From Values to Behaviors: How to Build a Culture of Candor

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Valentina Gissin: One of the things that my team does that is a little bit more radical when we have peer and upward feedback, we publish it to everyone so that we can show that candor is a huge part of our culture.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We’re on a mission to build a better world of work, and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I’m your host, David Rice.

My guest today is Valentina Gissin. She is the Chief People Officer at Garner Health. We’re gonna be talking about cultures of candor and how to build out behaviors into cultural competencies.

So Valentina, welcome!

Valentina Gissin: Hello. Great to be here.

David Rice: When we were talking before this, you mentioned you were speaking about institutionalizing culture at scale. I’m curious, what does that actually look like inside of a fast moving healthcare startup? What makes it stick?

Valentina Gissin: It’s not easy. I’ll start with what it’s not.

It is not simply, writing down your values and putting them on the wall of your cool office and using them for shout outs in town halls every other week. It takes a lot more work than that, and you have to be deliberate, especially in, as you said, when you’re growing quickly. And on top of that, you’re largely remote, which is our situation.

And so it really follows a couple of really important vectors. The first vector is everything the people team does, and really anything that touches everyone in the company. You have to have culture as a North Star and be very mindful that as you build, what you build further embodies the culture and doesn’t dilute it.

So that’s avenue one, and then Avenue two is, culture’s always perfect in the beginning, right? When it’s one founder with the 31st employees and everyone feels like a founder because there’s this it emanates from the founder and everyone just soaks it up and there’s this apprenticeship model.

Okay, so how do you scale that? And that’s really avenue too, is figuring out, okay, how do we take that sort of leaders, teaching leaders and really institutionalize and enforce that? So those are the two main things that we think about. There are lots of different mechanisms for doing it, but taking Avenue one, for example, things that people team does.

One of the things that my team does that is a little bit more radical and we can talk about later to institutionalized culture, is when we have peer and upward feedback, we publish it to everyone so that we can show that candor is a huge part of our culture. That mechanism is more powerful in institutionalizing culture than me talking about candor for, hours and hours perhaps of class Could be.

And then on the apprenticeship side, we pour into our leaders, both from the top down and in a scalable way through manager training to ensure that they really are culture champions to their betterment and take every teaching opportunity to make others better.

David Rice: Yeah. You mentioned there the publishing of 360, and I think that’s really cool. It’s, it seems like maybe a little bit of a radical move to reinforce candor, so I’m curious what pushback, if any, have you seen from leadership or employees, and then how do you handle that?

Valentina Gissin: So we definitely do get pushback and the type of pushback that we get is a, why would you do this? And so we have to zoom people out and explain the goals, and I can do that in a minute.

And then also, we get a lot of, I just joined, I wrote my three sixty’s. Wait a minute, you’re telling me that you’re gonna publish them? Hold on, open mine up. I need to go back and re-edit them all. I would say those are the two big kinds of pushback that I get. I’ll tell you how we address both.

So the why’s are really, it is an incredibly powerful tool to normalize and teach feedback and the way that it normalizes it, everybody is required to provide both constructive and positive feedback because we want people working on developing their strengths and guard railing and maybe developing against their opportunities.

And when you see, that everyone across the company gets this very thoughtful, constructive feedback, at least once a year, that normalizes that everybody, including our very top, most leaders, get constructive feedback. And it teaches that a, it teaches how to do feedback well. ’cause we have some people in there who are really our best feedback givers are in there providing feedback.

Then it also makes it very difficult in light of that environment to justify sitting on feedback for the rest of the year. That’s why it’s such a powerful mechanism, right? That’s why these mechanisms and these actions work better than words and teaching is because okay, I’m gonna have to deliver this feedback twice a year in reviews.

How am I gonna sit on it for the rest of the year? This person’s gonna know I had it.

David Rice: I like that. A real time strategy. I think that’s cool. You’ve built a system here also where you’ve translated culture into competencies essentially, and that is baked into things like performance reviews.

Can you walk us through a little bit how you translate values, which I think can feel a little bit abstract to people at times, right into concrete competencies that they can apply?

Valentina Gissin: Yeah, absolutely. I think, and for me, the development chain, the ideation chain is really what is your mission once you have that locked in, what are the values?

And I really do think of values. I find that they are more useful for employees than anyone else, and so I typically write them with a lens towards how are they going to be useful for employees. So your values, your operating principles, however you’ve codified your culture, really should be written as the behaviors that will drive that particular mission, your particular mission forward.

In a way that is like relatively purpose built, although I’m starting to believe there are some universal cultural elements. And then from there, so now you’re getting increasingly more concrete in terms of what does it take to achieve this mission. And from there, if your values are written well, they really should create at least a skeleton of a behavior code for employees to succeed at your company.

And for example, one of our values is integrity. We never have two different stories in terms of what’s going on at Garner. And so how do you take that and cascade something, very high level as that. And we really think about okay, what behaviors exemplify that value on a day-to-day level?

Both from, when you start at. The CEO level, it’s maybe a little bit more clear, but what does that mean for a line supervisor? Okay. You and we really identified that and thinking through, like from a behavioral perspective, how do we take this skeleton of behavior and really make a map at each level of what does scope success look like culturally?

David Rice: I’m curious, how do you identify when people think they’re aligned with the culture, but then their behaviors suggest otherwise? What do you do next?

Valentina Gissin: Yeah, so these kinds of things come to us through a couple of different directions. One is managers will come to us and say, Hey, we’ve hired someone, we’ve got a culture fit, and what do I do?

And the way that they identify it is typically. The first inkling is someone’s not great at taking feedback. Typically, that’s usually the first hint, either how high their standards are, how thoughtful they are in giving feedback. Those things tend to emerge later, how supportive and empathetic they are.

That tends to emerge later, but somebody’s ability to actually take thoughtful, thematic feedback to this to come up relatively quickly. Those tend to be the first things we hear. And so whether that’s the manager coming in or whether like literally we’re getting pinged saying, Hey, this person is being aggressive or defensive in response to feedback.

And typically what we do is we pull in the manager and we say, Hey, I. It is your job to onboard your people to this company, including to the culture and No, nobody comes in here. Perfect. Because our culture is unusual and yes, we absolutely do a piece of the cultural onboarding as the people team, but we also provide broader onboarding guidance to managers, which says, you have an obligation to teach people how to succeed in garner’s culture, and here is some guidance as to how that we give them, when they start.

And so it’s really getting the managers to be excellent at identifying and then helping onboard people who are going to be good in the culture, and then seeing the difference between people who really are a mishires and who would be a rehabilitation effort to enjoy our culture and what do we do then.

David Rice: I imagine for managers who, maybe they were in something very different from this before, that’s gotta be a little bit of an adjustment period and a learning curve.

Valentina Gissin: It is. Yes. And we support them. We, we have pretty rich manager training and that we require them to take as part of their onboarding and then also provide them with close partnership along the way from my team.

David Rice: Culture fit is like one of those things that’s often tested in hiring, but you’ve taken kind of a. You’re taking a more of a don’t ask test approach, right? What does that look like in practice and what have you kinda learned from that as you’ve implemented that?

Valentina Gissin: So I think the biggest thing, we haven’t cracked this perfectly, I don’t think that anybody has cracked interviewing a hundred percent, although I think we’re doing better than we were doing when we were doing behavioral based interviewing.

So on culture, the kind of test questions are really we get a. A layup that is the opposite of a layup, where basically it’s very easy to give a surface level answer and very easy for the interviewer to then say that’s a very surface level answer. And provide actually deep feedback to the interviewee during the interview.

And we do this I don’t wanna give away the questions and that we used to do it, but basically like our interview involves creating the opportunity for the interviewer to give deep, constructive feedback in the context of the interview in an empathetic nurturing way. I’m trying to help you see it in this interview, but you like.

This was an X, Y, Z, not great answer for these reasons. And I need you to dig deeper here and there. And so that’s one big piece of it that we changed that really made it hard for people to show up and say oh, this feedback culture surprises me. ’cause it was in the interview process and we’ve had people opt out after that interview, which is a bit the part of the goal, right?

Like people don’t wanna be in a culture where you could be given feedback during an interview, then they probably don’t wanna be in our culture.

David Rice: Yeah. Yeah, that’s fair. That’s really interesting. I can’t imagine the reactions is probably got, gets quite a few people off guard.

Valentina Gissin: The reactions run the gamut. Yeah. I would say a lot of people really love it and are like, thank you, this is so refreshing and honest. And then there are people who are, we have. Really senior people, 25 years in the industry, and they’re interviewing with our CEO’s, former chief of staff, who’s very senior at Garner, but doesn’t seem senior in the healthcare industry.

And she’s poking them and prodding them on their thinking and their feedback, and they’re like whoa. What’s happening here?

David Rice: I love it because you go too often. You go through the job hunting process, like when you’re out there and you’re looking and you go through interviews and people say you gotta go through a lot of interviews and learn.

But what are you learning? Most of the time it’s you’re learning, quite frankly to BS your way through things, and I think that’s really cool way to give people something substantive to go, what? I actually did learn from that. And yeah. Exactly. No, it’s, it brings more value to the interview for the person being interviewed. I like that.

Valentina Gissin: I think so too. It’s not quite as hard hitting as when I used to do, it’s, it is a different interview. When I used to do culture interviews back in my Bridgewater days afterwards, people would say, what do I owe you for the therapy session? Or, I never wanna see these people again.

David Rice: Oh yeah now when people come through the door though, now they’re aware of the culture because they’ve faced that in the interview, but. It’s like you said, it emphasizes feedback and candor, especially if they’re coming in from more traditional environments. I imagine it still takes a little bit of time to adapt.

So how do you support them through that?

Valentina Gissin: There’s the stuff that my team does, and then we’re working increasingly on making the managers more and more competent, like we talked about at onboarding people into our culture. But one of the things that we do is we do deeper cultural training than.

I think many companies of our size, which is, you join day one, you get your typical onboarding and high level overview into the culture. Then within the first 30 days, you get another window into our culture and how we use it to think about performance and our competencies and our culture competencies, and how our talent management process works.

And we also get. Culture case study session, which basically is 90 minutes facilitated by my team of real life scenarios that are cuspy enough that if you’re coming from the outside. We want people to like, they’re hard to be like, okay, how exactly does Garner culture work in this scenario? If you’ve been steeped in it for two years, you’re gonna be like, oh, this is obvious.

This is, this principle or this, it’s this sale and the culture competencies, but it’s cuspy enough that our new hires have to really grapple with it. Which I think is a much better way to learn a bespoke culture than, just somebody lecturing you about it or here’s examples of what good looks like, but no, we want examples of everything and you figure out what’s good and bad.

And so we do that and we’re currently working on a 2.0 of that. That would be closer to three to four months in when you’re more deeply steeped, where you both have harder case studies and where we solicit more deep feedback.

David Rice: I’m curious because obviously that’s really interesting and it seems intense. So how are you measuring sort of the impact and the effectiveness of that on the new hire?

Valentina Gissin: So one of the things that we do is we watch very closely, even being a non-traditional people team, I still quite like the old pulses. I like to ask directly. They may not be engagement based, they may be a little bit more performance skewed in some cases, but they do work from my perspective, when you really wanna find your way to an employee sentiment, even if it’s not the direct question that you ask. And so we measure whether, overall, whether people are operating by our culture, both by asking people directly and then by asking people a few like cultural kind of not gotcha questions, but okay, are you operating by our culture?

If you see others not operating by our culture, do you always give them feedback about it and a few other related questions? And if people say yes, I think we’re Garner operates by its culture and I’m operating by its culture. But no, I don’t give people feedback when I don’t see them operating by our culture.

And no, I don’t give people feedback when I see, below the bar work product at the at the level three levels above me and other things of that nature. We’re like, oh, you don’t understand it yet. Okay, there’s more work for us.

David Rice: We were talking before this, and you mentioned Bridgewater earlier, but we were, you were telling me how, you brought elements of that company culture with you, but with key edits and I thought that was an interesting way to say it.

I’m curious, what parts did you leave behind and why.

Valentina Gissin: Many parts? Yeah, that was an incredible experience and for those for whom it worked, it really worked and it worked for me. I’m not proud of everything that happened while I was there, but I learned a ton. I. I think you, you come out of that culture if you’re at all thoughtful and interested in culture, inevitably like a student of culture and grappling with to your point, what do I wanna take and what do I wanna leave?

And for me it’s interesting because Bridgewater was profiled as in the fearless organization as one of the most psychologically safe places to work because there is this incredible bully, open speech, truth to power environment. Yet, for some people it was incredibly psychologically unsafe to be there.

And so that was really the nub for me of ha what? Like how do I reconcile this and how do I suck out the good psychological safety pieces and the good things that made it so excellent and leave whatever it is that actually counteracted this intention of race. For me, when I posted it was really a few things.

One, it was, yes, you could speak truth to power all day long, but sometimes power would give you feedback on your truth. Like I. You could give feedback in a meeting to the CIOs, but they could turn around and say here’s the 90 ways in which your logic is wrong with respect to the feedback you’re giving me.

And then give you feedback in the system, bad conceptual thinking and logic, and then you’re an idiot in the system for all time. So one of the big things I took was like the quality of the voice doesn’t matter. You have to just reward the voice and so that’s one big piece. Another big thing that I think made it so fraught for people was that like if someone saying like entering your, yeah, Valentina down for a logical thinking and I will be an idiot.

This system for all time, literally the goal was to assess people and to paint a picture of people over time, not necessarily to figure out which things they would be best. To grow at and really it was a little Bridgewater overall was a developmental mindset, but the assessment approach was geared towards the fixed mindset.

Let me understand how good of a conceptual thinker you are. That’s not something you’re gonna improve on, but it’s important to me that I get your conceptual ceiling, right? So I know you know what jobs to put you in and not, and so that idea of fixed attributes and using them for assessment versus using constant feedback, culture for development is a key difference.

David Rice: Excellent. This has been a fantastic talk.

Before we go, I wanna give you a chance to, give everybody an idea where they can connect with you, find out more about what you got going on. If you wanna plug anything that you’re doing, feel free.

Valentina Gissin: Yeah, absolutely. So for all my people out there, you should definitely check out Garner. It could save you a ton of money on benefits, and is one of the most incredible and fast growing benefits out there. And you can always find me on LinkedIn and see what I’m up to, and that’s that.

David Rice: The second thing that we do here on the podcast, or the last thing I should say, that we do here on the podcast, we have a little tradition where you get to ask me a question, so turn it over to you. You can ask me anything you want.

Valentina Gissin: Yeah. What is your favorite interview question and why?

David Rice: Oh, God. I always laugh at those really abstract ones where it’s just I. What space creature would you be? I’m like, oh gosh, I actually just like the ones that are like I, I like when someone has taken the time to understand the things I’ve done before.

They’ll just ask you like, how did you get X from this? And it allows you to really dig into your strategic thinking or, ’cause it’s now a concrete example that we both have a context for. And so that makes me feel very comfortable as an interviewee if the interviewer has done that. But yeah, I’d say that’s my favorite one is where like we’re get, we get into the specifics and you can, I’m a little bit of a rambler if it’s really focused.

It keeps me from rambling. It keeps me on like these key points. And makes me feel like, oh, like I feel good when I give that answer. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, it’s those.

Valentina Gissin: The ones where people can get into your thinking and not just.

David Rice: Yeah. But not about like space creatures or, how I would deal with being in an underwater submersible and the oxygen is running out. I don’t know. I don’t want to know, I never find out how I do in that scenario.

Valentina, it’s been great. Thank you for coming on the show and we’ll definitely be in touch in the future.

Valentina Gissin: Thank you. This has been great.

David Rice: Alright listeners, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe, get signed up for the newsletter.

And until next time, think about a culture of candor.