029: How to Build a Highly Engaged Workforce Culture

In this episode I sit with Shawn Tomasello, a biopharmaceutical executive and public board member with more than 35 years of experience in leading teams and companies at the highest levels. From small start-ups to multiple acquisitions, we discuss what it takes to create a highly engaged workforce culture.   

Key Takeaways:

• The secret sauce for creating highly engaged cultures is to engage people's hearts and minds and do it with authenticity
• Build an environment where peers trust each other enough to have a debate with positive intent
• When it comes to setting goals, you have to inspect what you expect
• Employee Engagement Surveys are a critical component for understanding an organization's level of engagement, but you have to be transparent and ask, “what do we need to do to get better?”
• No one person impacts employee engagement scores. The team is going to rise or fall together
• When it comes to your career growth, when you're ripe, you rot, and when you're green, you're growing. If you are comfortable in what you're doing, it's time for you to get uncomfortable and take on a new role
• If you truly care about your people have the tough conversations with them
• Not everybody's going to like you. You're not going to be everybody's cup of tea. The thing you must strive for most is that even if they don't like you, they respect you, and they trust you to make the right decisions
• There's a lot of decisions you're going to make along your journey. Some people are not going to like you just have to do the very best you can to make the right decisions