Tevis Trower: Moving Beyond Buzzwords to Transform Culture

The Female Insight Zone is a series of 15-minute podcasts sharing insights from women who have made an indelible mark in business and the path they took to soar. Host Dr. Maribeth Kuzmeski, PhD, interviews inspiring female business leaders to reveal insights into successes, failures, and how they have overcome.

Tevis Trower: Moving Beyond Buzzwords to Transform Culture

Tevis Trower is the founder and CEO of Balance Integration, a consulting firm dedicated to humanizing the work experience. Trower is a pioneer in the realm of cultural transformation, leveraging her expertise in mindfulness, leadership development and employee engagement to create an environment where people feel valued and in turn, develop a commitment to the organization’s goals. Balance Integration boasts a client list that includes heavy-hitters like Disney and Morgan Stanley, and Trower’s work has been featured in Forbes, Fortune and Business Week, among many other media outlets.

Today, Trower explains why we cannot change work culture with policy statements, describing how leaders must move beyond proclamations around bringing the whole self to work and truly embody the authenticity they value. She also explores the idea of employee engagement, discussing the mistake leaders make in driving performance rather than engagement and outsourcing it as a problem to solve rather than a behavior to model. Listen in for Trower’s insight on the significance of leadership alignment and learn how you can foster a new sense of possibility in an organization at large.

Key Interview Takeaways

We cannot change work culture with policy statements. To truly shift the environment in an organization, we must go beyond proclamations and take our powerful mission and values statements to heart.

Code switching implies a fear of being authentic at work. Trower points out that bringing our whole selves to work serves as an elixir, while the fear of being ourselves creates an environment where we must conform in order to feel safe.

Leaders must role model authenticity in the workplace. If there’s a satisfaction gap in what you get out of work, then there is a contribution gap in what you’re bringing to work, and Trower suggests that the authenticity in organizations begins with the leaders’ willingness to show up as ‘more human.’

Engagement is not a problem to solve. Corporate leadership tends to focus on driving performance, while they outsource engagement to someone else in the organization. Trower argues that to engage employees, leaders need to see engagement as a behavior to model.

Leadership alignment enables cultural empowerment. When the C-suite works to close the gap between what they want to create and what they are manifesting now, such a shift creates a new sense of possibility in the organization at large.

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Resources

C-Suite Sessions