Bob Glazer: Entrepreneur, Best-Selling Author and Speaker, Founder & CEO @ Acceleration Partners which is an international affiliate marketing company. Acceleration Partners was a Forbes SG. Bob has spoken at the summit and his colleagues have also taught in the Leadership Academy.

JeVon McCormick: He’s made millions in the stock market (even though he didn’t go to college), he was the President of a software company (even though he can’t code) and he’s currently the CEO of a publishing company (even though he can’t spell). JeVon is the President & CEO of Scribe Media – a publishing company. JeVon spoke at a previous summit.

There’s a wave of turnover coming your way – half of workers intend to look for a new job this year. Is your organization prepared to weather the turnover tsunami?

As the pandemic eases, many workers are resuming the job searches they put on pause during the pandemic, and they’re joined by droves of people who are burned out, disengaged, or simply seeking other options in the new remote landscape. We want to help you and your team prepare for the turnover that’s coming.

Watch this month’s virtual panel to learn how to:

• Build and manage your talent pool to make hiring more efficient
• Cultivate employee loyalty and engagement to boost retention
• Navigate employee departures transparently in order to protect your culture
• 30-minute, facilitated breakouts at the end of the call to share best practices and discuss challenges with fellow purpose-driven leaders

In a truly equitable and inclusive workplace, people of all backgrounds and identities feel valued and respected and have an equal opportunity to be successful. Organizations that cultivate an inclusive culture often earn deeper trust and loyalty from team members and enjoy more innovation and increased revenue growth. But what strategies actually work when it comes to racial equity in the workplace?

In this one-hour roundtable, we covered your most pressing challenges and questions around race and equity at work, including:

• Practical ways to cultivate inclusion in all areas of the workplace
• Common pitfalls that undermine your organization’s DE&I efforts
• Tools and strategies to build understanding in your organization

In this fireside chat, Jack Stack, father of the Great Game of Business and economist, speaks to the financial state of small businesses in America a year after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Facilitated by Small Giants Community co-founder Paul Spiegelman, this conversation helps leaders know what they can expect economically over the next 12 months, how to prepare, and how to get their whole team involved in helping businesses thrive.

With companies facing the reality of ongoing virtual work, leaders are stepping up to the challenge of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding employees they’ve never met. In this roundtable, we facilitated a discussion among purpose-driven leaders about the best practical tips for hiring and onboarding employees in a virtual work world.

What does science have to say about leading high-performing teams? What are the driving behaviors and how can you encourage them within your own organization? In this interactive workshop, Amber Johnson, Ph.D., and Jim Ludema, Ph.D. brought evidence-based insights for leading high performing teams and shared strategies for implementing them with your team.

We covered:

• The 5 traits of high-performing teams
• Building psychological safety
• Fostering a growth mindset
• Leveraging your team’s strengths
• How to develop your team members

Are you a parent with school-aged children at home? Or a leader with team members who have young children at home? Chances are you’re pretty stressed out right now — managing work and home life just got a whole lot harder, and with many schools switching to partial or fully remote learning, it’s a long road ahead.

We rolled out the welcome mat to our Zoom room and brought working parents and leaders together for a casual, open roundtable discussion to share strategies for managing work and family stress, supporting team members with children, and how to approach homeschooling as a working parent.

With so many (awesome!) parents in the Small Giants Community — leaders, emerging leaders, and employees alike — we want to do our part to tackle this challenge as a community. This was an idea-sharing session and open dialogue around your greatest challenges, strategies that are working for you, and how you think employers can support team members through this.

When teams have trust and psychological safety, they take the kind of social risks that transform organizations.

Especially in times of crisis, it’s important to know how to forge meaningful connections with your team members and offer the trust and support they need. Forbes calls Chad Littlefield, co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of We and Me, Inc., a “global expert on asking questions that build trust and connection in teams.” In this free, virtual workshop, leaders and entrepreneurs will connect, share current experiences and work together to learn how to adapt.

By the end of the workshop, attendees walked away with two concrete, actionable tools for amplifying connection, belonging, and trust in your own organization during these challenging times.

We covered:
• Research and practical experience around building workplace relationships
• How to break down communication barriers, in-person and virtually
• Tools and strategies for sparking genuine connection and deeper conversation

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, teams across the country suddenly find themselves in virtual work situations. This can pose a challenge to culture-focused companies that want to care for their employees. The good news: the principles of a positive culture translate to sustainable virtual environments, too — and they offer exciting new ways to engage team members and do great work. In this workshop, we heard from Small Giants leader and CEO of Big Cartel, Anna Brozek, about how their entirely virtual team stays connected, productive, and culturally aligned.

We covered:
• Building a positive culture with virtual teams
• The best tools to use to communicate with virtual and local employees
• Fun ways to surprise and engage employees from afar

Learn how to create an employee onboarding program that sets new team members up for success and ensures you retain top talent. From the first handshake to the six-month mark, onboarding is an involved, dynamic process that demands time, attention, and resources.

In this workshop led by Connor Lynch of Rescue Agency, attendees learned how to create an employee onboarding program that sets new team members up for success and ensures you retain top talent.

We covered:

• Planning out a new hire’s most important first experiences on the job
• Measuring a new hire’s progress in their first six months
• Implementing feedback mechanisms for the new hire and your team

Small Giants leaders know that hiring the wrong person is costly, time-consuming, and can do serious cultural damage. But even with the best intentions, without a strong hiring process, wrong hires can still sneak in.

In this Fishbowl (a.k.a. webinar!) we’ll learn from Vivian Lee, SVP of People Innovation at Arkadium about their process for hiring top candidates quickly and ensuring they’re culturally aligned.

Arkadium’s interview process is thoughtful and strategic: all hiring managers follow an interview guide that is anchored in the position’s scorecard and defines what success in the role looks like. In this Fishbowl, you’ll learn about:

• The questions to ask to ensure cultural fit
• Arkadium’s philosophy that finding top candidates is the manager’s priority, not HR’s
• How to create your own interview guide for each role
• How to use an interview guide to combat interview bias
• How to remain disciplined in your recruiting and interview processes

Positive workplaces don’t happen by accident. Purpose-driven leaders know that behind the best company cultures, you’ll find leaders who put in consistent, intentional hard work to build this aspect of their organization.

But, what happens to the culture if you and your employees don’t see each other every day? What happens to the camaraderie and trust that make positive, successful companies? How do you build and maintain your culture with a virtual or distributed team?

In this webinar, attendees learned from 2019 Forbes Small Giants leader Behfar Jahanshahi on how InterWorks’ culture grew and flourished as its team became a distributed workforce.

He covered:

• How to build or maintain your company’s close-knit, positive culture among a virtual or distributed team
• How InterWorks’ culture grew with them as they went from one physical office location to having employees in co-working spaces and home offices around the world
• The software tools you can use to conduct meaningful, virtual meetings
• How to proactively stay connected to employees you don’t see every day
• How to cultivate trust and camaraderie among employees no matter where they are

Learn how this agency became a ROWE – a Results Only Work Environment – and how this approach creates a culture of autonomy, flexibility, and results.

In a ROWE, meetings are optional and employees work when and where they’re most productive. Results and quality become the key drivers of success — resulting in higher employee engagement, more quality work, and better overall efficiency within your business. In this Fishbowl (a.k.a. webinar!) attendees heard from Ashton Adair, Director of People and Engagement at Mojo Media Labs about how Mojo became a ROWE and the impact this system has had on the business, its operations, and employees’ lives. We learned:

• What it means to be a ROWE (Results Only Work Environment)
• Why ROWE can be a good fit for purpose-driven businesses
• How to prime your business for becoming a ROWE
• Challenges to avoid and lessons learned in becoming a ROWE
• How to use a results-focused environment to attract top talent
• How to measure results and quality
• What results-focused practices you can adopt even if you don’t become a full ROWE

One in five US adults experiences a mental illness in a given year — and even more experience the struggles through a friend or family member. Despite its prevalence in our lives, the stigma associated with mental illness often prevents open discussion about it. Ultimately, this stigma delays diagnosis and treatment — and the conversation can be even harder to have in the workplace.

Opening the dialogue and creating a safe and accepting environment to talk about mental health is just another way purpose-driven leaders can care for employees in the totality of their lives, as well as, support them to do their best work.

In this Fishbowl, Meg Switala and Karen Nelson of TiER1 Performance shared their process for leveraging the workplace for starting the conversation about mental health. Attendees learned about their experience following this journey at TiER1 and the positive impact it has had on their employees’ lives and their company culture.

From this Fishbowl, attendees learned:

• What you need to launch a successful Start the Conversation program
• The specific communication schedule, themes, and messaging they used to encourage open communication around mental health
• Simple-to-implement practices that will create a trusting space for employees
• The direct results this program had on their organization and its individual employees

Key Takeaways:

• How to structure feedback using questions and observations
• The mindset shift to become a great people manager
• What to do when you feel like you’ve given feedback but nothing changes
• How to take ownership of your contribution to a stuck situation
• Why boundaries are the most critical — and most avoided — ingredient in effective feedback
• How to use The Accountability Dial to give timely, thought provoking feedback

Deciding when an employee should receive a promotion or a raise can be difficult, especially when deciding how much. In this fishbowl, Karen Clark Cole, CEO & Founder of Blink UX, and Brigitt Rains, Director of Operations, shared how they developed an internal system to make career trajectory, promotions, and asking for raises transparent and easy in their organization.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to develop a career trajectory path for employees
• Learn how to develop a system for asking for raises
• Learn about he GrowTool system, which Blink UX built to monitor both systems

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, attendees learned 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

Values-driven leadership is something we all strive for as Small Giants leaders. But as Chris Hutchinson has discovered through his work with leaders and teams, it is not easy to get the right level of engagement from our teams. There really can be “too much of a good thing” when it comes to values-driven leadership. Through a short pre- questionnaire, participants will begin to evaluate how their leadership style is impacting employee engagement and positive conflict. During the interactive Leadership Fishbowl, Chris shared practical tools to help leaders generate positive conflict and employee participation.