What breaks culture when companies merge: lessons for HR leaders

Two bolt-on acquisitions clear, the operating partner wants a culture-integration plan, and the CEO keeps calling culture the soft stuff. Jamie Petter, founder of Culture Grid HR and a fractional chief people officer, says that framing has it backward. Culture is the strategy, and the deals that fall apart were usually betting on one thing nobody tested: whether the acquired team can run without its founder.

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Is culture strategy, or the soft stuff leaders keep dismissing?

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Culture is the strategy, and done well it produces the results leaders say they want. Petter builds the Culture Grid on purpose, product, and people, with trust as the heartbeat. A clear purpose gets people out of bed, a product worth selling builds pride, and the right people carry the behaviors that deliver both. "Culture is your strategy if you do it well, and it is what fuels your results," Petter says. Read the results and you are already reading the culture.

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What actually breaks a deal when two companies merge?

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Rarely the product. What sinks a deal is whether the leadership bench can run the business once the founder or previous owner steps out. The acquirers who get this right ask a sharper question first: are we adding a company that makes us stronger, or are we merging cultures? Portfolios that respect what already works stay at the level of shared goals and let the acquired culture keep running, instead of overwriting it and inheriting key-person risk they never priced.

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Who owns culture, if it isn't HR's job?

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Everyone, together. Culture works only when leaders, employees, and HR carry it at once, which is why Petter is blunt about the failure mode: "The people strategy won't work if it's only delegated to HR." HR builds the systems and tools, leaders model the behavior and hold the line, and employees live it day to day. What binds all three is trust, credibility, fairness, and accountability. Handed to HR as an initiative, culture stalls.

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Where does culture start to break as a company scales?

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At the manager layer, not the top. As headcount grows, people experience the company through whoever they report to, so a weak or misaligned manager becomes the culture in practice. "Your perception of an organization is usually closely tied to the manager and leadership that you encounter every day, not the actual company," Petter says. The guard against it is to document what good looks like early, then carry it through onboarding and hold leaders accountable.

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Why are your leaders your best recruiters?

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Because talent follows leaders, not job posts. Petter's rule is that A players pull in other A players, so thin candidate flow points back to leadership or messaging, not the recruiter. "Leaders are the number one talent magnet of your organization," Petter says. If a team cannot attract the people it wants, the real questions are whether the culture is worth showcasing and whether the leaders are worth following.

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How do you measure culture without drowning in KPIs?

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Start simple and let the signals narrow it down. Petter reads culture through what customers say, what employees say, and what sales are doing before opening any HR dashboard. Trust surfaces in retention and exit interviews, in pulse checks, and in customers who come back and refer others. "It's not just having a big dashboard of a million different KPIs that you're reading every day. It's like, what's it telling us? And let's do something about it," Petter says. Track the three to five metrics that move the needle, act, and swap them as the work changes.

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For a people leader holding an integration plan, the assignment looks different from here. The question underneath the deal is whether the culture can run once the founder walks out, and that is something you can measure before it closes.

Logan (00:00): Well, let's get into it. So I'm here with Jamie Petter. Jamie, is there anything you would like the audience to know about you and Culture Grid HR and the work that you're doing?

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Jamie Petter (00:14): Yeah, I operate as a founder of Culture Grid HR, also as a fractional chief people officer. So I help small to medium-sized businesses with their people. And I take either HR completely off their plate if they're a smaller organization, or I help them really build the systems that they need to drive results through people.

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Logan (00:40): Great, awesome. Well, in the name of the company, we're going to talk a little bit about culture. And we were shooting the breeze before this about some of the culture initiatives you're hearing. And I want to kick it off, but I'm gonna start with a story, because on a previous episode I wanted to use this story and I didn't find a place to do it. I'm a huge Oakland A's fan. Well, they're gonna be the Las Vegas A's, which is unfortunate, and they're currently in my hometown, Sacramento. But they had this, I don't know if it's an actual story, Jamie, but I always use it as a story for culture.

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Back in like 2014, they were the hottest team in baseball, and they had a player on the team, Yoenis Céspedes, and I've written about this trade. I was in the stands with my wife and I looked at her and I was like, this is their year. They're going. They would do these walk-offs, like they would end the game with home runs. Every team talked about how they were worried about the A's going into the bottom of the ninth at home, because they're like, we could lose the game. We could be down four run. We could be up four runs and lose it. And after I said that in the stands, like a week later, they had a blockbuster trade and traded Yoenis Céspedes to get a starting pitcher, which they needed a starting pitcher to be able to make a run in the playoffs.

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But what ended up happening with that particular trade is they became the worst team in baseball. Like the second half of the season, it wasn't even the second half, it was like the last two months of the season. They became the worst team in baseball. They scraped into the playoffs and lost in a wild card game. And I would watch and listen to every game after that trade, and it was just awful. And basically it broke the morale of the locker room. There's this culture piece and it just absolutely decimated it, because he was a foundation to the organization. And you know, that was a very depressing moment for me, having to go through that. But such is being in Oakland.

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Logan (03:02): Oakland has no sports now, but being a Raiders and A's fan, I guess they lost all their teams. But I want to talk about, that's the precursor. So sorry for the audience if you don't like sports analogies, but I love that one so much. And I want to talk about culture, especially in M&A, and how company culture can go through these same processes. Because that's one of the big things that you're interested in, when we were talking about doing this episode. So I just want to leave it there. How do you think about culture in companies as they're growing and scaling?

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Jamie Petter (03:40): Yeah. Well, I love your baseball analogy, because sometimes we miss who our culture influencers are. And it's really, really critical, when we're looking at an organization and what their culture advantage is. We tend to think it's probably the whole team, or it's the leadership. It's always a combination of the players and the leadership and the coaches, right, that get championships won. But deep rooted into our cultures are those that really activate, their spokespeople for it. They're champions of culture. And when you're working in an organization, understanding who those players are is really, really critical to your success or your failure.

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Logan (04:37): Yeah. So if you're getting ready to go through an M&A, because you hear about it all the time, companies that get acquired, or you end up having maybe three companies get bundled together in an acquisition and then they all operate as three different companies. How do you start thinking about those culture influencers that you mentioned through that acquisition process, so that you can not have one company get rid of their culture, but you can kind of mesh into that so that you can produce the results that you want?

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Jamie Petter (05:16): Yeah. I think those companies that do it right and do it well, from the outside they're really answering the question: are we adding a company to our portfolio that makes us stronger? Or are we merging cultures together? Are we bringing them in because they align with our culture, or are we adding them because they are strong on their own, and we want them to continue that culture? And I think that's what's really important, is understanding what you're working with first in that scenario. And it's different with different scenarios. But those companies that might have a portfolio, a private equity company that has a portfolio of brands, they really are respectful to what's inside that culture, how they operate, and reading into that, and not really messing with that.

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It's staying up here and saying, here's our overarching goals, here's what we're trying to achieve, and how do we support you as a brand in our portfolio, and allow that culture to continue to thrive? I think it's when you're merging the organizations together, or you're acquiring, so you're building and scaling through acquisition, that gets a little trickier.

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Logan (06:39): Yeah, and it's interesting because there's a bit of research and data to suggest that a lot of PE deals end up failing because of the culture integration portion of it. I wanna say it's like 90% of them have some kind of issue there. And it's probably historically been a little overlooked. I know for us, HRP, we see it now more and more. Like you have things like the good job score. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's a PwC Gartner thing. I'm probably, I'll have to go back and check who did it, but they're starting to think at the forefront a little bit more about that.

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Jamie Petter (07:25): Yeah. I think, when you're acquiring a company and you're looking at the measurements and the data, like, what is it telling you? Is this a healthy organization? Is culture fueling the results? And that's what's super critical. So if they're hitting their results and they have a fantastic product, then you're going down deeper to the next level. What does that leadership bench look like? And is the company operating, can the company operate when the leadership changes? Or can we continue with this leadership bench, but maybe the founder steps outside, or the previous owner steps outside the organization? Those are when the deals fall apart. That's when they get down in there and they look at, what does that leadership team look like? And can they rely, can they work and operate without that founder? And then what are the systems in place? How do they work?

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How do they actually get work done, and how do they produce those results? That needs to be really strong. And that's when companies bring me in. I'm talking to a company right now that's challenged with a similar situation, that maybe a sale didn't go through a couple of years ago because those components weren't strong enough. So they're not attractive enough. So companies that are looking to sell or buy are both looking at the same thing. Do I have the infrastructure, the systems in place to drive the results? Does my culture enable that? Do I have the right leadership team to do it?

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Logan (08:58): Yeah. And you have a system for walking through how you define culture before those things happen, right? You look at it as a grid. Do you wanna walk us through the grid?

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Jamie Petter (09:07): Yeah. Like my culture, the Culture Grid. Well, culture is complicated. Very few people can actually describe it, right? Like, what is your culture? And it's tricky. And so therefore it feels very soft. And so people are like, culture, it's too soft, we're about results. Well, culture is your strategy if you do it well, and it is what fuels your results. There's nothing soft to it, it's very strategic.

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If you look at the foundation of all great cultures, I like to say it's like the heart of the grid, in the center. And you're looking simply at purpose, product, and people. So in a nutshell, when I look at all of that, the heartbeat of that heart is trust. So if I have a compelling purpose, it gets my people out of bed every day. It drives me to perform and do what I do. And it's the why, right? And then my product: do I have a great product? Whether I'm selling my product as a service or I have a product, what does my product do? Is it spectacular? It builds pride in the company and the people that work for it. And then the people that are able to, are their mindsets, their behaviors, their beliefs, their skills aligned to delivering that purpose? And that's where you start. You take a look at that, and then you go into the data and you say, are we performing in a way that shows us that we have a strong purpose, people, and product? And then there's quite a few steps after that.

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Logan (10:51): Yeah. I like how you talked about the culture. A lot of times people think culture is soft, or like, our culture is delivering results. Like in our A's example, one of the things that was their culture, they had the whole Moneyball era, they were a low budget team. It was about players at two ends. If I were to sum up their culture, now I wasn't ever in the locker room or anything, but just watching, it was players at two ends of their careers, at the very start and at the very end, that said, we're just gonna go to Oakland and have a ton of fun and hit a bunch of home runs. And that's what they did. And every time they would walk off, they would do pies, they would throw pies in people's faces while they were doing their postgame interviews. So they'd be with the news reporters. That was what they did. It wasn't any kind of initiative that the coaches did. It organically grew.

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And I'm probably gonna use this example twice in this episode, but there's a book I really like, The Nine Lies We Tell Ourselves at Work, or Nine Lies at Work. I don't know if you've read it. They have an example in there about, people leave teams, people don't leave companies and people don't leave managers. So we say people leave managers, and they're making the argument that that's not true. People leave or stay because of teams. And one of the studies they did in there was a Cisco location in Poland. And the people stuck around because the culture of that particular team that had longevity was they ate lunch every day together. That was that team's culture. No initiative, but you can foster that kind of stuff, right? And then it ends up breeding results. So the idea that culture is fluffy, or programs, isn't always, I think, always the case.

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Jamie Petter (12:50): Yeah. And I would say, in both the pie in the face and the team that gets together and has lunch, what I would call that is a process or system in which we celebrate and recognize people, individuals. So that is the way, in their culture, they celebrated, throwing a pie in the face. The same as Zappos is a great company example of how they celebrate their employees. They do a parade around their office. And culture is really important to that. And those are the practices and behaviors that help you operationalize your culture. So it's very rarely one thing. But if the team feels like they have lunch together, that becomes part of their cultural DNA, so to speak. And that's what's memorable, and that's what creates collaboration.

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Same as Google. Working for Google, their food program was invented. That great benefit that they do for their employees was all created because of lunch conversations with leaders that would get them out of their offices and silos and into having lunch together, where they created Gmail. And so that became their recipe for, we need to make sure we create great cafes and great experiences where people want to come and gather for food, so that they can inspire each other with ideas. And that is definitely a great example of culture.

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Logan (14:25): Yeah, I love that example. I didn't know that's why they started their food program, but it makes so much sense. And it really is a great example. So you talked about your process for culture, and I just want to touch on, as you're going through an acquisition or scaling or growing, what points do you start to see culture, or a founder's original idea of culture, or a business's original idea, start to break as they scale or get acquired?

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Jamie Petter (15:08): Yeah, and that's where it gets tricky, right? So that's where that grid continues to expand out. If you have a strong purpose, product, and your people are strong, and now I'm gonna grow and scale, there's some components that absolutely need to be in play in order to do that effectively. And I think this is where our smaller organizations, 20, 50, even maybe a hundred employees, really need to pay attention, so that their results continue to happen. And that is really defining, and making sure we are really clear on the values and behaviors, what it looks like in action, what the mindsets of our people are. And we put those into written documents. We use success profiles, what we would call it in the HR business, where a clear expectation of what right looks like. It's documented. We see the competencies, we see the behaviors, and we see the expectations. And then we know that's what we're looking for.

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And then how do I take our documented secret sauce, or our culture advantage, and how do I start to communicate that? And I make sure I scale that through my onboarding programs, how I teach and train, and the consistency in that experience is carried out. And is it measured? Are we measuring it every day? Are we communicating it? And are we operationalizing it? So do our systems enable us to live out that culture consistently every day? And the larger you get, the more incredibly important your leadership is. Because that's where the processes start to break down, because how we operated as a small company is not sustainable in a large company to achieve the same goal. We gotta change it up a little bit. And we need to make sure we fix it before we break it. And then leadership needs to submodel it, be supportive of it, and drive the accountability of it. Because as you start to scale, your perception of an organization is usually closely tied to the manager and leadership that you encounter every day, not the actual company.

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Logan (17:29): Yeah. So as you're trying to figure out, I mean, I would imagine business leaders, especially in 50 to 100 person companies, kind of have a sense of what the culture is. But in order to document it, is there like a program to try and figure out and synthesize what that is, so that during that scaling or a sale they can articulate it?

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Jamie Petter (17:56): Yeah, absolutely. It's going in and really working with the leadership team and the right folks from the team to come in and really articulate what our values are. They might have them already documented, but do they have them in a way that is easy to see what those behaviors are? Like, how do you show up every day with trust? What does trust look like, for example? Making sure that you can clearly see what that value in action looks like, and making sure you document that. And then if we want to deliver this amazing service level, or this customer experience, then having a systemized approach. What does that look like from beginning to end? Making sure those processes are clearly documented. And then how do we train to make sure that our people get it, they connect to it, they understand it, and that we can hold them accountable to that? So yeah, there's lots of ways to do that. And I think insights and data help us with starting points, to see how effective that is.

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Logan (19:01): Yeah. And I'm gonna jump around a little bit, because I like how you talked about leaders getting involved in the culture piece and being a part of that whole strategy, rather than leaving it. Our question to chat through was, instead of letting HR or a department lead the people strategy, having leadership be involved in that. And I think that's such a key piece, because sometimes people may say, we're gonna hire this out, like the attraction of talent or things like that. But I think companies with strong leaders, I bet you they have people knocking at their door to come work for them. I mean, everybody uses Steve Jobs as an example. Some people right now would probably look at Anthropic and be like, yeah, Anthropic's probably got their leader, they probably have huge demand for attraction. Their leaders are all involved in it. How do you think about helping leadership get involved in the people strategy, rather than delegating everything to HR?

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Jamie Petter (20:20): Yeah. Well, the people strategy won't work if it's only delegated to HR. And that's what's so critical, that culture and people are integrated into and help drive the strategy. So when we think about the ownership of culture, there is an HR ownership. And sometimes it's like, HR will take care of that. Well, HR components are a piece of that. We help with the processes. We help make sure the systems are in place. We help build the tools and resources that might be needed. And then leadership own how they model that culture, how they live it day in, day out, how they hold people accountable to that, how they're building trust every day with their people. And employees own that, with the practices and how they participate and contribute. So culture will never work to fuel your results unless it's a full collaborative force, with people, leaders, and HR support on that.

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And when you look at what defines a great culture, there's two perspectives. Great Place to Work Institute has done amazing research on this, and they are the gold standard of what great looks like. But from an employee standpoint: if I have pride in what I do, and I trust the relationship I have with my leader and managers, and I have good camaraderie with the people that I work with, then I define that as a great place to work. And when you look at it from a leader standpoint, leaders look at, I want to work in a company that hits their targets and goals, right? Because they're responsible for that. With people that give their personal best every day. They give their maximum best, all in an environment as a team. And when you put those two together, the common denominator is trust, credibility, fairness, accountability. Those are the things that help drive culture. And everyone owns that. It's not an HR initiative.

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Logan (22:29): Yeah. And it's probably a very difficult thing right now, because I think trust and engagement is hitting a pretty big low at the moment for companies. I mean, you see it all over headlines. So it's gotta be a very tricky thing that I would hope is on leaders' minds, right?

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Jamie Petter (22:41): I would hope. And I think, again, trust is difficult for people to wrap their head around. And that's confusing, because when your culture is fueling results, you feel it, you can see it. Where you see it is your customers. Your customers trust you, they use you again, they talk about you and promote you, so your sales grow. And not only that, but when your people trust you, then they talk about you and they promote you, and now you're attracting top talent and you're attracting more customers. So it all services back to trust. And so, do we have the analytics in play to tell us what's going on with our trust level? And we look at that in different ways. We could look at it in retention, we could look at it in exit interviews, we can look at it in pulse checks. And are we asking the right survey engagement questions that are getting to the perceptions of our employees, and then the perceptions of our customers? Not just internal, but what are our customers saying about us?

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And our customers often can give us an indication that maybe our sales process is broken. Maybe we're too pushy. Maybe we're doing this incorrectly. Maybe we're not empowering our people to deliver the customer experience at the moment they're there, rather than having us solve it after they leave the store, so to speak. But those are all big, important measures. What's my customer saying? What's my employee saying? And then what's the deeper analytics from the HR space that we can use to give us insight?

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Logan (24:33): Yeah, I like how you referenced that customers can be an indication of the company's culture. I read a book years ago, I wanna say it's Breaking the Customer Value Chain, but I'm not entirely positive. And they were using the culture and things within companies, and one of the examples was Comcast, or Xfinity now. And how their culture was, or maybe it was DirecTV, it was one of those, I wanna say it was Comcast. I'm gonna go with Comcast. But basically their NPS score and their people wanting to do business with them was so low that the IRS actually rated higher than they did. So people would rather pay their taxes than work with Comcast, which is wild, I think. And so looking at that, I don't know if they ever cared or not. The book didn't go into that, but it's just a wild example.

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Jamie Petter (25:41): Yeah. But it's true. I mean, if you think about that, sometimes it's the person that you're talking to on the phone when you're trying to troubleshoot your television or your internet, or whatever that speed is that you're trying to get enhanced. But most likely it's the processes on the back end that are making that person answer the question that way. And that's what's dangerous. So when your people, if you get the right people with the right initiative, and then you empower them and give them the right tools to deliver service, you should see that in your service records. You should see that. And when you have your sales curve down, your net promoter score goes down, there's probably a problem somewhere in your delivery.

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Logan (26:39): So the other piece I wanted to touch on, and you had mentioned a little bit as we were going through, talking about leaders, but how leaders are attracting talent, and how you get leaders to start attracting talent. Like, maybe they don't view that as part of their job, or they're not born to, as they talk to people, come work with us kind of stuff. How do you think about that, and coach, maybe it's not just a COO, but a regional director or a store manager, to take that upon themselves?

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Jamie Petter (27:24): Yeah. Well, in those environments, I think it's a little bit easier, because maybe it's just a symptom of what their job requires them to do. But if you lead people, you're expected to recruit talent. And those that do it well are already attracting talent themselves, right? They're going out there, they're a magnet for talent, because they're inspiring and they want great people on their team. A players attract A players. And most leaders know that. So I think what you're looking at is, are we attracting top talent? And then you're looking, okay, if we're not, what's our problem? Are we just not showcasing and exploiting the great culture that we have? Are we not messaging our employee and our brands well enough to attract talent? That's one layer. And then second, is our leadership not strong enough? Do people not want to come here and follow these leaders? Are they inspired? What does our leadership look like? And is it attracting the customer or the employee that we're looking for? So it's absolutely critical. I mean, leaders are the number one talent magnet of your organization.

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Logan (28:43): Yeah. The second time I wanted to use the Nine Lies at Work example was on the leadership piece and gaining followers, and is the leader somebody that you want to follow? And one of the arguments they make in the book, they're a little provocative and say leadership's not a thing, but they go in and talk about how great leaders tend to be polarizing, because they have a point of view, and then that point of view attracts people that have that type of point of view. And they use examples like Martin Luther King and those types of folks that then gain these big followings and make change happen.

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Jamie Petter (29:28): Yeah. And I think what's interesting is, what I think your first comment was, that they did not believe that it was necessarily all that, that leadership could happen anywhere in the organization, or any leadership? Or was it more the point that you definitely know who the leader is and you're following them?

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Logan (29:50): Their point was just that leadership as this formal program isn't necessarily a thing, and that leadership can happen anywhere, and any person can grab a following and become a leader. It's not this enigma. Yes, you can coach it and all of that, but it's not a formal thing. The lie at work is that leadership is a formalized program. That's what we tell ourselves, whereas they're saying anybody can organically become a leader. Nobody formalized Martin Luther King Jr. into being a leader, right?

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Jamie Petter (30:22): Yeah, right. I think two things can be true at the same time. So I think one, yes, anyone has the capability of being a leader. Naturally, some of us have some of the skills that tend to make us better leaders innately. But the statistics would tell us otherwise. Statistics would tell us that leadership is learned, trained, and developed. Because why would we promote so many individual contributors in our organizations over time, and then they struggle because they don't know the right way to lead in that manner? They haven't been given the skills. So what makes a great individual contributor in an organization is not necessarily going to make a great leader, because I have to practice and use different skill sets.

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And that's what usually is the hang-up. But when you're speaking about the charisma, leadership comes in all packages, right? So it's not those that are just most charismatic, because sometimes charismatic leads to being ingenuine, and not a good listener. And so we know that the best leaders out there are ones that have empathy, that listen to their people, and then they know how to motivate and inspire, because they heard you. And that goes a long way. So it's not necessarily the charisma that makes you a great leader, but it's people that feel like they're being lifted up by their leader, supported and empowered by their leader, and held accountable. But that's a two-way job. That's what leadership feels like.

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Logan (32:21): Yeah, I really like that you mentioned the individual contributor track, because that seemed to be, I think businesses have changed their opinion on that now, but it was like, you did great at your individual contributor job, now you're gonna be a leader and a manager. And it was like that was the reward. And it is different skill sets, like you mentioned. One is doing the skills of the job, the other is leading in people management and a whole slew of other things. And they're not necessarily related. And the only track to more responsibility and better things that a company can, probably doesn't need, I think people have come to the realization that it doesn't have to be leadership.

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Jamie Petter (33:21): Yeah. And I think what's tricky, especially in organizations of all sizes, is, now I have to lead. I'm going from we, we are on the team, to me. But great leaders don't think about me. They think about we. And so there's this disconnect in this transition, where now I'm over here and the team's here. Well, not really. You still have to get work done through the team. And sometimes you have to be a player-coach. And how do I balance that? And then what I find is that what leaders most struggle with is, how do I have compelling conversations? How do I have inspiring coaching conversations? How do I deliver feedback continuously in a way that is constructive and not critical? So, coaching, feedback, and then how do I hold people accountable, where they see my authentic self, I'm genuine and transparent, yet I know where that line is, that invisible line, so that I create the environment and experience that is most helpful for my team? And I think those are the biggest things that leaders struggle with when they're making that jump.

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Logan (34:49): Yeah. So I guess for those listening, we're now a little off topic, but I really like this conversation, so if you don't mind, Jamie, if you're becoming a first-time manager, what are some of those things that you're thinking about, helping them come up with good constructive feedback that's not critical? Those are so important. And first-time managers, I think in my opinion, I don't know if this is what everybody else thinks, sometimes get neglected on how to be really good at all of that.

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Jamie Petter (35:23): Yeah, and it takes practice. And leaders are not born in the classroom, right? We want to give them maybe a shot in the arm of the skills and strategies, but it takes practice to do this. And I would say that, in building customized leadership development programs in my career, it starts with, there's a formula, and it's compiled of three main things. One is self-awareness and self-discovery. So I need to be able to manage self before I can manage others. And then I need to understand business acumen. I need to understand how the business runs. I need to understand what the bigger picture is, and how do I connect people to it. And then I need to understand some managing techniques, like giving coaching and feedback. And those three components hold true as you continue to elevate your leadership role. But then what percentage of time you spend in each one of those buckets varies based on entry level, first-time manager, mid-level, director level, and executive level.

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All of which is awareness, self-awareness and other, you know, psychometric tools, 360 feedback, whatever it is. That is critical, because it's the aha moment that every manager has when they first step into leadership, that other people don't think the same way they do. It's like the most surprising thing. You're like, really, not everyone thinks that they should just keep working until, blah blah blah, right? And so that awareness is really critical. And that's the first step. You gotta be aware, and then you build the skills after that.

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Logan (37:10): Yeah, those are three really great examples. I had a mentor tell me, know thyself. It came from a book and a program, I can't think of it right now. But then the business acumen.

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Jamie Petter (37:20): Yeah. Socrates, I think it is. I think it's one of those philosophers from long ago, which is awesome.

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Logan (37:26): Yeah. And then business acumen. And I talk about this a lot on the show. I've had most people on the show that we somehow touch upon this business acumen. And I was just having a conversation, and I find it so funny that you bring this up, that when I talk with HR folks and HR leaders, it's, we're having to justify HR to the business and our impact. I talk with marketers, because I sit in marketing, we say the same thing. And I was joking offhand with somebody, I was like, it seems that all departments maybe are just justifying their existence to finance, and learning the business acumen in order to do that. I say that tongue in cheek a little bit, but yeah. So I guess, for everybody listening, you don't have to feel alone. Everybody's feeling this pain and learning the business acumen.

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Jamie Petter (38:07): Exactly, right? Unfortunately, it's probably true. No, we're all fighting for our impact. And I think that's the important part of why I approach HR from a lens of results. Because at the end of the day, your people are the way you're gonna grow. Companies don't just grow by themselves. Technology might be helping them grow, the right tech stack, but it's the people that are putting the tech stack together, that are working in the organization, that grow businesses. And I think we're always looking to show value. And it's tricky, and some things are not easy to measure. Leadership development is not easy to measure. Sometimes those results that are most critical and important are hardest to measure. And so we're always looking for, how do I share value? And I think that's what's important about having analytics, and being able to really align on, even if it's not a KPI, but we are aligned that when we see an increase in our customer service score, then we know that that's probably been a change in how our leaders are coming in and impacting the sale. And there's ways to get to those levels of learning and levels of talent development, specifically by behavior and observation, things like that. But data points, and being able to tie in your value based on the results, is critical to your survival.

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Logan (40:01): Yeah. And it's 100% doable. And it just takes sometimes a little bit of thinking. Because in marketing we have the same thing, and in people analytics and all of this. And I think about scientists in science, and they figure out how to measure all sorts of things to run studies. And if you can come up with ways to measure all of that, there's ways to measure all of this as well. It just takes some time and some finagling, and knowing that there might not be a prescription right away for a particular use case.

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Jamie Petter (40:35): Yeah. I love that you said that, because what is challenging, if you haven't worked with that organization before, you could throw a dart and say, well, we absolutely need to hear from the customer, and we have to hear from the employee, and then we have to see what your sales are. If those aren't working, then we go down deeper and we figure out where they are. But getting to the right insights that are really moving the needle is important. So it's not just having a big dashboard of a million different KPIs that you're reading every day. It's like, what's it telling us? And let's do something about it. Let's fix it. And then let's hone in on the top three or the top five that are gonna move the needle. Know what those are, and work on those. Because I've seen the complexity of organizations focusing on so many things that they don't know what the insights are that the data is providing them. And sometimes it needs, let's just get more simple, so that we can then get more complex as we dive deeper into the root cause of that data and what it's telling us.

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Logan (41:57): Yeah, that's a good insight there. And those three to five that you're tracking can all change over time, depending on the initiatives as well, I think. So you don't have to say, these are the five that are gonna be here for all time.

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Jamie Petter (42:08): Absolutely. No, I mean, if you're in the retail world, you pretty much could say conversion of the customers that walk into your door is a pretty good indicator of what we're doing with the sale. So that pretty much holds true. But if your selling process is about how we make that customer feel, and how we build the relationship with them, then I probably need to be looking at some additional data to tell me if I'm gonna get more traffic in the door, because I'm doing what I need to do here, but I don't have the analytics to tell me that. So some are obvious and some aren't.

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Logan (42:53): Correct. That's a good call out. Well, Jamie, I appreciate the time. I wanna be conscious of time here. Is there anything else you would like to leave the audience with that we didn't cover?

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Jamie Petter (43:11): I think I would just say that, whatever organization, if you're in private equity, merger, acquisition, medium, small, medium business, maybe just take a look at your people differently and say, is my culture fueling the results that I'm looking for? And if I'm not hitting results, why? And start really taking a deep dive into the systems and practices and policies that you have in play, and the expectations. The people strategy is that three-legged stool. If you have your product strategy, and you have your purpose, and your financial strategy, without that people strategy, that stool's gonna be pretty wobbly. There aren't many two-legged stools out there. And so take a deeper look at your people strategy, and do you have the components you need to scale?

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Logan (44:12): That is a really great way to close this out. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Where would you like the audience to connect with you?

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Jamie Petter (44:20): I'd love for them to, they can find me on LinkedIn. Culture Grid HR is the only one, and Jamie Petter is the only one on LinkedIn, so you're sure to find me.

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Logan (44:23): Okay, that lets you know. Great. We will put both of those into the show notes for everybody. And Jamie, I wanna thank you for taking the time to chat with us today. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

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Jamie Petter (44:39): Okay, great. Yeah, it was a great conversation. Thank you for having me. Great topics.