Episode Overview
Susan G. Komen, the world’s largest breast cancer research and advocacy organization, underwent a bold transformation under former CEO and now Honorary Vice Chair Paula Schneider. Guided by kindness, urgency, and her own experience as a breast cancer survivor, Paula led Komen through a period of deep cultural and structural change, including navigating COVID, consolidating 63 affiliates, and shifting to a fully remote model. Key initiatives include:
- Kindness-Driven Leadership
Paula fostered a culture where empathy and accountability coexist, showing that kindness can be a strategic leadership asset — not a soft one. - Radical Restructuring
During COVID, Paula made high-stakes decisions fast — unifying the organization, closing offices, and streamlining operations to ensure mission continuity. - Clear Strategic Alignment
With a one-page strategy document and full organizational transparency, every employee could see how their work connected to the mission. - Culture in a Remote World
Komen scaled culture rituals like “skip-level” chats, onboarding copilots, and whole-company “weeks off” to maintain human connection and psychological safety. - Investing in Mission and People
Paula championed increased investment in metastatic breast cancer research while also embedding strong mental health and support systems for staff navigating emotional, high-impact work.
Komen’s evolution under Paula’s leadership shows how nonprofit organisations can lead with care, move with urgency, and build cultures that reflect their external missions.
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Read the Top Takeaways
Read Paula’s top takeaways in this time-saving guide.
Full Transcript
Luke: Hello and welcome back to Culture In Action. I’m Luke Fisher, the CEO of Mo. Today’s episode is a special one. I’m joined by Paula Schneider, Honorary Vice Chair of Susan G. Komen. They are the world’s largest breast cancer research organisation and I’m sure have touched the lives of many of us. With $3.5 billion invested in breast cancer research, advocacy, and support, Susan G. Komen’s impact is undeniable.
But what makes this conversation truly powerful is Paula’s deep personal connection to the mission of the organisation. As a survivor and now leading the reshape of the future of breast cancer care, she was just amazing to spend some time with. Paula shares how she transitioned from a high-profile career in fashion retail to leading a mission-driven, not-for-profit organisation through profound cultural transformation. We talk about leading with kindness, building resilience during a rapid period of change, and the unique rituals that help Susan G. Komen maintain a human-first, high-impact culture in the face of adversity. Let’s jump in.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back and thank you again for listening. I’m here with Paula today. In my research, I’ve learned that they are the world’s largest breast cancer research organisation. And some numbers that I was looking at beforehand are just astronomical, like $3.5 billion in investments into breast cancer research, advocacy, and support. And not only that, what brings us together is that you are a Top Workplace winner too. Therefore, you are an absolutely perfect candidate to be talking to me today and I can’t wait to dig into the conversation. So thank you for joining. Paula, do you mind setting the scene a little bit, telling us a little bit about you, a little bit more behind the numbers of the organisation too?
Paula: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me, and it’s lovely to meet you and the audience here. I’m very pleased that we have won these awards, which has been organic. We didn’t set out to win awards. We just set out to make a really nice workplace and I think it’s happened, so that’s great. I have been in this position for going on eight years now. This is my first time being a CEO of a philanthropy organisation. Before that, I was in the fashion industry for my whole career. It’s been a rather dramatic change from one to the other, but I think that the tenets of working with staff and motivating people are kind of the same regardless of whatever industry you’re in. You just try to do it with transparency and with kindness, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy or it’s not without accountability.
Personal Connection and Leadership
Luke: Yeah, indeed. Completely. So let’s open up, just to learn a little bit more, if you don’t mind, about what brought you to the organisation and if there’s any sense of personal connection or sense of purpose for you, because what you do must connect to many.
Paula: Yeah, and it connects directly to me. My mum died of metastatic breast cancer. I was diagnosed 18 years ago as a fairly young mum with breast cancer. I had triple-negative breast cancer, which just means it’s one of the most difficult types of breast cancers to treat. It means this treatment doesn’t work on it, that treatment doesn’t work on it, and that treatment doesn’t work on it, so therefore it’s triple-negative. It has a higher mortality rate than most of the other types of breast cancers, but I’m here and it’s 18 years later, so it’s very, very motivational for me. The challenge is that breast cancer is not just one disease, but for me, it was a very personal journey.
I was the CEO of major fashion companies my whole career. When I made this change, I was actually getting an award for being one of the top female retailers in the country. I got up on stage to give a speech about empowerment. It was supposed to be about retail, and I had nothing. So I got up and I talked about being the most empowered when I was the least physically powerful, when I had breast cancer, because when you’re used to being large and in charge, now you can’t even make it to the bathroom. People step up. People at work stepped up massively for me, my support system at home, people took care of my children, people cooked our meals. They did everything they possibly could. It’s really hard to accept that as a leader, but once you learn to accept it, it’s a really beautiful thing.
I was giving that speech, and a friend of mine who was in the audience got an email during the course of this—I went and sat down next to her afterwards—from a recruiter that was looking for a new CEO of Susan G. Komen. She said, “Oh my God, would you ever consider doing that?” And I said, “Hmm, yes, I would.” That was a Thursday. I gave notice to my job, which was a publicly traded company, because I couldn’t get an interview as a publicly traded company. But I decided that if something hit me that strongly and meant that much to me personally, that I wanted to give it a shot, whether I got the job or not remained to be seen because I hadn’t even had an interview yet. But it worked out and I’ve been here eight years and it’s the most fulfilling opportunity and role that I’ve ever had.
Luke: It’s lovely to hear that it matched the expectations that you believed it would do in such a fortuitous situation in finding the role. How does it influence your approach to leadership? There is a level of empathy that you must be able to feel that is unfathomable for somebody that hasn’t. But how does it shape how you lead the experience that you want to create for your people?
Paula: I don’t know that it’s much different from… I mean, it is the softer culture for sure. When you’re in the retail culture, it is much, much harder. This is a culture where many of our employees have had breast cancer or certainly have had it in their family, which has motivated them to work for us, right? So there’s a mission element that goes into this. But I think leading with kindness, regardless of where you are—and kindness does not mean necessarily softness, right? Because I think that there’s… we are very, very regimented in figuring out what are the strategies that we want to accomplish? How do we articulate those strategies? How is there inclusiveness in those strategies and building them from the get-go, and then the execution of those strategies? People are happier. And I found this out early, I’ve run a lot of companies, but people are happier when they understand what is expected of them and they can sort of have a playbook.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: And a playbook doesn’t mean you don’t bob and weave because every business bobs and weaves, especially in crazy times, like with, you know, geopolitical things and all the things that are happening around us. We have to move and change and evolve on a regular basis. But at least you have a game plan that you’re starting with, and everyone understands what the rules of the game are and what’s expected of me. That’s probably… I know we score very high on that because our strategy plan is built on to one page and then there’s all the backups for it. But if you’re not doing something every day when you get up on that one page that tells us what the strategies are for the business, and you don’t layer up to that, then you’re really not fitting in with what we have to accomplish here.
Luke: Yeah, that makes a huge amount of sense. It makes me question… you’ve been through an enormous amount of change as an organisation, doing some of the research for the conversation, like through COVID there was this massive consolidation. There’s quite a lot of transition that’s happened organisationally, and I would love to get your thoughts on leading with kindness. The softer culture that you described, but this need to support continuous change, which is sometimes fine functionally to understand, but emotionally, when you’re in a kind culture, how do you really create the transition with the pace that you need in that kind of environment?
Navigating Change and COVID-19
Paula: My background is a turnaround person, right?
Luke: Okay.
Paula: Once I did one turnaround, then other people called me for other turnarounds, and all turnarounds don’t work, right? they’re challenging, and a lot of times women will get those jobs versus men because they’re not guaranteed outcomes that are good. But I will say that we went through a massive restructure. We had 63 affiliates. If you think of them, it’s kind of like franchisees. The affiliates each had their own operating and governance boards. So we had almost a thousand board members, and then we had headquarters. That was the business structure when I came in the door, and it was never a great structure because you can’t control your destiny and it was really, really challenging. But we had great people in the field and we had great people at HQ. Instead of being the queen on the hill and taxing the folks that were in the affiliates, I wanted to work together to make sure that we were in a position where we were able to get everybody involved. And we were moving towards that.
Then COVID hit. This was literally March 23rd, the first day that we went home. By April 10th, I had a full-fledged plan in front of the board, which meant moving out of 63 offices, stopping all of the affiliate agreements, and moving into a single incorporation, cutting down the staff by almost a half. Because at this point you think about it, I had no idea how long COVID was going to last. We all had those conversations, “Hey, I’ve got a holiday planned for July, maybe I have to move it to August.” But we had to look at it as a long-term event.
Luke: Years, yeah.
Paula: Yeah, which you have to as a CEO and say, “Okay, what if this lasts for a year?” And each of my affiliates that were in different regional areas had a certain amount of savings, but 75% of every dollar they raised was raised by bringing, you know, 10,000 of their closest friends together in a race or walk, which you could no longer do. During that timeframe, we had to pivot massively. So we did. I went to every one of the boards and had a conversation with all of them and said, “This is what we’re doing.” I didn’t say, “What do you think about what we’re doing?” or “Will you go along with what we’re doing?” Because, you know, they’re all adults, they could all make decisions because they were a governance board. And out of 63 affiliates, 59 came with us. And four, you know, spent down all of their money and rolled up their tent and went home. So, it was a pretty good hit rate. It was really impactful because then we were able to bring some of that money into Komen and use that to pay for the employees that we brought in. All the children we adopted during the course of that and made it. We are still transitioning while we were building up the revenue, but we had this incredible spend because you can imagine what happened to most charities during the course of COVID. It was a really hard time. The majority of charitable organisations have three months to live of runway.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: We could not not be there at the other end because the work that we do is so incredibly powerful and no one would’ve been there to pick up the pieces.
Luke: It’s especially when you talked earlier about having playbooks, right? At that specific time, it was very hard to have a playbook. So what can you do to maintain this strong sense of organisational culture? Or maybe in hindsight now, what were the things that really worked?
Paula: Leadership is incredibly important through a crisis, and a lot of the things we established during that have continued to today. Every single week I did a PSA for my folks, you know, because we went home too. Now we are a virtual organisation, I mean, completely virtual. We gave up all the offices because, again, we didn’t know how much money we were ever gonna raise again, and I couldn’t afford to spend $4 million of hard-earned donations that people are giving us and wanting us to be fiscally responsible for, on rent, right?
Luke: Yeah, we did the same.
Paula: Yeah, so we just stayed home and we have been here ever since and we’ve worked into this new cultural norm and it’s working really well. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. People have dispersed to the four far corners of the earth and it’s all working fine. But you know, you really had to communicate and over-communicate. Our fiscal year-end is March 31st, right? So March 23rd was when we had our last board meeting. I took the budget and just ripped it up and said, “No clue.”
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: “I will have a clue and we will figure out a game plan.” Then it became more tactical as opposed to anything long-term. This was just, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do.” We moved very quickly. We figured out ways to do walks and races and things like that that were important to us from a fundraising standpoint, where it was individual, right, and it was online. It was a virtual experience.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: Not the greatest experience, but an experience. And people who still wanted to be involved with us had the opportunity to stay involved. Then once COVID died down, we had half as many employees as we had had before. But I had to do that and felt really horrible about releasing people into the wild when there was so much unemployment going on, but… greater good for the organisation, because this is an organisation that does greater good for the world. So I had to make those really, really tough decisions. Everyone took pay cuts during the course of it. And the beautiful thing was everyone took pay cuts. And I promised them, if we were going to make the year, which we ended up making the budget for the year, I gave everyone back what they had given in pay cuts.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: I made them whole again. So there’s a trust level I think people have because I communicated this throughout, you know, “Look, this is a world of crazy right now. We don’t know what’s gonna happen and no one has a crystal ball.” You just keep reiterating logic. I live on the side of logic. You know, even when I talk to all of my employees, they get it. When we’re concerned about people having the ability to give, people are worried about tariffs, they’re worried about so many different things. It’s challenging now. You know, we are not implementing pay cuts, but we’ve held on pay rises and doing all of those things. But I talk to them about it and say, “Okay, you’re watching the news, you’re seeing what’s going on, so what would you do if you were me? That’s what we’re doing,” because I’m gonna err on the side of logic. I get a lot of head nods and people go, “Yeah, I get it,” because we have to protect this entity at all costs because of the important work that we do.
Luke: Okay, makes a huge amount of sense. And maybe just talk to me a little bit about… I always think of culture emerging to a place in which there are some golden rituals, some ways in which you can tie together this organisation that used to be 63 separate things and now is one organisation striving behind the mission. What has anything stuck from that COVID time as you kind of learned, unlearned what you did before, and relearned how you build an organisation that feels like it’s in it together, like people are included in decisions still? What stayed and what have you learned and optimised since?
Paula: Oh, well, there’s many things that stayed and there’s many things that we’ve learned. We changed the entire organisation. We changed the structure of the organisation, which changed all of the fundraising mechanisms. I will say that if you think about it, we had 63 organisations and we had HQ. We didn’t have the ability to see what was happening in all of the 63 organisations. That brought in some of the tech, right? You know, I have dashboards now.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: That I can press a button all day long, every day. We use Salesforce and it does an amazing job for us. I can tell you where we are, where we stand with every single one of our areas of fundraising, which there are many, and where we stand with our mission delivery. How many bills we have passed. I mean, you know, I have dashboards for everything now, and it makes it so much easier to run the business so that if you think about it being disparate and with all of these different mini little organisations, there was also a lot of waste, because I don’t need 63 marketing people, right, because we do world-class marketing from HQ. And now everyone is Komen, so we are one Komen. And, you know, no one from the outside knew how this worked. The other part of it is that we couldn’t help our constituents and our stakeholders nationwide because the problem is if you were in… we had a San Francisco affiliate, let’s say, and you lived in Sacramento and you had a diagnosis, the San Francisco affiliate might not have reached up to Sacramento. So we weren’t able to help you. We’ve used technology in figuring out ways to help the community writ large. So now the whole United States, if you think about the way that we do mission delivery, it’s not office by office by office anymore. It is… we set up a patient care centre. We have a helpline. We had 60,000 people that called last year. We have psychosocial workers that help them regardless of where they live. You could live in Tacoma, Washington, or anywhere in North Dakota and we still are covering you and we’re still taking care of you and we’re still helping. So it was a macro, massive shift, but you know, we got buy-in on all levels, right? Because we had to change everything all at once. We went virtual, we got rid of the offices, we went to less staff and then built back up where we needed it. We had to be really, really strategic in figuring out which direction we wanted to go. What was the most important. So it’s… and all ideas were welcome. However, it is not a total democracy, right?
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: You know, and you learn that as you go because everyone wants to do everything for mission in this organisation. But you know what? No money, no mission. So you may have to spend more of your time on the fundraising than you do on mission delivery, just so that we can make sure, because we can always find really, really relevant ways to give out money to help people, but we gotta make it so there has to be a focus. And that’s, you know, the way that we work is we come up with what are the focuses. And then those are allocated in a very specific order. Words matter on how we describe them. And then those are the ones that get more of the funding, more of the time. It doesn’t mean that any of them that make the list are not important. It’s just that the importance is different. We changed it to where mission became top of the house as opposed to one of the initiatives, because everything we do is in service of the mission.
Luke: Okay. And you’ve talked a lot about how visibility, metrics, dashboards has enabled you to enhance how you run the business. Talk to me a little bit about what shapes how you lead the people, any of the anchor points or ways in which that so you have a dashboard for the business, tells you all of the numbers, all of the fundraising activities. But how in this constant state of change that we live in, how do you… what are your same frameworks, the dashboard, the click of the button, that gives you that sense that you’re leading the people and you’ve got the right feedback loops?
Leading with Servant Leadership and Authenticity
Paula: I have terrific people that work with me because I, you know, again, I always watch that Undercover CEO show.
Luke: Yeah, I love that too.
Paula: I think it’s so entertaining because if I went into the mission area and tried to pretend that I was going to be the one that was gonna lead the, you know, what research projects we were gonna do, I would be an abject failure because that isn’t my area of expertise, right? So I have subject leaders in each area, and I trust them, and they do their roles and they do a great job. Because, you know, I’m not a doctor. I came into this with a fashion background and a retail background.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: A business background for sure, but not anything to do with philanthropy. So, you know, learning how to do this really means listening and understanding how things work and then giving people, hiring the best possible people, mentoring them, and giving them the opportunities to do their job. You will find, if you went out to my direct reports, I am there to help them as a servant leader, but I’m not there to guide. You know, I could no more guide our IT structure than I could go build a house across the street. I mean, you know, it’s…
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: I know what I don’t know, and I’ll give you a cute story. When I first started, we have a scientific advisory board that’s made up of the top docs of the world. Clearly I’m not a doctor. And because I came from a completely different industry, one of our heads of our scientific advisory board was a doctor who led Stanford Oncology. I’m sure all of those scientific advisors, when I was hired and they saw what my background was, were thinking, “What is Komen doing? Hiring this woman from the fashion world to come in and run this organisation when she has no medical background other than having had breast cancer?” And I went out to dinner with him and during the, we were having a lovely time, and I was even thinking when we went in, “I don’t know what I’m gonna have to talk to him about.”
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: It’s not… we’re from different worlds completely. So we were having a really nice time and he’s a lovely, lovely man, and he was saying to me, “Paula, you know what would be great is if I… I’d be happy to teach you all of the tutelage on all of the different types of breast cancer,” and there’s hundreds, “and all of the, you know, like the glories of the cell cycle.” And I stopped him and I said, “George, let me just tell you what that would feel like. It would be like me learning Chinese and then having to negotiate with the highest levels of the Chinese government. They would know I don’t know what I’m talking about because of my background, so why don’t I do what I do best, which is bring the smartest and brightest people together, ask a lot of questions and get people motivated and moving in the same direction. You come with me to these meetings where they’re gonna want to talk about the glories of the cell cycle that I know nothing about. You have street cred because that’s what you do and that’s who you are. Let me do what I do and I promise you I’ll do that well.” I know what I don’t know. I’m very honest and very authentic about doing that, and he came with me to so many meetings and we have this fabulous friendship. Whenever anyone is asking about, you know, like a drug that was created for, you name it, he’s right there to talk about it because I would never be able to learn that much. I wrote this imposter syndrome blog once and talking about David Grohl and how he doesn’t have to know how to play every instrument in the band. He just has to lead the band. And…
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: That’s my type of leadership.
Luke: That’s… it is an amazing way to think about it, because often you find without the experience, you try to just be the person that you think that you are meant to be, rather than the person that you can deliver the absolute most value in the team. In the context then of a top workplace, you have an exceptional team around you, but you have to lead and set the direction of travel for the culture. How does that work? How do you say to the team, “Okay, you are the best at this, but this is the type of organisation we’re gonna be in,” and how did that shape up?
Paula: You know, it… we were located in Dallas. I moved out from LA to Dallas when I first started, and we had a physical location. The South is very lovely. I mean, people are so nice, but this was like a southern organisation where there was a lot of posturing and, “Oh, well I understand what you’re saying,” but nobody would really challenge each other. And I would watch these meetings and I would see that somebody would be saying something and other people’s body language would be like this, and they weren’t picking up what the other person was laying down, but they weren’t confronting each other about it. I would say, “Okay, you obviously don’t agree there, so tell me what you’re thinking, because I don’t know enough to interject here to say anything differently. So let’s have this be a safe space, right? Where we can discuss anything and have any kind of opinion and you gotta challenge each other because otherwise we’re never gonna grow and we’re never gonna learn.” I, I say that when I first got there, we were in massive silos, not even… and then we got into the same river and it took us a while to get into the same boat. And then once we got in the same boat, it took us a while to row in the same direction. A lot of that has to do with creating an infrastructure around it where people feel safe about strategies that you’re gonna implement and being invited in at the very beginning to talk about it. I can be… I poke and a lot of times just try to be provocative just to see if people will push back and boy, now it doesn’t matter. I’m one of the team.
Luke: Comes in waves, yeah.
Paula: Now we’re way the other side of that, whereas like, “No, Paula, that’s not gonna work.” “Well, tell me, tell me why,” and I appreciate that. Because again, you know, I’m eight years in, but I’m still relatively new to philanthropy in general, and certainly to the mission delivery side and all of the things that have to do with research and public policy and advocacy. I’ve learned a lot, but you know, now we are… I think we’re a very cohesive team and I think that shows. I do think also that being completely virtual has added to our ability to get great talent. You know, we have… and I can’t tell where it comes from. Because it is a, you know, a good workplace and it’s kind. We are very, very transparent about how we pay and what we do. Like we are in the 50th percentile. There are 50% of people below us, 50% of people above us, and we do benchmarking every year. And we tell people, “Look, this is your range for what this role is. If you, you could go out and make a lot more money, you could go out and make a lot less money. But these are the things that we also do. We have a generous 403(b) plan, which is a 401(k) plan for for-profit businesses.” One of the best things that I ever implemented, which has been fantastic, is two weeks off a year where everyone goes… the whole business other than…
Luke: All at the same time.
Paula: Yeah. We’re… a week of Christmas to New Year’s, right? So everyone has that off and a summer break over 4th of July, and that has been unbelievable. How much wonderful feedback. That’s probably been one of the main reasons we’ve gotten some of these great workplace things because people are so excited that they can go away. No one is bothering them. It’s not like they’re gonna be totally buried when they get back. And we plan for it, you know, everyone knows it’s coming. So, you know, you have to get everything done before the week of the winter break and you know that you’re gonna just be able to go and recharge. I get so many thank you notes and, you know, “This was wonderful. Thank you so much.” So I mean, for people that are worried about productivity, that increases productivity. So we just went to unlimited time off, and I’m pretty sure that people will take about the same amount of time that they did before, but I want them to feel like if you need time to recharge, that you should have it. Especially when you are dealing with life and death situations on the daily, you know, and you hear about so many people… I speak with every week to people that have just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and you know, and this seems to be getting younger and younger and younger, and women in their thirties, which… you know, it takes a toll because I have two daughters that are, you know, in that age group and it’s scary for me to think about that, and you know, I’m in it to win it for them, which are illustrative for all of the other young women out there. But more and more young women are getting diagnosed than ever before. And these are the reasons that it is so important for people in our world to take a little bit of time off and recharge. You meet people all the time, some don’t make it. I have had a lot of friends that have passed away in the last eight years that I have become very friendly with because of, you know, where they speak at our walks or runs or our galas and it’s heartbreaking. Because you’re on the front lines. So we have to be a kind culture and make sure that people are okay and make sure that our mental health is okay. We offer a lot of services around that. We also have a lot of people internally that work for us that have had breast cancer get diagnosed. We’re 90 percent women to begin with. So, you know, we have a lot of babies and we have a lot of…
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: You know, and we, we… when our general counsel had breast cancer last year or a couple years ago and we all surrounded her and took care… I mean, if you’re gonna get it, this is the best possible place you could work.
Luke: I can imagine.
Paula: But it is a very soft culture where people care very much about other people.
Luke: How do you consciously equip people to deal with those situations, whether it’s like team fortitude and resilience individually, or whether it’s those emotional moments where there is loss? Do you playbook that stuff? Is there a way or does it happen organically? How does it… has it formed to… sorry.
Paula: It is more of an organic moment. I mean, we’ve had people that have lost people in their family as happens, right, in any workplace. And we surround them with love and the ability to take as much time as they need and everyone else who has reports up or whatever, steps in and really does the right thing for the organisation to make sure that that person is taken care of and it becomes organic, you know, and it’s just how we roll.
Luke: Deeply rooted in kindness, I guess, ultimately is the…
Paula: In… yeah, because you care about…
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: So it’s… that’s it. There isn’t a playbook and I don’t think there ever really could be because that’s just part of culture that it evolves and happens that way. And I will also say celebrating small wins for us is big. It’s really big. I mean, we have kudos that we give out. We have, you know, we ring bells when people get good donations. We, you know, we try to do everything that we can to motivate people. We have game days and like play bingo and you know, I mean, we do all the things that you could possibly think of doing when you are a virtual organisation. You know, we have a fantastic head of human capital management. And she comes up with all of these great ideas. And what also works for us is because we are virtual, but we have events in 70 cities around the world.
Luke: To give people the chance to pull together and be in physically.
Paula: Exactly, right. And when you go to one of our events, if you go to a race or a walk or a gala or anything where people have the opportunity to speak and you see the humanity that we affect and how many people are there, you could go to our Rome Race for the Cure. There’s 120,000 people that show up for that. It’s the biggest event in Italy in the whole country.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: It is… just watching that humanity, you cannot sit there without tears rolling down your face to say, “My God, look at how many people we affect.”
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: You know, the statistics are one in eight are gonna get breast cancer and it’s getting younger and younger, and you know, this is very challenging. It’s the number one disease that women fear most. So there’s a lot for us to deal with at work, but when you go to one of those events and you feel it, it fills your cup. And then…
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: The opportunities. So we really encourage people to get together with other people in their areas and, you know, I’d love to bring my whole staff together. We have not been able to do it since COVID because it’s just so costly and, you know, it’s hard for us to justify bringing everyone together. Ultimately, I’d love to be able to do at least every five years so that people can get that camaraderie. But I…
Luke: Well.
Paula: Do a pretty good job with what we’re doing now.
Luke: One of the things that often happens when you transition to a virtual environment is that you lose that sense of just like information through osmosis, that sense of people feel informed. They’ve got that deep sense of connection, that wins are visible. You know, I imagine a world where before you had 63 different environments in which there’s wins happening every day, but nobody knows they’re happening, and then you transition to a virtual environment and there’s a big risk that there’s just a void.
Paula: Yeah.
Luke: How do you ensure that doesn’t happen?
Paula: You can’t. I think no matter what, you’re going to lose some, right, and let’s be realistic about it, because at the end of the day, you have to understand that when we’re not as prevalent with each other in community, there’s some things that are lost. Right. You know, I always talk, I personally, I speak with every group in the company, probably twice a year. I do just a chat.
Luke: Yeah.
Paula: What I do during those, it’s skip level, which means I’m going down a level, but I get to everyone in the organisation. Like I’ll take like the whole IT group or the whole legal group or whatever, you know, all the groups throughout the organisation. And I will start it by, you know, then you’ve got 20 people on the screen, right? And no one wants to say anything at first until you can start. And I use humour and try to get people to open up. And some groups are right out there and some groups take a while. But I start with the P&L and I go through, “Okay, this is where we are. This is the budget. This is where we are. These are the decisions that we’ve made. This is what’s happening in the macro environment. This is what’s happening with charitable giving to begin with.” So it’s, and then I stop and say, “Okay, now I’m going to take a sip of my water and you’re gonna talk to me, because otherwise it’s gonna be really quiet in here.” And then someone will start, and then we will go from there. But, and people are used to this now because I’ve been doing it for a while, for years, but it’s really great for me. And I think because then I can say, “How, you know, how do I help you? How… is there anything?” And I let them each say what they do and I encourage them to tell me, “Is there anything that I can be helpful with? Because if I don’t hear it, I don’t know it. And if I don’t know it, I can’t help it.” We do that regularly and I think that’s a really, really important step. Because, you know, it’s a lot of time that I spend doing that.
The other thing I know that we do an amazing job on is onboarding. And it’s hard to onboard virtually. It just is. We assign a copilot, and again, this is my HR team that figured all of this out, and they’re rock stars, so we assign a copilot to everyone. It’s not somebody in their area. It’s somebody across the organisation, right? And we make sure that we have regular touch bases with them for the first month that they’re there. Any questions that they ask, they ping, and there’s an open-door policy. And then we do a new hire quarterly coffee break and it’s with all of the ELT. So the ELT gets to say, “This is who I am, this is what I’m about, this is my fun fact or whatever. This is how long I’ve been working here.” Then they get to introduce themselves, talk about their background and all of that, but we do that quarterly so that we get to meet everyone who’s coming into the organisation. Again, it’s a, you know, there’s a time allocated to that, but I think it’s really important to allocate that time and you gotta make the time for the people that work for you to get them motivated, to want to work for you, and to give them a feeling of that there’s a culture. And whenever I have my skip levels and I see that someone’s, you know, I always ask, “How long have you worked here?” And then they’ll say, if they’re saying six months or whether they’re new or whatever, I’ll say to them, “Okay, so tell me, how was your onboarding? And you know what? Anything you would change, anything you would make better?” And you know, I’m sure there’s some managing up, but I’m hoping that, and some people will say, “Well, I…” overwhelmingly it has been incredibly positive in figuring out ways to onboard. So my team has done a really good job of all of the steps and processes. Plus it’s also an organisation you have to learn a lot. Like you have to learn about breast cancer. You have to learn about all the fundraising mechanisms. And because everyone here is a fundraiser and we also have a team, a national team where Komen is a national team. So we put our money where our mouth is. I’m the captain of the team and every year we have about 30 companies or so that have joined our national teams. And that’s a great way for them to engage with Komen because it’s employee engagement for them. And, you know, we have been the top fundraiser with Komen with our little 400 people compared to some companies with thousands of people. But it’s been really great for us because we can say, “Well, look what you can do if you just, you know…”
Luke: Put mind to it.
Paula: You engage.
Luke: Yeah, indeed. I have two questions left before we go into a quick-fire round. One of them is just threads of observation. We’ve only spoken for about half an hour and I can see that there is candour, transparency. I can see that there is core humanity and many of the things that you are saying. I’m really intrigued, just given that kind of the role that you found suits you best and this leadership and setting the tone for the culture, how those that sit around the table would describe you and any of the things that you think would, if you were to leave the organisation tomorrow, would be rooted enough that it would feel like a legacy of you in the way that it works, the way that it operates, the unique things that have come as a consequence of that leadership style.
Paula: Yeah. Well, I would hope that authenticity would come out because, you know, I am in it to win it. And again, this is Mama Bear here, and I am literally with my two grown daughters and grandchildren. I want to make sure that the next generation, because it’s my mum, it’s me. You know, I don’t want it to be them that I come to it with a level of urgency and with some business expertise. And I think I lead with humour. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of laughs because you gotta find a way to laugh every single day. And I’m pretty unfiltered and I say what I think. And I poke and provoke, but I do it in a way that people know that they, they’ll look at me and go, “Okay,” you know, and then they’ll do it back. So we have created this camaraderie. I’m hoping that some of the things that we have implemented during my time here, will democratise the ability to do research and help us to find a cure. Or, it’s not a cure by the way, you know, it’s a hundred different diseases. So there’s many, many ways. But Komen has, out of all of the 30 FDA-approved drugs for breast cancer, has been an early investor in 29. So I mean, we are important and I hope that being able to, as a thought leader here and out in the world, speaking my truth about Komen, that people understand how important this organisation is because millions and millions of people would’ve died. You know, and that’s worldwide because the research that we do is for everyone. It’s for humanity. So, I’m hoping that my legacy is that I’ve improved the condition. I’ve made a bigger investment in the metastatic world and in research for metastatic, shifted most of the research dollars to that because that’s the cancer that kills and those people are fighting for their lives every single day. And I want to be a part of that fight.
Quick-Fire Round
Luke: Yeah, it’s amazing. The next question before the lightning round is around a past guest. So we, we will ask you too in a moment, but a question relating to changing culture or what shapes a top workplace, and this one, given what you’ve just said, feels potentially simple to answer. But I’ll give you it anyway, which is, what’s the unique selling proposition for your culture and what’s the thing that sets you apart from any other organisation in the industry, which I think will be an important one for you because there are other people that do a similar thing. So, yeah, what’s the unique selling proposition? What sets you apart?
Paula: I would say it is the kindness that we exhibit internally and externally to help. And that’s what sets us apart. And I know that a lot of other philanthropic organisations have their mission and their kind as well. But for us, it’s really about figuring out ways that we can help people and the kindness that we bring to it every single day.
Luke: Amazing. Thank you. Right. This is the quick-fire bit and then we are done. So we have one tech tool that you can’t live without as a leader.
Paula: Salesforce.
Luke: Perfect. The moment that you look at with the most amount of joy from your career.
Paula: The first day that I walked into the office when I got the job and there was a big pink wall outside of my office and it said that the work that you do here saves lives. It was the onus of responsibility that when I looked at that and I went, “Okay, yeah, this is, this is…”
Luke: Big. This is real.
Paula: In any other job that I’ve had, I would say to people, “Come on people, you’re not curing cancer here. You know, like calm down.” And here I’m like, “Come on people. You’re curing cancer here.” So, and we literally are.
Luke: Yeah, I use that line so often. Like it is not that bad. We’re not, it’s not like we’re saving lives. But you literally are. A thinker, author, or a book that’s influenced your approach on organisational culture.
Paula: Oh, well then I was gonna use something completely different, which I’m gonna do anyway. I wrote a book, a little children’s book called Love Stays Strong. And it’s because I spoke with women who… for women that were under 30 or right around 30 that had small children that had been diagnosed and they had no tools to be able to talk to their children about their diagnosis. And so I decided I was gonna write a children’s book. It’s coming out in September and literally all the proceeds are going to Komen and it’s called Love Stays Strong. So I’m gonna use that.
Luke: You can absolutely use that. A culture trend that you’re most, most excited about right now.
Paula: Honesty, and to have people speak up when something isn’t working. It, you have to… this is much more of an employee-centric culture right now, and it’s happening everywhere. It’s not just here. You know, being able to listen to what people need and what their motivations are and go with the natural flow. It’s like making sure that when your kid gets A’s and everything and gets a C in biology, don’t worry about biology. Go with the A’s because you’re gonna, you’re gonna have a much better outcome. And for me, I want to know what blows people’s hair back and what really makes them excited. And let’s, let’s lean in there.
Luke: Yeah, the magic piece is the strengths and the thing that gives fire in your belly.
Paula: Yeah.
Luke: Cool. One piece of advice that you’d give to an aspiring top workplace, another CEO that is desperate to become a top workplace, even though for you it was organic.
Paula: Yeah, I think it’s inclusivity. It’s making sure, and I, these are sort of pat answers, right, but in my mind, it’s bringing people together to get the best possible outcome. And then sharing, like I share our P&L down to every single person throughout the organisation. If we’re not doing well, they all know it. And if we are doing well, they all know it.
Luke: Yeah, I do exactly the same. And then last one is one question. So we have, there’ll be another guest on, I think there’s one and another one next week. One question that you’d love to ask them, even though you don’t know who they are, about driving culture change.
Paula: How do you differentiate the difference between championing someone and mentoring someone?
Luke: Okay. Yeah, if I understand that properly, it’s about providing the platform for somebody without kind of giving them a steer for how to do that.
Paula: Well, and there’s mentors, which, you know, you can mentor a lot of people, but if there are people within your organisation that you think are fantastic, who’s championing them to move up to the next moment?
Luke: Perfect. Thank you. This has been so much fun and I really appreciate it. We are now at the end, and I leave inspired. I really, genuinely do. Because I think you are fantastic and I think the mission is even stronger, and I hope you don’t mind me saying that.
Paula: Well, I’ll say for anyone that’s listening to this, because it’s gonna be a lot of business people, if you want fantastic ways to have employee engagement, talk to us because we can do it. We can help.
Luke: Yeah. Perfect. Thank you ever so much.
