You Must Build Trust. We have historically been big proponents of Patrick Lencioni’s work and have had various programs over the years to help develop our leadership team’s capabilities around trust building and creating a healthy organization and culture. We were fortunate going into the pandemic that we had some familiarity with the right tools around trust and empathetic leadership.
Further, the traditional office environment places us all in a way that our co-workers become familiar with our “work person” only. During the pandemic, we have all been working mostly at home which means we are often seeing right into each other’s homes and personal lives. That’s been a great opportunity to get to know each other better and to see our colleagues beyond the traditional work role we all play. Whether it’s meeting their children, getting to know their pets or their spouses or partners, we have all benefited from this experience and it has allowed us to be more vulnerable and to accelerate trust and mutual respect in many cases. When people have a strong foundation of trust and vulnerability with one another, no one wants to let the other person down, and getting to the brass tacks of what needs to be done seems to become second nature.
Weare living in a new world in which offices are becoming obsolete. How can teams effectively communicate if they are never together? Zoom and Slack are excellent tools, but they don’t replicate all the advantages of being together. What strategies, tools and techniques work to be a highly effective communicator, even if you are not in the same space? In this interview series, we are interviewing business leaders who share the strategies, tools and techniques they use to effectively and efficiently communicate with their team who may be spread out across the world. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing LaVonne Brown.
LaVonne Brown is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Savant Wealth Management, an independent wealth management firm with 18 locations across the country. She is a Certified Culture Revolutionary from Zappos Insights and a graduate of the Disney Institute Approach to Quality Service. Prior to joining Savant, LaVonne was a recognized senior-level marketing and communications leader in her region’s tourism, hospitality, and non-profit industry.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Pursuing degrees in communications launched my career path. I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in communications from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and a Master of Science degree in integrated marketing communications from West Virginia University. Prior to my current role, I worked in the tourism, hospitality, and non-profit industry. I really thought that was where I would stay, but then I met the founders of Savant through a regional Vistage group. They had this amazing business model with a unique fee structure where the company does well when their clients do well. They truly help people, and I was drawn to that structure along with the Savant people and culture right away. After that, the rest is history as they say!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Transitioning out of the tourism sector into the financial sector just before the 2008 financial crisis and recession hit was an interesting bit of timing. After a quiet first few weeks, the financial markets suddenly became volatile and my orientation to the sector was dramatically accelerated! It really forced me to lean into my new role and not let my newness in the industry get in the way. Our clients and our team members needed help, and everyone sprang into action. My experience in the tourism industry, where we often had to “make it work,” applied as we quickly adapted and came up with new ways to communicate with our stakeholders. When we are the most uncomfortable and stretched to our limits are often the times when we grow the most. Looking back, it was probably one of the best training grounds and life lessons for me.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that is relevant to you in your life?
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” — Zig Ziglar
I think our own minds and our own thoughts can be our worst enemy if we allow our self-doubt to take control. If we sit, wait, question, ponder and allow self-doubt, we can never really get started on achieving our goals in life. Every single person has doubted themselves at some point. We cannot let that stop us from acting or moving forward. Learning how to be focused, envisioning what we want to accomplish and having the discipline to plan, and act are so important. They can build confidence and allow us to take the first step, so the next time gets easier. Over time, with some wins under your belt, that little voice of self-doubt gets a little quieter and we learn how to overcome our fears. This quote is a great reminder to all of us to just act and to get started on achieving our goals, regardless of any doubts we may have. And don’t let the desire for perfection be the enemy of the good.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I have been extremely fortunate to have had several brilliant people throughout my life who have helped me develop in my career and as a person. Brent Brodeski and Dick Bennett at Savant have helped me grow tremendously in my career. As two of the organization’s founders, they are great visionaries, mentors, and business leaders, and they are very good people too.
Brent and Dick invested a lot of time and effort into onboarding me amid the financial crisis and further encouraged me to expand my capabilities through education, industry study groups, assessment tools and beyond. I will be forever grateful to them and the experience they have given me with Savant. I remember wondering early in my time here how I would ever learn all of the ins and outs of the industry. Dick patiently encouraged me along. I recall a time when his words had a profound impact on me when he said, “you are a highly motivated and focused individual and I believe that whatever you put your mind to you will achieve it.” Actions and words from mentors, leaders or managers can make the difference between someone believing in themselves and rising to the occasion or falling victim to self-doubt and insecurity.
Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The pandemic has changed so many things about the way we behave. One of them of course, is how we work and how we communicate in our work. Many teams have started working remotely. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunity but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits of having a team physically together?
Working together in the same environment lends itself to what I would call “common ground.” Things are familiar to us when we are all working in a similar physical space, i.e. the same tools and equipment, a similar design in the physical office space. Aside from that, there are several other benefits:
- You can’t underestimate the impact of camaraderie and bonding at in-person events.
- Being physically together makes it easier to read and convey body language, tone of voice, and mood.
- Being in the same room allows for more natural collaboration and brainstorming.
- It’s easier to demonstrate or communicate tangible concepts in person. You can write on a whiteboard, point to a spot on a graph, or hand someone an object. Sure, you can do these things through Zoom, but there’s a learning curve. There have been so many times where I just wanted to pick up a marker and write on a whiteboard.
- Being together in a shared office often includes robust company equipment (computers, software, phones, network, and printers), on-site IT support, reliable business-speed internet, and quiet workspace (no deliveries, no pets, no kids, no spouse). These resources, which we have taken for granted until recently, keep us all productive.
On the flip side, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main challenges that arise when a team is not in the same space?
When working outside of a controlled office environment, there are a myriad of challenges that can arise. To name just a few:
- Video burnout/Zoom fatigue is real!
- Balancing workloads and knowing what others are working on
- Communicating priorities, goals, and tasks
- Managing large virtual meetings (participants speaking on top of each other, muting participants who should be muted and unmuting people trying to speak, keeping the attention of the audience behind a screen)
- Building trust behind a screen can be harder
Specifically, for employees who are working from home, top challenges that come to mind include:
- Troubleshooting technology without on-site IT support
- Risk of burnout for always being “on”
- Home life distractions during working hours
Fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? What are your “5 Things You Need To Know To Communicate With Your Team Effectively Even If You Are Rarely In The Same Physical Space? (Please share a story or example for each.)
#1. Your Organization/Team Must have the Right Tools/Foundation
A large part of our success at Savant can be attributed to our tech infrastructure and general core values of lifetime learning and growth.
To work effectively as a remote work team, technology like video conferencing and file sharing MUST be available. Training and policies around the expectations of how and when to use them are absolutely necessary. Our team has had great success working with Zoom; we’ve adopted it not only for video calls but also as a tool for ongoing collaboration and instant messaging one another. It has been a nice change of pace from the volume of emails that continue to pour in.
The organization must be committed to and embrace technology. It should constantly re-evaluate and evolve its technology infrastructure. Then when hiring employees, look for candidates who are lifelong learners, flexible and willing to embrace and learn new technology.
#2. You Must Build Trust
We have historically been big proponents of Patrick Lencioni’s work and have had various programs over the years to help develop our leadership team’s capabilities around trust building and creating a healthy organization and culture. We were fortunate going into the pandemic that we had some familiarity with the right tools around trust and empathetic leadership.
Further, the traditional office environment places us all in a way that our co-workers become familiar with our “work person” only. During the pandemic, we have all been working mostly at home which means we are often seeing right into each other’s homes and personal lives. That’s been a great opportunity to get to know each other better and to see our colleagues beyond the traditional work role we all play. Whether it’s meeting their children, getting to know their pets or their spouses or partners, we have all benefited from this experience and it has allowed us to be more vulnerable and to accelerate trust and mutual respect in many cases. When people have a strong foundation of trust and vulnerability with one another, no one wants to let the other person down, and getting to the brass tacks of what needs to be done seems to become second nature.
#3. Communicate, Communicate and Then Communicate Again!
When we are all scattered about working independently in different locations, we have found that communication needs to be stepped up considerably. For example, my department instituted regular “huddles.” At one point they were daily but now we are doing them a few times a week. A quick group touch-base video call has allowed us to stay well informed. This has prevented us from having any duplication of efforts and ensures we are all rowing in the same direction and in sync with what we must accomplish. Our team has decided that over-communicating in a remote work environment is necessary and we are more effective when we do so.
#4. Find Common Ground
When working in an office together, things are more familiar, and our surroundings are all relatively similar. When working remotely, everyone sort of has a different environment and there’s not a feeling of being “unified” as a result. As a Christmas gift this past year, I sent each member of my team a lighted “cinema box” so we can all express ourselves in a fun way and unify our Zoom backgrounds with our light boxes. The activity has turned into a fun way to be creative as a team and it makes us feel like we all have a common and unified workstation as a result. Other teams have since gotten the light boxes too, so the creativity and camaraderie are spreading throughout the firm.
#5. Create Virtual “Water Cooler” Moments
Whether it is a virtual happy hour or a “working lunch” meeting where we send an e-certificate to get something delivered via Grub Hub for the meeting, we have tried to make life in a virtual environment feel a little bit like it would if we were all together in an office. These little moments offer the opportunity to get to know each other better and maintain employee morale.
We’ve also achieved this through Zoom group messaging. Chatting about something interesting or funny that happened with the group can be a brief diversion that helps build relationships.
Has your company experienced communication challenges with your workforce working from home during the pandemic? For example, does your company allow employees to use their own cell phones or do they use the company’s phone lines for work? Can you share any other issues that came up?
We had some minor communication challenges but overall, our entire team transitioned into a work-from-home environment seamlessly. Our technology infrastructure was in a very good place when the pandemic struck, so we were quickly able to be productive in a remote operation. We had already launched Zoom and most employees were already familiar with the platform. We were able to set up a user-friendly call forwarding option where employees could either receive calls via their laptops or they could have them forwarded to an app on their personal cell phones. We launched Microsoft Teams as a collaboration tool, and some departments are quickly adapting to that tool and leveraging all that it has to offer. I would say the main issue at hand now is that we have so many tools available, we have to start making some organizational decisions about which ones to focus on and which ones to transition out.
Let’s zoom in a bit. Many tools have been developed to help teams coordinate and communicate with each other. In your personal experiences which tools have been most effective in helping to replicate the benefits of being together in the same space?
Far and above anything else, I would say that Zoom has been the number one tool that has afforded us the ability to remain connected to one another. From virtual happy hours to staff meetings, we remain highly connected to one another and it has been primarily thanks to our Zoom calls.
If you could design the perfect communication feature or system to help your business, what would it be?
Our team uses Zoom, email, Teams and a few other tools which can at times become overwhelming. There are times that I return to my desk to see that someone has left me a voice mail, emailed me, video dialed me on Zoom, messaged me on Teams and called my cell phone. Having some sort of central hub or dashboard via an app that integrates some or all these tools would be super helpful.
My particular expertise and interest is in Unified Communications. Has the pandemic changed the need or appeal for unified communications technology requirements? Can you explain?
I think a unified platform that centralizes instant messaging, video calls, phone calls and team collaboration in one place has become a need we didn’t even know we had a year ago. There are a lot of great components to many different tools, but there is not one perfect tool that allows for everything in one place. I like the ease of video calling with Zoom but I like the group collaboration with Teams. With Teams we can post, attach files, organize folders, and search. Email is great but it’s another place to have to go to keep up with others.
The technology is rapidly evolving and new tools like VR, AR, and Mixed Reality are being developed to help bring remote teams together in a shared virtual space. Is there any technology coming down the pipeline that excites you?
Interesting question and I do believe VR would offer an exciting ability to create an element of “common ground” or a space where people feel unified and connected with each other. Just the small act of my team all having a cinema light box in our offices has helped us feel more connected. I can only imagine the possibilities with enhanced technology like Mixed Reality.
Is there a part of this future vision that concerns you? Can you explain?
I would say that a little bit of this would go a long way with people, so my concern would be more on the regulation side of things. For example, could this type of technology become more of a distraction if it is overused?
Although these evolving new tools will serve a bigger role in bringing together remote teams, there’s no substitute for in-person contact and relationship building. One concern is that some companies may over-rely on technology to bring teams together for relationship building or skill development because of the cost savings. While cost savings is a good thing, we cannot lose sight of the benefit of in-person events, training and team building. Business travel to attend such events in person can still translate into better ROI.
So far we have discussed communication within a team. How has the pandemic changed the way you interact and engage your customers? How much of your interactions have moved to digital such as chatbots, messaging apps, phone, or video calls?
During the peak of the pandemic, we were conducting all our client interactions via telephone or video calls using Zoom. In recent months, some clients have had a desire to meet in person again while adhering to all the CDC guidelines such as mask wearing and social distancing. We believe the future will likely include a nice mix of both face-to-face, phone, and video conferencing.
In my experience, one of the trickiest parts of working with a remote team is giving honest feedback, in a way that doesn’t come across as too harsh. If someone is in front of you much of the nuance can be picked up in facial expressions and body language. But not when someone is remote. Can you give a few suggestions about how to best give constructive criticism to a remote team member?
I would say that constructive feedback in a remote environment is best delivered via a video call. And this is where having trust and an open communication discipline is super important. People will be more open to being vulnerable and communicating with each other if there is a solid relationship of trust, open communication, and continuous feedback loops.
The key in coaching and providing constructive feedback to me is that it should be a regular thing to begin with. Good or bad employees want to know if they are meeting expectations. Nobody likes to be surprised by something unexpected which is why managers should carve out regular one-to-one meetings with their direct reports and make it a habit of covering the good, the bad and the ugly in a constructive way and in a regular cadence.
Can you give any specific ideas about how to create a sense of camaraderie and team cohesion when you are not physically together?
I think it depends on your team and the element of customization could go a long way, but I would say basic things like carving out time and space for the “virtual water cooler” moments, building trust and open communication among your team, and finding “common ground” with each other can certainly help.
Another piece of advice I would suggest is don’t forget about traditional ways to express gratitude. A phone call instead of an email or a handwritten note can go a long way in today’s high-tech environment. For Thanksgiving this past year our leadership team designed an internal campaign telling all Savant employees, “We are thankful for you.” We had a customized thank-you card printed, then divided up all employees into groups so that they each received a hand-written thank-you note from their supervisor and one from someone else. It was a welcomed effort by all and truly made everyone feel special.
Ok wonderful. We are nearly done. Here is our last “meaty” question. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Strike the word “normal” from your vocabulary. Resist the temptation to return to traditional approaches and embrace everything we’ve learned over the last year. Get comfortable with “to be determined” as you think about moving forward. Technology is changing the way, the how, the when and the where we work. This will most definitely continue, and we have to learn to adapt, think outside of the box and be open to constantly learning and embracing new technology or new ways of executing our work. We also must get better about clarifying what it is that we need our workforce to accomplish. We’ve seen that people can accomplish a lot if they know what is expected and that their work is valued.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
It brings me great joy to help others and to see them find success. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find more on me and Savant Wealth Management at savantwealth.com, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.
About The Interviewer: David Liu is the founder and CEO of Deltapath, an award-winning unified communications company that liberates organizations from the barriers of effective communication. Liu is known for his visionary leadership, organic growth strategies, and future-forward technology. Liu is highly committed to achieving a greater purpose with technology. Liu’s business insights are regularly featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Tech Crunch, and more.
