2138 - Harnessing Fun and Innovation to Transform Corporate Culture with Elizabeth Bieniek

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1:05With us right now, it's Elizabeth Bieniek. Elizabeth, it is so great to have you. You are the author of the new book, Cake on Tuesday, 25 Lessons to Unlock Corporate Innovation. I'm so excited to talk about that. Elizabeth, you are also found on the web at elizabethbieniek.com. For those who don't know how to spell Bieniek, don't worry. In your podcast app, just click on the show notes or the information icon or whatever. Keep clicking on stuff and you'll just open up, click on the link that we have there so you can follow along. But Elizabeth, it's great to have you. You're also, by the way, a very accomplished speaker, author and so forth.

1:45But I love having you here. Thank you, Josh. It's great to be here and props on nailing the name. Yes, absolutely. I've got some Polish. I've got some Polish. There we go. You can tell. You can tell. So, Elizabeth, tell me before we kind of get into your work and your impact in the world, what do you do for fun? all the things, all of the things. I have three kids, 10 and under. So a lot of my fun gets tied up in crazy outdoor stuff. I'm very much in that living life through somebody else's eyes right now. But when I get times to myself, I love to read. A lot of my reading right now is being read to audio books because I can do multitask, do two things at once.

2:25I usually have about two or three things going at once, something in business, but I usually always have a fiction going. I'm working my way through the classics and I just did Last of the Mohegans. And I also love sci-fi fantasy realm. I'm working my way through the Wheel of Time series. And right now I'm geeking out on this book called Landmarks, which is all that I love etymologies of words and where things come from. Landmarks, it goes into all this history of Gaelic terminology that is used to describe the land and the way the different weather impacts the land. And a lot of it's being lost.

3:03So this book is really fascinating. It's tying together language and place and how those two correlate. And it's almost like poetry. So that's what I'm currently geeking out on. Yeah. And that book, by the way, was Landmarks. Do you happen to know the author? I'm looking it up right now. I do not. Sounds so interesting. Well, let's talk about your book while I'm looking up landmarks is, okay. And I'll have to find, I'll have to ask you which one that is a little bit later. But so your book is Cake on Tuesday. Robert McFarlane. Sorry, Robert McFarlane. There we go, landmarks. Thank you so much for that.

3:36I have it in my Libby app. It's right there. Yeah. Okay, what is Cake on Tuesday? 25 Lessons to Unlock Corporate Innovation. What does that have to do with cake? Everything, everything in life that's important includes cake, all celebrations involve cake. So my book is really capturing a particular season in my career where I spent about eight years running an internal startup inside of a large corporation. And it was an interesting journey that went all the way from, hey, there's an opportunity here that we're missing to, ooh, could we build something here? To, oh, what could that look like? To, hey, let's get a team together to do that.

4:13All the way through iterations on that, user testing, product trials, and then handing off to the product team. that was a long journey that I didn't necessarily set out to do I call it my accidental entrepreneurial journey and I learned so much through that process the the product was it was in the high-tech space the product was a holographic and collaboration system so was that how do we meet not just you and I chatting on a screen like this but if we were you were right here in my office in three full 3d and we felt like we're sitting down together it was focused on that feeling of togetherness.

4:46And Cake on Tuesday was a book that I wrote after the project was complete, looking back and say, what did I learn through those rollercoaster eight years? And it started as just my own personal postmortem of, let me capture my, what worked, what didn't, what I would change, what I would do different, what can I learn from this to take to the next season of my life? And it just, I kept writing, I kept doing more and more things and realizing this would be really helpful for anyone else trying to build an entrepreneurial venture specifically, but there's a lot of practical applicable lessons here that I maybe learned the hard way that somebody else could glean from.

5:21And it just formed itself into five sections, each one having five groupings, and really five lessons I learned through that entire journey. And it's titled Cake on Tuesday, because there's a chapter called Have Cake on Tuesday, which is talking about a particularly really hard stretch of the project in the middle. We're past all those first few years of excitement and building and this is something new, but we're not ready to hand it off and go to market with it. You're kind of in that middle where you're doing process improvements and quality improvements. And it can be boring. It can be hard to get excited, especially when you have a startup kind of mentality and a startup team.

5:56So it came from a conversation with my ops manager at the time. We're like, how do we make this fun? How do we make something fun right now to celebrate? And she had this idea of doing a Wheel of Fortune style Wheel of Winning that you just put everybody's name on the team. We're like a two pizza box team and spin it at the end of staff meetings. If it landed on your name, you'd be like, Josh, you win. You get a cake and she would ship you a cake because we're a remote team spread all over the world. No reason. Just the fact Wheel of Winning landed on you. And our staff meetings were on Tuesday.

6:25So that's where the name came from. It's just a way to how do we make something fun in this process? Because we have to be enjoying the whole journey. Yeah. Yeah. My gosh. I can imagine like people like if that wheel is sitting there during the meeting, I know if it were me and my name was on that wheel and I'm in the meeting, man, I'm going to be glancing over at that wheel. But that's interesting because I mean, it's a silly thing, but I want to ask you about like, you know, levity and I want to ask you about, you know, making you know it's like we want to have fun we won't we don't want people to be too distracted but i don't it doesn't sound like that's really a concern here i don't think you can have too much fun i might be i might be biased on this but i think back to i was telling somebody this story recently of i remember my first corporate review i mean this is going back a good uh 25 years or more.

7:23I remember sitting down with my manager and it was very formal and like, okay, this is the year in review. What can we work on? What can we improve? And it's the first time I'd ever been in this experience. And I really didn't know what to expect. And she started out with this, well, there's been some concerns. Some people have noticed and I've noticed that you smile a lot and it looks like you're having a lot of fun. And some people might construe that as you're not taking your work seriously. And I remember just thinking in my mind, like, what is happening? Is this what a corporate review is like?

7:58And I asked her, I'm like, so are you asking me to look more dejected? Like, do you want me to smile? What's the action I'm supposed to take from this? And like, we had, we had a back and forth conversation and she kind of backed, backtracked a little bit, kind of like, yeah, no, no, I don't want you to change it. I just out of the office thinking, I don't think this is the place for me. Like I love life. I love having fun. I work harder when I play harder. And I think that is really important. And especially if you think about people that you know, in certain high pressure fields, I was good friends with a paramedic when I was younger.

8:38And he was one of the funniest people I know. Just feel like somebody who's literally dealing with life and death every day, very stressful situations, such a good sense of humor. And I've seen that again in firefighters and police officers and people that are military, that they usually have a fantastic sense of humor because you have to balance. Hard, stressful work requires an outlet for that levity and the joy and finding the funny in life. And I feel like that translates really well to startups or high pressure scenarios where you're building something new or unknown that you're demanding a lot from your team.

9:14You're working really hard. You're putting a lot of effort into it. And you have to have that counterbalance of levity and joy and like, okay, yes, let's work hard, but let's play hard. And I feel like the two go in parallel. If you don't have the joy, you start losing some of the motivation and the hard work as well. I think you need both.

9:34Tell me, I mean, aside from the book, do you consult around this or you're speaking on this. Yeah. Not just on the aspect of joy, but the whole concept of Cake on Tuesday, like I said, it breaks into five sections. The first three are really about starting. They're all about different facets of starting. Yeah. And Elizabeth, I'm so sorry for disrupting that. Could you give us that outline there then? Sure, sure. So the first section is literally titled, Starting is Hard. I'm very much a say what you mean, mean what you say. And that goes through five different lessons I learned in the very initial stages of trying to pitch this idea for Webex Hologram.

10:15I was like, how do you, okay, I think there's something there. How do I hone in on something? How do I pinpoint that idea? How do I find that, make it super crystal clear? How do I make an NBO out of that if that's somebody that can rally around? And then how do I pitch it and sell it and get people behind that? That's what that first part is all about. How do you go from this chaotic noise to something small, actionable, and concrete. Then the second part is setting your idea in motion. And that's all about, I start my first chapter in the section is nobody cares until you make them. And it's all about understanding the perspective of the people that you encounter on this journey, whether you're pitching for funding, whether you're trying to convince somebody to join your team and be a part of it, whether you're trying to convince, I was doing an entrepreneurial venture.

11:00So I had to convince leaders to release one of their top performers into my care for a season of time and trying to pitch that to why, if you just say that, hey, can I have your best performer for a while? And we'll work on something really risky and new and it might not work. Nobody's going to give you their person. But if you really set the stage of this is amazing and new and groundbreaking, and you could be a part of it, and this is how, and you'd be plugged in and you kind of build this vision, people get excited about it. So everything else in setting your idea in motion is all about getting those people on board, getting permission, making sure that you're vetting your people because you really need attitude and people that want to have fun.

11:40And that's so important because when you want to go fast, you need to make sure not only you have the right people, but you put the right process in place to get rid of all the red tape. How do you streamline it? That's that second section. The third section is about adding oil and reducing friction. So that's once you've got something up and running and it's working, that's not the time to coast. That is the time to continuously improve. So I talk about making sure you're empowering your teams to operate when you're not there. I have a chapter called Don't Be a Flat Squirrel, which is all about not waffling and decision making.

12:13Just make your choice. Don't be stuck in the middle of the road kind of a thing. make sure it focuses on communication. That's where Have Cake on Tuesday that falls in the book as well. It's all about making sure that you are protecting the culture that you started with. And the fourth section, leading through the barren middle, that's a little bit of what I was mentioning earlier. When you're not in that exciting place, how do you persist through that? When you start losing the excitement of the beginning, how do you continue to rally your team around it. How do you be an umbrella and a shield to protect your team from all the noise and chaos and red tape that comes, not getting lazy in your process, being careful who you listen to.

12:52And the fact that sometimes you have to cheer yourself on, sometimes you have to be your own cheerleader. And that's really based on that concept of people can't lead where they've never been. So anytime you're doing something new that the world has never seen before, there are times you have to go it alone and there's times you have to cheer yourself on. And the final section is insights from the rear view mirror, which is all about the lessons that you get looking back that you might not have known when you were in it, but in hindsight, and this is, I'm a big fan of postmortems and really having a review and a look back and capturing those and writing it down and seeing what you learned through that.

13:25So that's all about identifying the people that helped me through that journey, why that worked, making sure that I was focusing on myself and protecting myself and focusing on the long-term goal of where you're trying to go. I have one section there called always play the long game. So making sure that you're constantly picking your head up above the trees and making sure you're aligned to your North star. So that's the way the book is broken down those five sections. Yeah. You know, and I want to just cause you had mentioned this earlier and I wanted to, I was thinking about this. You know, I remember when I was in the military, I didn't have a very military oriented personality, But he's not very, not super high compliance.

14:05You know, again, definitely I like my type seven Enneagram, you know, kind of a little bit more extroverted, individualistic energy. That's not traditional military, especially back in the day when I was in. And, you know, I was thinking about, you know, we might be to our, you know, we might have leaders that are listening to us that are working within an organization right now. And the culture, it is not what we're talking about today. And it makes it creates feelings of dread, perhaps, you know, just like I feel like a fish out of water. Can you share maybe any advice for folks in that situation?

14:47yeah there's there's a lot you can do to influence your culture and your situation regardless of where you are in the hierarchy i i quote in my book in cake on tuesday i quote um liz weisman who wrote multipliers which if you haven't read is a fantastic book and she talks about classifying people as either multipliers or diminishers that leaders fall into those two categories and i i referenced her a couple times in cake on tuesday because i think that's a wonderful way of looking at it. She's really looking at the point from leadership of, are you a multiplier or a diminisher? Are you working for a multiplier or diminisher?

15:23Who do you have on your team? And she talks about this concept of people could be accidental diminishers and have habits that you're doing that are actually squelching the impact of the people around you without necessarily meaning to do it. I thought that was a really nice way of putting it. But the way I try to tie it into KKIN Tuesday and the way I talk about it a lot is regardless of where you are in that hierarchy, I think there's, you have to tell your message for sure. You can't, when you're the boss, you get to have the luxury of just saying this is the way it is. You don't have that luxury when you're consulting, you don't have that luxury when you're a middle manager and you don't certainly don't have that luxury when you're on the bottom of the organization, but you still have a point of influence.

16:06And I think a lot of this does tie back to the nobody cares until you make them, really looking at who is causing the conflict in this organization right now. And if it is the manager, if it is the boss, what is driving them? What is the motivation? Are they, they've been in this role for a couple of years and haven't had a really amazing thing to show for it. And they're kind of looking for that next big win because they're worried their career is on the line. Have they been there for a long time and they kind of want to be comfortable and want to coast and I just want to be aware of what's going on, but don't want to rock the boat too much.

16:39You really have to get inside the head of that person and understand them as a whole, say what's motivating them. And then you can start addressing those in the way that you communicate and pitch and show your message and align it to the things they care about. Because we all have care about. We all have desires and emotions and fears and things that are motivating our decisions, whether we realize it or not. As much as you can understand those and tap into them and craft your message accordingly, I think that is the best way to subtly shift the environment around you. so obviously snag the book please please do and review it on amazon please please please yes elizabethbianic.com the book is cake on tuesday 25 lessons to unlock corporate innovation and on amazon it's available in all of the formats it's in paperback it's in hardcover it's in kindle and it's an audiobook thank you so much for getting an audiobook produced as well and aside from that, Elizabeth, I suspect that you have other resources that you'd recommend or other ways of connecting with you.

17:46Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm starting to write more and post on LinkedIn. I do have a following there. My website is elizabethbianyuk.com. I have a newsletter that you can sign up for. I only post once a month. I do not spam you by any stretch of the imagination and I'm building up my Instagram profile, which is at cake on Tuesday. Yeah. All right. Elizabeth Vianik, thank you so much. Congratulations on the book launch and the success. Has phenomenal ratings on Amazon. So you're definitely attracting some great attention for the work you do. Elizabeth, thank you so much for enjoying, or thank you so much for the conversation.

18:24Thank you, Josh. Thank you, y 'all.

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