Win the War for Talent with One Word

How understanding that love is work made visible will help you retain your best people

Through the experience of being fired as CEO of his own company, Jay Wilkinson learned the importance of showing his employees that he cares. By making them feel loved, being vulnerable and including them in important decisions, his employees remained loyal despite being asked to work longer hours and take massive pay cuts. During his leadership journey, Jay learned that the word “love” needs to be used more often in business. 
In this Fishbowl, you’ll learn:
  • How to retain great employees by showing them love
  • How to make every employee feel seen and appreciated
  • Why being vulnerable is the best way to show employees you care
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A Strengths-Based Culture: Boosting Your People and Your Profits

One key attribute that differentiates a Small Giant from other businesses is the devotion given to employee development. We know that when people feel valued in their workplace, they work harder. How much harder? 6 times, to be exact. Can you imagine walking in on Monday morning to the buzz of folks working hard and loving it because their Strengths are at work? Motivated employees results in motivated profits…and there’s nothing wrong with motivated profits. Join Heidi Convery, a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach and founder of Flourish LLC, as she introduces you to the productivity and profitability effects of building a Strengths based organization.

Key Takeaways

  • An introduction to Gallup’s CliftonStrengths Assessment and Movement
  • Understanding Your Strengths and How to Leverage Them as a Leader
  • Ways to Incorporate Strengths into Your Everyday Culture
  • Introducing the Process of Claiming Our Strengths
  • Aiding Employees in Utilizing Their Strengths in Their Roles

Leaders are encouraged to take the Top 5 Clifton Strengths Assessment before the fishbowl. However, it is not required. 

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How to Both Measure & Increase Your Company Culture’s ROI

Small Giants understand that culture dramatically drives and impacts profit. As the width of your team’s smiles expands, so does your bottom-line. In this energized fishbowl, Kris Boesch, CEO and Founder of Choose People, weaves valuable content, enlightening stories and tangible no-cost ways to help you improve the impact of your culture on your bottom-line. Participants will be able to take her doable best practices and lessons learned and implement them within their organizations to see immediate results.

Key Takeaways Include:

  • The Bottom-Line Business Case for Happy Employees
  • How to Measure Your Company Culture’s ROI
  • The Role of Compensation, Incentives and Bonuses
  • The 3 Pillars to Creating and Keeping Happy Employees
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How to Drive Business Results by Letting Your Employees Bring Their Souls to Work

Building culture in your company is a crucial component to being a Small Giant. What differentiates a Small Giant from others is their focus to embed culture into their business strategy. Culture of Good, a company that built an emotional operating system, teaches for-profit companies how to operate their business with the soul of a non-profit. How do we do this? By creating community programming that gets employees excited and passionate about their work. In this fishbowl, you will learn from Culture of Good Co-founders Scott Moorehead and Ryan McCarty, on how to increase employee engagement and get better team results by letting your employees bring their souls to work.

Key Takeaways

  • How to start building a culture strategy to see the cultural results you hope to achieve
  • How to create community programming that drives employee engagement
  • How giving your employees permission to care is the secret to engaging them on a soul level
  • How to drive profits by investing in your people rather than seeing profit as evil
  • Introduction to 5 promises that if lived up to become pillars you can build your business on
  • Learn how to measure culture in ways that empower employees to lead your efforts in building a culture of good
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How to Bring Your Purpose to Life

In this fishbowl, you will learn from The Purpose Institute’s co-founder and Chief Purposologist, Haley Rushing, on how to bring the power of your organization’s purpose to life in a systematic, meaningful and sustainable way. She’ll cover a wide range of activation areas including how to use your purpose to drive recruitment and talent management, how to create purpose-driven customer experiences, how to use it as a springboard for innovation, how it can intersect and amplify CSR efforts and, most importantly, how to establish purpose-driven metrics of success.  Having spent more than 20 years helping small giants become big giants using the Power of Purpose, bring your questions, your challenges, and your own perspective on where you’ve been successful and where you’ve struggled to this inspiring, yet practical, session on living your purpose more fully in your organization.

In this fishbowl, you will learn the following key takeaways:

  • A brief overview of all the benefits that accrue from having a powerful purpose at the heart of your organization
  • Tips on how to articulate your purpose in the most powerful way possible
  • A game plan for closing the gap between the aspiration purpose statement and the reality
  • Best practices for activating purpose throughout your organization including: recruitment and talent management, customer experiences, CSR efforts
  •  How to establish purpose-driven metrics of success
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Behind The Scenes: Mastering the Pre-work to Hire an Exceptional Candidate

Amy Whipple and Carrie Schochet of Purple Squirrel Advisors specialize in customized recruiting in the accounting, finance, human resources and operations functions for companies across industries and ranging from 8 million to 700 million in revenue. In this interactive Fishbowl, you will learn about the aspects of recruiting and hiring that Amy and Carrie have identified as crucial to bringing exceptional candidates on board, including how to write comprehensive job descriptions, identifying and avoiding common discrepancies when writing job descriptions, and mastering behavioral interviewing.

In this Fishbowl, you will learn the following key takeaways:

  • Learn about the Acumax assessment and how its results reveal candidates decision-making abilities
  • Learn about the most common disconnects when writing job descriptions and how you can avoid these pitfalls on your own leadership team
  • How and why companies should write comprehensive job descriptions which include company culture, history, tactical responsibilities, as well as a six-month trajectory plan (when possible)
  • How to use behavioral interview questions effectively in your job interviews – and walk away with a worksheet on behavioral questions as well!
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The Feedback Loop: How to Give and Receive

How do you tell a top-performing employee something that they don’t want to hear? How do you take in feedback from your employees, without coming across as defensive? Giving and receiving feedback well are two of the most-valued – yet difficult to master – skills for any leader. Claire Lew, , has spent her working life studying 15,000+ leaders and employees in 25 countries to develop a methodology for The Feedback Loop: How to Give & Receive Feedback Well. After over three years of research across hundreds of companies, Claire will share a playbook for how the most effective leaders give and receive feedback. If you’re a manager or CEO who’s always wanted to get better at giving and receiving feedback, this fishbowl is for you.

Key takeaways:

  • A deep understanding of why we dismiss tough feedback
  • How to handle feedback you disagree with
  • Five techniques for receiving tough feedback well
  • Research on how receptive employees are to tough feedback
  • How to tell an employee that they are wrong or that they messed up
  • A proven four-step framework for giving tough feedback to employees
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How to Deliver an Extraordinary Customer Experience

Cultivating meaningful relationships with customers is part of being a Small Giant. However, what separates a Small Giant from others, is their ability to embed customer service into their culture. imageOne, a document lifecycle management company, has created a culture of customer service that has generated millions in revenue. In this fishbowl, you will learn from imageOne Co-founder, Joel Pearlman, on how to systematize and quantify customer service in your organization:

Key Takeaways

  • Why extraordinary customer service starts with an extraordinary culture
  • How to create a customer centric culture – the imageOne way
  • How to quantify exceptional customer service (and use this as a differentiator from your competitors)
  • How to anticipate customer needs and build genuine relationships
  • Learn innovative ways to get new referrals
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Community: How to Save the Environment While Engaging Employees

In this fishbowl discussion, Liz Zavodsky, Director of Membership & Engagement at Northwest Earth Institute, will share examples of meaningful community engagement and how this impacts employee engagement.

Key Takeaways:

  • Learn how community programming can impact employee engagement and build stronger bonds
  • Learn what EcoChallenge is and how you can implement the community programming in your organization right away
  • Learn what Community and Sustainability Discussion Courses are, how you can facilitate them, and how they can be a tool for meaningful engagement in your organization
  • Learn best practices from organizations that have successfully implemented and completed EcoChallenge and Discussion Courses and the internal and external impact this had on their Communities
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A Small Giants Final Bow: How a Responsible Exit Strategy Impacts Your Legacy

Join us for a fishbowl panel discussion around values-driven exit strategies moderated by Small Giants Community Founder, Paul Spiegelman. You will hear two values-driven leaders share their succession stories: Kris Maynard of Essential Ingredients will share how he implemented an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and Jill Nelson of Ruby Receptionists will share how she sold her majority share to a culturally-conscious and responsible venture capitalist firm.

Key Takeaways

  • Hear how two values-driven leaders successfully transitioned ownership, implemented their decision, and the impacts of their decisions
  • Learn how to begin the process of an ESOP at your company
  • Learn how to vet and find a venture capitalist firm that you can trust
  • Gain insights on the timing and best practices for designing an exit strategy
  • Hear practical strategies for preserving your culture and values beyond your lifetime
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Coherent Leadership: How Your Physiological State Impacts Your Ability to Lead

In this interactive fishbowl, Tyler Mongan, Founder of Heart Lab, IIc. explores human physiology, coherent leadership and how understanding your physiology can help you to be a better leader in your company.

Event Description: A powerful mindset is only one aspect of good leadership. Leaders also need to infuse that mindset into their teams and culture. Research in human physiology is revealing that when the heart and brain are working together we enter a coherent state and our frame of mind shifts. We increase cognitive function, increase creativity, increase decision-making abilities, and decrease cortisol (the stress hormone). How you show up physiologically as a leader matters more than you think. Interestingly, when we change our physiological state, we also influence the physiological state of the people we interact with. As teams enter physiologically coherent states together they are more authentic, feel more supported, are more productive, and more innovative. Join Tyler Mongan from Heart Lab as we explore human physiology, coherent leadership and how your physiology impacts your company.

Key Takeaways

  • Learn About the Science of Brain and Heart Coherence
  • Discover How Physiological Coherence Influence Your State
  • Experience Simple Techniques to Develop Coherent Physiological States
  • Learn How to be a more Coherent Leader
  • Discover How Coherent Leaders are more authentic, more connected with their teams, and create a more innovative culture
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So Your Culture is Great, but Does the Talent Pool Know That?

In this interactive fishbowl, Shawn Busse, Kinesis Founding Partner and CEO, will help you assess how effectively you’re marketing your culture to potential employees and provide you with resources to better attract the right talent for your organization.

We all know that hiring for culture is key. But in order to attract the right talent, your brand has to accurately communicate your company culture. In this day and age of transparency and access to information, everything is interrelated: for example, if you’ve got a great customer-centric website, but no talk of employees, you’re dramatically limiting your candidate pool. Similarly, if you’ve got a great culture, but a weak external brand (bad website, limited social media, poor community engagement) you’ll miss out on great talent looking for something special. In this interactive workshop, Shawn showed attendees how to identify shortfalls in their brand communications, bringing them closer to delivering a consistent message that accurately conveys your company culture.

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The Power of Beliefs in Business

Ari Weinzweig, Owner and Founding Partner of Zingerman’s, shares his learnings from his book: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to The Power of Beliefs in Business. In this Fishbowl, Ari will take a look at how our beliefs play out in our day to day experiences in the workplace, and how we and our workplaces are impacted by those beliefs. Whether we accept it or not, what we believe about ourselves, about our organization, our co-workers, our boss, the work that we do and our ability to do it will significantly alter the outcomes we are seeking to achieve. Best of all, Ari will address how by becoming more mindful of our beliefs, we can effectively alter them and change the way we see our work and the world. And radically alter the outcomes we get from our efforts.

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