LeaderLab

People leaders have always been a powerful force in organizations. With hybrid workplaces, a new generation in the workforce (Gen Z), rise of AI and digitization, quickly changing geopolitical concerns, and more is people leadership more important than ever?

TILTCO Inc. gathered business leaders, consultants and academics for Season 6 of the LeaderLab to capture insights on the role for people leaders, what great looks like and what companies and people leaders need to do to be the people leaders employees need today.

In our first episode of this season, we speak to a roundtable of participants who offered the following insights:

• Trust and psychological safety are elusive; yet critical for greater success on teams. Todd shared: "People who build trust well within an organization by reliably doing what they said they would do. They get to know you as a person and they care and are more in it for the team than they are for themselves can build trust and psychological safety for their team."

• Giving feedback, like many parts of leadership takes intentional practice and a commitment to self-awareness. Diana shared: "Giving real time feedback, sometimes in very tough settings, you need to really have good EQ skills so that you can listen, you can deliver a message that's appropriate to the person. It can be scary to give feedback, so it requires practice, because then it becomes easier over time."

• Leadership has always been important, but in today's context, leadership matters more than before. Jennifer shared: "Leaders will help steward how organizations will evolve their ways of working, helping to adapt to the ever-changing environment. In addition, the workforce is challenging a lot of organizations and companies to really change the way that they work, the way they listen to their employees."

• The role of the people leader has changed, demanding a new set of capabilities and responsibilities. Eric shared: "I think a lot of times we look up to the leader to have all the answers and right now that's probably the biggest miss of leadership. We need leaders to understand that you're not going to have all the answers. Your team has to find some agency and that means, you as a leader, have to create the space for your team to be able to do that and be comfortable that you're not all knowing."

• With people leaders expected to fulfill different roles in a company, the people systems that support them must also evolve. Todd said: "Operating systems matter more than they've ever mattered. You need to build the operating systems of the company in a way that it is able to adapt faster to complex situations, build great culture and skill development, and handle these external factors as they come up."

Thank you to our panelists:

• Diana Amenyogbe, Managing Director, Investment Portfolio Management, Office of the Chief Investment Officer at CPP Investments where she's leading a multi-year culture initiative. Connect with Diana on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-amenyogbe/

• Jennifer Keri Choi, Senior Strategy Manager at The Coca Cola Company. Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-keri-choi-731a2816/

• Todd Scheidt, Tech Strategist and Operations Executive, formerly of Shopify, Google and McKinsey. Connect with Todd on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddscheidt/

• Eric VanDerSluis, Senior Director, L&D and Performance Strategy at Edward Jones. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-vandersluis-6b22846/

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her more than 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

Today's teams are faced with ongoing, unprecedented disruption. Leaders, then, are challenged to guide their teams through these new and uncertain times. Are leaders prepared?

In this episode of LeaderLab, we are joined by Kristine Steinberg, CEO and founder of Kismet, to explore what it will take for leaders to be successful in today's environment, and perhaps more importantly, what skills they'll need as we move forward in this new dynamic.

Kristine shared the following key insights with us:

• Self-awareness is critical as we navigate through an extended period of chaos: "Leaders are the people we're looking to right now to help us through this time. So, you have to really consider why would someone follow me right now? Am I setting a good example of how to take care of myself as I navigate through uncertainty? Am I taking care of myself physically? Where am I feeling vulnerable or challenged and how can I get help to work through those things."
• The power of micro-experiences to create a sense of survival when you're feeling burnt out: "Leaders are burnt out and they can't leave the wheel of their ship. They can't actually leave and go do something that would give them the break they need. So, they have to shift to micro-experiences to create a sense of survival – talk to a friend, go for a run, or any other form of self-care that won't take up a lot of time, but will ultimately take your level of energy up even ever so slightly."
• Leadership is about coaching, not command and control: "There's a time and place to be directive and there's a time and place to teach and advise. As a leader, you have to learn to bring people along and mobilize people and help them get inspired around their own strengths."
• Let go of expectations to know all the answer and get comfortable designing the way forward with your team: "Leaders need to take the pressure off of trying to know every politically correct thing to do in the wake of a race war, equality around gender, race, culture, religion, everything. Instead, move into a new mode of listening and hearing about people's experience, understanding what they need and responding; instead of trying to come up with the perfect equity formally.

Meet Kristine Steinberg

Kristine Steinberg is the CEO at Kismet, a consultancy dedicated to helping leaders become their highest selves. Kristine is a master leadership coach and guides her clients to strengthen their emotional IQ. This includes nurturing mindfulness and discipline, dissolving emotional rigidity, learning to communicate clearly and powerfully, balancing ambition with humility, how to empower colleagues and teams to grasp their true value and to navigate conflict with agility. Kristine has worked with dogged leaders from some of the vanguards of tech, business, fashion and lifestyle, including Bain & Company, Chanel, TED, LinkedIn, IBM, Adidas, Microsoft and others. Learn more about Kristine and her work at www.thisiskismet.com.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

Conversation is a powerful way for leaders to inspire and motivate their teams. It's also an opportunity to learn and make more effective decisions. Yet, engaging in conversations across an organization isn't always easy.

In this episode of LeaderLab, we are joined by Dave MacLeod, CEO and co-founder of ThoughtExchange, to explore the importance of conversations in organizations.

Based on his research and insights shared in his new book, Scaling conversations: How leaders access the full potential of people, he offers strategies leaders can use to engage in more meaningful, inclusive and productive conversations across teams.

Dave shares the following insights:

• There's never been a more important time to include as many voices in the conversation: "There are a lot of problems to solve [in our organizations] and a lot of pressure to do it. There's a lot of change to our life and a lot of recognition of systemic racism and the recognition of power to drive our business, and there's never been a more important time to hear from everybody who's impacted by these things.
• We're at an exciting moment where leaders feel they can admit they have bias and enter the right conversations that will move things in the right direction. "That's maybe a really exciting moment right now... that people can say, 'Yeah, I agree. I admit I have bias. So now what?'"
• When dealing with polarizing topics, search for the common ground. "There's ways to solve problems for two people who think very differently about how to make their business run faster and the same mechanism actually works when you have people who disagree strong – you have to find the common ground between them."
• Use technology and tools to eliminate our bias from conversations. "The idea of getting people to share ideas and listen to each other without knowing exactly who said them will get us to really think deeply about and empathize with each other's points of view."

Pick up Dave's book to learn more strategies to scale conversations in your organization. Order Scaling conversations: How leaders access the full potential of people here: https://www.thoughtexchange.com/scaling-conversations/

Meet Dave MacLeod

Dave MacLeod is the CEO and a co-founder of ThoughtExchange, the essential Enterprise Discussion Management platform for scaling conversations. Dave's expertise helped create the game-changing platform that's used by millions at some of the world's largest organizations like GE Healthcare and McDonald's. From corporations to schools, ThoughtExchange invites participants to share insights anonymously—removing bias and getting the most important ideas in front of the leaders who make them happen. Dave is also the author of Scaling Conversations: How Leaders Access the Full Potential of People. Prior to ThoughtExchange, he was a successful entrepreneur who designed businesses and events focused on analog group communication innovation. Outside of work, Dave keeps busy as a dad of three who loves the outdoors.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

Company culture matters. Strong culture is linked to stronger financial performance. During the pandemic, a third of organizations reported challenges in maintaining their company culture. With flexible work models here to stay, leaders are wondering how they can build a great culture in a hybrid work environment.

TILTCO Inc. gathered business leaders, consultants and academics for a series of Roundtable discussions to capture insights and practical ideas that leaders can use as they re-image their organizations over the next 18 to 24 months.

In this special LeaderLab series, our Roundtable participants offered leaders the following tips:

• Don't virtualize your in-office culture and how you work today. Get creative and design with intention from a blank sheet of paper. As Janeen shared: "Let's not replace the old thing with a new version of the thing. Let's actually zoom out now that we're in a new paradigm. Before we were solving XYZ needs and now the problems are a different set."

• Hybrid will create two or more distinct employee experiences. Your job: make each of them awesome. Stephen offered this: "If you create a two-class system of any sort at work, that's bad. So, however, you do hybrid and however you're modeling it, you need everybody playing by the same rules and principles."

• Office space will serve a new purpose in hybrid, so consider how you can intentionally design it to bring your culture to life. Jay asked this question: "What is an office? I've got this dream that it's a much more collaborative space, and if you're going into the office, it's to collaborate in person. It's not this, you know, historically walled-off office where everybody is in their own spot."

• Hybrid is complex and it will amplify culture challenges that exist in your organization today. Overcoming them will require leaders to step up in new ways. Here are Janeen's thoughts on the topic: "There's so much of this trust conversation going in one direction, which is 'Hey, employee. Show me I should trust you." The reality is do they trust you as their leader in this new environment? You need to create a whole different kind of conversation now for them to actually feel trust on their side of the equation."

• Leaders will need to intentionally build connection among and between their teams, and they'll have to find new ways to do it. Fiona said this would be the biggest job for leaders: "Hybrid offers a different set of challenges, especially when you get into different time zones. You can't just have the big lunch or the Friday drinks or all these things that are already in our toolkit. You really have to be very thoughtful and deliberate to figure out how to bring your people together."

Meet our Panelists

A special thank you to Will Bachman, managing partner of Umbrex, for his help in bringing these roundtables together. Learn more about the work that Umbrex does connecting independent consultants with one another at www.umbrex.com.

Thank you to our panelists:

• Jay Altizer, managing director, Falling Branch Advisors LLC. Connect with Jay on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/altizer.
• Kelly Duffin is an experienced strategy and transformation leader. Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyduffinmba/.
• Jennifer Hartz is CEO of Corporate Hartz. Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jehartz.
• Fiona Lake Waslander is COO and co-founder at Skylight. Connect with Fiona on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionalakewaslander/.
• Stephen Redwood is founder of Redwood Advisory Partners. Connect with Stephen on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenredwood/
• Mike Ross is chief HR officer at Simons. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikejamesross/
• Janeen Speer is vice president of Talent at Shopify. Connect with Janeen on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/janeenspeer/

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

Middle managers are a powerful force in organizations. As companies look ahead and consider the move to hybrid workplaces – that is where there is a mix of in-person and remote work happening – they'll want to focus on enabling their middle managers to be true people leaders who can coach, motivate and set pace for the people on their team to work towards the company's goals.

TITLCO Inc. gathered business leaders, consultants and academics for a series of Roundtable discussions to capture insights and practical ideas that leaders can use as they re-imagine their organizations over the next 18 to 24 months.

In this special LeaderLab series, our Roundtable participants offered leaders the following prescriptions:

• Move away from "face time" as a metric and support middle leaders to manage to outcomes and impact. As Lisa explains: "We're in a transition truly to a knowledge economy where you really have to be able to assess what is the impact this employee is creating, not how many hours they were online."

• Upskill middle managers on the human-side of leadership as they may be the only contact between individual employees and the organization. Susan explained this requires leaders to rethink manager training: "It's not just manager training in the way they thought, but we need training for people to be effective during remote work."

• Coach and equip middle managers to talk about trust in order to build it. Here's what Reid had to say: "It's really tough to talk about trust, but is there anything more powerful that will actually make you want to change than hearing that someone doesn't trust you?"

• Take care of your managers' psychological and physical well-being, so they can do the same to the people on their teams. Aneta offered a mantra that leaders can use to model positive well-being and tie it back to the business imperative: "When I take care of myself and my team, I take care of business."

• Role model the new expectations of hybrid for their middle managers, so they can cascade these new norms to their teams. Nils had this to say about it: "You have to show middle managers that they should want to change and that they need to change... and showcase what they should be striving for, and then provide the opportunity to get the support for it."

Find more insights captured at our Roundtable discussion here: https://tiltco.ca/5-ways-leaders-can-support-their-middle-managers-in-a-hybrid-workplace/

Subscribe to LeaderLab to be notified of our next episode in this special Roundtable series.

Meet our Panelists

A special thank you to Will Bachman, managing partner of Umbrex, for his help in bringing these roundtables together. Learn more about the work that Umbrex does connecting independent consultants with one another at www.umbrex.com.

Thank you to our panelists:

Nils Boeffel, principal consultant at Boeffel Consulting that focuses on digital strategy and agile transformation. Learn more about Nils' work at https://boeffel.net/.

Susan Charnaux is principal and founder at Fairhill Ventures that focuses on strategic guidance on talent and culture change. Learn about Susan's work at her website: https://www.fairhillventures.com/ and connect with her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-charnaux/

Kelly Duffin is an experienced strategy and transformation leader. Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyduffinmba/.

Lisa Dymond is partner and head of talent at Atlas Partners, a private equity investment firm. Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-dymond-nee-wiens-b84678/

Aneta Key is a strategic growth advisor at Aedea Partners LLC. Connect with Aneta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anetakey/.

Amanda Setili is the president of Setili & Associates that focuses on organizational performance improvements. Learn more about Amanda's work on her website at https://setili.com/ and connect with her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandasetili/.

Reid Wuntke is president at Energy Toolbase, developers of economic modeling software. Connect with Reid at https://www.linkedin.com/in/reidwuntke/.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

The future is hybrid. As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations will likely adopt hybrid models of work. What does this mean for leaders and how can they prepare to lead teams where some employees are working in office and others are remote?

TITLCO Inc. gathered business leaders, consultants and academics for a series of Roundtable discussions to capture insights and practical ideas that leaders can use as they re-imagine their organizations over the next 18 to 24 months.

In this special LeaderLab series, our Roundtable participants offered leaders some sage advice:

• Define a hybrid model for your organization based on your specific industry, business and employee needs. As Melanie explains, hybrid isn't new for everyone: "I actually don't think this is very new. And, I think we're finally having conversations about what the norm should be that probably should have happened maybe a few years ago."

• No matter the model you choose, for hybrid to work, leaders need to set explicit norms for their teams. Here's what John says: "How do you make sure everyone understands the kind of corporate norms and what you want your company to be or how you want to work together is much harder to do if you have different blends of people and that's important to think about."

• Leaders will also need to balance the dynamics on their hybrid teams. Phil says this: "Make sure you communicate in a way that feels inclusive. People working from a remote location are getting the same experience as working in the office."

• Hybrid can offer real talent advantages if investments are made to set up your team for success. Sarah had this to say about it: "There's real advantage to be gained for companies who think about this really carefully for their populations."

• Leaders serious about engaging hybrid teams must take deliberate actions to connect in new ways. Bernard offered this piece of advice: "You now have an opportunity to change the ball game and communicate much more efficiently. It's a more challenging environment, and you'll have to understand, more than ever, the population of employees you want to communicate to and communicate with."

Find more insights captured at our Roundtable discussion here: https://tiltco.ca/how-to-communicate-and-engage-employees-in-a-hybrid-workplace/

Subscribe to LeaderLab to be notified of our next episode in this special Roundtable series.

Meet our Panelists

A special thank you to Will Bachman, managing partner of Umbrex, for his help in bringing these roundtables together. Learn more about the work that Umbrex does connecting independent consultants with one another at www.umbrex.com.

Thank you to our panelists:

• Phil Arrata, business leader and former CEO of MEC. Connect with Phil on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/philarrata/.
• Bernard Borowski is a senior advisor at Digital Lean & Data Advantage. Connect with Bernard on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/create-value-from-data-process-technology/.
• Melanie Espeland is CEO and executive coach at Espeland Enterprises. Learn about Melanie's executive voice coaching services at https://www.espelandenterprises.com/.
• Rashay Jethalal is an experienced financial services executive. Connect with Rashay on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rashay/.
• John King is the managing partner at Special Circumstances Partners. Learn more about John's consulting practice at www.specialcircumstances.partners. You can connect with John via LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/john-a-king/.
• Agnes Kunkel is the host of The 2023 Podcast: Your window to the world beyond Covid-19. Listen to her latest episode at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-2023-podcast/id1516781638.
• Sarah Sonnenfeld is the principal and founder at Alsephina Consulting. Learn more about Sarah's work at https://www.alsephinaconsulting.com/.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

A leader's presence matters. It always has – be it in daily interactions with their teams and when influencing a new way forward for their organizations. But how do leaders build their presence and gravitas in a virtual workplace?

Melanie Espeland joins this episode of the LeaderLab with practical ideas that will help leaders more clearly communicate and more effectively connect with their virtual teams and stakeholders. Here's a sample of Melanie's tactical advice:

• Presence begins with self-awareness: "What is presence? What is gravitas? I would define it as the je ne sais quoi, the special sauce that gets people to actually want to listen to you. You want people to want to hear what you have to say, and to be engaged and to have it not be a chore to be on a call with you. So, that's why presence and gravitas is really important for leaders."
• Stop the ums and ahs with deep breathing: "I want you to breathe more deeply using the diaphragm, but I also want you to be able to control how much air you're expelling at one time. If you're expelling too much or too quickly, you might start gasping for breath. This will make you speak more quickly and you may use filler words."

• You're always communicating even when you aren't: "There's always two conversations happening. There's what's physically coming out of your mouth, but then there's also what's happening inside your head. That internal conversation is always going to come out in some way, subconsciously, to others around you even if you can't articulate it."
• Get the tools you need for virtual communications: "If you're going to be communicating digitally, that can be enhanced with specific tools. A microphone is one example that can make it much easier to literally be heard."

Meet Melanie Espeland

Melanie is an executive voice coach, entrepreneur, author and voice actor. She is CEO of Espeland Enterprises where she trains senior clients from top companies such as IBM and Morgan Stanley to use their voices more effectively, optimizing an important tool that is often ignored. That training has become even more relevant as remote meetings have brought presentation and communications skills to center stage.

Learn more about Melanie and Espeland Enterprises at https://www.espelandenterprises.com/.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

Character matters. In a year in which we've faced a global pandemic and growing unrest in pockets around the world, this has never been truer. But what is it and can it be developed?

Dr. Gerard Seijts joins this episode of LeaderLab to explore the behaviours associated with leadership character and to offer concrete examples of how leaders can develop good character and embed it in their organizations. Based on research he's been building since the 2008 financial crisis, Gerard shares the following insights on leadership character:

• Character is dispositional. It's not based on your role on the job, rather it's how you show up in the workplace.
• Character is defined by 11 dimensions: Judgement, transcendence, drive, collaboration, humanity, humility, integrity, temperance, justice, accountability and courage. Very few leaders get top marks in all dimensions. Instead, good character can be developed by continuously improving weaker areas.
• Covid-19 has not only revealed character in world leaders, but has demonstrated in real time how good character can produce good outcomes.
• Making time for reflection is important step in developing your leader character.
• There are specific actions organizations can take to develop character within their leaders and embed good character within teams – starting with integrating it specifically into their recruiting criteria.

Learn more about the 11 dimensions of leadership character here: https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/leadership/research-resources/leader-character-framework/

Access more leadership research from Ivey's Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute: https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/leadership/

Meet Dr. Gerard Seijts

Dr. Gerard Seijts is a professor at the Ivey Business School and a prolific researcher in a range of topics, including leadership, leading change, organizational behaviour, and performance management and staffing. Gerard also leads corporate leadership programs for organizations such as Aecon, Intact Financial Corporations, OMERS, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and many others. He has also worked with local government in Canada and Hong Kong on issues such as leadership and change. Gerard is the recipient of awards for research, innovation in teaching and outreach activities. He is the Executive Director of the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

Big, strategic change efforts often fail. Virtually all of them are harder than they need to be. Why is this and what can leaders do to make change stick? Dr. Elsbeth Johnson, based on a decade of research, calls on leaders to step up and step back.

In this episode of the LeaderLab, Elsbeth sheds new light on the role leaders play in delivering long-term strategic change to their organization. Based on the findings in her new book, Step Up, Step Back: How to Really Drive Strategic Change in Your Organization, Elsbeth highlights key aspects of her new approach:

• As the book title suggests, leaders must learn to step up in the early stages of an organizational change, and then step back in its later stages. This combination sets up the managers and teams for success when delivering the change.
• Strategic change isn't a Hollywood film. It's not fast, dramatic or easy. Instead, it's about doing the "non-glam" work of putting in place the right elements to set managers and teams up for success.
• A leader's charisma is not enough to sustain long-term change. While charisma can play an important role – particularly at the start of a change program, too much of it for too long can breed dependency in managers and teams that will inhibit true transformations.
• In the context of Covid-19, leaders may need to focus more on operations and execution in the near term. But, they also need to do more to provide clarity and to align their teams around their vision and priorities.

We recommend you pick up Elsbeth's book, Step Up, Step Back: How to Really Drive Strategic Change in Your Organization. Find it here: https://www.amazon.ca/Step-Up-Back-Successful-Effective/dp/1472970640

Meet Dr. Elsbeth Johnson

Dr. Elsbeth Johnson is an expert in leadership, strategy and change. She is a former equity analyst and London Business School Professor who now splits her time as a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and her advisory work through her consultancy, SystemShift. Elsbeth spent a decade researching how to deliver strategic organizational change in practice. Based on asking managers what they need from leaders, rather than asking leaders what they did to support change, Elsbeth developed her Step Up, Step Back approach that challenges more traditional beliefs about how to lead change, and about leadership, too.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.

Employee communications is no longer a nice to have. It's a must have. The first months of the pandemic forced leaders to leapfrog their communication skills and practices. And now, as we settle into this new normal - as temporary as we hope it'll be - Gillian Smith, Managing Partner at NATIONAL, encourages leaders to prepare for the marathon ahead.

In this episode of the LeaderLab, Gillian offers key ways leaders can better inform, support and motivate employees through communications. Here are some of Gillian's practical takeaways:

• Pay attention to the personal cues that show up on your screen. Meeting employees in their homes can present powerful insights that can help you better support your employees and build more meaningful connections with them.
• Acknowledge your own humanity to encourage others to share theirs. Be open about your uncertainties or worries, show empathy, address mental health challenges and ask engaging questions to foster two-way conversations.

• It's time to set a new pace that will lead your team through the marathon of this pandemic. Assess and adjust your communication practices to create a new sense of normalcy. Take a look at your messaging, too, focusing their attention on what lies ahead for your business and your team.

Meet Gillian Smith

Gillian Smith is Managing Partner at NATIONAL, one of Canada's leading PR firms. Gillian brings with her more than 20 years' experience in public relations and strategic communications. Before joining NATIONAL, she led her own consultancy, advising a portfolio of C-suite and Board clients across multiple industries. Over her career, Gillian has held senior positions with multiple organizations in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, and currently serves on the Boards of several arts-based organizations in Toronto. In 2018, Gillian ran in the Ontario provincial election.

About TILTCO

TILTCO is a boutique consulting company that helps leaders define and execute their strategies in order to achieve extraordinary business and personal results. Founded by Tineke Keesmaat, she brings her 20 years of leadership consulting experience rooted at McKinsey & Company and Accenture to supports today's leaders achieve exceptional results.