Elaine Bowers Coventry:

I think having digital skills in general, just like a good digital IQ in your business is incredibly important. Then you’ve got to have a combination of some of the behaviors that they’re not just behaviors, they’re also skills too, which are things like a rigorous approach to curiosity, a real depth, and accountability. I think COVID has certainly taught us more about accountability than ever before because of the remote ways of working.

Lauren Stiebing:

From LS International, this is the Career Success Podcast. I’m Lauren Stiebing and on today’s show, Elaine Bowers Coventry, the Chief Customer and Commercial Officer at the Coca-Cola company shares the skill sets which she believes are necessary to have highly performing diverse teams, and how important vulnerability will be for all future leaders. Welcome, Elaine.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Hi, Lauren. Great to be with you.

Lauren Stiebing:

Well, thanks for joining me today. Wanted to discuss bringing diverse skill sets together. I would love to hear about your experiences. I know that most blue-chip multinationals have really integrated diversity and inclusion goals into their strategies. But beyond the numerical targets, once diverse teams have been formed, getting them to a level of high performance isn’t really easy. So I’d love to hear just a bit first around your experience with Kelloggs and Coca-Cola and just some highlights in your career.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Thanks, Lauren for having me on the podcast. I’ve gotten multiple decades of experience in the business. And I think what I’ve seen is really an evolution from what was about starting more robust approaches to diversity with many companies really using inclusion as a powerful tool within their organization to get better business outcomes. And also to fully exploit the power of people and all of their contributions. I think one of the most important things is to flip the order. A lot of times people say diversity and inclusion, and I think it’s actually better if you flip it because if you have an inclusive environment as a leader, if you have an inclusive company as a culture, it is so much easier to make the most of diversity in terms of business impact. And it’s not just about representation. It’s actually about different types of skill sets and experiences and braids that you’re putting together to have the business impact. And I think that’s where I see real standouts in terms of differences between managers and companies.

Lauren Stiebing:

And what do you feel are the skills and behaviors that are needed in these teams?

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Table stakes are you’ve got to have the technical skills. I think that’s the baseline. You need people who know how to do something that’s important to your business, whether that’s marketing, revenue, growth, management strategy, or if that’s loading a truck, depending on what your business is, you need the technical skills. You also need the digital skills. And I think digital skills are something that everybody recognizes that’s important, but I think sometimes people miss the fact of how much speed is important in digital skills. Because as soon as you might catch up in theory, the whole space is moving so fast that you could always be behind. So I think having digital skills in general, just like a good digital IQ in your business is incredibly important. Then you’ve got to have, I think a combination of some of the behaviors. They’re not just behaviors, they’re also skills too, which are things like a rigorous approach to curiosity, a real depth, and accountability.

I think COVID has certainly taught us more about accountability than ever before because of the remote ways of working, et cetera. So I think some of those skills around curiosity, team building, knowing how to collaborate, but also knowing how to be self-directed. All of those are both skills and behaviors, it kind of blurs between the two, but I am purposely avoiding calling them soft skills because they’re not soft. These are actually the real skills that I’m looking for. If someone says to me, “Hey, I’m great at running pricing elasticities.” I’m like, “Super, but can you play as a team? If you can go sit in a room and do elasticities all day long, it’s not going to make it happen. So I really think reframing that from soft skills into hard skills is also just an important mindset for people to have.

Lauren Stiebing:

Yeah. And as new technology develops and adoption increases such as blockchain, I believe that we’ll really need technical profiles collaborating even more with commercial profiles, let’s say on a day-to-day basis because the speed will be increasing over time. Have you seen the need for this yet? Or do you still believe there’s quite a ways to go in terms of these really technical profiles, responsible for building in the blockchain and then let’s say the regular day-to-day business people?

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Well, I’ll give you a story about blockchain specifically. That’s a funny one because I think it really hammers home the point of what leaders need to do. To me, the most important thing is leaders need to be vulnerable because technology is forcing us to adapt and learn at rates of speed that we’ve never seen before. Several years ago, I was in a meeting with the World Economic Forum and one of the topics was all of the technologies that are disrupting business industry of the world. And they were talking about blockchain and I literally had no idea what they were talking about. So there’s a gentleman sitting next to me that I asked him, I said, “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is.” I said, “Can you explain to me what is blockchain?” He said, “Yeah sure.” So he literally hits it in three bullet points, explains it to me in terms of, it’s like an open ledger where everybody can see it and nobody can change it.

And I was like, “This is so clear.” I was like, “Thank you very much.” And then someone told me that he was basically at that point in time, truly one of the academic, on the forefront subject matter experts, knew everything. But I say that because you need to have vulnerability as the leader to ask the question, what was so beautiful about his answer was the humility in which he gave it to me.

Lauren Stiebing:

Right.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Yeah. He just said, “Let me explain it to you.” And it wasn’t like, “Oh, and let me tell you who I am. And I’m one of the leading people in academia on the topic.” So I think it’s leadership with both vulnerability and humility to where you’re able to figure out what you need to do and how to learn about all the things that are happening that I think truly can unlock a ton of value in businesses.

Lauren Stiebing:

Yeah. And I think the old saying of there are no stupid questions will become more and more and more important. Because it’s impossible to be able to digest all of the information as we could before. So it’s really understanding what questions that you need to ask and how you’re going to be getting the information, which goes back to your vulnerability piece as well.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Yeah. And to the point, maybe a build on the idea is as a leader or a manager, you also need to be able to ask the questions of your people to ensure that they truly understand it. Because I’ll give you another example where someone coined the term data is the new oil. And you’ll hear people talk about, well, we need data, we need data. And I’m like, “Okay, well what do you need the data for?” Because we’re not going to just go out and get data to do nothing with it. You actually need a thoughtful process of what you’re going to do differently. Why you need it specifically, what data you need to do it. Because otherwise, you can really turn into a massive grab for information that then you can’t do anything with. So I think sometimes you have to watch out to ensure that your teams understand what they’re really talking about and help create the environment to where it’s safe to learn.

Lauren Stiebing:

From your side, how can you create a positive tension with bias for action in diverse teams?

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

So I think it all starts with the purpose. One of the things that I do within my team and within my hiring practices, that is both, I think it’s been effective, but also just as a human experience, it’s been quite fun is to look for people that wouldn’t otherwise naturally work together. And naturally work together, meaning that they have very specific differences. But having the eye for the combinations of those differences that can really bring something that would be otherwise impossible. And if you think at the human part of the challenge of diversity is that people tend to like to be around people that are like them, it’s safe. It’s more comfortable. There’s lots of real deep human reasons for that to occur.

So I think as a leader, the more you can look for ways to curate combinations. I love metaphors. I think about it like cooking and recipes. I remember having a fish dish once that had a slice of grapefruit on it. And I thought that’s an interesting combination. It was wonderful. I look for that in people, of how can I put people together, but you have to recognize that you can’t just put them together with a specific job to do together. You’ve got to give them the purpose of why you’re putting them together to give them the patience that they’re going to need to find their way to get past that initial level of what is likely to be high levels of being uncomfortable because they’re so different.

If you give them the vision of what you see in terms of what’s possible between those two or three people coming together who are different to work on something and give them what you hope or what you think is possible. What I’ve seen many times are watching people really rise to that occasion to say, “Oh, you see something in me that I didn’t see before that this is going to create.” So I think in many cases it will give you the jump start and get you through some of that tension that starts at the beginning because people are different.

Lauren Stiebing:

And from the cultural perspective, enabling new skills and capabilities to really integrate and thrive within legacy organizations, what do you think is the best way to go about doing that in terms of fostering that culture?

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

I think legacy organizations, there are certainly more of a command and control approach to management. I think the best advice that I would give to people is to embrace the fact that companies are looking for more than that now. That they want people who are going to lead in a more approach that brings people along with them versus just tells them what to do. So I think creating an environment of empowerment is really important. I think creating an environment where people feel like you have their best interests at heart. The term of psychological safety is talked about a lot, but I think sometimes people don’t fully understand what it means. I think it means creating the environment where people can thrive. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have hard conversations. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have ambitious targets.

It means that voices are heard. People feel like it’s okay to be who they are in that environment. You can make the most of it. I think one of the biggest game-changers that many legacy companies have adopted, certainly, ours has, is the use of data. I think employees have never been heard as much as they are now. And some of that is the kind of what we’ve seen happening in social media, coming into the workplace. As an example, if we have a town hall with our CEO, we have a software called Gamer where people can send in their questions. They’re not filtered where before it would be, “Okay, we need six questions. We want them from three different regions of the world. Well, we’ll do these in this sequence, et cetera.” So I think it’s a more open environment. And through some of the feedback surveys that we do over time, we’ve actually got real data in terms of how we’re doing with both building the culture that we aim to have as well as how we’re doing in very specific areas, based upon manager, peer and employee feedback.

Lauren Stiebing:

Okay.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Direct reports. Yeah.

Lauren Stiebing:

Yeah. Well definitely. I mean, I think leveraging that data and also I think the anonymous piece that technology has been able to bring in has been very beneficial, even in some of the webinars that we do. Asking anonymous questions, you can really ask anything, where it’s not in the past where you had to get the microphone and speak in front of everyone, that you get a much more balanced response as well.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Yeah. I think anonymous, it can go both ways. I think the way you described it is a wonderful approach. I think there’s also times when you have to get people to put their names on things. If you’re going through a more trying time where people aren’t asking questions, then they’re more likely to make statements and hide behind anonymous. So just like social media, it’s just like the social media that we see in our personal life. You got some people who are showing their birthday pictures and saying, congratulations on whatever is positive that’s happened in someone’s life. And you’ve got some people who use it to really express their own frustration with the world.

Lauren Stiebing:

Yeah.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

I think there’s a time and place for anonymous. Sometimes you’ve got to own your comments.

Lauren Stiebing:

Yeah. I mean, I think definitely coming forward, making opinions is different than the questions. The question is more, how will I be judged for asking that question that you can anonymously get rid of.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Lauren Stiebing:

Well, Elaine, thank you so much for joining me today. I think it’s been very valuable and very insightful and thanks for sharing your opinions.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Yeah. Happy to be here. And hopefully, some of these thoughts help your listeners out there to have a more inclusive environment and high-performing teams.

Lauren Stiebing:

Great. Thanks.

Elaine Bowers Coventry:

Thanks, Lauren.