This episode features an interview with Olga Skouteli, Head of Culture and Engagement at Lilium, a high-growth scale-up revolutionizing aviation. Olga specializes in developing and delivering engagement, internal communications, and Diversity and Inclusion strategies. Olga previously served as an employee experience consultant for global organizations like Rolls-Royce, Visa, and Nestlé where she transformed their culture and employee experience to drive business results. In this episode, Amanda and Olga discuss breaking down silos, nuances of language, and their hopes for internal communications in 2023.
This episode features an interview with Olga Skouteli, Head of Culture and Engagement at Lilium, a high-growth scale-up revolutionizing aviation. Olga specializes in developing and delivering engagement, internal communications, and Diversity and Inclusion strategies. Olga previously served as an employee experience consultant for global organizations like Rolls-Royce, Visa, and Nestlé where she transformed their culture and employee experience to drive business results.
In this episode, Amanda and Olga discuss breaking down silos, nuances of language, and their hopes for internal communications in 2023.
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“I would like to see communicators be part of the conversation and the decisions, not only the conversation after the decisions have been made. Because, this is the power of communication and creating culture and building engagement and inspiring people, and there is so much potential in there. So, I think the trend I would like to leave back, is this trend of coming to communications just to communicate. It's about understanding that communications is much more than that, and the language and the words is just one aspect of it. Engagement is much more than communications, but communications can drive engagement.” – Olga Skouteli
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:49): Olga’s background
*(04:58): Segment: Story Time
*(06:54): The nuances of meaning behind language
*(16:11): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(16:49): Indications of working in silos
*(23:11): The do’s and don’ts of breaking down silos
*(25:37): Segment: Asking for a Friend
*(25:57): A trend Olga is looking forward to leaving behind in 2022
*(28:02): How Olga gets better at her job
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Links:
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Olga. How are you?
Olga Skouteli: Hi, Amanda. Very well, very well, and very happy that I'm here speaking with you.
Amanda Berry: Thank you for joining me today. I'm really glad you're here. I wanna first start off and understand more about you. Will you tell us about your career journey and how you got to where you are?
Olga Skouteli: Yes, of course. So I've had a quite squiggly career journey, or swi journeys, shall I say.
I started academically from law. Completely different environment, completely different area. And then my passion for communication brought me into marketing. So I started first from external communication, digital agencies, direct to consumer marketing, and after that I moved to internal world. If you want the employee experience in town, communication, change management, and helping.
People navigate through any type of transformation and change, which is where I've been the last 10 years. Really, my most professionally formative years as I like to call them, have been in London, which is where probably I picked a bit of this accent that you're hearing originally come from Greece. I then moved to London for my masters and I ended up actually making this switch in my career into marketing then.
Amanda Berry: Wow.
What did you focus on in your law, the law part of your career?
Olga Skouteli: So first of all, it was a foundational kind of law degree, my LL B as we call it actually in grace in Athens. And then I could see already signs that I wanted to somehow switch a bit and I went into media law, intellectual property and tried to explore that area.
Amanda Berry: Oh,
that's fantastic. Well, you're head of culture and engagement at Lilium, and I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about Lilium and what you do.
Olga Skouteli: So Lilium is fascinating
place with her very, very interesting vision mission. So first of all, it's a startup. Scale up high growth becoming publicly listed company we listed in NASDAQ a year and a half ago now.
So has already you can see, has had an amazing journey and a very interesting progress. What we do is we are building the first electric vertical takeoff in landing jet, the first electric jet essentially. So we are revolutionizing aviation, which is essentially how. Move. So we are in the area of transportation in aviation, and what we have been through as a company is we moved from being 400 people when I joined to being 900 people, which is where we are today.
And from a local startup starting in Munich to an international company, having 62 different nationalities, being in four different locations around the world and having experts from all over the world. So we've been. Quite a journey. Constant transformation, I wanna say, and a constant really evolution of who we are, what we do, and how we do it.
Amanda Berry: I wanna
follow up a question about that. You said it's a vertical takeoff jet. Mm-hmm. , just, can you explain what that means? I'm just very curious.
Olga Skouteli: Yes, of course. So essentially the takeoff and lending of it is vertical. It doesn't have the runway in the same way that you know the planes to have. Right. You know how they're gonna move on the runway until actually they go up.
So that means, Space to operate, essentially to go up and down, and it's just different technology in that sense.
Amanda Berry: Wow, that's amazing. That is amazing. I can't wait to keep an eye on that. We're gonna move into our first segment story. Time
to,
you've
just mentioned. Career background. You started in law, then you're drew into marketing. What got you an interest in internal communications culture, employee engagement, like how did you go from law to internal communications?
Olga Skouteli: So let me maybe break it into what got me into internal and what got me into communications.
So what got me into internal, in the world of employee, if you want employee engagement, I think first of all, I was inspired and intrigued by that start that I had actually read. I think it was a Gallup start actually, the 85% of people not being engaged into their work, not being engaged with where they are.
And I remember even. What a waste. What a waste for businesses. What a waste of energy. Of talent, of skills, because how much engage, inspired, fulfilled people can do wonders. And so I was really inspired by all this untapped opportunities that made me feel that I have to be there. There's such a big opportunity to reengage people with the business they've joined with, the industry that they've selected to work in with the people that they want to do.
And then the second part is kind of the communications, what broad region communications. And I think the more I'm reflecting on that, the more I think it's the love I have for the power of words, how strong words are. Words do matter. And I, I feel that in my core first words do matter because they evoke emotions and emotions inspire behaviors and behaviors essentially create a reality.
So this is why words matter, and I think this is probably something that I, uh, Had also as a law student about the importance of the words, importance of the nuances of your speech and what you say. Let's
Amanda Berry: break that down a little bit. Lillian's a, a global company, right? You said from 400 and 900 folks and the different places it's located.
I know this is an issue with tons of internal coms, people probably listening this and HR and just companies in. You have employees all over the globe and that that brings a lot of opportunities and some challenges. And you mentioned nuances of words, right? We talk about different components of this, but that nuance is such an interesting idea, right?
Because when you have these nuances between different employees who maybe geographically located, or for whatever reason, these nuances, but they occur and it isn. Everyone doesn't speak English. I wanna be clear to our listeners that this isn't, if you've got employees in a different country and you primarily speak English, this isn't really what I'm addressing.
It's really that idea of like meaning behind those words. This lost in translation. So this is really focusing on when there's language and the meaning of a word for one group means something different to another group. So have you experienced anything like that at Lillian?
Olga Skouteli: Yes, absolutely and some very interesting area for me to explore generally for a professional perspective, but also from a personal perspective because my own cultural background is quite diverse in the sense that I grew up in Greece.
I then moved to London with sometime also being spent in France, and now I'm in Germany. 19, six or two different nationalities. So I myself see this, feel this and observe this around me. So it's a really interesting one. First of all, the fact that we're talking about it is so important. It's important, the way I acknowledge it, this cultural differences, that language and the words is just one way to.
Just one manifestation of those cultural differences, right? There are so many other layers of it, but language obviously is our tool to connect, our tool, to communicate our tool, to work really and to interact. So that's why it's probably the most prominent and the most obvious. I think first of all, it's about understanding it and acknowledging it.
And I think the second thing, which is absolutely critical about asking, I think in. In the professional world, the business world, there is one thing that I'm missing quite often, which is the curiosity to ask questions and the humility that also this needs and demands, right? As a prerequisite, you need actually to have this humility of understanding that you may not know everything or you may not understand everything, or you may understand something different than what is meant.
So it's about asking the question. Being aware that things that you say might. Different things to other people and ask the question to check that what you said has been heard the way you've intended it. I have some interesting actually, examples about words that were meant in a different way, but I've realized through observation, talking with people that maybe they didn't land.
I remember this word, hustle. Other words at some point actually used a specific time that we were going through some change actually in our company. And remember it came from a couple of our leaders. And you know how quickly some words get picked up by other people and you hear them from in one meeting and the next day you hear them in three more meetings and you realize that, yeah, this is the viral power of words, right?
So there was this word hustle that came up. Like
Amanda Berry: hustle culture, you gotta hustle, you gotta get this done quickly. Okay.
Olga Skouteli: Exactly, exactly. It's interesting, as you say, it's a bit of American way, which I think it Ds a bit more, but again, not putting labels, it just came up as a word. And as a European myself, I could tell that this is not a word that we are comfortable necessarily with.
We didn't know it, we don't understand it straight away. So I started actually hearing it around me and I could see people actually not feeling necessarily actually. Comfortable with it. They weren't sure exactly what we mean. There was a slight, slight kind of, in a way, aggression within it. That wasn't what was intended.
What was intended there was about taking ownership and taking responsibility and do things on time and take ownership of what you have to do, which is absolutely healthy and something that every business needs. Right. But that small word was landing in a different way for people. So I think it was through observation and discussion that we very quickly suggested actually, okay, let's change it.
Let's break it down and understand what is that's behind it. Let's unpack it essentially. And this is, I think, where the nuances are coming because every word has so many things behind it, and we can choose something else. To try and test. How
Amanda Berry: do you discover that? I mean, I feel like in internal comms or anyone who works with leaders, when we come up with new values, I know that happens.
It's happening a lot or rebranding companies and you come up with a word. It could be, and innovation is a value or hustle or kindness. How did you get to the point where you've understood that like, well, it means something different here, but help me understand how we can work through and make sure that we're being really inclusive and thoughtful when we're communicating.
Olga Skouteli: First of all, that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful question by itself to all have it all the time with us de despite the environment that we operate within. Obviously when you have six internationalities, you have to have that front of mind, right? You don't have the choice to. To think about it, but I think this is something that does worth keeping in mind always, first of all, is about acknowledge the fact that not everything means the same to everyone.
And again, this is not only based on the countries or the nationalities or that type of diversity. It could be like a. Word that just triggers someone, or a word that does just does mean something different depending on the technical background that people have. Right? Another buzzword of these days actually is the buzzword of Scrum, right?
It means something different in software engineering, but then Scrum has been used extrapolated from that environment and being used really everywhere. Scrum, even in, I dunno, hardware and even in culture, we are using actually ology here and there. So it's about acknowledging it and. Knowing, being aware awareness is number one.
Number two is about asking the question, and I keep coming back to it because that is, I think, a very big theme of everything that we do around communication that we do around culture and engagement. It's about asking the questions and testing and testing it with people and. As an internal coms person, and I have engagement within everything I do really, and culture as an outcome of everything.
Communicate about, we have our test beds, we know our influencers, we know our barometer. I love some people, I should call them. You're a cultural barometer. I know that if something doesn't sit well with you, it might not sit well with some of the people and try to challenge our own blind spots, so people.
Come from a completely different side of the business or people who come from a different age group and just test it. And I think observation is key in everything we do as communicators, I think observe how people played back to you. I remember one advice that I had got from one of my directors years ago was that drop the word and.
Stakes, it should come back to you at some point through this whole kind of chain. At some point you should hear it somewhere, you should see it in a deck. You would see it in an email, and this is how you understand that something is, has landed. If he doesn't come back or he comes back distorted, then you understand that something hasn't been translated correctly.
And then also through stories. If you ask people, how do you experience innovation within our company, or we talk about collaboration, what does collaboration mean to you? That's another interesting one. Collaboration, I think from, it's not only cultural, it's definitely us organizational from different organization means different things.
People think that they have collaborated by having sent an email or by having said, oh, I'm doing that, and that for them could mean collaboration. So asking the question on how do you experience it, what does it mean? Can you gimme an example? This is, I think, how to bring out real impact of the words that you've used.
Amanda Berry: Yeah,
it's
Amanda Berry: interesting. I, I was just speaking with someone at a conference you just reminded me of, of something that they were talking about, about how. Sometimes when, when these conversations need to happen, right? And sometimes that if leaders come to employee and say, hustle's gonna be one of our values.
Let's just, let's say this is an example. How do you all feel about it? And you may have those feelings, but because people don't wanna speak up to leaders, raise their hand and go, I don't really like that. It doesn't mean the same to me, that it may not get recognized. It's more when you get those peer to peer conversations.
Interesting. Have you experienced anything like that as you've been working through some of these language nuance issues?
Olga Skouteli: Yes, of course. And you know what? It's so interesting that you're saying that because everything is in the power of the question, how you ask questions and you yourself actually driving the podcast, you know that better than anyone, right?
That the quality of the question almost determines the quality of the answer. So rather than actually asking how do you understand it, which sounds a bit like we testing people, right? Almost like there is a right or wrong answer. It's more. From your experience, how does it feel? So start actually bringing in this more open conversations that allow space for this difference to be accepted.
I think the space is very important. I think for any type of diversity to be unlocked and used related, it's. Biggest potential. I'm gonna move
Amanda Berry: us into our next segment. Getting tactical.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out tactics and be perfectly honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much. Here I am in charge and trying to say, why did you sleep through tactics, tactics.
Amanda Berry: I wanna continue this, but I wanna think about it a little bit broader, right? Cause beyond language and meaning, barriers are created, and this can create silos and it can be based on geographical location. You can have silos based in departmental silos. You can have teams within departments that are siloed, and just this idea of silos and sort of creating barriers.
Around groups of people, but I wanna dive into what happens when silos are created and sort of back up and then get some advice from you. So can be created within physical walls. Now that a lot of us are hybrid and working from home, it's interesting to see how that's been changing, but I'm sure a lot of our listeners can identify with that.
You know, you can have leaders in a silo, right? The executive team can be a silo
Olga Skouteli: and dunno any company really that's not risking creating silos as they're grow. As they're growing geographically, as they're growing in terms of number of people, silos is the number one. I think risk as you are growing that you cannot put all of your people in one room and talk to them at the same time, so they end up actually, Creating their small teams, right?
Silos is a loaded word, but in reality, what they say is, is groups. People actually tend to form. Groups, tend to form communities, and communi already has a much better ring to it, right? Because then you feel like there are people who, they feel they belong, they feel they can be heard, they feel have some similarities.
I was reflecting on silos recently when I was doing a communications plan. It's an interesting concept because we often traditionally think about silos from a geography perspective, from technical roles versus non-technical. For example, you have your silos, like your divisions, right? Your departments, but especially in small companies and in my last company, has been a very obvious and prominent because we were small and we became.
Big. Well, we grew to fold. That's what I mean, right? Someone might be hearing this and thinking, well, 900 is not that big. Well, it is when you started from 400 and I realized that there are so many silos that are being formed also based on the proximity, for example, that people have to the leadership or proximity to the situate or proximity to the founders or silos based on.
Volume of information that people hold. So you have actually silos being formed by people who know and people who don't. People who know much more because they're closer to the decision makers and people who know much less. And I think for me, this is a very interesting balance actually, to create the equity in the information, give access to everyone, to the same amount, information that they need to get their job done and stay engaged, stay inspired, and stay connected with the mission of the.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I think anyone who's worked at even like a small company or a startup that has seen it grow right, can say, oh man, that's not how we used to get information. The CEO would just come out with in our seating area and just tell us and happen once a day, and now we have to wait for a monthly right town hall.
And I, I just don't feel like I know what's going on anymore. That's such
Olga Skouteli: a good point. And comes with emotions, right? It comes with a lot of emotions because part of it. Practical as in I don't get to have access to the information as quickly as I used to, but part of it is I feel a bit outta the loop where I feel outta the circle or out of the club.
I'm not as in as I used to be. So again, there is another acknowledgement that this comes with some emotions in this is part of the journey and this is part of the change and the change curve that multiple people may be.
Amanda Berry: Absolutely. I mean, I've seen exactly what you're saying, right? Employees can feel very frustrated.
It is a form of siloing, right? When you've had access to information and, and now something's happened, and it doesn't have to be something bad, but something has changed and now you don't have access to that information. People can get very frustrated and think that something's wrong or they've done something.
But let's talk about that. So, are there indications that when you look at some company, you go, oh, everyone here works in silos. Like, what does that mean? I
Olga Skouteli: think actually working in silos can take different shapes and forms and you observe it as you move through the organization. Obviously there are the silos that people feel and they sense that they don't get information from other teams, or they don't know what other teams are doing, or they don't even know what the person next to them is doing.
So you realize that people. That way they feel probably more segmented essentially in their own teams. But the results of the macro view, when you see a company moving in different speeds and you see this one department moving quickly and doing great things and smashing their goals, and you see this other department being slow and probably they're engagement dropping or feeling disconnected or feeling they don't understand exactly.
Where the company's going, how it's changing. One of the tools that I use for any type of understanding how people feel and getting a bit of a temperature in their fillings is obviously an engagement survey, and doesn't have to be a full body engagement survey, like one of the long ones can be just questionnaires or just.
A quick pulse essentially to your people. But I think once again, it goes down to the leader understanding if they're making the connection they need to make a company's a system, right? And if it doesn't work as a system, then you will see some holes in that. It's about kind of aligning with people around you, and it's about actually getting different inputs from everyone.
So I think. Can be identified, can be seen essentially, and spotted straight away already. When people don't work together, don't ask each other. Yeah, that's
Amanda Berry: exactly what I've seen. Right. Just terrible alignment. I, you know, you hear stuff like, I didn't know that was happening, or I don't know what's going on in this department.
And employee satisfaction goes down exactly what you're saying. That engagement goes down. And
Olga Skouteli: the interesting thing, this is the. In a way this could be seen as a negative result from growing and expanding and having many more people actually around you. But there's a beauty also in having many more people around you and growing, because I know we, you spoke about the frustration, for example, that people may have that.
I knew what was happening every single day. Now I don't, I'm expecting the town hall that's happening every three months. But there is a beauty in this kind of expansion, this growth in the sense that you have many more people to give you input on things. You have many more brains to get insights from.
You have many more skills essentially around you that you can tap into. And I think we tend to forget that we tend only to see this as another hurdle or another obstacle, and we tend to forget how the beauty.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, absolutely. Let me ask you one internal comms person to another, and a lot of our listeners come from internal comms.
What are some things we can be doing to help break down these silos? Like help walk me through that process, the do's and don'ts and maybe your top three things that people can do to begin to break down some things. Cause you hear this so much work in silos, we need to break down. What are some true and true solutions that work?
Olga Skouteli: I think as with everything is always, there are two pillars. There is a system that you create, so you need to design the right system. Wearing my marketing hat, really it's all about this behavioral change that we want to inspire. So you need to build a system to nudge people to collaborate. Talk and get to input into each other's work.
And there is the other side, which is the behaviors. So you need to role model these behaviors and once people see how collaboration looks like and how breaking silence looks like, people don't understand. It's quite a consulting jargon, break down silos. People don't break down silos. People just. Talk to each other or people just meet people from other departments, or people just say, oh, I know Jenny from finance.
Do you know her? People just say, you know what? I joined the football team and there's so many people that had never talked to in the canteen. So people don't talk in the same way. They don't use the same terminology that we internal comms experts do. People just live their lives. So I think it's about creating a system that enables this collaboration to happen or sometimes.
Not only encourages, but asks for it to happen. So cross divisional or cross trans team, essentially teams that get together the solve an issue or they get together and they pitch something to a client and bringing people together from different departments and teams in order to work on. The same goal.
Part of this, of course, is the overall goals of the company. There is one goal for the whole company that the company can feel that they rally around this one goal. I already say that a lot of times when we set divisional goals, we already create silos by just creating. Goals for each one of the divisions.
So it's much better. Of course, the central goal will be translated in divisional ones, but it's so much more uniting to have one goal that everyone is working towards. Right. And the second piece about the behaviors, again, as with everything, it starts with leadership. The more. Leaders interact, connect, communicate, and align together the more their teams feel empowered and inspired to do the same.
Let's
Amanda Berry: move into our last segment, asking for a friend. I was asking for
Speaker 1: a friend. Hey, asking for a friend's.
Amanda Berry: We are leaving 2022 and heading into 2023. What is something that you are looking forward to leaving behind in 2022?
Olga Skouteli: Amazing question. I think communications as a title doesn't do justice in what we do. I think we need to reclaim our title and reclaim what is that we do in a company. So, although it's not a trend, so it's not answering really your question about a trend per se, I think it's more like a micro trend of them.
I would like to see communicators be part. The conversation and the decisions, not only the conversation after the decisions have been made, because this is the power of communication and creating culture and building engagement. It inspire people and there is so much potentially there. So I think the trend that I would like to live back is this trend of coming to communications just to communicate, and it's about understanding.
Communications is much more than that, and the language and the words is just one aspect of it. Engagement is much more the communications, but communications can drive engagement.
Amanda Berry: Oh, I love that answer. I absolutely love that answer. I think that's a really good one, because I think what we've seen in 2022 is there's this huge focus on culture and experience and having us really lean in to work with employee experience, culture and engagement, HR leaders on a bigger level to help set the tone for a really good employee experience.
What sets companies
Olga Skouteli: apart? It's all about connecting the dots, and that's what communicators are fantastic in doing. Connecting the dots and seeing an inconsistency between what is being said, but also what is being done and reflected back. And at the end of the day, a strong employee experience is an experience that's consistent, that creates this safety, creates that inclusion, creates that space for people actually to come in and.
Oh,
Amanda Berry: I have one more question for you. What do you do to get better at your job? I mean, you've got a lot of great advice. You have a lot of wisdom, you have a lot of experience. There are listeners out there who want to learn more skills and better skills. What are you doing to learn and grow and get better at your
Olga Skouteli: job?
Well, I throw myself into a lot of different things. I'm always raising my hand for. A lot of different things that can bring me into new communities, talking with peers, attending webinars, attending workshops. I also love self reflecting, but also getting feedback in order to reflect on what I do. What works, what doesn't work, what could be done better, could be done differently.
That's a passion point of mine. Also in my personal life, this kinda self development, this piece of like reflect and do and talk and read and exchange and get other people's thoughts. I really throw myself in different things, events, situations, but I also. Ask a lot of questions and I want to have people around me to just talk and exchange.
Amanda Berry: Although this has been so much fun. I've really enjoyed having you here today, and I hope our listeners pick up a lot of good advice and ways of thinking about silos and language nuances. It's been incredible. Before I let you go today, we let our listeners know where they can find.
Olga Skouteli: Well, I would love to connect with people on LinkedIn, Olga Skouteli, on LinkedIn, and I think that the platform, I keep myself quite open and busy there, so you'll see me posting a lot of things.
So please reach out and I would love to connect. Olga,
Amanda Berry: thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun.
Olga Skouteli: That was fantastic. Thank Amanda.
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