From Mission to Mindset – Microsoft’s Story of Culture Transformation: webinar transcript: Webinar host Srđan Vukčević talked with special guest Rebecca Winter about the incredible story of Microsoft’s Culture transformation. The conversation was recorded August 27th, 2020.
Srdjan: Good afternoon, all. Thank you, Rebecca, and welcome everyone to Inspiring Conversations, our monthly webinar with Blue Coach, and I want to welcome you from wherever you are. So, we are really thrilled and honored to have you join us today, and we have a very special guest and my friend and colleague, Rebecca Winter. Rebecca is a 20-year veteran of Microsoft and continues to love every minute of it. As she likes to put it, her Microsoft career spans three broad areas of experience, so service services, organizational leadership, global transformational leadership and large projects, the deployment and human resources. She currently supports an organization of eight thousand plus people as a director of talent management. And in this function, she focuses on developing transformational leaders, attracting and building talent that can change the world, supporting the businesses to create exceptional place to work, and partnering with business to close the gap with the and between the employees lived experience, as she likes to put it, also at Microsoft. And they aspire to culture. And this will be a basis of our talk basically today. My name is Srdjan Vukcevic and I will be your host speaker today alongside Rebecca on the topic: From Mission to Mindset, Microsoft’s Story of Culture Transformation. Welcome, Rebecca.
Rebecca: Thank you, a pleasure to be here.
Srdjan: Thank you for joining us. Whenever I think about culture, I have a quote of Peter Drucker coming to my mind, which says, the culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I have the story from my professor from the university when he was visiting an Italian shoe factory and they were strategizing with top management for hours and they had the chance to walk through the factory floor. And one of the workers just poked him and said, would you like me to tell you what we are doing here? And he said, yes, please, just for you to know we are packing left and left shoe, just for you to know the boxes and with a smile on his face. And it was like a providence for him, just he understood at that moment that actually the strategy and what you are doing is different from people, from what people are actually doing on the factory floor. And it was a moment of just bliss, intellectual and practical bliss to see what is the difference between strategy and culture. I wanted to ask you, just for the beginning of our talk today, what is culture? How do we define culture at all? How do we differentiate culture from other things in the organization?
Rebecca: Yep, now, that’s a great that’s a great question, Srdjan. I’m going to start with a story maybe to illustrate the impact of culture, and then I’ll tell you how we define it at Microsoft. And this story is one that’s quoted by Satya Nadella, our CEO in his book “Hit Refresh”, which launched recently. This is a story. It’s an American story. So for those Americans tuning in, you may have heard this before. It was a famous fire that happened in the past century in the US called the Mann Gulch Fire. A gulch is a big canyon. And this was a fire that started out fairly small. And at the time, what they thought they could do as the fire started was parachute in a group of people called smoke jumpers. So this is before the time of firemen and firewomen. And they parachuted these folks in. That group had a new leader, a guy by the name of Dodge. And that team hadn’t spent a whole lot of time building relationships or developing a culture, as it were. Dodge had dug in and started really relating to this team around operational topics. So they parachute into the gulch. And very quickly they realized that the fire had jumped the gulch and was raging faster than anyone could believe at a height of flames that were just astronomical. And pretty quickly, they all realized their lives were at risk. So the group started to run and as they ran, Dodge had what we would call an intuition or an inspiration. He had an idea. What he did was he ran ahead of the group. He lit a match and he burned an area of grass to clear it of any debris and he went and stood in the middle of that circle and motioned to the group to follow him. That would be standard firefighting procedure today. At that time, it was unknown. So, the idea came to him based on his vast experience fighting fires. And just a sudden inspiration, that team looked at him, motioning to them, having no idea what he was doing and not realizing that he had a brilliant idea to save their lives. And they ran on and of course, the vast majority of those folks died and their graves are still on the mountain on the side of the gulch and Dodge lives. There are many morals to that story, right? But one of them, and I believe the reason that Satya mentioned in his book was the power of culture, that group of people didn’t have enough trust in their leader, the right relationship with him to follow him into the unknown. So, he turned a corner where none of them could see saving his own life and they refused to follow and died. The story is a really powerful example of why culture is so important and why Satya prioritize culture as he set out on a journey to completely restructure our company and bring us into the world of the cloud. That’s why it’s so powerful and so important that the way and the way we define it, specifically word by word, is that culture is the result of values, behaviors, structures and processes that are encouraged or discouraged, really on a daily basis with an organization so certain. So Srdjan, it’s not a set of words on a PowerPoint. It’s really the accumulation of everyday decisions and behaviors that determine what a culture is.
Srdjan: Thank you for the story and thank you for the definition. From my experience also, just there are people sometimes who believe that the culture is what I write in a paper and just give it to my senior team and say, please implement this top-down. And then I believe that in Microsoft what Satya brought to something different. And I want to connect that with two books also that he was promoting heavily when he came to Microsoft, to lead Microsoft. One was the “Growth mindset” from Carol Dweck. And I believe that to nurture that kind of behavior and implement it in your culture transformation and also the “Non-violent communication” from Marshall Rosenberg, which is actually the empathy part, you know, just listening others and the inclusion of others in your decision making. So can you relate to that? Can you comment on that a bit?
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. We can unpack that in many ways. So, your first statement about Satya brought this to Microsoft; Indeed, he did. And our culture journey started with his wife. So, I understand giving him Carol Dweck’s book. And it made a huge impression on him and became the seeds of what he and the senior leadership team decided was needed to bring this company into its next 50 years of existence, right into the fourth industrial revolution. Growth mindset is actually written into our description of culture. And it is something that we talk about all the time. Still five or six years later. It’s something that we’ve worked very hard on and really does form the basis of what we call the Microsoft Culture Code, which is comprised of several things. That’s very present in our ecosystem. And then you also, you know, just this notion that senior leader of our company brought this. And I think that’s one of the most important things to emphasize culture is a combination of top-down and bottom-up. But it has to have that top-down piece to it. I think culture has to be deeply organic to a CEO and a senior leadership team. If it’s not deeply organic, you won’t get the constant repetition, you won’t get the modeling of behaviors. You won’t get the consequences for not living up to, you know, doing your best to live up to our Aspire-to-Culture. All of that needs to flow organically from the group of senior leaders and so beautifully done at Microsoft that that’s what has happened for us. So, the senior leadership team has been powerfully involved and powerful stewards of the evolution of our Microsoft cultural code. I think companies struggle if the statement of culture does not flow, really, that I’m pointing to my heart here does not flow from the senior leaders organically.
Srdjan: So, what will be your suggestion if someone actually, you know, is not having that or doesn’t know that what he’s bringing out to the table?
Rebecca: Yes, I’ve gotten that question many times before and talking to other groups, what if our CEO doesn’t do that or isn’t like that or doesn’t? Well, that’s a problem, I mean, I think there’s no good way to dance around that. And so, what I say is you can’t you can’t hand a CEO and a senior leadership team of PowerPoint and say, here, do this. HR wrote it here, you guys do it, that men and women, right, you guys and gals, that doesn’t work. That will never work. And my best advice is that it has to be a facilitated, well-structured process to arrive at what that description of culture will be with the senior leadership team. And so wherever your senior leadership team is at, I think the description of culture has to come from that. Obviously, there has to be a decision of what kind of culture will get us where we want to go in the next 20 or 50 years. What kind of behaviors? But you have to narrow in of all the things that will get you there, you have to narrow it on the set of things that feel deeply right and are deeply congruent to your senior leadership team. And you’re going to have to leave the rest because it just won’t work.
Srdjan: So basically, we are looking to what is organic to them, what is organic to the leaders.
Rebecca: Yeah, you’ve probably encountered studies. What kind of culture works best? Is it a learning culture? Is that a purpose culture? I mean, there have been studies like that and actually there’s not a whole lot of difference where the difference comes in, do we believe that the behaviors you describe will get us where we want to go and is the senior leadership team, is the company living up to those things, right? Are the senior leaders, do they believe in them? Do they do those things? Do they talk about those things? Do they model those things? So that’s what you have to narrow in on what resonates like children growing up in a household with parents, you know, you can’t be what you can’t see basically.
Srdjan: Exactly. Exactly. Some modeling behavior is one part. Yeah. So, we need to live that culture to let them have that culture organically coming from that. And the other part is, you know, just you have this like only in your part of the company. There are eight thousand people who need actually to first resonate with it. And the second thing to implement it, because they can be measured on it, isn’t it? And it is, I believe when you mentioned top-down approach, I noticed and you told me also that you did hundreds of hundreds of focus groups… It’s a bridge from old and new, isn’t it? Yeah.
Rebecca: Truly, truly so. So no one left and you can’t fake it. Something has to be organic to the CEO and the senior leadership team. Another very important lesson is that you have to honor your past to move into your future where you can’t just rip something away from people. We’re not a new company. We have been around a while. We used to be different. Right? We had a different set of things that were important to us. The behavior of employees and our behavior with partners and customers and each other was different in the world of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. So, you can’t just snap your fingers and we’re like this now. You have to honor your past in order to get to the future. And we did many things in order to do that. Our company ran hundreds of focus groups with employees to really pin down what it was people felt proud about in the with a Microsoft culture: what is it that they wanted to keep and then to pin down on the converse of that, what is it they want to, check out the window? And people wanted to keep things like tech intensity. We’ve always been a very technically savvy, deep company. We got a little bit away from that with Steve Ballmer after Bill Gates. And we’re back to that with Satya. So that was one thing people want to keep – the spirit of giving. We’re if not the largest one of the largest corporate givers on the globe. People feel really good about that. These are the kind of things people wanted to keep. And there was a set of pretty strong agreements about what people wanted to get rid of, things like there’s a famous Microsoft cartoon, a cartoonist did this of Microsoft. It was like a picture of people pointing guns at each other. So, we had a very combative type, a culture. People really had to be the smartest one in the room. People were fine getting rid of bad, right? It’s like survival of the fittest at my club. So those are the kind of things people wanted to get rid of, wanted to be written out of our culture. We had consensus from the employees and we went through quite a process. It was really what we came down to at the end of the day. And there’s a set of things that are contained in the Microsoft cultural code, not just growth mindset. That’s the basis of it that are really an amalgam of what employees wanted, what the senior leadership team wanted. And we’ve had partners to help us. Architect, sort of our final product in our final, the way we describe a good leadership is, the way we describe a good management is, and most of this work has been architected deeply on the principles of neuroscience. So, what you’ll find in our Microsoft code is a set of principles and a code that’s very simple. Easy for the brain to understand. Really, based on the needs of the brain when it comes to neuroscience. And they’re extremely sticky. There’re some great reasons because a lot of thought that went into that architecture. I would say, let me make that a third principle. So, you really have to tonette it out simply and make it sticky.
Srdjan: So, what I heard also when you when you said this about this cartoon and I’ll come back to the neuroscience afterwards, but this was also a crucial part. I remember what Dr. Hogan said, the founder of Hogan Assessment Systems, is that competition within the group is less important than competition between the groups. When the competition in the group is higher than between the groups, then the company goes down. So I, when preparing for this talk with you, you also mentioned to me that when Satya came, he came to this meeting that was half a year, in every half a year, every six months, something like that.
Rebecca: So that brings us to another principle. Srdjan, when you set out to change a culture it moves beyond PowerPoint. And people saying this is what it is, there’s many things you have to do after that. Many, many, many things. You have to keep doing them. But so very early on in that process, you have to make some symbolic changes. You have to make big ones and small ones. And by symbolic, I don’t mean meaningless. But things that are going to mean a lot to people. That have to be big symbols, big hallmarks of what you intend. So, one of those early changes that that our senior leadership team made was they got rid of a meeting that we have historically called Mid-year Review. Mid-year Review was a very grueling, scary experience for senior leaders. And it happened every January and everybody would fly into Redmond. It wasn’t a learning experience. It was how well do you know your business kind of experience? So many, many things about it were did not showcase growth mindset at all. So they did away with that and everybody was stunned because it was like, just one of those things that always happens for as long as you can remember. And they did away with that and that was amazing. So, it was empowering to the leaders in the field and going to check up on you on the same way. Of course, we still do. And we still do quarterly reviews and stuff like that. But we’re going to switch the tone to what have you learned, what should we do going forward? And we’re not going to do this crazy, fear inducing, stressful, internally focused experience like we’ve always done. That was huge for people, so huge for us. You may or may not realize the import to us, but what happened was serious.
Srdjan: And what I heard also, there is an integral part of what Satya did also implementing may be a part of the coaching culture and coaching is future oriented, then asking powerful questions, what have you learned? What can you do differently? Is that also part of what you do at Microsoft?
Rebecca: Absolutely. I would say, we’ve gotten to the fact that it has to be organic. We’ve gotten to the fact that you have to honor your past as you move into the future. And we’ve talked about you need to nut out what your culture is simply. And we can talk more about some of the other culture code statements we have. We’ve talked about the fact that you have to make symbolic changes, big or small, immediately. We’ve had many other symbolic changes very early on in those first six months. But then, so what you’re getting at now is you have to make it who you are. And that’s like the work. And that’s what you said at the beginning. Constantly focusing on closing the gap between our Aspire-to-Culture and our lived experience, which is the work we do every single day and what Satya talks about all the time. One of the many things we could list out in that is trying to enable, first, our management and leadership community with coaching skills. And ultimately our individual contributor as well. You can be an individual contributor and make great use of coaching skills when you work with customers asking powerful questions. Things like that. So that is something that we’ve worked a lot of. That’s part of the who make it who you are, formulas, really. What are those really key levers that will make the greatest shift for us in culture and coaching certainly was one of them? Instead of telling asking. This is hard, still is hard for smart, fast moving people to learn. Srdjan, you coach to use silence effectively. Right? And take off that mentoring, teaching, telling, telling hat and becoming a coach. So, we continue to work on that and focus very deeply on that. That’s quite a journey. There’s also, if I can switch gears a little bit, you have to build your culture into all your people and business processes. That takes time. So, we’ve rewritten how we do feedback. We’ve rewritten how we do our Codex, what we call connects our goals and objectives process. We’ve rewritten how we evaluate people at annual review. All these things that culture has to trickle down and show up in how you run the company. So that’s, you know, people processes. Then, there’s been a tone and culture shift in the way we run the business. And I talked about that first get rid of mid-year. There’s more asking, less grilling. There’s more what did we learn? There’s attempt to be more forward looking than backward looking. It just has to show up everywhere or it’s not believable. And that takes time. There’s a lot of architecture and program management involved in that.
Srdjan: I absolutely love that last one. It has to show up. So it’s believable. I think that’s a crucial part. And thank you for mentioning these examples. Shifting gears, explaining actually how, you know, something that’s called a growth mindset actually shows up over the meeting. So, connection with the customer? Isn’t it also not focusing on mistakes and more focusing on how that can improve?
Rebecca: Yeah. So for those of you who haven’t read mindset by Carol Dweck, it is about being open to change, being willing to fail, fail fast. Believing that you can learn. That things aren’t fixed. And what we certainly, in some areas of our life, we all have fixed mindsets. And that’s something that we have to confront in other areas. We tend to have more of a growth mindset. It’s not this one monolithic thing. We have to constantly work on. Absolutely! How did people react to this change? Looks all of a sudden, I’m supposed to be the smart one. The idea was to show up and be the smart one in the room and now somehow it’s not. And how am I valued if I don’t speak up? This is a work in progress. And I’m going to touch on in a second this notion of fear. I’ll tell you really how we sought to get at that, but it has been a work in progress. First there’s the launch, here is that this is what it is. Then all the senior leaders talking about it. We have a monthly employee broadcast where the senior leadership team show up together every month talking about it at those events, Satya doing a monthly growth mindset, two minute podcast, probably a few more, more than two minutes, but not that much longer, just showing up in the ecosystem. Then there’s the layer of change where we sent all our corporate vice presidents to two to a day and a half of training. What is this stuff? It was broader than growth mindset. It was also at that time we had architected what our leadership principles were. We have a statement on what good leadership looks like in this context. And to teach them about that, so we started teaching our senior leaders really ground I mean, a day and a half for every corporate vice president of a company is a lot. Folks at my level of the organization would take those assets and have quarterly conversations with the leadership teams evaluating ourselves on growth mindset, talking about how we can show up differently. And so HR here’s where they play a huge enablement role. It just starts to come through the leadership team, it starts to bleed into everybody’s conversation. And then comes the layer of after we’ve talked about and we work on living it and we think about it, then it starts getting written into people’s core commitments. And it becomes a conversation, an annual review. How is that person demonstrating X? Then it becomes the differentiator in how we reward leaders. It’s not just what impact he made on the numbers, but it’s how are you living your culture. There’s these layers. And to answer the question. As you go through that process people adjust and we use talent management as a strategy. The senior, the make up of the senior leadership team or the extended senior leadership team looks different than it did when we started this journey. Talent management is a tool, right? We launch to set of tools for managers to deal with all this change that essentially recognizes how different change is in this digital virtual world, this fourth industrial revolution universe we’re living in where change never stops. And I remember a million years ago when I was doing change management and we would use little things like the wonderful William Bridges model. You know, there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. There is no end anymore. It never ends. And so this is hard for the brain, right? You’re always on. We’re still like those people running on the savannah in Africa, you know, many thousands of years ago, running from the sabertooth tiger and experiencing that flight fight or flight reaction when things get stressful, when you’re not hitting a number on a scorecard is just like being chased by a saber tooth tiger, according to your brain. So lots of fear. We took it down to brain science is my answer, right down to the very basics of how people are neurologically wired. What will it take to flood somebody’s brain with dopamine instead of cortisol? What will it take to keep somebody in a tord or engaged state of mind versus a retracted state where the blood is leaving their brain and going to their major muscles to run from the sabertooth tiger? One of the tools we use a lot is the scarf model, many of you will know that authored by the Neuro Leadership Institute, which is a nice model to really get at what are the five core triggers for the brain to be put into that away from state, that cortisol state? We try to bring it down to that and that’s what we’ve taught managers, and are still trying to teach managers, is how do you interact with your directs in a way that prevents those reactions? What are their basic needs for certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness? How do I meet those needs? Even though change is happening around me at an enormous rate and if you bring it down to those really basic molecules, I don’t know what else you do in the times that we’re living in.
Srdjan: And the question is then also again, how do you keep the balance in between being supportive and demanding at the same time? So and how is this implemented? Are there any people as you mentioned? All oars in the water are important. So it means actually that all people are really working on that model or modeling that behavior. So how do you deal with that?
Rebecca: How do we get down? How do we get down to the individual contributor so that, again, there have been layers? I’ve started to talk about the layers senior leadership team, then teaching senior leaders and then HR working with the next level of leaders in the digestion process. Then building it into all the processes, business and people. Not that those things are really different, but you know what I mean. And then at some point, I guess it was about two years ago, we were asking ourselves, so how do we get it down to like the final common denominator, which is the individual employee? And we’re all sitting at a HR conference, I remember the whole HR organization and Satya is sitting on stage with our CHRO, Kathleen and he said, well, it’s all about the manager. And so we’ve gone seen so that at the end of the day, people work for another person. You do what your manager says. You know, the modeling the manager does is really critical. So, we, on the last two years of our journey, after we established a cultural statement, then we architected a set of leadership principles and next we began to architect what we said, good management is and at the same time the management framework came out, we’re architected our values statement as well. But so we finally came out with what we say good management is at Microsoft. And it’s three words and the three words are: model, coach and care. And there’s lots of stuff underneath that. But so in the past year and now heading into this year, we have a deep focus on manager and how managers live the values sort of, you know, embody or aspire to culture and live our leadership principles because our leadership principles are really for everybody. How they do all that and how that translates down to the individual employee. And so that’s the final a lot of change efforts forget that first layer of management. So that’s where we’re at now. And that’s really what we are focusing on, to kind of shore up that last level of a buy in and behavior. And these are folks out there with our customers. Right? Writing code and selling services and partnering with our customers. And so there can’t we can’t leave anybody behind. But it’s been five, six-year journey, really. It doesn’t happen overnight and you can’t ignore a layer. So here we are.
Srdjan: And that’s probably critical, that all layers are working just to support the culture. If any of these layers is not set up just to promote that culture and you are not measuring up, what’s going on in the layers and culture jobs immediately.
Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. And we’ve tried to be very thoughtful about it. Like last year we launched our management framework. Those three words, there’s some practices. It’s a bit more complicated now. But basically, the three, you can’t forget the three. Model-coach-care, we launched it last year and we spent a year with education, educating managers, allowing them to get used to it, ask their questions, attend trainings on it, talk to peers about it. We give all kinds of forums and stuff for that without measuring them on it. This year we’ve rewritten our classic manager core priority. Our goals and objectives, something might call it with those three principles. We gave them a year to adjust and learn and try on. And now the rubber meets the road, really, and so it’s again, it’s this thoughtful change management process. You can’t just say here yesterday you were like this and today you need to be like this. It doesn’t work. Right?
Srdjan: And if you say that also it attacks this basic brain, you know, neurobiology is just it attacks. And also, what I heard when you talked about the neuroscience there is this part of the needs. There is part of the empathy and listening to others, so buy in is also very important. People can really buy in what you are trying to live top-down as a leader.
Rebecca: So, yeah, no, it’s important. And to be really clear, people know that these aren’t just words, as we do our annual review and we evaluate managers, those managers get evaluated through our annual poll process. That’s true at many companies. And we do have a threshold for managers. If your team, up to a certain point, doesn’t think that you embody X, you can only be awarded up to a certain point. We really take it seriously. We don’t do. And we don’t do that blindly. In a completely black and white where there was one manager, I’m thinking of in one of the organizations and one of the teams that I support. And that manager had inherited a team from another manager and the team was in terrible shape. So, they responded on poll very poorly under the new manager’s name, who really we couldn’t have expected him to own that result. We didn’t punish him for that. We’re like, OK, next year. So, I think, we try to be thoughtful about it. But that would have been an exception. Right? To our end of the year result. So, we really do take it seriously. You have to. And that’s the way of sort of honing in and moving out talent and people who aren’t really working again to close that gap between the Aspire-to-Culture and our lived experience. It’s this real living process.
Srdjan: Exactly. So it has to be like that. Otherwise it doesn’t work.
Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. So these are the ways in which we make it who we are: modeling, teaching, embedding in the way we work, and then consequences for how people are reviewed and feedback, so we measure culture in our poll and in our monthly pulse process. We look at how people are saying that we’re trending not just how an individual manager is doing, but how an organization is embodying growth mindset or embodying diverse and inclusive. How are we doing? And we take that input into the culture work that we do every year.
Srdjan: And you probably attract the talent the same way. The question is just the thing about a talent you attract, the talent for the cultural fit and how important is that to have that cultural fit, of course, and how this relates also to being in danger of having a group think?
Rebecca: Yeah, so we are very wary of that term cultural fit, and I think, the talent acquisition team could speak more eloquently to this, right? I’m focused on internal talent management, but you do have to be very careful about “culture fit” because you are then excluding, you diverse candidates who could bring an important perspective to the company. And of course, one of our culture statements is being diverse and inclusive. So, we have five core components of our culture. The first one is growth mindset. And really the next one is diverse and inclusive. So, you have to be cautious. However, we try to take what we call a screen-in approach versus a screen-out approach. I mean, there are some things that would probably raise flags, right? If you aren’t willing to embrace the culture statements that we make and if you can’t see yourself in those, then you might not be a fit for Microsoft. However, the way you do that, where you’re from, how you think about it, can vary widely your life experience. But I agree. I know our talent, our wonderful talent acquisition team is very, very cognizant of the dangers of culture fit.
Srdjan: Yeah. And the last question from my side is you mentioned also that humbleness is a very important part of the culture. Just staying humble, staying on the course, something, for example, we have data from Hogan Assessments, tons and tons of data that says the humble leaders perform better than the arrogant ones. What do you have to say in terms of humbleness and just being like that?
Rebecca: Wonderful! Satya is a very humble leader. And in fact, the head of our board from our executive board, when I’ve heard him speak several times, has said that one of the most important reasons they chose Satya – was for his humility. And you need humility to approach all this work as if it’s never done. Again, Satya uses the term closing the gap between our Aspire-to-Culture and our lived experience constantly. He will talk about mistakes he’s made; he will talk about feedback he’s gotten from misdirects. So, he models that. And so you always have to be humble. If you ever think you’ve arrived, if you ever think you’re something special, you ever stop trying to look around the corner trying to evaluate how you’re doing, you will quickly be irrelevant as a leader, as a company. So, humility is a really, really important component. Are all our leaders humble? No. I mean no, right? Let me not say all, but all the leaders I know, do a tremendous job of trying to work in within the boundaries of that Microsoft culture code. And to talk about these things, to continually publicly work through them with their teams, to embrace these concepts. And I can’t think of an example right now, I can’t think of one. They may exist. Right? The company is enormous. But I think folks do a good job of acknowledging where they are on the journey. And that’s all that’s really required and continuing to talk about the journey. Because it’s not really the goal. It’s the process. You know, what’s a goal, a goal is not true long-term thinking, actually. It is about the systems and the processes you put in place to move you forward that are ultimately going to impact where you get to at the end of the day or how you continue to thrive in the ecosystem that we’re in. So that would be my answer, that if I can answer the question that I see there on communicating leadership principles at the beginning. So, our leadership principles are, I don’t think I’ve said them out loud, but again, the power of three, we have three of them. Each of them has three practices under them, but three ones are: create clarity, generate energy and deliver success. So that is what good leadership looks like at Microsoft. They have been built up in partnership with the Leadership Institute. And the practices are really, truly based on neuroscience and honoring how our brains work. So, create clarity, generate energy, deliver success, really super sticky, really easy to remember. We found that, when we put them out there in the ecosystem, our leaders just automatically started talking about them and sharing them on stage and saying them publicly, partner events and customer events, because you can’t, it’s not some list of 16 things that are really hard to remember. And half you relate to half. You don’t create clarity generators. You deliver success. At some point, we said we believe leadership is for everyone. And so, here’s what leadership looks like. It’s not management, management is something different. We have model coach care for management, but create clarity, generate energy, deliver success is what leaders do, any leader at any level in the organization. So, we, at some point, launched it to employees as well. And it continues to be in our Microsoft lexicon because we just went through that process and it was such a you know, we have gobs of material behind each of those three principles which have three practices, all this neuroscience, all these exercises, all of this or that that HR could take and really help leadership teams to dig into and practice and talk about and reflect on and how can I generate more energy. We did all of that, right? We did all that work. So, I hope that answers the question.
Srdjan: So, we came to an end. I’m sorry that we can’t respond to all the questions coming. Thank you, Rebecca, again for being our guest today. It was a very pleasurable and knowledgeable and insightful conversation. We learned a lot. Me personally, also finding bits and pieces and closing my puzzles around culture. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge with us today.
Rebecca: My pleasure. And thank you for having me, Srdjan. Goodbye.
View the webinar recording HERE.