But just really thank you everyone for the time. I know there is always so much going on and so many activities happening and so many things in your world.I saw a number of folks joining from the very snowy places of The United States and folks from all different parts of the world. And so, I know no one is sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting to find things to do. So the fact that you are willing to spend a bit of your time with me, I appreciate and hopefully can make this worth your while. I also anticipate most of us that are joining already care pretty deeply about workplace culture and our organizations. So I'm not gonna try and kind of change your mind or convince you, but hopefully give you some insights and some metaphors and some examples and some data, and some things that I tried to communicate in the book that hopefully are helpful to leaders and to, you you know, kind of, folks that are helping to build their organizations and guiding others.

And so, the book, The Performance Culture is, meant to include, like, thirty years of my own experience and decades and decades of social psychology research and business, you know, expertise and all sorts of other things. It's difficult to get all of that in a couple 100 pages and then even more difficult to get a couple 100 pages into about an hour's worth of content and conversation. But we'll do our best, and we'll continue to keep the conversation going. So, I also encourage you to use the chat, use the q and a. Polina and I will have some time towards the end where I am as much of an open book as possible. So I'm happy to share any things that I've done that I have found that have worked and things that I've seen from others. Things that haven't worked, I try to be very humble and recognize that, you know, this is a journey, not a destination, and I certainly have not finished that journey.

I continue to try to figure out how every day and every interaction to create a culture, that is high performing because it is done through the lens of taking care of employees and and the business and and kind of finding that mutually beneficial, scenario where everyone is benefiting and the company is continuing to do really well.

And those two things are symbiotic and supporting one another. So let's get into it. I've got a handful of slides. I'll take about half of our time to talk through a bunch of this. And like I said, I'll move a little quickly. You probably won't grasp absolutely everything, but that's what the book is for. And you can always find me on LinkedIn or other spaces. And, hopefully, this helps to generate some questions and some comments. And so, you know, first and foremost, I think it's important to just kind of ground in what is workplace culture. And so for me, some of this is, you know, it it is defined in a lot of different ways across a lot of different literature.

And also, we tend to sometimes confuse it with kind of the culture of a, you know, a civilization or of a country. And really, sometimes I've heard workplace culture described as kind of how things get done around here and that around here is the company. And even within any particular company, you're gonna have multiple cultures. Right? You're gonna have the culture of marketing and sales and, you you know, human resources and finance and the comp you know, the culture of this particular country or this particular city. But if you zoom up, most organizations have a feel. They have a tone or a tenor. If you were to drop into an average meeting in one of these organizations, there are certain things that you would find or that you would experience that differentiate one company from another in very slight and distinct ways and sometimes in very big and significant ways.

And so is this a culture of accountability, and what does that look and sound like? Is this a culture of inclusion, and what does that look and sound like? And so all of the the practices, the, the priorities, the programs, lots of other things like that that you've said, these are the things that we value, and this is how we're going to demonstrate that those things value. And sometimes, companies have not done the work of saying this is what we value, but I guarantee you a company is showing you what they value. And so when we look at do we value the highest paid person in the room is usually the one that speaks. Do we value subject matter expertise and we don't value a growth mindset to the same degree? Do we value innovation and creativity and we don't necessarily value rigor and discipline?

And so thinking about how all those things come together is incredibly important and the the ability to do that intentionally and to really architect the culture as opposed to just letting one emerge is the difference between organizations that have been thoughtful about what they're trying to accomplish and those that have just kind of let things happen as they will.

And so I often in on my teams describe it a bit as a bonsai tree. It has a natural way of growing, and yet there's still a little bit of pruning and still a little bit of shaping that happens where you want to accentuate the natural flow of where things are going. There are some that try to constrain the culture and say, I know we've hired these type of people, but we really wanna push everyone into this type of model, and that doesn't tend to work really well. And then there are the others for whom their garden or their bonsai tree is probably just growing in all sorts of different directions because they've never really thought about how do we continue to reinforce certain behaviors and deincentivize other behaviors. And so if we think about workplace culture as essentially kind of how things get done around here and all of the underlying elements that go along with that, one of the things that we tend to see is that the culture becomes a bit of a filter for how people experience the organization.

And so it colors and influences what we see and how we interact and how we engage. And so the difference between someone questioning an idea in a particular type of culture versus really challenging an idea in another one, maybe as simple as what is it that I'm used to experiencing here? How do we normally get things done? And if how we normally get things done is through questions and debate and dialogue, then that question that is raised at the end of my presentation is a really positive one because it's an opportunity to double down on something or to identify an area where maybe I didn't explain something to the degree that I would like versus another organization where that question can feel really provocative or feel really targeted.

And so more and more, what we are trying to do is be clear about how are we architecting intentionally the type of workplace experience that allows us to perform over an extended period of time. Because almost any team can do well in the short term. It's about how do we build processes and habits and behaviors so that we are consistently performing and consistently delivering at a high level even as folks join the team, leave the team, as our market changes. And if there's one thing I can guarantee is that everyone that is listening right now is in a market that is in rampant dynamic change. There is no market out there right now, no industry that is not experiencing a tremendous amount of change, and the ability to keep up with that and to navigate it successfully and to kind of go to where the puck is going to be, to use a a hockey analogy, or to see around corners is pivotal nowadays, and building that high performance culture is something that you can weave into the very DNA and the very fabric of the organization.

So that's what I was trying to get across. And, again, what I'm always trying to do and what so many of the organizations that I either partner with or folks that I talk to are trying to do in their space as well. And so a little bit of kind of data and some research and a couple slides that, you know, in my mind continue to reinforce why this is important. Because, again, you've got folks that say, I get it. It's totally important. This is what I feel like we're meant to do, and I wanna uplift all of our employees. And sometimes the question is to what end? Right? How do you determine some of the return on the investment?

How do you know how much is too much and when you've gone from creating a high performing team to one that may be unintentionally coddling folks or allowing poor performance, which ultimately can have a toxic experience on folks that want to continue to see the organization do well.

And so some of the data that we see here coming out of Gallup, and their research, right, you know, these are really powerful figures around, you know, folks that feel connected to the culture of their organization and that requires being articulate and clear around what that culture is and making it really powerful so that it comes through are 4.3 times more likely to be engaged.

And we know that that engagement leads to a willingness to overachieve and a willingness to put in, kind of additional effort to see the company be successful. You know, the likelihood to recommend your organization, we've realized that, you know, that that, you know, promoter score, folks that would say, oh my gosh. You should absolutely come and work here, is tremendously beneficial for lowering attraction costs, for reducing attrition, for finding the the type of folks that that reinforce the values of your organization. And I've often said the best cultures are ones that are actually unintentionally, and and ironically, quite exclusive around values. And so we we align around, you know, the customer. We align around the way that we treat one another, and yet they're incredibly inclusive around demographics. And so gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, all of those things are are secondary and then kind of push to the side of how do we work together to really drive forward and make things happen together.

Burnout is incredibly prevalent right now. We see it coming out of the pandemic. We see it in the conversations that folks are continuing to have around trying to find balance in work and life and, you know, and and the rise of AI and so on and so forth. And so if folks are feeling connected to the culture of the organization, it's having all of these benefits and all of these kinda, you know, opportunities to continue to drive the organization forward. And then not looking for another job. Now this one maybe have been a little bit more relevant before. Many of you might have heard the the term job hugging, which seems to be kind of the the new term that is going around now that instead of job hopping, far more people are staying in the role that they had before, and not necessarily wanting to venture out to other organizations.

But for anybody that has heard me speak in more than probably one instance, there's something that I go back to that my mother who led people for a long time when she was working first told me when I started leading teams. And she said if you don't treat people well, they will either quit and leave or they will quit and stay. And so simply because people are not looking for other jobs and attrition may be low in your organization doesn't mean that you are capitalizing on the talent of your team and really unlocking the possibilities and the opportunities for really high performance. So this idea that people may not be looking around right now doesn't mean that we're leveraging all of those other benefits, and yet having a really strong culture and a connection to that culture gives us all of these benefits and more. And yet part of what we see is that leaders sometimes feel too busy. There has almost never been another time where we have layered more onto mid level managers than we do right now.

There's pressure from individual contributors and from their teams to be mental health professionals and to be strategists and to be, you know, they're in their corner and to be compensation experts and to do all of these incredible things to support their teams. And then there's pressure from their senior leaders to drive more AI and articulate the strategy and, you know, drive greater sales and talk about the return on investment. And so that middle layer of leaders that are so critically important are feeling overwhelmed in a lot of ways, and it can be very natural to say, I'm just too busy. There's too much going on. The team knows what they need to do. Let me just get out of their way and let them do it. And yet we all know that that can be a a really dangerous scenario where your highest performers are still saying, I want feedback. I want your guidance. I want your support. I want to understand where we're going, and I need autonomy and flexibility in how we get there.

But if you just leave me to my own devices and say, I'm so busy over here that I can't pay attention to the health and the well-being and the care of my team and how that team comes together, then we unintentionally sometimes put ourselves in a position where our teams are are aren't able to perform at the level that we would like.

And so that too busy tends to trend into a couple different spaces. One that we see here is some research from Edelman, that has done about twenty five years of their annual trust barometer. And so they look across, you know, all sorts of different countries and all sorts of different demographics, and what they're continuing to see is an erosion of trust in institutions. And so, you know, it's always been for the past few years that companies have been trusted more than media outlets and governments and religious institutions and others. And yet even being the the most trusted, there's still this kind of, a whittling away of trust. And so folks are not trusting always that their organization will do the right thing or that there's a values alignment or that the company truly is aligned from a cultural perspective.

And so we need to be leaning in. We need to to all the things that we've been talking about up to this point, recognize that that matters. Right? That connection that we were looking at with the Gallup research to marry that then to this Edelman research and then to even marry it to some of this research from MIT, Sloan, where what they did was look at, a bunch of these different factors relevant to their importance, around compensation.

So if folks were going to be leaving an organization, how relevant were these other things related to compensation? So sometimes we think, well, if we just pay people fairly or even if we overpay them in some instance, that will be enough to kind of keep them engaged and keep them in their seat and keep them doing the work that we need them to be doing at a really high level. And what this analysis shows is that a toxic corporate culture, which was defined as a lack of attention to things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, toxic behaviors, you know, lying, cheating, so on, were 10 times as important as compensation. So you can be paying people really well and treating them poorly, and it will absolutely impact whether or not folks, again, are either quitting and leaving or quitting and staying. And so the fact that this is one of the most prominent and significant elements, tells us something. Right? It tells us that we need to be paying attention to culture.

And I don't hear it as often, but I often go back to the classic, management consultant and management guru, Peter Drucker, that, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And so as we're thinking about the strategies of our organization and what are we going after and what are we saying yes to and no to, That clarity cannot be overstated. It is absolutely important, and yet the way that we get there and the way that our teams operate and, absolutely influences whether or not we are able to deliver on that strategy. And in so many cases, we hear the best leaders say I would rather have a decent strategy and a really strong culture versus an incredible strategy and a mediocre culture because the right team can take slightly ambiguous directions and really challenging spaces, and drive all of that forward in really thoughtful ways because they know what good looks like, and they're used to performing at a high level.

But if you give a really strong strategy to a really weak culture, even in mediocre culture, things will get lost in translation and things will start to slide away. So I'm gonna spend the rest of our time probably just like another fifteen minutes, if you will, talking about kind of what are some of the things that I saw and wrote about in the book and that I continue to employ in my spaces, that are all about trying to capitalize on the right types of actions and behaviors, the right spaces to be focused in to make sure that we are crafting that culture really deliberately.

And it's four pieces, if you will, and they are somewhat discreet and yet they absolutely connect with one another. They wind up being a bit of a cycle. So as I said, there's no real destination. And for some folks, that can be incredibly exciting because there is this, you know, this this, knowledge that we're never going to be done. For others, it can be daunting because, like, oh my gosh. I just wanna be kind of over this. When can we put the pencil down and say, we've got a great culture. We're done. We we don't have to look at that at it anymore. We can move on to the next thing.

It's kinda like health, right, or fitness or anything else that you can get to a point that you feel really good, but if you start to ignore it or backslide, you lose some of those gains. But absolutely doing these things can build a resilience into your culture. Again, the ways in which we get things done. So awareness, behaviors, community, and systems. And I'll pull those apart a bit. And as I do, I'm gonna talk about kind of generally what do these categories mean and then what are three things that you should be thinking about and focused on and what are three things that organizations or teams tend to get wrong. So it's a little bit of kind of do this, not that if you will. And so if we tackle, you know, awareness first, some of the things that we need to kind of think about, you know, what are the spaces that we can lean in?

Where are the things that we pay attention to? What are we forgetting so we can step away from things that maybe we did previously, how are we listening? Because, one of the things I learned as a consultant, before the current role that I'm in is that some of the best ideas already exist inside your organization. And if you pause and listen, you will find them. You will hear them. People are already raising these. And so whether those are through pulse surveys or, you know, one on ones or skip level meetings or whatever the case may be, how do we continue to learn? And then how do we prioritize? Because there are lots of things going on in any organization. We need to make sure that we are orienting ourselves to the things that matter the most.

And so this awareness stage is very much about, you know, kind of orienting. Again, paying attention to what is happening in the business, where are the places that we need to lean in. And so the three things that I have found that work really well that I've seen over and over again, first is kinda to forget what you think you know. Right? This idea of a beginner's mindset. It's incredibly challenging to learn something if you already think you know. And so if you already think you know what are all the challenges in our organization, what are the things we need to go after, especially as you start to reach more senior levels of the company, you kind of know what's already in your vicinity, but you may not truly be listening.

And that's where kind of what's in the the the white in the parentheses, this overconfidence that leaders can put themselves in a space of overconfidence where they say, I know exactly what's going on. I know what we need to solve. Let me just go off and do it versus taking a step back and doing some of these other things, asking deep questions, right, versus asking leading questions. And so, a leading question, you know, maybe something along the lines of, would you agree that our biggest challenge is x? There aren't very many people that are gonna say, nope. I completely disagree. This is the thing we need to do. Now, again, if you work in one of those environments, good for you that folks would say, nope. Senior leader, I disagree.

I think we need to be doing something else. But asking open and closed questions to really seek to understand and to really be listening with a willingness to be changed and listening without some of the judgment or some of the preconceived notions. And then doing your research. In so many instances, we tend to go to the same resources, and I've been guilty of that as well. Right? You read a book that you really like. You find a a management guru that you think is totally locked into your industry or what you're focused on, and then you continue to go back to those same things over and over again. And, kinda, there's that Abraham Maslow quote that when when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

And so if we're not paying attention to, well, what's the right tool right now? Is this problem actually a nail, or is it a screw, or is it something completely different? And how do I continue to pull things out that are going to be relevant and useful based on the scenario that I'm experiencing right now. So there may be some things you can apply from the past, but if we're not doing these things, forgetting what we knew a bit in the past and really approaching each of these with some some openness to, is it different or can I apply some filters from previously? And if I can, great. Which are the right filters? How do I ask the right questions? How do I do my research appropriately? And that will get you to a certain point of some level of awareness. Right? Then we get to awareness and that's great.

But if we pause there, part of what we see is and, you know, I've heard this in various parts of the world. It may not still make sense everywhere, but, kind of this idea of the flavor of the month, that sometimes companies spend all of their time raising awareness of issues, but then never get to, so what are you gonna do about it? And so there is the great. We did a survey. We identified that this is a problem. Then we did another survey. Then we moved on to this other thing. Then we we tackled this because there's always something new. But if we're not getting to this next step, which is behaviors, so what do we want to see or hear done differently based on what we've learned? So where are the places now that we need to lean in that we understand? Great. We finished our awareness phase for now because it's never done complete completely.

We've identified a particular thing that we wanna change. So what are those actions? What does it look like? How do we make it simple? How are we going to role model those? And within that space, a handful of the things that we are focused on is how can we be specific. Right? Being general is one of the biggest challenges that I see from a lot of organizations, and it's not intentional. It is done with the best of of kind of efforts and energy. But when we say things like be inclusive, I argue that if we knew how to be inclusive, most of us would be doing that already. Right? The vast majority of us do not come to work to be exclusive or to accidentally make people feel bad or to, you know, be a a work bully.

There's a very, very small percentage of people that are doing that. What we are doing is working cross culturally. We're working across different generations. We're working across different, you know, all sorts of different kind of dimensions, where folks are saying, what does good look like here? What does it sound like here? How can you provide me some degree of specificity instead of just saying, you know, we want to be more collaborative. What does good look like in that space, and how can you help me understand this is what we're talking about and this is not what we're talking about? So that same kind of vein, using plain language and making things shareable, and making them shareable will get into the next kind of the sea of this work that we're talking about, which is the community. But using plain language, the the kind of, you know, thing that so many folks get wrong is this intent to try to seem smart. Right?

We'd see it in legal language. We see it sometimes in some of the work that we put forward that we we spend so much energy trying to seem smart that we stop making things easy for people to understand. And this can be the same whether we're talking about folks that are speaking English as a second language or we're talking about folks that are new to our organization, so we use a lot of acronyms, whether it's folks that just don't generally know what we're talking about because we're using a lot of corporate speak.

All of those things can be pushed to the side when we're using plain language because we've identified our awareness stage, and now we are anchoring on the behaviors that we want to see done differently. And so making it shareable is useful because we've done the awareness likely with a relatively small group of people because we're not gonna get out to everybody. We've identified what we want to do differently, and now we need to bring everybody together. So this is kind of a classic change management type of space. All of the great work that's been done in change management over the past few decades, lands, you know, kind of breaks down into some of these spaces. So it's how are we creating connection across the business to help people feel like they are, aligned around this work that we're talking about? What is the storytelling that we're gonna put in place so that people can really see themselves in this work?

How are we going to get, you know, actively engaged and get people participating? And then what is the level of accountability, which is also then going to feed into the s of our model, which is the systems? So within that community building, again, classic things that we see so often but we get wrong so often as well. One of those is going to be who are the crucial stakeholders. We cannot bring everybody along from the very, very beginning, but if we identify where are the greatest points of leverage, where are the places that we're likely to face the greatest resistance, who are the promoters that if we get them on our side, they are going to be the ones that can help to drive this forward and bring other people along.

And doing that stakeholder analysis doesn't necessarily mean that it's always our senior most leaders. It may be that there are change makers and crucial stakeholders in other parts of the business that if we go to them and we get them on our side and get them understanding and we engage them as a part of either the awareness or articulating the behaviors or in this particular portion that they will help drive this work forward and embed it in everything else that we're doing.

Shifting our perspective so that we are truly making sure that we are seeing this from the lens and the point of view of the others. In so many instances, we do this work behind the scenes and we draw out this beautiful tapestry of how everything is going to fit together and how it's going to make sense and we're gonna do this and then this and then that. And then we bring that out to folks and we forget that they're only seeing certain portions of it or they are, you know, kind of filtering this through their own lenses or they are trying to hear this through the, you know, all of the noise, if you will, of the million other things that are going on in our organizations.

And so when we're able to shift our perspective to what does this sound like to somebody that's never heard it before? What does this look like to somebody that's incredibly busy and is, you know, gonna hear this for a a pretty finite period of time? What is the thing that's going to capture them and get them motivated? And the biggest piece that gets kind of this going is helping to craft the story. So we are naturally by evolution, folks that care about stories. We used to sit around fires. We used to sit around, you know, food. We still do in a lot of instances and tell stories, and that's how we pass things along. It's how we make meaning and make sense of things. And so facts alone, even the most kind of rigorous data oriented folks in your organization don't care only about the facts. And it's why we see visualizations.

It's why we see narratives. It's why we see, kind of data told in a particular way. So even in data driven and data oriented organizations, your data scientists, the folks that are helping folks to realize what am I looking at and why does it matter? How does this impact me? What's in it for me? Getting away from just using the facts. And so within this space of building the community and bringing the community together, You're identifying your stakeholders. You're shifting your perspective. You're crafting that story. And this is a place where I often talk to teams about the idea that, I I will push back and say, your organization, I don't use the metaphor of a family because I found it to be incredibly unproductive in a lot of instances. And so when we say we're all a family, we need to come together, the difficulty is that tends to fall apart when we actually have to make some difficult business decisions.

I am fortunate. My wife and I have been together since high school. I've got you know, we've got two wonderful boys. I've never sat them down and given them a performance appraisal. As much as they have challenged and made it difficult when they don't wanna clean their rooms, I've never thought about downsizing and not having them a part of the family. And yet these are some of the things that the difficult decisions that we need to, you know, kind of make and and choices that come up sometimes, when we're talking about an organization. But in a community, whether it is a home or a townhouse or a condominium or an apartment, what you find is that people come and go. You find that you have your own spaces and yet there are absolutely other kind of shared spaces.

There are things that you do to help build the community and times that you need to hold others accountable when they are doing things that are help that are eroding the community. And so this metaphor of the community tends to work far better in organizations and doesn't create some of the hypocrisy when we're saying we're a family. We're a family. We need you to lean in. And yet, unfortunately, when times are tough or when things need to happen, that family metaphor starts to fall apart. And so if we're thinking about all of this through this lens of we are coming together to accomplish things collectively that we likely would not be able to accomplish on our own. I've worked for companies that were hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of people, and thousands of people. And in each of those instances, we came from a lot of different spaces and a lot of different backgrounds in order to be able to create something together and to drive something forward.

And so after you kinda build the community and you've got people kind of lined up and we're like, yep. We understand. We've got our awareness. We know what we're going after. We recognize the places that our culture is not yet optimized and where we want to lean in. We've identified the right behaviors, and we're super clear and specific about what those things are. We're helping to build the community and bring folks along now and make sure that we're moving these things forward collectively. The final element that I find so important and that comes up in a lot of the research and a lot of the best practices are around the systems. And so the systems are both kind of the the technological systems in some instances, the the rewards and recognition systems, but also the, you know, the hiring systems, the promotion systems, the ways that you are reinforcing that the things that we've defined, the behaviors we've articulated, the way that we've brought these things together are actually going to matter throughout the organization.

And so we can say all we want, but if we are rewarding different behaviors, so we've identified and said this thing is important, but the people who get promoted don't demonstrate those behaviors and in fact sometimes demonstrate things that are antithetical to these, then then what we're going to find is that people say, well, you tell me that this matters, but you reward that.

You tell me that this matters, but we're hiring that. You tell me that this matters, but we're giving that, you know, prominence and and and kind of opportunities within the business. And so I'm gonna do the thing that is getting rewarded and seen and and kind of uplifted versus the things maybe that you've just paid some lip service to. And so making sure that we are taking all of this and weaving it through the organization at a really, you know, kind of ground and granular level becomes important to some degree of sustainability. And so within that space, the kind of key three that I talk about here are anticipate and evaluate. So we can be overly optimistic, and we say, oh my gosh. This has been going really well.

It's gonna be so easy to kind of, you know, just embed this in the work that we do. Understanding where are going to be the places of resistance, where are the obstacles, where are the places that our systems don't yet support what we're talking about. So is that in performance management? Is that in promotion? Is that in succession planning? And how do we continue to kind of file down some of the ridges and the areas of opportunity so that we're making it frictionless for people to do the things that we've said that we care about and the things that we want to see happening more often? Mapping out that that kind of, you know, road map, instead of just kind of, you know, trying to go really quickly can be useful because you then get to see where are the roadblocks along the way, where are the places that as we look at the entire employee life cycle that we're not yet where we want to be?

And I don't know about you, but things don't change immediately in any organization I've been in. So figuring out those places where you can tweak and adjust and continue to refine to make it easier again for folks to do the things that we want them to do and make it more difficult to do the things that are the the suboptimal behaviors. And then this last around keeping systems supportive is really a nod to the idea that in some instances, you know, we often hear, you know, folks say the the thing that I hate most is, well, that's the way we've always done it around here. Or that you embed a new system and it's so difficult to remove that system that that just becomes the way that things get done now. And so you're looking at a hiring process that includes questions that are no longer relevant, but we've always used those. We haven't updated them. They don't speak to kind of the speed and efficiency of what we're trying to get at now, but that's still what we're using to identify and evaluate talent.

Or our, you know, our our kind of annual performance appraisal cycle. Yes. We're asking for completely different and nimble behaviors, but our system is continuing to reinforce the wrong types of behaviors. So when the system now becomes the overriding factor and that becomes a thing that is impeding you from continuing to adjust your awareness, adjust your behaviors, build the community, and then refine those systems. And it's time to think about, do we need to remove those systems? Do we need to find a different way to get things done? And that is where, again, this becomes a cycle because once you've implemented those systems, you're gonna continue to ask, okay. Where can we drive greater performance? Where are the places that we can do better?

And how do I go back to thinking about forgetting maybe what we knew before and going to new sources and finding new ways of doing things and articulating new behaviors and keeping those simple. This is an ongoing and repeating process that becomes really important in this space. And so, you know, I often look at these as kind of individual building blocks, if you will, you know, and for anybody that's ever had lots and lots of these around your home. I have two boys who absolutely love to build using these. They are wonderful for kind of the the building blocks, not so good to step on, but that's a completely different story. But, ultimately, what we are trying to do is to use these building blocks, to use each of these elements, to better understand how do we build the infrastructure, how do we build the community in our organization.

And so I'll pause there. I know lots in the chat, and I've been trying to actively ignore it. But I know Pauline is gonna come back in and talk through some of what we're seeing in that space. But, you know, absolutely, as we think about why this matters, why it's important, what some of the data that we're seeing even from the, you know, the Gallops and the Edelmans and the MITs and the Harvards and all of these wonderful institutions that are saying it matters. It's critical. It is important for accelerating our ability to perform. And then, hopefully, what I've provided is just a handful of ways to think about, so how do we operationalize that, and what does that look like in our organization? So stop there. Paulina, I see you back. Yes. I'm here. Thank you. Thank you for all your insights. I I really enjoy.