Gut + Science

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**Gut + Science**

Gut + Science is a leadership podcast for executives, people leaders, and high achievers who want to build stronger teams, healthier workplace cultures, and higher employee engagement.

Hosted by Nikki Lewallen Gregory, each episode blends people-first leadership, practical leadership development, and real-world insight from executives and thought leaders.

Through candid conversations and powerful stories, Gut + Science explores culture, coaching, communication, performance, employee engagement, and the human side of leadership, giving listeners practical ideas and perspectives they can put into action.

Latest Episodes:

030: Sue Joyce | Empathetic Onboarding Nov 01, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Remember What It's Like to be a New Face: Put yourself in the shoes of your new hires. Imagine what their first days are like. Who is everybody? Who can they go to with questions? Where is everything located? Your job is to provide a clear roadmap to make the transition as painless as possible. Don't make them figure everything out by themselves.
Start the Onboarding Process With the First Interaction: If you want to hire engaged employees, don't wait for their first day to start onboarding. Engaged employees have values that match with those of your culture. So, during your initial phone interview, ask what "culture" means to them. This will weed out anyone with a "culture disconnect" and make the rest of the onboarding process easier and more effective.
Make Onboarding a Full Force Effort: Onboarding shouldn't just involve your Operations or H.R. Department. It needs to be a culture-wide process. Create a culture that is welcoming to new hires and allow them to introduce themselves to everyone. Have them share not only who they are professionally, but a personal interest as well.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/sue-joyce/

Book Recommendation:

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Sponsors:

Titus - In our conversations with CEOs and hiring managers, we hear they are frustrated with traditional recruiting... From outrageous fees to focusing on candidates before clients, the process was broken and needed to be fixed. Enter Titus Talent. Titus Talent Strategies serves its clients using passionate people, a proven process, and unparalleled performance. Oh, did we mention they guarantee the PERFORMANCE of their candidates for 12 months?
Custom Concrete - Custom Concrete has been creating foundations for the finest homes, commercial buildings and industrial facilities throughout Central Indiana since 1969. Builders, contractors, and homeowners rely on our expertise because so much depends on getting it right. Our knowledge and control of all aspects of the job, from excavation to waterproofing to backfill, means that extra value is built into every project. Codes don't drive our business, excellence does.

029: Rachel Druckenmiller | Healthy Company Cultures: More Than Standing Desks and Yoga Classes Oct 25, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Inspire employees to connect and build relationships.
Provide opportunities for growth starting immediately after an employees hire date.
Ensure all employees at every level are involved in work bigger than themselves.
Leaders can't care for people they don't know. Build deep relationships and get to know your people
Develop individual strategic plans with each employee you lead to help them achieve their dreams. Tie their involvement in your company to the dream they're trying to achieve, and help them get there.
Above all, relationships trump everything. This is where we find the most meaning. So whether that's internally from leader to individual team member, or helping employees build relationships outside the company—the more relationships, the stronger the engagement.
As a leader, get in the habit of sharing what you need help with. Asking for help shows you are human, and the vulnerability builds trust, which ultimately drives employee engagement.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/rachel-druckenmiller

Book Recommendation:

The Fire Starter Sessions by Danielle LaPorte

Sponsors:

Emplify - Are you still using pulse surveys? How about annual questionnaires? If your organization relies on either of these, it's time to discover Emplify. Emplify has created a new way to measure employee engagement. It's where CEOs who want to know what's really happening within a workforce go… to get honest feedback… and to understand what needs to change for people to love their work using simple and trustworthy data.
Purple Ink - Purple Ink's customized HR services will help you make your workspace JoyPowered. Whether you're looking for help with recruiting, compliance, or leadership training, they listen to what you need and tailor their solutions to you. And look for The JoyPowered Workspace Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts!

028: Rich Armstrong | Playing the Great Game of Business Oct 18, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Treat Employees Like Owners: Perception is reality, right? So be transparent and share yourself and what's under the hood with your employees. This builds trust, which directly correlates to engagement.
Educate: Knowledge is power, so taking the time to educate your people on the front end will save a lot of time on the back end. Plus, you will see employees taking more ownership when they're more confident.
Have Small Group Challenges: Have teams like departments, locations, or shifts own a challenge and break down the plan to achieve it. Incorporate weekly huddles to report progress. Stay focused and celebrate each win along the way. Expect to see energy grow among these groups.
Provide Employee Stake in the Outcome: Understand what is important to the individual and align their reward (e.g. time off, more pay, time to volunteer, more responsibility) with something they get really excited about. Always circle back to the individual "why".

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/rich-armstrong

Sponsors:

Purple Ink - Purple Ink's customized HR services will help you make your workspace JoyPowered. Whether you're looking for help with recruiting, compliance, or leadership training, they listen to what you need and tailor their solutions to you. And look for The JoyPowered Workspace Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts!
Titus - in their conversations with CEOs and hiring managers, they hear frustration with traditional recruiting. From outrageous fees to focusing on candidates before clients, the process was broken and needed to be fixed. Enter Titus Talent. Titus Talent Strategies serves its clients using passionate people, a proven process, and unparalleled performance.

027: Cara Silletto | Decreasing Turnover in an Employee Market Oct 11, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Make a Diagnosis: Diagnose why people stay and why they leave. It's important to have data to help truly understand the reality in your organization and stop relying on guesswork. There are so many different tools out there to help you gain that data and understanding.
Beef Up Your HR Team: Don't skimp on your HR team. Also, make sure they have a seat at the executive table. Think about it. Most executives agree working on turnover should be one of the top priorities in any organization. If that's the case, we need to treat the workforce who manages this with super high priority as well
Get to Know Your People: Try to understand the reality of the team members you're leading and managing. One of the greatest training topics for your leaders should be helping them understand how to connect. Truly connecting with direct reports means building relationships and learning to listen and really understand what they need. Doing this effectively can help bring programs and solutions to life based on the needs of your individual workforce.
Focus on High-Risk Employees: Turnover is especially prevalent among new hires. Knowing this, it's essential to ensure your onboarding is constantly being innovated on. You should be clear in your expectations from the beginning and help new hires find a mentor to help them through the process. Consider giving tours so every new employee is crystal clear on how the organization works, who is who, and how to communicate with all of the different levels in the organization.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/cara-silletto

Book Recommendation:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Sponsors:

Custom Concrete - Custom Concrete has been creating foundations for the finest homes, commercial buildings and industrial facilities throughout Central Indiana since 1969. Builders, contractors, and homeowners rely on our expertise because so much depends on getting it right. Our knowledge and control of all aspects of the job, from excavation to waterproofing to backfill, means that extra value is built into every project. Codes don't drive our business, excellence does.
Emplify - Are you still using pulse surveys? How about annual questionnaires? If your organization relies on either of these, it's time to discover Emplify. Emplify has created a new way to measure employee engagement. It's where CEOs who want to know what's really happening within a workforce go… to get honest feedback… and to understand what needs to change for people to love their work using simple and trustworthy data.

026: Jonathon Burns | Awesome Place, Awesome Props Oct 04, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Drive Connection to Your Brand: Help your employees see the impact of the work you do and how you serve your customers. This can be done by sharing stories or, better yet, helping them actually go out into the world and experience the product or service you're offering.
Create a Vision Slogan: Develop your own version of "Awesome Places Awesome Props". The best way to do this is by gathering your leadership team together to help co-create your vision slogan. This will increase leadership buy-in from the very beginning. Your slogan should encompass what you want your workplace to be, do, have, and give for your employees and for our customers.
Try an Action Board: Get your team involved to collectively create an action board and review it on a weekly basis. You can borrow the components from Jonathon's board to get you started: reflection and celebrating wins, identifying tools and resources the team needs, understanding the team's focus for the upcoming week, and reinforcing each individual team member's personal commitment.
Just Dive In: Don't wait for everything to be perfect before launching them. You can make tweaks along the way as needed. You're always going to have employees who aren't going to buy in right away, but that shouldn't stop you from trying new things. Get something going. Get it out there. And just dive in.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/jonathon-burns

Book Recommendation:

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box by Arbinger Institute

Sponsors:

Emplify - Are you still using pulse surveys? How about annual questionnaires? If your organization relies on either of these, it's time to discover Emplify. Emplify has created a new way to measure employee engagement. It's where CEOs who want to know what's really happening within a workforce go… to get honest feedback… and to understand what needs to change for people to love their work using simple and trustworthy data.
Titus - In our conversations with CEOs and hiring managers, we hear they are frustrated with traditional recruiting... From outrageous fees to focusing on candidates before clients, the process was broken and needed to be fixed. Enter Titus Talent. Titus Talent Strategies serves its clients using passionate people, a proven process, and unparalleled performance. Oh, did we mention they guarantee the PERFORMANCE of their candidates for 12 months?

025: Special Episode | Celebration and Reflection Sep 27, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Ask: Spend time asking employees for their feedback and practicing your listening skills. If you don't have a third-party tool helping you with this, it is highly recommended so you can gather honest and helpful feedback. This can truly help you solve problems and get better. Don't forget to ensure you have a confidential tool your employees trust and to spend time truly reflecting on the data and feedback.
Analyze: When you discover areas needing more insight, ask deeper questions to understand not just where and who has challenges, but why as well as their input on how to solve it. Again, spend lots of time listening, but also think through that analyze portion to know what questions to ask, so you can then spend time prioritizing and building a strategy. Hopefully, you have data that can partner with your gut and emotion. Data tells a story, it's factual, and it helps leaders on your team get on board. So we need to stop guessing. We need to take the data, feedback, and our gut and put it all together to build an effective strategy.
Act: Take action on the strategy you lay out. This means communicating to your employees exactly what you are doing. When in doubt, over communicate it. As you take action, realize you may need some outside help with implementation - most organizations do. So, partner with rockstar recruiters, hire a coach for accountability or bring on a strategic HR consulting to hone your onboarding program. Do whatever you need to do. But make sure you're taking action and regularly communicating the things you are doing to make the organization better. This means so much to employees.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/episode-25

Sponsors:

Custom Concrete - Custom Concrete has been creating foundations for the finest homes, commercial buildings and industrial facilities throughout Central Indiana since 1969. Builders, contractors, and homeowners rely on our expertise because so much depends on getting it right. Our knowledge and control of all aspects of the job, from excavation to waterproofing to backfill, means that extra value is built into every project. Codes don't drive our business, excellence does.
Emplify - Are you still using pulse surveys? How about annual questionnaires? If your organization relies on either of these, it's time to discover Emplify. Emplify has created a new way to measure employee engagement. It's where CEOs who want to know what's really happening within a workforce go… to get honest feedback… and to understand what needs to change for people to love their work using simple and trustworthy data.

024: Andy Medley | Game On: Creating a Culture of Winning Sep 20, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Schedule a 45-Day Check-In: Do a 1-on-1 check-in with new employees to get feedback on their experience with the onboarding process. Sitting down with them, listening to what they have to say, and building a relationship will make a huge impact on their satisfaction.
Gamify Your Business: Using an Open Book Management style is a great way to help employees get educated on foundation business principles. This approach will instill ownership by helping them understand the financials of the business, how the business runs, and how they play a part in its success.
Practice Transparency: Transparency fuels accountability. This can be accomplished by posting scoreboard and stating goals for all to hear. Doing so will breed a feedback-driven environment where everyone is holding each other accountable.
Build A Culture Club: Have a team of employees (apart from leadership) come together on a routine basis to come up with new ideas, get input from other employees, and make decisions around employee events. Have them brainstorm ways your company is going to give, options to get involved in the community, and new ways of learning and improving your company culture.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/andy-medley

Book Recommendations:

High Output Management by Andrew Grove
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil

Sponsors:

Titus - In our conversations with CEOs and hiring managers, we hear they are frustrated with traditional recruiting... From outrageous fees to focusing on candidates before clients, the process was broken and needed to be fixed. Enter Titus Talent. Titus Talent Strategies serves its clients using passionate people, a proven process, and unparalleled performance. Oh, did we mention they guarantee the PERFORMANCE of their candidates for 12 months?
Custom Concrete - Custom Concrete has been creating foundations for the finest homes, commercial buildings and industrial facilities throughout Central Indiana since 1969. Builders, contractors, and homeowners rely on our expertise because so much depends on getting it right. Our knowledge and control of all aspects of the job, from excavation to waterproofing to backfill, means that extra value is built into every project. Codes don't drive our business, excellence does. See the difference at customeconcrete.com

023: Toni Richins | Leveraging Engagement (Not Satisfaction) to Improve Your Workforce Sep 13, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Don't Confuse Engagement with Satisfaction: Employee engagement and employee satisfaction are not the same. Ensure that you understand the difference to get an accurate read on engagement levels of your leaders and team members. You must learn to measure the right things.
Lend Your Ear(s): One of the simplest ways to gain buy-in from an employee is to listen. Be as intentional as possible in developing your listening skills as a leader. Practice less talking and do more listening this week.
Embrace Challenges: One of the keys to engagement is whether or not an employee feels challenged in their work, to have a position where they're growing. Equip your managers to have real conversations with team members to understand the level of challenge they are feeling with the work they are doing.
Reassess Your Cultural Norms: Culture is a collection of behavioral practices of the organization, both stated and unstated. Are there unintentional harmful norms that are happening in your organization and need to be discussed? Appoint a group of people to keep a collective eye and report regularly, so these norms don't continue within your workplace.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/toni-richins/

Book Recommendation:

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Sponsors:

Emplify - Are you still using pulse surveys? How about annual questionnaires? If your organization relies on either of these, it's time to discover Emplify. Emplify has created a new way to measure employee engagement. It's where CEOs who want to know what's really happening within a workforce go… to get honest feedback… and to understand what needs to change for people to love their work using simple and trustworthy data.
Purple Ink - Purple Ink's customized HR services will help you make your workspace JoyPowered. Whether you're looking for help with recruiting, compliance, or leadership training, they listen to what you need and tailor their solutions to you. And look for The JoyPowered Workspace Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts!

022: Dee Ann Turner | Going the Second Mile For Your Culture Sep 06, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Behaviors Equal Culture: Your business' mission statement and core values don't create culture - you must put these ideas into practice. Promote an engaged workplace by hiring individuals that believe in the mission of your business and provide tangible steps for how they can live it from day one.
Enforce with Principles: Enforcing strict rules based solely on compliance limits the creativity and overall impact of your employees. Strive to empower your workplace by teaching guidelines, expectations, and principles of commitment that allow individualistic solutions to breed.
Know Why You Exist: A connected culture must be one that contains commonality and shared interests. Constantly revisit the "why" of your business, and share it often to rally your employees around the challenging mission you are trying to accomplish.
Own Your Culture: Top organizational leaders own company culture. When they set an example, the rest of the workforce will follow suit. Foster deep pride and ownership from your staff for the guiding principles of your company by living the mission of your business while outwardly communicating these ideals frequently.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/dee-ann-turner/

Book Recommendation:

It's My Pleasure: The Impact of Extraordinary Talent and a Compelling Culture by Dee Ann Turner

Sponsors:

Titus - in their conversations with CEOs and hiring managers, they hear frustration with traditional recruiting. From outrageous fees to focusing on candidates before clients, the process was broken and needed to be fixed. Enter Titus Talent. Titus Talent Strategies serves its clients using passionate people, a proven process, and unparalleled performance.
Emplify – Are you still using pulse surveys? How about annual questionnaires? If your organization relies on either of these, it's time to discover Emplify. Emplify has created a new way to measure employee engagement. It's where CEOs who want to know what's really happening within a workforce go… to get honest feedback… and to understand what needs to change for people to love their work using simple and trustworthy data.

021: Brent Oakley | Leading Culture as a Player-Coach Aug 30, 2018

Show notes

Truth You Can Act On:

Be A Players' Coach: For your employees to want to better themselves, they have to be empowered to learn about their role, their business, and their industry. Instill this desire for personal development by emphasizing the importance of continuing education, every single day.
Set The Tone: We all know that meetings are a necessity, but they often last too long and become unfocused. Try forming shorter, more frequent informal sessions to complement your weekly updates. These various tones of conversations will promote greater productivity and accountability.
Make Yourself Great(er): As a leader in your business, your walk is just as important as your talk. Are you a living example of the culture you want to create? Don't let your title stand as your lone credibility. Whether it be hiring a business coach, reading books, or soliciting feedback, put the energy into furthering your abilities as a leader.
Foster The Big Picture: Feeling connected - It's the basic need of every human, and it drives our daily ambitions. Create a workplace environment that embraces connectivity and encouragement to grow the emotional ownership of your employees to the business and one another.

Full Shownotes:

https://gutplusscience.com/brent-oakley/

Book Recommendation:

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney

Sponsors:

Emplify – Are you still using pulse surveys? How about annual questionnaires? If your organization relies on either of these, it's time to discover Emplify. Emplify has created a new way to measure employee engagement. It's where CEOs who want to know what's really happening within a workforce go… to get honest feedback… and to understand what needs to change for people to love their work using simple and trustworthy data.
Custom Concrete has been creating foundations for the finest homes, commercial buildings and industrial facilities throughout Central Indiana since 1969. Builders, contractors, and homeowners rely on our expertise because so much depends on getting it right. Our knowledge and control of all aspects of the job, from excavation to waterproofing to backfill, means that extra value is built into every project. Codes don't drive our business, excellence does.

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