Megan Gianinni:

The talent strategy is responsible for making sure that you have the necessary capabilities for you to deliver on your strategy, and I would put capabilities into four different buckets.

Lauren Stiebing:

From LS International, this is the Career Success podcast. I’m Lauren Stiebing and on today’s show how Megan Gianinni and her team have been able to link business performance and culture to really make it tangible. We discussed the process she used and what tools and agencies she used to get there. So Megan, thank you so much for joining me today. I invited you to this podcast to discuss how to link business performance with culture. And for those of you who don’t know Megan, she’s currently the global head of talent development and organizational effectiveness at Philips. And I know you’ve been doing a bit of work around linking business performance and culture. It’s not so easy because culture is sometimes a bit intangible. So yeah, how do you look at the relationship between culture and business performance?

Megan Gianinni:

Yeah, it’s a great question. And I will say culture is one of those topics that I’ve struggled with a bit in my career because I like things that have clear answers. I always liked math because there’s a clear answer to the question, to the equation, and culture’s always felt to me like something that’s hard to get your hands on. And so I’m fascinated by it for that reason. What I’ll share with you is what I’ve learned, on how to make it more tangible and connects culture to business performance. The first I think is when you are working on this is to make sure you start with your purpose. Why does the business exist? And to really think about how your culture can help make sure that it enables that purpose, the why. What are the values that you have that enable your purpose?

And from that they need to connect to, all right, then what is your vision based on that purpose and those values? What is the strategy? And then how does that all show up to the external world in your brand? So I think that’s the starting place, is to make sure all of that connects and that the values are the why of your purpose and your values are what drives your culture. Another thing that can help make culture more tangible, in addition to linking to your purpose, your vision, your strategy, and your brand, is that they need to enable better business outcomes visibly. And so they have to be defined clearly enough, and when people use them, then they have a better result. And so that often the work isn’t done well enough for that to happen. And so to be able to do that, they have to be crisp, they have to be accurate, and they have to help.

And so in order to enable them to help, they need to be role models. They need to be visible in action. Leaders need to be overt about, I had a dilemma, I chose this because that’s what we value, and as a result we were more successful. So they can’t be too implicit. They need to be explicit. And I think the third way that that values can really be tangible or that culture can be tangible is that they need to be deeply understood in an individual’s context. So having values sitting on a piece of paper or on a website won’t do it. It doesn’t make a difference. People need to understand how to use them in their country and their role and their function, and they also need to have that similar experience of when I’m using these values, these behaviors that I get a better outcome. And then lastly, what I would say is that when there’s behavior incongruent with those values, that it’s visibly addressed because then they’re real and people can say, hey, that was inconsistent with what we value here, and there’s a consequence for that, that it’s addressed and worked with. Those are some of the things that I’ve done to help make this intangible thing of culture become more tangible.

Lauren Stiebing:

And were there any tools or agencies that you use to support you on this journey?

Megan Gianinni:

Yeah, I’ve crowdsourced a lot of help to navigate this topic. My advice for anyone who’s working through this is to get help. It’s definitely an art. I think the organizations that I’ve got the most help from or really valued in this work have been, one is the University of Michigan has an HR executive program that’s all about creating people strategies to enable business strategies. And they do a lot of content on this topic on making sure you have a culture that enables you to be successful. So I think that’s one organization, one program that’s really helped me. I think Gartner is another one. They’ve done a study on how to create a culture that performs, and so I referenced that work often. And then the Nowhere group as well, who’s very, I think creative and outside the box thinking when it comes to ensure you have the right macro frameworks for thinking about and working on culture and linking it to your business strategy and your purpose, but also, how do you make little changes, they call them micro skills to have the type of culture that you desire. So making it really concrete. So those are three groups that I’ve worked with.

Lauren Stiebing:

Yeah, thanks for sharing. I know whenever doing these large pieces of work, you definitely don’t do it alone. So thanks for sharing that. And yeah, then how do you link that to your talent strategy internally?

Megan Gianinni:

Yeah, yeah, good question. So the way I look at a talent strategy is that the talent strategy is responsible for making sure that you have the necessary capabilities for you to deliver on your strategy. And I would put capabilities into four different buckets. One is your leadership capabilities, the next is your strategic capabilities, and those would be the ones that are most critical for driving strategic growth. The third is your foundational capabilities. These are things like having the right knowledge of quality, FDA requirements, et cetera, that you cannot be in business without, but they alone will not help you win and grow. And then the fourth is cultural capabilities or those values or behaviors. So I think there are those four different capabilities that fit into any talent strategy, and I see the values and the behaviors as the cultural capabilities, which is one fourth of the equation.

Lauren Stiebing:

And I know when we discussed previously, you were mentioning a bit about the capabilities and bringing specific capabilities from other companies. Could you speak a bit around where you see the most benefit coming from, let’s say industries identifying or companies identifying which sectors or which industries they may want to be pulling capabilities from?

Megan Gianinni:

Yeah, absolutely right. So I think from a process perspective, once you’ve identified those core capabilities that you need, then you do your gap analysis. What do we have and where are the gaps that we need to fill in terms of those capabilities? And we’ve used talent intelligence to go out and do internal and external research to better understand what we have and where we can fill those gaps from a buy and from a build perspective. So one of the areas that we’ve been really focusing on at Philips over the last couple of years is our medical technology and clinical capabilities. And we’ve gone from a big conglomerate that had different sectors and semiconductor lighting, healthcare, of course, consumer products, and we’ve consolidated and become really a medical technology companies. So one of the enablers to that is to ensure we have the right composition of medical technology experience internally. And so we’ve had a big focus on that and have used talent intelligence to go out and put in place a strategy to find where do we need to buy that talent, but also how can we build internally as well.

Lauren Stiebing:

And yeah, I think one of the challenges as well that people can face is really, let’s say once they have the data, they built those strategies, how to track them, do you have any tips on best ways to track that?

Megan Gianinni:

Yeah, this is a great question and one that I would say we haven’t nailed yet. I think there’s still more work we can do at Philips. I’m curious to continue to learn about some of the best practices in this space of tracking the progress against these workforce and talent strategies. What I would say we do is the minimum, which is defining what are the KPIs that we have to know when we’ve made progress on closing a capability gap. And so we’ve done that both from a talent acquisition perspective as well as a learning perspective. But I think that that’s kind of the bare minimum. How do you put that all together and show that together that we’re tracking year over year towards closing those gaps? If there are systems and tools for that, it’s probably an area I’d love to learn more about.

Lauren Stiebing:

Great. Yeah, I will definitely link your LinkedIn profile to the podcast, to the YouTube video in case someone wants to reach out to you or you may want to reach out to other people in our network. I know it’s always great to exchange best practices as well. And yeah, Megan, thank you so much for joining me today. This has all been very helpful. And yeah, I hope you have a great weekend.

Megan Gianinni:

Thank you. Thanks Lauren.