Leading Through Change with Intent (Afroditi Ladovrechis, CPO at Innocap, and Kahina Ouerdane, CPO at Workleap)

Afroditi – 00:00
HR is hard because you're dealing truly with people. You're dealing with their career, you're dealing with their ego, you're dealing with their life. And I love every second of it, but it's harder than I thought it would be.

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Kahina – 00:17
Welcome to Leading Culture: Building the Future of Work. I'm Kahina Ouerdane, Chief People Officer at Workleap.

I've always believed in the power of collective intelligence—like, big time—how people coming together can create a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. And that's exactly what this podcast is about, really.

We're having real conversations about what it takes to lead in today's workplaces: to navigate change, build strong cultures, and evolve the way we work.

Today I'm joined by Afroditi, Chief People Officer at Innocap. After practicing law for several years, first at Norton Rose and then at the National Bank of Canada, Afroditi became Innocap's Chief Compliance Officer and then, a little under three years ago, their Chief People Officer. She's led the organization through a major transformation with a significant M&A, all while building an authentic leadership culture.

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Kahina – 01:11
Like the best of us, she's left the legal world for better horizons.

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Afroditi – 01:15
Hi, Kahina. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much.

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Kahina – 01:18
I'm so happy you accepted to be here.

So you and I first connected over the reality of acquiring companies and all the transformation and change management that entails, and that led us to talk about a lot of things. So let's kind of pick up that buffet and talk a little bit about several elements that I wanted us to chat about.

When you're talking about being your great self at work—that's something that's been very trendy in the past years, like “bring your whole self to work” and “be yourself,” and that authenticity is important.

And at the same time—and I mean, I've experienced it, I don't know about you—there's also having alignment with, let's say, the core values of the organization and fitting with, you know, aligning with the purpose and the general direction and the business direction of the organization at the same time.

So I find it's sometimes a space to navigate between:

Of course, bring your whole self to work and you'll be an addition to the culture, you'll add on to the culture. We have newcomers and we want to learn from them, and we recruit them because they have different expertise, experiences, and so on.

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Kahina – 02:24
And at the same time, how do we keep the core, the DNA, the values? I find that it's a balance to strike.

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Afroditi – 02:32
Absolutely. And I can't say that there's any magic formula to it. I think each organization obviously is different, etc.

But in our world, I feel like the culture is fed bottom-up very strongly. Bringing in new people, having them add to the culture, slowly shapes it. And we have our core values, and I feel like our core values come from the type of business we are.

We operate in the finance world and we operate in hedge funds. The pejorative way to look at hedge funds is that you attract sharks. You attract people that are very focused on performance, that are very focused on P&L, on results and on profits.

We're a different kind of business, though, because we're a dedicated managed account platform, which means that we do everything about hedge funds except for the trading part. That attracts a certain type of person that has shaped our culture, because it's not that we're not smart enough, we're not good enough to work at hedge funds—it's just that we don't have the personality to go where it's more of a cut-throat environment.

And I see it. It's funny—yesterday I was interviewing somebody that's a trader at a hedge fund, and it was quite interesting. We were both laughing by the end because I said, “We are a nice culture,” and he said, “It would be really nice to work somewhere nice.” And he just sort of…

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Afroditi – 04:07
Because he was a Wall Street guy, you know, and he came in guns blazing. And I started saying, “If you come work here, we're a different breed. We attract a different breed, because we're people that are interested in finance, but we don't have that skew of P&L.”

That has shaped our culture without us even trying. Does that make sense?

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Kahina – 04:30
It does.

It's very interesting because you're talking about the culture of “nice,” and, you know, I come from the culture of nice. I mean, at Workleap, we build software for employee experience, and we're all about culture—through our business and also through the products that we build.

And I've also seen, let's say, the downsides of the culture of nice. And one of the things we've been working on—so just to go back to that theme of authentic leadership—is having the courage to have the difficult conversations, not being the nice person at times, because you have to tell someone something they don't want to hear.

And I also experienced that. In the first years, I would say—I’ve been here a while—it was also a problem being nice.

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Afroditi – 05:15
You know, that's why we connect so well.

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Kahina – 05:17
Because, yes, it prevented us from achieving certain things.

And it's interesting, as you're talking about P&L and you're putting it as if it were an opposition, whereas I think we're trying to do both. We're in a very competitive—I'm sure you are too—very competitive market ecosystem. If you're not growing, you're dying. The competition is fierce, and so we don't have the choice to focus on that as well.

I really believe that high performance and humanism can walk hand in hand if people are in the right spot for them, aligned with their values and their purpose. And we were talking this morning about the meaning of work and the meaning at work:

The meaning of work—like the job that I'm actually doing—if I get energized by that, I believe that this can really walk hand in hand.

And I also believe that “nice” has its limits. And I know that you're talking about something that's at the other end of the spectrum. So it's finding the balance between the “nice” all the time and the “shark” all the time, and having this balancing act. But it's not always easy.

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Afroditi – 06:16
It's not always easy when your culture is nice, of course—which is a fantastic thing. And I've always stayed where I was because I felt, again, I could be myself, which can be a lot sometimes, I realize that. But I was allowed to take the space that I wanted, and everybody was nice, and I would never work somewhere that's not nice.

Where we strive to improve is: you can still be nice and have really authentic and true conversations. You don't have to be confrontational and you don't have to be aggressive, but you have to be realistic.

And that's always, you know, when we have conversations with my colleagues, it's always like, “Let's operate in reality, guys.”

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Kahina – 07:05
Let's…

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Afroditi – 07:05
We could just tiptoe around this not to hurt, but… We all know what the reality is. We're all thinking it. Let's say it.

Once you say it, then we can work through it and find solutions that make sense for us—solutions that benefit our firm. And we can continue being nice. But I find that it's not nice to not say the truth.

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Kahina – 07:31
It's true. And it reminds me of a saying—I think it was Brené Brown who said it—that being clear is being kind.

And I really believe—and again, it's a spectrum. It's not about getting to the “ruinous empathy” where it's too much, but it's also finding the right spot where you're telling it like it is.

It's actually one of our values at Workleap. And, you know, our values are things that we believe in but are also a bit aspirational, in the sense that we know that we need to get even better at those. And “telling it like it is” came because we were realizing that, yeah, we were sometimes too nice.

So all that to say, it's the balancing act, I think, of finding all that.

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Afroditi – 08:08
Absolutely. And it goes to—and I'll speak for myself, because again, I've always told it like it is—where I've had to improve, and I've been in this business a long time too, is self-mastery.

Sometimes I'm in… You know, I'm Greek, right? So we raise our voices. Sometimes we talk with our hands. We do… Well, when you're delivering a message at work and you know it's the right message and you know it's the truth, you've got to work to deliver that message in a way that it's going to land.

And it's taken years of experience to realize that you can be saying the truth—my mother used to say this to me all the time: “It's not what you say, it's how you say it.” So being nice is part of that.

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Afroditi – 08:50
It's being realistic, being truthful, and knowing how to deliver a message that's going to land, that's going to make an impact, and that's going to promote change.

So we're in it now, and I'm proud—I'm so proud. We just finished a leadership training two weeks ago. I'm so proud of what we've built together as a leadership team.

Because, you know, we referred to the M&A in 2022—that was, you know, two seconds ago—and we have built a leadership team that is more truthful, that speaks the same language and has gone a long way together. And we're not perfect—and that's great. That means that there's room to improve.

But it's all been around self-awareness, self-mastery as much as possible, but the truth and being realistic and authentic. That's authenticity for us, 100%.

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Kahina – 09:47
And I want to get back to the whole M&A piece in a minute because there's so much to talk about there. And I think M&A is also talking about—not everybody will acquire a company in their business—but it's a lot about change management and so on, especially to navigate in a world that's constantly changing, where we have to reinvent our jobs constantly, where we're constantly making mistakes, where we have to experiment.

It puts us in a vulnerable spot. Making this podcast is an example of that—I was talking about this with colleagues earlier today. You know, we're experimenting right now, and it's messy and it's vulnerable and, at the same time, that's the whole point.

So it's interesting to see the different types of reactions to both. I don't know if any of this resonates.

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Afroditi – 10:27
100%.

And that's the thing. Also, I think we have the common experience, too, of changing careers. It's very humbling, you know—changing a career and you've done ten years, and so you're seasoned, and you get in a room and, you know, blah, blah… and then you change and you start from square one again, and you're learning.

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Kahina – 10:45
It's a beginner's mindset, they call it. It's really important.

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Afroditi – 10:48
Humility is one of the most important things, in my mind, when I think of leaders. And it goes to what you're saying about when you receive feedback: how do you receive it?

If you receive it with humility, then you're in pretty good shape. If you receive it by blocking it and letting your ego respond, I would argue that you probably shouldn't be managing people. And that's something that we're very much into.

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Kahina – 11:13
Really depends on the culture of the organization. Like, I guess this is a testament to the culture of your business—I think we have the same in ours. But it's also true, as you know, that in many contexts, being humble is sometimes even seen as being weak.

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Afroditi – 11:27
But you do need to mirror that at the top. And I do feel like that's where leadership is so important and HR is so important, because when you show that vulnerability—vulnerability, I always have a hard time with that word—but at the top, you see that people feel so relieved that somebody is showing it, and then slowly they'll start to show it too.

And like I said, not everybody—humility is not for everyone. And again, if you don't feel like you can show humility, we prefer for you not to manage people.

And we have a wonderful track for professionals at Innocap, and we're happy for you to be an SME, and you'll grow and you'll have a wonderful career.

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Afroditi – 12:12
But when you want to be a leader, you need to show that, because your team will just breathe easier, 100%.

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Kahina – 12:23
And I think this is a good use case of going back to—we were talking about M&A and acquiring a company—and then they talked to you back then, saying integration is going to be so key, as it always is in any acquisition.

And I think there's an incredible statistic that says—I don't want to say the wrong number, but I think eight or nine out of ten acquisitions fail because of integration. So, you know, it works well on paper, and somehow in practice it just doesn't work.

So I'd like to hear you a little bit more on that experience and the lessons that you learned, because I'm hearing you talk about how strong the leadership team now is, and that you seem to have built a common culture in just a few years—with a company, if I'm not mistaken, that was bigger than you.

How did you manage to get to that level of, I don't know, homogeneity, or of building this culture?

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Afroditi – 13:16
I think, when I look back—because everything was being done, you know, we did the transaction… I find, and you've done transactions, a transaction is a lonely time, I feel like. You're sort of in the clouds for a very long time because it's very busy and there's a lot of pressure.

And so I look back at what we did and I think what helped us the most was humility, truly. I think that every single conversation that happened in that context—we worked on this transaction for a year before it was announced. That's a long time to be in the clouds alone, you know, with just a few. Everything is so confidential, you're only speaking to a few people. There's maybe 20 people under the tent.

So every conversation is important from the first.

I remember the first time I had a call with the president of the company that we were buying. His name is Josh. Me and Josh right now, you know, right away became like this—we speak 50 times a day now. But it was that first conversation where it was not, on either side, posturing.

I came in understanding that this was probably very difficult for him. I was assuming he was being bought by a Canadian company, we had been competitors for so long, and now we go in. So I came in with my heart on the table and right away acknowledged, “This must be a complicated time for you. I'm here to make it so that we have a blast together.”

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Afroditi – 15:00
And every single conversation after that, with every other leader after that, for a year with just a few people in the tent, was those kinds of conversations—and understanding where they were coming from, seeing where I was coming from, and us working all in the same boat, in the same direction.

When we were going to announce to our employees, that we were going to announce with the right message to the right groups, and that we were going to them with bright skies because we were going to show them that we were a united leadership team.

People might find it simplistic—it’s not “sexy” enough as an answer—but that's truly how we did it: just conversations where we showed vulnerability and that we were in this together, and slowly building on that. And it worked.

And again, not everything's perfect and it will never be. But when I look back, I'm very proud of what we all accomplished. And it was done in the most humane way, where people connecting was the foundation of people integrating after the announcement.

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Kahina – 16:25
So that's what you're…

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Afroditi – 16:26
Yeah.

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Kahina – 16:26
You're most proud of. And I totally get it. What would you say was your biggest lesson learned?

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Afroditi – 16:32
My biggest lesson learned was to not discount cultural differences.

We purchased Hedgemark at the time; they had offices in different locations. We were just in Montreal with a smaller office in Ireland, so we had two locations, and we were buying a company with many.

And although we were very respectful of the different locations and changing our messaging, I also didn't have a deep enough understanding of how people were going to react. So I read reactions wrong because, again, in an arrogant way, sometimes you think, “Oh, well, if I'm vulnerable to this group of people, they're going to love it.”

But you can't assume that. Their reactions are going to be different. So again, although we changed our messaging per location, for sure…

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Afroditi – 17:37
It was more the reactions—I had gotten accustomed to how to read people, and back then, again, I thought that everybody would react in the same way. And I didn't have that nuance.

So cultural differences—it's important.

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Kahina – 17:54
I'm thinking, as you're talking, about the acquisitions we've made—and a lot of lessons learned on my part. A lot, a lot.

But one of them is surely the fact that you can—and I knew it already, but again, it hit me in the face—you can never over-communicate. And that has been a lesson for me, because I feel like we didn't do it enough. And it's not only communication as in one-way communication; it's the spaces that you hold so that there are conversations or interactions.

We were talking about this not so long ago: just migrating the Slack channels and the spaces of those employees so that they can join the main arena.

And the fact that some of those things took a while, and then during that time you're not coming together as one, and then there are interpretations and misconceptions. And because we're remote, that's also another challenge. So I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you because you have employees in different locations.

So how do we make them feel at home? You know, I always give my analogy of traveling, but how do you make them understand, deep in their bones, you know…

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Afroditi – 19:03
But just to piggyback on that: when you were saying it's a two-way street, right? That's a little bit of what I would— that's my lesson learned.

We were very much in the “two-way street”: “Tell us what you think, tell us how we're doing, tell us…” And my lesson learned was: not every culture is going to tell you how you're doing.

And so you're taking it as, “Oh, we're fantastic, we're doing a great job,” but it's like, yeah, but with this kind of culture, they're not going to tell you—that's not how you're going to get it.

And it's like when we go back to our leadership training and how others perceive you. If I come and I say, “So, what do you think of me?”

Maybe you're not going to tell me—but it doesn't mean that you don't have your own idea.

So the lesson learned for me was that we were caught…