Grow Kind: A Conversation with LifeLabs Learning CEO Priscila Bala

The LeaderLab Podcast is BACK for a brand new season! To kick things off, The LeaderLab invites listeners into an intimate conversation with LifeLabs Learning’s new CEO, Priscila Bala. Vanessa and Priscila’s conversation spans both the personal and organizational as the two discuss the journey of change leadership and the vision we’ve identified to shape the company’s evolution as we enter a phase of intentional hypergrowth: growing kind.

Want to help your organization grow kind? Get in touch with us to find out which learning experiences are right for your team. 

[Music by Blue Dot Sessions]

Transcript

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Priscila Bala: (00:00)
For me, one of the biggest areas of focus was trying to learn from the mistakes I've seen other companies make as they grow really fast. Because in most companies, the focus becomes on growing as quickly as possible without as much regard for the other areas of the business. And for me, it was extremely important to keep profits, people, and purpose as equal priorities, right?

Vanessa Tanicien: (00:30)
Welcome back LeaderLab listeners, have you missed us? Because we've missed you. So let's jump into a new season of The LeaderLab, powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host, Vanessa Tanicien, and I'm especially excited that we get to kick it off by introducing our new CEO, Priscila Bala. Welcome to the lab, Priscila.

Priscila Bala: (00:51)
Oh my God, I'm such a fangirl. So this is like a dream come true for me.

Vanessa Tanicien: (00:55)
Well, Priscila, this is pretty exciting for us too.

Vanessa Tanicien: (00:59)
On this special episode of the LeaderLab, we'll span the personal and the organizational — because after all, organizations are made up of people. Priscila and I will explore the journey of discovery, development, and drive that brought her to this exciting moment of leadership. We'll also dig into her insights on healthy business growth and engaged retention. Those are the building blocks of what it means to grow kind, which just happens to be our 2022 theme for LifeLabs as a company, and this season of the podcast. And without further ado, for your listening and learning pleasure, let's continue the conversation on growing kind with Priscila. I'll let her pick up where she left off, contemplating the priorities that serve as guidelines for sustainable kind growth.

Priscila Bala: (01:47)
If we're super financially successful, but our team is miserable or we're letting down our clients or our learners, that's not success in my book. So truly being intentional about how can we pace that growth in a way that's really exciting, engaging, and meaningful for all stakeholders. What we've seen at LifeLabs is actually, if we start with people and purpose, the profits tend to follow because as a business that's what you need to be sustainable, to give the team security, to invest in what comes next, and to be constantly innovating, right? So it's important that all three be running in parallel.

Vanessa Tanicien: (02:23)
Priscila's right — as we've seen here at LifeLabs, when people, purpose, and profit align, organizational growth and change are usually right around the corner. And at the same time, as we think about stewarding that growth, it's also important to consider what is important to protect, what is it that we want to stay the same?

Vanessa Tanicien: (02:44)
In an upcoming episode that we have with Joie Lim, our Impact Lead, we're going to be exploring organizational ethos, which is what makes us, us. How would you describe the organizational ethos of LifeLabs? What makes us, us, and will remain at our core even as we change through growth?

Priscila Bala: (03:02)
I truly believe that it's our wholehearted commitment to our values, right? It's Choose Courage Over Comfort, Always Be Learning, Open the Circle, Cut the Clutter, Find a Way to Play, Be Kind to Your Mind, and 80% is Better than 0%. What is so unique and impressive for me is that at LifeLabs, values are not just things you put on a piece of paper, they guide every decision that we make, right? I'm always so delighted when we hashtag them to each other, how we use them to explain ourselves in our emails, we give feedback to each other based on these values, they truly guide us to make LifeLabs-y decisions, no matter our size, right?

Priscila Bala: (03:42)
So when we were tiny, Open the Circle might have meant involving every single Labmate in a decision. At our current size, Open the Circle means ensuring that we have transparent decision criteria and multiple decision-makers, but it is impossible for everyone to participate in each one of those things. However, I think that the spirit of it and the application of it is still as real at a large size as it ever was.

Priscila Bala: (04:05)
I also think that something else that makes us unique is just how intensely participatory our culture is, right? The level of transparency that we have internally, and then everything is co-created. Everything goes through our systems, whether it be new roles, podcasts that we're creating, or any other projects that we're doing. And that has fundamentally changed how I personally do work. It's like, it's one thing to know rationally that if you are working with a good team, the project is going to come out better. And it's another thing to live it day in and day out. There's not a single idea that I'll start with at LifeLabs where it won't come out materially better on the other end because there's been input and collaboration and support from the rest of the team.

Vanessa Tanicien: (04:53)
Priscila continued to gush about our team, and hey, far be it from me to stop her.

Priscila Bala: (04:58)
We truly are the most methodical kind, compassionate, and well-organized company I've ever been in. So the bar is really high. I've always been someone who prides in being competent and preparing and really honoring people's times by being ready to do the thing. And I have to say, LifeLabs meetings are the only meetings that intimidate me, because I know that our people not only are just so excellent themselves, but I really have this passion for doing right by them and really being good at my job in equipping them and giving them the resources and the clarity they need. So I have to say it was pretty nerve-wracking kind of for the first month or two, especially because I also had very big shoes to fill.

Vanessa Tanicien: (05:46)
The big shoes Priscila's talking about are those of Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger, LifeLabs Learning's co-founders and former co-CEOs. As you can remember from last season's finale episode featuring the two of them, they started and developed the company on a rich foundation of curiosity, passion, and thoughtfulness. I asked Priscila to share the story of how she ended up taking on the CEO role for this next phase, the LifeLabs Learning journey.

Priscila Bala: (06:13)
I was working in venture capital at the time, and LifeLabs was recommended to me because I was looking for a solution to upskill the portfolio executives. And once I sat in one of the workshops, I remember thinking, "Whoa, this is so brilliant, life would be so much better for so many people if they had access to these skills. And how come I didn't get to learn any of these things when I was getting my MBA at Yale and being trained by all of the world-class organizations I had worked at until then." I really fell in love with the product, and the co-founders Tania and LeeAnn, we were kind of collaborating and doing things together, and they're like, "Hey, you're giving us some great ideas, why don't you just come work here?" And they were like, "Well, we wouldn't want to poach you." And I said, "By all means, try."

Priscila Bala: (07:02)
And I was just so ready to join. And honestly, it was one of those moments of, wow, this is a team I love, a product I love, a mission I love, I really didn't care very much what the role was as long as I could do good in it. So I joined as the Director of Sales in consulting, and from there, the role quickly grew in scope and complexity, and then I became the Chief Revenue Officer. And two years later, Tania and LeeAnn extended the offer to me to take their place as CEO.

Vanessa Tanicien: (07:31)
Yeah.

Priscila Bala: (07:31)
And the irony is that LifeLabs was the first place I ever worked where I didn't want to be the CEO, because I was really happy with our leadership and I really enjoyed collaborating with them, but it ended up being the perfect fit and timing. And it was just the kind of opportunity I couldn't say no to because I was completely in love with everything that we were doing.

Vanessa Tanicien: (07:55)
And I've got to tell you all out there in listener land, when Priscila Bala came onboard suddenly it felt like a rocket ship had attached itself to the company. And we started growing so quickly and it was so wonderful to see our business mature, especially as you sort of rose through the ranks. And I remember when the announcement was made in one of our team-ups (what we call our all-hands). And I was just thinking to myself, oh my goodness, so well-deserved, so exciting to see.

Priscila Bala: (08:22)
Oh, thank you, thank you. I think that the support that I got from the entire organization and the fact that as a team we default to curiosity and compassion and kindness when we're asking questions and when we're approaching each other, truly made a difference. And knowing that I have the organization behind me was really exciting because it was never meant to be, and it still isn't meant to be ever the Priscila show. And in fact, I very much to some extent to resent that the world, in general, has idolized CEOs to such a level to at times not give credence and privilege to the role that the team plays in that effort as well. So for me, I always knew that it was going to be kind of a joint enterprise. And I have to say that I feel like I can only accomplish the things that we do as a team because we have each other's backs.

Vanessa Tanicien: (09:12)
Priscila's constant emphasis on the team effort is clear in her leadership style. And yet, she has just completed her first quarter as CEO and in true LifeLabs Learning fashion, we needed to take a beat to celebrate that milestone. And we asked her to extract the learning she'll bring with her as she continues to grow into this role.

Priscila Bala: (09:33)
For me, it was a big reframe insofar as going from, my job is getting these things done to my job is truly equipping these things to be done without me, has been a massive learning for me so that I can really reframe how I approach every conversation that I have with a team. And to really double down on asking questions ever more and coaching folks so that they can do it.

Priscila Bala: (09:58)
The other thing that I was really trying to apply hard this year is the theme that we set out, which is grow kind, right? If folks focus a lot on efficiency or speed, but then forget that at the end of the day, we're all a bunch of humans with human minds and bodies and needs that need to do human things. It can be easy to be lost in that and truly burn out, which is what you see in a lot of fast-growth companies. So I'm trying really my best to learn how to set goals and systems that allow us to achieve what we need to, but also create space to breathe, connect, play, have fun together, learn from one another all in balance.

Vanessa Tanicien: (10:38)
So why use grow kind as our theme, both for LifeLabs Learning as a company and here on this podcast? Well, because that's the point. At LifeLabs Learning, we see the workplace as a practice lab for life's most useful skills. And so if we aren't creating spaces that empower people to thrive alongside the business, we're at risk of losing them. Enter grow kind, an ethos that focuses on elegant, scalable, sustainable systems that prove kindness and success can go hand in hand. Lately, Priscila has been encouraging the team to cut kind, a mashup of our value Cut the Clutter and our theme grow kind. I was curious to know more about how she saw that in action.

Priscila Bala: (11:24)
I mean, Cut the Clutter, it's such a core value for us at LifeLabs because it represents trimming unnecessary steps, costs, words. And to me, it's one of the kindest values because it's impossible really to grow kind without saying no more often than we say yes. Without this discipline, we end up rushing in, have all sorts of directions, and still feeling behind, which basically has been the state of the world. And I think that that feeling of being in a hamster wheel is something that's really unfulfilling and awful for folks. So when we think about cutting the clutter, it's really about prioritizing, and I think about it as the equivalent of pruning. I've recently become more of a gardener.

Vanessa Tanicien: (12:07)
Listeners, you have to know that Priscila has like, 13 hobbies. So just a casual gardener now on top of another crocheter and everything else that you do. But yes, let's go on with the analogy here.

Priscila Bala: (12:20)
Well, you and I need to find some pottery time and then my life will be good. But so in this analogy, it's really that notion of, hey, cutting sometimes can feel painful. And when you think about pruning a plant, for example, right? It might seem cruel to cut living branches, but that's really what helps the plant stay healthy and grow strong. So I think of it as really trying to make kind cuts. So I think the shift is really in asking, is this the most important thing we're trying to achieve together? Is this the best way to achieve it? Is this the best use of our time? And to be in it as a community, and in conversation because I think that it only works when we're willing to listen to each other and to also give people permission to know, hey, it is totally okay, and it's actually kind to cut the stuff that's not the most important thing.

Vanessa Tanicien: (13:10)
Who knew a gardening metaphor could shed so much light on growing kind. Since we've already been chatting about a few of her hobbies, I wanted to dig in (see what I did there) and learn a little bit more about Priscila as a person. Priscila Bala is a chosen name, I would love for you to share a little bit of color on how you got to be Priscila Bala.

Priscila Bala: (13:32)
It still sometimes shocks me that it's so unique for folks, right? Because as a woman, the expectation for me growing up, particularly growing up in Brazil, was that you get married and you change your name. But changing your name by yourself is very unique, but let's get there. I was in business school and I met this fantastic woman called Janet the Planet. And Janet had changed her name to literally be Janet the Planet. And I thought that was the most exciting thing I had ever seen because it was where she felt the most her. And it was that moment that kind of sparked me to realize that it is possible to actually change my name, this is something that I could do.

Priscila Bala: (14:13)
And I went on this leadership trip, and I was hiking in the canyons of Utah, and we had to share the pivotal moments that made us who we are. And you had to think about your story and what you wanted next. And the night that I had to share, I ended up being very vulnerable, and then I'm crying, and then they're crying, everybody's crying, and now I'm embarrassed. And when I woke up the next day and I realized that I wanted my story to be a combination of all the things I had gone through, but also all the things I was going to build ahead, truly from the sense of autonomy and ownership. I wanted to feel like I could write the story that was going to be most meaningful to me. And that I could then also live with the consequences of it, whether they be good or bad. And so I just decided I was going to change my name.

Priscila Bala: (15:05)
And so I get back all excited and I'm like, "Everybody, I'm changing my name." And they're like, "To what?" And I'm like, "I don't know." So picking the name was also cool because I had to then figure out how to give it meaning. And I ended up choosing Bala because, in Latin, Priscila means old, and in Sanskrit Bala means young, and so it was my yin and yang. And in Portuguese, Bala also is... It's the same word for candy and bullet. And that was the goal, being sweet and fierce.

Vanessa Tanicien: (15:35)
I think you achieved that. I think that your name suits you incredibly well.

Vanessa Tanicien: (15:40)
Our conversation about Priscila's chosen name and the sense of autonomy and ownership that picking her name created for her took us back to growing kind and the ways that leaders can shepherd sustainable, engaging growth by making space for the whole person.

Vanessa Tanicien: (15:57)
When we're thinking about growing kind, Priscila, I'm curious from your perspective, what skills do you think are most important for senior and executive leaders to practice as their organizations grow kindly?

Priscila Bala: (16:09)
So I love this question because I actually had started writing this list out several weeks ago, even for like internal purposes. And then I looked at my list and I'm like, "Oh, holy cow, this is just our manager core program." So I do think that all people in leadership and management need the core part one skills we teach, the one-to-one skills, right? Coaching, feedback, productivity, effective one-to-ones, because those are truly the fundamental tools. And then as people's roles become increasingly complex, and they take on more leadership responsibility, those skills are not enough. And this is where things like the strategic thinking, the meetings mastery, the leading change, and the people development come in, because these are the one-to-many skills. It's how are you now not just participating, but you're unleashing how those folks can best do their work. And those are big responsibilities for leadership in my mind.

Priscila Bala: (17:04)
I also think that there's a bit of a mindset shift, right? That it has to happen. And I think that for me, a lot of being part of a leadership team has to do with being good stewards of resources, whether that's time or money or energy, right? The more leadership you have, the more imperative it is that you really help people focus on what makes the biggest difference, and spare everyone's time and emotions from the low-value distractions. So in some cases, I see myself as just trying to guard people's attention to some extent, and as you can imagine, that's much easier kind of said than done, right? And it's very hard in practice to figure out what matters most and keep people focused because especially when you have folks that are very talented and that are operating in other spaces, how is it that you ensure that the organization's priorities are staying top of mind, even if they might not be the thing that feels most important to every single unique role.

Vanessa Tanicien: (18:02)
Finding the alignment between the needs of the organization and the strength and energizers of our teammates is a topic we cover in our career growth workshop. It's also an issue that we know is top of mind across the people ops community, as we turn our efforts from managing the great resignation towards driving the great retention.

Vanessa Tanicien: (18:21)
So the great resignation, we're still in the midst of it, people are switching jobs. So I'm curious, how does growing kind and cutting the clutter dovetail with this idea of retention in your mind?

Priscila Bala: (18:32)
Yeah. No, I think that this is such an important question. So now, it's not just about creating workplaces that people have to be in, but it's about workplaces that people want to be in. And I think that what we're seeing is really that the optionality that initially technology companies had because talent in technology was so scarce that, that talent could choose where it wanted to work. Some of that optionality is now expanding to everyone, everywhere. And I think that that is a really wonderful development for the world, right? Gone now are the days when someone's job opportunities were limited by the 50-mile radius around where you live. Right now with a world that's going to be much more hybrid, and in many cases, much more virtual, all employees have much greater optionality about how they want to do work.

Priscila Bala: (19:24)
And I think that all of this ties to the retention in the sense that the way we structured life in the workplace, they weren't designed to be human-centric. In many cases, they were built for efficiency, and now that the majority of work that is repetitive and that's easy to automate will be automated in the coming decades. When you look at what's going to be left, we really need to change how we work to be truly human-centric and to recognize what are the things that engage humans' brains, and how is it that we can make the work be an extension of what's going to be functional for humans rather than the other way around.

Vanessa Tanicien: (20:02)
Now, you might be wondering, as far as an organizational strategy, how do we operationalize making work that is functional for humans? Well, I think it might be helpful if we shared one of our success metrics here at LifeLabs. This is real, this is literally on our vision and strategy doc everyone: At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. How do we come to the conclusion that that was a measure we wanted to focus on?

Priscila Bala: (20:28)
Yeah. Well, so it starts with the fact that Gallup predicts that it is one of the best predictors of engagement. It's this ability of, can you feel like your talents and skills are being utilized in an ongoing fashion? And it also has this implicit feeling of job crafting, right? It's, how can we truly give people the autonomy to choose how they are going to apply their skills to the roles that they have. And I think that that's the ongoing balance we try to achieve at LifeLabs, is how can we as an organization give every Labmate, which is the word we have for the folks who work in our team. So how can we give each Labmate sufficient clarity to understand what the what of the role is going to be, and then sufficient autonomy to figure out the how on their own, right? And to give them as much flexibility as possible on the how. And I think that achieving that balance really gets us closer to fulfilling those brain cravings that we have. Have we talked about CAMPS in the podcast before, Vanessa?

Vanessa Tanicien: (21:31)
We have, but I would love to hear your take on it.

Priscila Bala: (21:34)
Yeah. So for listeners who aren't familiar, CAMPS is our acronym for the five things that every human, regardless of role, position, department, or function, is going to be engaged by or motivated by — to different levels, of course, and in different ways. But the C stands for certainty, the A for autonomy, the M for meaning, the P for progress, and the S for social inclusion.

Priscila Bala: (21:59)
So whenever we are thinking about how is it that we create a workplace of the future, and how is it that we really respond to these cravings, is thinking through what are the elements that as an organization we can put in place to support people in having certainty, in expressing their autonomy, in finding meaning for them, in celebrating and extracting those moments of progress, and in feeling the sense of social inclusion. That's so important, especially, as our world becomes ever more widespread. And in many cases, our families might be far away from us, and we might be in entirely different geographies from where our friends are. And so I think that if we can be responsive to those, and intentional about how they manifest themselves in the ways we interact with each other and how we organize company practices, then you can really make a difference and create the kind of engagement that retains people.

Vanessa Tanicien: (22:56)
Intentional growth that is mindful of generating engagement is a magnet for retention. And that magnet will draw in and retain people who are eager to deepen their skills and co-create exciting new things. Here's a quick preview of some of those things on the horizon for us at LifeLabs.

Priscila Bala: (23:15)
I'm super excited to implement lots of kind things at LifeLabs, some of which include really getting capacity right for each role, right? So we've been very intentional over the past few years to truly try to find the amount of work that's not too little, not too much, just right. And I think that, especially as we're growing and new roles are created, this becomes so important, right? Because so many companies stuff more and more work into people's list of job responsibilities. We really want to set people up to succeed, and that's why we want to be very careful to understand what feels appropriately spacious and not just push more and more into existing role. So that intentionality around capacity planning is something that I'm super, super excited about in 2022.

Priscila Bala: (23:59)
I'm also really stoked for us to roll out some new technology that will hopefully make our team and our clients' lives easier and more delightful. And then I'm also really looking forward to the innovations we're going to do on the content side. So when we think about growing kind, how do we also stay at the forefront of work? And I'm really thrilled for all of the magic that's getting cooked up by our content team so that we can continue to help folks everywhere be even more intentional, productive, and engaged in the work that they do.

Vanessa Tanicien: (24:34)
So here's some food for thought, let's start focusing on how a Great Retention can help us grow kind. As leaders, we can help folks be even more intentional, productive, and engaged in the work that they do, which inevitably leads us to business gains. Because as Priscila shared with us at the very beginning, it's all about keeping people, purpose, and profits, in balance.

Vanessa Tanicien: (25:00)
And that's a wrap of another episode of the LeaderLab! Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon. This season we'll continue to explore the leadership skills of growing kind on three levels, from the organization to the team, and then finally, with the individual. The LeaderLab is executive produced and hosted by me, Vanessa Tanicien. NeEddra James is our Senior Producer, and Alana Burman is our Creative Director. We've added some new members to our team: Julianna Jack is our Assistant Editor, and Lauren Feller is our Audience Engagement Lead. You can connect with us and check out upcoming and past episodes online at lifelabslearning.com/podcast. See you in the lab soon.