A great culture doesn’t just happen by accident. Marvin Boakye, Chief Human Resources Officer at Cummins, believes it must be engineered with the same discipline, rigor, and accountability as any complex system. For him, culture is not an abstract idea. It is something leaders design through daily behavior, decisions, and tradeoffs.
In this episode of Talent All Stars, Marvin explains how Cummins Inc., the global power leader, builds intentional culture across more than 70,000 employees worldwide. He breaks down the five elements that make culture stick, why leadership behavior carries more weight than values statements, and how Cummins uses real data to understand engagement, performance, and risk. The conversation offers a clear look at how intentional culture becomes a strategic advantage for any talent team.
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[00:00:00] Marvin Boakye: There's this idea that culture eats strategy for breakfast. When you started with just the strategy, without a focus on the things that make us successful, we weren't able to actually achieve the strategy. When you're able to focus on the culture that you need to make that successful, you saw that happen more successful.
[00:00:16] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter, and on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses.
Today's Talent All-Star is Marvin Boakye, Chief Human Resources Officer at Cummins, a global power leader committed to powering a more prosperous world. Marvin leads global HR talent acquisition and culture strategy for more than 70,000 employees worldwide. Supporting Cummins' mission to deliver innovative solutions that move people, goods, and economies forward.
He's earned a reputation for treating culture as a true business driver, modernizing recruiting, amplifying employee voice, and building the capabilities Cummins needs as the company evolves its business and workforce for the future. In this episode, we talked with Marvin about why Cummins views diversity as a competitive advantage, how leaders can turn values into everyday behaviors.
Why asking for help can actually strengthen trust and how an organization is ultimately defined by what it practices, promotes, and permits. Marvin, welcome to Talent All Stars.
[00:01:30] Marvin Boakye: Well, thank you for having me. Really appreciate the time to get, be able to talk with you.
[00:01:32] Dave Travers: So excited to have you, and I really appreciate the fact that you have so many different cool experiences that we could dive into, and so many, um, different angles we could take it. But I wanna start with your journey to leadership, and you've been a leader. Many companies that people have heard of, Home Depot, Papa John's, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
On and on. I won't even list them all, but you can if you want. When was it? Thought like leading people and leading people in the domain of people and people teams is a thing that really spoke to you and became something that could be more than just my current nine-to-five, but could become a calling.
[00:02:15] Marvin Boakye: It's a good question. You know, you always think about it because for all of us, we all have these stories of what got us there, and it's so different. And I don't know if I think 30 years ago I thought this is where I thought I would be, or what I would get to do. But I think for me, one of the things that happened was.
I didn't start in the human resource field. In fact, what I started with was in the conflict mediation field. That was kind of where I got my learnings from, and when I got into the work, I had no idea that I was eventually going to do anything in corporate organizations, but I had the opportunity to take on experiences where I got to work with communities.
Then, eventually started working with land rights disputes, to then working in labor with labor relations stuff, to then working with Oregon. Organizational effectiveness work and realizing at the end I'm spending a lot of my time in that space. And so that kind of led me into going into working into corporations and where I got to take on things, where I also got to be in leadership roles.
And I think a couple things that probably stood out for me is one, the role of the leader has such a huge impact on the success in an organization, particularly the culture of the organization. What I started to realize is this idea around the role that culture plays a role that leaders play. There's something about that that makes organizations more successful than others, and I've been able to focus on that throughout my career and with the organizations I've been able to work with.
And we have been able to see some pretty good success. By understanding it. So I've been fascinated about kind of the idea of what makes strong cultures and the work that makes leaders strong in it, more successful in it. And I've been fortunate enough to be in positions where I get to test and learn to see what works and doesn't.
[00:04:07] Dave Travers: So that is clearly a theme of what your rise in leadership has been, what is it that attracted you to that, that drew you to that as a topic and a theme around which you started thinking about leadership as you rose through the ranks?
[00:04:24] Marvin Boakye: A few things that came up was that number one is. I didn't start this way, but I started seeing this as a theme, and that was, you know, there's this idea that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
I gotta tell you, that has been a big part of what I have found in the organizations and groups I've been able to work with. When you started with just the strategy, without a focus on the things that make us successful, we weren't able to actually achieve the strategy. When you're able to focus on the culture that you need to make that successful, you saw that happen more successfully.
The second thing that was really important, and it was a board member who said this to me, and it really rang true, is that this person said, look, all organizations have a culture. Whether they know it or not, but not all organizations have an intentional culture, and what I found is that the groups that were able to focus on what it meant to create an intentional culture saw a significant outperformance versus those that had not.
And so for me, that's something that I've become fascinated. It's not just about the fact that you have cultures; it's that you have an intentional culture that leads to creating a strategic business advantage. And so I have been focused on this idea, and what's been really interesting to me is that as I've kind of gone through my career.
I'm always trying to figure out kind of the mental model. Is there a way of thinking about this? Is there a formula? And I was always trying to say, this part works and we spend a little more time here. Maybe that comes together. For me, it's actually probably come up that I'm now at this place where there's maybe about five things that I think you need to be able to create an intentional culture.
And in all the groups that I've worked with, you know, I've seen pieces of it that have worked well. One of my previous experiences with the `turnaround we did at Papa John's Pizza was a big example of it, but I've never seen it as a group come together in all of these five ways until I had a chance to come and do the work that I get to do as a C-H-R-O of Cummins.
[00:06:27] Dave Travers: I wanna dive into the five things, but I wanna also think about somebody listening to this who's like, I'm a people leader. I like the culture. I think we've got, you know, a few things we can improve about it. But I haven't thought previously about this thing about intentional culture. What is that and how does that sound good to me.
What is that? And how do I start going down that road if that's a new thing for my organization?
[00:06:51] Marvin Boakye: I think in order to be able to do that, even if it's not new, even if it's something that you have already or some parts of it here, you have to get clear about what does that mean and how I think about it.
There's kind of two lenses I think about this. One way is it is. Quite simply, the way we treat work with one another, wherever we are in the world, it's rooted in something for you, whether it is your mission, your vision, your values, and yes, that's kind of a bit of a technical way of going through it. The easiest way, if you forget anything else, the way I think about an intentional culture, it's the things that you do that are about the way you practice your culture, the things that you promote within the culture or the things that you permit.
And that last one, one of the first two, practice and promote. Most people will say, Yep, I get it. We're focused. We're thinking about that. It's the last one around the things that you permit that we don't put as much focus on. And so what does that look like? That could mean the stuff we put on our walls that we say, this is what we do, here's how we operate, what people.
Your employees, your teams, remember are the things that you allowed to have happen whether you intentionally did it or not. That's what they do when they think about what that culture means, well, how that culture plays out. And so when you're able to think through that and intentionally put in practices that address the things you promote and you permit, those are the ways that you start to drive an intentional culture.
[00:08:16] Dave Travers: What's interesting and tricky about that is that if somebody's making a bigulture push or wants to redefine their culture, promote it more. Sometimes the things that we permit in an organization don't fit with the things we're out there outwardly promoting. How do you think about that so that you're not undermining yourself with what you're passively permitting that undermines what you're promoting?
[00:08:41] Marvin Boakye: I'll tell you this part is probably of the work that done in within culture, and you know, I was telling you about the formula, the way that I think about it here. There's gotta be steps that you put in place around what it is that you believe in, and second, who has responsibility for making sure that you're leading it the way that you wanted it to, and that you have a way to measure regularly what you're doing.
So here's how I think about it here, 'cause it ties nicely into this whole story. Look, the list of the five that I have now seen most come out, and I think I said before, I think Cummins of the groups I've worked with has probably been the strongest in driving this year, which is what excites me the most.
Number one, I think that you have to have a very clear understanding of your values. Now, some groups, when they define their culture, it might be something different for them. But here, it kind of the values become the basis by how we do what we do. So you've gotta have a very clear understanding. Second, you need to be able to take those values, and they've gotta be able to translate those into something.
In this case, they gotta be translated into behaviors for all employees. Now I say that because what I've seen groups do, and I've been part of this as well too, that I've created, is we tried to create language. It was simple and made sense that we could resonate with everyone. The issue is that in a group like one I have right now, within Cummins, you have 70,000 employees across the world.
What may resonate in terms of behaviors that you expectation for the executive team might look very different for someone that's operating on a shift on the shop floor. And so you have to be able to. Adjust and change to make sure those behaviors make sense, and not just make sense, but make sense in a way that people can remember and recall it when they need it.
Third, you need to assume. Someone's gotta own this. And the thing that I've found most powerful is that when you make the assumption that the role of your leaders are the ones that are responsible for modeling the behaviors to live your values, you give kind of accountability to someone.
And I have seen this to be one of the strongest features. Putting leaders and ensuring that one of their key roles is not just setting strategies, but it's also being the leaders of delivering on the culture through your behaviors and your values. So then I think the fourth thing for me has been, if you're saying your leaders have this role, you've gotta do something to teach them.
You have to continually keep teaching them to do that. And if I look at the way that I've seen this at its best at Cummins, there are kind of three things that are really important about teaching leaders. One is you've gotta make sure they're self-aware. You have to make sure they're authentic, and you have to make sure that they learn how to be vulnerable.
And I could share a bit more about that, 'cause I know for me that has been something that has been a journey that has taught me a lot, even about myself and how I can be better, a better leader at delivering all this. And then for me, the fifth thing in that measurement in that formula is you've gotta use data to continuously measure those culture indicators if you are not checking to see through data, and most of us have those data points already available.
Sometimes we have to create them when we don't have them. But just doing that regularly, continuously allows you to know how are you doing against this intentional culture that you're trying to create.
[00:12:16] Dave Travers: So I want to get back to data, but I wanna double click on the fourth thing there, which is leaders, and how do you become self-aware and vulnerable when you're in this position where I'm elevated into this position where I'm now a leader for the first time, or I'm a leader of leaders for the first time and it feels like I'm on stage and when this is new, I feel a little bit tensor and I'm just trying not to make a mistake, which feels very contrary to.
I'm gonna be super self-aware and vulnerable. How do I learn how to do that? Because it sounds great, but it also doesn't, when I think about how tense it is to take on this new, even higher role, it sounds very difficult and counterintuitive type. The feeling in my gut.
[00:13:03] Marvin Boakye: I don't know about you, and maybe you have the same experience. The way that I was taught around leadership was definitely the opposite of what I'm saying now. Right, right. So I was taught, you know, particularly, I grew up playing sports in my life, and you had to show this sense of invincibility. You had to be there whenever things were bad. You had to be the one that always showed this voice that we're gonna do it.
You had to be tough. But I'll tell you, it's what I remember for some of my best leaders that I have been led by is when they were able to say things like, I'm scared about this. I think we need help, or I'm excited, but here's where we need to go together. And when you are able to take those opportunities and say that what you would expect, or at least what I learned before is the expectation is people would think I was weak.
Right? As in fact, the opposite happens. People become more engaged to, there's an affinity that starts to get created. It creates even, builds trust as you're able to share more about yourself to others. Now, a lot of us, we don't get that opportunity so many times it doesn't come natural. So we need help.
We need coaches. We need sometimes external folks to help us through that. And I know for Cummins, part of the journey that they took is they brought in people, experts to help them really get focused on learning about what it meant or means to be self-aware, what it really means to be deep about getting authentic and how to be vulnerable in a way that creates connections.
You gotta start with yourself before you're an ability to lead others. And Cummins, where I give so much credit to is that this is so important that. Before they focus on team development, they put tremendous focus on the individual and the development of the individual. And once that's there, then they can then go from working on themselves to then working on their teams and working on others.
[00:14:58] Dave Travers: Oh, I think that's really powerful. I think starting out a meeting or project, or first time you meet with a team, and saying, here's what I'm scared about. It feels very courageous, you know, like that. That just feels very counterintuitive, and yet everyone else in that room has something they're anxious about or scared about or whatever.
Anyways, so what you're doing as a leader, even though you want to be seen as strong and tough and optimistic and all those things, what you're really doing is you're saying. The things you're feeling are okay. I'm feeling them too. But you're showing it rather than saying it what you just said.
[00:15:34] Marvin Boakye: One thing resonated with me there because part of the aha is that we focus so much on teaching business acumen, and please, let's be clear, it's a critical part of being effective in a culture, right?
Driving a culture effectively. But there's also an importance in leaders understanding that there's equal importance in you building your emotional intelligence. And so. Being able to learn how to focus on both will endear people to you will build trust. And we know that the more trust you build, the more you get people to follow you, right?
The more successful and the more they will drive discretionary effort, which leads to better performance.
[00:16:09] Dave Travers: I think the theory sounds great. I would like to be the person in the world where everyone's like, I've got my five-step plan. All of them make sense. I know how to drive and what the playbook is, at least to drive the intentional culture.
Let's get specific. Let's talk about. Cummins in particular, what is the culture there? And let's bring this theory alive, and how do you, to step five or the fifth part of having an intentional culture, how do you measure how it's going?
[00:16:35] Marvin Boakye: I'm gonna say a few different things here, so I apologize if it sounds long-winded, but it's something I'm excited about when we talk about this work.
Alright, so remember I mentioned one of the things I think in the formula is start with your values. So for us, we articulated five values. They're very specific from integrity, caring, teamwork, excellence, diversity and inclusion. And they have that simple language to go speak to them too, right? But then the next piece of that is taking that and translating to behaviors.
And in fact, we're going through a journey where we are re-creating and looking at. Are the behaviors that we hoped were consistent with what we want at all levels of the organization? And so we're actually going through an exercise right now where we are looking at all of those and learning, okay, this worked here, but this didn't quite work there.
So let's say for example, one of the ones that we talk about, we believe diversity and inclusion for US is a strategic competitive differentiator, and it's been very successful. When we're able to bring different people in the room with different perspectives and ideas, it leads to better innovation. And when you're in a business where you sell to a lot of the people you're competitors with, you've got to be innovative.
This has been a strategic competitive advantage for us, but the behavior behind that for us, as an example, is we want leaders and people who value differences. They see this as an important thing for them to be able to do, right? They don't ignore it, but they understand it, and they embrace it, and they make sure that when I'm trying to make decisions, if I don't have that in the room, I need to go find out how I get that in there.
So that's one. So then the next step is, okay, if that's something you believe is important for all, what does that look like at different levels? What we did is that we took that and we basically said the levels for us include things that go from awareness to action. There's a basic, a skilled and advanced, and an expert level, and not only that.
Depending on where you are. So all employees are expected to have a basic level of understanding. Let's say managers are expected to have skill level leaders, kind of senior leaders advanced. And then we also go all the way up to experts, and we give specific information around what does it mean, what does that look like when we talk about what you need to be in that space.
Right? And then we do measure it, and we'll talk more about measure, 'cause there's a bunch of different things that we do from the measurement side where we're checking and asking how well are we doing against it? And then I mentioned to you before around thinking about, okay, I on all of that, how do I drive those expectations with my leaders?
Well, you've got to set some accountability. And for us at Cummins, we said we believe this is. In a sense, the role of the leader. And we literally said to our leaders. This means we actually want you to spend a percentage of your time. And so we put it out after we looked at this, and we said, we want you to spend 30% of your time focused on this work here.
When we first said it, people said, I got so much stuff to do. What do you need? 30% of my time to be able to do this stuff? But when you think about it actually comes up pretty well. 30% of your time includes things you're doing to help drive performance and development, setting clear goals, right? Clear measurement, clear sense of what success looks like, making sure you're getting regular.
Feedback from your direct reports, both giving it and receiving it, coaching your people on their careers and on their performance, driving individual accountability, being a role model in doing this work. And we actually put time to say that is the expectation that you need to go about achieving. Right.
And so then you have all of that. Then you talk about measuring, right? How do you go about the prospect of measuring? Are you doing this work here? And there's a number of different measures. A lot of people have some of this here, so you know, whether you decide to use engagement surveys or experience surveys.
We do a lot of that within our work, but it's obviously leading to good results. I mean, our latest. Surveys told us that over 70,000 people, from hourly to exempt employees, 85% of them intend to stay. That's the first time I've had that in any group I've had before. But you also think about ways that you wanna do interviews and understand themes.
All of us do things like exit interviews. Very few of us do stay interviews, and we do some of that where we actually ask people, Why do you stay? What are the things that keep you happy? One of the things that are challenges for you, and we look around, are there differences around what regions feel versus demographics and functions?
We measure things like who's getting promoted and why are they getting promoted? Who's getting career opportunities? We look at things like employee resource groups. Who's participating in those and why are they, and are they engaged through that? We look at things like we expect people to participate in the communities, so what percentage of them are doing it?
How are they doing it? We check out things like we have things like a campaign we call It's okay, which helps us understand wellness, mental wellness, physical wellness. If we see spikes around mental wellness, we can track that back to how people are feeling about their wellbeing.
Some of the stuff I talk about, the culture work is in our performance, so we measure both kind of the what you delivered, but how you deliver it, and it's equally important. And then, where it gets really fun is our analytics team, they created this thing they call a flight risk indicator, which is basically an algorithm they put together looking at a variety of different types of things around people to predict the likeliness that that person might turn over the latest data.
I looked on that, which was really exciting, is that that was about 90% accurate in telling us. Whether someone was going to end up leaving.
[00:22:22] Dave Travers: Amazing. So let's dive in. So let's say I'm just starting on this journey and I wanna, uh, put forward my first metric. I think this like notion of even without a whole data analytics team, this notion around predicting a little bit and finding some variables that predict somebody might wanna leave is something that could resonate across many businesses.
So if you were just getting started. And we say, Hey, we're gonna measure our culture. And think about that as a metric. How would you start that process from a clean sheet of paper?
[00:22:55] Marvin Boakye: If you're a young leader, I've given you how few different measures that are there. If you, I always say, look, gimme the cheat sheet.
If I was a starter, are there any ones I would absolutely go ahead with? Look, I would give a couple that. I would say, one is focus some time on doing experience surveys. You know, some organizations do it every two years. Some do pulse surveys, some organizations that are much more advanced, and by the way, we're hoping to get there as well, too, do it on a very regular basis with just a couple of questions that they might check in every day or every other day or so.
But something that just asks. How are your people feeling? How engaged are they doing? What are they concerned about? Constantly having a listening process, and you don't have to always go out and buy the latest stuff. You can get really simple things, and they can be questions just about your own strategy.
You know, in a past life, I remember addressing this with simple questions like, Hey, do you feel like you know what's expected of you? Pretty simple question, and I remember when we went out and put that question out there, something like 50% of the population said, I don't know. That's a great indicator to tell you.
Maybe our first thing is just to make sure, are we really clear about what we're trying to do and what it means that everyone else needs to do, number one.
[00:24:10] Dave Travers: So one of, and it's intuitively, it feels like something that isn't going to change, isn't on an upgrade cycle every six months, but we're living in this world where technology is changing, where all of us are being asked, how are you using new technology, ai, or whatever, even fast, to do things even faster, even more efficiently at even higher scale.
How do you reconcile being a technology company like Cummins is? That's powering how critical goods and services get everywhere that make sure that hospitals never go dark, et cetera, et cetera. How do you, then as a technology company at the bleeding edge of so much innovation? Balance that with a culture that's not changing all the time. How do those two things coexist? Well, it's interesting.
[00:24:58] Marvin Boakye: First of all, I really appreciate you called us a technology company. I know that my team would love, love that. Uh, I think that's a big part of where we, I think it's pretty obviously true. You know, reason why I tell you that is, is because when people hear about Cummins, they first thing they say to us.
Aren't you the people that created the diesel engine? And technically we didn't create it, but we'll take the credit anyway within our time. But if you think about all the ways that we have expanded in our work, it's been an incredible story. But I think there's something that you said has been one of the ahas for me when I was trying to to work in some of my previous roles.
I remember at the Papa John's piece when we were trying, going through that turnaround and transformation, you already know. You're gonna have to put a lot of work to focus first on what's the culture that we want to have. And you do that. What people don't realize is that even if you have a good culture, it takes just as much work to continue to maintain it, right?
Continue to keep it, and part of the trick I believe around that is culture is fluid. That was a big aha for me that took place. And even in a place that's been around over a hundred years like Cummins, it's very clear. And so what we're having to do is we have to get really clear about what parts of the culture are we gonna say no matter what, are not going to change.
Right? These are the things that will always be the same for us. Everything else, we have to continually evolve. Everything else. And so to do that, the stuff that never changes, you gotta really keep it a small list, 'cause it's tough to stay focused on everything else on that. But if you can separate that between your other sides, I mean, for us, we're constantly evolving.
Okay, what do we mean by accountability? What does it mean about innovation and this in, in this work, when we say it's a value, how does it look like now in a place that just a few years ago, right? We weren't talking about the role that artificial intelligence would play within the work we do. Okay. If that's the case, what's the mindset?
I mean, even to the point where one of the things that we get is at the pace we're going, it's not unrealistic to hear people say, That's a lot of change. What about change fatigue? And one of the things that we have been starting to talk through is. This may just be the world that we're in right now. So maybe part of the behavior is, as opposed to figuring out how to get to just a steady state, how do you get to a point where you understand that if this is the way we operate, right, maybe we need kind of change adaptability that may be more important to us to teach as a mindset, as a way of operating. Does that make sense?
[00:27:28] Dave Travers: Yeah. I think there's this human desire that. People want to think that it's going to get easier, like once we get over this hard push, I'm in the middle of right now, that things will get easier. Like we've got all this change happening right now, but then we'll be done with that, and it'll be easie,r and I'll just be able to do my routine and.
I have news for everyone, and you have news for everyone. That's not gonna happen. That's a mirage, not an actual body of water out there on the horizon. So what we're going to do is instead of it getting easier, we're just gonna handle hard, better. And I think that's what you're talking about with what the power of culture can do is you're giving people this North star they can reorient to.
That's always up there in the sky to reset your bearings, but it's not. There to tell you that the hike is about to get, or the journey's about to get easier. It's just that you're gonna get better and better at knowing where you're going and how to deal with the things that come
[00:28:23] Marvin Boakye: And leaning back into what you said. The thing again that, that I think we're learning, because again, I continue to tell you how surprised it is. I expected in my previous roles, I was gonna spend all my time doing it. Cummins already has a strong culture, and I still spend a lot of time focused thinking on this. To do this, to keep it strong is a constant set of work and actions that you need to do.
It's constantly being able to weigh, okay, let's check back with, this is still important to us. Oh yeah, we, we met, we still said this. These two things are still important. Everything else we can continue to evolve. That's the kind of stuff that leaders have to take on as their role. Leaders definitely have to take that on.
[00:28:58] Dave Travers: It is so clear, Marvin Boakye, why you are our Talent All-Star. Thanks so much for taking the time with this today. Well, thank you so much. It's been great. Really appreciate it.
That's Marvin Boakye, Chief Human Resources Officer at Cummins. We'll put his LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And as a reminder, we put out the video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at TalentAllStars@ziprecruiter.com.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars, and we'll see you right back here next time.