The show’s guest in this episode is Christy Pretzinger. She transformed the landscape of healthcare content creation and, along the way, transformed what it’s like to work at a growing agency. As the owner and CEO of WG Content, she has established an industry-leading company that delivers superior content and strategy to healthcare brands nationwide. How did she do it? She intentionally focused on building the business based on kindness.

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Building Better Workplaces Through Kind Leadership with Christy Pretzinger

Hello. I’m Melanie Parish, and I’m excited to be here with you. I’m a coach and author. I create content around leadership, and it’s really fun to be here today.

Hi, I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m the co host of our podcast. I’m McMasters first transgender department chair. I’m happy to be here today.

Well, I’ve been thinking about change in our family as our as we are preparing the empty nesters, and it’s had me thinking about change in a lot of ways, like in leadership, when one person leaves an organization, how the whole organization has to shift, how it sometimes leaves vacant roles, or people have to take up the slack in our family, one of our Kids who’s leaving always feeds our dogs. And so I, you know, I’ve been contemplating who’s going to fill that role. And then I’ve also been contemplating, sort of, as things change, who am I and and I notice that I can choose suffering over my children moving away. I think the other day you said, Melanie, that was the intention was they would grow up and succeed and move out on their own, but I’m going to miss them, and so I’m just thinking about change. What are you thinking about?

Well, we’ve also had some big changes in our department, in our we’ve had changes in our department leadership. We have a new department manager and a new assistant department manager, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about in the context of leadership change is how much the exiting leader should pass on to the new leader, both in terms of structure, like here’s this is how we do it. This is how you should continue to do it. And also specifically in terms of any biases and prejudices that you might have about people in the department, should you say to the new leader, you know, you should look out for this person, because I think they’ll blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I kind of have the hypothesis that if you’ve dealt with it well as a leader, if you’ve had the conversations that you needed to have as a leader, you don’t need to pass the biases and the confidential information onto the new leader. You can let a new relationship grow from scratch.

I think that’s really interesting, because I in my profession as a coach, have to believe that change is possible, which means that change is possible in at every layer of an organization. So the biases or challenges that some one person had in an organization at one point might be different, particularly in your organization, where people spend their whole careers there, as academics, like they, they might, you know, we, people we just met have been, you know, our friends for 20 years.

Yeah. Why are you even having these challenging conversations? If you don’t believe that change is possible,
right? So I think that as leaders, believing change is possible is super important. It’s one of the core beliefs we need as leaders, is otherwise everything will always stay the same and we just atrophy in place.

So do we have a guest today, Melanie?

We do, and I’m super excited about our guest. Our guest is Christy Pretzinger, and she transformed the landscape of healthcare content creation, and along the way, transformed what it’s like to work at a growing agency. She’s the owner and the CEO of WG content, and Christy has established an industry leading company that delivers superior content and strategy to healthcare brands nationwide. And you might wonder, how did she do that? And she’s intentionally focused on building a business based on kindness, so I’m really excited to talk to her about that. She also has an upcoming book ” Your Cultural Balance Sheet. Keys to Creating an Environment Where People Can Thrive”.

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So Chris, welcome to our show.

Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Me too. So why kindness? Why was kindness the stake you put in the ground?

You know, someone asked me if I worked for unkind people, and I had never thought about that before, and I had to pause, and I thought, no, actually, I did not work for unkind people. They were very kind, but the structures within which they worked did not foster kindness. And I don’t think I knew at the time when I had that intention of building a business based on kindness, it was really only over time, and of course, in hindsight, realizing that that is certainly my driver, but my driver around creating a structure, an environment where people can thrive and Where kindness is a core value.

And how would you, how would you define kindness?

Oh, that’s a good question. How would I define kindness? One of the things that that I say is that you know, we all know, you know you shouldn’t assume anything, but I always tell anyone if you’re going to assume anything, assume that the other person has good intentions. And I that’s one way to to foster kindness. It kind of gets you out of your own story, the head the head game that you’re the story that you’re telling yourself in your head, and puts you into a different space where you can assume that the other person you’re talking to, even if you are at cross purposes, that both of you have good intentions. I think that is a demonstrably kind thing to do. I don’t know, I’ve never really actually thought about how you define kindness, but there’s, there’s so many things about it. You know, our values are, we are empowered, curious, kind and fun. And what’s interesting about that is, I don’t know that we’ve ever defined that each one of those words, but I will tell you that they have remained constant. Our values have and that I look at them as a thread that flows throughout our organization and upon which all decisions can hang. And so whether it’s leadership or whether it’s someone who’s working directly with one of our associates or with a client. When they’re making decisions, especially about something that might be somewhat difficult or challenging, they always have those values in mind and think, Well, how can I do this in line with what our values are?

When I became department chair, I was I was told that I’m responsible for the department’s culture. I’m wondering, how, what’s the secret for a new leader coming into an organization? How? What are the practical steps, or the can you offer some advice? How do you, how do you create the culture that you’re looking for?

Yeah, that’s an excellent question, and it’s, it’s definitely a long game, isn’t it? It’s not something you can just do with a, you know, with a snap for for new people. What one of the things that I say about creating a culture, and this may sound like it doesn’t go together, but really, I think that self awareness cannot be overestimated in terms of importance to setting the tone for a culture, because in my organization, I say that I cast the vision for the vision for the culture. I think that that’s important that a leader cast the vision, but then you have to have an environment where the people that you are leading can actually live out that culture, because they’re the ones who make it what it is. I frequently say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and I was listening to you all talking about change and people leaving, and things like that. And I often say that, you know, positions can be replaced, but people cannot. There’s a special magic that each person brings, and if they leave, it will be missed. That position may be replaceable, but that special magic will always be the same. I think, in terms of for newer leaders coming in to set the culture. Another thing that that is can be, it sounds easy, but it’s really, really challenging, is to be vulnerable, and you have to determine your own level of comfort, you know, with with that vulnerability, but, but what I have learned in my experience is that if I’m willing to be vulnerable as a leader, for example, not always having the answers to everything, or even just admitting my own foible in a situation that you know something when you’re just a little bit vulnerable like that, it allows other people to feel safe and allows them the permission, gives them the permission to be vulnerable in return, which then helps Build a relationship that isn’t transactional. It’s actually really a rich relationship, because you get to know each other a little better.

I’m struck as a woman by this idea of kindness, having you know, I think we all, at various times in our lives, were told, be nice. Oh yeah. The. Difference between kindness and niceness, and there’s some little smattering of like, and what does it mean to be authentic within those two so quite enamored of this thought. Because absolutely, I love the word kind. I like trying to be kind. I do not like trying to be nice.

And in fact, I’ve said many times over the years, don’t mistake my kindness for weakness, because they are not, you know, they’re not. They’re not mutual, exclusive. You can be kind and also very strong. Yeah, I think that for me, when I when I think about the word kind by itself, like I do use the word love about my employees, because the definition of love is genuinely wishing the well being for others, and I genuinely wish the well being for everyone who works with our organization. I think that that is an important piece of building a culture people know that that they matter to me, their their hopes and dreams and their lives actually matter to me. We talk about work life balance, not, not, I’m sorry, we talk about life work balance, not work life balance. And we also, this is an organization of all women, although we have associates that are contractors, there are men in that part, but all the employees are women. And it wasn’t my intention to that just the company used to be called writer girl. So I think that partially attracted women to begin with, but, but I think that the thing that I wanted to do when I was building it, thinking about kindness, was that I had just had my son. He was probably about three, four years old when I started building the business, and I really wanted to share my experience of being able to do meaningful work and still be around for my child, still be an active and involved parent. And I also wanted people to be treated like adults. I didn’t want, you know, the women to have to ask permission to pick up their child from school or to a doctor appointment. You know, we are all grown ups, and you can manage your life effectively. That’s not up to me to give you permission to do, to do your life. And I also know that that I wanted it. I see certainly in corporate America, there’s still, even all these years later, there still is a brain drain from corporate America of women when they have children. And I think that is just absurd, seriously. I mean, I know, in my case, you want something done, give it to a busy mother, right? They just get a lot of things done. That doesn’t mean that men don’t I mean that I am not in any way, shape or form, denigrating that at all. I’m just saying that I see this brain drain, and I saw an opportunity, and thought, well, I can. I know, these people can do meaningful work, and still, you know, work full time, get all of their work done and still, you know, still parents, so that’s always been kind of a driver for me, too, is to enable people to have a full life, whatever that looks like, but still do meaningful work.

Yeah, that connects to the you were making comments earlier about whether a person is kind or whether the systems and processes allow kindness is that the kind of thing you were referring to when you were talking about systems and processes?

Very much. And what we also do, I always say, in our organization, we engineer the processes and the structure to allow for the magic of the weaving of the tapestry that is the culture. Our mission is actually we build relationships one word at a time. And so we do that. Obviously, we’re a writing organization. Principally, we do a lot of other things too, but that’s that’s words are our stock and trade. And so we build those relationships actively with one another, with our associates, with our clients, with our clients, target markets. So that a lot of it’s very, very relational, and so allowing to your point. Mel, the question about the the the kindness is that structure, the way that we are, what we actually have a pod structure, but then we have engineered specific meetings and different things that we do to allow the two to work together, so that they’re not working in isolation, and that, you know, one time we did find out, a few years back, we did something with the pods together, talking about a recent project they worked on, one person, one pod, and one from another. Ended up they were like, wow, we were living parallel lives and didn’t even know, and like, well, we got to share that, because you could be helping each other, right? That that makes everything better. So then we, you know, we look at that and say, Okay, well, what can we do to formalize this, to make sure that we don’t have these silos going on, and that, in addition to sharing the the work information, that you can build relationships across those that pod structure and the structure as well.

I’m curious about this, the the title of your book, your cultural balance sheet. What does that mean?

In an organization which are familiar with it, called Entrepreneurs Organization, and it is a global organization in, like, I don’t know, 70 countries, something like that. And it consists of entrepreneurs, business owners. And so I we have these small groups. I have a small group here in town, and. And I several people in my particular it’s called a forum. In my particular forum, have had successful exits out of their business, meaning they’ve either sold to a publicly traded company, or they’ve gotten PE money, or whatever they’ve done. And so, you know, we were talking about that, and there’s a lot of conversation as business owners, around valuing your business, looking at EBITDA and all those kind of things. And we were having that conversation, and I said just I was thinking out loud, and I said, it’s, I mean, of course, I look at my balance sheet, but I said, it’s almost like I don’t look at my business through the lens of a balance sheet. I look at it through the lens of a cultural balance sheet. And so a friend of mine was there, and he’d been urging me to write a book, and he’s like, there’s your book title. And I was like, Okay, that’s a great idea. Great idea. So I thought, well, how do I build that analogy? So started thinking about it a lot, and I figured that that would be something that anyone with financial responsibility, who also has cultural responsibility would understand that balance sheet, you know idea. And so when I started thinking about it, I thought, well, we can outline your assets pretty easily. We know what those things are. Obviously people, number one asset, your organization’s values. There’s a number of different different assets. The thing that I discovered, as I was pondering this and thinking about it and trying to figure out how to frame this was when it comes to cultural liabilities. The interesting thing that I found is that these liabilities can be turned into assets if you put both intention and attention toward them. So I’ll give you an example of that I talk about like, about your values, that your values are an asset, that you have, that they should remain constant. The expression of them may change, but they should remain constant. And then I go into liabilities and say, so a liability is rigidity. Well, I just talked about, don’t change your values. And now rigidity is how does that work? So the thing about rigidity, you know, if we ever hear ourselves saying, well, that’s the way we’ve always done it, and we need to keep doing it that way, that’s when you know your little spidey sense should go off, right? But if you become too rigid and you are not open to new ideas or new ways of doing things, that shuts everybody down. I always say that, you know, we have two years in one mouth and use them accordingly. And I always think when I’m in a meeting that I already know what I know, and especially as the leader, it’s important for me to, you know, quiet down and listen to what other people have to say. So if you have an intention of being open and you give it attention, because if you have an intention and you never give it attention, nothing happens, right? You have to pay attention to your intention. So if you have pay attention to that being open, and if you are noticing some rigidity, and you work to change that, then that actually becomes an asset, because you have turned into an open hearted leader who is open to others ideas. And so I kind of talk about a lot of different liabilities, that if you, if you give them attention and have an intention of making them into an asset, you can actually do that. And then the equity, the cultural equity, is the culture itself that you have built and the psychological safety that you create for the people you lead.

I think that’s really interesting. It it there’s, there’s something that you said earlier about the system holding the kindness that reminds me of, sort of Toyota, Toyota, the Japanese efficiency that always says that you don’t want heroics in the organization. You don’t want one person who has to go above and beyond. You want the system to hold the way that work is done. And so those two sort of aligned for me, and I thought they were really interesting. It was interesting to think of kindness, and how you structure an organization around kindness, to do the same thing.

You know, it’s interesting. Sometimes I feel like I have to define it by what it’s not. And I’ve heard some really interesting stories. And someone shared a story with me once that they were a manager, they had a team of people, and they worked at an organization that they had to track 40 hours of time a week. They didn’t have to bill it, but they had to track it. That’s reasonable. So her team was doing that their their their production was good. Everything was fine, but the they had to the people who were tracking 40 hours a week, they couldn’t be put on a performance improvement plan, because they weren’t doing anything wrong. They, along with this woman, the boss, had to go meet with an HR representative to see how they could do better. So the implication was that they needed to be working more. And this woman who’s sharing this is very kind person. She hated that she didn’t want to go into those meetings, and I highly doubt that the HR person wanted to do that either it’s icky. You know, nobody wants to do that kind of thing, and that that’s what I mean by a structure that doesn’t foster kindness. There’s probably nobody that wanted to go into that meeting. I don’t know who’s brilliant idea that was, but it’s not.

And the idea that you’re working 40 hours a week and somehow are supposed to be more once you’ve tracked it.

You know, that’s like anything else. It’s actually compared to bankruptcy. It happens slowly and then all at once, right? And that’s exactly what has happened to Boeing as they implode. And they were all thinking, yay, look how great we’re doing. Our shareholder value is through the roof. Meanwhile, you know, it was coming apart, literally at the seams, you know?

Well, and I think if we want another example in that industry, Raytheon buying Hughes Aircraft is quite similar, like I’ve heard that, yeah, they, they sold their assets. And so it’s a very similar story as well.

I mean, you know, again, who am I to say how everybody else should run their business the way I want to run mine. And the thing that brings joy and meaning to my life is that connection and enabling people, you know, you know, leading a horse to water you can’t make them drink, but creating this environment where people have access to tools and all sorts of things that can help them be better people in their own lives, which, of course, then makes them better employees, but also helps make the world a better place, right? Nobody likes mean people. You know, let’s, let’s be self aware and try and be kind and and, you know, I see, especially in the world in which we live at this moment in the United States, that you know, if your neighbor’s house is burning down. You don’t say, who did you vote for? You say, How can I help? That’s who we are. And so I always try and think about that in terms of a driver for for how we work with one another, and how we how we relate to people.

Do you have any thoughts on how you would measure success in this goal of having a kind organization?

One of the things I talk about in the cultural balance sheet, or cultural balance sheet, is that, as you all know, turnover is a hidden cost on a balance sheet doesn’t show up anywhere, and it’s very expensive. I mean, every time study organizations, like a whole library has walked out the door, right? And I’m happy to say that in the 20 years I’ve been doing this, I think I can count on less than one hand the number of people who have left. And in fact, one of my HR person frequently says, If someone which I hadn’t left a long time, but I think, I think we had a contractor who was like, taking a full time job or something, and she said, Well, we’re not breaking up. We’re just seeing other people. It’s kind of an interesting way of putting it, but interestingly, I think everybody who has left keeps in touch with us. Sometimes they still contract with us, even though they’re employed elsewhere, because it’s not transactional, it’s it’s relational and and they enjoy the people that they work with. So I would definitely say, Mel, to your question, that looking at your turnover is you have, you know, low turnover, and you have people who are engaged, who want to protect the culture, who live it out every day. I think that’s really important. And I think as a leader, it’s really important, at least from from where I sit, my experience of this is for me to keep my eye on that so, like, I’m not in the day to day, but I sit back and if all of a sudden I hear something, I’m like, wait a minute, that sounds like it might be a problem. And so, you know, maybe I dig a little bit deeper. You know, as somebody like, like, I honestly don’t believe and I check people every once while, we just had a company wide retreat. So I was kind of talking to people about said, you know, I’m not in the weeds, working with all of you day to day, but it feels like this is not a place where you would hear an employee bad mouth another employee, another employee. And they were like, yeah, that just doesn’t happen. And I’m like, well, that’s really good. I’m happy to hear that. So you know, again, the joy that we all felt when we came together, and whenever we come together, we’re a virtual company. A lot of people are in the same city, but there are people you know, different places across the country. And when we all get together, it really is palpable. It’s it’s that, that palpable experience of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, of all those people coming together, and that that feels like success to me.

How can people find you, Christy?

I’m very easy to find you. Can go to WG content.com and just you can see our team, and I’m right there. There’s a little video on the homepage about who we are and why we do what we do. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can also just Google, Christy Pretzinger, I’m way too easy to find. You know? I should figure that how to hide myself, I guess, but not really. So, yeah, I’m definitely available on LinkedIn and through my website.

Sounds great. And when, when will your book be out?

We are looking at a date in November.

That’s great. That’s amazing. Congratulations.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Well, I really appreciate you all having me. It’s been a pleasure talking with you as well.

Thanks for being here.

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Christy Pretzinger

Christy Pretzinger transformed the landscape of healthcare content creation and, along the way, transformed what it’s like to work at a growing agency. As the owner and CEO of WG Content, Christy has established an industry-leading company that delivers superior content and strategy to healthcare brands nationwide. How did she do it? She intentionally focused on building the business based on kindness. And that approach has proven to be good for people and the bottom line.

Over time, Christy discovered her true calling: to create a workplace that nurtures personal and professional growth — and help other leaders do the same. She’s a popular guest speaker for events and podcasts, always ready to guide audiences on how to grow leaders and build inclusive workplaces. She’s been featured on numerous podcasts, including From Founder to CEO, Her Million Dollar My$tery, Lead Like a Woman and Smart Business Revolution. See for yourself how Christy is reinventing how businesses evaluate effective leadership, how employees can contribute to success and how everyone can win — if you start wit.

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