Laura Butler: Leading People and Culture Through the AI Era

Speaker A: Foreign. Covey C Suite Conversations I'm your host Patrick Leddon and today we're exploring what it means to lead people and culture in a world that's changing faster than ever. My guest is Laura Butler. She's the chief people officer at ttech, a leading global customer experience technology and services innovator delivering AI enabled CX solutions. Laura leads people and culture programs for get this folks, 54,000 employees who speak more than 50 languages and operate in 70 plus sites across six continents. That's a lot. She's known for building global talent led organizations and crafting exceptional employee experiences. Before joining TTech, she played roles at large and small companies across the board where she has led people functions in some very tech focus forward entities. In our conversation we'll talk about how to balance technology with humanity, maintain culture through disruption and help people move from simply complying with change to truly committing to it. Whether you lead a team or an entire organization, I think you'll find Laura's insights practical, inspiring and deeply human. With that said, Laura, thanks so much for joining us today.

Speaker B: So happy to be here and talk to you.

Speaker A: We're so happy to have you here. You know, I want to jump right in and just ask you a little bit about your story and you've had a remarkable career. I had the chance to do a bit of digging in it and you and I talked previously before we hit start. You've done a lot with leading people and culture. What are some of your experiences that helped shape the way you approach leadership and growth?

Speaker B: It's interesting, I think that leadership is one of the most important decisions that companies can make. When you even look at shaping culture, that the quality of leaders, uh, in their ability to role model, learning, their ability to role model and operating rhythm, to set a pace, a tone, uh, create a safe culture where you can speak up that there really isn't. Even when you look at selecting leaders and what that tells people in the organization about, oh, that's what it takes to get promoted. Leadership is one of the most important areas for an organization to invest in and it's never done. A leader evolving and growing is never done. That's a very important, um, there's not a class you can take and now you're good or you know, some assessment that you do and now you're, it's perfect. It's just an ongoing evolution, um, that I think makes the biggest difference between companies that are successful and those that are not.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's so true. It's not that you can get In a room for two hours and you check that block and you're just kind of done or you're done for the next decade. Have you always been interested in leadership? Was there something early on that kind of pointed you in the direction of the importance of that?

Speaker B: Well, I think that starting off my career, I didn't understand the importance of leadership. It was about getting the work done. What did they ask me to do, let me get that done. And really didn't start understanding that. The importance of understanding why. Um, and leaders that painted bigger pictures of why are we getting it done, what is our purpose, uh, this is where we're going. And what the broader context is became increasingly more important in my career. In fact, I'll always remember, you know, crucible moments in people's lives was around 911 and in 911 no one really was certain in the US what it meant. What's going to happen next? Are people ever going to buy things again? Like what is the world going to look like? And leadership? And I worked for a company that the leaders at the time did hard things and made some hard decisions that set us up for long term success. And I will always admire that they did that with transparency. They explained what was at stake. They helped understand their decision making and the way that they role modeled how difficult it was for some of the personal decisions they had to make to separate some people that were good people and they were comfortable talking about it. And they didn't use jargon and they didn't use buzzwords and they just were human. And the authenticity and the role modeling and the decisiveness is still something that inspires me today to say as a leader, if you can be authentic, present role model that, be decisive, but provide context, it really matters. That's really when I saw the rubber hit the road. That was leadership that wasn't about a project to be done or, or an EBITDA number to hit or a revenue number. It was operating in uncertainty. And this is what we're doing and how we're gonna take the hill. And it inspired teamwork and confidence and unity. And then you look at the crucible event of the recessions and even ah, Covid, um, and that type of leadership, I think those principles are universal.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting too on those type of leadership experiences. And I love that you went to a positive one. You said this is something that really shaped me. Cause sometimes it's really easy to go to the negative one, somebody do this, that or the other. But you went to a positive one and the things that they did, those leaders did that I would imagine that that didn't come out of thin air one day. They were probably, whether they knew it or not, kind of preparing for those moments.

Speaker B: It's true. And I think that it's interesting people that are students of leadership. I worked for a leader, uh, actually um, at Workfront who one of the most important elements for him was developing a leadership institute and codifying specific leadership behaviors that were, and actually Franklin Covey was a part of that curriculum, um, was around how do we create a leadership experience that gives leaders those tools? Because some will gravitate towards that and will find and read and learn. But not everyone has that opportunity or motive. And so keeping everyone aligned on the type of leadership culture behaviors, how to set goals, cascade those through an organization to create execution, get things done that, that investment I believe is what really helped galvanize the workforce culture to something I think anyone there at Workfront would be, you know, this was a very special time for us. But also it allowed Workfront to have a terrific outcome with uh, the Adobe acquisition. And so it, it also showed when you're investing in that type of unity what you get. Uh, and even at a, uh, larger company at PG&E made an extraordinary long term investment in leaders from supervisors all the way through to senior leaders in the organization on an ongoing basis. And it helped keep a very safe culture that kept everyone aligned towards a common purpose and this common notion of growth, ah, and learning, mindset and agility that resulted from that. So I've seen some great outcomes from investing in leadership.

Speaker A: I've seen um, in my career and I've been kind of playing in this space for a long time, three decades or so. Um, I've seen some executive teams or let's say the CEO that has a really clear um, understanding of why they want to develop leaders and they recognize it's a strategic imperative to do it and it takes a fair amount of time and they invest the time and energy and resources into kind of trying to get it right. Then I've seen other side of the spectrum that says we don't need to do any of that. People just figure it out on their own. And you see some things in the middle. Like I'm doing it not because it's strategic, it's just that I feel it's like the right thing to do to invest in people. Um, you mentioned a couple of examples where your senior leaders were doing it for really strategic reasons. Um, have you been drawn to leaders who do it that way, have you been fortunate to find them? Have you helped influence them? How did that dynamic play out?

Speaker B: Well, I would say that I am drawn to leaders that invest in leadership or even understand the importance of investing in leadership quality, um, and development. I think that the maturity of the organizations may vary, but the leaders themselves, I Frankly feel like CEOs more and more universally are in the seat because they value leadership. Though, uh, I was actually recently at uh, a CEO event that had many, many CEOs and those that I talked to all said legitimately and authentically. The single most important thing that they focus on is leadership quality. They spend time interviewing new leaders, successors, developing successors that they feel like the return on investing in leadership quality, decision making, clarity, that is what pays dividends for the rest of the organization. It's the single most important thing they can do to influence the entire company.

Speaker A: You know, it's interesting you say that because there's so much, you know, changing. You're feeling it in your industry, everybody's feeling it in their industry. Um, and it's not that things haven't always been changing. I mean, change is a constant. But there's some certain things, technology certainly fueling things that are moving quickly and some things that some organizations or industries that felt like they were going to be pretty stagnant for the next ten, uh, years from a development or change perspective are getting completely revamped. But so there's a lot of organizations I'll talk to where the senior leaders know where they want to take the business. They might say, okay, we need to, we need to really transform in some ways or we won't be around in 10 years. I mean, they're kind of really thinking like that. But then they look at the people in their organization and they're wondering, do I have the leaders? Do I have the culture that can get, get us there? And I think that that might be one of the reasons where there's this continued saying we have to invest in the right leaders because that's almost the bottleneck that'll keep us from achieving our strategy. Or the amplifier m mixing analogies there or the amplifier that'll really get this thing moving.

Speaker B: It's a good point. And I think the leadership skills that are needed right now are skills that are brand new. I mean, who can raise their hand and say, I've worked in AI transformation for a decade. This is all new to everyone. It's creating new products, new operating rhythms, new profit margins, all sorts of things that leaders are confronting for the first time. And I think there is a, uh, buy versus build mentality. It'd be so much easier, hey, I just want to buy this resource, have them come in and magically help the entire organization understand what it's going to take to lead in the next five years. But we can't, we don't have time for that. We need to infuse an urgency like we've never seen before around transformation. And so I feel like this notion, um, around leadership has never been as important as it is now. Investing in leaders and growing leaders and focusing on when you think the person might be a roadblock, being more clear about that and telling people what the expectations are that I'll use as an example. In our organization we have a number of people who have adopted AI, uh, and a number of people who have not. And as long as it seems optional, you get the people who are like, this is great, and the ones that aren't, but the level of impact of AI across and the urgency that that's driving, we need to push people faster. And part of that is creating. This is actually a core expectation. And once you create it from this hobby to a core expectation of your role, and here's the enabling tools to do it, here's the roadmap, and now follow along. It's easier to tell. Okay, now I can tell. Is it the person, is it their will or is it their skill? And if it's their skill, that's a lot easier to solve for. But really being clear as a company to prioritize what matters. Because sometimes people, the reason they appear as an obstacle is because they don't have clarity on, um, what's trying, what you're trying to do. And so once you provide that clarity, it takes people and it moves them a lot faster.

Speaker A: Right? Because otherwise I'm like, okay, I get that strategy, I understand what you're trying to do, boss type of thing. But I'm back here at my desk at ah, my workspace. I don't know what to do with this thing. It just sounds like this big, perhaps scary thing to some people called AI. And what tends to happen is if I'm not sure what to do with something, I kind of stay in that emotional state where I'm either ignoring it happening or I'm experiencing a bunch of anxiety or fear associated with it. And we usually don't make our best decisions in either place.

Speaker B: Well, and it goes down to time. Recently I, I took a, a course on AI, uh, and I honestly did not have the time, but I had to make the time. Because if, if you don't make the time, it's that if, even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you stand still. And that's never been more true with AI. And I think that's one of the. The more difficult is figuring out how do I fit in time to learn about how to leverage these tools and the magic about AI. And we were talking earlier about that paradox on it's both easier and harder than ever to achieve extraordinary productivity. But if you do invest the time in learning how to leverage AI in your day to day work, it actually gives you more time on the back end. That's one, that's one thing that isn't always true on training, but that is true here with AI, is that investment in time will give you more. Uh, and leaders are impacted by us going through different roles to say, can this be automated or not? And when people create a new job in our company, they have to indicate why AI could or couldn't do that job. But it's limited by their knowledge about what AI can do. Well, how do you get that knowledge? Well, it takes time. Well, how do you get time? And it's just this circle. Yeah, it actually has to be carving that out.

Speaker A: I was actually talking to an executive the other day who took some time to take a class and she was like, wow, it's, it's pretty intense. I'm learning a lot. It does take a fair amount of time. But she said she was starting to wonder. I don't know how somebody in this C suite can operate in the future if they don't have an understanding of AI. You can't just leave it to your, you know, CIO to tell you things because it's so embedded in everything you're doing. You need to be able to ask what platforms it's on, what this, that and the other, about that particular solution that's being brought in. You know, earlier when we were talking, um, you mentioned, you said that something I wrote down you said when you were at. Was it workfront, you said it was a special, it was a special time for us. And I just, I just smiled when you, when you said that because I think culturally in organizations, there's just some times in our career where we have something that was a special time for me. I really enjoyed that. And we tend to think it was like lightning in a bottle. Like it just kind of happens sometimes. But you could do a lot to set a culture up to create those special times for people. What have you learned? And uh, I know it's a broad question, but like, about the importance of culture, about developing culture, especially in a place that's moving so fast.

Speaker B: It's interesting. I'm lucky, you know, as you mentioned, it feels like lightning in a bottle, but I bottled up, uh, I've been part of that lightning in a bot more than once in my career. And the commonality there is when people have knowledge and awareness of how the leaders are thinking. The senior leadership team, do they get along? Are they aligned, are they seeing things the same way? There's this shortening in each of those organizations, big and small, a shortening of the distance between a line worker, regardless of levels. But the CEO is accessible. People feel like they understand the decision making, etc. And they create a feeling of connectedness around purpose, that here is our purpose, here's what we're out to do. And that connectedness and we're in this together creates an incredible emotional intensity that I'm not just we can do our jobs at rinse, repeat, any company, you know, right. There's for example in hr, employee relations exists in any company. But why this one and not that one? It's that connectedness, the authenticity of leadership, the driving towards purpose and a common vision that you believe in. Um, that's the galvanizing factor that creates co workers that like each other, trust each other, want to talk to each other, have a little bit of fun. It's not all about the project list that you, uh, know, did you get all 10 things done?

Speaker A: You know, it's interesting, when you were talking earlier about the leadership during 911 in your organization, I jotted down to myself the idea that those leaders were both, they had, they had expectations for performance, but they also demonstrated care for people even in some of the most difficult decisions. And when you think about the cultural aspect that we were just going, you were just talking through the idea of being able to create a degree of transparency and kind of immediacy, kind of breaking down that psychological distance between the C suite and the frontline employees. These are the things that allow leaders at every level to expect a lot from their people and also care for them because they understand where are we going and what do we care about? What do we value? What are the boundaries? What decisions can I make? Where's risk at? I mean all of those type of things come oftentimes from having that level of clarity and ongoing communication.

Speaker B: It's true. And I think that it's. And you know, you hit on communication. I Think is harder than ever. Communication and change because there's so much of both that especially in communication, there are people who prefer email, that prefer video, that prefer podcasts, that prefer any number of things. And so even creating it sounds simple. Just create the intimacy shortens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Things, right. Super simple.

Speaker A: You'll get along. You'll start that on Monday. You'll be done by Thursday, long weekend. Right? No problem.

Speaker B: Totally. Totally. Exactly. And the difficulty is that there are all of these channels and there's this deep personalization. This is where I think AI is so exciting to me and what that can do. So when you look at even uh, the capability of these digital assistants or digital twins, one of the things I think about is like Kim Scott has Google, um, portrait her digital, uh, twin, for lack of a better word, where you can go in and have her coach you on giving someone feedback. Amazing. And I just imagine when leaders, great leaders are able to have the same sort of accessibility where you don't need to get calendar time, which is always so difficult, but actually shortening that distance. Imagine if you had questions for the CEO and you could interact with their digital twin around different questions and strategy and which way to go. And I'm thinking about this, but it wasn't actually them. Um, what would that unlock? But that's this expansion that I think AI helps, uh, provide. Even thinking about coaching, not all leaders, some leaders are really good at execution. Here are the things you need to do, go do it. But they might not be the fuzziest leaders around coaching. And some people need different things from leaders. And the opportunity that AI provides by allowing us access to digital coaching and helping us, uh, get what we from AI instead of relying solely, uh, my leader needs to be all things to me. They need to be my, you know, my task director, they need to be my therapist, they need to be my, you know, my career coach. But really allowing an expansiveness to get what you need in order to be your best. Yeah, I think AI is going to really help that.

Speaker A: I love the excitement level in your voice too. I kind of see it as we're talking. So here's one thing to think about too, is that that organizations are increasing the span of control for leaders. Historically, when I was growing up or things like that and learning early on about leadership, they're like, okay, uh, a five to eight person span of control is what you'll have as a leader. But we're seeing many multiples of that. People listening to this podcast M might be like, I wish there Were only five people reporting to my leader. There's a bunch of us. And the question becomes how can I run from meeting to meeting and serve the needs of 27 people on my team? And AI is going to give us some ability to do that because it can begin to respond in your authentic voice.

Speaker B: That's exactly right. And this is so important because you uh, know, I think we just saw uh, the headlines continue around this m. Middle layers that are getting collapsed all the time. And even as you think about talent development and capabilities that leaders who have never had those spans before and have them for the first time think about doing 27 one on ones. Well that's 27 hours potentially of your week. And so even the notion of is doing a one on one, what's the right frequency and context there has something has to give. And that's where I think AI can magically step in to help fill that gap and fill that void. And we just need to redefine what does management in the AI era look like?

Speaker A: Yeah. What's your org chart going to look like, team leader in the future? Do you have bots over here doing certain things? Do you have people kind of. Are you are you have, you have carbon based solutions, life forms and silicon based ones as well? Um, well you talked about, you latched onto the word communication when I said it. I'm just curious. When I read it was exhausting earlier when I read the introduction I'm like 70 plus countries, 54,000 people, um, you know, 50 languages, six continents. That's what I remember were the things that I read earlier. Um, I just wonder what's it like kind of leading across globally generations, constant transformation, a uh, 24 hour clock that never stops. What's it like in your world trying to have a positive impact across that type of entity?

Speaker B: Well, I think that it creates a need to focus on what's important and ensure that people have access to the information they need when they need it. So there's this push of communication. I sent a memo out, I did this. Didn't you get that? Didn't you read that? Didn't you go to that webinar and

Speaker A: I'll send this back, I'll send it back, put it at the top of your box again type of thing.

Speaker B: It's like totally, totally. It's just too. And, and then all of the things that people are sifting through and I know AI is helping with that too. But the point being is there needs to be an ability for people to access what they need and Ask questions when they need to know those types of things rather than this constant push. And again with AI and large language models, uh, we're able, we're actually uh, have a knowledge bot that you can ask questions to about policies and procedures and different elements. This notion of I need to be able to get answers when I need them and have seekers instead of having this one way communication which I think has been historically the way that things have worked. But AI is offering an ability to now pivot that in a more real time conversational way to get people what they need when they need it. Because the illusion we hire, you know, several thousand people a week and so even if we communicated something last week in a memo, you know, that's not going to be something that the new hires are going to be able to access.

Speaker A: Never saw it. Yeah. Uh, you know, as you were saying that this is kind of funny, I was thinking about when I. So I've been married 34 years and when I first got married, I remember we bought our home early, relatively early on and somebody gave me, maybe my father gave me one of those books that's like how to repair everything in your home. It was like, you know, a big book with all sorts of things about what you could repair. And I probably cracked it open a few times. But now with YouTube I can just whatever I need it. I could have somebody instruct me and not only somebody instruct me, but I could choose from 10 different people to instruct me about how to, how to change you know, a gasket on something or replace the garbage disposal. And it's just kind of interesting. You can sit, you can have that reference manual sitting over there that you may never seek or crack open as opposed to like in the moment. Here's what I need and uh, my wife is think things have gotten so much handier around the house. It's like no, I just better taking in the media apparently.

Speaker B: It's such an interesting paradigm and I love that story for a few reasons. I learned how to fold a fitted sheet on YouTube actually, which I thought was a miracle. But um, I feel like uh, the notion of asking for help and getting help, it's unbelievable how many people don't think about that. Did you Google that? What research did you do in order to come to that conclusion? I feel like we really need to pivot that and tell stories like the one you just told. So in our company we have this 60 second power ups during all our uh, our all hands that has people share a story of a transformation that they've done, it only takes 60 seconds so we can share a few of them in a short period of time so people can see and go, oh, I didn't even think of using AI to do that. I didn't even think of using that, you know, YouTube to learn how to do that. I didn't even think of that. And watching, we need to create more of those sparks. And so even when you talked earlier about what about the leaders that maybe, uh, speed bumps, sometimes there's speed bumps because they just, they need a little inspiration and a little spark and once they get that, everything else unlocks. And it's like, well, gosh, I'm doing this all the time now. I'm always using that. How did I not. Even when I think about something like Outlook, if you look at an expert in Outlook, what they will take you through is something like you've never experienced what Outlook can do. And like I thought it just send and receive email, right? Put things in folders. No, no, no. There's this whole thing that it can do, but talking and sharing stories is critically important and making time to do that will pay dividends in the long run.

Speaker A: You know, it's so true with like applications, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, I probably use 10 to 15% of their functionality. And when you see somebody who really does it, well, it's like, wow, when you mentioned the idea of I hadn't even thought about using that or I didn't consider doing that, uh, it's funny how, and you're exactly right, when somebody starts to realize they can use it for this and then for that, and then for that they go from I didn't think about using that to why I can't imagine not thinking about going that way or using that tool to help me figure that out. As we, as we wrap up the conversation, there's listeners that are all over the place in their career, right? There's people who are in senior roles like yourself saying, hey, I want to, uh, get some insights from Laura. There's other people that are early on and maybe they're just kind of wondering what's going on in the, in senior leaders heads. There's also some people early on they may not want to necessarily, necessarily, or maybe they do, or um, maybe they don't even know yet want to move up into more leadership roles or stay on more of a technical path or whatever it might be, but anything you can think of that's just kind of good advice career wise for all of them, regardless of what they See as their future.

Speaker B: Well, I think the one thing that I had always wished that I had known was there is a job out there that takes everything that you love and that you're good at, and it's. And there is a job out there that exists or will exist in the future. And as you're building the skills that you need, going out to the Internet and finding the jobs that you think would be phenomenal, even if you're not qualified, even if they're not the skills you have, you can then build a portfolio that you start building those skills. I did that when I was in meeting planning and I wanted to go into tech. I looked at jobs, and I was in absolutely no way close to being qualified, but I thought, ooh, maybe I'll write a database to manage my meetings. And that's what I did. And it starts to build that. And also in my role, chief people Officer, this job keeps changing. I go out and I look at other job descriptions around chief people officer, and I see, ooh, they're doing that. I'm not doing that. Maybe I should. What skill might I need? And we constantly need to grow and cultivate our skills more. More than getting to the title into the next level, we need to really be building skills, and then the title, the career, and the job will come. That is absolutely magic.

Speaker A: You know, I love that idea that it's out there. And I also love the idea that you can do something to put yourself in the driver's seat here as opposed to feeling like all this other stuff's just out to get me. Or if I roll the dice, I might get lucky. It's like, no, no, no. You can begin to shape that future, which is awesome. Well, Laura, thank you so much for joining us. That 30 minutes flew by for me. I'm sure it did for the listeners as well. And I just want to say thank you for joining us. Um, we really appreciate it. And just keep doing all the great stuff you're doing.

Speaker B: Thank you. My pleasure.

Speaker A: Well, folks, that was Laura Butler sharing some powerful insights on leadership, transformation, and the future of work. Her perspective reminds us, while technology drives much of today's change, it's still people who make progress possible through connection, creativity, and as she mentioned, that one story about 911 care. As we wrap up, I want to thank you, our listeners, for being part of this journey. Over the course of C Suite conversations, we've had the privilege of learning from some remarkable leaders who challenge us to think differently and lead more intentionally. The podcast will now go on hiatus as we take time to reflect, recharge, and plan what's next. In the meantime, I encourage you to revisit past episodes, share them with your teams, and continue applying the ideas that have inspired you. On, uh, behalf of the entire Franklin Covey team, thank you for listening, for learning, and for leading alongside us.