High Octane Leadership Ep. 166
Turning Personal Insight into Collective Team Brilliance
with Emily Best
[00:00:00] Donald: Hello, this is Donald Thompson and welcome to another episode of High Octane Leadership. I'm very excited about today's discussion, uh, with my good friend, Emily Best, the founder and CEO of Seed and Spark. And we're gonna talk all things entrepreneurship, workplace culture, but we're also gonna talk about their amazing venture of how they're really transforming leadership development while also bringing forward a creative enterprise for creatives in the visual arts. And so, Emily, thank you so much for joining our show.
[00:00:30] Emily: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:32] Donald: One of the things that we like to do in the beginning before we get into these two major topics is I want our audience to get to know you. So whatever you feel comfortable sharing, where you grew up, family background, brothers, sisters, anything that'll help our audience get to know you as an individual, and then we'll dig into some of the business.
[00:00:51] Emily: See, I was born in Stockton, California in 1980. The eighties was a really interesting time to be in Stockton, California. And I grew up mostly in Northern California, Stockton, and then Sacramento. Went to public high school in Sacramento, California in an amazing international baccalaureate program that was really just the effort of some amazing teachers who decided that's how they wanted to teach. And I was lucky to go to this incredibly diverse high school with just like a remarkable academic program that I credit with setting me up for everything else. Because if you know, you know. But one thing about International Baccalaureate Education is that you have to write all your exams. Right? So you'll sit for six hours, then have to write three essays during that time. And I really feel like the ability to just, like, sit down and write something front to back has been the most formative professional tool I've ever been given. Went to college on the East Coast, moved to Barcelona after that to pursue a very short lived career as a jazz vocalist, and moved back to The States and started running restaurants because I had started working in restaurants when I was 16, and I really loved it. And and then I started running restaurants and I learned why most people should not run restaurants. It's a really, really hard business. I was, like, 26 years old, had 96 employees, and was working for, like, the most toxic restaurant owners you could possibly. But I learned a lot about how to cultivate a positive mindset on a pirate ship. So if you don't know restaurants, like, they operate like a pirate ship. The front of house wants it to be busy. The back of house does not want it to be busy because, like, the back of the house gets paid the same no matter what. And the hosts and the bartenders and the servers and the kitchen team, like, they all have different desires, and you've gotta convince them to all sail this direction together without mutiny. I learned a ton during that time and developed training manuals, which sadly, I had to leave behind for the toxic owners who probably didn't implement them after I left. But I I sort of like got into this thing of helping restaurants get from the red to the black quickly through employee led training. It's all about the host, if you ever wanna know the answer to control the flow through the front of the door. Anyway, so, uh, so I did that for a while and then I moved to New York and started to pursue more creative passions, but I was also helping my dad get his own consultancy off the ground. By my late twenties, I had had a lot of small to medium sized business operations experience. The last restaurant I had run had like a $56,000,000 a year revenue. When my dad was getting his business off the ground, he is a genius big thinker. He's, like, one of the best strategic consultants in the world, but needed some support on the, like, business operations side. And so I moved to New York to help him. And then I got to basically be a fly on the wall in rooms of the c suites of some of the biggest financial institutions in the world as they were thinking through their big strategic problems. So I learned a lot during that time about strategic problem solving. And my dad's role was always to try to get the room to really take advantage of all of the ideas, perspective, and experience in that room, which as anybody who knows on Wall Street, it's more about power and dominance than it usually is about encouraging diverse thinking. And so it was fascinating to witness him who had gone to boys school his entire life. He's only operated in these, like, very male dominated spaces. Fascinating to witness him navigate that and still get to the best idea in the room, which was just really remarkable and formidable training. I'm now a mom of two, Cody and Mina, six and eight years old. I live outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And I got there because while I was helping my dad get his business off the ground, I was really starting to pursue a career in the creative arts. I started acting. I had a voice over career brief that helped carry me through the launching of Seed and Spark. But I basically got myself caught up in producing because I started acting in theater and I just didn't think it ran very well, some of these productions. And I had all this business operations experience. I remember being like, hey, can I help this next one go more smoothly? Can I help you raise money? Can I help you, you know, put some things into place? And I would learn that that had a title and that's called a producer. And so the thing is, like, the second you get labeled a producer, stuff starts coming your way. Right? Because people don't volunteer to be producers. People sort of become producers because of a set of, like, interests and capabilities that they have. Like, very few people are like, yeah, I always wanted to be a producer. They're like, well, I guess I'm a producer now. So, yeah, I started producing theater, started a couple theater companies, and then produced my first feature film with this incredible group of women I met doing a play in New York. And it was through those experiences that I started Seed and Spark. There was like an opportunity and a moment in technology where this new online capacity for crowdfunding was really empowering artists, but it wasn't connecting all of the dots from the funding all the way through the distribution and connecting things to audiences. And that was the opportunity that Seed and Spark was really founded to create and foster for creators. And now we're thirteen years later, 75,000,000 raised for creative projects, about 6,000 films and shows and books and podcasts and theater productions and dance productions. And we're just launching into the music space today, actually. So, yeah, we have a big announcement later today on Seed and Spark launching into music. And then as you know, we're always looking for opportunities to expand the reach of the creative work. And in 2021, we launched Film Forward, which is the experiential learning platform for replacing, like, boring corporate training videos with learning that's built around the world's best short cinema. That's the fastest I can give you my life story, I think.
[00:07:13] Donald: That is awesome. And I tell you what, I am really excited about digging in on a couple of points. And one of the things that I encourage people to take advantage of is what are the learnings of rooms that you're in even when you don't have that positional authority. And so when you were talking about being with your dad and being a fly on the wall in the C Suite, and then I love this positive mindset on a pirate ship. And what you're talking about, though, is leadership in a lot of toxic environments. Right? How do you create some semblance of unity of mission in moments of chaos and confusion? Right? And so all of this super interesting and and good. I wanna back up just a minute. And if you could give our audience a thumbnail of Seed and Spark because we walked into it. Just give that one to two minute of how it started, why it started, and what it's doing for the creative community.
[00:08:04] Emily: So Seed and Spark is now the number one crowdfunding platform in the world for independent film and storytelling. We have the highest crowdfunding campaign success rate, project size, audience per project. And that's largely because we really focus on the crowd side of crowdfunding. So we really view crowdfunding as a power building tool for creators. My own personal experience was, as I mentioned, I produced this play with this incredible group of women and we were feeling at that time, like the experience we were having of being young professional women working together to make really cool stuff. How we were relating to each other, how we were supporting each other's dreams, how we were, like, really helping one another grow just wasn't represented anywhere in modern media. And, you know, this is, I don't know, 2010 or so. Where are the stories about women friendships that we feel like represent our experience that aren't about women friendships that are broken up over a man or women friendships that are like a side note? Like, where is that really the central thesis of the story? And so we we did what you do in theater, which is, like, we went to the bar after the show and we had a few, and then we were like, we should make a movie, which sounded really cool at the time until they were like, and Emily will produce it. And I was like, wait. What did I decide for? I got super lucky that my dad bless my dad, he's been such an amazing steward in my life. He had just gone to his forty fifth high school reunion. I think he'll be mad if I if that's the right number. I something like that. It sounded something. Maybe it was thirty fifth. I'm not sure. He'd been to this high school reunion and run into a friend of his from high school, this guy Barr Potter, who had been out in Hollywood producing movies for years. And Barr came at it from the legal side. And so he put us together, and I had another friend, Liam Brady, who was part of a really esteemed class in the graduate program at NYU. It was just like a friend of mine socially in New York. And so I got like basically, Liam was going and taking NYU classes and incurring all of that student debt and then coming back and, like, teaching me all the stuff that I needed to know. And then I would call Barb Potter and be like, okay, how do I set up the contracts and sort of professionalize this? And I just pieced together a producer's education, right, over the course of making this movie. And there came a point where we had almost everything we needed. We had raised some money, but we had this, like, one window in time when everybody was free. We were gonna shoot in Maine, in our friend's hometown with all the resources that she could bring to bear with that. And we were $20,000 short and like we were gonna hire people. It was like a professional production. We had like payroll that we had to meet and stuff. And so Kickstarter and Indiegogo were, like, brand new to the market at this time, and they were just starting to take off in artist communities in New York and LA, but they were not widely known at that time. It was very novel. And if I asked any of my friends' parents, for example, if they knew about it, they all said, no. I never heard of it. But we were inspired by it and we thought, I love the idea of crowdfunding, but it doesn't help people understand what the money is for. Otherwise, it's like, send us $20,000 to go to Maine for the summer. Like, that didn't feel like it honored what we were really trying to endeavor to do. We wanted to tell a story that represented women's friendships better than we knew how. We were gonna go to a place where the inspiration from this story was really palpable for the lead actress. And we were trying to do it in a community way in a small town that could galvanize around something like this. And so instead of using Kickstarter or Indiegogo, we made a wedding registry. Like we listed all the individual items that we would need in order to get this done. And my roommate at the time was doing like a front end web development. She helped me build a WordPress website where I just literally listed all of the items and their associated costs and I embedded a PayPal link, which is still maybe the most technical thing I personally have ever done. And we sent it out to everyone we knew and then we posted it on Facebook, which back then was a lot better for networking than it is now. Some of what we were taking advantage of was a pretty special moment in time from a technology perspective when social media was actually social. Social media is now entertainment. It's just television. It's stuff coming at you by professionalized entertainers with marketing in between. Back then, if I liked a post, everybody who I was friends with would also see that post. It worked a little bit more like LinkedIn works now. The last actually social media, in my humble opinion, other than there's some really cool upstart platforms. But anyway, we got to take advantage of this early social media uprising and this thing kind of took off and people were funding our projects based on their own personal interest. So we had a nurse that she didn't just fund the kit. She sent us a medical kit. And a cousin of mine who I wasn't in touch with that frequently was working in, um, outdoor sports warehouse in Tahoe and drop shipped us a case of bug spray and sunscreen. Absolutely the most critical contribution to the entire production, let me just say. And then friends of ours started reaching out saying, hey. I just finished my movie. I don't see these things on your list. And all of a sudden we were like, oh my god, there's some stuff missing from our list. Would you like to if you can just come pick them up from my house, you can have them for the duration of the production. But that extended to a used car salesman in Rockland, Maine, near where we were gonna do this, reached out and said he'd like to read the script and he read the script because we were looking for picture cars. Right? These are the cars that appear as your character's cars in the film, reached out and said, and then he says, these are the cars I think your main characters would drive. And we're like, we totally agree. And then he gave them to us for six weeks for free. So all of a sudden, we had this incredible, like, community resourcing, true crowdsourcing moment and 450 people, many of them strangers to us, contributed to this project not on a major platform, but because they could see themselves making a meaningful contribution to something. We weren't even offering incentives. We were just literally like, we'll put your name in the credits. Right? And then we make this movie and we have the experience of prior to this crowdfunding campaign, I had managed to get my way into the office of some sales agents and some distributors, and they effectively, like, laughed me out of the room with my little independent movie about women friendships. One of them very helpfully said, well, if you could put some lesbian erotica in it, we could sell it. And I was like, sir. And then I realized he didn't mean lesbian erotica for lesbians. He just meant, if you can make this hot for men, I could understand it. And I was like, oh, no. We have to make this movie. Right? We make the movie, and then the very same people who were laughing us out of the room prior to this crowdfunding campaign were interested in offering us deals because all of a sudden, we had all these email addresses and all these different theatrical markets, and we had all of this data and information. And I was like, oh, isn't that interesting? How the power dynamic shifted all of a sudden. And these gatekeepers got a lot less gatekeeper y when I showed up with the data. So the next thing that happened is I got contacted from creators all over the country asking like very informally advising and then a mentor of mine was like, you know, this is a a business. Right? Like, this is a that's a startup is what that is. And so I started working on this idea of an independent media wish list. It's a very bad first name, which would eventually become Seed and Spark.
[00:15:54] Donald: That is awesome. And I can see the producer, writer, storyteller in you because I just was dialed in to that creation story. That is the Seed and Spark piece in Wonderfully Told. And then earlier you talked about, I think you said $75,000,000 in dollars that have gotten to creators back to the data and the metrics. That's really, really powerful. Talk to me a little bit about how you then came up with the construct around film forward and that experiential learning. And one of the things that has got me excited about partnering and thinking about it even more deeply is, one, I'm a leadership development junkie. Like I love thinking about how to build more connected high performing teams. I'm always looking to learn there. And something you said on a previous call that I want to share with the audience is that most tools create individual learning experiences. And one of the critical differences with Film Forward is you're creating a team learning experience. If you could share with our audience a little bit about how that idea created and then some of the business value that you're seeing in the marketplace with these tools.
[00:17:06] Emily: So when we launched Seed and Spark even back in 2012, we knew that there had to be some distribution component involved. And we tried everything. And then we went to Techstars in 2016 and we built out a subscription service where you could crowdfund on Seed and Spark, you could stream your film on Seed and Spark, and we could sell subscriptions throughout that funnel. And it was, like, kind of starting to work. But then by 2018, literally every major studio was building their own subscription streaming service. And if you didn't have b b billions, you were just not going to compete in that space. And that became very clear to us. And at the same time as we were coming to this realization, our creators started coming to us and saying, okay. So we've gotten really good at raising money and building an audience and leveraging that audience to get to big festivals, to get distribution deals. And then those distribution deals market us on social media and stream us on streaming platforms and everything is delivered via algorithm. So we are now stuck in an echo chamber just talking to people who already look like us and think like us, and that's not why we make work. We make work to change people's minds and challenge their worldview and build empathy and and representation and build political power or social power. The idea that you would just go talk to a bunch of people who already agreed with you is not why artists make stuff, and they are willing to take risks on new models in order to accomplish that for the most part. So I can remember exactly where I was standing when I was like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. So I think what they are asking is how do we deliver films to audiences at scale who don't identify as the audience for this work without using social media or streaming platforms? That's a really hard set of questions. Right? And so I went to all my advisors. If you've taken away anything at this point is like, I rely heavily on the advisors in my life, in my sphere. Right? I look to my peers and to my parents and to my parents' peers for their advice and expertise. By this time, I had built a pretty incredible advisory network and I went to all the smartest people I knew. And it was Wendy Smith, who I've known for a long time. She took me to lunch at the Rose Cafe in Venice. I was living in LA at the time. And she said, have you thought about the workplace? The workplace is the most diverse place most people are in their lives. If you could figure out a way to get phones into the workplace, that would be really interesting. And I was like, yeah. I've heard that SaaS contracts are, like, very attractive. That's all I knew at that point. So my senior leadership team and I designed a research project that took us the first six months of 2019. Well, I miss Twitter so much. I used to have a really beautiful organic following on Twitter that was so useful to me. And I sent a tweet out to kick off this project, like, we're looking to talk to DEI and LND leaders. And I got 800 replies to that tweet with either I'll talk to you or I have recommendations for who you can talk to. And we built out this huge spreadsheet and we started setting up thirty minute meetings. And I think we did probably a hundred and fifty thirty minute meetings in this like initial research. And then from there, we did another two or 300 after that. Really trying to get at like it was a jobs to be done interview affected. What are you trying to do that you're not able to do? What tools are you using to try to do those things? And what we heard unilaterally number one, as you can imagine, is nobody likes corporate training videos or believes they are particularly effective. And the industry standard rates of, like, twenty eight percent completion will underline that. That I was hearing learning leaders being like, I know this is a tool and I deploy it all the time, but I hate it. They hate it. Everybody feels bad about it. Like but what else do I have? Right? So that was number one. Wow. Okay. This online learning model is not delivering on the results. It's everybody uses it for checkbox training because it's checkbox training. But, like, what do you really have that's better? Well, what we were surprised to learn was how many people were trying to design storytelling based learning experiences. I bring in a speaker and I pay them $20,000 or I some people were, like, ripping clips of movies off of YouTube, which is, like, kind of illegal. But they a lot of them were really trying story based learning, but they didn't really have a a mode for translating that into sustained behavior change. And that was the thing that everybody was trying to figure out. How do I create sustained behavior change to build high performing cultures? And more broadly, we talk about high performing cultures now. We have the this term psychological safety that can be broken down into component proficiencies in the workplace. Right? Do people feel seen, heard, and valued? Are they able to learn and fail? So have you cultivated experimental mindset in the workplace? Do people really know what that means and how that happens? Can they resolve conflict in a really productive way that builds team cohesion rather than drives divisions and gossip and all of that? Can your leaders really coach talent and do they have the time and capacity to do that? And the answer these days is like, no, nobody has a ton to coach their talent. You need supporting services. So we really started to understand, like, what were these core competencies that workplaces were really driving towards? They were all soft skills and could there be replicable behavior change? And what we heard unilaterally was none of these like one off workshops are going to get the job done. They can create experiences that people like remember and feel good about, but like in order to actually build sustained behavior change, you have to change habits. You have to give people things they can do differently, then they have to get some positive feedback around that, and then they need time to, like, test it with their peers and they need time to work it out. And so we started designing pedagogy method to take storytelling, which we had in spades. So there are hundreds of thousands of new short films made every year. And now normally, Donald, I would ask you the question of, like, how many short films have you seen? But your daughter makes great films. You've seen more than the average bear. Right? But for the most part, I would ask people, like, how many short films have you seen this year? I don't know. I've seen commercials. I've seen sent me something on Vimeo that I really liked. But for the most part, people don't see them. There's this unbelievable untapped resource, and a thousand new short films get made on Seed and Spark alone every year. Um, and we could see that they were going on and winning awards and getting Academy Award nominated and and launching careers for these creators, but the short films themselves were not like an economic asset to them. They couldn't really do anything with them to monetize them or to create the impact with them they really wanted to. And so we thought, wow, I wonder if we could take short films and infuse them into a curriculum to build sustained behavior change. And that was the the genesis of Film Forward. And then we tested it six ways from Sunday from 2021 to 2023. And it was really in 2024 that we figured out this framework and the set of the suite of curricula that we could take into a workplace and confidently say, a lot of these soft skills challenges you're facing, this can help solve for with different learning journeys that involve on platform learning and also live facilitated sessions to put what we're teaching you on the platform on its feet in teams. But that, like, one of the biggest, I think, fallacies of the online learning, upscaling an individual is the same as upscaling a team. It's not. Might be upskilling an individual. It doesn't do anything for team cohesion. So the real premise behind film forward is that having shared experience and being able to reflect on shared experience with watching a film, unpacking and analyzing a film, having a little water cooler conversation around a film because none of us is watching the same thing. Everybody's on different platforms. We're all watching different TV shows at different times. It's, like, really hard for us to talk about stories that we share anymore. And so we give people shared stories to talk about, discuss, reflect on, and then real applicable activities related to each one. And every single learning module has a personal growth exercise, an interpersonal growth exercise to be practiced with one or two other people, and then a team growth exercise to come actually start to practice these things. And that creates a little bit of shared accountability, which is part of why a lot of online learning doesn't get accomplished because, like, who's gonna know?
[00:25:59] Donald: The thing people know about the online learning is your certificate, but they don't experience your changed behavior. I really appreciate so much, like all of what you were describing. I wanna dial back to the construct of psychological safety. And the one thing that you did that I would like us to work with in for a minute is you actually started to layer in specific behavioral elements that people can create and sustain psychological safety in the workplace. Right? So I'm super interested. How did you all come up with that framework? Is that something that is a module within film forward? Talk to me a little bit about that lane of psychological safety, but the unpacking that you did at a pretty granular level.
[00:26:47] Emily: So every one of our learning journeys, it's all soft skills based. And I hate that they're called soft skills because they're the hardest to learn and they're the hardest to change. We have a blog that we call right brain blog because I think it's better to think about it as, like, we need both a balance of right brain and left brain skills to be successful as as human beings, even just to be bipedal. We need both hear and speak language. We need two sides of our brain. So our workplace skills need to be both technical and so social. The right brain skills really require behavioral approaches. And some of that is our friends at August Public gave me this term, which I really love, called dilemma testing. You need to be able to imagine a scenario together and unpack what's happening in that scenario. But everybody has had the experience of doing just, like, sort of broad scenario based training where or, God forbid, they make you, like, act something out. Everybody hates it. It's like spongy and atrocious. But if you watch a movie together, you can talk about your perspective on what happened, why it happened, what should have happened, what I would have done differently, where the breakdown was. How does that mirror what I'm experiencing as opposed to having to, for example, go in and trauma dump everything that's wrong in the workplace and then have to unpack it in this really like emotionally high stakes arena. So it allows us to have an opportunity to unpack some of the dilemmas that we face in the workplace at an arm's length distance where we can still see how differently our colleagues might view a situation based on their positionality. And so all of our training is infused with skills and behaviors around psychological safety. It's just a matter of in the art of civil discourse, we are really focused on emotional discipline, constructive productive conflict resolution, accountability. The actual components that I would say go into day to day really professional interactions that also, by the way, will help you in your personal relationships. From a leadership standpoint, like, you need a framework for courageous decision making that also provides transparency and context to create buy in with your team. And all of this is about how to handle hard things, change, loss, failure, great success very rapidly, but keeping that team cohesion. Because like, what do we do? Work. Why is it called work? It's hard. We're all trying to do hard things. So if you don't have a framework for how to do hard things together, you're just gonna sew division. That's antithetical to getting the work done well. Right? So we think about these specific sets of behaviors and the paradigms in which they have to be deployed. Right? Courageous decision making also takes like really good context setting. It takes a very clear understanding of who are the decision makers and who are the stakeholders, and what are the differences in those roles, and how do we need to understand the differences in those roles if we're going to have, like, a productive environment for making decisions. It's, like, not rocket science, but I know the times in my life as a leader when somebody just explained to me the different kinds of power and authority, I all of a sudden could better understand how to share power effectively. And I'm telling you, Donna, we've had this conversation. Like, I've been hosting executive dinners all over the country, and we talk about the challenges of leadership and all these things. And I said, well, how much do you talk about power in your workplace? And unilaterally, the answer is never. And we're talking in some of the largest corporations on the planet. Like there's no language around what is power, how do you wield it, how do you share it, how do you distribute it? Everybody can talk about empowerment, but I'm like, what does that mean? How can you possibly know how to empower someone if you literally don't know what kind of power you are assigning to them and how that shows up? Is it decision making rights? Is it social capital? Is it a straight up promotion and more money? What do you mean when you say you are empowering someone? And look, a lot of companies want power to be invisible because they think that's the way to sort of, like, suppress employee discontent. There's some large companies out there who gets access to the company jet. That's a lot of power, but they don't want anybody talking about that.
[00:31:28] Donald: Proximity to the CEO's office, the ability to be in person versus being somewhat now invisible if you work remotely. It is how do you disagree with people in different levels or hierarchy? And one of the things to your point that I strongly agree with is because people don't talk about power, only the people that have it understand how to leverage it.
[00:31:58] Emily: And, yes, it makes everybody else feel like they have no power, which is also not true. And so we also have a module on agency. Right? Like, how do you build personal agency inside an organization? And how do you advocate for understanding the limits of your agency in organization? The ultimate agency for an employee can be like, I don't work here anymore, but let's be real. In the construct of The United States, that's your health care, that's your food on the table, you know, that's your four zero one k. Like, you can't just say, well, if you don't like it, like, don't work here. You're actually threatening somebody's safety. So I think for me as a leader, one of the things I had to learn was it doesn't matter how cool I try to act or like how good the vibes are. I have CEO next to my name and people are gonna listen to me and hear me differently in a meeting than if I had another title. And so I have to be very mindful of how I behave because otherwise, I become a steamroller. Even when I don't mean to be and I don't think that's how I'm acting, if I'm really excited about something and I'm really forward with my ideas, everybody takes that as a mandate. Unless we are it's only clear that your job involves making these decisions. So if you hear me starting to make those decisions, you can say to me, hey, Emily, I think this is under my purview. This is the way I would like to make the decisions. If you wanna do it this way, I need to articulate for you what are the trade offs you're now asking me to make. And if we don't have a shared language for that, you have a bunch of leaders who are steamrollers who are not taking advantage of the fact that they have other people working for them who might also be able to do the work, and then the leaders get burned out because they're like, I have to do everything. And I said, no. You're just not sharing responsibility.
[00:33:53] Donald: It's sharing responsibility, but back to the term psychological safety, one of the ways I had to learn, and this is a personal testimony for a moment, to create psychological safety is not to speak first about things I'm passionate about, but to ask more questions. That I had to learn as a business leader that my goal was to outline the objectives, outline the challenge or opportunity we were trying to address, and then pull the best information from others. And to your point, to recognize that if I started out with my idea of how to solve, then the rest of the meeting becomes how to make my idea work. And we've not yet established whether my idea was, a, directionally right, b, the right tactics, or, c, align with overall strategy. But if I bring forward the right questions and then as a leader sit back and say, uh, and here's, like when when I talk to high octane leaders that fall into that steamroller you described, one of the biggest things that I tell them that small change, big impact is use questions to set the table and then make sure that you eat last. And that way, the leader, you still have the power and authority to decide, but you've allowed the participation level of the team to be so much higher. And then the other thing that I've found personally, even if I have a strong way of how I think something should be done, when I'm patient, I often find a better way through my team. And then politically and powerful, no one had to say my idea was dumb. I just can say it to myself, but I'm glad I waited for Emily, for Daki, for John, and now all of a sudden, we're able to coalesce around the teamwork aspect. We use words like, let's break silos. We use words like, we want more collaboration. But sometimes as leaders, we create the dynamic for a command and control. And so I really appreciate what you're saying and the acknowledgment that many of us that are steamrolling are not doing it intentionally. We don't know any better. Now that doesn't mean the impact is any less. Right? We still need to change that behavior, but the intent is usually, as a leader, we're excited about something. We're passionate about something. We wanna share, and we gotta learn to share the microphone a little bit more.
[00:36:12] Emily: I have a member on my team. He's very soft spoken. He's so unbelievably good at his job. It's sort of like astonishing. He'll never go first. He because he wants to take it all in and be thoughtful about it. And I've learned now that I want him to just kinda listen to everything, and then I wanna make sure that we stop and say, okay, Mike, what do you think? And typically, in his very soft tone, he comes forward and we're all like, yeah, that's a good idea. Right? So the other thing is, like, I think the more that you do this and you kind of understand how people operate, how they assimilate information, their different approaches, I don't ever worry that engaged in the conversation because he's hanging back and listening. I now, like, I witness his approach and we all learn a a lot from him every time. So I think that's the other pieces is learning tools to help recognize the different ways your team members show up and then facilitating meetings that can make it possible without creating like a single correct way to be in the workplace. And so a lot of the skills that we also have are recognizing inherent strengths in people, calling those out, starting to recognize them in yourself. That's such an important part of self empowerment when really creating a culture of acknowledging one another's strengths, contributions, and capabilities as a way to build team confidence and cohesion. Right? So there's these little tools and tricks along the way that, again, I say it's not rocket science, but if if nobody gives you the framework, you can go right past these incredible opportunities for team strengthening. And sometimes all you need is, like, a reminder and a table setting. I like the way that you said that. Give people some guidance and make sometimes very small changes that can be really powerful.
[00:38:03] Donald: One of the things that because I could literally talk to you all day, and we're almost at an hour. And, usually, I we rock for, like, twenty five minutes, but this is awesome. Just so you're clear, I'm having a great time in learning it. Hope my audience does too, but I have three pages of notes, and and I'm a competitive learner. One of the things that I have the good fortune, one, I have I have three daughters, so I'm always thinking about how to teach them things that maybe they're not gonna get in school, about how to think about the corporate landscape. But I do see ask this of you, so I'll try to frame this as a question. When I'm working with partnering with women leaders, I do see a more dominant trait of getting along versus pushing their ideas, a more dominant trait of apologizing where their male counterparts don't apologize. If my daughters could have a coffee with you and you're a CEO, you're a leader, you've been on all different sides of this, what would you share with women leaders about how to think about power dynamics? These are things I don't hear a lot of women talk about, but yet they have to understand in order to manage their environment better. Because everything that's happening is not done to us purposely. Some of it has to do with our relationship with work, our relationship with meetings, our self esteem. But as a male leader, I have to also be thoughtful and careful how I describe some of these perspectives. So I wanna borrow your expertise and see if you have some thoughts for women leaders that we can help change the paradigm on some things.
[00:39:52] Emily: So one thing that we actually just have to say out loud is that women are being asked to take responsibility for their own oppression in the workplace and society. So that move to get along or that desire to apologize comes from being punished for the same behaviors that are viewed positively in their male colleagues. And this is shown by, like, every major research institution that has ever studied dynamics in the workplace. Like women get viewed negatively for the same things that men get viewed positively for. Those behaviors are learned behaviors to avoid getting punished for what should otherwise be very appropriate workplace behaviors. And the the dynamic that I had to learn the most is that if you are a woman and especially a woman leader, people will turn you into their mom whether you like it or not. And what they are seeking from you is comfort, not accountability. And so it took me twelve years and then working directly with Carla Monterosso, who's an incredible leadership coach especially around building multicultural institutions. So she works with leaders that are specifically trying to build social purpose multicultural institutions that have, like, you know, an impact angle that brings another layer and dynamic because you're leading and you're also expected to be like a beacon of perfect leadership behavior all the time in a crumbling environment of rising authoritarians. It's very, very challenging undertaking. And what I came to understand after working with her and and developing this language around power, sharing power, trade offs, decision making rights, and all those things, I was like, oh, I get looked to for comfort. And my job as a CEO is not to make you comfortable. My job as a CEO is to create a clear framework for understanding your expectations, the outcomes that we're looking for, what the business needs, the, like, high level objectives, and then to hold everyone accountable to accomplishing those things that we have agreed that in exchange for this, like, employment relationship you're signing up to do. And that I want you to have a good time. I want you to feel empowered. I want you to love your colleagues. I want this to feel like a tremendous growth environment. But, like, you can't come to me and be like, can you promise me it's all gonna work out? Because I can't promise that. I don't control that the government is, like, trying to drive the economy off a cliff right now. I don't control a lot of the elements that are going to impact us, and I cannot be here for your comfort. I can be here to, like, create some structure around, well, what are the trade offs that we have to make? What does it mean to be financially responsible in this kind of decision making? And those are uncomfortable conversations. And so I realized that I would end up in these things where I'm like, how did this get so hot so fast? And it's like, oh, because I'm breaking the expectation that I'm here to make it cozy. That's not my role. And it took me five or six, like, very clear experiences where I was like, oh, this is gonna sound really callous, but I need you to understand that I'm not your mother and I don't love you unconditionally.
[00:43:21] Donald: That's fire. That's awesome.
[00:43:23] Emily: I don't know why you think it's appropriate to treat me this way in a professional context as if we have a familial relationship that I will do anything to repair. That's not what's happening here. We have professional expectations. We have professional accountability. We have professional decision making rights. Like and if all of that is not in place, then it becomes an emotional battleground. And in every single case, and this is in society and in workplaces, women are expected to make the allowances, make the affordances, make people comfortable, which is why I, like, quintuple down on frameworks and tools for having these conversations so that I don't get embroiled. I'm like, no, we we know how to have this conversation. It's all written and detailed right here.
[00:44:15] Donald: I am thankful for the way you described it because one of the things that, you know, we'll use terms like setting boundaries and different things, but actually most people don't. And so what they do is they just allow the world to happen to them and then frustrated with the behaviors that they don't like when they've not established and said very simply I'll just use a very simple email example. Right? If you have a boss or a leader that's emailing you all different times a night or different things, how do you take agency over saying very simply, here are my working hours. If there's certainly a work emergency, different things we understand, but this is the communication path and platform that we've established, you know, based on my compensation and role. And so I'm gonna get your email, but I'm also gonna turn off my cell phone, turn off my email on the weekends when it's time for my family. But what I find is so many people, I'm just using that simple example, are focused on, I have a toxic boss. This person's doing XYZ to me. All these things may be true, but I try to help people with what is our personal accountability to manage the situations we're in the best we can.
[00:45:25] Emily: I think it's really challenging when there are not defensible frameworks you can point to because then your boss will be like, well, you know, Jim over here answers my emails on the weekend and I guess he's gonna get a better performance review. And this is why I think it's so important to actually establish frameworks in the workplace because otherwise, it is just all your performance reviews are just a favoritism contest and that is meaningful. So I agree with you, by the way. Like, we do have to take responsibility and personal agency and set those boundaries. It often comes at a cost who don't have positional power more so than it does. And yes, it comes at an organizational cost, but, like, that's never really calculated until later when you're like, why are our turnover rates so high? And it's like, because you've allowed this sort of, like, toxic culture of favoritism to proliferate, but that's very, like, behind the eight ball. And so I'm always advocating for helping people inside workplaces themselves advocate for the frameworks and tools that can establish a a working agreement as opposed to just a personal boundary. Because, again, women, we get blamed for setting personal boundaries. And I have seen it at the most senior levels, like in c suites where the CEO himself will say, you know, you were here to empower women and then just, like, watch him steamroll his CFO's boundaries with no defensibility. And so if that's the example that's getting set from the top and we don't have working agreements to point to, it's coming at the cost, the emotional labor of the people who are trying to set boundaries and being punished for that.
[00:47:14] Donald: Thank you for saying that. Right? Because that's the perspective that I don't personally have because of my male privilege, because of my personality. Right? Like, all the different things. So my lens is still somewhat skewed. What you're describing, which I really appreciate, is when we're talking about a relationship at work, to me, there's three legs to the stool, right? There's the corporate structure and frameworks, right? What is the corporate brand? What are the corporate goals? All the things. And what is the corporation's responsibility for the well-being of their employees? Then there's that manager relationship with the team that they lead, and then there's the employee responsibility. So then what I'm describing sometimes is that employee responsibility, but we have to talk in the construct of all three. And then when we loop in all three, now all of a sudden, we're having a conversation about frameworks, about workplace connectivity, and that personal agency. And so I really appreciate, like, the way you've framed it.
[00:48:13] Emily: And this is why we built parallel tracks. We have an effective leaders curriculum and an effective teams curriculum. And the effective leaders curriculum is to really turn leaders into coaches that can coach the best out of their teams, that have frameworks for sharing power, for courageous decision making, for productive collaborative meeting facilitation, like all the things that you need to build really high performing teams. And then we have a curriculum for the individual contributors and, like, early managers that is their own personal capabilities and responsibilities inside that framework. Right? Because I think these two things have to happen in tandem or else we have what most organizations are doing, let's be real, which is trickle down training, and it doesn't work. So we spend a ton of money on, like, senior leaders and maybe, like, VPs training all of them, and then you have to go and train your team. But now with more often the economic contraction, everybody's spans of control have grown. So, like, maybe you could have done that with five direct reports. Can you do it with 15? For me, like, there's a real need for us to reimagine training from the bottom up and the top down together. Otherwise, you are spending all this money churning on the bottom and turning out people that, like, if they only had this, like, disengaged employees, that if they only had a little investment and frameworks could actually become your highest performers. And there's some really interesting case studies around that. Emory Healthcare here in Atlanta did a deep investment in their literally lowest performing leaders, and they would enroll them, sort of voluntell them to enroll in this program where they got treated like top performing employees. They came in, they had the gift bag, They had the extra investment, all of those things. And now they don't even have enough low performers to fill out an entire program.
[00:50:16] Donald: One of the things that my mentor, Grant Willard, taught me about leadership, and you just described it, so I'll be really brief, is the power of high expectation because ultimately, people don't go to work to mess up on purpose. They wanna do a really good job. They want their boss, their team, their leaders to be proud of them, right, that wanna get promoted and grow their career. But we all need that person or that team that believes in us. And when people have high expectation of us, we walk a little different, we walk a little taller, we work a little harder. And that's what you described. I have to do something I don't wanna do. I have to land the plane because this has been wonderful. I wanna be thoughtful of your time, and I'm really appreciative of this conversation, the depth of the conversation. And I wanna give you the last word. Is there something that I haven't asked that you wanted to share about Film Forward or Cedar Spark or leadership that you'd like to share with our audience as we wind down this wonderful conversation?
[00:51:20] Emily: Oh my gosh. That's a big question. I would say that like when it comes to falling forward, I think it's okay if corporate learning is fun and I don't mean enforced fun, right, when forced fun is the worst kind, right? I think it's okay to build frameworks that people enjoy because that develops a learning culture of joy. Like we get excited when we learn new things. And that is the foundation of an innovative mindset. So that's what I would say. It's okay if it's enjoyable and that you introduce and you build learning frameworks that get people pumped.
[00:52:01] Donald: That is awesome. Emily, like I said, a couple of times, I could chat with you all day. I am, uh, looking forward to our conversation about continued partnership and different things, uh, later this week. This has been a great primer for that dialogue. I'm gonna share this with our audience. I'm also gonna share this with my internal team so that as they meet you, they already know you a little bit and what you're doing. And again, thank you for spending time with us and what great insights.
[00:52:27] Emily: Thank you for these great questions.
Turning Personal Insight into Collective Team Brilliance
with Emily Best
[00:00:00] Donald: Hello, this is Donald Thompson and welcome to another episode of High Octane Leadership. I'm very excited about today's discussion, uh, with my good friend, Emily Best, the founder and CEO of Seed and Spark. And we're gonna talk all things entrepreneurship, workplace culture, but we're also gonna talk about their amazing venture of how they're really transforming leadership development while also bringing forward a creative enterprise for creatives in the visual arts. And so, Emily, thank you so much for joining our show.
[00:00:30] Emily: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:32] Donald: One of the things that we like to do in the beginning before we get into these two major topics is I want our audience to get to know you. So whatever you feel comfortable sharing, where you grew up, family background, brothers, sisters, anything that'll help our audience get to know you as an individual, and then we'll dig into some of the business.
[00:00:51] Emily: See, I was born in Stockton, California in 1980. The eighties was a really interesting time to be in Stockton, California. And I grew up mostly in Northern California, Stockton, and then Sacramento. Went to public high school in Sacramento, California in an amazing international baccalaureate program that was really just the effort of some amazing teachers who decided that's how they wanted to teach. And I was lucky to go to this incredibly diverse high school with just like a remarkable academic program that I credit with setting me up for everything else. Because if you know, you know. But one thing about International Baccalaureate Education is that you have to write all your exams. Right? So you'll sit for six hours, then have to write three essays during that time. And I really feel like the ability to just, like, sit down and write something front to back has been the most formative professional tool I've ever been given. Went to college on the East Coast, moved to Barcelona after that to pursue a very short lived career as a jazz vocalist, and moved back to The States and started running restaurants because I had started working in restaurants when I was 16, and I really loved it. And and then I started running restaurants and I learned why most people should not run restaurants. It's a really, really hard business. I was, like, 26 years old, had 96 employees, and was working for, like, the most toxic restaurant owners you could possibly. But I learned a lot about how to cultivate a positive mindset on a pirate ship. So if you don't know restaurants, like, they operate like a pirate ship. The front of house wants it to be busy. The back of house does not want it to be busy because, like, the back of the house gets paid the same no matter what. And the hosts and the bartenders and the servers and the kitchen team, like, they all have different desires, and you've gotta convince them to all sail this direction together without mutiny. I learned a ton during that time and developed training manuals, which sadly, I had to leave behind for the toxic owners who probably didn't implement them after I left. But I I sort of like got into this thing of helping restaurants get from the red to the black quickly through employee led training. It's all about the host, if you ever wanna know the answer to control the flow through the front of the door. Anyway, so, uh, so I did that for a while and then I moved to New York and started to pursue more creative passions, but I was also helping my dad get his own consultancy off the ground. By my late twenties, I had had a lot of small to medium sized business operations experience. The last restaurant I had run had like a $56,000,000 a year revenue. When my dad was getting his business off the ground, he is a genius big thinker. He's, like, one of the best strategic consultants in the world, but needed some support on the, like, business operations side. And so I moved to New York to help him. And then I got to basically be a fly on the wall in rooms of the c suites of some of the biggest financial institutions in the world as they were thinking through their big strategic problems. So I learned a lot during that time about strategic problem solving. And my dad's role was always to try to get the room to really take advantage of all of the ideas, perspective, and experience in that room, which as anybody who knows on Wall Street, it's more about power and dominance than it usually is about encouraging diverse thinking. And so it was fascinating to witness him who had gone to boys school his entire life. He's only operated in these, like, very male dominated spaces. Fascinating to witness him navigate that and still get to the best idea in the room, which was just really remarkable and formidable training. I'm now a mom of two, Cody and Mina, six and eight years old. I live outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And I got there because while I was helping my dad get his business off the ground, I was really starting to pursue a career in the creative arts. I started acting. I had a voice over career brief that helped carry me through the launching of Seed and Spark. But I basically got myself caught up in producing because I started acting in theater and I just didn't think it ran very well, some of these productions. And I had all this business operations experience. I remember being like, hey, can I help this next one go more smoothly? Can I help you raise money? Can I help you, you know, put some things into place? And I would learn that that had a title and that's called a producer. And so the thing is, like, the second you get labeled a producer, stuff starts coming your way. Right? Because people don't volunteer to be producers. People sort of become producers because of a set of, like, interests and capabilities that they have. Like, very few people are like, yeah, I always wanted to be a producer. They're like, well, I guess I'm a producer now. So, yeah, I started producing theater, started a couple theater companies, and then produced my first feature film with this incredible group of women I met doing a play in New York. And it was through those experiences that I started Seed and Spark. There was like an opportunity and a moment in technology where this new online capacity for crowdfunding was really empowering artists, but it wasn't connecting all of the dots from the funding all the way through the distribution and connecting things to audiences. And that was the opportunity that Seed and Spark was really founded to create and foster for creators. And now we're thirteen years later, 75,000,000 raised for creative projects, about 6,000 films and shows and books and podcasts and theater productions and dance productions. And we're just launching into the music space today, actually. So, yeah, we have a big announcement later today on Seed and Spark launching into music. And then as you know, we're always looking for opportunities to expand the reach of the creative work. And in 2021, we launched Film Forward, which is the experiential learning platform for replacing, like, boring corporate training videos with learning that's built around the world's best short cinema. That's the fastest I can give you my life story, I think.
[00:07:13] Donald: That is awesome. And I tell you what, I am really excited about digging in on a couple of points. And one of the things that I encourage people to take advantage of is what are the learnings of rooms that you're in even when you don't have that positional authority. And so when you were talking about being with your dad and being a fly on the wall in the C Suite, and then I love this positive mindset on a pirate ship. And what you're talking about, though, is leadership in a lot of toxic environments. Right? How do you create some semblance of unity of mission in moments of chaos and confusion? Right? And so all of this super interesting and and good. I wanna back up just a minute. And if you could give our audience a thumbnail of Seed and Spark because we walked into it. Just give that one to two minute of how it started, why it started, and what it's doing for the creative community.
[00:08:04] Emily: So Seed and Spark is now the number one crowdfunding platform in the world for independent film and storytelling. We have the highest crowdfunding campaign success rate, project size, audience per project. And that's largely because we really focus on the crowd side of crowdfunding. So we really view crowdfunding as a power building tool for creators. My own personal experience was, as I mentioned, I produced this play with this incredible group of women and we were feeling at that time, like the experience we were having of being young professional women working together to make really cool stuff. How we were relating to each other, how we were supporting each other's dreams, how we were, like, really helping one another grow just wasn't represented anywhere in modern media. And, you know, this is, I don't know, 2010 or so. Where are the stories about women friendships that we feel like represent our experience that aren't about women friendships that are broken up over a man or women friendships that are like a side note? Like, where is that really the central thesis of the story? And so we we did what you do in theater, which is, like, we went to the bar after the show and we had a few, and then we were like, we should make a movie, which sounded really cool at the time until they were like, and Emily will produce it. And I was like, wait. What did I decide for? I got super lucky that my dad bless my dad, he's been such an amazing steward in my life. He had just gone to his forty fifth high school reunion. I think he'll be mad if I if that's the right number. I something like that. It sounded something. Maybe it was thirty fifth. I'm not sure. He'd been to this high school reunion and run into a friend of his from high school, this guy Barr Potter, who had been out in Hollywood producing movies for years. And Barr came at it from the legal side. And so he put us together, and I had another friend, Liam Brady, who was part of a really esteemed class in the graduate program at NYU. It was just like a friend of mine socially in New York. And so I got like basically, Liam was going and taking NYU classes and incurring all of that student debt and then coming back and, like, teaching me all the stuff that I needed to know. And then I would call Barb Potter and be like, okay, how do I set up the contracts and sort of professionalize this? And I just pieced together a producer's education, right, over the course of making this movie. And there came a point where we had almost everything we needed. We had raised some money, but we had this, like, one window in time when everybody was free. We were gonna shoot in Maine, in our friend's hometown with all the resources that she could bring to bear with that. And we were $20,000 short and like we were gonna hire people. It was like a professional production. We had like payroll that we had to meet and stuff. And so Kickstarter and Indiegogo were, like, brand new to the market at this time, and they were just starting to take off in artist communities in New York and LA, but they were not widely known at that time. It was very novel. And if I asked any of my friends' parents, for example, if they knew about it, they all said, no. I never heard of it. But we were inspired by it and we thought, I love the idea of crowdfunding, but it doesn't help people understand what the money is for. Otherwise, it's like, send us $20,000 to go to Maine for the summer. Like, that didn't feel like it honored what we were really trying to endeavor to do. We wanted to tell a story that represented women's friendships better than we knew how. We were gonna go to a place where the inspiration from this story was really palpable for the lead actress. And we were trying to do it in a community way in a small town that could galvanize around something like this. And so instead of using Kickstarter or Indiegogo, we made a wedding registry. Like we listed all the individual items that we would need in order to get this done. And my roommate at the time was doing like a front end web development. She helped me build a WordPress website where I just literally listed all of the items and their associated costs and I embedded a PayPal link, which is still maybe the most technical thing I personally have ever done. And we sent it out to everyone we knew and then we posted it on Facebook, which back then was a lot better for networking than it is now. Some of what we were taking advantage of was a pretty special moment in time from a technology perspective when social media was actually social. Social media is now entertainment. It's just television. It's stuff coming at you by professionalized entertainers with marketing in between. Back then, if I liked a post, everybody who I was friends with would also see that post. It worked a little bit more like LinkedIn works now. The last actually social media, in my humble opinion, other than there's some really cool upstart platforms. But anyway, we got to take advantage of this early social media uprising and this thing kind of took off and people were funding our projects based on their own personal interest. So we had a nurse that she didn't just fund the kit. She sent us a medical kit. And a cousin of mine who I wasn't in touch with that frequently was working in, um, outdoor sports warehouse in Tahoe and drop shipped us a case of bug spray and sunscreen. Absolutely the most critical contribution to the entire production, let me just say. And then friends of ours started reaching out saying, hey. I just finished my movie. I don't see these things on your list. And all of a sudden we were like, oh my god, there's some stuff missing from our list. Would you like to if you can just come pick them up from my house, you can have them for the duration of the production. But that extended to a used car salesman in Rockland, Maine, near where we were gonna do this, reached out and said he'd like to read the script and he read the script because we were looking for picture cars. Right? These are the cars that appear as your character's cars in the film, reached out and said, and then he says, these are the cars I think your main characters would drive. And we're like, we totally agree. And then he gave them to us for six weeks for free. So all of a sudden, we had this incredible, like, community resourcing, true crowdsourcing moment and 450 people, many of them strangers to us, contributed to this project not on a major platform, but because they could see themselves making a meaningful contribution to something. We weren't even offering incentives. We were just literally like, we'll put your name in the credits. Right? And then we make this movie and we have the experience of prior to this crowdfunding campaign, I had managed to get my way into the office of some sales agents and some distributors, and they effectively, like, laughed me out of the room with my little independent movie about women friendships. One of them very helpfully said, well, if you could put some lesbian erotica in it, we could sell it. And I was like, sir. And then I realized he didn't mean lesbian erotica for lesbians. He just meant, if you can make this hot for men, I could understand it. And I was like, oh, no. We have to make this movie. Right? We make the movie, and then the very same people who were laughing us out of the room prior to this crowdfunding campaign were interested in offering us deals because all of a sudden, we had all these email addresses and all these different theatrical markets, and we had all of this data and information. And I was like, oh, isn't that interesting? How the power dynamic shifted all of a sudden. And these gatekeepers got a lot less gatekeeper y when I showed up with the data. So the next thing that happened is I got contacted from creators all over the country asking like very informally advising and then a mentor of mine was like, you know, this is a a business. Right? Like, this is a that's a startup is what that is. And so I started working on this idea of an independent media wish list. It's a very bad first name, which would eventually become Seed and Spark.
[00:15:54] Donald: That is awesome. And I can see the producer, writer, storyteller in you because I just was dialed in to that creation story. That is the Seed and Spark piece in Wonderfully Told. And then earlier you talked about, I think you said $75,000,000 in dollars that have gotten to creators back to the data and the metrics. That's really, really powerful. Talk to me a little bit about how you then came up with the construct around film forward and that experiential learning. And one of the things that has got me excited about partnering and thinking about it even more deeply is, one, I'm a leadership development junkie. Like I love thinking about how to build more connected high performing teams. I'm always looking to learn there. And something you said on a previous call that I want to share with the audience is that most tools create individual learning experiences. And one of the critical differences with Film Forward is you're creating a team learning experience. If you could share with our audience a little bit about how that idea created and then some of the business value that you're seeing in the marketplace with these tools.
[00:17:06] Emily: So when we launched Seed and Spark even back in 2012, we knew that there had to be some distribution component involved. And we tried everything. And then we went to Techstars in 2016 and we built out a subscription service where you could crowdfund on Seed and Spark, you could stream your film on Seed and Spark, and we could sell subscriptions throughout that funnel. And it was, like, kind of starting to work. But then by 2018, literally every major studio was building their own subscription streaming service. And if you didn't have b b billions, you were just not going to compete in that space. And that became very clear to us. And at the same time as we were coming to this realization, our creators started coming to us and saying, okay. So we've gotten really good at raising money and building an audience and leveraging that audience to get to big festivals, to get distribution deals. And then those distribution deals market us on social media and stream us on streaming platforms and everything is delivered via algorithm. So we are now stuck in an echo chamber just talking to people who already look like us and think like us, and that's not why we make work. We make work to change people's minds and challenge their worldview and build empathy and and representation and build political power or social power. The idea that you would just go talk to a bunch of people who already agreed with you is not why artists make stuff, and they are willing to take risks on new models in order to accomplish that for the most part. So I can remember exactly where I was standing when I was like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. So I think what they are asking is how do we deliver films to audiences at scale who don't identify as the audience for this work without using social media or streaming platforms? That's a really hard set of questions. Right? And so I went to all my advisors. If you've taken away anything at this point is like, I rely heavily on the advisors in my life, in my sphere. Right? I look to my peers and to my parents and to my parents' peers for their advice and expertise. By this time, I had built a pretty incredible advisory network and I went to all the smartest people I knew. And it was Wendy Smith, who I've known for a long time. She took me to lunch at the Rose Cafe in Venice. I was living in LA at the time. And she said, have you thought about the workplace? The workplace is the most diverse place most people are in their lives. If you could figure out a way to get phones into the workplace, that would be really interesting. And I was like, yeah. I've heard that SaaS contracts are, like, very attractive. That's all I knew at that point. So my senior leadership team and I designed a research project that took us the first six months of 2019. Well, I miss Twitter so much. I used to have a really beautiful organic following on Twitter that was so useful to me. And I sent a tweet out to kick off this project, like, we're looking to talk to DEI and LND leaders. And I got 800 replies to that tweet with either I'll talk to you or I have recommendations for who you can talk to. And we built out this huge spreadsheet and we started setting up thirty minute meetings. And I think we did probably a hundred and fifty thirty minute meetings in this like initial research. And then from there, we did another two or 300 after that. Really trying to get at like it was a jobs to be done interview affected. What are you trying to do that you're not able to do? What tools are you using to try to do those things? And what we heard unilaterally number one, as you can imagine, is nobody likes corporate training videos or believes they are particularly effective. And the industry standard rates of, like, twenty eight percent completion will underline that. That I was hearing learning leaders being like, I know this is a tool and I deploy it all the time, but I hate it. They hate it. Everybody feels bad about it. Like but what else do I have? Right? So that was number one. Wow. Okay. This online learning model is not delivering on the results. It's everybody uses it for checkbox training because it's checkbox training. But, like, what do you really have that's better? Well, what we were surprised to learn was how many people were trying to design storytelling based learning experiences. I bring in a speaker and I pay them $20,000 or I some people were, like, ripping clips of movies off of YouTube, which is, like, kind of illegal. But they a lot of them were really trying story based learning, but they didn't really have a a mode for translating that into sustained behavior change. And that was the thing that everybody was trying to figure out. How do I create sustained behavior change to build high performing cultures? And more broadly, we talk about high performing cultures now. We have the this term psychological safety that can be broken down into component proficiencies in the workplace. Right? Do people feel seen, heard, and valued? Are they able to learn and fail? So have you cultivated experimental mindset in the workplace? Do people really know what that means and how that happens? Can they resolve conflict in a really productive way that builds team cohesion rather than drives divisions and gossip and all of that? Can your leaders really coach talent and do they have the time and capacity to do that? And the answer these days is like, no, nobody has a ton to coach their talent. You need supporting services. So we really started to understand, like, what were these core competencies that workplaces were really driving towards? They were all soft skills and could there be replicable behavior change? And what we heard unilaterally was none of these like one off workshops are going to get the job done. They can create experiences that people like remember and feel good about, but like in order to actually build sustained behavior change, you have to change habits. You have to give people things they can do differently, then they have to get some positive feedback around that, and then they need time to, like, test it with their peers and they need time to work it out. And so we started designing pedagogy method to take storytelling, which we had in spades. So there are hundreds of thousands of new short films made every year. And now normally, Donald, I would ask you the question of, like, how many short films have you seen? But your daughter makes great films. You've seen more than the average bear. Right? But for the most part, I would ask people, like, how many short films have you seen this year? I don't know. I've seen commercials. I've seen sent me something on Vimeo that I really liked. But for the most part, people don't see them. There's this unbelievable untapped resource, and a thousand new short films get made on Seed and Spark alone every year. Um, and we could see that they were going on and winning awards and getting Academy Award nominated and and launching careers for these creators, but the short films themselves were not like an economic asset to them. They couldn't really do anything with them to monetize them or to create the impact with them they really wanted to. And so we thought, wow, I wonder if we could take short films and infuse them into a curriculum to build sustained behavior change. And that was the the genesis of Film Forward. And then we tested it six ways from Sunday from 2021 to 2023. And it was really in 2024 that we figured out this framework and the set of the suite of curricula that we could take into a workplace and confidently say, a lot of these soft skills challenges you're facing, this can help solve for with different learning journeys that involve on platform learning and also live facilitated sessions to put what we're teaching you on the platform on its feet in teams. But that, like, one of the biggest, I think, fallacies of the online learning, upscaling an individual is the same as upscaling a team. It's not. Might be upskilling an individual. It doesn't do anything for team cohesion. So the real premise behind film forward is that having shared experience and being able to reflect on shared experience with watching a film, unpacking and analyzing a film, having a little water cooler conversation around a film because none of us is watching the same thing. Everybody's on different platforms. We're all watching different TV shows at different times. It's, like, really hard for us to talk about stories that we share anymore. And so we give people shared stories to talk about, discuss, reflect on, and then real applicable activities related to each one. And every single learning module has a personal growth exercise, an interpersonal growth exercise to be practiced with one or two other people, and then a team growth exercise to come actually start to practice these things. And that creates a little bit of shared accountability, which is part of why a lot of online learning doesn't get accomplished because, like, who's gonna know?
[00:25:59] Donald: The thing people know about the online learning is your certificate, but they don't experience your changed behavior. I really appreciate so much, like all of what you were describing. I wanna dial back to the construct of psychological safety. And the one thing that you did that I would like us to work with in for a minute is you actually started to layer in specific behavioral elements that people can create and sustain psychological safety in the workplace. Right? So I'm super interested. How did you all come up with that framework? Is that something that is a module within film forward? Talk to me a little bit about that lane of psychological safety, but the unpacking that you did at a pretty granular level.
[00:26:47] Emily: So every one of our learning journeys, it's all soft skills based. And I hate that they're called soft skills because they're the hardest to learn and they're the hardest to change. We have a blog that we call right brain blog because I think it's better to think about it as, like, we need both a balance of right brain and left brain skills to be successful as as human beings, even just to be bipedal. We need both hear and speak language. We need two sides of our brain. So our workplace skills need to be both technical and so social. The right brain skills really require behavioral approaches. And some of that is our friends at August Public gave me this term, which I really love, called dilemma testing. You need to be able to imagine a scenario together and unpack what's happening in that scenario. But everybody has had the experience of doing just, like, sort of broad scenario based training where or, God forbid, they make you, like, act something out. Everybody hates it. It's like spongy and atrocious. But if you watch a movie together, you can talk about your perspective on what happened, why it happened, what should have happened, what I would have done differently, where the breakdown was. How does that mirror what I'm experiencing as opposed to having to, for example, go in and trauma dump everything that's wrong in the workplace and then have to unpack it in this really like emotionally high stakes arena. So it allows us to have an opportunity to unpack some of the dilemmas that we face in the workplace at an arm's length distance where we can still see how differently our colleagues might view a situation based on their positionality. And so all of our training is infused with skills and behaviors around psychological safety. It's just a matter of in the art of civil discourse, we are really focused on emotional discipline, constructive productive conflict resolution, accountability. The actual components that I would say go into day to day really professional interactions that also, by the way, will help you in your personal relationships. From a leadership standpoint, like, you need a framework for courageous decision making that also provides transparency and context to create buy in with your team. And all of this is about how to handle hard things, change, loss, failure, great success very rapidly, but keeping that team cohesion. Because like, what do we do? Work. Why is it called work? It's hard. We're all trying to do hard things. So if you don't have a framework for how to do hard things together, you're just gonna sew division. That's antithetical to getting the work done well. Right? So we think about these specific sets of behaviors and the paradigms in which they have to be deployed. Right? Courageous decision making also takes like really good context setting. It takes a very clear understanding of who are the decision makers and who are the stakeholders, and what are the differences in those roles, and how do we need to understand the differences in those roles if we're going to have, like, a productive environment for making decisions. It's, like, not rocket science, but I know the times in my life as a leader when somebody just explained to me the different kinds of power and authority, I all of a sudden could better understand how to share power effectively. And I'm telling you, Donna, we've had this conversation. Like, I've been hosting executive dinners all over the country, and we talk about the challenges of leadership and all these things. And I said, well, how much do you talk about power in your workplace? And unilaterally, the answer is never. And we're talking in some of the largest corporations on the planet. Like there's no language around what is power, how do you wield it, how do you share it, how do you distribute it? Everybody can talk about empowerment, but I'm like, what does that mean? How can you possibly know how to empower someone if you literally don't know what kind of power you are assigning to them and how that shows up? Is it decision making rights? Is it social capital? Is it a straight up promotion and more money? What do you mean when you say you are empowering someone? And look, a lot of companies want power to be invisible because they think that's the way to sort of, like, suppress employee discontent. There's some large companies out there who gets access to the company jet. That's a lot of power, but they don't want anybody talking about that.
[00:31:28] Donald: Proximity to the CEO's office, the ability to be in person versus being somewhat now invisible if you work remotely. It is how do you disagree with people in different levels or hierarchy? And one of the things to your point that I strongly agree with is because people don't talk about power, only the people that have it understand how to leverage it.
[00:31:58] Emily: And, yes, it makes everybody else feel like they have no power, which is also not true. And so we also have a module on agency. Right? Like, how do you build personal agency inside an organization? And how do you advocate for understanding the limits of your agency in organization? The ultimate agency for an employee can be like, I don't work here anymore, but let's be real. In the construct of The United States, that's your health care, that's your food on the table, you know, that's your four zero one k. Like, you can't just say, well, if you don't like it, like, don't work here. You're actually threatening somebody's safety. So I think for me as a leader, one of the things I had to learn was it doesn't matter how cool I try to act or like how good the vibes are. I have CEO next to my name and people are gonna listen to me and hear me differently in a meeting than if I had another title. And so I have to be very mindful of how I behave because otherwise, I become a steamroller. Even when I don't mean to be and I don't think that's how I'm acting, if I'm really excited about something and I'm really forward with my ideas, everybody takes that as a mandate. Unless we are it's only clear that your job involves making these decisions. So if you hear me starting to make those decisions, you can say to me, hey, Emily, I think this is under my purview. This is the way I would like to make the decisions. If you wanna do it this way, I need to articulate for you what are the trade offs you're now asking me to make. And if we don't have a shared language for that, you have a bunch of leaders who are steamrollers who are not taking advantage of the fact that they have other people working for them who might also be able to do the work, and then the leaders get burned out because they're like, I have to do everything. And I said, no. You're just not sharing responsibility.
[00:33:53] Donald: It's sharing responsibility, but back to the term psychological safety, one of the ways I had to learn, and this is a personal testimony for a moment, to create psychological safety is not to speak first about things I'm passionate about, but to ask more questions. That I had to learn as a business leader that my goal was to outline the objectives, outline the challenge or opportunity we were trying to address, and then pull the best information from others. And to your point, to recognize that if I started out with my idea of how to solve, then the rest of the meeting becomes how to make my idea work. And we've not yet established whether my idea was, a, directionally right, b, the right tactics, or, c, align with overall strategy. But if I bring forward the right questions and then as a leader sit back and say, uh, and here's, like when when I talk to high octane leaders that fall into that steamroller you described, one of the biggest things that I tell them that small change, big impact is use questions to set the table and then make sure that you eat last. And that way, the leader, you still have the power and authority to decide, but you've allowed the participation level of the team to be so much higher. And then the other thing that I've found personally, even if I have a strong way of how I think something should be done, when I'm patient, I often find a better way through my team. And then politically and powerful, no one had to say my idea was dumb. I just can say it to myself, but I'm glad I waited for Emily, for Daki, for John, and now all of a sudden, we're able to coalesce around the teamwork aspect. We use words like, let's break silos. We use words like, we want more collaboration. But sometimes as leaders, we create the dynamic for a command and control. And so I really appreciate what you're saying and the acknowledgment that many of us that are steamrolling are not doing it intentionally. We don't know any better. Now that doesn't mean the impact is any less. Right? We still need to change that behavior, but the intent is usually, as a leader, we're excited about something. We're passionate about something. We wanna share, and we gotta learn to share the microphone a little bit more.
[00:36:12] Emily: I have a member on my team. He's very soft spoken. He's so unbelievably good at his job. It's sort of like astonishing. He'll never go first. He because he wants to take it all in and be thoughtful about it. And I've learned now that I want him to just kinda listen to everything, and then I wanna make sure that we stop and say, okay, Mike, what do you think? And typically, in his very soft tone, he comes forward and we're all like, yeah, that's a good idea. Right? So the other thing is, like, I think the more that you do this and you kind of understand how people operate, how they assimilate information, their different approaches, I don't ever worry that engaged in the conversation because he's hanging back and listening. I now, like, I witness his approach and we all learn a a lot from him every time. So I think that's the other pieces is learning tools to help recognize the different ways your team members show up and then facilitating meetings that can make it possible without creating like a single correct way to be in the workplace. And so a lot of the skills that we also have are recognizing inherent strengths in people, calling those out, starting to recognize them in yourself. That's such an important part of self empowerment when really creating a culture of acknowledging one another's strengths, contributions, and capabilities as a way to build team confidence and cohesion. Right? So there's these little tools and tricks along the way that, again, I say it's not rocket science, but if if nobody gives you the framework, you can go right past these incredible opportunities for team strengthening. And sometimes all you need is, like, a reminder and a table setting. I like the way that you said that. Give people some guidance and make sometimes very small changes that can be really powerful.
[00:38:03] Donald: One of the things that because I could literally talk to you all day, and we're almost at an hour. And, usually, I we rock for, like, twenty five minutes, but this is awesome. Just so you're clear, I'm having a great time in learning it. Hope my audience does too, but I have three pages of notes, and and I'm a competitive learner. One of the things that I have the good fortune, one, I have I have three daughters, so I'm always thinking about how to teach them things that maybe they're not gonna get in school, about how to think about the corporate landscape. But I do see ask this of you, so I'll try to frame this as a question. When I'm working with partnering with women leaders, I do see a more dominant trait of getting along versus pushing their ideas, a more dominant trait of apologizing where their male counterparts don't apologize. If my daughters could have a coffee with you and you're a CEO, you're a leader, you've been on all different sides of this, what would you share with women leaders about how to think about power dynamics? These are things I don't hear a lot of women talk about, but yet they have to understand in order to manage their environment better. Because everything that's happening is not done to us purposely. Some of it has to do with our relationship with work, our relationship with meetings, our self esteem. But as a male leader, I have to also be thoughtful and careful how I describe some of these perspectives. So I wanna borrow your expertise and see if you have some thoughts for women leaders that we can help change the paradigm on some things.
[00:39:52] Emily: So one thing that we actually just have to say out loud is that women are being asked to take responsibility for their own oppression in the workplace and society. So that move to get along or that desire to apologize comes from being punished for the same behaviors that are viewed positively in their male colleagues. And this is shown by, like, every major research institution that has ever studied dynamics in the workplace. Like women get viewed negatively for the same things that men get viewed positively for. Those behaviors are learned behaviors to avoid getting punished for what should otherwise be very appropriate workplace behaviors. And the the dynamic that I had to learn the most is that if you are a woman and especially a woman leader, people will turn you into their mom whether you like it or not. And what they are seeking from you is comfort, not accountability. And so it took me twelve years and then working directly with Carla Monterosso, who's an incredible leadership coach especially around building multicultural institutions. So she works with leaders that are specifically trying to build social purpose multicultural institutions that have, like, you know, an impact angle that brings another layer and dynamic because you're leading and you're also expected to be like a beacon of perfect leadership behavior all the time in a crumbling environment of rising authoritarians. It's very, very challenging undertaking. And what I came to understand after working with her and and developing this language around power, sharing power, trade offs, decision making rights, and all those things, I was like, oh, I get looked to for comfort. And my job as a CEO is not to make you comfortable. My job as a CEO is to create a clear framework for understanding your expectations, the outcomes that we're looking for, what the business needs, the, like, high level objectives, and then to hold everyone accountable to accomplishing those things that we have agreed that in exchange for this, like, employment relationship you're signing up to do. And that I want you to have a good time. I want you to feel empowered. I want you to love your colleagues. I want this to feel like a tremendous growth environment. But, like, you can't come to me and be like, can you promise me it's all gonna work out? Because I can't promise that. I don't control that the government is, like, trying to drive the economy off a cliff right now. I don't control a lot of the elements that are going to impact us, and I cannot be here for your comfort. I can be here to, like, create some structure around, well, what are the trade offs that we have to make? What does it mean to be financially responsible in this kind of decision making? And those are uncomfortable conversations. And so I realized that I would end up in these things where I'm like, how did this get so hot so fast? And it's like, oh, because I'm breaking the expectation that I'm here to make it cozy. That's not my role. And it took me five or six, like, very clear experiences where I was like, oh, this is gonna sound really callous, but I need you to understand that I'm not your mother and I don't love you unconditionally.
[00:43:21] Donald: That's fire. That's awesome.
[00:43:23] Emily: I don't know why you think it's appropriate to treat me this way in a professional context as if we have a familial relationship that I will do anything to repair. That's not what's happening here. We have professional expectations. We have professional accountability. We have professional decision making rights. Like and if all of that is not in place, then it becomes an emotional battleground. And in every single case, and this is in society and in workplaces, women are expected to make the allowances, make the affordances, make people comfortable, which is why I, like, quintuple down on frameworks and tools for having these conversations so that I don't get embroiled. I'm like, no, we we know how to have this conversation. It's all written and detailed right here.
[00:44:15] Donald: I am thankful for the way you described it because one of the things that, you know, we'll use terms like setting boundaries and different things, but actually most people don't. And so what they do is they just allow the world to happen to them and then frustrated with the behaviors that they don't like when they've not established and said very simply I'll just use a very simple email example. Right? If you have a boss or a leader that's emailing you all different times a night or different things, how do you take agency over saying very simply, here are my working hours. If there's certainly a work emergency, different things we understand, but this is the communication path and platform that we've established, you know, based on my compensation and role. And so I'm gonna get your email, but I'm also gonna turn off my cell phone, turn off my email on the weekends when it's time for my family. But what I find is so many people, I'm just using that simple example, are focused on, I have a toxic boss. This person's doing XYZ to me. All these things may be true, but I try to help people with what is our personal accountability to manage the situations we're in the best we can.
[00:45:25] Emily: I think it's really challenging when there are not defensible frameworks you can point to because then your boss will be like, well, you know, Jim over here answers my emails on the weekend and I guess he's gonna get a better performance review. And this is why I think it's so important to actually establish frameworks in the workplace because otherwise, it is just all your performance reviews are just a favoritism contest and that is meaningful. So I agree with you, by the way. Like, we do have to take responsibility and personal agency and set those boundaries. It often comes at a cost who don't have positional power more so than it does. And yes, it comes at an organizational cost, but, like, that's never really calculated until later when you're like, why are our turnover rates so high? And it's like, because you've allowed this sort of, like, toxic culture of favoritism to proliferate, but that's very, like, behind the eight ball. And so I'm always advocating for helping people inside workplaces themselves advocate for the frameworks and tools that can establish a a working agreement as opposed to just a personal boundary. Because, again, women, we get blamed for setting personal boundaries. And I have seen it at the most senior levels, like in c suites where the CEO himself will say, you know, you were here to empower women and then just, like, watch him steamroll his CFO's boundaries with no defensibility. And so if that's the example that's getting set from the top and we don't have working agreements to point to, it's coming at the cost, the emotional labor of the people who are trying to set boundaries and being punished for that.
[00:47:14] Donald: Thank you for saying that. Right? Because that's the perspective that I don't personally have because of my male privilege, because of my personality. Right? Like, all the different things. So my lens is still somewhat skewed. What you're describing, which I really appreciate, is when we're talking about a relationship at work, to me, there's three legs to the stool, right? There's the corporate structure and frameworks, right? What is the corporate brand? What are the corporate goals? All the things. And what is the corporation's responsibility for the well-being of their employees? Then there's that manager relationship with the team that they lead, and then there's the employee responsibility. So then what I'm describing sometimes is that employee responsibility, but we have to talk in the construct of all three. And then when we loop in all three, now all of a sudden, we're having a conversation about frameworks, about workplace connectivity, and that personal agency. And so I really appreciate, like, the way you've framed it.
[00:48:13] Emily: And this is why we built parallel tracks. We have an effective leaders curriculum and an effective teams curriculum. And the effective leaders curriculum is to really turn leaders into coaches that can coach the best out of their teams, that have frameworks for sharing power, for courageous decision making, for productive collaborative meeting facilitation, like all the things that you need to build really high performing teams. And then we have a curriculum for the individual contributors and, like, early managers that is their own personal capabilities and responsibilities inside that framework. Right? Because I think these two things have to happen in tandem or else we have what most organizations are doing, let's be real, which is trickle down training, and it doesn't work. So we spend a ton of money on, like, senior leaders and maybe, like, VPs training all of them, and then you have to go and train your team. But now with more often the economic contraction, everybody's spans of control have grown. So, like, maybe you could have done that with five direct reports. Can you do it with 15? For me, like, there's a real need for us to reimagine training from the bottom up and the top down together. Otherwise, you are spending all this money churning on the bottom and turning out people that, like, if they only had this, like, disengaged employees, that if they only had a little investment and frameworks could actually become your highest performers. And there's some really interesting case studies around that. Emory Healthcare here in Atlanta did a deep investment in their literally lowest performing leaders, and they would enroll them, sort of voluntell them to enroll in this program where they got treated like top performing employees. They came in, they had the gift bag, They had the extra investment, all of those things. And now they don't even have enough low performers to fill out an entire program.
[00:50:16] Donald: One of the things that my mentor, Grant Willard, taught me about leadership, and you just described it, so I'll be really brief, is the power of high expectation because ultimately, people don't go to work to mess up on purpose. They wanna do a really good job. They want their boss, their team, their leaders to be proud of them, right, that wanna get promoted and grow their career. But we all need that person or that team that believes in us. And when people have high expectation of us, we walk a little different, we walk a little taller, we work a little harder. And that's what you described. I have to do something I don't wanna do. I have to land the plane because this has been wonderful. I wanna be thoughtful of your time, and I'm really appreciative of this conversation, the depth of the conversation. And I wanna give you the last word. Is there something that I haven't asked that you wanted to share about Film Forward or Cedar Spark or leadership that you'd like to share with our audience as we wind down this wonderful conversation?
[00:51:20] Emily: Oh my gosh. That's a big question. I would say that like when it comes to falling forward, I think it's okay if corporate learning is fun and I don't mean enforced fun, right, when forced fun is the worst kind, right? I think it's okay to build frameworks that people enjoy because that develops a learning culture of joy. Like we get excited when we learn new things. And that is the foundation of an innovative mindset. So that's what I would say. It's okay if it's enjoyable and that you introduce and you build learning frameworks that get people pumped.
[00:52:01] Donald: That is awesome. Emily, like I said, a couple of times, I could chat with you all day. I am, uh, looking forward to our conversation about continued partnership and different things, uh, later this week. This has been a great primer for that dialogue. I'm gonna share this with our audience. I'm also gonna share this with my internal team so that as they meet you, they already know you a little bit and what you're doing. And again, thank you for spending time with us and what great insights.
[00:52:27] Emily: Thank you for these great questions.
