IAM1419 – CEO Creates a Play-Based Learning Experience for the Teams

Alex is a woman on a mission to transform workplaces from the inside out, starting with building human-centered and resilient team cultures. Her goal is to help teams be the change they want to see in the world.

As CEO and co-founder of Barometer XP, Alex creates and facilitates play-based experiences that help individuals and teams explore self-awareness and make meaningful, sustainable culture changes.

• CEO Story: Alex wanted to achieve a cultural change behavior in the workplace but the challenge was how to retain and grab the attention of individuals to be more participative as well as learn from the purposeful event. So she incorporated playing games into the activity, which turned out to be very effective in the learning experience in the communication workplace.
• Business Service: Directly working with consultants, facilitators, and trainers who work with teams. Provide games as a tool that they can use for teaching new information and having it implemented as a new habit.
• Secret Sauce: Integrating culture-changing workshops with playing, encourages individuals to spend time together and bring new nutrients to the surface among individuals in the workplace.
• CEO Hack: Playing games is doing the same thing that makes you effective.
• CEO Nugget: Notice what is going around you just be open, explore, and be curious.
• CEO Defined: Inspiring people. Doing something in a new way. Have a vision and be intentional about it.

Website: www.barometerxp.com

LinkedIn: alexandrasuchman

barometer-interactive

Instagram: barometerxp

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00:26 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello, this is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today, Alex Sukman of Barometer Xp. Alex, super excited to have you on.

01:04 – Alexandra Suchman

I'm really excited to be back and hanging out with you.

01:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, excited to have you back on. Alex is a former guest on the show, episode number 66 of our RMCO podcast and I'm super excited to hear about all the awesome things that she's working on. So Alex is a woman on a mission to transform workplaces from the inside out. Starting with building human-centered and resilient team cultures. Her goal is to help teams be the change they want to see in the world. As CEO and co-founder of Barometer XP, Alex creates and facilitates play-based experiences that help individuals and teams explore self aware, make meaningful and sustainable culture changes. Alex, excited again to have you on the show, my friend. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:44 – Alexandra Suchman

I am ready.

01:45 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what you're working on, and what I call your CEO story.

01:55 – Alexandra Suchman

Yeah. So as you know, because we've known each other for a good number of years now, I was doing process improvement and organizational development work with nonprofits and small businesses that were in the service and mission-driven spaces really trying to accomplish big things within their community and what happens a lot. We both live in the D.C. area. You have a lot of smart people here who want to change the world, whether it's healthcare climate, or education. Very big-picture people with really big hearts and great ideas. But the workplaces are very chaotic. They're Very reactive. There's not a lot of attention to systems, not a lot of processes, not a lot of training on how to do things.

It's just sort of run as fast as you can on the treadmill, hope you don't burn out, and then people burn out and there's turnover, and that's it. So I was doing the work, trying to build up that infrastructure, but what I noticed was that I was spending a lot of time on that. The hardest part of any type of change project was dealing with the people stuff. You know, we get very set in our ways. We're busy. There's so much information coming at us. We fall back on our lizard brain a lot of the time and are on autopilot and how we react and fall back on our habits. And once you're an adult, you don't have that many opportunities to check in and say, huh? Is the way that I communicate or are my thought patterns or behavior patterns actually serving me?

Are they actually helping me professionally? Are they getting to the conversations that I need to have with my colleagues? The answer. So rhetorical question is often no. And when you're working with a bunch of people, that's, you know, let's say you're on a team of five people. Five different communication styles, five different ways of problem-solving, and five different personal and professional histories are brought to the table. And it's complicated. It takes a little while to get to know each other and navigate that. So initially I wanted some activities that I could do with my consulting clients to start those conversations.

So rather than me saying, Gresham is so annoying, he is always hassling me to get these data reports to him, and he doesn't understand that I have all these other things on my plate and I'm so busy when I'm not pausing to think about, oh, maybe these reports are really integral to you doing your job and you can't move on to complete your individual goal without them. But there's not really the space to have those conversations. So initially it was just, how do you break down those barriers and assumptions?

And once I started playing around, pardon the pun for using games to break through some of those communications, it ended up turning from an idea to a side project to a full business using games and experiential play, experiential learning to help people get to know each other better and understand their own role and where they fit on the team and hopefully create more compassionate and ultimately productive and effective workplaces.

05:11 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that. I love the organic nature it sounds like everything kind of came out of where you saw that there was a gap in an opportunity and you started to just kind of. I'm going to use the pun to play around and see what would work or what wouldn't work to kind of make sure those things happen. And the thing that I like about it is that I really always say that we forget about the human aspect of business. And it sounds like the work that you do kind of really nails that. It's not just like, why aren't those reports that I was supposed to do getting done and getting over to where they need to be? It starts to really drill down deeper and deeper and deeper to understand the communication, the workspace, the space, and just so many different moving parts that sometimes it's harder to I guess tackle or maybe even talk about at the very least.

05:54 – Alexandra Suchman

Yeah. And I think it's by design, although not necessarily intentional. The modern workplace came out of the Industrial Revolution assembly lines where when you're manufacturing something, it's okay to have part A go in part B, and then part C gets added on. And that's still the model of the workplace even now when it's a much more information and service-driven economy that requires people to talk to each other people to think creatively and people to understand information in different ways or solve really complex problems.

But there's not a whole lot of time in the workday or space given to really talk about things. It's sort of expected that I will send you a Slack message and you will understand perfectly whatever I need and we never need to talk about it and how much can you produce in an X amount of time. And we're humans, we're social animals, we don't work that way. We like to collaborate, we like to be part of something bigger. We like to have ideas and solve problems together. And I think workplaces fundamentally need to change to make more space for that.

07:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Not only do they need to change, they are changing whether we're paying attention to it or not. And a lot of times I think that speaks to the great resignation. Just so many things that are happening in a workplace where people are sometimes craving those interactions, that purpose, just so many of those things that it sounds like when the work that you do, you're able to help at least create that space. So those conversations are happening which is so vital for the team as much as the leadership and also the employees that are within it. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. I know we touched a little bit on how you're serving clients, and how you're working. Could you take us through a little bit more on what that looks like, and how you're making an impact for the clients you work with?

07:43 – Alexandra Suchman

Yeah. Most of the clients that we are directly working with are other consultants or facilitators or trainers who work with teams. So whether they're in the organizational development space, whether they do disk assessments or predictive index or our leading retreats, we like to provide games as a tool that they can use in their tool belt to help not just teach new concepts, but build that bridge between teaching new information and having it be implemented as a habit. We are prideful beings. We don't like to make mistakes, we don't like to do new things, or we're not automatically good at it. I'm totally guilty of that myself. And there you don't have an opportunity to play around with trial and error in the workplace.

If you make a mistake, there are real consequences, whether it's the quality of the work the relationships with your colleagues, or how you look to your supervisor. And you need that intermediate space. So we are providing these games and teaching people how to facilitate games as tools to make that implementation leap of how do you get comfortable trying something new? How do you practice it? How do you see how other people practice it? How do you get to know people in different ways? So that's the bulk of our work. But we also. I lead retreats, I do speaking, I do lunch, and learn for teams that just want to have something fun and do something different.

For a lot of teams that have either gone full remote or hybrid and just need new ways to connect, all of our games can be done virtually. And so if people are all over and they never really have that chance to walk by in the hallway and have a casual conversation, game sessions are a really good way to remind everyone that we're all humans, we all have a lot of talents and ideas and that you don't necessarily see just on the surface level and the tasks. So it's another way to spend time together.

09:40 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. So would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? The thing you feel kind of sets either you or the organization apart and makes it unique. Is it your ability to kind of see what it sounds like? Play doesn't become something that you check off a box. It becomes something that's embedded and integrated into everything that you can do. Do you think that's part of your secret sauce?

10:00 – Alexandra Suchman

Yeah. And it's not so much play, but Culture is not something that you just talk about once and expect. It's always going to be there. The dynamics of a group are always changing. New people are coming in, or a team expands, or the focus changes and having time to spend together and analyze. Hey, is the way that we're communicating still working for us? Are there new strengths in the group that we aren't leveraging and how do we understand those? And play is just a great way to.

If you think of farming and you till the soil, bring the nutrients that are hidden below up to the surface. So I think playing synchronously, people at the same time doing the same thing and having that shared experience and then reflecting on it together is just a really good way to bring new nutrients up to the surface. And whether that's ideas or talents, I think that the secret sauce that we do is just encouraging people to spend time together on something other than work and to be very mindful about it.

11:06 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

11:19 – Alexandra Suchman

I'm going to go back to the same thing and say playing games or just doing something unexpected. I hear so much. People were like, hey, how do we make our meetings more effective? And you're always doing the same thing and it's not effective, so try something different. And whether it's starting with a question like what's your favorite game experience? Or even playing something like 20 Questions, those games you would play on a car ride to pass the time, it changes the mood, it changes the energy, it helps people think in different ways. So I really think just playing a game or bringing some type of creative thought exercise or creative exercise into the regular pattern of what a team does is my hack.

12:06 – Gresham Harkless

Appreciate that. And so I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. And you might have already touched on this as a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it's something and you might tell your favorite client, or if you have to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:21 – Alexandra Suchman

Oh my goodness. I think it would be something along the lines of self-awareness. If there are things that you don't like in the workplace, you have to see how you're contributing to it. It does not necessarily mean that you put this in place so you're doing something wrong, but what are the patterns that you're buying into that perpetuate that? And I look back to my earlier self, earlier in my career, where I knew something wasn't quite right, but I didn't want to ask a question or I didn't want to suggest something different because I was scared of what would it be like to do something differently.

And I think I would have been a lot happier. I think people would have gotten a lot more stuff done. I think I could have changed the workplace culture if I had spoken up. So I think just noticed what's going on around you. And if you see something and you recognize that maybe you can be a change agent or maybe you're somehow perpetuating the things in the culture that you don't think are great, just go for it. Be open to trying new things and explore and be curious.

13:28 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now what I call my absolute favorite question, which is, what does it mean to be a CEO? And we're hoping to have different, quote, unquote CEOs on this show. So what does being a CEO mean to you, Alex?

13:41 – Alexandra Suchman

What is a CEO? That's a great question. I knew it was coming, and I still feel like, huh, what does it mean for me? It's. It's inspiring people. It's doing something in a new way. There are millions and millions of businesses out there, and they all, you know, we're all trying to make a change in the world that we believe in new ways. And so to me, it's having a vision and being very intentional about it and hoping that you can inspire the people who are working with you.

14:15 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I think that. So in line with everything that you're doing, of course, but also the things that we have been talked about in the Nugget, it's just realizing that you have that opportunity to be an inspiration, to create that domino effect, to be the change. And what I loved about the Nugget that you talked about is often when we think about being the change, we're always kind of. We can be pointing fingers the other way. And I realized that there are very fingers pointing back at us. And sometimes it's, what can we do to kind of create that change? What can we do to be that inspiration and motivate people and do whatever we need to do? Because we have more at our fingertips than sometimes we think that we do.

14:52 – Alexandra Suchman

Absolutely.

14:54 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, Alex, truly appreciate that definition and of course, appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak. Just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know in of course how best people can get a hold of you. Find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

15:10 – Alexandra Suchman

Yeah, absolutely. So you could check out our website which is BarometerXP.com My email is Alex BarometerXP.com we have a whole catalog of games on our websites with instructions on how to play them. So if you want something new to do with your team, you know it's right now it's all free so you can go find a game that works for you. We like I said, do training on how to facilitate games. So if you work with teams, if you're a manager, if you're a consultant and want to add games to your toolbox, let me know and we can get you in the cohort program. We write about different ways and different types of conversations that games can start. So I could talk about games and the value of them all day, every day. So if anybody's interested, please look up what we're doing and reach out to me.

15:59 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well. Appreciate it my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day anytime.

16:07 – Alexandra Suchman

I always love talking to you Gresham.

16:09 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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