Dr Wendi Walker-Schmidt Of National Life Group On Why Corporate Culture Matters in Business

An Interview With Vanessa Ogle

…My parents as public educators always talked through the mantra of patience, tolerance, kindness, and love to all people. I love that here at National Life Group, our culture statement is simply: Respect All. If I could start a movement that could bring the most good to the most amount of people, what would that be? It would be a mixture of our Culture Statement and how my parents brought me up. Have patience with people, be kind and above all else, respect all…

Every company has a corporate culture. This culture can foster innovation and a fresh exchange of ideas or it can promote selfishness and backbiting which will damage the bottom line of any business. Sensitivity to the culture of a business goes beyond mere awareness; it’s about actively adapting and responding to create the culture that you want to represent your brand. This is crucial for building successful, respectful, and inclusive working environments and for creating products and services that resonate with a diverse customer base. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Wendi Walker-Schmidt.

Dr. Wendi Walker-Schmidt was destined for a career in education, but not a typical classroom experience. She found her way to Organizational Development (OD) through a love of teaching adults. And in the spirit of lifelong learning, she pursued her doctorate at the age of 47. Today, she heads OD at National Life Group, a financial services company with the values of Do good, Be good and Make good.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about Why Corporate Culture Matters in Business, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

My parents were both public educators and I had watched them throughout their careers and decided education was not what I wanted to do and my mom told me ‘it’s in your blood; you will end up in a classroom.’ I was a terrible social worker for about a year — I say terrible because I couldn’t leave my work at the end of the day; I took it all with me. I fell into a teaching job and I’ve been here ever since, so, mom was right; she was always right! It was in my blood and this is what I’m meant to do.

My dad taught high school and was a football coach and my mom taught math. Watching them teach children and teens, I was really drawn to adult education because the way you teach adults is a little bit different. It’s really the huge impact that teaching can have on adults that keeps me going. To watch adults be able to take a concept in class and be able to apply it to their jobs or apply it to their personal lives, to see that spark and light in their eyes when they’re like ‘this is cool; I got it’ it’s a different feel like there’s more relevancy in teaching adults because they can put their learning into immediate practice.

I started by teaching adults software, which grew into teaching salespeople selling software, to teaching soft skills, which is what hooked me ultimately. I found my way into organizational development — where you get to teach adults from all angles all the time — and I found my place.

I did not go back to school to start my doctorate until I was 47 years old, which my friends thought was nuts, but I found a program that I really liked. It had elements of learning and organizational change to it, which are two of my passions. and I decided this is what I want to do. As an educator you have to be a lifelong learner so I couldn’t just say ‘oh I’ll stop here; I’m not going to do anything else.’ I entered the EdD program at 47, worked full-time, went to school full-time raised a child, took care of my husband and my father, and finished my doctorate in three years with all A’s.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Being in HR you can imagine there has been a plethora of interesting things over the years. I worked for a time in healthcare. It was an eye-opening experience. As a training professional, you often focus on the class you’re teaching, and the people in front of you. While it may be in the back of your head “What I’m teaching them will influence others outside of this classroom,” it isn’t until you walk a mile in their shoes that you see it. Each year we all had to take the compliance training. One year it had iced very badly, and staff could not make it into the hospital. My husband had a 4-wheel drive truck and was able to take me to work. We were assigned different duties in the hospital. Obviously, I was not put in patient care, but assigned to the cafeteria. Cafeteria safety compliance is different than classroom safety compliance. I spent my day washing dishes, bussing tables, whatever they needed. Not only did it help me connect to purpose differently — we are taking care of those taking care of our patients, their families, and staff — I also saw the compliance training in a different light. It was the WHY behind some of the elements I had ignored in the training. It helped me always keep the WHY at the front of my classes and projects.

You are a successful individual. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Time management, perseverance, and grit.

When you start a doctorate program at 47 years old, you have a son in elementary school going into middle school, you have a husband and your dad lives with you and you’re taking care of him, as well, and you’re working fulltime and you’re bound and determined you’re going to go to school fulltime, you have got to manage your time very wisely, so, pretty much down to the minute my time was blocked. I would get up in the morning and get on my stationary bike and read and then on my way into work — I had a 45-minute commute — I would actually listen to what I had just read to reinforce it in the car on the way to work. I would work all day and then on the way home again, listen to it again. On nights when I had class, my husband was great and cooked dinner for everybody. Nights that I didn’t have class, I got home, and I was mom and wife and daughter and took care of things — laundry, dinner, etc. — and then after everybody had gone to bed, then I did the homework.

I think it took perseverance and grit as well because there were times when finishing a doctorate in three years was really fast and keeping on schedule…let’s just say there were times I wanted to give up. There were times I was like ‘I cannot write another word in my dissertation.’ And it was like ‘just write one more sentence’ and then one sentence led to two sentences, and then to three. I had an amazing academic advisor who would always tell us ‘Just keep swimming’ like in ‘Finding Dory’ and that actually kind of kept me going.

I had lost my mom eight years before starting my doctorate and she was one of the most brave, courageous, toughest women I knew. She got her math degree at a time when women didn’t major in math, only men did. She taught math; she was one of the few women math teachers. She was the first female administrator in our school district. She taught me that if anyone says you can’t go further than this, you can always go further than this if you have the grit. So, thinking about her made me feel that I could absolutely do this.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. How do you define corporate culture in the context of your business, and why is it important for your company’s success?

I don’t think you can define corporate culture. There’s no recipe for it, there’s no ‘do a, b and c… and your culture will be great, and your business will be great.’ To me, I often define culture as like the magic pixie dust that’s floating over an organization. It’s that vibe you get when you walk into a building and it’s like ‘ooh, I just feel it.’ I often envision an iceberg regarding company culture. There is the tip of the iceberg that’s sticking out of the water, and those are the things that you can see about an organization. For instance, at National Life, you walk into our office, and you see we have a lot of glass and a very open floor plan; that’s conducive to collaboration. You see that we have conference rooms on the outside of our building full of natural light. There are things that you can see, but it’s those things that you cannot see about company culture that create that vibe. And it’s the things you can’t see that make a company successful. It’s not just attracting people to come work with you as employees, but also those external customers. When they see it and they feel it; they want to be a part of it.

Can you share an experience where corporate culture impacted a business decision or client relationship (positive or negative)?

It’s not really a business decision per se or a client relationship, but it’s kind of a little bit of both. People always ask us about the secret to our success. If you look at our financials, you’ll see that over the last 175 years the chart is climbing. Our CEO Mehran Assadi meets a lot of people, and they’ll ask him ‘what is the secret to your success? You’ve got this small company over here of 1,200 people yet look at your numbers.’ And he always says that the people are our secret sauce, and that’s actually what I would say is that our corporate culture impacts all of our business decisions and all of our client relationships; it’s all about our people. They are our secret sauce, and the thing is you can’t replicate that. It is the biggest part of the attraction piece; we’re putting off that vibe that other people want, and they want to be a part of it because we feel good about what we’re doing; we’re appreciated and we just want to pass along the good vibe.

What strategies do you employ to monitor and enhance corporate culture within your team or organization?

Within our organization, we use a tool called Gallup to measure employee engagement every year. It’s a survey that gives us quantitative metrics behind employee satisfaction and how people are engaged in their work. For a more qualitative perspective, we have a group called Culture Fellows. Other organizations may call them culture ambassadors. This group of people have their full-time jobs, but they also have a passion for keeping our culture intact, so they also participate in Culture Fellows, which is awesome. That’s where we get a lot of our qualitative data. They run Culture Connections. They’re optional conversations with our teammates here at National Life Group. They come in and they just open it up and have conversations. They begin with guiding questions to get the conversation started but that’s where people share their thoughts, feelings, and emotions about this place. So, we get that quantitative and qualitative data and mesh that together to see the themes.

How do you handle situations where the executives may not be aware of corporate culture in mid-management?

This is an example from my past life. Being in organizational development I had connections with the executive leadership team and middle management, as well. It was like this giant canyon separated the two. The executive leadership team would say ‘oh, the culture’s great, performance is great, everyone’s happy, it’s wonderful.’ But then you’d get in front of middle management, and they would be like ‘well, if the executives would ever come out of their offices, they would really see what was going on.’ So, there was this huge gap between them and the thing we always talk about — there’s perception and there’s reality. They weren’t seeing it for what it was. So, as the middleman, which I sometimes felt like we were in OD, talking to the ELT telling them ‘I know you think you see x, y and z, but it’s really a, b and c, according to middle management.’ So, of course, there was denial. No one wants to hear there are problems. That’s where we had to bring in data from qualitative and quantitative metrics to the ELT to show them there was a problem. But it was a really good exercise because it got them to start ‘managing by walking around.’ They got out of their offices and walking around to experience what was going on out there.

Based on your experience and research, can you please share “5 Ways Corporate Culture Boosts a Business’s Bottom Line?”

Framed around the employee lifecycle: attraction and recruitment, retention, internal mobility, engagement and performance.

As I mentioned before, here at National Life, people come in and they feel the vibe. They come into the offices, and they feel the culture here — that’s part of the reason we have interview offices that have glass fronts to them so people can see what going on in the office, that attraction and recruitment part — people feel it and they want to be a part of it.

Regarding retention: to me there’s a lot wrapped up in retention. It begins with orientation — that first shot of engagement for people; it’s the first impression if you will. We changed orientation from a four-hour information session to a two-day experience because it’s all about the employee experience and creating that emotional connectedness for people, that’s what our orientation and onboarding process is all about. It’s about making sure that we’re helping people grow and develop in their current role but also, we’re asking those questions about where do you want to be in the future, and we’re helping them get there. Of course, we want to grow and develop people here and help them move in the organization anywhere they want to be, so, we really do try to focus on internal mobility but not necessarily in the way you might think about that traditionally. Typically, people think of moving up a ladder, moving up positions, but we position internal mobility as moving up a ladder but also as moving across a lattice and getting experience across the board. For us, it’s about what are the knowledge, skills, and abilities you have that can be applied to another role and help you grow.

Engagement is very important to us; we measure it through Gallup for the quantitative data and the Culture Connects for the qualitative data. The research shows us the more engaged a person is the more discretionary effort they’re going to put forth, so, it is very important to us to make sure that people are engaged. One of the ways we work on that is to make sure that leaders understand that all people have personal and practical needs that they bring to an interaction. Everyone’s got emotions and personal needs, but at the end of the day we’re a business, we need to make money, so we need to get stuff done — that’s those practical needs and accountability piece. Making sure that we balance those for people is really critical to engagement and ultimately their performance.

Performance — we are a pay-for-performance organization, so, again, it’s important that we are creating that environment with emotional connectedness, so our people are engaged in their work and giving that discretionary effort — that’s always going to help the pay-for-performance structure. However, money does not motivate everyone, so, regarding performance, it’s a matter of finding out what are those motivators for people. For some it is the pay for performance structure, ‘if I put forth more of my discretionary effort, I’ll get more in my bonus.’ But for other people, it’s not about money, it’s about asking individuals what are those things they want as a reward for a job well done. Some people love their name in lights or announced at a town hall. Other people would hate that and find it embarrassing and would prefer a note or an email acknowledging their good work. So, it’s about finding out what are those motivating factors for people.

When we think about driving performance, it’s about these three elements: individual value, meaningful work, and creating a positive work environment. Individual value just means that I’m appreciated and encouraged to grow, and that’s going to look different for everybody, so, leaders have got to be having those conversations. Meaningful work, making sure that what I do matters and that I have purpose, but that also as a leader you see my purpose and you recognize my purpose, which is critical. And then, creating that environment where there’s that emotional connectedness, making sure that at the end of the day, this is a great place to work. Because if this is a great place to work, I’m going to have much higher performance.

In what ways has focusing on Corporate Culture given your business a competitive edge?

There is recent Gartner research around the correlation between corporate culture and business performance. The research study talked about companies that had a very strong corporate culture clearly saw strong financial results. We could be a case study for Gartner. We have a very strong corporate culture, we invest in our Culture Fellows, and we invest in our people. I have never seen a more generous organization than this one. I have no doubt every day when I come to work that the organization cares about me. It’s not always the case with every organization, so, when people come to work and they feel it’s a positive environment and they love what they’re doing, they’re going to go above and beyond and give that discretionary effort and that is always going to lead to that competitive edge for a business. You can see it in our numbers: Every year for the last 175 years we have been growing and increasing our bottom line. By investing in our corporate culture, we’re able to focus on the sustainable growth of the business. Our company values are Do good, Be good and Make good. We want to do well as a business so we can give back to our communities and to be able to do that successfully, we must have a solid corporate culture.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

My parents as public educators always talked through the mantra of patience, tolerance, kindness, and love to all people. I love that here at National Life Group, our culture statement is simply: Respect All. If I could start a movement that could bring the most good to the most amount of people, what would that be? It would be a mixture of our Culture Statement and how my parents brought me up. Have patience with people, be kind and above all else, respect all.

How can our readers further follow you online?

Wendi Walker-Schmidt, EdD | LinkedIn

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

About The Interviewer: Vanessa Ogle is a mom, entrepreneur, inventor, writer, and singer/songwriter. Vanessa’s talent in building world-class leadership teams focused on diversity, a culture of service, and innovation through inclusion allowed her to be one of the most acclaimed Latina CEO’s in the last 30 years. She collaborated with the world’s leading technology and content companies such as Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and Broadcom to bring innovative solutions to travelers and hotels around the world. Vanessa is the lead inventor on 120+ U.S. Patents. Accolades include: FAST 100, Entrepreneur 360 Best Companies, Inc. 500 and then another six times on the Inc. 5000. Vanessa was personally honored with Inc. 100 Female Founder’s Award, Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and Enterprising Women of the Year among others. Vanessa now spends her time sharing stories to inspire and give hope through articles, speaking engagements and music. In her spare time she writes and plays music in the Amazon best selling new band HigherHill, teaches surfing clinics, trains dogs, and cheers on her children.

Please connect with Vanessa here on linkedin and subscribe to her newsletter Unplugged as well as follow her on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, and X and of course on her website VanessaOgle.