How Adobe’s DEXecutive unleashes inclusive, high-performing teams

Digital Workplace Impact Episode 145: How Adobe’s DEXecutive unleashes inclusive, high-performing teams  

[00:00:01.210] – Toni Vanwinkle 

I’ve always been one of those leaders that enjoys co-creating a future possibility with the team. And in my own personal leadership philosophy, the way to do that is to hear as many voices as you can. And that includes your team, your customers, the stakeholders that are investing in the work that you have so that you can create a meaningful impactful outcome for the organizations that you’re serving. I’m not looking for members that have the same talent, the same background, or otherwise, we’re going to get the same thing. But does this new person complete us? Does it offer us anything else that we need to make a greater impact? 

[00:00:52.110] – Nancy Goebel 

Welcome to Digital Workplace Impact podcast. I have to say, coming back into the studio to have a chat with longtime member, Toni Vanwinkle, was just such a thrill. Toni is the Vice President of Digital Employee Experience at Adobe, and I’ve decided to dub her DEXecutive of Note as part of this conversation. And Toni has been recently recognized by the ACG Silicon Valley as one of the top 40 leaders to watch this year. And today, we’ll be diving into some incredible milestones and insights from her career. Just to name a few things that we explored together. They include things like Tony’s key strategies for building onboarding and mobilizing inclusive and high-performing teams. We talk about her vision for the future of work, including the most significant opportunities and challenges for companies in the next 10 years. Finally, I asked her to take that forward and impart some valuable advice to help fellow digital workplace leaders and their teams in their paths towards the future of work. And so I hope you’ll stay tuned for what I would think you’ll come to see as an engaging, inspiring, and enlightening episode featuring Toni Vanwinkle. This is Nancy Goebel, Chief Executive at DWG. And your host, as always, Digital Workplace Impact, is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group. Happy listening. 

[00:02:39.790] – Nancy Goebel 

Toni, I am just thrilled to bring you into the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio. We have collaborated on so many events and conversations over the year. I was so surprised to realize that we hadn’t yet ventured into this podcast series conversation yet. So I recently was on LinkedIn and saw some of the happenings in your orbit, and that gave me pause to say, We have to bring those things together. Great story and conversation with another first with DWG. So I am just so happy to welcome you into the studio today. 

[00:03:24.090] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Nancy, I’m always delighted to be in the same virtual or physical room with you. You bring so much wisdom. And the podcast is named Impact. I think that’s what you and the organization do. And it’s just a pleasure to be here and talk about these happenings. I’m wondering what happenings you’re going to ask me about. 

[00:03:48.140] – Nancy Goebel 

Well, today, I think we’re going to put a little bit of a magnifying glass on what’s going on in your circles. I say that because when I was on LinkedIn some weeks back, it just seemed like there were so many interesting career milestones happening in and around your day to day. And I just love opportunities to hone in on impact stories of a different sort in the sense that when I see leaders who are sharing what I like to call their sparkle, not only with their team but our wider industry circles, that’s a moment that’s worth having conversation around. And so for starters, you were recently recognized by the ACG Silicon Valley as a top 40 leader to watch this year. And within that, they gave a call out to the fact that you’re a visionary leader, both in terms of advancing the careers of others and innovation. And so I take that data point and the fact that you recently had a visit to the White House, and I’m thinking, this is quite a powerful opening for a conversation. And of course, your visit to the White House was tied to a commemoration for Juneteenth. 

[00:05:25.390] – Nancy Goebel 

Maybe we can start there because I’m really intrigued, just given the world that we’re in and the timing with elections, how did this visit come about? And of course, how do you prepare for something like that?

[00:05:42.020] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Yeah, it’s fascinating. I think I even wrote this in my post, which was titled You’re Invited. And I received an invitation in the email that said, President Biden and the First Lady would like to invite you to the White House to celebrate Juneteenth. And in the business I’m in, at looking at messages and emails and digital communications, of course, I thought this can’t be real. So it has to be a phishing attack of some kind, and validated that with our government relations team. And it was in fact, it was, in fact, real. Myself and some of my colleagues were invited to this event. Adobe sponsored the celebration itself, but a few of us executives were invited to actually meet the President and Vice President and do a bit of a tour of the White House and enjoy a concert afterwards. For me, first, what an honor to be invited to the White House, period. Then the second piece that I thought about is what an honor as an African-American woman and a citizen of the United States to be at this incredible moment where we’re celebrating something that is so meaningful to me, my family, and my heritage. 

[00:07:22.490] – Toni Vanwinkle 

I was invited because I’ve been involved in diversity and inclusion efforts at Adobe for some years. As you know, Nancy, I founded the Black Employee Network almost a decade ago and helped to found the Asian Employee Network and many other diversity initiatives so that first people could be seen and heard in the organization, but also so that we could have an organization that reflects the customers that we serve out in the public. After the death of George Floyd, Adobe leaned forward into making sure that our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion was very meaningful, and that meant to be involved in moments that mattered culturally to the population of our employees, but also moments that mattered to moving forward with all of these activities, including investing in pipelines, HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, making sure that our products and our communities were infused with diversity investments and so on and so forth. So a lot of that. At a personal level, being on the South lawn to celebrate this, I know that there was a time in history where African-Americans were never invited to celebrate anything at the White House. In fact, outside of being very select few that could serve in the White House, the imagination of being invited to a party was profound to me. 

[00:09:16.840] – Toni Vanwinkle 

And so that was remarkable. And it was even more profound to look up on that stage and see a woman, an African-American and South Indian woman, who was is or is the Vice President of the United States. I mean, my goodness, the fabric was looking very different to me and reflective of the contributions of so many. And so, It was super profound for me. 

[00:09:47.870] – Nancy Goebel 

Well, I can only capture a fraction of what that experience must have been like for you in the moment. I just know that when I saw you share the experience that you’d had, it stirred me at a very profound level as someone who is born from a family from the Caribbean and comes from a multiracial background herself. And over the years, I’ve seen many women from Haiti who have come to the States or Europe or even Canada to be and have made their mark in the US in very key leadership roles. When I see other living examples, not only does it want me to does it inspire me to engage in conversation, but it also prompts me to look for other living examples so we can gather support from each other, inspiration from each other, learn from each other. And so I see this as part of that important responsibility sitting in a chair, as I do as a podcast host, to be able to do exactly what we’re doing today and to continue building on that for a lifetime. For me, it’s a moment to appreciate your courage and your leadership, but also to share in some of your own learnings because, yes, you’re doing these amazing things at an enterprise level, but I tend to see in the day to day more of what you do with your immediate team, which is no less significant. 

[00:11:47.910] – Nancy Goebel 

I think about leadership at so many different levels. And I know part of what our audience would want to hear is how you think about hiring and team building from within your own organization and how that radiates out to the wider enterprise and our industry, of course. 

[00:12:09.490] – Toni Vanwinkle 

I’ve always been one of those leaders that enjoys co-creating a future possibility with the team. And in my own personal leadership philosophy, the way to do that is to hear as many voices as you can. And that includes your team, your customers, the stakeholders that are investing in the work that you have, so that you can create a meaningful, impactful outcome for the organizations that you’re serving. So first, one has to have a diverse team in order to hear diverse voices. And so I think that starts with a couple of things. Looking at when you have an opportunity to grow or form a team, looking at the talent pool that you want to acquire talent from. I know Adobe as an organization, we had to examine this ourselves. In very early days, we were recruiting from Stanford, MIT, very noble organizations to recruit from as a software company. And in days of late, we’ve said, Can we open the aperture of that and look at other sources of talent? And I certainly think about doing that myself. One is not everyone in my organization has to be a programmer. I need strategists, I need communicators, I need people who can execute that have project and program management. 

[00:13:59.810] – Toni Vanwinkle 

I need organizational change managers. Suddenly, you’re starting to open up this pool of talent and possibilities. And so that’s just at the skill level. But what about my lived experience level? It is so rich that you come from a multicultural background, Nancy, because you can hear more of the spectrum of voices just from your own lived experience around your table as a child and growing up, maybe traveling to the Caribbean and to New York and other places up and down the East Coast and through the Americas and Europe and so on and so forth. Those lived experiences are enriching to coming out with better outcomes. The second piece of this is if you are able to have a talent pool that is inclusive, you can now start to interview and select members of your team. I try to use a diverse interview panel in order to select talent because we need to hear from people in collaboration and people from endpoint management and people from all those disciplines that I mentioned earlier and what they view about this new potential candidate that is coming into our organization. Diverse panels are really a good practice. 

[00:15:30.360] – Toni Vanwinkle 

The question that I always ask my team as they think about this is, will this person thrive in our culture? Does this complete us? I’m not looking for members that have the same talent, the same background, or otherwise, we’re going to get the same thing. But does this new person complete us? Does it offer us anything else that we need to make a greater impact? And then we make decisions based on all of those inputs. But I think you need to create the container for inclusivity, and that begins with making sure that you can hear all of the voices and invite people to be heard. 

[00:16:17.770] – Nancy Goebel 

When we look at groups of people like mid-career hires, meaning they’re not coming into a team like yours fresh out of school, what does the onboarding process look like? How do you help create the gel factor, so to speak, that helps that team feel complete when newcomers do come into the mix? Because very often when you’re catching individuals at a mid career higher level as opposed to a management training program, the cost of hire and the cost of attrition can be quite high And so learnings around building a new team, because effectively, when you add new blood, new talent, new thinking, in a sense, you’re building a new generation of your team. So any thoughts, learnings that you can share there? 

[00:17:19.890] – Toni Vanwinkle 

I love this. And many people don’t really process that notion that one person changes your entire team. And it really does. Some of the practices that I employ are a restart for the entire team, which is, do you understand the role of this person and why we need this person in our organization to complete us? And that can be a conversation that happens way before somebody enters the team, signaling that there will be a shift, getting other people ready for the change. And then once a person starting that onboarding process. Another statistic, and I’ve read this in research, it may have changed over the years, but the first 90 days really decides if a person is going to stay with your organization or not. Their experience in that first 90 days is important. Making sure that you’re having some teaming event that introduces the new person into the team and the existing people to the person that is coming in so that folks understand who the players are and who their partners are as they move through the organization. The other thing is, here’s a list of people that I would really like you to meet. 

[00:18:45.560] – Toni Vanwinkle 

We set up one-on-ones with critical stakeholders and partners, and of course, colleagues that the new joiner needs to meet. We hopefully deliver a good onboarding experience in terms of all the technical things that you need, all the training you need up front, and so on and so forth. That includes the casual things. Don’t eat lunch alone. Eat lunch with somebody. It could be just as casual as that so that people start to feel that they’re integrated into the organization. Regardless of where you’re getting hired in my particular organization, I personally want to have a one-on-one with you. I I do this with our interns, I do this with middle management. I do this with executive hires just to make sure they understand the vision that I have for the organization, the culture that I would like to create in the organization, and this ideal of making sure that we’re thinking about outcomes, and we’re thinking about differentiating human experiences in our organization. 

[00:19:57.630] – Nancy Goebel 

And albeit we’re not operating at the same scale inside of DWG, that’s a point that I can echo very strongly. So in my role as chief executive, I’m meeting, albeit virtually most of the time, people coming into the organization to do those same things in terms of making sure purpose is clear, talking about opportunity to share thoughts and ideas and suggestions for how to make the best of the experience and to foster an open virtual door for conversation because fresh talent bring fresh ideas and sometimes fresh feedback, too, about how things are going. But all of those are points to learn and build from. 

[00:20:51.850] – Toni Vanwinkle 

A hundred percent agree with you. I find it so personally inspiring, especially with mid career and interns, to hear their opinions about, for example, their onboarding experience. There’s some really interesting strategies that we can be inspired by through that dialogue. 

[00:21:16.290] – Nancy Goebel 

Absolutely. And of course, with the scope of your team being digital employee experience, that is real time user feedback that you can draw upon in that moment. So we’ve talked a little bit about creating that hiring pool. We talked a little bit about onboarding. Then there’s the day to day. And I know one of the things that you talk about, not only in sharing with other leaders, but in terms of your personal approach to leadership, is that it’s important to be outcomes-based. For generations, there were managers who led by walking around or had certain expectations around face time, and clearly, that is not how you are operating nor what you encourage others to do. So it might be interesting to reflect a little bit about some of the challenges that you see most typically involved in making that shift and how you’re operating with a digital employee experience team that is outcome-focused. And that’s important because I’d say in our industry, measurement and outcomes tend to be the thing that people still have to work extra hard to be able to lift up into the storytelling part of individual and collective team performance. So just to bring it back, some of the challenges around shifting from observation to outcomes, and then some learnings and how you’ve addressed that. 

[00:23:01.870] – Toni Vanwinkle 

It’s interesting. So that the listeners understand the scope of work that is in my remit. So I have productivity applications so that’s automating processes, including things like the support processes for our employees. I have the collaboration teams that has the strategy on the technology we use for virtual meetings, chat, all of the Microsoft Office Suite and how we work within those systems. I have everything around employee technology and support. That means your laptops, your desktops, your cell phones, and all of those services as well as what we call tech cafés around the world that help our employees with support. I have the HR technology stack, enterprise learning, and a number of other things, including the technology that goes into our real estate. So as we build buildings around the world, I’m working with our workplace strategy team and our real estate teams to make sure that the digital experiences in those places make sense. And when you think about that remit, there’s a lot of operations in there. And for years and years and years in operations, we have been about activities and output. How many cases did I close today? What is the top case that I have? 

[00:24:34.340] – Toni Vanwinkle 

What is the number of employees per tech in this type of thing? Those are the kinds of things that we measure, and those are very activity and almost widget type of… If you think about the manufacturing environment where we used to count how many units did we make? So it’s very natural for people to think about that. What I’ve tried to do with the team is say, Well, to what end are we doing this activity? We still need to do the activity. We still need to be very good at operations, but to what end? One of the examples that I draw from is when I first started the organization, the formation of this particular organization that I have did not exist before 2016 when I developed, at that time, the Digital Workplace Organization, that’s now the Digital Employee Experience Organization. I was speaking to the gentleman that runs support, and I said, Please give me your metrics around support. And he said, Sure, Toni. I said, Great. He says, Our number one support case is password reset, and this is probably not foreign to most people. Password reset. And he was super proud that he knew the top five cases in password reset was the one. 

[00:25:56.880] – Toni Vanwinkle 

And I said, Well, how long has that been your top He says, Well, definitely over a year. Really? Well, why has it been that way for so long? Well, because this person in this other part of the organization needs to do something in order to help with to solve the problem. Great. Let’s go talk to that person. We talked to that person, and that person said, Well, hey, it’s not me. It’s this other person. Okay, well, guess what? We’re all going to get into the room, and what we’re going to do, the outcome that we want for this is we want an outcome to remove password reset as a case within our ecosystem. We no longer want password reset as a problem in our environment. They’re like, What? That cannot happen. Well, the problem is, is we were focused on an output called close the case really fast versus an outcome of removing cases from our problems from our ecosystem. We eventually solved that problem, but it took a mindset shift to say, why do we have to have cases for password research? Unwinding that. How could we honor the intelligence of our employees and say they could reset their own password if they needed to. 

[00:27:18.290] – Toni Vanwinkle 

And then we unwound that. And what if we had an environment of high security and high whatever? What automations could we put in place? And after we had that dialogue, it was like, Oh, that is the difference between output and outcome when solving a problem. And we now put on a hat of that. Are we driving activities or are we driving strategic operations that starts to say, we need an outcome that is better for our employees. We need to honor the fact that people need as much as possible a frictionless environment for them to do their best work. Those are some of the things. Lessons, let’s do human-centered problem solving. Let’s check ourselves and make sure that we are also measuring the outputs as well as the outcomes for a better experience. Then cross-functional alignment and intention is priceless. There is no one that can do and move mountains like we do alone. You will always have to have a partner, even if it’s within your own team. But cross-functional partnership moves mountains. 

[00:28:43.600] – Nancy Goebel 

And this explains in volumes the benefit when you have new team members coming in of this panel approach, because that’s actually the first foray into building social capital for getting things done. 

[00:29:00.550] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Right. I say trust is a currency that is both earned and pays dividends. 

[00:29:08.580] – Nancy Goebel 

Also nestled in there is way of translating problems into solutions, and solutions are part of the realm of innovation. When I think about my opening remarks, innovation was one of the areas that was spotlighted as part of how you do business inside of Adobe. And so I’d be remiss not to have a spotlight moment around that, too, because nestled in this one outcome, driven example was a show of how you’re developing talent and helping to open up thinking horizons to that solution’s focus. What other approaches do you have to foster a culture of innovation inside of your team and others that are being touched day to day inside of Adobe? 

[00:30:13.200] – Toni Vanwinkle 

I think the first step in this, Nancy, is you have to have a willingness to be changed in any dialogue, so that curiosity to be changed. Now, I think about three particular mindset pivots that we in my organization. One was to, we still have projects, but to think about products, that what we do is provide products and services to the organization. We don’t just execute on projects that have just a clear start and end date. We have enduring services where the technology may change, but we have products and services that we’re trying to create for the organization, deliver for the organization, and have them provide value. The second piece is to be human first versus technology first, because technology first means that I have a hammer, where’s the nail? We start to solve the problem from the wrong end, versus who are the humans using this? What do the humans need? How could the technology empower the human to do their best work? How do we shift that from technology first to human first? Then the third piece, which is all about that use case around password reset, which is how do we move from support, employee support in this case, to employee success, which is a huge change. 

[00:31:50.630] – Toni Vanwinkle 

That’s the mindset. Then putting this into motion through all the things that we do. We have an initiative, just some initiatives that we have. We have Lab 82, which DWG has written about before, which is an innovation engine about the future of work, where we test things and we fail things and we pass things that may go into production. The reason why Lab 82 is so important is based in a general philosophy from the founder of Adobe, which is great ideas come from everywhere in the company. So could we have this place where people come, they test out technology, and they say, This is wonderful, or they say, This is awful, and that helps me make decisions about what gets promoted to production. And it actually saves me millions of dollars, millions of dollars to ask the question of the humans first versus being technology first. And we furthered Lab 82 by taking it out of the lab environment, and I call it Lab 82 in the wild, is like, let’s bring Lab 82 to other places in the physical environment and maybe in the virtual environment, especially after the pandemic. People were very differently. 

[00:33:21.380] – Toni Vanwinkle 

We have more remote workers. We are working in different ways. Even before the pandemic, as you and Paul know, I always talked about the digital nomad, people who work everywhere, coffee shops, airplanes, airports, et cetera. So we need to open up experimentation through all of those experiences. And so those are some of the things is first, we have to be changed. And I use design thinking as the method of problem-solving, which is very human-centered. 

[00:33:53.910] – Nancy Goebel 

And this is all a very, well, an insightful share. And the fact that the Lab has now moved into the wild, I love the way you’ve coined that as a way of framing it. I know that when others hear this part of the conversation, they will say, yes, but what happens to stability and security in the solutioning when you’re working in the wild? 

[00:34:27.430] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Yeah. You know what? It’s interesting. I think the other initiative, and this one might be germane for your listeners today, is I’m the co-chair of AI at Adobe. And so we’ve started an initiative that is literally a movement to have all of our employees in the organization rethink the way that they work with the use of generative AI. Sounds a little disruptive, right? A movement not a project, not a program, but a movement. The way that we’ve thought about this movement is saying, we want the solutions to be closer to the problem. We’ve set up work streams by persona-based groups. For us, it’s the builders, the people who build software, design software. It’s the customer-facing, those who touch our customers and sales and customer success. We have the enablers like myself and HR and finance. We have what we call the communicators, executives that need to land a message, and professional communicators. We’ve created work streams and we said, experiment with AI and solve problems. Then you start to get this experimentation and you get these wonderful real-life use cases of really big problems that need to be solved, and then you put the wood behind that area. 

[00:36:03.730] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Balancing operations and making sure that this is an enduring change is where it becomes tricky. You need to give people safe environments to experiment. That means rules, guidelines, et cetera, and tools. Then when it graduates, that’s when you start to put the structure in so it’s not disruptive when you roll this out to the entire environment. You can do this with your operations team. You can do this with a broad-based initiative like AI at Adobe. You can do this in your digital workplace environment or your digital employee experience. 

[00:36:41.130] – Nancy Goebel 

Some months ago, I heard the CEO from Avanade say, either be the disruptor or be disruptive. 

[00:36:49.500] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Yes. 

[00:36:50.160] – Nancy Goebel 

And this is the perfect example of how to think about this movement that you’re creating. You’re building champions who are disruptors and leveraging AI, not only to get tasks done, but to think about their work differently. And that’s inspiring, empowering, and enabling. And I’m sure if we were to check in a year from now, 18 months from now, it will have spurred more ways than I can think of or we can think of today day around how work has changed inside of Adobe. 

[00:37:33.870] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. 

[00:37:38.250] – Nancy Goebel 

We’re coming down to our final minutes together, and I have to do a little bit of future gazing with you. Clearly, AI is a piece of the puzzle. But based on what you’re seeing, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about, what do you see as some of the most significant opportunities for companies, digital workplaces, inside of the next five years, 10 years? 

[00:38:12.500] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Well, I’ll start with AI and the AI revolution that’s happening right now. And I believe that this is an opportunity for us all to step in this space and understand not only how your employees can experiment with the technology, but also make significant changes in the way that they approach their work, particularly when you talk about either Adobe’s Acrobat assistant or Microsoft Copilot or the various other types of generative AI solutions that are out there, thinking about this as augmentation in a superpower. Nancy, I’m a visual person, so I think about the movie, Wakanda Forever, and the wonderful scientist that creates her own suit, and that suit has telemetry in it, and it has tools for her to beat her opponent. It has data and analytics and all the things in this suit. This is what I believe generative AI is for us, and that’s what’s on the horizon. How can you create your superhero suit with generative AI to help propel your business forward? Keep that in very practical senses. I love this question about how do you disrupt while you operate? That is going to be the challenge for people. This is what I invite folks to do as they’re disrupting themselves, we’ll pull from the dialogue as disrupting themselves is bring strategic partners along with you. 

[00:40:07.200] – Toni Vanwinkle 

What I mean by that is, for example, with AI and Adobe, we have privacy, we have security, we have ethics, we have technology, we have the business teams all working together to move the mountain on artificial intelligence together together versus being a sequential line. I think that work environments should think about being more matrixed as they solve problems because they may be able to use inclusive thinking to think differently, to think more holistically. That’s the thing that I believe will help us in the next one year, two, five, decade, is we need to change the way we think about departments and silos. We need to break those down and create pods of innovation that are working on common problems that are relevant to your industry and organization to move it together faster. 

[00:41:22.040] – Nancy Goebel 

So you anticipated what my next question was going to be, which is fantastic, as always, because I was going to ask you to offer a piece of advice for your fellow digital workplace leaders and their teams. You’ve done that. So bonus question is, is there anything you had hoped I would ask you and didn’t? 

[00:41:44.300] – Toni Vanwinkle 

I guess the one question that I probably would have thought you would ask me is, Toni, what inspires you? 

[00:41:56.420] – Nancy Goebel 

Okay, so now, of course, you have to answer it. 

[00:41:58.950] – Toni Vanwinkle 

And It’s such a complicated question for me. I am a naturally curious person, and I am inspired by the funniest things. It could be a movie. It could be one of my one-on-ones with an intern. It could be a walk in the park. But here’s what I have to offer, folks, is find the thing that inspires you to think out of your box. Think out of your box and apply that inspiring thought to one of these innovative experiments and water it and see where it goes. 

[00:42:46.150] – Nancy Goebel 

I think that was the perfect way to tie this conversation together. Toni, thank you for stepping out of your day, and I can’t wait for us to share this conversation with others and to create a ripple effect around inspiring others. Thank you so much, Toni. 

[00:43:09.560] – Toni Vanwinkle 

Nancy, thank you. It is always a pleasure. 

[00:43:20.850] – Nancy Goebel 

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by the Digital Workplace Group. DWG is a strategic partner covering all aspects of the evolving digital workplace industry, not only through membership, but also benchmarking and boutique consulting services. For more information, visit digitalworkplacegroup.com.