[00:00:03] Donald: When we talk about mental health, when we talk about well-being, we usually talk about them in the context of culture, and we don’t connect them with performance and profitability. If we don’t focus on the well-being of our team is like an athletic coach that doesn’t focus on the rest and well-being of their team and then expects them to perform at a high level during the match.
[00:00:31] Intro: Welcome to Experience Matters by Hiver, a podcast where we keep it real about customer service. Every episode features industry experts who share what really goes into creating unforgettable customer moments. No boring stuff, no fluff, just honest conversations. Stay tuned, and we promise you’ll walk away with insights you can actually use.
[00:00:55] Niraj: Today, we are joined by Donald Thompson, Managing Director of the Center for Organizational Effectiveness at Workplace Options. Donald has led high-growth tech companies through acquisitions, advised enterprise CEOs on aligning leadership, culture, and revenue, and now works with global organizations navigating transformation, AI adoption, and workforce change at scale. In this conversation, we’ll explore how leadership behavior directly impacts customer experience, how AI is reshaping service teams, and what it really takes to scale support operations without sacrificing trust, engagement, or results. Donald, welcome. It’s great to have you on the show.
[00:01:33] Donald: Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this.
[00:01:35] Niraj: Absolutely. So, let’s get started, right? I was going through all the great work that you’ve done, and it’s very impressive how you’ve led companies through high growth phases, through acquisitions, and major transformations as they’re scaling up and building up. I would love to get started by learning about some of your key experiences that shaped your perspective on leadership and how leadership generally impacts customer experience.
[00:01:58] Donald: Thank you for the question. I’ve done a lot of things in my career, and that has been exciting, but they do boil down to a handful of things, right? How do you gain a customer, and how do you keep one? And when you think about it in those simple terms, and then as I flash back to my career, I started my career in business development and sales. And one of the things that when you know, I’ll date myself now. I’m 54. When I started in sales 30-some years ago, I was dialling for dollars. It wasn’t email marketing, digital marketing, and different things. You had to get people on the phone and keep them there in terms of moving and selling your products. So, you had to be very cognizant that every word you were saying mattered specifically to the person you were talking to. How do you make money, save them money, or reduce their risk? And so one of the things, as we get to business and things that I’ve learned is number one, to keep things simple in this complex world. And then number two, realize that once you gain a customer, it’s very easy to lose them when you don’t provide the same care that you did when you were trying to win them. A lot of times, what we do is we win a piece of business, we grow that business, and then we start to take that business that we’ve won for granted. And so, without going into too much detail, I’m on the board of a marketing agency. And one of the things when we win new business that we hear all the time about our competitors is that they stopped bringing in new ideas, and they just were doing what they were told to do. So, think about that in terms of customer support. Think about that in terms of new product features. Think about that in terms of if you’re a lawyer in M&A. You want to bring new insights that help grow your client’s business, and that’s what makes you different and unique, and that’s why they’ll stay with you long term. Customer service is not just are you polite, but are you driving the business forward for the people that you serve. And those are some of the things that I learned along the way that even in the age of AI, even in the age of all the digital tools, we still are doing business person to person with people, and I wanna bring people new ideas and insights that I work with.
[00:04:12] Niraj: Essentially, continue having the same or bring to the table the same energy and inventiveness that you did in the sales process through the journey of the customer, right? And customer service plays such a huge role in that, right, I mean, just to keep that fire alive and to keep things running and improving.
[00:04:29] Donald: And one other thing I would say is, one, you have that perfectly correct. The second thing is that you can do that through questions. If someone calls me on the line and they’re having a challenge with a particular part of their business, and we solve that particular challenge, we normally will say, “Sir, is there anything else I can help you with?” Right? Whether it’s in-person or virtual, we’ll ask that question. Here’s how I tweak that question to be more consultative. Are there any new opportunities your business has taken advantage of that I can be helpful with? So, now we’re talking about growth. Are there any things that I can investigate within our company that we can bring you new information and insight the next time that we talk? So, it’s changing those phrases to a more next-step orientation versus just finishing the conversation orientation. And I think that’s an important difference as well.
[00:05:20] Niraj: That makes sense. Yeah. Being proactive on that, right? Instead of just being reactive to, you know, fixing what is going wrong. I think that is so important. Absolutely. Just changing, you know, I’d love to get back to this, but just changing direction slightly. Right? And then talking about your book, Underestimated, one thing that you talk about, which I would say is, you know, one of the central themes, is how does one rise from being overlooked to actually, you know, being able to lead a company, right, or lead a function, right? Just looking at it from a leadership perspective, right? What are some good ways for me or for leadership in my company to be able to find and spot underestimated talent? Right? Especially in functions like customer service and a lot of customer-facing roles, which are extremely numerically focused, which are extremely analytical and where your assessment of performance might simply be, you know, something that you do offer a spreadsheet.
[00:06:08] Donald: One of the things that I do when I think of how to stand out, right, from the crowd, especially when we’re doing things in the sea of sameness, the commoditization economy we live in. A couple of things are important, especially your relationship with your manager and your manager’s manager. One thing that I did early in my career is I got so proficient at my current job that I was able to ask my leadership, is there anything I can do that is a stretch assignment that’s good for the company and good for me professionally? Is there a seminar I can go to, or is there something I can read? Is there something that needs to be investigated? Is there a problem that hasn’t quite been solved that, if I’m on my lunch break and I want to think about our business, I can bring you some new innovative ideas? It’s about the questions of asking more because the thing that’s unique is that most times, as a CEO and a business leader, people are asking me to solve problems, versus bringing me solutions to problems. So, anyone that’s bringing me solutions to problems or new opportunities or things they’ve learned from the last customer conversation they had, this is music to my ears as a leader because you’re giving me new insight. And people that give me new insight, I want to talk to them more. And so, when you’re in customer service, and you’re working with clients, be searching for and listening for things that our clients need that we can put in our next release, problems that our clients are having that could be solved through better automation. And then I bring those to the leaders. It’s almost like if you are thirsty and somebody brings you a nice, clear glass of water, you remember that person not because of the value of the water, you remember that person because of the value of the problem you had at the moment they solved it, which is I was thirsty and they helped me. And so what is a leader’s version of that? New information, new insight from people that are the closest to the customer. And that’s your value, right? Before you have a big title, before you have a big salary, your value is that you’re talking to the client more than your leaders. So, how do you take that information and catalog it, and get new information and knowledge to your leadership? That’s how you start to become unique.
[00:08:28] Niraj: Very useful, Donald. There’s a study with the entire scenario around. Of course, I understand that everyone who is in the company should be looking for, you know, as you call it, stretch assignments that help them bring value to the leadership. But, you know, as a leader myself, I also feel that a certain part of the onus is on me to be able to build an environment where people can look at the problem that way. And then how do we build a company, a team, an organization where we really seed and encourage this kind of behavior, which helps people come out of the small silos that they are in and contribute in a large way?
[00:09:02] Donald: No. I think that is a wonderful question. The term that I like to use in my full-time role as the managing director for the Center of Organizational Effectiveness at Workplace Options, we produce each year, a psychological safety report, and we talk to thousands of employees every single month, and we catalog that data to basically build out what are the top workplace concerns that employees have based on geography. We do this across 21 different countries. And one of the things that we found as a through line is the relationship with the manager is one of the bigger indicators of success or failure within your company. So, to your point, what can leaders do to bring out and discover that new talent? Number one, as leaders, we often lead with statements instead of questions, and we make statements in a meeting, then the team falls in line and gives ideas to make our statements true. If instead we say, we would like to grow revenue in the next quarter, I would love to hear some ideas from the team. And then, as a leader, we stand quiet. Now, all of a sudden, we’re giving permission, and we’re giving space for people to add ideas to the conversation. And then instead of answering the question, you say very simply, “Jonathan, please tell me more. I really like where you’re going. I’m not fully understanding that yet. Can you unpack this a little bit for me?” “Joanna, thank you so much for that insight. Is there something that you can research, and maybe we’ll have a fifteen-minute meeting in a couple of weeks? I really like your idea. How about pull that forward?” Another one specifically that I was really impressed with, and I wanna share this with our company. So our firm, Workplace Options, was just acquired by TELUS Health. And so TELUS is a global wellness organization, a billion-dollar organization based out of Canada, publicly traded. So, we’re now part of a much larger organization. My direct manager, Alan King, the CEO of Workplace Options, is now on the executive team at this new, bigger business. Wanna set the toll. Anyone that’s been through an acquisition knows how busy it is. People are changing. People are jockeying position. All the things. Two weeks ago, at 7 AM U.S. time, I saw my leader spend two hours, and I was on this call with 14 other leaders from our team. Alan, our CEO, our CEO Eric Santo was on, our head of global VP for marketing, Kurt Merweather, our head of IT, and we listened to five pitches of ideas from people within the organization of new innovations, new ideas, new ways to do things, and the thing I was impressed by the most, all of the ideas were great, we got next steps, but I looked at the leadership team that was assembled, that was listening, that was present, that was there. And that’s another way to get people to share ideas because guess what? It’s not just those five folks; it is that spread through the water cooler that leadership really does want innovation. They really do want to get to know the people that are closest to the client. And demonstrating those things within your organization is another way. Most companies have town hall meetings and monthly meetings, but use those not just to push information to the team, but to listen to the team about how to solve problems better. And so those are two things. I know it took a little bit too long on that, but I really wanted to share that story because there’s some things I’m seeing in organizations I work with. And then the final thing, I’ll give a shout out to one of my clients, Hugo Boss. Hugo Boss is a global retailer, very big business, and I was doing a training with Hugo Boss for their top 30 directors for their American leadership, so their top 30 leaders. One of the things that we did is we split those groups up into five groups to attack a specific business problem that they were having in the organization. And at the end of the training, the entire C-suite leadership team, for an hour and a half, listened to those pitches, gave feedback, gave recognition to those leaders on that team, and those are ways that you demonstrate care and openness to hear new ideas, new insights that can trickle through the organization. So, I wanted to answer your question, but I also wanted to give you a couple of examples of organizations that I think are doing it really well.
[00:13:35] Niraj: A lot of this is actually culture, right, and there’s no quick fix to it, there’s no short path to it. It’s about how you operate as a company, how you operate as people, how you run every meeting, right? What you do every single day from 9 to 5, or whatever hours you work, right?
[00:13:49] Donald: People set their behavior by the culture that the leaders represent. And we use the word culture, and I like to even drill down a little bit further in terms of behavior modeling. Our behavior as a leader shows what we expect and what we respect, and that drives the culture.
[00:14:08] Niraj: So, as leaders, as you know, the topic of behavior, right, I mean, if we were to look at it from behavior modeling, what would you think would be the top 3, 4 behaviors that we should actually be modeling, shooting for, making sure that everyone inculcates it? Could you just describe your opinion of what is the best behavior to have in a company that is culturally like this?
[00:14:27] Donald: Based on the research, one of the biggest challenges that we see is lack of recognition. And so one of the behavior models is to start looking for the good in your people and your team. So, that’s number one, and sharing that in public forums. Number two is feedback, right? Model how to give and receive feedback because most of the time employees are silent, not because they don’t have something to share, but because they don’t know how it’s going to land in the room that they’re in. So, as leaders, we have to pull for feedback, and then we have to give praise for the people that are strong enough and courageous enough to give us that real feedback. So, that’s two. And then the third, which is really, really important, is follow-up on what you hear. So, a lot of companies do surveys, pulse surveys, listening sessions, all the things, but what happens with that information? What changes in the organization? What do you do? And so that follow-up and follow-through is really, really important. So those are the three pillars, I would say, in terms of behaviors that I’ve seen and then based on the data that I think people should really work on.
[00:15:35] Niraj: I think the last one is very important. I think it’s also important to complete the loop on that feedback, you know, once you collect your feedback, going back to the team and saying exactly what we learned, and this is what we did, right?
[00:15:44] Donald: That’s exactly right.
[00:15:45] Niraj: And psychological safety, as you know, mentioned at the start of this point that we’re talking about, is so important to all of this, right? I mean, none of this is possible without actually making sure that there is psychological safety to talk about things openly. And then from there, you know, I would like to navigate into a slightly associated subject, and that is of mental well-being and mental health, right? I mean, that is something that you do a lot as, you know, your role as managing director of Workplace Options, which I think you’ll continue to do, you know, after acquisition too, as you just told us about. It’s such an important aspect, right, especially if you talk about teams that are frontline teams talking to customers all the time, right? Sales teams, customer support teams, and customer success teams, do you think organizations pay enough attention to the mental well-being of teams like that, what they might be missing? And what should they be doing better?
[00:16:37] Donald: So, a couple of things on that. No. I don’t think organizations pay enough attention to it. And part of the reason is because when we talk about mental health, when we talk about well-being, we usually talk about them in the context of culture, and we don’t connect them with performance and profitability. And so, one of the things that I describe when I talk to executives is the simple fact that if we don’t focus on the well-being of our team is like an athletic coach that doesn’t focus on the rest and well-being of their team and then expect them to perform at a high level during the match, which is untrue, right? Whether it is football, whether it is cricket, whether it is baseball, whether it is basketball, we have to think about our employees as corporate athletes, meaning their rest, their well-being, their ability to focus, is really business critical for them to perform at a high level. So, that’s number one. The second thing that I think is important in terms of the leadership focus on it is that they don’t know what to do. So, a lot of times we expect leaders to be therapists. We expect leaders to have all the answers. And when leaders don’t have answers, they shy away from a subject. So, one of the things that we have to do is we have to share with leaders that we’re not asking you to solve for, we’re asking you to be aware and empathetic of, which is different. And so if your employee, for example, is having financial stress, we’re not asking you to be a financial manager. You should just know that most companies have employee assistance programming, EAPs, and we should encourage our team to understand what’s involved in those services that are already available in the corporate infrastructure, so that we can help point people in the right direction, but then also understand the moments of time when they’re not ready to push. Let me give a very specific example. In the U.S., there is a lot going on. Politically, there are things going on with AI adoption, there’s fear in the workplace, there are ICE and immigration issues, I was talking with one of my team members who has very young children, and a lot of their young children’s friends are Hispanic or Latinx. So, even though they’re not personally dealing with all the things in the U.S., it is still affecting their family because who their kids go to school with, are their kids safe from school shootings, all of these things impact the wellness of the employee. So, for me, as the manager, to ignore these things and expect high performance every day is naive. And so I try to get executives to say, “Okay, what can we do and think about so that we can be more thoughtful about mental health and well-being?” I’ll give you a specific example, and I’ll land the plane on this answer. Flexibility. It’s not always more money or a bigger title, but you may have times where people in your organization need to know that they can take an hour or two off if they’re just having a tough moment. It doesn’t mean they don’t get their work done on the deadline, but when they do the work, maybe a little flexibility can be thought of. We can reintroduce to our team what our EAP programs are and how they can be used so that we are endorsing the fact that if you have something that you’re working with at home with your family, if you’ve lost a loved one, if you’re working with mental health and well-being, if you have burnout or anxiety, there’s places you can go for care, that we have these built into the company just like we have health insurance for your physical, that we have that for your well-being. And so those are things I do highly encourage. There is a lot of data behind it, but employers that don’t provide that flexibility and focus are going to be less desirable. And with AI, AI is going to handle the routine. There’s going to be an impact to the base-level things that companies do. So, we’re all going to be chasing the outstanding A and B players. And those folks that can work anywhere and are scary talented are gonna expect a more thoughtful level of leadership. They do not expect a lower standard. They expect more flexibility and thoughtfulness to achieve the standard, and that’s what we try to share with leaders.
[00:21:01] Niraj: Makes sense. Follow-up question, right? How does a company go about doing this? Right? I mean, let’s think of a company that has not really thought through this in a very deliberate manner till now. They probably had the best intentions. They have done a few things, but probably have not done this deliberately. Who owns this? How do they decide what outside help they need? Because the company will ultimately want to measure the results of what they’ve done. How do they go about trying to do that? And if it even makes sense to try to do.
[00:21:26] Donald: Fair point. So, I’ll answer the first question, which is, what do they do if they’ve not entertained this before? And then the second part of it is, how do they measure what they’re doing? One of the things that is really nice about being a part of a larger company, since we’ve been acquired, is that we have over 100,000,000 lives under care in what we do. So, we have a lot of data and best practices. So, based on your industry size of company, we will match you with an assessment program that is aligned with who you are, what you do, the markets that you serve. So, if you’re a global business or a localized business, none of that is critical. We will align you with best practices that are engineered for your industry, size, scale, and geography. Then the second thing that we’re going to do is work with your leadership to create an understanding of what the phased approach to enter this kind of wellness at work thinking. So, two things that we do almost all the time. Number one is if we don’t have leadership buy-in, things don’t typically work. So, we do want to work with the leadership, and understanding where they are in the process, where they are in terms of buy-in. Then we typically do a series of listening sessions where we talk to subsets of your team, and then the third thing is we review all of the data you already have, your surveys, your exit interviews, things of that nature. And from those three elements, we build out that initial blueprint. And that initial blueprint is, I like to phrase it this way very simply, crawl, walk, run. We’re going to give you some things that you can do to take some very small steps and then see how you’re doing. Then we’re going to walk, we’re going to do some additional training and create some more flywheel effect. And then we’re going to make sure that wellness is a part of your culture. How do you measure? We have a very robust set of assessment tools that are data-driven in terms of the way we ask the questions. There are PhD engineered in terms of learning and development experts that are looking at the efficacy of training. So, what is the impact of new education and training? And we build all of that data to bear so that we can look by department within your organization, by work, role, and style, and see if we’re having an impact on improving the culture based on how you want to design it.
[00:23:35] Niraj: Makes sense. Very useful. The one thing that I want to go back to is something that you just alluded to recently, which is a few minutes back. You talked about how AI is probably going to take up a lot of the easiest, simplest stuff, which means you are going to need a lot more APIs and probably, you know, B players as we go forward, right? And, essentially, my question is how do companies and, you know, HR departments and heads of HR go about building this AI-centric, AI era capability? If you talk about it from a purely customer support perspective, what we are getting to probably is that a lot of the easier, simpler, you know, low-touch conversations will be taken up by AI. AI already is getting so good at handling simple how-to or why queries, which is not very obvious at the outset. Is that a lot of what will actually reach people in your team would be complex, you know, emotionally complex, technically complex? Right? And then how do we get to this point where there are no easy things to be done, and then pretty much everyone is expected to bring their A game to absolutely everything they do?
[00:24:35] Donald: I will give you my perspective, but I will be very direct with you and your audience that AI is a learning journey for all of us. So, I will give you the components that I’m seeing and the trends that I’m seeing as we do this work. First, you have to start with education because we are all more confident about things we’re educated in, and we fear things that we lack education in if we put it in two buckets. And so, we don’t want to create AI as the enemy versus AI as the facilitator of how you drive innovation within the organization. I’m a big proponent, and I’m going to specifically answer the question in teaching people how to really, really talk to the machines through prompt engineering. In order for you to get full value from AI, you’d have to be curious, but you have to be able to structure your questions and insights so that it can give you quality information that’s actually usable. Sometimes AI can just give you generic information fast and at scale, and that doesn’t make you better. That just makes you average faster, and that’s not what you want in the higher-level complex problems. What we have to do is teach people how to orchestrate the activities of AI so that we get more complex problems with solution options, and then we align human judgment to make the final decision. Because AI doesn’t do judgment. AI does assimilation of information. Judgment is still a human expertise, an experiential thing. And so in terms of creating readiness within the organization, education, then experimentation, then execution with pilots, and then we find the economic value. But I find that organizations that are making AI a part of the team education and are building in real education for the team are finding really good applicable insights of how to use the technology in an environment that’s not scaring people, I’m gonna be replaced, versus empowering people, I’m gonna be better at my job. My career is gonna be stronger and faster because I’m learning these new tools.
[00:26:40] Niraj: That brings us back to the topic of psychological safety that we just talked about, right? So important in current times.
[00:26:46] Donald: That’s right.
[00:26:47] Niraj: Absolutely. Last question, Donald. A very related subject, which is talked a lot about, meaningful work and trust in workplaces. And for all leaders and all customer service or customer experience leaders in our audience, right? Could you talk about a few, maybe one or two leadership principles that are really relevant in the current times, in the current AI-led or AI-centric times, right, which we should all hold close to ourselves and bring to work every day?
[00:27:12] Donald: So, the one is really adaptive listening skills. And here’s what I mean by this term. Most people listen to get ready to speak, and we need to really slow down and listen to people to really focus on understanding. Because in this time of digital conversations, in this time of interaction on Zoom, all of these things are less about the human experience and become more transactional by default. So, what your team actually really needs and craves is being understood, being connected not just to the work, but the work being connected to their personal goals and who they are as a person. And so the leadership behavior is this, and I’ll give a specific example. I had a one-on-one with someone on my team yesterday, and we had thirty minutes. I asked that typical, how was your day? How are you doing? Different things. And the answer was, you know, I’m doing okay. And I said, “What’s the story behind just doing okay?” And I just created that opening, and that employee began to talk about some things that they were really struggling with. I created that opening. What made sense was instead of having a thirty-minute meeting covering three or four different items, we talked about how that person could stay productive in a moment that they were struggling with a few things. And then we focused on one item, the most critical business item, in the last ten minutes. If I had just gotten straight to the business and tried to cover three or four items, I would have had zero impact from that meeting because the moment was not right for the business. I needed that person to get reoriented. I needed them to be able to be open, but then the one critical item still got done. I didn’t lower the standard of what the business needed to get done that week. I just said to the employee, if over the next 48 hours, we can handle this project and get to a different place, we’re gonna cover the couple of items that I have on my list. I’ll send you a quick follow-up email, and we’ll put that on for next week. “Oh, my God. Thank you. I really appreciated that I can handle this. I can do this.” Right? But if I would have added three or more things on the plate at that one time, it would have been overwhelming. Again, I wanna share with your audience and your leaders that are listening. I’m not talking about lowering standards. I’m talking about getting to the standard in a humane way, realizing that everyone’s dealing with so much just life today, that people’s focus and attention is so bifurcated. So, if we try to cover too many things in a single meeting, too many things in a single training, our level of retention, our level of comprehension, our level of follow-through is going to be lower. So, sometimes, and times like this is one of them, sometimes you have to slow down to progress fast. And this is one of those times because people are handling a lot.
[00:30:11] Niraj: That’s enlightening, right? I mean, what you just said is that the foundational principle of building teams, building company, is not changing. You have to listen, listen, and truly listen, and that is what takes you forward.
[00:30:21] Donald: That is exactly right.
[00:30:22] Niraj: Absolutely. That’s great, Donald. You know, great talking to you. It was a great conversation. I hope you enjoyed it too.
[00:30:28] Donald: I as well. And I really appreciate you thinking of me. And if I can ever be of help, please let me know.
[00:30:33] Niraj: Thank you, Donald.
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