Transformational Leadership and Culture at Burning Man and Beyond
Show notes
In this episode, join the insightful discussion with Kat Steinmetz as she delves into fostering human connection, leadership transformation, and organizational growth. Kat shares her experiences from her tenure at Burning Man in an HR and people leadership role, discussing the unique philosophy and structure that makes the event transformative. Learn about her lessons on how vulnerability and empowerment play crucial roles in leadership.
Kat also reveals how she transitioned these learnings into rapidly growing companies like Stitch Fix and Box, and finally to her unexpected yet impactful journey into venture capitalism with Initialized Capital. Gain insights on building a resilient, open, and human-centric corporate culture and discover how companies can serve a greater purpose in society beyond profits.
Timecodes
01:01 Welcome Kat: A Journey into Burning Man
01:11 Burning Man Explained: A Unique Cultural Phenomenon
01:37 Behind the Scenes: HR Leadership at Burning Man
06:30 The Transition to Non-Profit: Challenges and Triumphs
09:54 Growth and Legacy: Lessons from Burning Man
11:43 Applying Burning Man Lessons to Corporate Culture
17:02 Innovative Leadership Programs
19:41 Creating a Feedback Culture
20:17 Balancing Structure and Freedom
21:02 The Power of Simplicity and Principles
22:41 Leadership and Human Skills
25:01 Transition to Investment
31:35 The Role of Companies in Society
35:14 Final Thoughts and Reflections
___________________________
Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matchr/
Get in touch with us: https://www.matchr.io/who-we-are/contact/
___________________________
Connect with Kat Steinmetz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsteinmetz/
Connect with Adriaan Kolff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaankolff/
___________________________
RSS feed: https://media.rss.com/leaders-in-talent/feed.xml
Searching for Global Talent?
Expand your reach with Matchr’s expertise, connecting you with top-tier talent from around the globe.
Transcription
[00:01:01] Adriaan: Welcome, Kat! Thank you so much for being here!
[00:01:04] Kat: Thank you for having me. Super honored. Great to be here with you.
[00:01:09] Adriaan: Kat, let’s jump right in. One thing that we immediately connected on when we met a couple of months ago is that we’re both big Burners. And when I say Burners, the people who went to Burning Man know what I’m talking about, but for those who don’t, we’re talking about Burning Man, one of the most iconic and largest festivals in the world that happens every year in Nevada.
[00:01:30] Adriaan: Yeah. Currently, 75,000 people come together for a week to be in the desert. But where I was an attendee, you actually worked in an HR and people leadership role from 2005 to 2015. I want to dive right into that experience.
[00:01:51] Adriaan: Probably 50 percent of our audience will know what Burning Man is, and 50 percent will not. Can you, in a few sentences, explain what Burning Man is to give a little context as to why this was such a special role? Then, I’d love to hear a little more about the transition from entering Burning Man in 2005 to what the organization looked like in 2015.
[00:02:13] Kat: Yes, absolutely. It is notoriously infamously hard to explain. But I would say that Burning Man is generally known as a counterculture event or gathering—not a festival. A lot of people think about it that way, but it’s not considered that by the founders and the people who work there.
[00:02:31] Kat: One of the main things is that it’s a beautiful place for incredible art that you will see nowhere else. A lot of funds are put into that art, with many grants given. And really, what differentiates it from a festival is the very specific but simple structure: how the city is laid out, the 10 principles that guide it, and the acculturation of people in the community towards that.
[00:03:04] Kat: It’s not your typical festival where there are vendors, an agenda, a schedule laid out, and all the music acts are hired, and you just come and consume. At Burning Man, everyone is a participant. You come there, and you have to participate in some way—or at least you’re expected to.
[00:03:23] Kat: Everything that is built there needs to be interactive. Every camp, every art piece, everything about it needs to have participation as part of what’s happening. And the participants are the ones who build the whole thing, really. Other than the man in the center, the center camp, and the streets that are laid out, the rest is built by the people who come, including the temple, all of the art, all of the camps, and all of the musicians. Basically, everyone—huge, especially in the electronic world, but many other big artists—comes to play there, and they’re mostly doing it for free or for very little.
[00:03:56] Kat: And everyone who comes in and out of Burning Man is treated the same. You have to have a ticket, and you have to go in and out the exact same door, whether you’re a prince from the Middle East, Prince the musician, or P. Diddy, who’s been there. Whoever you are, you have to go in and out the same door, and you still have to do everything there.
[00:04:16] Kat: It really has this incredible freedom within that structure to make it what you want it to be. At the same time, it’s definitely ruled by law enforcement. In fact, there are four different ones: two counties, a federal bureau, and the tribe. I dealt with all of them in my job.
[00:04:34] Ad: Are you facing market volatility, need to hire quickly, or have a team that sits idle? Meet Matchr, your flexible recruitment and sourcing partner. Scale your recruitment capacity up or down without compromising on quality. Trusted by Booking.com, Miro, Heineken, Grammarly, and Deel, Matchr is the RPO disruptor making waves in Europe and the US. For scale-ups and corporates, Matchr covers engineering, go-to-market, and G&A roles. Visit matchr.io to see how we can support you. That’s M-A-T-C-H-R dot I-O.
[00:05:11] Adriaan: Yeah, I can only imagine.
[00:05:13] Adriaan: So, that’s Burning Man, right? You were there in 2005, left after 10 years in 2015, seeing phenomenal growth. Tell me a little bit more about that journey, especially on the people side and what you experienced with something as iconic and well-known as Burning Man.
[00:05:34] Kat: Yeah. When I came in 2005, it was, I want to say, about 28,000 people who attended the event. And the staff at that time was maybe 30 people—maybe not full-time. There were many volunteers, as always, and many temporary staff that came on to build the city and run it. So when I showed up, there was not a lot of structure. There were a couple of accountants, an office person who sat at the front, a software team that was running the website and tickets, and some various other leaders and the six founders. That was it.
[00:05:57] Kat: So when I came in as an HR consultant, I ended up doing a lot of just infrastructure systems, human systems, org design, and hiring. I hired 75 percent of the organization until I left in 2015, probably more. Building out the entities under the umbrella, helping them become a nonprofit—that was a huge part of why I ended up there for 10 years. About halfway through, maybe a little bit less, there was a lot of push by the community and the senior staff for us to become a nonprofit. At that point, they were still an LLC but run like a nonprofit. There was a lot of resistance for many reasons, particularly from the founders, to do that. Until Larry became sick, and that was around 2008.
[00:06:58] Kat: Yes, Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, who founded it in 1986 on Baker Beach and later moved it to the playa of Nevada with the Cacophony Society in the early 90s. So, yeah, he got sick, and it really helped propel the idea that we have this legacy, his legacy, right? And the community does too. We wanted to keep it intact. We didn’t want it to become corporate or get sold off somehow. The urgency increased, and thankfully, Larry got healthy again.
[00:07:33] Kat: We ended up becoming a nonprofit, but that was a huge undertaking. So the whole last half of my years there was really about helping to propel that and then bringing the whole process to life. That included everything it took: org design, infrastructure systems, hiring programs, policies—everything you can imagine to help that run, and all the entities under the Burning Man Project.
[00:07:59] Kat: The event is one of those things. But there’s also Fly Ranch now, which all happened during the time I was there. The buying of it took a long time, the figuring out of what that was going to be, and putting the team in place that was going to fulfill how that’s going. And it’s still being built. Burning Man Arts, which was Black Rock Arts Foundation before. Black Rock Solar was one of the things. It’s now no longer, but that popped out of Green Man 2007 when everything was about how we’re greening things. That’s very Burning Man—something popped out, and somebody took off. Burners Without Borders was another one. Really helping to hold the infrastructure of all those things was a lot of the work. So, a lot of change management.
[00:08:38] Adriaan: Yes. So, 28,000 people was the size of the festival. The organization was 30 people in 2015. Roughly, how many people were attending?
[00:08:50] Kat: Like you said, 75,000, with staff, right? The stipulations have continued to stay at 80,000 because there’s just no way to really get any more people in and out of there. Believe me, we’ve had a million meetings about how we could do that—build a train, do this or that. There’s a track there. What could we do? It’s just a tiny road in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, so it’s really hard to say how else you would do that. So yes, up to 80,000 with all the staff. And by the time I left, the full-time staff was probably about 130, maybe 140 full-time. But the temporary staff, the people who come back every year—it’s not what you would think of as temp staff. These are people who stay in the community the whole time—probably about a thousand. So, up to a thousand of those people who come to build the city, run all of the organizations like a city. And also, all the volunteers—so many come out there.
[00:09:54] Adriaan: So for you, this has been phenomenal growth from an organizational perspective but also phenomenal growth in your career. Looking back, can you distill some of the lessons that you’ve learned that now make you successful in your current work and the roles you’ve had after?
[00:10:11] Kat: Yes. Lots of things, lots of lessons learned. When I left, I was ready to say, “Okay, I feel like I came here, I did what I came here to do. They’re this nonprofit now, they have a good org design, they generally have the right people, and they’re going in the right direction with where they need to go as a culture.” I really felt like, “What do I want to do with that? What happened from that?”
[00:10:29] Kat: When Larry did pass away later, one of the things that I thought was really interesting—and one of the reasons I left—was that there was an air of “we’re the coolest, we have nothing to learn, everyone has things to learn from us, but we don’t have anything to learn.” That was the feeling I had from the staff, and that’s just very against my style. I’m very much a lifelong learner; everything is about how I can learn, grow, and be humbled by that. So when Larry died, I felt like his gift was that there was a humbling for people. There was a heart cracking open, a warmth in the sadness, the tenderness, the heartbreak of him dying. I felt like it really got people to a place where they could be more human. They could understand what they had to grow and learn, and I was so happy for the organization—not for Larry to be gone, but for the beautiful gift that he allowed in a way through how that all unfolded.
[00:11:31] Kat: I really felt that, and I think it helped them get through COVID. It helped them continue to be the amazing organization, the influential organization, as well as the event that it is. When I left, I was like, “How can I take what I learned there and bring that to other companies?” When I went to Stitch Fix and then Box right after Burning Man, my thought was, “I can, with others, create people—the container and the ability for people to have peak experiences but in their careers.” Because believe me, I’ve seen and had my own, as I’m sure you have. Anyone who’s ever been to Burning Man, you’ve had a peak. I met my wife at Burning Man. Burning Man is an accelerator of either exploding people or bringing them together, right? That’s what it is—it’s a permission machine and an accelerator. And I thought, “How can we take that and bring that to a company, to work, to organizations?” I was very focused on doing that.
[00:12:31] Kat: When I joined Stitch Fix, it was a wonderful open canvas in that way. I was an early employee, and it was a skyrocket to IPO. The person I worked under who hired me, Margo, she really wanted the creativity and innovation. That’s what she wanted, and she took a chance on me. I was coming from a really weird, crazy organization, which didn’t have a lot of strategy or business-type things that we did, right? So, she really erred on that side, and I felt a lot of ability to start from this blank canvas of “how do we do that?”
[00:13:06] Kat: And we did, with the way we built the culture, how we built out the leadership programs there, how we had people involved. One of the things I learned was that structure is really healthy for humans when it’s just right. When it’s too much, it’s rigid and micromanaging, and we all know how that feels—it doesn’t feel good. But when it’s not enough, it’s chaos, and that’s also terrible, right? Nobody’s clear, everybody’s overlapping work, and people don’t understand what they’re there for. So, each way is not good.
[00:13:42] Kat: What I learned at the Burning Man event is that the structure was so freeing for people, right? It’s exactly the same every year. The man is where it is, the streets are laid out how they are, the center camp is where it is, the temple is where it is, and everything happens. The man burns on Saturday, right? You can count on that. And then, nothing else is set. So, you have all this freedom to decide how you’re going to make your life for the next week, however you want to do that. That’s terrifying for a lot of people—I have seen people literally have complete breakdowns because they don’t know what to do with that freedom. At the same time, because they can count on the 10 principles, the structure of how it’s run, they can go, “Okay, I know how to walk about here. I know how I can be here, and I can make something of that.” So, I have agency, I have this ability to do something, and at the same time, I can count on where the camps are, where the man is, and when it burns. And how I get in and out of this event.
[00:14:38] Adriaan: How did that translate into your next two roles at Stitch Fix and then at Box? I find that fascinating—how did you drive that?
[00:14:47] Kat: That’s where I thought, “Okay, this peak experience, we can make that happen. We can gently push people towards opening themselves up, towards having a vulnerable experience that is also empowering, towards connecting with humans in a whole new way, like taking what I saw on the playa as well as towards myself, right? A transformation.” So, building transformational leaders was a big focus, but also really helping everyone become a leader or have access to leadership. So, that idea of being able to have this peak experience and also the way we would teach things—the culture, the values—not through your typical way. We went about that in some very innovative and creative ways. That was really welcomed by this kind of blank canvas I had with both Margo, as well as Cat Lake and the management team at Stitch Fix. They were really down with that and had done a lot of their own personal development work.
[00:16:20] Kat: I think it really opened up the opportunity for the leadership on down to see that this is a permission slip to be a bigger person in how they’re doing things. So, that was one stream.
[00:16:49] Adriaan: But break that down for me. What does that look like? I’m inspired, but now going back to my company, what are some of the things that you did that I can use?
[00:17:02] Kat: One of them was something we called the leadership offsite. Every single employee went to that, regardless of their role or level, and they all went together into one group. Every level of employee, starting and onboarding, went to the leadership offsite within their first three weeks. We called that the immersion period, and we gave them three weeks to immerse in the culture. We had a whole plan for them, which included this leadership offsite, facilitated by actual leaders at Stitch Fix. It wasn’t me and my team; we were overseeing it and making sure it went well, but the leaders themselves were facilitating and bringing their full heart, their full vulnerability, and modeling that for people. And people were like, “Oh, okay, I’m being expected to do that.” That’s a whole other thing than just, “Oh, what’s the thing you have a charge with? Time management?”—like, who cares, right? We wouldn’t allow that. We would go, “No, actually, what’s under that? What’s the fear you have that’s happening there?” So, coaching, but really in a place where they could feel transformation in a day. They could come out at the end of that day and be like, “Whoa, I just had what we would call a rehire moment.” So, we created across every program we had rehire moments. Where are we rehiring people, even if they’re just being onboarded or they’ve been here three years? Where are they being rehired? We were always pushing ourselves to make sure that like, “I would have that if I were in this program.” I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it because that’s the kind of programs we were running. Leaders were that involved and that committed. So, it took off. Everyone did all of these programs, and we had no problem getting people to actually engage in them because they were meaningful. They felt the transformation and the realness of them, and they felt how they were becoming a more grown human by going to these programs. So, that’s a good example.
[00:18:47] Kat: Another one was our process for performance reviews, called Collect and Reflect. You yourself would go in and decide who your feedback partners were, checking with your manager too, right? Did they have any other ideas? But you would have your own live conversation with some tools that we provided and questions, where you and I would come in and say, “Hey, I want some feedback on this. How am I doing here? What about this value? How am I showing up?” We would have real conversations. We would teach in onboarding day how to give and receive great feedback, and we would hold you accountable to it. We would role play it, do it, and you would have to show up in that way all the time because that’s what was expected. Again, the whole ecosystem has to work—the leaders have to believe in it, they have to show up and do it, they have to model it, and you have to hold people accountable by showing up and having the right content. All of those things matter, but you can do it. Once that ecosystem is working, it works.
[00:20:14] Kat: Another example is this idea of structure, right? How can we provide just enough where people feel agency? They feel like they could be a leader because they have access to that for themselves, as well as anyone else, even if they’re just peers. How am I helping my peers by being a leader in my own life? So, we did a lot of things around self-development and growth, but also making things really clear for people. They know what their jobs are, they’re very clear about how promotions work, they’re very clear about how their compensation is, and it’s very equitable. All of those things needed to work together for that to be true. Those are just some of the ways we started to do that, but in this small period, I’ll go with that.
[00:21:02] Adriaan: One thing that I always experienced at Burning Man, and to your point, right? Very little structure, but everyone abides by the 10 principles.
[00:21:27] Adriaan: Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. But it is so hard—at least in my experience, having built multiple companies—to really get that ingrained in a company, even a 30-person company like we are now. How do 75,000 people, many of whom are there for the first time and have never interacted with anyone who is part of Burning Man, still follow those same cultural values? What have you seen there? Tell me a little bit more about that.
[00:21:43] Kat: Yeah, and I would say it goes back to that simplicity, right? It’s the simplicity of the ten principles. They’re not rules, they’re principles. So you want to live up to that and be accountable to that. It’s also something that people believe in very happily, sometimes too much, and they feel a lot of purpose around it. So, they already want to make sure this thing keeps staying alive, keeps doing well. Everyone can feel the magic that is happening there, right? But it’s this simple stuff of like, there is freedom, but there is still structure, right? We all have to be good citizens. So, how are you teaching citizenship? Even at my son’s school, they literally have a class a couple of times a week where they talk about how they’re good citizens to each other. How are they showing up for themselves, their school, each other, and the world? How do you teach that, and how are you as a leader showing up in that? That doesn’t mean you’re perfect—quite the opposite. Please don’t be that because that’s not human and it’s not real. So, how are you showing up in your humanness while still showing your team that you got this? Because that’s what a leader needs to do. You can’t be in the “Oh no, who has this?” Just like a kid can’t feel that from a parent or the roles start to change—”I need to be in charge here,” like a dog with a person, “Oh no, I’m in charge, this is not good.” So, you still need to be the one that has it, but you also need to be able to say, “I’m human too. Here’s where I messed up. Here’s where I’m having some sadness. Here’s where things might be hard. But here’s how I know we’re going to approach this. Here are the values I know we’re going to still be in. Here’s how we’re going to approach this thing that might be really hard. But I’m talking real to you, and I’m being a real human, and I expect the same from you.” So, it’s high integrity, high values in that way.
[00:23:34] Kat: To me, anyone I’ve ever hired—and I’ve hired a lot of people and built a lot of teams—I always err on the side of those skills. Of course, they need to have the skills for the job—that’s a table stake, you applied for the job. But otherwise, I overemphasize those so-called “soft skills” or emotional intelligence—I think they’re human skills, right? Can they be in self-awareness? Do they have personal responsibility for their behavior? Can they hold ambiguity and complexity? Can they hold emotions for themselves and others? Do they see that there’s a long-term vision, not just a reaction? Can they be curious? Can they assume the best of people? Can they understand how we can get through this? Those kinds of skills are what see companies and teams through hard stuff and also really good stuff. Think about the rocket ship when you’re growing— that is also really difficult, even though there’s a lot of amazingness in that. It’s busting at the seams, it’s pulling at people. Stitch Fix is a great example—it did that in a very short amount of time and did very well. What was going on there? A lot of it was this. We were allowed this agency to be human and do things in that way, and the leaders showed up that way too.
[00:25:01] Adriaan: After those phenomenal years as a leader in people teams, you made an interesting career move. You joined the investment team at Initialized Capital and became an investor. Very different—at least on paper—from your previous role. Tell me a little more about that transition, and I’d love to understand what you think your background helped you bring to the table as an investor, and how you navigated that transition where I assume most of your colleagues and peers came from more traditional finance backgrounds.
[00:25:36] Kat: Yeah, I didn’t see it coming either. And as per usual in my untraditional career trajectory, I definitely felt the energy of, “Oh, I see how this kind of comes together.” I was working at Stitch Fix and Box, and I’m also a People Tech Partners advisor, right? That’s an incubator program for founders and companies. So, I had some good experience through that, as well as just radical generosity coaching in my community, right? I have an amazing community, really incredible from all the different areas of my life—Burning Man, tech, longtime musician and artist, mom, all these things. My community is everything to me—my mini communities, right? So, being able to pull from all of that was also very interesting. To see, like, how was that all going to come together and be in the midst of that.
[00:26:32] Adriaan: So the question was the transition from a people leadership role to the investment team of Initialized Capital, right?
[00:26:38] Kat: Yes. So, going into this, it was like, “Okay, I’ve done some angel investing. I’ve been advising founders and companies, and I’ve been coaching. I’m a certified coach, have been for a long time in various ways.” When they recruited me, it was really out of the blue. They were like, “We are a team of all former operators and founders, or both, and we really value that. That’s part of our credibility, why founders come to us and want to be invested in by us.” They said, “We don’t have anybody with your background, and we barely value that.” Coming into the team, it was really about the future of work. I could come with those things and invest in those areas—SaaS, coming from Box, anything related to work. But also, how would I advise, coach, and help founders?
[00:27:37] Kat: Pretty quickly, I was able to see that investing in a founder is a lot like recruiting a leader.
[00:27:49] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:27:49] Kat: I started matching them up. It’s a hiring process in a way, but it’s an investing process, right? You’re doing interviews by having pitch meetings, maybe a second pitch meeting, and then going back to your hiring committee—or in this case, your investing committee—to say, “Here’s why I think this person should be hired or invested in.” For early stage, that’s the leaders I’ve been advising and investing in now for multiple years—it’s a founder bet. Early stage is all about the founders and what you think they’re capable of, both in building a team and in how they’re going to see the company through pivots—all of those things. It’s about, what do you think this person has? What’s their character, and how do you think they’re going to show up in those different instances? One of the biggest things is how coachable they are. I would say that is huge—if a founder or a person is not very coachable, if they’re not open, they don’t hear feedback, you can’t do anything with that. There’s nothing to do. If they don’t have the intrinsic desire to be coachable, you can’t make them. So, I would say it’s a founder bet. While I was doing a lot of advising and helping around talent and culture, one of the other investing team members used to say, “You do more advising than all the rest of us combined,” because that’s what founders need so much of. It’s actually what they don’t have, especially technical founders—they don’t come with that. So, they really need all of this. And I think from my 20 years of doing this type of work, I’ve seen it all. I’ve heard it all. I think I’m able to hear in the human source code, like underneath what people are saying or what they’re not saying, “Here’s what I’m hearing you say, and that’s actually where the challenge is,” and being able to pull that out and help them.
[00:29:45] Adriaan: Do you feel that has made you a good investor and also differentiated you from your peers who had a more traditional background?
[00:29:53] Kat: We need each other. I would not say I have all the skills to do every part of investing. I don’t think that’s true. But I think my differentiator, my distinguisher, is that I have those skills, which are often the most important—or one of the most important—to early-stage founders and companies. How do I build this? How do I build it, especially as you get a next round of funding? What do I do to hire people? How do I build my culture? How do I deal with legacy issues that might not be going well? How do I coach and uplevel myself so I can be a better leader? How do I get along with my co-founder? All of those things. And then, when we’re investing, what do I see as possible for this person? How is this investment going to be good for us long-term, not just short-term? How are we going to be the right people to see this founder through what they’re up to? How are they going to be connected and coachable towards the things that we have to offer them? Because we’re not the boss—we’re a soft advisor. They can take whatever we have to give, but are they going to turn their wheels to reinvent the wheel? Are they going to say, “I’d love that help so I don’t have to do that”? I think that ability to relate and make that an easy transition—that’s part of my essence. I bring that ability for people to feel at ease and want to be coached and helped because I’m not telling them what to do, and I’m coming at it from a place of humbleness that I have something to learn too and that we’re both teaching each other.
[00:31:29] Adriaan: Every podcast, I ask a previous guest what they would like to ask the next guest. Katie Evans had a pretty philosophical question for you—not knowing that you would be on the podcast. She looked at it more from, “What do you see the role of companies should be in the future?” What she means by that is, should they be more than just a profit machine? Should they also really look at their role in society, versus policies, versus the impact that they make? How do you maybe see that role changing for companies in the future?
[00:32:02] Kat: Yeah, great question. Very interesting, philosophical. I had to think about that for a bit, deep. If I’m understanding what she meant, what I would say is, “Are companies, yeah, like you were saying, do they have a greater purpose than just being a money-making machine?” I would say hell yeah to that. If I wasn’t saying hell yeah to that, I don’t think I could stand behind the work that I do. So, I think that companies can—does it mean all of them will? No, but I think they’re leaving a lot on the table if they’re not doing that. I think companies can be very influential towards policy, towards legislation, towards culture change, towards how people are being treated, how benefits should be, how people get to show up to work, and how they get to do their work. We get to shape the labor market, which is the hugest force, right? Not only in a company. Yes, the product is important, but the product is nothing without the people making that product. And the same with the labor market, right? That’s one of the biggest forces of anything. When the jobs report comes out, it’s the biggest influence on the stock market, right? It’s everything, really. So, I think how we’re deciding that we’re doing work, companies have a lot to say about that. And I think taking that with gravity, but also with a playfulness—like, how can we add? Things are hard enough, right? Let’s bring curiosity, let’s not take ourselves so seriously. Let’s take the work seriously, but not ourselves. And I just think, how can we be playful about it while really seeing people as the humans that they are and bringing that ability? We have the research, we have the studies already saying how that helps businesses. There’s no question that makes a better team. There’s no question that having diversity of people and thought makes a better company. There’s literally no question about that. The research is already there, so I don’t need to say that. So, it’s like, knowing that is true, what’s the impact we want to have? It doesn’t have to be all the ocean—don’t. In fact, that’s probably a terrible direction to go because you’re just going to water down everything. So, what’s going to be our mark? What’s going to be, even if it’s small, something that has an impact on people and how they go back to their communities, how they go back to their families, who they become? Every person I’ve ever hired, I’m still in touch with as much as possible because they’re in my community. They’re my people. And so, how are we in that kind of mindset where even if you’re just shifting the way a benefit is being given, you’re allowing people to see that there are different ways that families can be? That’s never been at a company before, and now somebody feels more belonging, less otherness. They feel that they can show up and be whoever it is that they are and be respected for that. So, whatever it is for you, it’s like picking the thing and saying, “I’m going to have an impact here.” Because truly, isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? We just want to have an impact, leave a little bit of a legacy in our lives, and add value. That’s really all we want to do. So, how are you helping your employees to do that?
[00:35:12] Adriaan: Love it. Love it, love it, love it. Any follow-up question that you would like me to ask the next guest?
[00:35:19] Kat: Coming off of COVID, with all the craziness in the labor market and in general with work and people, everyone I’m talking to is experiencing so much transition and transformation, not quite sure. So, I would say the complexity and ambiguity are really high right now.
[00:35:34] Adriaan: So…
[00:35:34] Kat: My question is, what are you doing to do your own work to be able to hold that ambiguity and that complexity so that you can have the biggest impact you’re having out in the world?
[00:35:47] Adriaan: That is such a great question. I’m really excited to ask the next guest this question. Kat, it was such a pleasure. Time absolutely flew by. I feel that we could have spent more time on all your different experiences. So good. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being on the podcast. If people want to connect with you, what’s the best way to connect with you after the show?
[00:36:06] Kat: You can either LinkedIn for sure, or I’m kat.steinmetz@gmail.com.
[00:36:12] Adriaan: Kat, thank you so much. Absolute pleasure.
[00:36:14] Kat: A pleasure to be here and an honor to be on your show. Thanks, Adriaan.
Need an External Recruitment Support?
Embed Matchr’s expert recruiters directly into your team. Seamless integration for immediate impact on your hiring process.