Transformation Leadership: Culture at play

[gentle music] So if I could kick you off with a kind of a big question, transformation means many different things in different contexts.

For you, what does it mean? How has it shown up? And w- in a sense, what's the transformational challenge that you're, that you're facing?

You know, it's funny 'cause as...

Before we, we, uh, got on the line, I was thinking through, you know, original sort of definitions of transformation, and you hear a lot of that in biology.

Um, and one that stuck with me was really just the metamorphosis during the life cycle of an animal, right? And so you think about things like a caterpillar to a butterfly, things like that.

And that is a really good, I think, analogy for what happens in business as well, because businesses have these different life cycles.

There's new technologies introduced.

There's new things that happen in the world that can impact whether or not a business can succeed and deliver on its goals, and the ones that I find the most interesting are transformations in culture.

The health of your employee base and the way people work together towards that common goal can really make or break a company.

Honestly, if you have the best technology and the best product, but your, your business as people is not functioning well, that can make the difference between whether or not a company succeeds.

So that's, to me, I think, what I've been closest to in my role as a communicator and in corporate affairs.

Uh, so, so for Riot, you know, um, we've gone through, obviously, many transformations as a company.

We're a gaming, PC gaming company, so our first and flagship game, League of Legends, exceeded expectations.

It became huge, the number one game in its genre, um, and working at Riot exceeded people's expectations.

So by 2015, in those first 10 years, we were named one of Fortune's, like, top 100 best places to work.

We were actually number 13 on the list, right? So alongside Google and Salesforce and Twitter at the time, so really a place that, that people craved and wanted to work for.

Um, but after that, you know, as Riot continued to grow, both in our size and our success, as we scaled, we did face a number of challenges, but also a reckoning in our industry and specifically a reckoning around, around Riot as well.

So the entire game industry at the time, um, probably in 2017, 2018, was really under a microscope for issues of gender discrimination, inappropriate workplace behaviors, things like that, very sort of male-dominated industry, and, and Riot was, um, caught up in a lot of that and, you know, unfortunately mentioned in things like articles and lawsuits and, and that was obviously very demoralizing for, for the company, uh, and our employee base.

And so that kicked off sort of a first cultural transformation led by our people and our D&I teams to sort of upgrade those processes and those programs that you really need as a grown-up company to make sure that you have a safe, inclusive workplace.

Um, you know, we sort of established more concrete values that prioritized inclusivity.

So that was sort of a, an initial cultural transformation effort at the time to really take sort of this crisis that had happened and how do we make sure that we're then shoring up to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

But what was interesting is despite this work, so you get all the processes in place, and you get all of that sort of the nuts and bolts of what you need as a company to make sure that you are creating that safe place to work, uh, what we didn't address at the time, or probably just didn't have the foresight to address at the time, was the healing and the trust that needed to happen and be rebuilt within the company.

So if you take, you know, back in 2017, negative sentiment, you know, negative press stories, a prolonged period of public litigation, and then you even take that to 2020, then the sort of shock and fear and isolation of a pandemic, we saw that there were some pretty sort of unhealthy behaviors and misaligned expectations that emerged within our company.

And so, you know, we went from being a company that had been about open communication and sharing ideas, and it sort of morphed into call-out culture on internal Slack channels.

So for anyone who uses Slack, there's a lot of, you know, very easy real-time feedback, but that can t- quickly turn into unproductive feedback and sort of piling on if it's not...