Podcast: Speaking of Quality
Season 6 Episode 7
Title: How to Navigate the Modern Workplace

Episode Transcript:

Maxine Cuffe 00:03 

You’re listening to “Speaking of Quality” with Hank Smith, a podcast by The Haverford Trust Company. On “Speaking of Quality,” Hank features authors, business leaders and wealth management experts who share stories from their careers and insights on topics that impact financial wellness. And now, here’s your host, Hank Smith. 

Hank Smith 00:24 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of “Speaking of Quality.” I’m your host, Hank Smith, Director and Head of Investment Strategy at The Haverford Trust Company. On this podcast, we explore topics ranging from leadership and economics to civic engagement and community building. Today, I’m joined by Anna Welsh. She’s a lecturer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a professional speaker focusing on workplace dynamics and soft skills, in particular for early career professionals. She’s also the owner of her own business, Anna Welsh Leadership, where she offers keynote speaking programs, leadership training and coaching. Welcome to Speaking of Quality, Anna. 

Ana Welsh 01:10 

Thank you so much for having me, Hank. 

Hank Smith 01:12 

Well, I think this is going to be an exciting 30 minutes or so, a lot to unpack and share with our listeners. But why don’t we just start and have you tell us a little bit about your background and the early part of your career. 

Ana Welsh 01:36 

Thank you again for having me, and thank you to all the listeners for joining. My name is Ana Welsh. My background is I helped build a large dermatology group practice. It was based out of New York City, called Schweiger Dermatology Group. Prior to that, I was a drug rep, and I called on all the dermatologists from Midtown East to Upper East Side and formed relationships with many of the physician-owners, one of which was Dr. Eric Schweiger. About a year after me calling in on him, he called me into his office and offered me a job. I had no idea what I was going to do. I just knew he wanted to grow. I love to work hard. I’m a risk taker, and I love to make money. So, I decided to take the risk and proceed, and I was there for 10 years. That job changed my life and taught me everything that helped me start my business today. I was the eleventh employee when I started. When I left, there was 1,200. We had just opened up the second office in Flatiron when I started, and at the end of my 10 years, there were 93 offices across four states, and I had no gray hairs when I started, and they started sprouting a few years in. I really faked it until I made it, cut my teeth there, worked extremely hard, failed tremendously. I once had an employee quit, no notice, because of me. I was a bulldog manager, one size fits all, and I learned quickly that was not the way to be. 

Hank Smith 03:02 

So, at this practice, you start out in operations, then you are in human resources, and then you were eventually named Vice President of Employee Engagement. Tell me, when I think about a dermatology practice, small or large, I don’t think there’s an employee who’s involved in employee engagement. So, share with us how that came about and what it entailed. 

Ana Welsh 03:35 

Sure. The first four years I was helping build the operations team call center integrations. We grew mostly through acquisition, and it was around 2016 that Dr. Eric Schweiger joined YPO and met Verne Harnish and learned about scaling up. Also met John Ratliff of align5, and they were so great at illustrating the importance of culture and the employee experience, so much so that after I turned it around and became a well-liked leader, they asked me to build the HR department from the ground up. But instead of calling it HR, they wanted to call it the Employee Experience Department. So, as VP of Employee Experience, I helped reduce turnover from 60% to 21% over the first two years. We won tremendous awards, had a great engagement and NPS score, and we did that through being disciplined around the scaling-up methodologies in particular, into the people part. We had core values that were not just words on the wall. We actually lived and breathed them. We had employee-recognition programs, daily shout-out emails that we sent out because our mission was to have happy employees. Those happy employees would treat our patients well, we’d have happy patients that treated our business well, and that was a beautiful cycle that we put into place in 2017. 

Hank Smith 05:01 

So, I want to go back a little bit further. Your career, if you want to call it that, actually didn’t start at being a detail salesman to the dermatology business. You’re actually a waitress, and you referenced going into a restaurant, and so you experienced that firsthand on the other side as being a service provider, and talk about the difference, a waitress, waiter, server, whatever you want to call that – but they are client-facing – the difference by having the skills and the attitudes that you have just started talking about – what that makes for the client experience. 

Ana Welsh 05:59 

For every listener at this point, if you can remember one thing from our podcast here today, it’s I firmly believe that every young adult, teenager, their rite of passage should be required by law that they should work in hospitality. I worked in restaurants from age 14 to 25. I paid my way cash through college. It took me seven years working at the Cheesecake Factory in Boca Raton, Florida, and Houston’s, also known as Hillstone Restaurant Group. The latter had zero marketing dollars in their P&L. Their marketing was the service and the quality of food. What I learned being a waitress, I still use to this day. It taught me patience. It taught me to multitask. It taught me to think on my feet, to interact IRL, the way our kids say, in real life. It literally taught me everything that I know that has genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, I firmly believe, set me up for my career success that I’ve had. When you learn to interact with different personalities, knowing that you need to make money off of whether or not they like you, right? That will teach you something that you’ll never be able to learn in any college or any job function. So, I firmly pay a lot, I firmly pay a lot of credit to my experience there. 

Hank Smith 07:32 

So, you mentioned you, kind of figuratively speaking, jumped into the pool and took this risk joining the dermatology group up in New York City, but then you jumped into a much deeper pool with a much bigger risk when you decided to go off on your own, be an entrepreneur, start your own business. What motivated you? What told you the time was right and I can do this? 

Ana Welsh 08:10 

What motivated me was freedom of time and money. The timing was my kids were a bit older. I now have a six and a nine-year-old, and I was able to lift off of the heavy multitasking of toddlerhood life. And why is because I learned through failure. I am a Brazilian immigrant. I did not come from professional parents. They worked extremely hard. The best thing that they did for me is bring me to America to give me a better life. And I’ve been intrinsically motivated to want to continue to next-level myself any chance that I get. And I had a very hard time, so I didn’t have many professional resources or tools or network to help me understand how to play the game. So, I would work lunch shifts at Houston’s in Boca because that’s where I would have all the suits come in. And it was one gentleman with a suit that gave me my big break for my first internship. I did five internships. I worked tremendously in public relations and then in sales and dermatology. I read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People at age 26, multiple years too late, and I had to learn through failure. So why I do what I do today, and I genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, with all the humility in the world, believe that this is my life’s calling, is to help the younger generation not have such rough speed bumps along the way because there are so many unwritten rules to work dynamics. Soft skills is a great, but generic, term. I want to teach them the exact behaviors, the exact sound bites, the exact way to look at things, to make sure that they’re focusing on what’s in their control, that they’re building that network and relationships, and become indispensable where opportunities chase them versus the other way around. And they’re that person that everyone loves to work with because we all know what it’s like to work with people we can’t stand. 

Hank Smith 10:17 

You’ve coined a phrase, “the indispensability principle,” and what it means to be an indispensable worker. So, unpack that for us, please. 

Ana Welsh 10:34 

So, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, NACE, since 2019, has been putting out surveys to employers, asking them what are the top skill sets that they are seeking out of new grads and early-career professionals. And then they also survey those same employers to understand where do the proficiency levels lie. Since 2019 to 2025, the skills that have the highest gaps are critical thinking, which I say is a formal way of saying common sense, communication and professionalism. And so, when I teach early-career college students, interns, high-school students, I tell them, these are the three main areas that you need to sharpen your saw on. Professionalism, boundaries. I tell them and I say, please don’t be upset with me, but TikTok is lying to you. Do not bring your whole entire self to work the way that I am in South Florida with my girlfriends and the way I am with my in-laws and the way I am here with you today is still me, innately, authentically – I’m using air quotes for the listeners – but I’m going to adjust my approach based on the environment. I’m going to take responsibility for the energy that I contribute to the environment. That’s adaptability, that’s reading the room, that’s professionalism, and I trademark the term “signature self.” Don’t bring your whole entire self to works that’s unfiltered and has a high risk of your approach not landing well; bring your signature self, instead. Going into indispensability, this is not about being a people pleaser. This is not about being the loudest or the smartest person in the room. This is someone that people love to work with and teams cannot succeed without. They know how to master managing themselves. You can self-regulate, you can have a yellow-light moment, just slow down and proceed. I tell all the students to remember the Q-tip acronym. Quit taking it personal. Most people are not out to get you. The more that you can self-regulate, know how to talk to yourself in your head, show up as your workplace personas, your signature self, that’s the first pillar. Second is managing work. AI is here; it’s not coming. And soon enough, it’s going to go from an efficiency tool to innovation. But you know what’s really going to be future-proofing and causing success is the human element, the critical thinking, the common sense. In history and life, the pendulum has always swung far and then come back. Cigarettes, alcohol, social media, AI. I predict, by 2030, it’s going to be the big human comeback. We’re all sick of fake stuff, the AI slop. So, in terms of managing work, it’s twofold. Brain first, AI second. How can I add a human element to this? How can I think deeper? And how can AI make this even better? And then the third pillar of indispensability, the core leadership concept, is managing relationships. It’s the X factor. Your network is your net worth, as we all know. But managing relationships, in order to build trust, respect and connection, you have to be an anti-avoider. We avoid hard things. We avoid things that make us uncomfortable, tough feedback. When you do that hard thing first and have that kindly, honest conversation, that’s how you drive depth and relationships for years and years to come. 

Hank Smith 14:15 

So, you talk and train about communicating across generations. Isn’t it as simple as the word communicate? 

Ana Welsh 14:30 

Oh, I wish it was. I wish it was that simple. Communication is another broad term that needs further explanation. First and foremost, all the problems and the victories in the world all boil down to communication as a failure point or as the success lever. Younger folks communicate completely different than senior leaders. They communicate in headlines. Senior leaders communicate in context. Younger folks are thinking, why is this taking so long? Why is this so complicated? When senior leaders are thinking, it’s not that simple, slow down. The way that even the language – I teach at Wharton. I teach sophomores. I teach Wharton sophomores their required leadership class, Business Communication for Impact, and I learned all the Gen-Z lingo. I tell them that I want to be young at heart, so teach me all of your lingo. Communication, tactically, is very different from the Baby Boomer, Gen X to the Gen Z, but also, conceptually, is very different as well. And once again, you eliminate that assumption bias, and you start to see from a different point of view, then you can meet them where they are. Then you can speak their language. I had a CFO that I worked with. Him and I, when we first started working together, we could not stand each other. Not only were we different generations, but we were wired completely different. I was the extrovert, social butterfly, culture queen, feelings, engagement. And he was the analytical, black and white, numbers person. And it wasn’t until we underwent a DISC Profile workshop that we had to separate into the four colors of where we were. And we had to learn how to interact and communicate with one another. The challenge was, okay, yellow, I in DISC, you have to interact with someone blue, the C, and your goal is to ask them to produce a report for you by Friday end of day. How do you ask? And I raised my hand. I’m like, pick me. I got this. I’m in front of the yellows as a cheerleader of the yellow group. I’m like, can you please do this report for us? It would mean so much to me and would help me with my, and they’re like, wrong. All you need to say is, can you produce this report by Friday at 4:00 PM. We were speaking English, but we were speaking in a different language. So, communication is much more complex, and it’s being curious to understand what’s going to be effective and land well and keep that ball moving towards the first down and end zone. 

Hank Smith 17:08 

So, one thing related to this topic that, at Haverford, that I think we do a pretty good job. We certainly stress it with all of our client relationship managers that get to know not just the clients, other advisors, accountants, lawyers, get to know their children and, in some cases, their grandchildren. And, quite often, they have very, very different perspectives, very different views about money, on how things should be done, how things should be communicated. But again, you’re not going to find that out unless you actually engage. And only then will you learn and be better able to communicate. 

Ana Welsh 18:08 

I could not agree with you more. I always say, yes, there’s the ABCs of selling, always be closing. But to get to that close, you have to always be curious. And, many times, individuals think it’s transactional. It’s just to that one, it’s linear to that one person. But as you know, Hank, I think it was Dale Carnegie’s quote, the sweetest sound in the world is one’s own name. And you know what I say to that? And especially when I’m training customer service, sales, and that the sweetest sound is knowing the person’s child’s name. If you talk, and you remember my kids’ names, Dylan and Monroe, my heart will explode and burst with joy. So be curious about them. Go deep and understand their lives. That’s how you’re going to drive that click, that deep connection, and that’s how you’re going to have generations of clients to come. 

Hank Smith 19:09 

So, you speak to leadership and leadership training and coaching. Are leaders, do they have an innate skill, or is it something they can truly be coached? And furthermore, there are a lot of different styles of leadership. There is no one formula. And how do you address that? 

Ana Welsh 19:39 

Do they have an innate skill? Potentially. Can they be coached? Possibly. There are different leadership styles. You should be authentic to that, but it’s most important that you’re effective. People leave jobs. They don’t leave the company, they leave their managers, and most really strong, high-performing, individual contributors, the next logical step in their promotion is great news. You’re going to make more money, and you’re going to be a manager. And here are two or three humans that you have to manage. And they’re expected to learn how to manage from thin air just because they’re good at their job as individual contributors. Some of the highest performers are best as individual contributors in my opinion. And some of the average individual contributors are great leaders and managers. And so, it really does depend on the situation, the context, the person. I do believe it can be trained. You can lead a horse to water. You can’t make it drink, but an underutilized resource and tool that feels like a nice-to-have for companies is training and coaching, especially teaching them how to think differently. 

Hank Smith 20:56 

Well, Ana, this could be an hour-and-a-half podcast given I think we’ve only barely –  

Ana Welsh 21:04 

We’re having too much fun. 

Hank Smith 21:06 

– barely opened the box of stories, and we’re going to have to have you back in the future because I’m sure there are so many more, and this has been so engaging and educational. 

Ana Welsh 21:20 

And I want to encourage the listeners to reach out to me if they have any more questions or if they want to share what they’re working on. We will be doing an event together, Haverford Trust, in the Speaker Series for Women in June, where I’ll share even more stories, in real life, with the Haverford Trust community. But this was an absolute joy, and I had so much fun talking with you, Hank. 

Hank Smith 21:45 

Again, thank you for joining this podcast, “Speaking of Quality.” It’s been a wonderful discussion, and we’ve learned so much about a variety of subjects and important subjects. I look forward to you continuing the conversation at our next Speaker Series for Women in the June event that you just mentioned, where you’ll be sharing many more strategies for standing out and succeeding in today’s workplace. To our listeners, if you do not currently receive information about Haverford Speaker Series for Women and would like an invitation to the June event, please email podcast@haverfordquality.com for more information. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of “Speaking of Quality.” Our next episode will be released shortly. In the meantime, please send suggestions or questions for me or the Haverford Trust team to podcast@haverfordquality.com. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review and share this podcast. Until next time, I’m Hank Smith. Stay bullish. 

Maxine Cuffe 22:56 

Thank you for listening to this episode of “Speaking of Quality” with Hank Smith. To hear future episodes of “Speaking of Quality,” please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about The Haverford Trust Company, please visit https://haverfordquality.com/. This podcast is provided as general commentary and market overview, and should not be relied upon as research, a forecast or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt an investment strategy. Any opinions expressed are as of the date this podcast was recorded and may change at any time and are the opinions of that commentator, not Haverford. Any opinion or information provided are believed by Haverford to be reliable at the time of this podcast’s recording but are not necessarily all-inclusive or guaranteed for accuracy. Before making any financial decisions, please consult with an investment professional.