Joe: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to On Boards, a deep dive at what drives business success. I’m Joe Ayoub and I’m here with my co-host Raza Shaikh. Twice a month, On Boards is the place to learn about one of the most critically-important aspects of any company or organization – its board of directors or advisors – with the focus on the important issues that are facing boards, company leadership and stakeholders.

Raza: Joe and I speak with a wide range of guests and talk about what makes a board successful or unsuccessful, what it means to be an effective board member, and how to make your board one of the most valuable assets of your organization.

Joe: Our guest today is Dr. Angela Jackson. Angela is the founder of Future Forward Strategies, a labor market intelligence, design thinking and strategy firm that assists leaders with transforming organizations [00:01:00] and human capital structure to maintain competitiveness while creating positive impact. She’s also an award-winning social entrepreneur, a Global C-Suite executive, and an experienced board member.

Raza: Angela is a lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as the architect of the Future of Work Grand Challenge, an initiative to rapidly reskill 25, 000 displaced workers into living wage jobs within 24 months. Among the boards on which Angela serves is the board of Needham Bank located outside Boston, a board on which I also serve, and she is the author of a book entitled Win-Win Workplace that will be published in January 2025.

Joe: Welcome, Angela. It’s great to have you here today as our guest.

Angela: Thank you, Joe and It’s great to be here.

Joe: Let’s just start with a little background, because even though we’ve [00:02:00] given an introduction, talk a little bit about your background, because I think there are so many components that go into what makes you, in my mind, a terrific board member, and I think it’s worth going through a little bit.

Angela: I’ll say a couple of things about my background. One is I started out my career as an operator so I built new businesses, domestically and internationally, for Viacom and for Nokia. I transitioned out there and launched my own company that I ran and that was venture backed for eight years.

After I had exited, I decided to go back to do my doctoral degree, and I was just really fascinated at the time around the fact that I had been an entrepreneur, I didn’t know the statistics about being an entrepreneur at that time, that by being a woman, a woman of color, that the odds are that I was going to have difficulty raising money and raise less money.

For me, although raising money was challenging, I was able to successfully do that, and [00:03:00]again, know, I raised about $10 million in venture funds by the time I exited to a partner. But after that experience, I was really interested in investing in women and understanding how capital flows.

After my doctoral degree, I began working with a venture philanthropy firm and raised about a $50 million fund on economic mobility and investing in HR and workforce tech that really helped to train people for the future of work and jobs that don’t even exist today, and and that really started my deep research in the future of work and understanding the technologies, the business practices that make for a sustained workforce, but also impacts positively the bottom line.

Joe: Fantastic. Last year you joined the board of Needham Bank as Raza said in the introduction. That’s a mutual bank that decided to take itself public, which it did, [00:04:00] in December of last year and quite successfully, I might add. Let’s start with this, what were some of the factors that led you to decide to join the board?

Angela: Well, I think the big one is just starting with the IPO and the reason behind it. The CEO, Joe Campanelli, is really a visionary leader. At the time, a lot of companies’ IPO because it’s about the money that they can bring in. It’s about the accolades behind it. As a board, when we talked about the reason for going public, this is right after Silicon Valley Bank had folded and we had the banking crisis, and what was happening here locally in Boston is that a lot of banks had put a lot of restrictions on their lending. There are a lot of small business owners that were out there and entrepreneurs who needed access to capital, and we felt, and our leadership know, led by Joe, if we were to IPO at this time, we would actually have more cash to put on the street to invest in these entrepreneurs and business leaders.

The second part was [00:05:00] around the values behind that. They wanted to do the IPO so they could invest in an employee stock ownership program, and for me and my work around the future of work, I deeply believe in companies and CEOs who are really seeing their employees as shareholders and the fact that we wanted to use the funds and to ensure that everyone from the frontlines to the C-suite could be an owner in a bank was significant.

And then the third place, we looked at building a foundation that we could invest in local communities. For over a century, we had a history as a mutual community bank, and so we wanted to continue that. The vision was still how can we be national, but also hyper-local at the same time.

We were just completely aligned with how we wanted to use the money. It was values based to really invest in the community, who we’re investing in, the talent and people, and then making sure that we were just being a good neighbor. I was sold by that.

And [00:06:00] I’d say there’s just one more piece that struck me when I saw the board listing for Needham Bank. They had in there that they were looking for someone with HR and human capital experience. If you look at most board listings, that is very rare. Most boards are looking for someone who’s been a sitting CEO or a CFO, maybe someone in technologies. You rarely see that listing for a human resource person.

Why that’s important? Through my research at Harvard University, you mentioned I’m a lecturer on the future of work, the future of boards is going to be really important how we’re thinking about human capital, and we’ve seen that since the pandemic, that there is a lot of risk and opportunities around how we’re centering our workers and our employees, and so it really signaled to me that the bank was future forward in their thinking around their human capital, and so that sealed the deal. I was ready to sign on.

Joe: Well, thank you for mentioning those points, some great points, [00:07:00] one of which I want to take up, which is the board spec and talking about someone who was a chief people officer or someone in human capital. Lots of companies say that their most important asset or one of the most important assets are their employees, but very few actually back that up with what they do, and everything you said about Joe Campanelli as a visionary leader, I couldn’t agree more.

As you both know, I was fortunate enough to work with Joe and his senior team in recruiting five board members to this board, you and Raza were two of them, and it was a great journey, they were so dedicated to finding the right kind of board composition. And as you said, they really were incredibly thoughtful, but what do we need on this board to make it the best board we can have to support a public offering and to support the senior [00:08:00] management as we go public and, obviously, now to be the board of a public company, which by going public is fun, a lot of work for for them, obviously, but the being public is a different kind of challenge for a board.

In that regard, I wanted to ask you a little bit about a couple of things. First of all, about the board’s role as you were discussing this and how they brought it to you and how the board talked about it, you kind of started that, and then I do want to end up with something a little more fun, which is the ringing of the closing bell. I have pictures of both you and Raza and others that day at NASDAQ. I have to say it looked like a lot of fun.

Angela: Yeah, it was definitely a lot of fun, and I would just say when we’re thinking about the organization Needham Bank. They were very intentional. When we were brought on, Joe Campanelli was [00:09:00] really future thinking and saying, “What type of board do we need to meet this moment? We know where we want to go. We know that we want to grow so that we can better serve the community and our customers. Who do we need around the table if we’re going to go public?”

If you look at our board, the diversity of experiences, if you look at the makeup and gender of the board, for example, we have three women who are on the board and in the current state, we have less than 30% of women who are serving on boards internationally, that’s future thinking in itself. I mentioned the sitting CEO, we had a cyber expert, so all of the things that boards are facing in this current context, we have people who have expertise in addressing it. So, when we’re sitting around the board seat and thinking about whether we go public, it’s helpful to have someone who’s a sitting CEO who’s saying, “Okay, these are what the conditions I’m saying here.” It’s great that we have someone who’s a deep financial expert [00:10:00] who’s taken a lot of other companies public to say, “Okay, these are the headwinds. These are the pros and cons.” It’s helpful to have a cyber expert to talk about, “This is the type of microscope that we’re going to be over.”

Truly what was phenomenal about those conversations is that everyone had a voice and it was really a mutual decision that we came to, like this is going to be not only right for the bank, it’s right for our client, it’s right for our talent at the bank, and It was exciting on how we did that and did it as a team, especially the newly-formed team, and I could tell you, I tell my friends who asked me, how was it going through the IPO process? It’s intense. It is serious. And I think anyone who is thinking about going public, really making sure that you have the right team of advisors that are around you, and we had the best in class legal team, et cetera, it helps and it also helps to have the board members who have done this before and who actually want to lean in and lean into the thought of [00:11:00] being an independent director, and that’s why we’re there to to speak up and to make sure that the bank are aasking the questions to make sure the bank is making the right decision for the moment, and I felt that we did.

Joe: Thank you. Before we go on, talk a little bit about the closing bell.

Angela: Oh, my God, Joe. I would love to talk about the closing bell. It was just an exciting moment for all of us. We’re based here in Boston in Needham and we’re going to go to New York for the NASDAQ, and I talk about Joe a lot, and again, I have so much respect for him. We thought, how are we going to get everyone from the bank to New York, and so they came up with the idea that we’re going to take these coach buses from Needham Bank and it would travel to New York.

Now, you would think any bank CEO who’s deciding to do this, maybe they would fly in and they would be there to meet everyone. Actually, Joe jumped on the bus with everyone else, shoulder to shoulder, to make that five-hour plus journey to New York and to take it back to be there.

The enthusiasm, the [00:12:00] camaraderie, it was really the feeling of what had happened, that we did this, from the front lines to the C-suite, it was because of the effort of the people in the bank that were all customer facing, some that are internal, that made this moment happen, and so it was amazing.

We get in this room, the people who couldn’t be there, we had videos of them up front, and it really felt like a family affair, just pure joy. And then I think afterwards, we knew what this moment meant, that we were able to go back to our community and even better serve our customers.

Joe: That is fantastic. It did look like a lot of fun and it certainly sounds like it was. I didn’t realize that everyone went up together. So, since you joined the board, what are some of the practices that the board has adopted, that in your view, have really worked to improve governance?

Angela: Some of the big practices that we’ve had that have improved governance that’s just starting[00:13:00] out the sense of transparency. When you think about the relationship between the board and the management, there are many ways that that can go. And one thing that I appreciated as I started out is that we have full access to the management and we’re encouraged to have mutual relationships with them so that if they need to come to us for something as a board, we can. If we have a question, we can have comfortability going to them. And I think that transparency and access is key to really understand what’s happening and how we can best advise as a board.

The second thing we do as a great practice is just really taking advantage of executive sessions, and this is something that Raza brought to the board that was just really critical. What are the conversations that we can have directly with management? What are the conversations that we can have directly as a board and making sure that, again, that we’re advising, that we’re getting the information that we want.

The third practice is, and I don’t know [00:14:00] how this is for other boards, but I have to tell you, we all really have a deep mutual respect for each other, and that shows in the boardroom on how we work and how we govern. That just makes for a really stronger team, and then there are things we do as just a practice of policy that any meeting that we have, regardless of whether you’re on a committee or not, those meetings are open to you.

For me, that’s important because it provides not only visibility, but also learning opportunities that someone can come and sit in, and for example, I know I came and sit down and we have everyone, the enterprise risk committee. I learned so much throughout those meetings.

I’m on the audit committee. I’m on the nom gov committee. But when you think about enterprise risk, risk happens in every single area, and so when I’m sitting in that committee, I’m thinking with my nomination and governance hat on, what are the risks in the areas that [00:15:00] we should be thinking about? Looking at our charters, looking at our documents, looking at our policies, procedures, and really, risk is everyone’s job, and so the fact that we’ve normalized that and that’s part of our ways of working and operationalized it, it just makes it so much easier to actually meet our fiduciary responsibilities.

Joe: That is a great description of a board that’s newly composed and has really just not missed a beat. I mean, that is great to hear. What does decision making look like on the Needham Bank board?

Angela: Decision making is, it’s interesting, before a decision is made, there are lots of conversation, and because of that, one is we really want to make sure we’re deeply understanding all of the facts and the state of facts. We want to discuss them so we’re seeing the decision point from other angles, what are the pros, what are the cons, what information we might not know that we [00:16:00] might need to know.

That’s been great because, again, we’re coming in as advisors. We really depend on the management team and the C-suite of the bank to be experts of their business.

When they’re bringing decisions to us, they’re bringing that decision, but they’re also bringing a point of view, and we’re able to engage with them about what that point of view is on said subject and make sure that we’re just road testing and being thought partner with them about things that they may have not thought of or may have seen, and things that they may have thought of that they might want to rethink through again.

That’s been a great exercise for us, because at the end of engaging with management, the decisions usually become very clear to us about the directions we want to go into. That said, with every board, there are occasions where you have to send these decisions back, we’re not prepared to make a decision. Out of those discussions, we’ve unearthed more questions that we need more information on.

[00:17:00] Being okay with that, and I think I’ve been impressed with that, even during the time of the IPO when we were moving quickly, the board was willing to go slow, to go fast, so sometimes you needed to just pause for a beat, send some things back to committee, call some of our advisors to make sure we were making the best decision even though we wanted to be expedient about it It was just great that we had the willingness to do that.

Joe: One of the things you said when we spoke recently was that once the board reaches a decision, everyone really supports it and you leave the room feeling that it was a good decision making process, even the decisions to which you were adverse. I guess the question is, what helps to create that kind of really positive board culture where everyone feels heard, and obviously, there’s disagreement, and at the end, everyone is together [00:18:00] in supporting the decision, because that’s obviously the optimum. How does that board culture happen?

Angela: Well, the board culture starts with what I mentioned on the top, it’s about that deep trust and respect that we have for everyone. And one thing that Joe did really well, he’s very transparent about the search and why he brought individual board members on, and so we have an idea of the deep expertise and the culture around each board member Once you have that trust and you have that mutual respect, that matters when things are difficult in the boardroom. I won’t speak too much out of school, when we were making the decision whether we were going to go public, there were some people who were a bit more cautious and others that were like very excited about it, and it wasn’t just about the IPO, it’s also about the timing, like when’s the right time to do it? Shall we wait?

Especially with everything that was going on at the time, we have to think about the economic climate, the crisis that was happening, and so we had some real meaty decisions about, is this the right time? There were [00:19:00] some people who want to wait. There were some people who want to go now and we went back and forth on that decision and had pros and cons, discussed with management or with our advisors, and then at the end of the day, when we call the vote, the majority of people voted that we want to do this now, not about the IPO, it was more just about the timing. We think now is the right time for the reasons that have been laid out.

I have to say once we made that decision, everyone, even the people who are a bit more cautious, they said, “Okay, decisions made. Full steam ahead. How can I lean in? How can I be helpful?” People became not even 100% on board, 150% on board, and that’s why that day as we were at NASDAQ standing together, it really felt like it was this joint moment to get us here. Everyone leaned in, we had more meetings than we expected to have when some of us signed up for the board, but everyone was willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work and get behind this decision.

I never talked to a board member or [00:20:00] staff who had any doubts about what we did, and I think that’s what you need and I think that’s why we were able to pull off what we did in such a successful way.

Joe: What an exemplary culture to create, and kudos to you and Raza and the board and to Joe Campanelli and his senior staff for everything they did to help foster such a positive culture. It’s one thing to bring great board members into a room. It’s another thing to have a well composed board, but if you don’t handle it properly, it really doesn’t matter, and that goes back to leadership. It goes back to the chairman of the board, the CEO, and in this case, both roles are filled by Joe, and as you have said, he gets a lot of credit for taking great board members and making sure their voices are heard. Because when you shoot for the best board members, one thing you have to remember is they’re there to have their voices heard, and as long as that happens, it’s usually going to be pretty good.

Raza: Angela, talk a little bit about [00:21:00] the future of work. Are we seeing more boards looking for chief people officer, chief HR officer on the boards, and maybe then also talk about how does the future of work impact the boardroom.

Angela: I would love to talk about that. When I think about the future of work and really the future of boards, a lot of the issues that we’re grappling with in the workplace today, they have a human capital component to them. When we think about news headlines around return to work, mandating return to work, you see JP Morgan Chase and others doing that. You see some that have just fully gone remote, these are major issues that actually level up to the board.

I want to give you a quick example. So, If we think about cybersecurity, for example, we think about all of our systems, the protection that we have them, the protocols and Raza, I don’t need to tell you you’re an expert here.

As it relates to human capital, we have to think about [00:22:00] what does that mean if you have a remote workforce? What are the cyber risk around that? All it takes is one email for someone to open accidentally, and that could impact the whole system, and so really understanding as we’re making these decisions about remote work, and I’m not saying that the board should say yes or no to that. What I’m saying is just really understanding what are some of the implications around that.

A second I’d share is like what we’re seeing in the workplace is a generational transition in the workforce, and we’ve been talking about it for years where they’re saying, “Oh, those millennials. Oh my God, those Gen Z.” Well, the real deal is, this is our workforce. They are going to be the majority of the workforce very soon, and so if we’re thinking about it’s us old school versus them, a lot of companies are going to be end for a rude awakening.

When I talk about the future of boards, why they might want someone with a talent background is really thinking about what is that strategy to [00:23:00] bridge these generations? Because you’ve got Gen Z and millennials, like they’re going into management now. This is our leadership, so we just can’t afford to say us versus them and really need to think about how do we have a strategy, what training do they need, and then as managers and as leaders in this board, what do we need to understand? Where do we need to learn and grow to actually meet this moment? It can’t be adversarial.

The third thing that I think about, too, is just around training. Everyone, every CEO that I speak with and board, they’re talking about generative AI, and some companies are thinking, “Do we have an expert on staff? Do we have a chief trust expert in person that’s on staff?” We need to think about generative AI because it is going to reshape work. There will be roles that will go away. There will be roles that will evolve. We need to understand that that interplay between human and machines. What type of new training will our staff [00:24:00] need? Really, our focus on incumbent workers in a very different way, it was fascinating.

I was looking at Edelman Trust Barometer, and if you look at statistics, you have employees who trust their employers more than they trust the government, for example, more than they trust institutions of higher learning. When you look at statistics, 70-plus percent of workers think that they’re going be get their education and professional development from their employers, and so if companies are not meeting this moment, that’s going to cause attrition. That’s going to cause people to choose other employers. That’s going to cause disengagement.

We’re sitting in a state where there’s 60% plus workers who feel like their companies don’t care about them, and if we think that these people are going to invest in our companies, we have another thing that we need to consider, and I think that’s where boards come in to understand, are we having those people/human capital decisions, are they [00:25:00] coming to the board level? Are we able to have visibility on what’s happening with turnover and how we’re grooming and growing people and you’re building a deep talent bench?

Again, that’s going to be more and more important, especially when we look at skills gaps, talent gaps, positions that are going unfilled, that’s going to directly impact the company’s bottom line, and so it’s something as a board more and more, more than ever, we’re going to have to attune to.

Raza: Yeah, there’s a lot of important things that you said. Angela, you will also have done some research on Fortune 500 companies and their outcomes to be mapped back to their people practice. Talk a little bit about that, and what did you find?

Angela: Right. So, you mentioned at the top of the podcast, I oversaw an initiative called the Future of Work Grand Challenge. And right after COVID, we had people who literally overnight lost their jobs, and I was on a research project where we were tasked with studying a group of 25,000 [00:26:00] people who were displaced by COVID helping them in an accelerated fashion train for new jobs and then place them in jobs that we called work of the future, where their jobs were not estimated to be automated in the next three to five years.

In doing so, we were able to track a set of these employees to find which ones were able to land jobs with great wages, which ones were able to stay and have sustained employment and which ones left after six to nine months. And in working with these companies, I got really curious about why some people stayed at companies, who were able to progress into management and above, and why do we have a subset that left, and I really wanted to drill in and study the companies that had practices where they showed a lower turnover, that they showed higher engagement, and based on that, with my colleagues at Harvard, I produced a framework called the Equitable Future of Work Framework.

What that framework is, we’ve outlined nine dimensions and strategies that [00:27:00] we saw in top companies that were, one, able to really engage their employees, reduce turnover, increase engagement, and also they had their bottom line thriving in terms of EBITDA, in terms of share price and looking at the nine strategies, there are some things that we’ve talked about today, really investing in a deep talent bench and training and understanding what’s the strategy if you have someone who’s coming from the front line, what could be a pathway to them being at management and ultimately, maybe the C-suite, for example.

You’ll see that at a company like Walmart. If you think about Doug McMillan, he started as a floor clerk at a Walmart, right? and he’s a CEO, and they have many other people that they can show who have that career path but that’s actually telling an employee that that can happen in the company.

Really thinking about how are you shifting the relationships between people, getting away from some of these bigger hierarchies, making sure that when we think about the future of work knowing that a good idea can [00:28:00] come from anyone and really building structures internally across power, across goals that we’re like seeing where this innovation is coming from, and so we can build these new ideas and seeing great companies have been doing excellent work around that.

The third one, they’re nine, I’m not going to go through all of them, but the third one that I’m really a fan about is re-imagining benefits. If we think about HR as human capital, we think 401k plan, we think can we give credits for transportation, etc.

We’re seeing some companies that are really, really deeply understanding the lived experience of their employees and they’re thinking of benefits in a different way. So when we think about transportation, they’re thinking about how can we provide transportation, not just to put transportation credit. They’ll think back in the day when we heard about know, Google and Meta doing the big buses that they go from San Francisco out to the Silicon Valley. There are companies are doing this on a smaller scale, saying, “I want to make sure you can get [00:29:00] to work.” Knowing that people have caregiving responsibilities, we want to ensure that we have funding around that available.

There was one company that I have studied called Guild Education. They actually created like this Montessori preschool on their property for their workers and I’ll give you an example, workers who are frontline who can not afford as much, they don’t pay as much, it’s management who can and how beautiful it is when I talked to and interviewed people from the frontline to management, they said, “It’s so important that I’m able to see my child during the day, and I know that this is a best in class center.”

It was phenomenal the results that we saw during COVID where you saw many women who were dropping out of the workforce. They said they lost one person, and that was because the woman left and was moving to another state, and so these are things that really matter. These are companies that I talk about, and we’ll talk about this a bit with the book that I’m writing, The Win Win Workplace, talking about nine proven strategies for employee [00:30:00] thriving, but also bottom line success, showing in the business model how these businesses who do this make this make sense in terms of the ROI.

That’s where I think it gets interesting when we’re talking about the future of work. The future of work is how is one human, there’s always going to be technological advances, how do we ensure that the people that we’re working with can be there, can show up and be their best selves, and that’s going to lead to the business outcomes that we want.

Raza: Wow, Angela, that was a terrific framework. Do talk a little bit more about the books that’s coming up. Who is it intended for? What are you covering in that book?

Angela: So, when I think about the book, it’s really two audiences. The first audience is for employees. It’s for workers for them to understand what is out there expansive so they can build a case for themselves and thinking about these practices and strategies to advocate and actually have the business case behind it. So, if they see one of these practices, that they can [00:31:00] go to their manager, they can go to the CEO and introduce one of these ideas.

It’s also for boards and C-suite leaders too when they’re thinking about their talent practices and wanting to use that as a competitive strategy, looking at having these tools, having the case studies and of companies and peers that are doing this and have done this successfully, that they can use to bring these practices to life in their companies.

Raza: Well, we’ll look forward to the book. I can’t wait to read it.

Angela: Excellent. And I will definitely be in touch. If anyone’s interested, they can go to drangelajackson.com and there’s a sign up for there where they can learn more.

Joe: And we will post that on our website. And again, the name is the Win Win Workplace published next January

Angela: January 2025.

Joe: Oh my God. That’s right. Okay. Angela, what a great conversation. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Angela: Oh, and thank you. And thank you for this podcast. It’s always one of my top two listens. I learn so [00:32:00] much and it’s just been great sharing with you.

Joe: Thank you for saying that. And thank you all for listening to On Boards with our guest, Dr. Angela Jackson.

Raza: Please visit our website at OnBoardsPodcast.com. That’s OnBoardsPodcast.Com. We’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and feedback. And if you’re not already a subscriber, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And remember to leave us a five-star review.

Joe: Please stay safe and take care of yourselves, your families and your communities as best you can. We hope you’ll tune in for the next episode of On Boards. Thanks.