Nellie Wartoft
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Yeah, I'm sure that happens in a lot of places. And that's not good. I think for us, it's very different because employees like it. And we actually started B2C. So we actually started as a consumer platform to ensure that engagement was high, people liked it, it was an experience that suited them, which I think many platforms don't do.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So that's, of course, one differentiator when it comes to how we've approached it. But then I think also it's Like people tend to, it's not helpful to have generalizations like a piece of software is bad. It's not about the software. It's not about the technology. It's not about the platforms. It's about what problem are you trying to solve and how are you solving it?
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And that's actually on the leaders in the organization to decide that. So in your friend's case, I would challenge the CHRO and say, what problems are you trying to solve by bringing in all of these different software platforms? Like it's clearly not delivering the value or delivering the results that they had intended for it to do. So it's never about the platform.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
It's about what does that platform, software, technology, whatever you're bringing in, what is that intended to solve? And that's up to the business leaders to decide. Because it's not about the amount of technology is never a problem, right? Think of our phones. Like how many apps do we have? I think the average is like 400 or 450 apps in your phone.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
But some of the number of apps is not a problem with the ones you use, right? So people who use WhatsApp and Instagram and LinkedIn, and I'm a big user of all of those three. I don't have an issue with having three platforms because they all fill their own purpose and they all have solve a need or something.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
a problem or they have a purpose right so i think that's the approach you have to take as an enterprise buyer as well it's not about the software or the number of platforms it's about are you reaching the goals that you intended to reach and software is always a means to an end it's never the end so i think for your friends you probably have to take this conversation to the people who are bringing in the software and better understand
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
What is the problem they're trying to solve? And is it solving that problem? If not, then throw it out. If yes, then keep it. That's how I would approach it.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating. No, it was more like I was seeing how hard it was for employees on the ground to grasp what HQ wanted out of them and what they should be doing. And I saw this disconnect and how it was like both parties have really good intentions. People are trying to drive change and transformation and make their companies become better.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So we have Tiger Hall, right? So we use Tiger Hall. So that's the software that we use for it. Then within change, you have three stages, right? You have the strategy, you have the planning, and you have the activation. And we focus on the activation side of it.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
When it comes to the strategy and the planning side of Tiger Hall, that's where I, from time to time, absolutely use advisors and experts and speak to people in different fields and so on. But when it comes to activation, then that's what TigerHall was built for. So then we use TigerHall.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And we use TigerHall for everything from new employee onboarding to change communications, leadership information, customer feedback is on TigerHall. When we do live streams with our own customers. So we have, and what we're seeing is, especially with the customer interviews, bringing that directly into the business. That's a very big piece of it.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
In our sense, the transformation that I'm driving internally is more, I would say, like market education, customer education, having everyone in the business understanding what is chief transformation officer? What do they do? What are their priorities? What is change management? And like having everyone across engineering and product and all the other departments understanding what that is.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So that's a big piece. And all of that is done on Tiger Hall. So all the education around the space and different industries and customers and their pain points. And that's where we have very high engagement levels, especially on the live streams with live customers.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And then getting that direct feedback on onboarding, for example, when they do their onboarding journeys in Tiger Hall, having that direct feedback and ultimately just saves a lot of time.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
In my previous startups as well, where obviously we didn't have TagRoll because it wasn't built, it became a lot of me repeating myself on a lot of Zoom calls and doing a lot of trainings and information and sharing sessions and typing long messages on Slack and producing documents and all over. That's what I don't have to do anymore.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So it's a big save of time where I can, and there is no whispering game where like I tell the leadership team, then the leadership team tells their direct reports and then they tell their direct reports and so on. This is just like straight from the horse's mouth. So I can be coming out of a customer meeting, pick up my phone, record a short message to the team or whichever it
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
department or audience that I want to send it to and it's just done and there right away. So it's much more faster for me as a leader and all my leadership team and everyone else who communicates internally and not having these like one hour town halls and long trainings and so on. And that goes for onboarding and training as well.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Like in my previous company, I used to do all the onboarding with everyone and that took a very big part of my time. Whereas now they do that on Tiger Hall and then we have a Q&A session and then they ask me any questions that they want to ask. So yeah, so anything in change, we definitely use Tigerhawk for it.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
But all it does is that it increases this change fatigue and resistance and fear in employees. And I was like, this is not necessary. And then employees also have good intentions. They really want to help. They want to support. They want to do a good job, right? No one shows up to work and thinks, I'm going to do a really shit job today. Let me see how bad I can do this job.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
People generally have good intentions. So it's good intentions on both sides, but it's the in-between that makes it get lost, right? And that's the complexity of the size of these companies, the communications and the lack of the availability of these tools. Like you can't target very well with email or SharePoint and it's hard to create high quality engaging content with these tools.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Like it's mostly just written documents. So I was looking around and I saw what are people engaged with? They're really engaged with their TikToks and Instagrams and Spotify's and all of the consumer grade technology and things that are social, things that have engaging content. It's like, why isn't change communications more like this?
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Why can't we communicate change and transformation to employees?
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
the way an influencer communicates about the latest fashion trend or whatever to their followers right so that was a big inspiration for it as well and just how do we bring that content consumption engagement and social aspects into change and transformation when it comes to change a lot of it goes beyond technology is ultimately rooted in human behavior and cultural nuances
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
I think there are a lot more similarities than differences, actually. At the end of the day, we're all pretty similar as humans and the human psyche and human emotions, they don't differ that much across geographies, from my experience. And things like the fear, the chaos, the uncertainty, politics, emotions, all of these are in all of these cultures, right?
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So the human experience of change and including change resistance and fatigue and all of those are very natural and very human regardless of where you're from. I think the differences that more than the cultural differences shows up in organizations more from.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
couple of ways right so one is the role of talent and how it's viewed and the kind of like how you view talent as a resource versus an investment for example and that also influences the leadership culture so if we take Asia where it's more generally more top-down work cultures. You don't really question your boss. You don't really speak up to authority.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
There are other cultural nuances that drive other kinds of behaviors. Whereas in the US, it's very common to challenge authority and speak up against your manager and say what you think and voice your concerns. So that's leading to differences in communication.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And we also see that because we have clients across 32 countries work with around half a million employees worldwide that are using the platform. So across those differences in geography, you can see that leadership style and the hierarchical nature of organizations differ than in the two-way feedback loops, for example, and the kind of feedback that people share and how they share that.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And you also see it in things like trust in leaders. So in Asia, people are much more prone to trusting their leaders. I would say maybe not blind. Oh, but he's the boss, so he knows best. Yeah. Because of someone's level of seniority, that person automatically has power and authority and knowledge.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Whereas that's not the case in the U.S., where people are more like, yeah, just because he's the chief whatever or she's the senior something, it doesn't matter that they always know best. I also have my opinion, and they matter as much as theirs. So that's a big difference in how communication is handled and how people trust and follow and view their leaders, right?
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And then I think the other difference is the long-term versus short-term thinking. So leaders in Asia are much more long-term thinking and the US is much more short-term. So the US is much more around quality results for Wall Street and showing earnings and all of the numbers every three months. So they don't really have long-term visions when it comes to thinking about change.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
It's more like trend hopping, like AI, for example. Everyone is on AI and everyone needs to implement it now. And everyone wants to show it to Wall Street next quarter. Whereas in Asia, it's a little bit more, let's see what we're going to do in the next 10 years. And especially the Asia headquartered companies are very much focused.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
More long-term vision and like, how does this play into our heritage and the longer-term view of who we are as a company and our identity? So that's also another approach to change, which I've noticed where changes happen slower in Asia, but perhaps more intentional, I would say, like it's a bit more intentional.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
visionary and like thinking through more instead of just like jumping into execution right away and all of those sides have both pros and cons it depends on how you want to do it right like i think for example asia could be much more faster in execution given the top-down hierarchical culture it has but then this long-term vision which is great in my view that kind of makes it not as fast but if you had for example the short-term vision of the u.s.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
with the top-down hierarchy of Asia, that could potentially be extremely intense and fast execution, right? But I think both of them balance themselves out in interesting ways. But those are some of the differences that I've noticed in just the work that we've done.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Yeah, I don't think some fail. I think most fail, depending on how you define failure. There's a very well-known statistic that 70 or even 80% of transformations fail, right?
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And the definition of failure in most of those studies is not achieving the intended outcome, so not delivering the value that it was supposed to deliver, not reaching the milestones on time, so getting dragged and dragged for time and budget, or just being abandoned, like it didn't work and we have to stop and go another way. Which I also wouldn't necessarily call failure. We live and we learn.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And I think that's completely fine. And to just say, this didn't work, we're going to try something else. So I don't think there should be any fear around failing. But if you want a transformation initiative to really succeed, there are a couple of things that I notice between the customers that we work with and just like what makes them successful versus the ones who are less successful.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
What do they do instead? The number one thing, or the number one, but like the first thing to think about in the journey of a transformation is when do you start involving people? That's a big difference I see. There are some companies that are really good with involving people early, you know, instead of having three people in the ivory tower deciding everything and then starting to roll it out.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And then at the very last minute, when it comes to execution, that's when they go, Hey, like Tom, Dick and Harry, like, why don't you need to do this differently now? So go ahead and do it differently and change your workflows. That's usually not received very well. And on the other side of that, I see companies involving employees early, like at the formation stage.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And even if you can decide the strategy and what the change is going to be, let's say you're going to have. or renewable energy by 2030. Okay, that's your plan. But then how do you start involving people in the thinking, in the formation, in the how-to, in shaping the transformation? And I see companies are really successful, have involved more people earlier.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And there's a study from McKinsey on this as well, where most organizations involve and engage on average 2% of their organization. McKinsey argues that's equivalent to around a 20% success rate of change and transformation initiatives. Whereas if you have just 7% engaged, that's already 50% success rate.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So really, you only really need 7% of your organization to be fully engaged for you to have a 50-50 chance of success. And then if you start climbing up to 30%, having 30% of your organization engaged, that's when you get... Realistic success rates up to 80, 85%.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So it's not about having 100% on board, but it's about how can you have more than just the ivory tower people involved and getting people involved very early. So that's one big difference I see. Then the other one would be how much effort they put into the with them. So what's in it for me, the language and the words that they use with different audiences.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Do you go to a factory floor, for example, with very formal headquarter corporate language that's usually not flying very well? Or do you actually meet people where they are? So the amount of effort that they put in to like Target the different audiences, understanding their needs, using the words, the language that they use and like speaking their language both literally and metaphorically.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
That's another big difference. They'll see like everything from vocabulary and words used. And then I think almost the biggest one is actually the ego and fear of the leaders. It's almost a direct correlation between the level of, or inverse correlation, I should say, with the ego of the CEO and the success of transformation.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
And the higher the ego of the CEO is, the lower the success of your transformation. I've seen this in multiple companies and heard about it as well from change leaders that I talk to every day. And it's always the high ego, high fear type of leader that makes transformation very difficult. Because usually what that means, right, it's not the ego in itself that is a challenge.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
But the ego means that usually they are less open to feedback. They take things more personally. And any negative feedback or information, they take it very personally. They think it's all about them. So high ego and high fear in leaders is usually a very bad combination because it stifles any and all conversation and feedback that you can have around it. And that is what creates these issues.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
Top down, do as I say, and if you say anything, I'm going to punish you or I get very scared or I take it personally. And that kind of approach in leaders is just not beneficial at all for a transformation type of environment. So that might have worked in the old days where you needed a leader to just tell people what to do and then they go execute it.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
But in 2024 and beyond, it's not going to be that type of leadership that succeeds. So that's another reason I see companies fail is when senior leaders have that high ego or very sensitive to feedback or don't even want to hear any feedback at all or not interested in what people think on the ground. That's another big challenge.
Chief Change Officer
#165 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part Two
So those are some differences that I've seen, and both of these hold true both across Asia and the US.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So we're solving the problem that large enterprises have in engaging and getting buy-in from their employees during large transformations. So think of it like this, like a big enterprise is going through a culture transformation or merger or acquisition or technology implementation, like any kind of big change that is affecting a large part of the company.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
Then what they do today tends to be they go out, so after the strategy and planning side of things, they go out and they're trying to activate this across the organization, right? What do they do? They would send math emails. So they maybe send a couple of emails a day bombarding people. They would put up SharePoint site number 50,000.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
They would put something on the intranet that nobody goes to look at. They would put something in the LMS platform, and then the CEO suddenly talks about it in the town hall and people have no clue what he's talking about or she's talking about. And it's all over the place. It's very messy. It's very difficult for employees to follow and make sense of.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So the small group that has done this strategy and planning, they are like, why aren't people just getting it? Why aren't they just executing? Why don't they just get this transformation done, right? Whereas the people on the ground are like, I don't know what this transformation is about and why should I care and what's in it for me and why should I do it?
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So there is this huge disconnect between large enterprises, say change, transformation, the people that are trying to make this transformation happen, right? And then the thousands and thousands of people on the ground. So instead of having that disjointed experience fragmented all over the place, what Tigerhole does is it allows you to create content, first of all, in very engaging formats.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So let's say you have a PDF, a seven-page PDF. No one is going to read that. You can upload that and it turns into a podcast. And it turns into a podcast in the local language of the person who's listening to it. So instead of having American HQ sending out those English PDF documents, suddenly you have a podcast in Cantonese or Bengali or French or any language that you want to listen to, right?
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So it allows for breaking through the noise instead of having all of these PDFs and emails and mass communication that people don't really read. And then you can send that communication, engagement, capability building, training, all of it through very targeted audiences. So you can be very specific around who you target with what message. It's a lot of audience segmentation.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So people only get what they are supposed to receive. So there's not this one size fits none kind of approach where you send the same thing to everyone. And then it's integrated where they work. So you would get it directly in your workflow. You don't need to go to the intranet or LMS or all over the place. You just have it where you already work, like in Microsoft Teams.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And then you can give your feedback. And this is the most important part that you have your voice heard as an employee and the change leader can then get feedback from the ground. So they can actually get feedback on how is this change received? What are people thinking? What is the input? What's going well? What's not going well?
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
Because it's really hard as a change leader to have that visibility across so many layers and geographies and the complexity that large organizations present, right? So this way you can get that two-way feedback loop from all over the organization. And then the last piece is you have data. So you have really good analytics and data on all of these things. So you see exactly what's happening.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
Are people reacting to it? What do they think? What is their feedback? Who is consuming it? Who isn't consuming it? What is the sentiment analysis of all of these different groups? So as a change leader, you don't have to fly blind where it's like you send emails out and then 7% open it and you don't know where the rest went.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And instead of having that, you can have all of these analytics and data and insights. So it allows you to get much better with strategy. It can be much more agile and adjust your strategy as you're going through the transformation, which helps to increase the speed of execution and retaining top talent is a big one. And also ensuring that you catch those problems early.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So before the big problems become even bigger, you can actually catch them and address them early on. So that's what Tiger Hall helps change leaders with.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
A tech platform. Yeah, correct. It's a software platform. And then we also do a bit of advisory around like communication strategies, audience segmentation, targeting and those things. But it's 80-85% software and the platform is what people are buying. What triggered you to start this company in the very first place? I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
Absolutely. Yes, I grew up in Sweden, in a small village in southern Sweden. I usually say more cows than people. It's hard to describe that small town. And I wanted to get out as quickly as I could for professional reasons and cultural reasons. and decided to move to Asia.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
On my 18th birthday, I went to singapore.com, booked a one-way flight, packed everything I had in an ice hockey trunk and moved across. And I've been very obsessed with Asia since a very young age. I started studying English when I was around 11, 12 years old. I thought the education system was way too slow in how it taught English. It was like, Thomas is one pear, Mark is one apple.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And I was like, I want to work in this language. I need to pick it up quicker. So I started reading more international media. And that's when I discovered there's a whole continent out there called Asia. And there is China and India and Japan. And I was just like so fascinated.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So I did every single school project on Asia and Singapore and Hong Kong, where you are, and just was super, super fascinated by this part of the world. So I decided when I was about 14, 15, that I want to live in the capital of Asia. And that's when I decided it's probably Singapore.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
and that's why i moved to singapore when i was 18. so landed in singapore before that back in sweden started working very early i was started mcdonald's when i was 14 before that i was supporting stroke patients with their physical exercise i've been working since around age 12 and continued that throughout my time in sweden and in singapore and then spent a bit of time in london south korea
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
Was in headhunting for a good part of my corporate career. And thereafter started a couple of companies, which ended up being Tiger Hall, which is the business that I'm running now. And that is what ultimately took me to LA. So that's a very quick, brief overview. I'm happy to dive into any of those details that you might find more interesting. Would you call yourself adventurous? Yes.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
I think a risk taker, like risk addicted or excitement addicted. Yeah, I need to have constantly new things happening. I'm not very good with standard, just daily routines. That's not the kind of person I am. I need adventure and I need risk taking. I think that's a big part of my personality.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
I agree with that. I think the comfort zone is the most boring because nothing ever happens in the comfort zone. So you always need to be outside of your comfort zone for things to progress. And I read a good quote on this. It was just this week, earlier this week on LinkedIn, I think. There was someone that said... Life, a life of leisure is hell and a life of adventure and purpose is heaven.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
But the problem is that since we're children, we're taught that it should be the other way around, that we should aim for leisure and aim for free time and aim for rest. But actually, that's not the purpose of life. Sure, you need rest. rest from time to time, but it's not the purpose of life to just be lying on your couch and scrolling TikTok, right?
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
A life of purpose and adventure, that's really what is heaven, and leisure is not.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
Yeah, so I spent a little over four years, four and a half years at Michael Page, which is a great recruitment consulting firm. And I loved, absolutely loved my time there. And the reason I went into recruitment was that when I started working back in Sweden at McDonald's when I was 14.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
I learned, and this is why I always talk about McDonald's being the most transformative experience for me, because at McDonald's, I learned my professional addictions, if you will, or like my professional passions and what I love doing professionally. Those are three factors that has, since McDonald's, actually been in all my jobs of professional endeavors. So the first one is the fast pace.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And always having a high pace. Things are happening quickly, changing quickly. It's high adrenaline, high tempo. The second one is commercial. The rush that I get from commercial endeavors, whether it's selling cheeseburgers or closing large enterprise deals or anything that is commercial.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
I love the, I almost see like revenue growth as like a gamification or like gaining points in a game type of thing. So I love the commercial side of it. And then the third one is leadership, the human aspect and being able to lead and coach and grow people and orchestrate resources and get people together and have them work together as a team. So leadership was the third one.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So throughout my entire professional life, that has been a thread because that's what I realized at McDonald's, that I love this high tempo. I love the commercial thrill and I love leadership and leading others. So that's why I then went into recruitment.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And the fourth side, I would say, which wasn't as big in McDonald's, but that became very big at Michael Page, was the independence and how much I love running my own business and being in charge of my own destiny and driving my own results and having my own P&L and team and so on. So that's really what drove me to do recruitment and be in Michael Page.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And when I came in, I was obviously very low at the leaderboard, right? And I was like, I want to be number one. I want to win. I want to be the top biller, being competitive. And obviously the only thing I could do differently from the others, much more years of experience and network and skill sets. were that I could work harder.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So I started implementing my 7-11 shift, which means be at the office at 7 a.m. in the morning and don't leave before 11 p.m. at night. And this was obviously way before hybrid work and having a laptop at home and those kind of things. So that's what I did and became number one in the region the second year I was there. So that's something I really enjoyed as well.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And again, that fast pace and the high thrill of it. So yeah, overall, it was a great time. And it was also where I saw the needs that then led me to start Tiger Hall around knowledge sharing, communications, how change is driven, especially in large enterprises. And that was a very big source of inspiration for Tiger Hall.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So I think resilience is something that you can't really learn unless you're going through difficult times. And I think this is the both good and difficult part about resilience, but like having a bunch of workshops or trainings around resilience. Yeah, sure.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
You can teach mindset and you can teach like how to approach it when it comes, but there is no such thing as building resilience without going through hard times. And I think that's what people sometimes don't understand, that you have to go through hard times in order to build that muscle. It's like, how are you going to build any abs or biceps if you're not doing push-ups or sit-ups, right?
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
You have to work the muscle to build it. And that goes the same for resilience as well. So whenever I faced hardship or setbacks or difficult times, you either win or you build resilience or character, as I tend to think about it nowadays.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And when things don't go my way, when I fail, when things are going sideways, I'm like, right now I'm building character, I'm building resilience, I'm learning and having that mindset when you're going through difficult times. When you're not going through difficult times, it's really hard to build resilience. So be grateful for those difficult times and see what you can learn out of it.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
And also you need to see yourself coming out of it stronger, right? You need to go through those times and the difficult times to build resilience. So it really is like that muscle. So whenever you are going through hard times and difficult times, be grateful for it because that's actually the only thing that can help you build resilience. And then seeing yourself coming out of it, right?
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So when you see yourself like, I was okay, I managed to do that, I succeeded, I got through it. That's what builds resilience slash confidence. And that is what builds your self-assurance that you can actually get through this and it's nothing impossible. Then I think the second thing is, and I talk about this quite a lot, is identity and your self-talk and how you identify internally.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So for me, for example, I identify as a resilient person. So when things happen and I need to be resilient, I'm like, this is who I am. This is what I was built for. And this is my identity to be resilient. So if you identify, if we take some examples, right? Let's say you identify as the head of marketing at product X, like your title is your identity.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
That's going to be really hard if you lose that job because then you lose your identity. And same if you identify as...
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
something else that can be taken away from you right then anything that can be taken away from you and it does then you lose your entire identity so base your identity on something that cannot be taken away from you that is there regardless of external circumstances regardless of your job title which company you work for what
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
investors you have who your friends are like just everything that is external take that out of your internal identification and just think about who are you without all of those things and then build your identity based on that so for me I've built it on resilience, on always learning, always trying my best, always working hard, always having good intentions.
Chief Change Officer
#164 Change Fatigue? Tigerhall CEO Nellie Wartoft Has the Cure — Part One
So that's who I am and that's how I see myself. So if everything was taken away from me tomorrow, I would still be, I'm a resilient person with good intentions who will always learn and work hard. And that's who Nelly Wartoft is. It's not the CEO of Tiger Hall or this and that. So that's another big piece of resilience that I think is incredibly important.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
Yeah, I'm sure that happens in a lot of places. And that's not good. I think for us, it's very different because employees like it. And we actually started B2C. So we actually started as a consumer platform to ensure that engagement was high, people liked it, it was an experience that suited them, which I think many platforms don't do.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So that's, of course, one differentiator when it comes to how we've approached it. But then I think also it's Like people tend to, it's not helpful to have generalizations like a piece of software is bad. It's not about the software. It's not about the technology. It's not about the platforms. It's about what problem are you trying to solve and how are you solving it?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And that's actually on the leaders in the organization to decide that. So in your friend's case, I would challenge the CHRO and say, what problems are you trying to solve by bringing in all of these different software platforms? Like it's clearly not delivering the value or delivering the results that they had intended for it to do. So it's never about the platform.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
It's about what does that platform, software, technology, whatever you're bringing in, what is that intended to solve? And that's up to the business leaders to decide. Because it's not about the amount of technology is never a problem, right? Think of our phones. Like how many apps do we have? I think the average is like 400 or 450 apps in your phone.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
But suddenly the number of apps is not a problem with the ones you use, right? So people who use WhatsApp and Instagram and LinkedIn, and I'm a big user of all of those three. I don't have an issue with having three platforms because they all fill their own purpose and they all have solve a need or a problem or they have a purpose, right?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So I think that's the approach you have to take as an enterprise buyer as well. It's not about the software or the number of platforms. It's about, are you reaching the goals that you intended to reach? And software is always a means to an end. It's never the end.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So I think for your friends, you probably have to take this conversation to the people who are bringing in the software and better understand what is the problem they're trying to solve. And is it solving that problem? If not, then throw it out. If yes, then keep it. That's how I would approach it.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So we have Tiger Hall, right? So we use Tiger Hall. So that's the software that we use for it. Then within change, you have three stages, right? You have the strategy, you have the planning, and you have the activation. And we focus on the activation side of it. When it comes to the strategy and the planning side of Tiger Hall, that's where I, from time to time, absolutely use advisors and
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
experts and speak to people in different fields and so on. But when it comes to activation, then that's what TigerHall was built for. So then we use TigerHall. And we use TigerHall for everything from new employee onboarding to change communications, leadership information, customer feedback is in TigerHall. When we do live streams with our own customers.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So we have, and what we're seeing is, especially with the customer interviews, bringing that directly into the business. That's a very big piece of it. In our sense, the, the transformation that I'm driving internally is more, I would say like market education, customer education, having everyone in the business understanding what is chief transformation officer, what do they do?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
What are their priorities? What is change management and like having everyone across engineering and product and. all the other departments understanding what that is. So that's a big piece. And all of that is done on Tiger Hall. So all the education around the space and different industries and customers and their pain points.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And that's where we have very high engagement levels, especially on the live streams with live customers. And then getting that direct feedback on onboarding, for example, when they do their onboarding journeys in Tiger Hall, having that direct feedback and ultimately just saves a lot of time.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
In my previous startups as well, where obviously we didn't have TigerHall because it wasn't built, it became a lot of me repeating myself on a lot of Zoom calls and doing a lot of cranings and information and sharing sessions and typing long messages on Slack and producing documents and all over. That's what I don't have to do anymore.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating. No, it was more like I was seeing how hard it was for employees on the ground to grasp what HQ wanted out of them and what they should be doing. And I saw this disconnect and how it was like both parties have really good intentions. People are trying to drive change and transformation and make their companies become better.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So it's a big save of time where I can, and there is no whispering game where like I tell the leadership team, then the leadership team tells their direct reports and then they tell their direct reports and so on. This is just like straight from the horse's mouth.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So I can be coming out of a customer meeting, pick up my phone, record a short message to the team or whichever department or audience that I want to send it to. And it's just done and there right away. So it's much more faster for me as a leader and all my leadership team and everyone else who communicates internally and not having these like one hour town halls and long trainings and so on.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And that goes for onboarding and training as well. Like in my previous company, I used to do all the onboarding with everyone. And that took a very big part of my time, whereas now they do that on Tiger Hall and then we have a Q&A session and then they ask me any questions that they want to ask. So yeah, so anything in change, we definitely use Tiger Hall for it.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
Yeah, that sounds great. We'll be happy to.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
But all it does is that it increases this change fatigue and resistance and fear in employees. And I was like, this is not necessary. And then employees also have good intentions. They really want to help. They want to support. They want to do a good job, right? No one shows up to work and thinks I'm going to do a really shit job today. Let me see how bad I can do this job.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
People generally have good intentions. So it's good intentions on both sides, but it's the in-between that makes it get lost, right? And that's the complexity of the size of these companies, the communications and the lack of the availability of these tools. Like you can't target very well with email or SharePoint and it's hard to create high quality engaging content with these tools.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
Like it's mostly just written documents. So I was looking around and I thought, what are people engaged with? They're really engaged with their TikToks and Instagrams and Spotify's and all of the consumer-grade technology and things that are social, things that have engaging content. It's like, why isn't change communications more like this?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
Why can't we communicate change and transformation to employees the way an influencer communicates about the latest fashion trend or whatever to their followers, right? So that was a big inspiration for it as well. And just how do we bring that content consumption, engagement and social aspects into change and transformation?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
I think there are a lot more similarities than differences actually. At the end of the day, we're all pretty similar as humans and the human psyche and human emotions doesn't, they don't differ that much across geographies from my experience and things like the fear, the chaos, the uncertainty, politics, emotions, all of these are in all of these cultures, right?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So the human experience of change and including change resistance and fatigue and all of those are very natural and very human regardless of where you're from. I think the differences that more than the cultural differences shows up in organizations more from A couple of ways, right?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So one is the role of talent and how it's viewed and the kind of like how you view talent as a resource versus an investment, for example. And that also influences the leadership culture. So if we take Asia where it's more generally more top-down work cultures, you don't really question your boss. You don't really speak up to authority.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
There are other cultural nuances that drive other kinds of behaviors. Whereas in the US, it's very common to challenge authority and speak up against your manager and say what you think and voice your concerns. So that's leading to differences in communication.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And we also see that because we have clients across 32 countries work with around half a million employees worldwide that are using the platform. So across those differences in geography, you can see that leadership style and the hierarchical nature of organizations differ than in the two-way feedback loops, for example, and the kind of feedback that people share and how they share that.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And you also see it in things like trust in leaders. So in Asia, people are much more prone to trusting their leaders. I would say maybe not blind. Oh, but he's the boss, so he knows best. Yeah.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
because of someone's level of seniority that person automatically has power and authority and knowledge whereas that's not the case in the us where people are more like yeah just because he's the chief whatever or she's the senior something it doesn't matter that they always know best i also have my opinion and they matter as much as theirs so that's a big difference in how communication is handled and how people trust and follow and view their leaders
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And then I think the other difference is the long-term versus short-term thinking. So leaders in Asia are much more long-term thinking and the US is much more short-term. So the US is much more around quality results for Wall Street and showing earnings and all of the numbers every three months.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
so they don't really have long-term visions when it comes to thinking about change it's more like trend hopping like ai for example everyone is on ai and everyone needs to implement it now and everyone wants to show it to wall street next quarter whereas in asia it's a little bit more let's see what we're gonna do in the next 10 years and especially the asia headquarter companies are very much
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
more long term vision and like how does this play into our heritage and the longer term view of who we are as a company and our identity. So that's also another approach to change, which I've noticed where changes happen slower in Asia, but perhaps more intentional, I would say, like it's a bit more visionary and like thinking through more instead of just like jumping into execution right away.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And all of those sides have both pros and cons. It depends on how you want to do it, right? Like I think for example, Asia could be much more faster in execution given the top-down hierarchical culture it has. But then this long-term vision, which is great in my view, that kind of makes it not as fast.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
But if you had, for example, the short-term vision of the US with the top-down hierarchy of Asia, that could potentially be extremely intense and fast execution, right? But I think both of them balance themselves out in interesting ways. But those are some of the differences that I've noticed in just the work that we've done. When we first met,
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
Yeah, I don't think some fail. I think most fail, depending on how you define failure. There's a very well-known statistic that 70 or even 80% of transformations fail, right? And the definition of failure in most of those studies is not achieving the intended outcome, so not delivering the value that it was supposed to deliver.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
not reaching the milestones on time so getting dragged and dragged for time and budget or just like being abandoned like it didn't work and we have to stop and go another way which i also like wouldn't necessarily call failure we live and we learn and i think that's completely fine and to just say this didn't work we're gonna try something else so i don't think there should be any fear around failing but if you want a transformation initiative to really succeed there are a couple of things that i notice
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
between the customers that we work with and just like what makes them successful versus the ones who are less successful, what do they do instead?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
the number one thing or the number one but like the first thing to think about in the journey of a transformation is when do you start involving people that's a big difference i see there are some companies that are really good with involving people early you know instead of having three people in the ivory tower deciding everything and then starting to roll it out and then at the very last minute when it comes to execution that's when they go hey like
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
Tom, Dick and Harry, like, why don't you need to do this differently now? So go ahead and do it differently and change your workflows. That's usually not received very well. And on the other side of that, I see companies involving employees early, like at the formation stage. And even if you can decide the strategy and what the change is going to be, let's say you're going to have
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
of renewable energy by 2030. Okay, that's your plan. But then how do you start involving people in the thinking, in the formation, in the how-to, in shaping the transformation? And I see companies are really successful, have involved more people earlier. And there's a study from McKinsey on this as well, where most organizations involve and engage on average 2% of their organization.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
McKinsey argues that's equivalent to around a 20% success rate of change and transformation initiatives. Whereas if you have just 7% engaged, that's already 50% success rate. So really, you only really need 7% of your organization to be fully engaged for you to have a 50-50 chance of success. And then if you start climbing up to 30%, having 30% of your organization engaged, that's when you get...
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
realistic success rates up to 80, 85%. So it's not about having a hundred percent on board, but it's about how can you have more than just the ivory tower people involved and getting people involved very early. So that's one big difference I see. Then the other one would be how much effort they put into the with them.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So what's in it for me, the language and the words that they use with different audiences. Do you go to a factory floor, for example, with very formal headquarter corporate language that's usually not flying very well? Or do you actually meet people where they are?
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So the amount of effort that they put in to target the different audiences, understanding their needs, using the words, the language that they use and like speaking their language, both literally and metaphorically, that's another big difference. I see like everything from vocabulary and words used. And then I think almost the biggest one is actually the ego and fear of the leaders.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
It's almost a direct correlation between the level of, or inverse correlation, I should say, with the ego of the CEO and the success of transformation. And the higher the ego of the CEO is, the lower the success of your transformation. I've seen this in multiple companies and heard about it as well from change leaders that I talk to every day.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And it's always the high ego, high fear type of leader that makes transformation very difficult. Because usually what that means, right? It's not the ego in itself that is a challenge, but the ego means that usually they are less open to feedback. They take things more personally. And any negative feedback or information, they take it very personally. They think it's all about them.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
So high ego and high fear in leaders is usually a very bad combination because it stifles any and all conversation and feedback that you can have around it. And that is what creates these top down, do as I say, and if you say anything, I'm going to punish you or I get very scared or I take it personally.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
And that kind of approach in leaders is just not beneficial at all for a transformation type of environment. So that might have worked in the old days where you needed a leader to just tell people what to do and then they go execute it. But in 2024 and beyond, it's not going to be that type of leadership that succeeds.
Chief Change Officer
#399 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part Two
so that's another reason i see companies fail is when senior leaders have that high ego are very sensitive to feedback or don't even want to hear any feedback at all or not interested in what people think on the ground that's another big challenge so those are some differences that i've seen and both of these hold true both across asia and the us yeah like you said human nature is universal
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So that's who I am and that's how I see myself. So if everything was taken away from me tomorrow, I would still be, I'm a resilient person with good intentions who will always learn and work hard. And that's who Nelly Wartoff is. It's not the CEO of Tiger Hall or this and that. So that's another big piece of resilience that I think is incredibly important.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So we're solving the problem that large enterprises have in engaging and getting buy-in from their employees during large transformations. So think of it like this, like a big enterprise is going through a culture transformation or merger or acquisition or technology implementation, like any kind of big change that is affecting a large part of the company.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
then what they do today tends to be they go out so after the strategy and planning side of things they go out and they're trying to activate this across the organization right what do they do they would send math emails so they maybe send a couple of emails a day bombarding people they would put up sharepoint site number fifty thousand
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
They will put something on the intranet that nobody goes to look at. They will put something in the LMS platform and then the CEO suddenly talks about it in the town hall and people have no clue what he's talking about or she's talking about. And it's all over the place. It's very messy. It's very difficult for employees to follow and make sense of.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So the small group that has done this strategy and planning, they are like, why aren't people just getting it? Why aren't they just executing? Why don't they just get this transformation done, right? Whereas the people on the ground are like, I don't know what this transformation is about and why should I care and what's in it for me and why should I do it? So there is this huge disconnect between
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
Large enterprises say change, transformation, the people that are trying to make this transformation happen, right? And then the thousands and thousands of people on the ground. So instead of having that disjointed experience fragmented all over the place, what Tigerhole does is it allows you to create content, first of all, in very engaging formats. So let's say you have a PDF, a seven page PDF.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
No one is going to read that. You can upload that and it turns into a podcast. And it turns into a podcast in the local language of the person who's listening to it. So instead of having American HQ sending out those English PDF documents, suddenly you have a podcast in Cantonese or Bengali or French or any language that you want to listen to, right?
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So it allows for breaking through the noise instead of having all of these PDFs and emails and mass communication that people don't really read. And then you can send that communication, engagement, capability building, training, all of it through very targeted audiences. So you can be very specific around who you target with what message.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
It's a lot of audience segmentation, so people only get what they are supposed to receive. So there's not this one size fits none kind of approach where you send the same thing to everyone. And then it's integrated where they work. So you would get it directly in your workflow. You don't need to go to the intranet or LMS or all over the place.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
You just have it where you already work, like in Microsoft Teams. And then you can give your feedback. And this is the most important part, that you have your voice heard as an employee and the change leader can then get feedback from the ground. So they can actually get feedback on how is this change received? What are people thinking? What is the input? What's going well? What's not going well?
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
Because it's really hard as a change leader to have that visibility across so many layers and geographies and the complexity that large organizations present, right? So this way you can get that two-way feedback loop from all over the organization. And then the last piece is you have data. So you have really good analytics and data on all of these things. So you see exactly what's happening.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
Are people reacting to it? What do they think? What is their feedback? Who is consuming it? Who isn't consuming it? What is the sentiment analysis of all of these different groups? So as a change leader, you don't have to fly blind where it's like you send emails out and then 7% open it and you don't know where the rest went.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
And instead of having that, you can have all of these analytics and data and insights. So it allows you to get much better with strategy. It can be much more agile and adjust your strategy as you're going through the transformation, which helps to increase the speed of execution and retaining top talent is a big one. And also ensuring that you catch those problems early.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So before the big problems become even bigger, you can actually catch them and address them early on. So that's what Tiger Hall helps change leaders with.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
A tech platform. Yeah, correct. It's a software platform. And then we also do a bit of advisory around like communication strategies, audience segmentation, targeting and those things. But it's 80, 85% software and the platform is what people are buying. What triggered you to start this company in the very first place? I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
Absolutely. Yes, I grew up in Sweden in a small village in southern Sweden. I usually say more cows than people. It's hard to describe that small town. And I wanted to get out as quickly as I could for professional reasons and cultural reasons. and decided to move to Asia.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
On my 18th birthday, I went to singapore.com, booked a one-way flight, packed everything I had in an ice hockey trunk and moved across. And I've been very obsessed with Asia since a very young age. I started studying English when I was around 11, 12 years old. I thought the education system was way too slow in how it taught English. It was like, Thomas is one pear, Mark is one apple.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
And I was like, I want to work in this language. I need to pick it up quicker. So I started reading more international media and that's when I discovered there's a whole continent out there called Asia and there is China and India and Japan and I was just like so fascinated.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So I did every single school project on Asia and Singapore and Hong Kong where you are and just was super, super fascinated by this part of the world. So I decided when I was about 14, 15 that I want to live in the capital of Asia and that's when I decided it's probably Singapore.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
and that's why i moved to singapore when i was 18. so landed in singapore before that back in sweden started working very early i was started mcdonald's when i was 14 before that i was supporting stroke patients with their physical exercise i've been working since around age 12 and continued that throughout my time in sweden and in singapore and then spent a bit of time in london south korea
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
was in headhunting for a good part of my corporate career. And thereafter started a couple of companies and which ended up being Tiger Hall, which is the business that I'm running now. And that is what ultimately took me to LA. So that's a very quick, brief overview and happy to dive into any of those details that you might find more interesting. Would you call yourself adventurous?
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
I think a risk taker, like risk addicted or excitement addicted. Yeah, I need to have constantly new things happening. I'm not very good with standard, just daily routines. That's not the kind of person I am. I need adventure and I need risk taking. I think that's a big part of my personality.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
I agree with that. I think the comfort zone is the most boring because nothing ever happens in the comfort zone. So you always need to be outside of your comfort zone for things to progress. When I read a good quote on this, it was just this week, earlier this week on LinkedIn, I think, there was someone that said, A life of leisure is hell, and a life of adventure and purpose is heaven.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
But the problem is that since we're children, we're taught that it should be the other way around. That we should aim for leisure and aim for free time and aim for rest. But actually, that's not the purpose of life. Sure, you need rest from time to time, but it's not the purpose of life to just be lying on your couch and scrolling TikTok, right?
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
A life of purpose and adventure, that's really what is heaven. unless sure is not.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
Yeah, so I spent a little over four years, four and a half years at Michael Page, which is a great recruitment consulting firm. And I loved, absolutely loved my time there. And the reason I went into recruitment was that when I started working back in Sweden at McDonald's when I was 14,
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
I learned, and this is why I always talk about McDonald's being the most transformative experience for me, because at McDonald's, I learned my professional addictions, if you will, or like my professional passions and what I love doing professionally. Those are three factors that has since McDonald's actually been in all my jobs of professional endeavors. So the first one is the fast pace.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
And always having a high pace. Things are happening quickly, changing quickly. It's high adrenaline, high tempo. The second one is commercial. The rush that I get from commercial endeavors, whether it's selling cheeseburgers or closing large enterprise deals or anything that is commercial.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
I love the, I almost see like revenue growth as like a gamification or like gaining points in a game type of thing. So I love the commercial side of it. And then the third one is leadership, the human aspect and being able to lead and coach and grow people and orchestrate resources and get people together and have them work together as a team. So leadership was the third one.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So throughout my entire professional life, that has been a thread because that's what I realized at McDonald's, that I love this high tempo. I love the commercial thrill and I love leadership and leading others. So that's why I then went into recruitment.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
And the fourth side, I would say, which wasn't as big in McDonald's, but that became very big at Michael Page, was the independence and how much I love running my own business and being in charge of my own destiny and driving my own results and having my own P&L and team and so on. So that's really what drove me to do recruitment and be in Michael Page.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
And when I came in, I was obviously very low at the leaderboard, right? And I was like, I want to be number one. I want to win. I want to be the top biller, being competitive. And obviously the only thing I could do differently from the others, much more years of experience and network and skill sets. were that I could work harder.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So I started implementing my 7-11 shift, which means be at the office at 7 a.m. in the morning and don't leave before 11 p.m. at night. And this was obviously way before hybrid work and having a laptop at home and those kind of things.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
um so that's what i did and became number one in the region the second year i was there so so that's something i really enjoyed as well and again that fast pace and the high thrill of it so yeah overall it was a great time and it was also where i saw the needs that then led me to start tiger hall around knowledge sharing communications how change is driven especially in large enterprises and that was a very big source of inspiration for tiger hall
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
So I think resilience is something that you can't really learn unless you're going through difficult times. And I think this is the both good and difficult part about resilience, but like having a bunch of workshops or trainings around resilience. Yeah, sure.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
You can teach mindset and you can teach like how to approach it when it comes, but there is no such thing as building resilience without going through hard times. And I think that's what people sometimes don't understand, that you have to go through hard times in order to build that muscle. It's like, how are you going to build any abs or biceps if you're not doing push-ups or sit-ups, right?
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
You have to work the muscle to build it. And that goes the same for resilience as well. So whenever I faced hardship or setbacks or difficult times, you either win or you build resilience or character, as I tend to think about it nowadays.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
And when things don't go my way, when I fail, when things are going sideways, I'm like, right now I'm building character, I'm building resilience, I'm learning and having that mindset when you're going through difficult times. When you're not going through difficult times, it's really hard to build resilience. So be grateful for those difficult times and see what you can learn out of it.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
And also you need to see yourself coming out of it stronger, right? You need to go through those times and the difficult times to build resilience. So it really is like that muscle. So whenever you are going through hard times and difficult times, be grateful for it because that's actually the only thing that can help you build resilience.
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
and then seeing yourself coming out of it right so when you see yourself like i was okay i managed to do that i succeeded i got through it that's what builds resilience slash confidence and that is what builds your self-assurance that you can actually get through this and it's nothing impossible
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
Then I think the second thing is, and I talk about this quite a lot, is identity and your self-talk and how you identify internally. So for me, for example, I identify as a resilient person. So when things happen and I need to be resilient, I'm like, this is who I am. This is what I was built for. And this is my identity to be resilient. So if you identify, if we take some examples, right?
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
Let's say you identify as the head of marketing at product X, like your title is your identity. That's going to be really hard if you lose that job because then you lose your identity. And same if you identify as...
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
something else that can be taken away from you right then anything that can be taken away from you and it does then you lose your entire identity so base your identity on something that cannot be taken away from you that is there regardless of external circumstances regardless of your job title which company you work for what
Chief Change Officer
#398 Nellie Wartoft: Global Fix—Change Management Without the Migraine — Part One
investors you have, who your friends are, like just everything that is external. Take that out of your internal identification and just think about who are you without all of those things and then build your identity based on that. So for me, I've built it on resilience, on always learning, always trying my best, always working hard, always having good intentions.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Yeah, I'm sure that happens in a lot of places. And that's not good. I think for us, it's very different because employees like it. And we actually started B2C. So we actually started as a consumer platform to ensure that engagement was high, people liked it, it was an experience that suited them, which I think many platforms don't do.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So that's, of course, one differentiator when it comes to how we've approached it. But then I think also it's Like people tend to, it's not helpful to have generalizations like a piece of software is bad. It's not about the software. It's not about the technology. It's not about the platforms. It's about what problem are you trying to solve and how are you solving it?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And that's actually on the leaders in the organization to decide that. So in your friend's case, I would challenge the CHRO and say, what problems are you trying to solve by bringing in all of these different software platforms? Like it's clearly not delivering the value or delivering the results that they had intended for it to do. So it's never about the platform.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
It's about what does that platform, software, technology, whatever you're bringing in, what is that intended to solve? And that's up to the business leaders to decide. Because it's not about the amount of technology is never a problem, right? Think of our phones. Like how many apps do we have? I think the average is like 400 or 450 apps in your phone.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
But suddenly the number of apps is not a problem with the ones you use, right? So people who use WhatsApp and Instagram and LinkedIn, and I'm a big user of all of those three. I don't have an issue with having three platforms because they all fill their own purpose and they all have solve a need or a problem or they have a purpose, right?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So I think that's the approach you have to take as an enterprise buyer as well. It's not about the software or the number of platforms. It's about, are you reaching the goals that you intended to reach? And software is always a means to an end. It's never the end.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So I think for your friends, you probably have to take this conversation to the people who are bringing in the software and better understand what is the problem they're trying to solve. And is it solving that problem? If not, then throw it out. If yes, then keep it. That's how I would approach it.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So we have Tiger Hall, right? So we use Tiger Hall. So that's the software that we use for it. Then within change, you have three stages, right? You have the strategy, you have the planning, and you have the activation. And we focus on the activation side of it. When it comes to the strategy and the planning side of Tiger Hall, that's where I, from time to time, absolutely use advisors and
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
experts and speak to people in different fields and so on. But when it comes to activation, then that's what TigerHall was built for. So then we use TigerHall. And we use TigerHall for everything from new employee onboarding to change communications, leadership information, customer feedback is on TigerHall. When we do live streams with our own customers.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So we have, what we're seeing is, especially with the customer interviews, bringing that directly into the business. That's a very big piece of it. In our sense, the transformation that I'm driving internally is more, I would say, like market education, customer education, having everyone in the business understanding what is chief transformation officer? What do they do?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
What are their priorities? What is change management? And like having everyone across engineering and product and whatever. all the other departments understanding what that is. So that's a big piece. And all of that is done on Tiger Hall. So all the education around the space and different industries and customers and their pain points.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And that's where we have very high engagement levels, especially on the live streams with live customers. And then getting that direct feedback on onboarding, for example, when they do their onboarding journeys in Tiger Hall, having that direct feedback and ultimately just saves a lot of time.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
In my previous startups as well, where obviously we didn't have TigerHall because it wasn't built, it became a lot of me repeating myself on a lot of Zoom calls and doing a lot of trainings and information and sharing sessions and typing long messages on Slack and producing documents and all over. That's what I don't have to do anymore.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating. No, it was more like I was seeing how hard it was for employees on the ground to grasp what HQ wanted out of them and what they should be doing. And I saw this disconnect and how it was like both parties have really good intentions. People are trying to drive change and transformation and make their companies become better.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So it's a big save of time where I can, and there is no whispering game where like I tell the leadership team, then the leadership team tells their direct reports and then they tell their direct reports and so on. This is just like straight from the horse's mouth.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So I can be coming out of a customer meeting, pick up my phone, record a short message to the team or whichever department or audience that I want to send it to. And it's just done and there right away. So it's much more faster for me as a leader and all my leadership team and everyone else who communicates internally and not having these like one hour town halls and long trainings and so on.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And that goes for onboarding and training as well. Like in my previous company, I used to do all the onboarding with everyone. And that took a big part of my time. Whereas now they do that on Tiger Hall and then we have a Q&A session. And then they ask me any questions that they want to ask. So yeah, so anything in change, we definitely use Tiger Hall for it.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Yeah, that sounds great. We'll be happy to.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
But all it does is that it increases this change fatigue and resistance and fear in employees. And I was like, this is not necessary. And then employees also have good intentions. They really want to help. They want to support. They want to do a good job, right? No one shows up to work and thinks I'm going to do a really shit job today. Let me see how bad I can do this job.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
People generally have good intentions. So it's good intentions on both sides, but it's the in-between that makes it get lost, right? And that's the complexity of the size of these companies, the communications and the lack of the availability of these tools. Like you can't target very well with email or SharePoint and it's hard to create high quality engaging content with these tools.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Like it's mostly just written documents. So I was looking around and I thought, what are people engaged with? They're really engaged with their TikToks and Instagrams and Spotify's and all of the consumer-grade technology and things that are social, things that have engaging content. It's like, why isn't change communications more like this?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Why can't we communicate change and transformation to employees the way an influencer communicates about the latest fashion trend or whatever to their followers, right? So that was a big inspiration for it as well. And just how do we bring that content consumption, engagement and social aspects into change and transformation?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
I think there are a lot more similarities than differences actually. At the end of the day, we're all pretty similar as humans and the human psyche and human emotions doesn't, they don't differ that much across geographies from my experience and things like the fear, the chaos, the uncertainty, politics, emotions, all of these are in all of these cultures, right?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So the human experience of change and including change resistance and fatigue and all of those are very natural and very human regardless of where you're from. I think the differences that more than the cultural differences shows up in organizations more from A couple of ways, right?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So one is the role of talent and how it's viewed and the kind of like how you view talent as a resource versus an investment, for example. And that also influences the leadership culture. So if we take Asia where it's more generally more top-down work cultures, you don't really question your boss. You don't really speak up to authority.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
There are other cultural nuances that drive other kinds of behaviors. Whereas in the US, it's very common to challenge authority and speak up against your manager and say what you think and voice your concerns. So that's leading to differences in communication.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And we also see that because we have clients across 32 countries work with around half a million employees worldwide that are using the platform. So across those differences in geography, you can see that leadership style and the hierarchical nature of organizations differ than in the two-way feedback loops, for example, and the kind of feedback that people share and how they share that.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Because of someone's level of seniority, that person automatically has power and authority and knowledge. Whereas that's not the case in the US where people are more like, yeah, just because he's the chief whatever or she's the senior something, it doesn't matter that they always know best. I also have my opinion and they matter as much as theirs.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So that's a big difference in how communication is handled and how people trust and follow and view their leaders. And then I think the other difference is the long-term versus short-term thinking. So leaders in Asia are much more long-term thinking and the US is much more short-term.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So the US is much more around quality results for Wall Street and showing earnings and all of the numbers every three months. So they don't really have long-term visions when it comes to thinking about change. It's more like trend hopping, like AI, for example. Everyone is on AI and everyone needs to implement it now. And everyone wants to show it to Wall Street next quarter.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Whereas in Asia, it's a little bit more, let's see what we're going to do in the next 10 years. And especially the Asia headquartered companies are very much focused. More long term vision and like how does this play into our heritage and the longer term view of who we are as a company and our identity.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So that's also another approach to change, which I've noticed where changes happen slower in Asia, but perhaps more intentional, I would say, like it's a bit more intentional. visionary and like thinking through more instead of just like jumping into execution right away. And all of those sides have both pros and cons. It depends on how you want to do it, right?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Like I think, for example, Asia could be much more faster in execution given the top-down hierarchical culture it has. But then this long-term vision, which is great in my view, that kind of makes it not as fast. But if you had, for example, the short-term vision of the US with the top-down hierarchy of Asia, that could potentially be extremely intense and fast execution, right?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
But I think both of them balance themselves out in interesting ways. But those are some of the differences that I've noticed in just the work that we've done.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Yeah, I don't think some fail. I think most fail, depending on how you define failure. There's a very well-known statistic that 70 or even 80% of transformations fail, right? And the definition of failure in most of those studies is not achieving the intended outcome. So not delivering the value that it was supposed to deliver, not reaching the milestones on time.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So getting dragged and dragged for time and budget, or just like being abandoned. Like it didn't work and we have to stop and go another way. Which I also wouldn't necessarily call failure. We live and we learn. And I think that's completely fine. And to just say, this didn't work, we're going to try something else. So I don't think there should be any fear around failing.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
But if you want a transformation initiative to really succeed, there are a couple of things that I notice between the customers that we work with and just like what makes them successful versus the ones who are less successful. What do they do instead?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
The number one thing, or the number one, but like the first thing to think about in the journey of a transformation is when do you start involving people? That's a big difference I see. There are some companies that are really good with involving people early, you know, instead of having three people in the ivory tower deciding everything and then starting to roll it out.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And then at the very last minute, when it comes to execution, that's when they go, hey, like, Tom, Dick and Harry, like, why don't you need to do this differently now? So go ahead and do it differently and change your workflows. That's usually not received very well. And on the other side of that, I see companies involving employees early, like at the formation stage.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And even if you can decide the strategy and what the change is going to be, let's say you're going to have. all renewable energy by 2030. Okay, that's your plan. But then how do you start involving people in the thinking, in the formation, in the how-to, in shaping the transformation? And I see companies are really successful, have involved more people earlier.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And there's a study from McKinsey on this as well, where most organizations involve and engage on average 2% of their organization. McKinsey argues that's equivalent to around a 20% success rate of change and transformation initiatives. Whereas if you have just 7% engaged, that's already 50% success rate.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So really, you only really need 7% of your organization to be fully engaged for you to have a 50-50 chance of success. And then if you start climbing up to 30%, having 30% of your organization engaged, that's when you get... realistic success rates up to 80, 85%.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So it's not about having a hundred percent on board, but it's about how can you have more than just the ivory tower people involved and getting people involved very early. So that's one big difference I see. Then the other one would be how much effort they put into the with them. So what's in it for me, the language and the words that they use with different audiences.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
Do you go to a factory floor, for example, with very formal headquarter corporate language? That's usually not flying very well. Or do you actually meet people where they are?
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So the amount of effort that they put in to target the different audiences, understanding their needs, using the words, the language that they use and like speaking their language, both literally and metaphorically, that's another big difference. I see like everything from vocabulary and words used. And then I think almost the biggest one is actually the ego and fear of the leaders.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
It's almost a direct correlation between the level of, or inverse correlation, I should say, with the ego of the CEO and the success of transformation. And the higher the ego of the CEO is, the lower the success of your transformation. I've seen this in multiple companies and heard about it as well from change leaders that I talk to every day.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
And it's always the high ego, high fear type of leader that makes transformation very difficult. Because usually what that means, right? It's not the ego in itself that is a challenge. But the ego means that usually they are less open to feedback. They take things more personally. And any negative feedback or information, they take it very personally. They think it's all about them.
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So high ego and high fear in leaders is usually a very bad combination. Because it stifles any and all conversation and feedback that you can have around it. And that is what creates these...
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
top down do as i say and if you say anything i'm gonna punish you or i get very scared or i take it personally and that kind of approach in leaders is just not beneficial at all for a transformation type of environment so that might have worked in the old days where you needed a leader to just tell people what to do and then they go execute it but in 2024 and beyond it's not going to be that type of leadership that succeeds
Chief Change Officer
#276 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part Two
So that's another reason I see companies fail is when senior leaders have that high ego or very sensitive to feedback or don't even want to hear any feedback at all or not interested in what people think on the ground. That's another big challenge. So those are some differences that I've seen and both of these hold true both across Asia and the US.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Yeah, I'm sure that happens in a lot of places and that's not good. I think for us, it's very different because employees like it. And we actually started B2C. So we actually started as a consumer platform to ensure that engagement was high, people liked it, it was an experience that suited them, which I think many platforms don't do.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So that's, of course, one differentiator when it comes to how we've approached it. But then I think also it's, Like people tend to, it's not helpful to have generalizations like a piece of software is bad. It's not about the software. It's not about the technology. It's not about the platforms. It's about what problem are you trying to solve and how are you solving it?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And that's actually on the leaders in the organization to decide that. So in your friend's case, I would challenge the CHRO and say, what problems are you trying to solve by bringing in all of these different software platforms? Like it's clearly not delivering the value or delivering the results that they had intended for it to do. So it's never about the platform.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
It's about what does that platform, software, technology, whatever you're bringing in, what is that intended to solve? And that's up to the business leaders to decide. Because it's not about the amount of technology is never a problem, right? Think of our phones. Like how many apps do we have? I think the average is like 400 or 450 apps in your phone.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
But suddenly the number of apps is not a problem with the ones you use, right? So people who use WhatsApp and Instagram and LinkedIn, and I'm a big user of all of those three. I don't have an issue with having three platforms because they all fill their own purpose and they all have solve a need or a problem or they have a purpose, right?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So I think that's the approach you have to take as an enterprise buyer as well. It's not about the software or the number of platforms. It's about, are you reaching the goals that you intended to reach? And software is always a means to an end. It's never the end.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So I think for your friends, you probably have to take this conversation to the people who are bringing in the software and better understand what is the problem they're trying to solve. And is it solving that problem? If not, then throw it out. If yes, then keep it. That's how I would approach it.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating. No, it was more like I was seeing how hard it was for employees on the ground to grasp what HQ wanted out of them and what they should be doing. And I saw this disconnect and how it was like both parties have really good intentions. People are trying to drive change and transformation and make their companies become better.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So we have Tiger Hall, right? So we use Tiger Hall. So that's the software that we use for it. Then within change, you have three stages, right? You have the strategy, you have the planning, and you have the activation. And we focus on the activation side of it.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
When it comes to the strategy and the planning side of Tiger Hall, that's where I, from time to time, absolutely use advisors and experts and speak to people in different fields and so on. But when it comes to activation, then that's what Tiger Hall was built for. So then we use Tiger Hall.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And we use Tiger Hall for everything from new employee onboarding to change communications, leadership information, customer feedback is in Tiger Hall. When we do live streams with our own customers, So we have, and what we're seeing is, especially with the customer interviews, bringing that directly into the business. That's a very big piece of it.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
In our sense, the transformation that I'm driving internally is more, I would say like market education, customer education, having everyone in the business understanding what is chief transformation officer? What do they do? What are their priorities? What is change management? And like having everyone across engineering and product and all the other departments understanding what that is.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So that's a big piece. And all of that is done on Tiger Hall. So all the education around the space and different industries and customers and their pain points. And that's where we have very high engagement levels, especially on the live streams with live customers.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And then getting that direct feedback on onboarding, for example, when they do their onboarding journeys in Tiger Hall, having that direct feedback and ultimately just saves a lot of time.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
In my previous startups as well, where obviously we didn't have TagRoll because it wasn't built, it became a lot of me repeating myself on a lot of Zoom calls and doing a lot of trainings and information and sharing sessions and typing long messages on Slack and producing documents and all over. That's what I don't have to do anymore.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So it's a big save of time where I can, and there is no whispering game where like I tell the leadership team, then the leadership team tells their direct reports and then they tell their direct reports and so on. This is just like straight from the horse's mouth. So I can be coming out of a customer meeting, pick up my phone, record a short message to the team or whichever
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
department or audience that i want to send it to and it's just done and there right away so it's much more faster for me as a leader and all my leadership team and everyone else who communicates internally and not having these like one hour town halls and long trainings and so on and that goes for onboarding and training as well right like in my previous company i used to do all the onboarding with everyone and that took a very a big part of my time whereas now they do that on tiger hall and then we have a q a session and then they ask me any questions that they want asked
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So yeah, so anything in change, we definitely use Talk Your Hope for it.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Thank you.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
But all it does is that it increases this change fatigue and resistance and fear in employees. And I was like, this is not necessary. And then employees also have good intentions. They really want to help. They want to support. They want to do a good job, right? No one shows up to work and thinks I'm going to do a really shit job today. Let me see how bad I can do this job.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
People generally have good intentions. So it's good intentions on both sides, but it's the in-between that makes it get lost, right? And that's the complexity of the size of these companies, the communications and the lack of the availability of these tools. Like you can't target very well with email or SharePoint and it's hard to create high quality engaging content with these tools.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Like it's mostly just written documents. So I was looking around and I saw what are people engaged with? They're really engaged with their TikToks and Instagrams and Spotify's and all of the consumer-grade technology and things that are social, things that have engaging content. It's like, why isn't change communications more like this?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Why can't we communicate change and transformation to employees? the way an influencer communicates about the latest fashion trend or whatever to their followers, right? So that was a big inspiration for it as well. And just how do we bring that content consumption, engagement and social aspects into change and transformation?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
I think there are a lot more similarities than differences, actually. At the end of the day, we're all pretty similar as humans, and the human psyche and human emotions, they don't differ that much across geographies, from my experience. And things like the fear, the chaos, the uncertainty, politics, emotions, all of these are in all of these cultures, right?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So the human experience of change and including change resistance and fatigue and all of those are very natural and very human regardless of where you're from. I think the difference is that more than the cultural differences shows up in organizations more from A couple of ways, right?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So one is the role of talent and how it's viewed and the kind of like how you view talent as a resource versus an investment, for example. And that also influences the leadership culture. So if we take Asia, where it's more... generally more top-down work cultures. You don't really question your boss. You don't really speak up to authority.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
There are other cultural nuances that drive other kinds of behaviors. Whereas in the US, it's very common to challenge authority and speak up against your manager and say what you think and voice your concerns. So that's leading to differences in communication. And we also see that because we have clients across 32 countries work with
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
around half a million employees worldwide that are using the platform. So across those differences in geography, you can see that leadership style and the hierarchical nature of organizations differ than in the two-way feedback loops, for example, and the kind of feedback that people share and how they share that. And you also see it in things like trust in leaders.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So in Asia, people are much more prone to trusting their leaders. I would say maybe not blind, but he's the boss, so he knows best. Because of someone's level of seniority, that person automatically has power and authority and knowledge.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Whereas that's not the case in the US where people are more like, yeah, just because he's the chief whatever or she's the senior something, it doesn't matter that they always know best. I also have my opinion and they matter as much as theirs. So that's a big difference in how communication is handled and how people trust and follow and view their leaders.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And then I think the other difference is the long-term versus short-term thinking. So leaders in Asia are much more long-term thinking and the U.S. is much more short-term. So the U.S. is much more around quality results for Wall Street and showing earnings and all of the numbers every three months. So they don't really have long-term visions when it comes to thinking about change.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
It's more like trend hopping, like AI, for example. Everyone is on AI and everyone needs to implement it now and everyone wants to show it to Wall Street next quarter. Whereas in Asia, it's a little bit more, let's see what we're going to do in the next 10 years. And especially the Asia headquarter companies are very much focused.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
More long term vision and like how does this play into our heritage and the longer term view of who we are as a company and our identity. So that's also another approach to change, which I've noticed where changes happen slower in Asia, but perhaps more intentional, I would say, like it's a bit more intentional.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
visionary and like thinking through more instead of just like jumping into execution right away and all of those sides have both pros and cons it depends on how you want to do it right like i think for example asia could be much more faster in execution given the top-down hierarchical culture it has But then this long-term vision, which is great in my view, that kind of makes it not as fast.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
But if you had, for example, the short-term vision of the US with the top-down hierarchy of Asia, that could potentially be extremely intense and fast execution, right? But I think both of them balance themselves out in interesting ways. But those are some of the differences that I've noticed in just the work that we've done.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Yeah, I don't think some fail. I think most fail, depending on how you define failure. There's a very well-known statistic that 70 or even 80% of transformations fail, right?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And the definition of failure in most of those studies is not achieving the intended outcome, so not delivering the value that it was supposed to deliver, not reaching the milestones on time, so getting dragged and dragged for time and budget, or just being abandoned, like it didn't work and we have to stop and go another way. Which I also wouldn't necessarily call failure. We live and we learn.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And I think that's completely fine. And to just say, this didn't work, we're going to try something else. So I don't think there should be any fear around failing. But if you want a transformation initiative to really succeed, there are a couple of things that I notice between the customers that we work with and just like what makes them successful versus the ones who are less successful.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
What do they do instead? The number one thing, or the number one, but like the first thing to think about in the journey of a transformation is when do you start involving people? That's a big difference I see. There are some companies that are really good with involving people early, you know, instead of having three people in the ivory tower deciding everything and then starting to roll it out.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And then at the very last minute, when it comes to execution, that's when they go, hey, like, Tom, Dick and Harry, like, why don't you need to do this differently now? So go ahead and do it differently and change your workflows. That's usually not received very well. And on the other side of that, I see companies involving employees early, like at the formation stage.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And even if you can decide the strategy and what the change is going to be, let's say you're going to have all renewable energy by 2030. Okay, that's your plan. But then how do you start involving people in the thinking, in the formation, in the how-to, in shaping the transformation? And I see companies are really successful, have involved more people earlier.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And there's a study from McKinsey on this as well, where most organizations involve and engage on average 2% of their organization. McKinsey argues that's equivalent to around a 20% success rate of change and transformation initiatives. Whereas if you have just 7% engaged, that's already 50% success rate.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So really, you only really need 7% of your organization to be fully engaged for you to have a 50-50 chance of success. And then if you start climbing up to 30%, having 30% of your organization engaged, that's when you get... realistic success rates up to 80, 85%.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So it's not about having a hundred percent on board, but it's about how can you have more than just the ivory tower people involved and getting people involved very early. So that's one big difference I see. Then the other one would be how much effort they put into the with them. So what's in it for me, the language and the words that they use with different audiences.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
Do you go to a factory floor, for example, with very formal headquarter corporate language? That's usually not flying very well. Or do you actually meet people where they are? So the amount of effort that they put in to like, Target the different audiences, understanding their needs, using the words, the language that they use, and speaking their language both literally and metaphorically.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
That's another big difference. So you like everything from vocabulary and words used. And then I think almost the biggest one is actually the ego and fear of the leaders. It's almost a direct correlation between the level of, or inverse correlation, I should say, with the ego of the CEO and the success of transformation.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And the higher the ego of the CEO is, the lower the success of your transformation. I've seen this in multiple companies and heard about it as well from change leaders that I talk to every day. And it's always the high ego, high fear type of leader that makes transformation very difficult. Because usually what that means, right?
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
It's not the ego in itself that is a challenge, but the ego means that usually they are less open to feedback. They take things more personally and any negative feedback or information, they take it very personally. They think it's all about them.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So high ego and high fear in leaders is usually a very bad combination because it stifles any and all conversation and feedback that you can have around it. And that is what creates these top down, do as I say, and if you say anything, I'm going to punish you or I get very scared or I take it personally.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
And that kind of approach in leaders is just not beneficial at all for a transformation type of environment. So that might have worked in the old days where you needed a leader to just tell people what to do and then they go execute it. But in 2024 and beyond, it's not going to be that type of leadership that succeeds.
Chief Change Officer
#78 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part Two
So that's another reason I see companies fail is when senior leaders have that high ego or very sensitive to feedback or don't even want to hear any feedback at all or not interested in what people think on the ground. That's another big challenge. So those are some differences that I've seen, and both of these hold true both across Asia and the US.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So that's who I am and that's how I see myself. So if everything was taken away from me tomorrow, I would still be, I'm a resilient person with good intentions who will always learn and work hard. And that's who Nelly Wartoff is. It's not the CEO of Tiger Hall or this and that. So that's another big piece of resilience that I think is incredibly important.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So we're solving the problem that large enterprises have in engaging and getting buy-in from their employees during large transformations. So think of it like this, like a big enterprise is going through a culture transformation or merger or acquisition or technology implementation, like any kind of big change that is affecting a large part of the company.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
Then what they do today tends to be they go out. So after the strategy and planning side of things, they go out and they are trying to activate this across the organization, right? What do they do? They would send mass emails. So they maybe send a couple of emails a day bombarding people. They would put up SharePoint site number 50,000.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
They will put something on the intranet that nobody goes to look at. They will put something in the LMS platform and then the CEO suddenly talks about it in the town hall and people have no clue what he's talking about or she's talking about. And it's all over the place. It's very messy. It's very difficult for employees to follow and make sense of.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So the small group that has done this strategy and planning, they are like, why aren't people just getting it? Why aren't they just executing? Why don't they just get this transformation done, right? Whereas the people on the ground are like, I don't know what this transformation is about and why should I care and what's in it for me and why should I do it?
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So there is this huge disconnect between... Large enterprises say change, transformation, the people that are trying to make this transformation happen, right? And then the thousands and thousands of people on the ground. So instead of having that disjointed experience fragmented all over the place, what Tigerhole does is it allows you to create content, first of all, in very engaging formats.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So let's say you have a PDF, a seven-page PDF. No one is going to read that. You can upload that and it turns into a podcast. And it turns into a podcast in the local language of the person who's listening to it. So instead of having American HQ sending out those English PDF documents, suddenly you have a podcast in Cantonese or Bengali or French or any language that you want to listen to, right?
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So it allows for breaking through the noise instead of having all of these PDFs and emails and mass communication that people don't really read. And then you can send that communication, engagement, capability building, training, all of it through very targeted audiences. So you can be very specific around who you target with what message.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
It's a lot of audience segmentation, so people only get what they are supposed to receive. So there's not this one size fits none kind of approach where you send the same thing to everyone. And then it's integrated where they work. So you would get it directly in your workflow. You don't need to go to the intranet or LMS or all over the place.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
You just have it where you already work, like in Microsoft Teams. And then you can give your feedback. And this is the most important part, that you have your voice heard as an employee and the change leader can then get feedback from the ground. So they can actually get feedback on how is this change received? What are people thinking? What is the input? What's going well? What's not going well?
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
Because it's really hard as a change leader to have that visibility across so many layers and geographies and the complexity that large organizations present, right? So this way you can get that two-way feedback loop from all over the organization. And then the last piece is you have data. So you have really good analytics and data on all of these things. So you see exactly what's happening.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
Are people reacting to it? What do they think? What is their feedback? Who is consuming it? Who isn't consuming it? What is the sentiment analysis of all of these different groups? So as a change leader, you don't have to fly blind where it's like you send emails out and then 7% open it and you don't know where the rest went.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And instead of having that, you can have all of these analytics and data and insights. So it allows you to get much better with strategy. It can be much more agile and adjust your strategy as you're going through the transformation, which helps to increase the speed of execution and retaining top talent is a big one. And also ensuring that you catch those problems early.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So before the big problems become even bigger, you can actually catch them and address them early on. So that's what Tiger Hall helps change leaders with.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
A tech platform. Yeah, correct. It's a software platform. And then we also do a bit of advisory around like communication strategies, audience segmentation, targeting and those things. But it's 80-85% software and the platform is what people are buying. What triggered you to start this company in the very first place? I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
Absolutely. Yes, I grew up in Sweden in a small village in southern Sweden. I usually say more cows than people. It's hard to describe that small town. And I wanted to get out as quickly as I could for professional reasons and cultural reasons. And I decided to move to Asia.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
On my 18th birthday, I went to singapore.com, booked a one-way flight, packed everything I had in an ice hockey trunk and moved across. And I've been very obsessed with Asia since a very young age. I started studying English when I was around 11, 12 years old. I thought the education system was way too slow in how it taught English. It was like, Thomas is one pear, Mark is one apple.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And I was like, I want to work in this language. I need to pick it up quicker. So I started reading more international media. And that's when I discovered there's a whole continent out there called Asia. And there is China and India and Japan. And I was just like so fascinated.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So I did every single school project on Asia and Singapore and Hong Kong, where you are, and just was super, super fascinated by this part of the world. So I decided when I was about 14, 15, that I want to live in the capital of Asia. And that's when I decided it's probably Singapore. And that's why I moved to Singapore when I was 18. So I landed in Singapore.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
Before that, back in Sweden, I started working very early. I started McDonald's when I was 14. Before that, I was supporting stroke patients with their physical exercise. I've been working since around age 12 and continued that throughout my time in Sweden and in Singapore, and then spent a bit of time in London, South Korea.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
I was in headhunting for a good part of my corporate career and thereafter started a couple of companies, which ended up being Tiger Hall, which is the business that I'm running now. And that is what ultimately took me to LA. So that's a very quick, brief overview and happy to dive into any of those details that you might find more interesting. Would you call yourself adventurous?
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
I think a risk taker, like risk addicted or excitement addicted. Yeah, I need to have constantly new things happening. I'm not very good with standard, just daily routines. That's not the kind of person I am. I need adventure and I need risk taking. I think that's a big part of my personality.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
I agree with that. I think the comfort zone is the most boring because nothing ever happens in the comfort zone. So you always need to be outside of your comfort zone for things to progress. When I read a good quote on this, it was just this week, earlier this week on LinkedIn, I think, there was someone that said, A life of leisure is hell and a life of adventure and purpose is heaven.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
But the problem is that since we're children, we're taught that it should be the other way around. That we should aim for leisure and aim for free time and aim for rest. But actually, that's not the purpose of life. Sure, you need rest from time to time, but it's not the purpose of life to just be lying on your couch and scrolling TikTok, right?
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
A life of purpose and adventure, that's really what is heaven. unless sure is not.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
Yeah, so I spent a little over four years, four and a half years at Michael Page, which is a great recruitment consulting firm. And I loved, absolutely loved my time there. And the reason I went into recruitment was that when I started working back in Sweden at McDonald's when I was 14.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
I learned, and this is why I always talk about McDonald's being the most transformative experience for me, because at McDonald's, I learned my professional addictions, if you will, or like my professional passions and what I love doing professionally. Those are three factors that has since McDonald's actually been in all my jobs of professional endeavors. So the first one is the fast pace.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And always having a high pace. Things are happening quickly, changing quickly. It's high adrenaline, high tempo. The second one is commercial. The rush that I get from commercial endeavors, whether it's selling cheeseburgers or closing large enterprise deals or anything that is commercial.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
I love the, I almost see like revenue growth as like a gamification or like gaining points in a game type of thing. So I love the commercial side of it. And then the third one is leadership, the human aspect and being able to lead and coach and grow people and orchestrate resources and get people together and have them work together as a team. So leadership was the third one.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So throughout my entire professional life, that has been a thread because that's what I realized at McDonald's, that I love this high tempo. I love the commercial thrill and I love leadership and leading others. So that's why I then went into recruitment.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And the fourth side, I would say, which wasn't as big in McDonald's, but that became very big at Michael Page, was the independence and how much I love running my own business and being in charge of my own destiny and driving my own results and having my own P&L and team and so on. So that's really what drove me to do recruitment and be in Michael Page.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And when I came in, I was obviously very low at the leaderboard, right? And I was like, I want to be number one. I want to win. I want to be the top biller, being competitive. And obviously the only thing I could do differently from the others, much more years of experience and network and skill sets. were that I could work harder.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So I started implementing my 7-11 shift, which means be at the office at 7 a.m. in the morning and don't leave before 11 p.m. at night. And this was obviously way before hybrid work and having a laptop at home and those kind of things. So that's what I did and became number one in the region the second year I was there. So that's something I really enjoyed as well.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And again, that fast pace and the high thrill of it. So yeah, overall, it was a great time. And it was also where I saw the needs that then led me to start Tiger Hall around knowledge sharing, communications, how change is driven, especially in large enterprises. And that was a very big source of inspiration for Tiger Hall.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So I think resilience is something that you can't really learn unless you're going through difficult times. And I think this is the both good and difficult part about resilience. But like having a bunch of workshops or trainings around resilience. Yeah, sure, you can teach mindset and you can teach like how to approach it when it comes.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
But there is no such thing as building resilience without going through hard times. And I think that's what people sometimes don't understand, that you have to go through hard times in order to build that muscle. It's like, how are you going to build any abs or biceps if you're not doing push-ups or sit-ups, right? You have to work the muscle to build it.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And that goes the same for resilience as well. So whenever I faced hardship or setbacks or difficult times, you either win or you build resilience or character, as I tend to think about it nowadays.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And when things don't go my way, when I fail, when things are going sideways, I'm like, right now I'm building character, I'm building resilience, I'm learning and having that mindset when you're going through difficult times. When you're not going through difficult times, it's really hard to build resilience. So be grateful for those difficult times and see what you can learn out of it.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
And also you need to see yourself coming out of it stronger, right? You need to go through those times and the difficult times to build resilience. So it really is like that muscle. So whenever you are going through hard times and difficult times, be grateful for it because that's actually the only thing that can help you build resilience. And then seeing yourself coming out of it, right?
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So when you see yourself like, I was okay, I managed to do that, I succeeded, I got through it. That's what builds resilience slash confidence. And that is what builds your self-assurance that you can actually get through this and it's nothing impossible. Then I think the second thing is, and I talk about this quite a lot, is identity and your self-talk and how you identify internally.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
So for me, for example, I identify as a resilient person. So when things happen and I need to be resilient, I'm like, this is who I am. This is what I was built for. And this is my identity to be resilient. So if you identify, if we take some examples, right, let's say you identify as the head of marketing at product X, like your title is your identity.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
That's going to be really hard if you lose that job because then you lose your identity. And same if you identify as CEO.
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
something else that can be taken away from you right then anything that can be taken away from you and it does then you lose your entire identity so base your identity on something that cannot be taken away from you that is there regardless of external circumstances regardless of your job title which company you work for what
Chief Change Officer
#275 Change Management Without the Migraine: Nellie Wartoft’s Global Fix — Part One
investors you have, who your friends are, like just everything that is external, take that out of your internal identification and just think about who are you without all of those things and then build your identity based on that. So for me, I've built it on resilience, on always learning, always trying my best, always working hard, always having good intentions.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So we're solving the problem that large enterprises have in engaging and getting buy-in from their employees during large transformations. So think of it like this, like a big enterprise is going through a culture transformation or merger or acquisition or technology implementation, like any kind of big change that is affecting a large part of the company.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
Then what they do today tends to be they go out. So after the strategy and planning side of things, they go out and they're trying to activate this across the organization, right? What do they do? They would send math emails. So they maybe send a couple of emails a day bombarding people. They would put up SharePoint site number 50,000.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
They would put something on the intranet that nobody goes to look at. They would put something in the... LMS platform and then the CEO suddenly talks about it in the town hall and people have no clue what he's talking about or she's talking about. And it's all over the place. It's very messy. It's very difficult for employees to follow and make sense of.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So the small group that has done this strategy and planning, they are like, why aren't people just getting it? Why aren't they just executing? Why don't they just get this transformation done, right? Whereas the people on the ground are like, I don't know what this transformation is about and why should I care and what's in it for me and why should I do it?
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So there is this huge disconnect between large enterprises, say change, transformation, the people that are trying to make this transformation happen, right? And then the thousands and thousands of people on the ground. So instead of having that disjointed experience fragmented all over the place, what Tigerhole does is it allows you to create content, first of all, in very engaging formats.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So let's say you have a PDF, a seven-page PDF. No one is going to read that. You can upload that and it turns into a podcast. And it turns into a podcast in the local language of the person who's listening to it. So instead of having American HQ sending out those English PDF documents, suddenly you have a podcast in Cantonese or Bengali or French or any language that you want to listen to, right?
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So it allows for breaking through the noise instead of having all of these PDFs and emails and mass communication that people don't really read. And then you can send that communication, engagement, capability building, training, all of it through very targeted audiences. So you can be very specific around who you target with what message. It's a lot of audience segmentation.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So people only get what they are supposed to receive. So there's not this one size fits none kind of approach where you send the same thing to everyone. And then it's integrated where they work. So you would get it directly in your workflow. You don't need to go to the intranet or LMS or all over the place. You just have it where you already work, like in Microsoft Teams.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And then you can give your feedback. And this is the most important part, that you have your voice heard as an employee and the change leader can then get feedback from the ground. So they can actually get feedback on how is this change received? What are people thinking? What is the input? What's going well? What's not going well?
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
Because it's really hard as a change leader to have that visibility across so many layers and geographies and the complexity that large organizations present, right? So this way you can get that two-way feedback loop from all over the organization. And then the last piece is you have data. So you have really good analytics and data on all of these things. So you see exactly what's happening.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
Are people reacting to it? What do they think? What is their feedback? Who is consuming it? Who isn't consuming it? What is the sentiment analysis of all of these different groups? So as a change leader, you don't have to fly blind where it's like you send emails out and then 7% open it and you don't know where the rest went.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And instead of having that, you can have all of these analytics and data and insights. So it allows you to get much better with strategy. It can be much more agile and adjust your strategy as you're going through the transformation, which helps to increase the speed of execution and retaining top talent is a big one. And also ensuring that you catch those problems early.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So before the big problems become even bigger, you can actually catch them and address them early on. So that's what Tiger Hall helps change leaders with.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
A tech platform, yeah, correct. It's a software platform. And then we also do a bit of advisory around communication strategies, audience segmentation, targeting and those things. But it's 80-85% software. And the platform is what people are buying. What triggered you to start this company in the very first place? I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
Absolutely. Yes, I grew up in Sweden, in a small village in southern Sweden. I usually say more cows than people. It's hard to describe that small town. And I wanted to get out as quickly as I could for professional reasons and cultural reasons. And I decided to move to Asia.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
On my 18th birthday, I went to singapore.com, booked a one-way flight, packed everything I had in an ice hockey trunk and moved across. And I've been very obsessed with Asia since a very young age. I started studying English when I was around 11, 12 years old. I thought the education system was way too slow in how it taught English. It was like, Thomas is one pear, Mark is one apple.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And I was like, I want to work in this language. I need to pick it up quicker. So I started reading more international media. And that's when I discovered there's a whole continent out there called Asia. And there is China and India and Japan. And I was just like so fascinated.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So I did every single school project on Asia and Singapore and Hong Kong, where you are, and just was super, super fascinated by this part of the world. So I decided when I was about 14, 15, that I want to live in the capital of Asia. And that's when I decided it's probably Singapore.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
and that's why i moved to singapore when i was 18. so landed in singapore before that back in sweden started working very early i was started mcdonald's when i was 14 before that i was supporting stroke patients with their physical exercise i've been working since around age 12 and continued that throughout my time in sweden and in singapore and then spent a bit of time in london south korea
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
was in headhunting for a good part of my corporate career and thereafter started a couple of companies and which ended up being tiger hall which is the business that i'm running now and that is what ultimately took me to la so that's a very quick brief overview and happy to dive into any of those details that you might find more interesting would you call yourself adventurous
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
I think a risk taker, like risk addicted or excitement addicted. Yeah, I need to have constantly new things happening. I'm not very good with standard, just daily routines. That's not the kind of person I am. I need adventure and I need risk taking. I think that's a big part of my personality.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
I agree with that. I think the comfort zone is the most boring because nothing ever happens in the comfort zone. So you always need to be outside of your comfort zone for things to progress. When I read a good quote on this, it was just this week, early this week on LinkedIn, I think, there was someone that said, A life of leisure is hell, and a life of adventure and purpose is heaven.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
But the problem is that since we're children, we're taught that it should be the other way around. That we should aim for leisure and aim for free time and aim for rest, but actually that's not the purpose of life. Sure, you need
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
rest from time to time but it's not the purpose of life to just be lying on your couch and scrolling tick tock right a life of a per for purpose and adventure that's really what is what is heaven unless sure is not you describe yourselves as adventurous rustica rose progressive someone who doesn't follow the standard playbook
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
Yeah, so I spent a little over four years, four and a half years at Michael Page, which is a great recruitment consulting firm. And I loved, absolutely loved my time there. And the reason I went into recruitment was that when I started working back in Sweden at McDonald's when I was 14.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
I learned, and this is why I always talk about McDonald's being the most transformative experience for me, because at McDonald's, I learned my professional addictions, if you will, or like my professional passions and what I love doing professionally. Those are three factors that has since McDonald's actually been in all my jobs of professional endeavors.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So the first one is the fast pace and always having a high pace. Things are happening quickly, changing quickly. It's high adrenaline, high tempo. The second one is commercial. The rush that I get from commercial endeavors, whether it's selling cheeseburgers or closing large enterprise deals or anything that is commercial.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
I love the, I almost see like revenue growth as like a gamification, like gaining points in a game type of thing. So I love the commercial side of it. And then the third one is leadership, the human aspect and being able to lead and coach and grow people and orchestrate resources and get people together and have them work together as a team. So leadership was the third one.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So throughout my entire professional life, that has been a thread because that's what I realized at McDonald's that I love this high tempo. I love the commercial thrill and I love leadership and leading others. So that's why I then went into recruitment.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And the fourth side, I would say, which wasn't as big in McDonald's, but that became very big at Michael Page, was the independence and how much I love running my own business and being in charge of my own destiny and driving my own results and having my own P&L and team and so on. So that's really what drove me to do recruitment and be in Michael Page.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And when I came in, I was obviously very low at the leaderboard, right? And I was like, I want to be number one. I want to win. I want to be the top biller, being competitive. And obviously the only thing I could do differently from the others, much more years of experience and network and skill sets. or that I could work harder.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So I started implementing my 7-11 shift, which means be at the office at 7 a.m. in the morning and don't leave before 11 p.m. at night. And this was obviously way before hybrid work and having a laptop at home and those kind of things. So that's what I did and became number one in the region the second year I was there. So that's something I really enjoyed as well.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And again, that fast pace and the high thrill of it. So yeah, overall, it was a great time. And it was also where I saw the needs that then led me to start Tiger Hall around knowledge sharing, communications, how change is driven, especially in large enterprises. And that was a very big source of inspiration for Tiger Hall.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So I think resilience is something that you can't really learn unless you're going through difficult times. And I think this is the both good and difficult part about resilience. But like having a bunch of workshops or trainings around resilience. Yeah, sure, you can teach mindset and you can teach like how to approach it when it comes.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
But there is no such thing as building resilience without going through hard times. And I think that's what people sometimes don't understand, that you have to go through hard times in order to build that muscle. It's like, how are you going to build any abs or biceps if you're not doing push-ups or sit-ups, right? You have to work the muscle to build it.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And that goes the same for resilience as well. So whenever I faced hardship or setbacks or difficult times, you either win or you build resilience or character, as I tend to think about it nowadays.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And when things don't go my way, when I fail, when things are going sideways, I'm like, right now I'm building character, I'm building resilience, I'm learning and having that mindset when you're going through difficult times. When you're not going through difficult times, it's really hard to build resilience. So be grateful for those difficult times and see what you can learn out of it.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
And also you need to see yourself coming out of it stronger, right? You need to go through those times and the difficult times to build resilience. So it really is like that muscle. So whenever you are going through hard times and difficult times, be grateful for it because that's actually the only thing that can help you build resilience. And then seeing yourself coming out of it, right?
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So when you see yourself like, I was okay, I managed to do that, I succeeded, I got through it. That's what builds resilience slash confidence. And that is what builds your self-assurance that you can actually get through this and it's nothing impossible. Then I think the second thing is, and I talk about this quite a lot, is identity and your self-talk and how you identify internally.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So for me, for example, I identify as a resilient person. So when things happen and I need to be resilient, I'm like, this is who I am, this is what I was built for, and this is my identity to be resilient. So if you identify, if we take some examples, right? Let's say you identify as the head of marketing at product X, like your title is your identity.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
That's going to be really hard if you lose that job because then you lose your identity. And same if you identify as... something else that can be taken away from you, right? Then anything that can be taken away from you, and it does, then you lose your entire identity.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So base your identity on something that cannot be taken away from you, that is there regardless of external circumstances, regardless of Your job title, which company you work for, what investors you have, who your friends are, like just everything that is external.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
Take that out of your internal identification and just think about who are you without all of those things and then build your identity based on that. So for me, I've built it on resilience, on always learning, always trying my best, always working hard, always having good intentions. So that's who I am and that's how I see myself.
Chief Change Officer
#77 Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One
So if everything was taken away from me tomorrow, I would still be, I'm a resilient person with good intentions who will always learn and work hard. And that's who Nelly Wartoft is. It's not the CEO of Tiger Hall or this and that. So that's another big piece of resilience that I think is incredibly important.