to is this is our why does this resonate with your personal why? And if so, come join us and help us advance our mission, right?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
That’s right.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah.

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Come be with the cool kids that are changing the city of Houston, one family at a time building. And one of the things that we say is when we do this really well, we’re going to disrupt generational poverty because one of the steps in there is making sure we give our members access to home ownership and we know how important home ownership is to building wealth and just not having to face the insecurities of housing. And so I love how you said it. It’s very purpose-filled.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. And so you’re the chief Experience officer. Can you tell us what that means in the context of will be financial?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Yeah, absolutely. So we look at experience in two ways. We know that our team members are having experiences that we’re responsible for because we’ve told them this is a great place to work and we need to show up every day and be that. And then we know that our membership is having an experience when they choose us as who they’re going to bank with. And so I’m responsible for making sure from every team member that enters the door that they have an incredible onboarding experience, that our training and professional development is second to none, that our culture embellishment and all of the things that really define how you get work done and how you feel while you’re getting that work done. And so my learning and development and my organizational development teams and I, we rally around that expectation. And then I’m also responsible for our branches, our contact center, our wealth management division, our business and community development groups. Then so those things are kind of again how the membership experiences. So what is our culture around excellent member service? How do we make sure we’re assessing the right needs for where you’re at in your build growth thrive? What is it like when you call here? Just that ease of doing business with us. And so we build the trust, build the relationship, and then you choose us as a great financial services partner. So relationship kind of holistically, what’s it like to work here and what’s it like to bank here?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So this is one of those cutting edge roles that we’ve started to hear about. Maybe it was cutting Edge 10 years ago, right? Yes. And then five years ago, more and more people started taking this on, but this is the role that Mary’s brand and culture,

Speaker 3:
Because

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
You understand they’re the same thing, right? Absolutely. Our culture is an internal manifestation of our brand and the brand is an external manifestation of our culture. If your culture sucks and your brand is great, that’s fake. And if your brand is bad and your culture is fantastic, well something not aligning there. So we love Culture Partners is all about experiences at the

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Very

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Much found foundational level. Everything is about experience. So I would love to talk about your, we don’t usually do this, but to talk about your journey, your culture journey, starting with before we got involved, I mean what was happening before we joined you as partners in the business in the experiences of internally and externally, what was the challenge that you were trying to solve for

Monique Robertson Gunter:
You say what was happening? I would almost say it’s like what was not happening. So
We were undergoing tremendous transformation, a name brand change. So our legacy brand was Johnson Space Center. We had almost 60 incredible years under that brand serving families and employees of the NASA Johnson Space Center workforce. And so under some leadership decisions, it was really thinking about how are we again going to serve all of the greater Houston area. And we recognized that it was an opportunity for some great transformation moments. So we did a name brand change, now will be financial. We opened about three new branches, four new branches on the western side of Houston where we’d never been before. We changed our core system. So the way that we transact for the member and then we changed our online banking system. And so the way the members self-serve and believe it or not, we did all of that on the exact same day. We chose 10, 10, 20, 21 and literally changed everything about ourselves in one day.
And it required that the leadership team hear the membership, hear the team take the long list of things that were not working and get to work. And we literally started doing that really started first with team member experience and some low hanging fruit around member experience. We wanted you to be able to do business easy with us. And so we knew that meant having a double down on the training because all of a sudden we went from having experts that had been here for 7, 8, 9, 10 years to all of us being on day one because all the systems were new. And so it was a real journey around our own internal resiliency. And so in that time, what we also were experiencing as team members, just kind of losing a little faith, a lot of faith if I’m being honest. And our turnover was through the roof.
And so not only were the systems really new and the members expecting the service they had come to expect all those years, we weren’t building a place where employees and great talent wanted to stay. So that is really what led us to the journey with Culture Partners and even the journey to re-look at our strategy, our purpose. And so we kind of took a clean slate and said, while all the decisions we made were good for the longterm of the business, we’ve got some real short term things that we’ve got to own and solve. And so it led us right to culture partners. There was a lot of the things you guys already had built around how you anchor a team around those shared goals, the see it, own it, solve it, do it being above the line versus below the line. Those were things that we didn’t really have language for yet, but that we were seeing happen around us.
You can see when someone’s exasperated and when they’re totally below the line and they’re getting some others to get below there with them. And it gave us shared language, it gave us a shared finish line around it’s okay to fill it but pop back up. And so our partnership with Culture Partners couldn’t have come at a better time because we were doing really great things for the future of the credit union, but we had to have some real moments around how do we take the team members on a journey that they’re also proud of and creating a place that where retention is significantly better now significantly.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So let’s start at the beginning. The first thing that we do is always focus on clarity of results. Let’s get clear on what it is we want to accomplish. So what were those initial key results that you identified would be the measure of success of the finish line as you called it?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Absolutely. So we took our key results and we have them at the five-year mark, but we do break them down annually. But our key result, we said if we did what we set out to do in five years, we will have 10,000 of our members being homeowners.

Speaker 3:
We’ll

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Have 70,000 of our members with 3,500 or more in a savings, and that number is the median income in Houston and just divided by 12. So we wanted them to have that resiliency if something happens, you don’t got to swipe a credit card or go to a cash advance place, you’ve got that savings that you need to weather a little storm. And so that was where we, again, it’s that member and team member experience. And then so that’s how we wanted to really serve our members from a results. And then we had some key results around our team member experience. And so it was around what do we call our team member engagement scores. And so we set a pretty high mark around what we want our team members to be able to anonymously once a year, tell us how it feels to work here.
And so we set the bar pretty high for ourselves and got to work around team member engagement. And then that final one takes us back to the member experience. It was our net promoter score, which we know is all about the relationship. It’s the long-term view. It’s not how was it last Tuesday when you came in, but it’s when you reflect on being a member at wellbe, how likely are you to recommend, how are they solving for you? And so we took those four key results as our finish line when we started the journey with Culture partners.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So how much of a stretch were those key results when you set them? I mean how far were you?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Far, far. We are an ambitious group. I like to say my chief strategy officer has a saying, he says, we’re going to take over the world. And sometimes you have to, whether you call it the BHAG or the take over the world goal, they were ambitious. Jessica. We are talking about significant year over year performance results to accomplish those goals. We are doing fantastic on our mission to home ownership. We are on pace and doing really well. We are having a fantastic year over year, year on our net promoter score. And so we are now at the financial services mark, but the bar’s really high for credit unions. And so we’re now striving to get back into that 50 to 60 mark where we know best of the best credit unions do it. But I mean in two years we have completely turned it around and it has really started with the team members and the internal culture.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, that’s incredible. Okay, so you got clear on the goals. The goals were not small goals. These are stretch goals that seemed very, very far away. They were take over world goals. Yeah, exactly. And so step two is alignment, right? We have to create the alignment around those goals at every level of the organization. And so that begins with cultural beliefs. We understand, let me just break this down. For those of you who haven’t heard of Culture Partners, culture Partners does almost all of their work based on the results pyramid. We know results come from actions and most leaders just stop there. They focus on here’s what we got to do, here’s what we got to do. Which may be part of the challenge that you had fallen into, the trap you’d fallen into before we started working together. You thought we got to update our system, we got to update our website, and so you did a bunch of actions. That’s

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Right. All the actions,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
All the actions, the action trap. You don’t want to get stuck in that trap. And what you were missing perhaps was the underlying belief that will drive actions. That was not a focus at the time. And those beliefs are driven by experience, the chief experience officer, right? So what beliefs did you rally around in this effort to drive those results instead of focusing on here’s what we got to do to improve NPS, it was what beliefs do we need people to hold about us in order for them to take the action to work with us or to stay with us in order to get these key results? What were those beliefs at the time?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
I think at the time, and this might sound a little simple, but it’s the truth, there were two things that we, I think that a fantastic job at. We created the belief that we were a feedback culture, so tell us what’s working and tell us what’s not. And then with that, we coupled that with the belief that we are a continuous improvement culture.

Speaker 3:
And

Monique Robertson Gunter:
So if you tell us it doesn’t go off into LA land, but we now have a charge from you as our team members to make this a better place. Small groups, large groups, interdepartmentally, we really began what are all the things we call them? Like what are the workarounds? Where do you find yourself doing workarounds all day when really you’re just thinking, do my leaders not know that this is not efficient? And by asking some of those questions around what are your thorns, we were able to get a list, create a culture of feedback, and then say thank you for the feedback. Not give an excuse on why we built it that way, but here are the team members that use it every day and go and make it better. So it was the culture of feedback and the culture of continuous improvement by creating that belief system, it really helped start to turn things around very quickly because you started to earn trust in that way too.
If I tell them they’re not offended, I am not in trouble. I’m not on some weird list, they are taking my feedback and they are literally changing it. And then also just closing the loop too. Thank you for that feedback. I hope you notice the receipts are different. I hope you notice that the papers are different. And so kind of creating that culture of look, oh look, they changed what she said and they heard what he said. And so then that kind of began to feel this culture of shared accountability. It is your executive team’s responsibility to make this a great place for the members and for you.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So I love this. Let’s talk about first a culture of feedback and continuous improvement. You are dealing with very challenging, deeply ingrained cultural dynamics that you have to overcome for that to feel authentic. Because
When I give my boss feedback, I understand there is a risk that they will be offended, that they will take it personally, that they will not like me because they got their own problems to deal with at an ego level, at an interpersonal level, right? Hundred percent. It can easily become a career limiting move. I mean, I have experiences all throughout my career where I had plenty of feedback to give and I kept my mouth shut because I was trying to save my job. I was trying to be, I think we all do the top performer, right? Everyone does. Exactly. So it goes to experiences. What specific experiences did you have to create and how did you scale those experiences for people to really buy it that they weren’t going to be in trouble?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
We started with just, again, cross-departmental experiences. So I mean, I’m going to really go into the weeds with you. There is a great Mexican restaurant that was around the corner from our headquarter building, they’re not even open in the morning. We reached out and I said, can I use your banquet room in the mornings? We every quarter run the voice of the team member breakfast now,

Speaker 3:
And

Monique Robertson Gunter:
It’s about 45 people in this restaurant that’s closed. It’s just us. And I start off with some of the same things. I’ve been hosting it now for about two years, and it’s the welcome and the introductions, but then it’s, you’re going to see me do a couple of things. One, I’m writing, I am not writing down who said what? I’m writing down what you all said because this is my homework. And then that allows me to also know if one person says something and all the heads start nodding, that’s a thing. That’s a thing that’s at the top of the list for me and my peers. And then there’s one or two things that are thorns for separate locations. Also thinking about it as a credit union, we have 22 branches and we have a major headquarter building, and then we have an administrative building on the southwest side of town because Houston is so large. And so you’re also thinking about these experiences in all of these different buildings. And so again, I start with, I’m going to write down what is said, not who said it, who said it is not important, and I really don’t write down who said it. And then the other thing is I’m going to ask questions. It is not to challenge you. It is to make sure I capture it correctly. And then I think the thing again is,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Oh wait, can I interrupt you for a second because this is brilliant. What you’re doing is you’re using the results pyramid in your language to create a new belief. You’re saying the belief I want you to have about the questions that I will ask is that they are for curiosity and for deeper knowledge, they’re not for pushback or defense

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Defensiveness

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Because

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Sometimes I have to ask a lot of questions to understand what the teller is describing in the deposit process. When you fund a cd, I’m like, okay, wait, what happens? We get so far away from the way the work actually gets done that I’ve got to ask these questions that when I go back to it, I am giving them a story. When they do this, this is what happens. This is what they think should happen. Help me fix this disconnect. And if I’m not close enough to describing it correctly, I’ve kind of come back with notes that no one can really use.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And it’s so easy for people to, we call it MSU, make stuff up about why you’re asking questions, why you’re pushing back. And the experience that they could have is, oh, see, she’s being defensive, right? She needs me to justify what I just said. And so sometimes it’s just as simple as explaining the experience you’re trying to create and the belief you want them to hold to reframe the way they interpret. You’re doing experience interpretation, right? You’re interpreting the experience that they’re having for them.

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Yes. Yes, absolutely. And then we spend the next 90 minutes eating breakfast and I don’t know if I’ve had a breakfast that I don’t have to go, guys, I’m sorry. I have to stop us. Your managers are going to kill me if I don’t get you out of here. Because we go to the 90th minute and the feedback is fantastic. I take it back, I share it with the leaders of, and it’s IT feedback, it’s signage feedback, it’s my drive-through doesn’t have X, y, Z. It’s the things we just would never think about that they have to say 10, 15 times a day because we just don’t know. We just don’t know. And it’s created again, just we’re a culture of feedback and we are a culture of continuous improvement and that both of those things are okay.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And the continuous improvement is really where the executives are taking accountability. They’re saying, we heard the feedback, we’re implementing the feedback, and we are accountable to focusing on what we can control. Because I’ve done employee engagement surveys, I’ve been in organizational development and organizations and also done consulting in that space. And you would maybe not be surprised at how many executive teams look at the results and they dismiss, well, I know who said that. I know why that’s there. This was taken how many months ago. Exactly.

Speaker 3:
We’re not going

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
To talk about compensation with the team. We don’t want to even talk go there. I mean, it’s so much resistance to the feedback and then people are irritated that they even participated in a

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Survey. It’s like our ego shield to believe that the feedback is an outlier.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Exactly. It’s an ego shield. I love that. So really what you’re doing is you’re surrendering. You are a leader that has surrendered to the collective knowledge to the process of experiences shaping beliefs to the feedback of the people who know because they’re on the front lines. I mean, you have to let go of ego. You have to let go of your fear of looking bad, your fear of being right, and you have to just surrender.

Monique Robertson Gunter:
That’s right.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Which does not look like strength ticked a lot of the time in the corporate world. I mean, corporate is all about never surrender. We’re going to drive results, we’re going to get there. And oftentimes, I mean that ability to control is totally an illusion. I mean, you’re in the action trap, right?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. It is an illusion.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Was there work that needed to be done with the leadership to let go, to help them let go and surrender to the collective?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
I think we got a little lucky in this because in the timing of all of these changes, we moved from an interim CEO to our permanent CEO. And when you talk about what strength looks like, our CEO is Marty Pell, and he is by far one of the most down to earth dynamic smart CEOs I’ve ever worked with. But he really leads from a position of servant leadership. It’s almost like this is me describing my boss, but it’s like we all know he’s the CEO. He doesn’t walk in the room and remind us. He doesn’t walk in with his title. It’s a very much like, what are we hearing? How can we help? Who’s going to take what? And what it does is it models for us to remember that there’s no need to walk in anywhere with hours. The title is the title, but the work is really how you show up for the team. Well,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s accountability. I mean, what baffles me sometimes is we get reached out to by companies that feel like they have an accountability problem and they say, we heard you’re the accountability people. We want you to drive accountability in our teams. Can you come in here and train everyone on accountability? And that’s what we do. So of course the answer is yes. Having said that, what we end up talking about is accountability is a personal choice. As leaders,

Speaker 3:
It

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Starts with you. Culture is leader led. We all own culture, but it is leader led. And so this isn’t something you can just delegate, put all your frontline workers in the culture of accountability training, and then you’re exempt because you’re in charge. I mean, it’s so baffling. And yet we are in a corporate system in which there’s perceived power at the top due to titles due to paychecks. And that perceived power, that power that’s on paper often confuses the people in those positions to think that it’s real.

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Totally agree. And you kind of remember who has the dynamic when you are faced with what we were faced with a couple of years ago with our attrition just so high, we were in a place where really great talent was walking out, and that’s when you kind of remember where the power lies.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So for you, the cultural shift happened with a leadership change, which sometimes has to happen. I mean, there are some leaders that just don’t get you there. They’re so laser focused on driving results and here’s what we’ve got to do. And they’re telling everyone and they’re managing and they think that’s strength. But really it’s counterintuitive, but it’s totally logical that it is the opposite that needs to happen. Wow, this is so great. Can you tell us one of the things that we have these tools. You talked about the common language right above the line and below the line and the see it, own it, solve it, do it. Could you tell us a story about those tools being used in action in a moment, a particular person or a particular team that leveraged those tools and how it changed the outcome just to help people understand how it comes to life in the real world?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking of a story. One of the things I want to say first is just that one of the journeys that we’re on, this is an everyday thing. Our culture committee and our culture champions, the executives that help Cote those teams, we are on it and after it every single day. Because one of the things for us, the things I’d like to remind my leaders of is we have a new hire orientation every other Monday. So every other Monday, we’re already going to have to bring someone now into our culture of accountability. As you still perfectly said earlier, they’ve come into our purpose field culture, they agreed with that, but now let’s bring them into how we get worked out and how we support each other. And on that journey, we are still doing a lot of great work around accountability is not what happens after, because sometimes we think of being held accountable.
And so what I love about the way Culture Partners helps us give our teams the visualization of it is it’s the steps. And so one of the things we’ve recently celebrated is we had a member call actually got through to us, they were in Dubai and they were in Dubai and had misplaced some things and their debit card wasn’t working, and it’s Christmas morning. And so of course the credit union is closed, but our member is across the world and we appreciate that this is the card they want to use, and we’re going to make sure this is the card they can use. And so my CEO reaches out and he doesn’t feel great about it, but we get to our VP of payments and she’s working with Visa and she’s working with the member that’s in Dubai, and she’s doing all of these things to get the card turned back on.
And what we ended up celebrating is obviously one that we don’t want to call anyone on Christmas morning, but the team member that ended up helping us while she was overpayments, she wasn’t over cards. And so there’s a little bit of a differentiation, but for her it was really about this member needs us and I have the relationship with Visa too. And so I’m going to see it. I’m going to own it. I’m going to solve it, and I will do it. I don’t need to tell you guys on that day that, Hey, that’s not actually me. So it was our member needs us. Let’s get on the line. Let’s do what we need to do. And so when we have those moments, we’re really able to, it’s one great that a leader is modeling that because those are always fun stories to be able to tell and cascade, but it’s that reminder of we don’t pass the buck, we go above the line.
It’s all of our responsibility. There was a really fun activity we actually did with Culture Partners is like, what do you do here? And it’s not your title, it’s our purpose. And so we go around the room and it’s what I do here is I help people prosper. We all help people prosper. And so I would just say that’s one of the times that we’ve been able to share a really great See it, own it, solve it, do it because it’s just so extreme. Christmas morning member in Dubai, the leader that’s not even over that department is the one that’s like, you need me and I’m going to do it. And so we’re all in it for the member. And so it was really great. That’s

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So beautiful. And it’s also a demonstration not to get too touchy feely, but that’s a demonstration of care. It’s a demonstration of Agape love where she’s in that moment saying, let me just take care of this. I’ve got the bandwidth right now. I’m not in the middle of opening presence or whatever. Instead of calling the person who might be, I’m just going to do what I can to show up for you and to serve and that demonstration. That’s a powerful experience. And then there’s another element of this that you touched on, which is that’s a story that you can tell. That’s a story that then none of the people who are on that email chain, the people who weren’t even employed at the time, they hear that story later. And that stories are the most powerful experience that you can create. I mean, we learn, we love through storytelling.
So I love that so much. I mean, it’s such an honor to be able to work with a company that’s got such a powerful purpose statement and that we like to also work with clients that we have purpose fit with because it makes our purpose also more powerful. Our purpose and culture partners is to impact 5 million lives in 2025. And so to get to work with your company means we’re that much closer to accomplishing our purpose, which is, and my purpose is to serve God and others, and I get to serve God by helping serve 5 million lives, which we get to help you serve your purpose. And I mean, it is this just little full circle.

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Yes, we’re all connected. Yes, it reminds you of how connectivity of life.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Totally it is. We are all connected in this web of life and work is just one of the many playgrounds in which we do things. And here we are doing things, just trying to make it meaningful. It’s beautiful. Well, thank you so much for this. It has been such a joy and such a pleasure. I have one last question for you, which is, what is something that you don’t get asked about very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Something I don’t get often asked about, but that is very important to me. It might be even a little bit centered into my why. It’s just the work that I really enjoy doing with women, women groups, women’s advocacy. Even here in Houston, I have the fantastic opportunity to be a part of a Global Women’s Leadership network, which is a credit union network, but through them I get to work with our local sister society. And so the sister societies bring at any given time, 30 to 50 women together. And we really talk about what are the barriers that we do to remove what are the barriers that we can support each other with in removing access to getting women into the C-suite. So it is a credit union focused mission on knowing the importance of women leaders and really shattering that glass ceiling and moving that thought leadership and these skills and gifts into the C-Suite so that we can be more appropriately represented in the credit union space as women leaders.
I also have a great opportunity to work with Greater Houston Partnership and their executive Women’s partnership group. You have a lot of mentorship that happens there, women’s advocacy, women’s networking. And I really thoroughly enjoy groups that are very intentional about, I will say your name. And so I really try and lead with that effort of what are the opportunities, knowing each other’s resumes. And it really circles back again to some of my why, which is really about women’s mentorship. I recognize how I see the faces sometimes when I walk in the room and they’re like, that’s the chief. And I recognize that being able to see someone that’s like you is important. It is important because it breaks down that mental barrier of what’s possible for yourself. And I don’t take that lightly. And I love being a role model for what’s possible for women in executive spaces and being a steward of making sure that I bring as many seats to the table as I possibly can. And if we have too many seats, we’re going to build another table because women leaders are important and they matter. And I think this is, we’re in a generation now where we are being represented in an incredible way in the Fortune 500 space. And I could just go on and on about women’s leadership. And so that’s one thing that I’m not often asked that I do enjoy and have a passion around.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, please keep going on and on about it because I’m also passionate about that. Three years ago, we did research at Culture Partners. We’re always trying to, I mean, it’s easy enough when you care about people and culture to say, well, you should work on culture and you should do the right thing. But the reality is it also has to make sense for people to invest in those ideas. And we did research that shows that the more women you have in leadership positions at your organization, the more growth you will experience and financial success you will experience. Companies that had less than 20% of their leadership roles filled by women were doing significantly worse than companies that had at least 45% of their leadership roles filled by women for exactly the reason that you said, right? If I show up, I mean, that’s actually one of the first things I do whenever I’ve considered a new role at a new company is let me look at their leadership page and see if I belong. That’s, see

Monique Robertson Gunter:
No idea, not so belonging is critically important to people.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And if I work at a company like that, it is demotivating. It is frustrating. It does not feel aligned with who. I have to see myself in that role, and I need to know that you guys see me too. And so that’s right. It also works for business. Like many, many, many of these things, even though some people need to be convinced of it through data, the reality is oftentimes, more often than not doing the right thing translates to greater business results.

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Yes, it does.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, it’s beautiful. Thank you so much, Monique, for joining us. This has been one of the best episodes. Have a wonderful rest of your weekend. Let’s stay in touch too. I mean, this has been great.

Monique Robertson Gunter:
Thank you.