Lead. Empower. Strengthen.

Brendan: Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining the third webinar in our series to support middle market business leaders with helpful information on timely topics.

I'm Brendan Chambers, Head of First Citizens Middle Market Banking group. Our webinar today focuses on the importance of leadership in today's economic and cultural spheres.

Our panelists will provide insight on various leadership topics and share their strategies for executing business plans, strengthening workplace culture, motivating employees and making positive impacts across their organizations.

I'm thrilled to welcome three panelists to the webinar today. Today, we have Jacque Albus, a partner at the law firm of Husch Blackwell, which has over twenty offices across the US, including their virtual office called The Link.

David Altman, PhD, and Chief Research and Innovation Officer at the Center for Creative Leadership, which is one of the world's most prominent providers of leadership research and practice.

And Matt Snow, Chairman at FORVIS, a professional services firm providing insurance, tax and advisory services.

We have a series of prepared questions for our panelists, and we expect to have time at the end of the webinar for questions from the audience.

If you have a question for our panelists, you can submit it at any time by clicking Q&A in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Type the question in the box that pops up and hit send.

Alright. Let's get started.

Our first question is about leading through today's economic, changing economic environment as it relates to the workforce.

We're seeing rising interest rates and recession fears triggering layoffs across industries.

What leadership practices do you use to ease employees' concerns and keep them motivated?

Jacque, if you don't mind, I'll turn to you first.

Jacque: Yeah. Sure. Thank you.

I think this comes up a lot for us, especially because of the industry that I'm in. So, I'm a private wealth attorney, you know, by trade, but I also run our firm's financial services and capital markets business units. So, we really do have a lot of folks in our business unit in our industry who are impacted by change in the market, whether it's—we have insolvency attorneys, we have banking and finance attorneys, we have corporate M&A attorneys, and these people are always going to be impacted by what's going on in the market. And I think one of the biggest things that we try to do to keep people's concerns at bay is making sure that we have a steady pipeline of work and making sure that we have the right people with the right skill set, doing the right type of projects and on the right teams. I think a big part of this, too, is being adaptable and not being afraid to learn new skill sets. We saw a lot of people doing this over the past couple of years where if there's not a ton of work to do in your particular specialty branch out a little bit, learn a new skill.

I mean, if you're worried about, you know, something that you have a skill set in not becoming something that's very valuable or in demand in the future, take that time and invest in your education, invest in your team, and make sure that you can pivot if you need to, to adapt to do whatever you might need to do depending on what the market's got going on in terms of deal flow, you know, all sorts of things like that. So, I think making sure that you are being entrepreneurial and finding new ways to use your skill set is one of the best things you can do to alleviate concerns due to the market.

Matt: Yeah. Jacque, that's great advice. And I think one of the best things we can do as leaders today is to teach our team members in our constituencies, you know, how they can adapt during different economic cycles. You can look at how old I am, I've lived through three or four different economic cycles, and I've really learned that being prepared to push through those is really important. So as a leader, I've always considered it part of my role to keep my ear to the ground on how are people thinking—what's on their mind? And many times, like, right now, we've been fortunate to not have to do any types of adjustments to team member sizes and whatnot in this cycle, but we have in the past. I mean, every business does at some point have to deal with that. And so having the right information about how people are thinking, what's on their mind through surveys, through talking to your other leaders is number one.

For me, the number two is just really being transparent with everyone on exactly what's going on. And I might, you know—Brendan I see how you've asked the question there; you know, how do we ease their concerns? We might not be able to tell them, "Don't worry, everything's going to be okay." That's actually not helpful in the end. I've found that people just want you to tell them the truth. And so, then our group goes into how do we adapt and how do we push through these economic times and things like what Jacque has just mentioned are significant.

I've also actually had an organizational psychologist join me on a call with all of our team before to say, "How do we work through this from a mental health perspective?" And that really gave people some tips, I think, on pushing through and understanding they'll get through this, and they're going to get better. And it's part of their professional development.

Jacque: I love that, Matt. Also, the thing you basically said about being transparent. I think being open, honest, authentic, transparent is so critically important as a leader at whatever level of leadership you are in. I think you're not going to do yourself any favors, or your team any favors, by not being transparent and letting them know what's going on. And I just think, just to add on to what you're saying is I think, you know, I love the words flexibility, transparency, honesty, authenticity, but also just think about opportunities. So, whenever there's a downturn, that always means there's another opportunity. So, I'm a big fan of encouraging people to raise their hands for opportunities because, you know, it's always good idea to stretch yourself and learn new things. I think those are all things that kind of go together.

David: Yeah. If I could just add one comment to those two really good comments. We've been struggling at the Center for Creative Leadership, CCL, with this hybrid workforce, and we were talking to our board about it a couple months ago. And a very senior leader at a work day said they, too, were struggling with it, and their line was "transparency is kindness."

That has stuck with us. It's like you may not agree with our policies, but by being transparent, we as leaders are being kind to the workforce because we're laying it all out.

Brendan: That is, I think that's very insightful from really all three of you. And I think I would totally agree with you that transparency is always most helpful to everyone. Even in situations when you think it's not going to be, but you just have to make sure people understand and are communicating. So, thank you. Thank you for that insight. I really appreciate it.

I guess I'll move on to a little bit of the hybrid remote work environment topic that is so prevalent these days. So, in our post-pandemic world, another concept that's really top of mind for leaders is work arrangements and whether, you know, to adopt a fully remote, fully in office, hybrid work model. And I know, David, I know you at the Center for Creative Leadership, you've done a lot of work around that. So, I'd love to get your thoughts if you don't mind.

David: What people would love for me to say is, "Here's the perfect model. Here's how to do it." And that doesn't exist. So, everything I'm going to say today is on ccl.org or cclinnovation.org. We've got a wealth of resources and they're all free, so that's the last time I'll say that. So, we did some research with 43,000 leaders across the US, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific on this topic of hybrid. And the data that I'm going to share with you from those leaders come from late the last quarter of 2022. So, a little bit dated, but I think that they're still relevant.

So here are the three overarching themes from the research. You can read the full report. It's called Three Tensions Leaders Should Resolve in 2023.

Number one—leaders want to work remotely. But it's socially isolating.

Brendan: Right.

David: Number two—leaders want more development opportunities, but they're burned out.

Number three—leaders need to make hard decisions, but they also need to motivate and engage their people.

So, this gets us into topics, kind of underlying factors of belonging and mattering. Humans have a basic need to connect with each other, to be seen, to be heard, to be included, to belong, to be supported. That's belonging.

So, whether you're virtual, on-site or hybrid—belonging is either a risk factor or it can be a superpower for organizations. Related to that is mattering. This is a core universal need that humans have. It's the key to human flourishing.

And is what is mattering? Well, it's when people miss you when you aren't in a meeting or aren't in the office. It's feelings that people have of being valued, of being heard, of being appreciated, being cared for. And when you have uncertainty about whether you belong, or you have uncertainty about whether you matter, bad things happen. You don't take risks. You're not comfortable asking for help or giving help. You don't persist when you face challenges. You leave organizations. You waste energy. You carry a heavy backpack all the time when you're at work. So, belonging and mattering I think is kind of at the root of some of the issues that come up when we talk about hybrid, fully virtual, on-site.

Brendan: That's super helpful. I love the themes. What best practices have you seen, you know, in your in your work that companies are using and deploying here that you've seen them do successfully?

David: Yeah. So, I've talked a little bit about belonging and mattering, and some of what is in the resources that are available to you talk about that. Let me talk about some other issues. Because of mental health issues that have come up over the last couple years, there's been talk about work-life balance.

And we've been writing about that for quite a number of years. And about ten years ago, we gave up on the term work-life balance. Because balance is—it's elusive. It's temporary. It's difficult to achieve. Think about it. How often do you feel in work life, home life you're fully in balance? For me, I sometimes feel that way. It's great. And then it goes away. Because stuff happens in the world. Stuff happens in your brain. So, what we've done research on, and it resonates with leaders, is the term work-life integration.

And so work-life integration requires one to think about boundaries between work and non-work. And boundary management, being effective at that, helps you manage the different demands that you have between work and non-work. And the more control that people have about where, how and when they work, and how they manage the responsibilities at work and at home or in the community—the easier it is for them to fit the different pieces together. And so, the more control that we, as leaders, can give to our employees, more autonomy, more security about the decision-making process, then people are better able to manage work and non-work and therefore integrate the different aspects of their lives.

Brendan: Yeah. I tend to agree with that. And I think it's insightful. And it's obviously something that has gotten of lot of press, and it sounds like you and the firm have done a lot of good work around it. Thank you.

Jacque, I'd love to hear your some of your perspective on this topic as well, just given how your firm stood up an entirely remote office called The Link even before the pandemic hit. I think a lot, you know, I think that would be—learning a little bit more about that would be great.

Jacque: But, yeah, I mean, you guys have chatted a little bit before me. I can talk about this all day. I always joke that before COVID, I was a person who was always in the office. I would stay in the office until I was done for the day. Maybe I'd take my laptop home, but I did not want to work anywhere other than in my office, even on the weekends. So, when COVID hit, I was one of those people that frankly ran out to Best Buy to get my stuff set up and go home. I thought it's never going to be the same again, but now I actually am a member of our virtual office.

I think it's fantastic. I think it makes so much sense for so many people. And as I was telling you guys earlier, the stats that we have here are crazy. So, we've grown from 50 team members in this virtual office in July of 2020—to 629 today.

So, that's crazy growth in this virtual office that we have. And these are people that are 100% remote, meaning we don't have our own office. We all can go into the offices whenever we want to, and people do, and we encourage that.

But, you know, we've got a large number of people that are working for our firm, and we consider to be team members, who don't actually go into a brick-and-mortar office on a regular basis. And of that 629—200, a little over 200 of those people, are full-time attorneys who work at our law firm. So, it's attorneys, it's paralegals, it's from leadership, it's staff, it runs the entire gamut of folks that we have at our firm who are in this virtual environment.

And I think that initially during COVID, it was a necessity. And I think that was a good testing ground for the technology and other things we needed to do just to do our jobs, just to serve our clients. But then I think people recognize that you know, they were gaining time with their families. They were doing things they never could have done otherwise. I think it's been amazing for recruiting and retention. We're able to be in markets where we otherwise wouldn't be if we were just looking for places that have a brick-and-mortar location.

And it's interesting for me personally because my practice has always been a national practice. I live in Saint Louis, Missouri, and that's kind of where my flag is down, but I travel across the country to work with clients and team members, and I always have. So, when you think about it, we've all kind of been virtual all along to the extent that we have clients or team members who aren't physically in your zip code. I've always joked that I want to be able to work across zip codes.

I think that, you know, associates and law firms have a better experience if you're not just working for the person two doors down from you. You learn more when you work for people in different markets with different experiences, diversity of background. I think there's just so many things. Again, you'll have to make me stop talking about this at some point, but there's so many things about it that are so great, and I think one of the things that our firm has done incredibly well, we have two fantastic office managing partners who run this virtual office, J. Y. Miller and Jen Dlugosz. And, you know, the way that they lead this group I think is critically important.

Of course, our technology is critically important to make sure that we can all work from home, but having leadership in place that cultivates, you know, our people, our culture, the things that we stand for. I mean, I think that you know, they will focus very heavily on our mission, which is serving our clients, but then our people. You have to make sure people are happy. Happy people are more productive and more engaged. The interesting thing is, you know, we do a lot of, like you were mentioning, we do a lot of testing and surveys and things with our firm, and we've done engagement testing. We look at productivity, and our virtual office leads our law firm in productivity, meaning billable hours, and also in engagement. So, all the—we've done all the Gallup engagement type surveys at our firm, and all of the questions: do you have a best friend at work? Which is one of one of the test questions I came up with. Like, do you feel supported? Do you feel like you have a person to go to? Do you have the resources you need to be successful? The people in The Link are off the charts. And I think it's because if you think about it, as soon as it's easier to hop on a Teams call with someone who's, you know, five cities away, is you can pack your day with more connections, with more people, when you're doing things virtually. And I think that was part of the thing that we all learned during COVID.

But I think we see that more and more with our virtual office. I think it's something that, you know, we put a lot of effort and intention into that connectivity.

I think sometimes people think that, you know, younger associates aren't going to get the attention and mentoring and learn the things they need do if they're a 100% virtual. I can see that going both ways. I think first of all, we do have a lot of people that go into the office. We do meetings in the office. We do social events in the office. The virtual office, their social calendar, I can't even fit it on one screen. I mean, they've got happy hours, there's virtual coffee chats, but they do things in our brick-and-mortar locations on a regular basis to get people, you know, in front of other people and talking and learning how to be lawyers and things like that. But I think that we've done a ton of work to kind of double down on culture, access to one another, flexibility, making sure that we're training our associates to be future partners of our law firm.

But I think the freedom and flexibility and support of working in a virtual environment has been critically important to our success. I think if I look at the team of folks that I've built to work on my client matters, nine out of ten of us are 100% remote.

A lot of it's because people are in markets where we don't have a brick-and-mortar office. And some of it is people that just think they're more productive working from home. And I think you see that a lot of people, I think some people like that flexibility, they feel like they can get more work done in less time. They're not with distractions of commuting or things like that, but I think that, you know, for me personally, it's been great. I think it's a great way to work with more people across the country in terms of our clients and our colleagues. And, yeah, as I said, I could talk about it forever, but I do think it's a great way to empower people to be independent and manage their practice and all those sorts of things.

So, I think that the one thing we will say and then I'll stop talking is, you know, I think just having a brick-and-mortar office and J. Y. Miller, who is one of the leaders in this space, says this a lot, but just having a brick-and-mortar office does not create culture. You have to have intention and focus.

So, we could have, you know, 500 physical office locations, but if we didn't really work hard on connecting and culture, it still wouldn't make a difference. So, I think the fact that our virtual office works even harder to have that culture, I think to me, it almost makes the brick-and-mortar, you know, situation seem almost like a thing of the past in a lot of ways. So, I think we do work really hard at that, and I think that's super important.

Brendan: Well, that's super helpful. And that was actually a great segue into kind of where I wanted to take this.

You know, both of you mentioned an organization's culture when talking about work-life boundaries, supporting employees' mental health and providing opportunities to connect and engage.

Let's talk a little bit about a leader's role in all that and building and influencing the workplace culture. And, Matt, if you don't mind, I'll turn it over to you first.

Matt: Yeah. Thanks, Brendan. I, you know, as I took on my leadership role, I don't know, 8, 10 years ago, I knew intuitively that building culture was part of my role. I think it took me a year or two to really understand what that meant and how to do that. And so admittedly, though, I have really become a big champion of this very topic.

I believe that a firm leader's or company leader's role is first and foremost to build that culture. And we hear the saying that "culture eats strategy for breakfast every day," and I could not agree more because you're not going to be able to accomplish what you want to unless you get that right, and it is my job, you know, our leaders' job in our firm in order to make that happen. So, a few things around that that I'll share that are important to me.

You know, number one is checking myself. Being sure that my actions, what I do, what I say, how I make decisions, are all consistent with that culture and with that comes the need to constantly check myself, and I don't rely only on myself for that. I have always had two maybe three people that I have empowered to say, "You have the obligation to come into my office and tell me when I appear to not be in sync with something culturally, maybe strategically, but definitely culturally," and they have before. And I learned that from serving clients. I've worked in the financial services space, and all my clients were in that place.

I worked with a wide range of leaders and was able to see the good, the bad, the really great, and some not so great. And in that, I realized that leaders must have someone check them all the time. And there is no one that and some leaders think that they can do everything. They're autocratic or they're dictatorial, whatever. And so that is to me personally one of the greatest tools that I use to make sure that I'm doing my job in setting that workplace culture. So, checking yourself and having what I call the "truth teller" that has come into your office all the time. I talk to our board about it, so they know who the truth teller is. So anyway, it's so important to do that.

You know, a couple other things. I have always leaned on having a very strong communications team that can advise me on best ways that I can communicate, our leadership team can communicate and using different strategies to do that. They're more creative than I am. I'm by background a CPA, and so I tend to not be as creative as some and so they really bring that element to the table where I can know what are the best strategies for communicating what that culture is, and many times it's storytelling.

And so, they'll bring me stories that I can share with our teams about things that have worked and not worked. And, hey, look, this is what happened a month ago, and this is how our culture works here. And it also includes how it doesn't work, as well. I've had situations where we've actually let go of some client relationships where, you know, they were bullying our people to be quite candid with you, and that's very rare. But it has happened, and our team to this day, I know who was on that team—that stuck with them, seeing that culture in action because we took action when that actually happened.

Last thing I'll add here, and I'm really interested in hearing David and Jacque's views on this too, but having a really strong performance measurement system for your leaders, but even, and I say leaders very broadly, into the middle management, you know, ideally everyone in the organization on adherence to firm culture.

And these are subjective. So, yes, a CPA is asking for subjective measurements. We all want numbers, and you know, exact, precise things. You can't do that with something like this, and getting feedback from a number of people, how am I doing personally in my role in adhering to the requirements of our firm culture? And so, me leading that—first with myself and then with every other leader on how are you perceived as adhering to firm culture—is critical in terms of making sure that it's consistent and working throughout the organization. But I don't know, David, Jacque, one of you may have another thought.

Brendan: That's insightful. That's insightful. At First Citizens, we call that "behavioral true north." So exactly what you're talking about.

Matt: We call it "one FORVIS" at FORVIS. And so, that's how we do that. That's great.

Jacque: No. I love it.

Matt: The words matter too, David. I will tell you, and, sorry, Jacque. But the other thing is having those words, and this is where that communication team, it’s always helped me make it very simple. You know, it's five words or five concepts that we can very easily share. But sorry, Jacque, I cut you off.

Jacque: Oh, no I get excited about this stuff too. I think that, you know, it's something I always say is to be a good leader you also have to be a good follower. When you were talking about evaluating adherence to culture for all levels of leadership, I think that's really important because everybody's a leader in some respect. And I think that every member of your team has a leadership role of some sort.

And I think people really want to feel like they are a member of a team, and they have a leadership role. And I think that, you know, we do, we do a lot of 360 evaluations of our leaders. We, we really, you know, I say we, a lot of us really focus on and walk the walk and talk the talk of servant leadership at our firm. We have a lot of former military folks at our firm in leadership positions, not like at the hardcore, but like they have that there's that inspiring motivational side of people with that background.

You know, we do leadership coaching and training. A lot of us work with executive coaches to make sure that, you know, we always want to be better at what we do. And I think it's just like you want to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. You know as leaders, we want to surround ourselves with people who are better leaders than we are. You want to learn, you want to be inspired by the people who are our fellow leaders in your law firm.

And I feel like I'm lucky enough to have people I look at that I'm like, "Wow, I'm really inspired by the way this person leads." And you can look at examples and learn and grow, but I think that that feedback is really important because, you know, it should never be a dictatorship, as you said. I think leaders should be humble. I think leaders should be able to recognize when they've made mistakes and nobody's perfect. You know, even in my practice, I make it very clear to my team. If something goes great, I give the credit to everybody else. But if something's messed up, I will take responsibility because as a leader of this team, that means that I did something wrong. I didn't give you the right information, I didn't coach you properly. I didn't give you, you know, what you needed to do an excellent job.

So, I think that people want to feel like you have their back. You were talking about essentially kind of firing a client for being disrespectful. I very strongly believe in that as well. Your team wants to know that you have their backs and that if they're being disrespected that's not going to be tolerated. So, I think a lot of it, again, it goes back to culture, how you treat people, you know, putting people first is something we talk about a lot at our law firm. And I think that's really, really important. And I think that's what gets people excited and gets them motivated to look at these leadership roles and want to aspire to be a leader at some point.

I think all that stuff is very critical and also very exciting.

Brendan: I agree. Thank you. David, what are your thoughts on this subject?

David: Jacque and Matt, just so beautifully stated. You're speaking our love language at CCL. I just resonate with what you spoke about. And this issue of culture is so dominant.

Literally, in the last 24 hours, including a couple hours ago, our executive team had yet another conversation about culture. Our initiative, one of them, is one CCL. We're all over the globe. We've got different business units. We've got to get out of the silos. We've got to become one organization.

And we teach this stuff, easier to teach and to write about than to do. Earlier this morning, I spoke with the Chief Strategy Officer of one of the largest mining companies in the world, and it was all around toxic culture. And how to get out of that.

Yesterday, I spoke with leaders of one of the largest, most impactful public health groups in the world in Geneva Switzerland. Get funding from the World Bank, from WHO, from the Gates Foundation and many others. What do you think they're talking about? They're talking about the culture of bringing different public health, global public health groups together who work in 78 countries, and how do we come together as one organization culturally focused on the same outcome?

And then, earlier today, I spoke with some colleagues in Saudi Arabia. Same thing. Around how do we improve health and health care in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia? So, these issues that you're facing in your organizations are pretty dominant. And it's made more complicated with the ongoing public health crisis around COVID and other things, inflation, dysfunctional government, economic upheaval, issues with employee engagement, inclusivity, digital transformation, violence, war. I mean, all these things come to affect us as organizations directly and indirectly. And so, we need to have cultures that are adaptable, and you know, we humans are plagued by the status quo bias. We love certainty as human beings. And when things are uncertain, you know, we at first cling to the status quo because that's how we know how to work. And today we need cultures that are different than that. And as Jacque said, beautiful, bricks and mortars don't create culture. That's so critically important.

And, you know, culture is more than what's in annual reports, on websites, on hangings, you know, on plaques that are on the walls. It's, you know, the basic thing is how we do things around here. And you get what you measure, and Matt and Jacque both spoke about that. If you're not measuring culture, then you're not going to get it. And if there aren't explicit or implicit rewards for culture, then you're not going to get that as well.

And there are weak signals. You know, you can walk into an organization or listen in on how people interact with each other, and you can pick up if you're astute, to elements of the culture. I remember when we were taking our daughters to college visits. I won't name the university, a very good university. And the moment we park the car, and we started walking my daughter to where the orientation was, she said, "No, I'm not going here." I said "What are you talking about? We haven't even taken twenty steps."

She said, "Oh, I can tell. This is not the type of higher education institution that I want to go to."

Well, we ended up going to the orientation, and it clearly wasn't a fit, but she was picking up the signals. So, we as leaders, we need to pay attention to the verbal and nonverbal, to the artifacts, to the weak signals that represent culture that we aspire to have and cultural artifacts that are getting in the way of what we're trying to achieve.

Brendan: Very well said. I tend to agree with all that. And I think, you know, the challenge is I think it's hard enough to create the culture in a stable organization, but when you bring M&A into the fold that creates a whole other angle.

And of course, here at First Citizens, we just completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley Bank. And so, I'm really interested in the topic of how you maintain culture through a merger or an acquisition, and Matt, any thoughts on that? I know FORVIS has gone through plenty, plenty of those events. So, I'm sure you've got some great ideas and insights for us.

Matt: We have, Brendan, and for those who may not know FORVIS was created by the merger of DHG and BKD, which are two firms that knew each other very well going back 20, 30 years.

And, and yet were in different parts of the country, primarily. And, so you know, bringing them together was, you know, certainly an exercise in how do we merge cultures? And let me just say a few thoughts here on that, and I've learned a lot frankly on this topic from watching my clients and institutions like First Citizens and how that happens. And it's, you know, it takes several key steps, and I'll tell you. Number one for us was in the diligence phase of this, really from the very outset, was almost one of the first conversations we had, which was about culture.

Now we knew each other very well in our situation, and so I'm not sure we could have done it if we had not, but it's absolutely imperative that you really understand what that culture is. And I'm going to get into something that I mentioned earlier, which is you got to have somebody independently check you on that. The dealmakers on any deal will want to tell you the culture. Oh, they work. Look, they've got words that are synonyms in their cultures and value statements, but as we all know, culture is how things get done. And so how do things get done? And so, you know, we used some independent checkpoints along the way, and we got our leaders to work together on projects as we developed the merger plan before we ever even announced it. And, yes, we got the solutions to the projects, but they also told us, are we working well together?

And we could really get a good assessment. So really having that upfront is critical before you do that and not being afraid to stop it if it really doesn't work.

I'd say number two is prioritizing culture when you get into merger integration. It was the number one thing that we focused on right after. Actually, from the moment we announced the deal and had our partner vote, we immediately began—before we started talking system integrations or platform integrations or, you know, combining HR policies or whatever—it was culture. And we brought in an outside party to help us do that. We brought in a team of people from both firms, very diverse group of people, to help us take the best of both and create something new. Those people then became our champions for culture as they went out into the firm, and we began to disseminate the plan. But we prioritize that as number one. And that we got words around it. We put concepts and examples, and we've actually got, you know, put it into a book so that we could read it.

And so, yes, we are integrating systems and platforms, but that was really number one right out of the gate there, to do that. And involving our team members throughout the firm and diverse team members really helped us in the buy-in of that.

I also say, you know, two other things here. One, it was really important, and this is true, I think, for any M&A deal, to be very clear on the leadership structure because leadership also, as we just said, drives culture, and we cannot have too many people calling the shots. And especially in a merger of equals.

So, we made a decision early on in our deal. We wrestled through what are the leadership structures going to look like, and we would have one CEO, not two. I'm chairman. I'm toward the latter part of my career, but Tom Watson is our CEO. He had been elected to the BKD CEO role pretty right before we did the merger within a year or two. And so, and he has a lot of runway, and so it made sense that Tom is our CEO. We've been very clear about that so that everyone understands that in our firm, but it brings clarity to, you know, who's running things that we don't have three or four or five different cultures being spread out about how that works. And so those leadership lines are critical in a merger or an acquisition to bring clarity.

And last thing is, and I've brought this up before, it's coming up again, but measuring and evaluating how you are doing. Not just organizationally, but at the individual leader and team member level, on adhering to that culture. And so, we've got that measurement and accountability, and that is really helping us in driving that consistency around the firm. And we think we've made tremendous progress, in doing that. We're not there yet. We're not perfect either. So, we're a little bit like whack-a-mole, but we're after it, and we're getting better every day to make that happen. But time, I think, is the last thing, patience and time and letting things evolve and happen naturally, and not, you know, try to be, give grace where needed when somebody kind of steps out of line. But those are some of my thoughts from what we've been through over the last few years.

Brendan: That's great. Thank you, Matt. Jacque, you have thoughts on this subject?

Jacque: Yeah. No, me, I agree with everything you just said, Matt, and I think the, you know, culture can really quickly kill a deal when you've got a firm like yours, like ours that’s very invested in culture.

I mean, this comes up all the time, whether we're just interviewing an individual lawyer who wants to join our teams or if it's another group or another law firm. I mean, we, you know, we're very protective of our culture. I think everybody is. And needs to be. I think that's so important.

I think protective is the right word because you've built this thing, and you want to keep it, and just bringing in one wrong team or one wrong person can really easily spread like, you know, like wildfire and really quickly destroy something that you've spent so much time building and fostering and cultivating. So, I think finding ways to identify kind of like you said, David, like she got out of the car and could tell that it just wasn't right. So, I mean, there's times when there's red flags, and those of us that have been interviewing people for a long time or, you know, on these kind of like merger teams, like, you can kind of pick up on it, but it's kind of like a thing you can't describe in a lot of ways.

That's why I think it's very interesting that you guys measure performance when it comes to culture and things like that because it is such an unquantifiable thing. I'm a, I say, recovered CPA by nature, so I'm a very sequential thinker, and that's kind of hard for me as well, but I think it's super important. It's just as important as your financial performance. Right? I mean, culture is what's going to make people want to join your team and also culture can drive people out the door. And I think that you have to be very careful of. I would say recruiting and retention are kind of the same thing.

You work so hard to bring people into your firm or your organization, but it's completely a worthless effort if you can't keep them. And I think part of what keeps people is culture. And I always say, like, you know, anybody could go work someplace else and make more money. It can't just be about the money. People stay because of other things. They stay because of culture. They stay because of opportunities. They stay because there's, you know, things that they like about the work that they're doing, but I think culture is a very critical part of that equation as to why someone wouldn't just easily walk out the door for another job that's going to just get them some more money at the end of the day.

And people at my firm are tired of hearing me tell this story, but it's about culture, and I love it. So, when I started at my firm right out of law school. I think it was about 150 or so attorneys, and we were in Saint Louis, Springfield and Kansas City. So very midwestern, large firm at the time, but not large by today's measures. And I left the firm in 2004 to be a special agent with the FBI. I kind of had a post- 9/11 feeling of duty to serve my country, and I came back to Husch about in 2018, so almost six years ago when it was, but at that point, it was 750 lawyers and I think 20 different cities. So, I went from 150 in three cities, to 750 in 20, and now we're over a thousand. But I remember thinking to myself, okay, I haven't worked at this law firm in 15 years, and it's now turned into this big, huge giant law firm with all these mergers, like, how am I ever going to know who my resources are? How am I ever going to know who my people are, my friends are, like, you know, all those things, and it's kind of this intimidating thought. And really, I feel like within a week or two, I kind of feel like I had it figured out at least as much as you can. Like, it wasn't and I think that we work so so hard on integration is a word that you use, Matt, integration and culture, and I think that that's how we're able to continue to grow but maintain the culture that we had back when we were a 150 lawyers and a lot of our other predecessor firms kind of have a similar story.

Some of us used to say we have a midwestern culture, but then people who aren't from the Midwest, are like, what the heck does that mean? It basically just means you do what you say you're going do, like, you know, be a good partner, be a good firm citizen. That's not necessarily a midwestern thing, but a lot of us think it is, but it's kind of basic. Right? It's just, you know, be a good partner.

You know, you offer help when someone needs it. But those are the things that I think as we grow, and even as we grow into our virtual, we're growing a lot in Nashville right now, for example. We don't have a brick-and-mortar there, but we've got a massive team of people that have started at our firm in Nashville, and they all love our culture. And none of them are actually in an office. So, I think that really speaks volumes when you're talking about merging in groups of attorneys from other law firms that don't even come into an office, but yet they think our culture is important and impressive. So, I think, I think culture again is something that will keep you where you are. It's also something that can really make people want to run out the door pretty quickly too if you're not very protective of it.

Brendan: No. I think that's super insightful and some great perspective on culture and the impacts of M&A and that sort of thing. So, thank you. Thank you both. I'm going to move a little bit, shift a little bit over to business strategy now.

And it's that time of year. Right? Everyone's looking at closing the books on 2023 and opening them up in the new year in 2024. So, you know, the cultural alignment piece is obviously a critical component, but it's also the responsibility of all of us to think about how we communicate business strategies and objectives as we go, and we shift, and that sort of thing. So, communication has been a key theme during this webinar and so I'm really interested in the thoughts, and David, maybe you can start here on your thoughts around that and just, you know, some best practices for communicating and executing business strategies, and how to kind of keep the team aligned around them. So, I'll turn it over to you if that's okay.

David: Okay. And let me just build a bridge between what Matt and Jacque just said. So, when we talk to leaders, most can articulate their business strategy. So, what's your business strategy? Okay. They tick the box. What's your leadership strategy? What? What? What are you talking about? And then we say what then what is your leadership culture? Well, well, I don't know. Let's talk some more about that.

And so, this, there's a tension in the leadership development field between soft skills and hard skills, which I think is BS.

Hard is easier than soft.

And so, you need both. Or you need the human element. Of course, you need technical skills and be able to articulate the ROI of different strategic decisions that you make, but without people and without culture and without attending to leadership culture, the leadership strategy is going to fall short. So, now let me get into the topic of communication, which is really, really key.

Humans are storytellers. Matt, you may have mentioned that before. We are storytellers. This is how we've survived for thousands of years, and too many business leaders fail to tell stories that motivate, that stick, that inspire.

They're good at the technical. Here's how we're doing. Here are the KPIs, here's the financials, et cetera. But there are stories underneath those. And to the extent that we can be good storytellers, we will be more effective communicators. There's an older book published in 2007, for those of you in North Carolina, one of the authors – it's Chip and Dan Heath. Dan, I think, is involved with Duke University. And, and the book is called, Made to Stick. And I think the messages that they convey about sticky messages apply to this day. And I'm not going to go into them in a lot of detail, but the core is simple messages, condense the idea to the core essence.

The unexpected—use surprise to grab attention. It's really boring to hear people blah blah blah. And you know exactly what they're going to say because they've said it a lot of times.

Be credible. Make the ideas that you present concrete and believable. Abstractions aren't that good.

Appeal to people's emotions. Human beings are emotional beings. Even if on the surface somebody seems like they're not, they have no emotions. They do. We're wired to have emotions, appeal to that.

And then, you know, use stories to bring things alive. So, this is what we teach people. We actually videotape leaders, doing "rocket pitches," you know, talking about the vision that they have, various prompt questions, and then they watch themselves on a video. And it's humbling. It's scary. It's depressing, and it's inspiring. And people can learn these skills. So, let me stop there and give others a chance to weigh in.

Matt: David, that's very helpful. And I have read the Heaths' books before and including that one, and they're very helpful, and I think really sync up a lot with how I see best practices in communicating strategy. So, a confession here. I don't think I was really good at communicating our strategy as a firm until COVID. And, you know, and look, that was five, six years in to my run in leading our firm. And yet, and I realized it was because I was boring. I didn't have examples. And most of all, I didn't have this video. And I realized for the first time, okay, we're all stuck in our homes, but we can bring together, you know, three or four thousand people at the same time on a video, and I now can—it's like a whole new world. And so, we need to take—that's one of those many takeaways from our pandemic experience as a leader is to use that to your advantage, make it live. People want to see you be vulnerable and tell the truth about things, and they want to learn about the strategy by hearing stories about how it worked and how it did not work. And they begin to start to see how those words I talked about earlier with culture and strategy you can talk about each one and actually bring them to life through the stories that you tell and whatnot.

I have, in terms of communicating strategy, absolutely need somebody there who's a communication specialist. We have a director of corporate communications who's been very helpful, as well. I've used a third party as well. That's been very helpful on some really tough issues on how to think about things, and they challenged me to kind of look at things differently. So as a leader, you really ought to consider using somebody from the outside.

I mentioned the town halls, I mean doing those frequently is critical and have culture and strategy as a part of those every time. Doesn't have to be long. "And today, we're going to talk about our leadership strategy." And so, it's five minutes, whatever, and then we'll cover something else. But that's just very important.

You know, also as I go around the firm and as Tom Watson goes around the firm, we try to be very careful to bring in those stories of strategy and every encounter that we have with people and have them ready to go when we're there.

And the last thing I'll mention that I believe relates to communicating strategy. So many times, executing strategy is about change. And, you know, it's interesting hearing Jacque, hearing all that you all have built at your firm and the change that you all must have gone through in doing that, but I believe that having a strong change management process and culture is critical to really effectively communicating and executing strategy because you can remind them. Remember, this is how we change, and I believe, our firm believes, that change agility is a core skill set of any professional anywhere in the business world today. And so, we're just helping our people by teaching them about change as we also talk about communicating strategies.

I did want to throw that one in there as well. So, Jacque, I'd love to hear your views on this too, especially given that you're in a in a largely hybrid environment.

Brendan: Right.

Jacque: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I think communication is so critical because we have so many people that are remote. And even, you know, we have, you know, I don't even know how many hundreds of partners we have at our law firm now, but our partner meetings are, you know, Webex meetings, right? We don't sit in a room together as partners.

So, you know, I think that when it comes to communicating to your team, to your firm, to even smaller, you know, pockets of those teams, I think some things that you guys both said that I picked up on, I actually wrote down some of them, is I am a big fan of communication. I think you have to communicate. It kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier about being transparent and authentic. But I think in order to be a good communicator, I think you have to be genuine.

People have to believe what you're saying, and they have to believe that you actually care. So, I definitely think that, you know, telling stories and making things personal is very important, but also people have to believe what you're saying. So, I'm a big fan of being super genuine and authentic. I also, this comes into play for me in a couple different ways personally.

One is in my practice. I'm a private wealth attorney, which means I'm talking about estate planning and business succession planning and family governance and stuff. So, I'm talking about very complicated technical stuff all the time, but you have to be able to figure out how to make that simple to understand.

Even the most intelligent person in the world, if they don't do what I do all day every day, it makes absolutely no sense to them, nor should it. Right? So, there's making complicated things simple. And even in leadership, you're talking about, you know, David, you said, you know, what's your leadership strategy versus what's your business strategy.

I think that a lot of times within leadership, we get so pulled in so many different directions with all these different initiatives going on that people can't articulate, okay, what is actually your strategy?

I don't know because there's so many different things going on that you don't know which one warrants your attention or your priorities. So, I think really keeping things simple. This goes back to CPA, right, the sequential thinking, like, one, two, three, like, get it on one page. Make it simple. Make it executable. People want to be able to know that, yes, I accomplished that. I'm a big fan of action items, to do lists, like, set it on paper, say, "Have we accomplished these things?" Yes. If not, why, where did we fall down? You know, what are the things that we learned? I'm a big fan of learning from successes and failures.

I think you always learn something. Again, it kind of goes back to surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you are because I think that everybody, no matter where you are in your career, and whether you're a leader or not, you should be learning something every single day.

Otherwise, I think we get bored, and I think we get stale. And I think that also can kind of shrivel up your culture when people just feel like they're just turning their wheels, you know, day in and day out. So, I think motivating, exciting and educating people are things that we have to do in terms of this communication and strategy that we've been talking about.

Brendan: I think that's super insightful. And I think, you know, what you're getting at there, Jacque, is about personal growth. Right? And finding ways to help people feel like they're constantly growing, I think is really important and can be very, very engaging.

That was super insightful discussion.

Thanks to all three of you. I'm really hoping it helps our audience build and communicate and execute on their business plans for the new year in 2024. We're going to open it up for some questions. So, if you have a question, just a reminder, bottom right-hand corner of your screen, just type your question in and hit send, and we will get those up.

While we're doing that, just a couple seconds on First Citizens Bank and our Middle Market Banking team. A big shout out to our relationship managers that work across the country, helping middle market businesses grow and succeed and execute their strategies. It's fundamental to what we do to really bring value and share ideas and insights. And so, this is just an example of that.

We'd love to get in touch with you if we're not already in touch with you, and just give you an opportunity to learn a little bit more about our approach and the collaborative and consultative approach we take to banking clients.

So, in one other quick shout out, we continue to grow, and so today, we're announcing two new leaders in our Boston market that are going to be joining our Middle Market Banking team to expand our coverage in the Northeast, and we're super excited about that. So more to come on Linked In with a big announcement coming there.

And so, we'll get right to our first question, if that's okay, just in the interest of everybody's time. And, I guess, there's a couple things that have come in. Let's see.

So, what guidance do you have for leading through today's increasingly polarized world?

Matt: Hmm, boy.

Brendan: That's a full one.

Matt: I'll tackle that one. I want to also hear Jacque and David have to say. It's really something if you're a leader, you need to be prepared and don't wait until something happens, go ahead and get your policy and your mind around it before it happens because you'll be moving quickly, and you don't want to have to process it in, you know, three hours. You want to have a long time to really understand that and get consensus, you know, from your team as well about how best to handle these things. So that's number one.

But I would say we have been very clear to our people outside of having an event happen about how we will respond when these things happen. So, everybody understands we are not a political organization. Politics is nowhere in any of those cultures and strategies that we've been talking about. We, in fact, we want all the views at the table. We don't want just one or two, and, you know, we don't want to attack any one or two. And so, we want them all at the table.

And as a result, we're not going to take a position on things like that with one exception. And that is when issues that happen in the world or in our communities impact our people directly and think tragedy, think injustice, think things like that. We will do it in the context of our people, and maybe our clients if they're impacted.

But otherwise, you know, political matters or rulings or laws or whatever, we're just not going to get into it. And the point there is less what we decided to do, but more, we've told our people that in advance. So, they understand and, you know, if anybody's watching from the outside, they understand. We're not going to do that because it really works against what we're trying to build.

Brendan: So, you're setting up the expectation on the front end. Right?

Matt: Correct.

Brendon: Then no one's—there's no real question about how you're going to approach it.

Matt: That's right.

Brendan: Makes good sense.

David: Yeah. Maybe I can jump in here. Humans, we're wired to be polarized. We carry around 180 documented cognitive biases. And one of them is called the in-group bias where we favor members of our own group, our own social identity group or groups over members of other groups. That leads to polarization, stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination.

Or the out-group homogeneity bias. That's a lot of words, but we perceive members of other groups as being more like each other than they are and perceive members of our own group as being more diverse.

And so, when these cognitive biases, if we can become aware of them, especially as leaders, then we get into what we've written about—boundary spanning leadership. That part of leadership is bringing people together who believe on the surface that they're different than other people, but there's so many commonalities. I recently was in Singapore and was facilitating an executive program, CEOs, 14 people from 10 countries.

And when they walk in the room, they think they're all different. And by the fifth day, they see so many commonalities in core values, in career and life aspirations, in all kinds of things. And so that's what we need to do. Yes, there are differences. Yes, we are tribal. Yes, we are polarized. But in the middle of that, in the middle of that tension and conflict, there's commonality and common purpose. That's what we need to elevate and shine a light on and have people help people understand that there is that as well.

Brendan: Very good. That's super helpful, David. Thank you. We did have one come in for Jacque. Jacque, how do you view culture's role in employee recruitment and retention?

Jacque: Oh, that's a good question. I think a lot of times, you know, that is a thing that's a big differentiator for us in recruiting.

In other words, you know, people want to know that they're not just coming to work at a "big law" law firm. You know, big law firms have a reputation of not really caring about people. It's all about, you know, billing hours and being chained to your desk so to speak. So, I think when we talk about how important culture is to us, I think that's really something that people pay attention to when we're recruiting whether it's individuals or groups.

I think people have lots of really great questions about that, and I think those of us that are interviewing people to join us in that recruiting process all have our own personal stories of how culture has impacted us in a positive way, such as my example that I gave earlier about, you know, coming back to this law firm. The one thing that's kind of interesting, you know, I interview a lot of folks whether they're for my team or for other positions in the firm and, you know, we talk about our culture. We talk about how much we love it here.

And then after you hire these people, they come back to you and say, you know what? All the things that you said were true. What benefit would there be to not tell you the truth about that? So, I told you our culture is so great and you get here like well actually no it doesn't.

So, that's the thing that's kind of cool is they'll say all those things that you said, they're actually true. But so, I think the fact that we're very passionate about our culture and very protective of it, I think it comes through when we're interviewing people and talking to people and trying to recruit them to our firm. And then, to that point, if you don't actually do the things you say you're going to do, then you don't retain those people. So, I think recruiting, integration, retention—they all go hand in hand.

And I think that the retention piece of it is doing what you say you were going to do. So don't tell somebody your culture is a certain way, recruit them on that basis and then have them join your team and be like, wait time out. Like, this isn't at all what you told me. Or even just over time, so it's not an immediate issue. It's how do you retain those people over time through their careers, through changes in their careers, through changes in their life, you know, whether it's, you know, they've had children or positive things, negative things. So, it's a long-term investment and commitment is the way I view it. And I think you have to be flexible and meet people where they are, culture is going to be different to every single person and how much they value it and how important it is to them. So, I think making sure you recognize the importance of it, and each person's experience of it, I think is something that's really important to do.

Brendan: I think that's very, very true and well said. Thank you. And really, I want to thank each of you for your insights today, the thought-provoking discussion, and for sharing your time and expertise with us. It's super valuable and very helpful. And I want to thank our audience for joining our Middle Market Banking webinar today as well.

We'll share information on our next webinar and ways to engage with our team via email, and of course on our social media channels and FirstCitizens.com. Thanks again for joining us today. We hope you have a very happy holiday season and a strong start to 2024. Take care everybody. Thank you.