Category: Community

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15 Years in the Making

It’s hard to believe that it has been 15 years since Bo and Paul started the Small Giants Community! Like many of us, Paul was inspired by Bo’s book and that started a series of conversations, leading to them bringing purpose-driven leaders together as a Community.

Years later, the principles Bo wrote about in his book are stronger than ever, and we’ve seen the focus on culture and values become company differentiators. All of us continue to benefit from relationships and learnings with like-hearted leaders.

Join us as Paul and Bo take a walk down memory lane, share stories, challenges and what’s changed over the last 15 years. What happened to the original companies Bo wrote about? How has the Community evolved? Are there newer common characteristics of Small Giants companies? What are Bo and Paul up to now? Bring your questions for a genuine and touching fireside chat!

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Reimagining the Client Experience

When the leadership team at Venturity Financial Partners realized they were losing clients at an alarming rate, they knew a new approach was needed. With thoughtful and intentional planning, this CXO and accounting services firm created a dedicated Client Experience work group to revitalize how they worked with clients externally and managed them internally. Fast forward to today, Venturity has a net promoter score of 91 among their clients, when most accounting firms have a score of 40!

Tune in to learn from Deanna Walker, the CEO, and Rane Lallier, the VP of Client Experience, and dig into how they’ve prioritized and executed on the goal of improving their clients’ life cycle experience, and as a result, reinforcing the company’s core values.

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Speak-Up Culture

As the Andy Stanley quote goes, “Leaders who do not listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.” And, that silence is dangerous.

Stephen Shedletzky – or “Shed” to his friends – has focused his career on helping leaders listen to and nurture the voices of others — to foster an environment where people feel it is both psychologically safe and worth it to speak up. In this session, we will uncover how creating such an environment is the responsibility and the advantage of leaders at every level who want to be great at leading and who want to create a better version of humanity while they do it. The bottom line, for everyone, is that organizations with speak-up cultures are safer, more innovative, more engaged, and better-performing than their peers.

A sought-after speaker, coach, and leadership advisor, Shed has led hundreds of keynote presentations, workshops, and leadership development programs around the world. As a thought leader on psychological safety in the workplace, he works with leaders in all industries where human beings work.

In this session we will:
– Unpack the two main questions of a speak-up culture: Is it safe? Is it worth it?
– Explore why speak-up cultures are good for people and good for business
– Learn tactical and proven methods to listen to your people and cultivate a feedback rich, speak-up culture
– Unpack leaders’ responsibility and advantage in building a speak-up culture

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Develop and Retain Your Best Leaders: A Small Giants Panel

Have you identified your bench of future leaders? Are they confident, emotionally-intelligent individuals who are prepared to lead? Is your organization struggling to have its values understood and practiced at every level of the organization?

In this panel discussion facilitated by Small Giants Community co-founder Paul Spiegelman, three Small Giants Leadership Academy graduates will share how the experience has impacted their leadership and organizations. These leaders will share what it’s really like to participate in the Leadership Academy and reflect on the most impactful takeaways from their year of learning.

The Small Giants Leadership Academy is a nine-month training program for emerging purpose-driven leaders to learn and grow together. With enrollment now open for the next class, this is your chance to hear from graduates and understand the program from the perspective of those who have experienced it.

Find out why one graduate called the Leadership Academy “the perfect program for an emerging leader” and learn about “the lifelong relationships with amazing people” that continue to serve graduates to this day. We’ll also answer your questions about the program, like who in your organization is the right fit and how this experience can fundamentally change the trajectory of your organization.

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Inside Out: How to Market Your Cultural Story Consistently

When it comes to marketing and branding, many companies create internal documents touting their culture to employees (ie the classic ‘mission, vision, values’ poster), and then separately produce external messaging of what they think the outside world wants to see and hear. In reality, these are two content streams that should have little to no divergence at all.

As Small Giants Community leaders, many of you may inherently understand this, but the execution side can be easier said than done. For our next virtual event, Jim Hume, founder of Phire Group, will guide us through his company’s proven process of practical ways to bring these two worlds together and create one cohesive brand that spotlights your culture authentically.

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How to: Define and Describe Your Organizational Culture

Company culture is a squishy idea and notoriously tough to formalize. Carefully defining your culture is work, often hard work. Yet doing this work makes hundreds of future decisions much easier.

In this interactive workshop, Carl Erickson, founder and chairman of Atomic Object, shared his culture framework that’s eighteen years in the making, using Atomic’s culture at each level in the framework to illustrate each element.

How to Bring Your Purpose to Life

In this fishbowl, attendees learned 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 covered 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.

In this fishbowl, attendees learned 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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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.

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

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.

Getting Started on Change

Screening for Value

At Chief Outsiders, Tom & Art believe that culture is their primary competitive advantage. It is what allows them to attract and retain the best talent who create the most value for their clients. Their approach to hiring for culture is rooted in their core values. Join Tom McCrary, Managing Partner, and Art Saxby, CEO and Founder for a conversation about their process for vetting values in the hiring process.

Rally of Reell

Small Giants Community