Chief Change Officer - Nellie Wartoft: The Chief Change Officer Behind Leaders and The McDonald’s Effect — Part One

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

Part One. I’m joined by Nellie Wartoft, someone I like to call the chief change officer behind change leaders. Originally from Europe, she’s spent years in Asia—especially Singapore—working across cultures. Now based in the U.S., Nellie is the founder and CEO of Tiger Hall, a tech-driven platform helping organizations navigate change more effectively. This is part one of a two-part series. In these episodes, we’ll dive into navigating cultural differences across three regions, why most change initiatives fail, and how to set up for success. If you’ve ever struggled with change—whether in your career, company, or life—this series is for you. Key Highlights of Our Interview More Cows Than People: The Swedish Small-Town Origin Story “Growing up in a small village in southern Sweden—population: lots of cows, not many humans—instilled an early drive to explore bigger horizons. For professional and cultural reasons, leaving was a must.” The McDonald’s Effect: Discovering Professional Passions “The guest credits their time flipping burgers at McDonald’s as a pivotal moment in shaping their career. It was there they discovered their love for three key elements: a high-paced environment, the thrill of commercial success, and the art of leadership. These ‘professional addictions’ would become the foundation of every role they pursued.” Resilience and Identity: Anchoring Yourself Beyond Titles “Basing your identity on external factors like job titles or status is a risky game—what happens if they’re taken away? Instead, ground your sense of self in unshakable traits: hard work, learning, good intentions, or resilience. These are constants, no matter what life throws your way.” Life of Adventure vs. Life of Leisure “Challenging societal norms, the guest recounts a thought-provoking quote: ‘A life of leisure is hell, and a life of adventure and purpose is heaven.’ From childhood, we’re often told to seek rest and relaxation, but the guest argues that purpose and adventure are what truly give life meaning.” _________________________ Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Nellie Wartoft Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 3% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI, JP 2 Millions+ Downloads 50+ Countries

Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today I'm joined by Nellie Wartoff, someone I'd like to call the Chief Change Officer behind Change Leaders. Originally from Europe, she spent years in Asia, especially in Singapore, working across cultures. Now based in U.S., Nellie is the founder and CEO of Tiger Hall, a tech-driven platform helping organizations navigate change more effectively. This is part one of a two-part

series. In these episodes, we'll dive into navigating cultural differences across three regions, why most change initiatives fail, and how to set up for success. If you've ever struggled with change, whether in your career, company, or life, this series is for you. Let's get started. Nellie, good afternoon to you in Los Angeles. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.

Thank you, I'm so happy to be here. Nellie and I share at least one thing in common, which is extensive experience in Asia. Originally from Europe, Nellie's been a significant amount of time in Singapore and still maintains strong connections with clients and contacts in Asia. Now, she's based in the US, bringing together a wealth of cross-cultural experiences. Before we dive into those experiences and insights, Nellie, let's start with your story.

Not the typical job interview introduction, but a deeper dive into your journey. Where are you originally from? What brought you to Asia? How did those experiences lead you to move to LA and take on the work you are doing now? Let's begin there. Absolutely. Yes, I grew up in Sweden in a small village in southern Sweden. I usually say more cows than people, it's hard to describe that small town. And I wanted to get out as quickly as I could for professional reasons and cultural reasons. And I decided to move to Asia. On my 18th birthday I went to singaprair.com, booked a one-way flight,

packed everything I had in an ice hockey trunk and moved across. And I've been very obsessed with Asia since a very young age. I started studying English when I was around 11-12 years old. I thought the education system was way too slow in how it taught English. It was like, Thomas is one pair, Mark is one apple. And I was like, I want to work in this language. I need to pick it up quicker. So I started reading more international media. And that's when I discovered there's a whole continent out there called Asia. And there is China and India and Japan. And I was just like so fascinated. So I did every single school project on Asia and Singapore and Hong Kong where you are

and just was super, super fascinated by this part of the world. So I decided when I was about 14, 15 that I want to live in the capital of Asia. And that's when I decided it's probably Singapore. And that's why I moved to Singapore when I was 18. So landed in Singapore. Before that back in Sweden started working very early. I started McDonald's when I was 18. So landed in Singapore before that back in Sweden started working very early. I started McDonald's when I was 14. Before that I was supporting stroke patients with their physical exercise. I've been working since around age 12 and continued that throughout my time in

Sweden and in Singapore and then spent a bit of time in London, South Korea. Was in head hunting for a good part of my corporate career and thereof to started a couple of companies and which ended up being Tiger Hall which is the business that I'm running now and that is what ultimately took me to LA. So that's a very quick brief overview and happy to dive into any of those details that you might find more interesting. Would you call yourself adventurous? I think a risk taker. Like risk addicted or excitement addicted. Yeah, I need to have constantly new things happening. I'm not very good with standard just daily routines. That's not the kind of person I am. I need adventure and I need risk taking. I think that's a big part of my personality.

Two weeks ago, I interviewed a guest who described himself as a change addict. That phrase stuck with me. When you mentioned being a risk taker and not following a standard playbook, choosing to carve your own path. It reminded me of that mindset. It also explains why you do what you do now, which we'll dive into shortly. You and I are not the type to settle in a comfort zone when everything seems calm and everyone around us says, why change? Everything is just fine. For us, it's not about comfort. It's about growth, progress, and doing things differently, better. While others may not fully understand, we see opportunities where they don't, and we

create our own paths forward. That's why I come up with the term called growth progressive. I call my show a space designed for growth progressives. People who stay in their comfort zones still seek growth, but they follow a traditional framework, a standard playbook. Those I call gross conventionalists. But people like us, we push boundaries. We explore the uncharted. Take risks and figure things out as we go. That's what being a gross progressive is all about. Would you see yourself that way?

I agree with that. I think the comfort zone is the most boring because nothing ever happens in the comfort zone. So you always need to be outside of your comfort zone for things to progress. When I read a good quote on this, it was just this week, early this week on LinkedIn, I think, there was someone that said, a life of leisure is hell and a life of adventure and purpose is heaven. But the problem is that since we're children,

we're taught that it should be the other way around. That we should aim for leisure and aim for free time and aim for rest. But actually that's not the purpose of life. Sure, you need rest from time to time, but it's not the purpose of life to just be lying on your couch and scrolling TikTok, right? A life of a purpose and adventure. That's really what is heaven and leisure is not. You describe yourselves as adventurous, risk-taker, gross, progressive, someone who doesn't follow the standard playbook. Before starting Tiger Hall, you worked in headhunting. Can you tell us more about your experience in that world?

Were there any pivotal moments, maybe a major change, a bold transition, or a risk you took that shaped your journey, or influenced your decision to build something entirely your own? Yeah, so I spent a little over four years, four and a half years at Michael Page, which is a great recruitment consulting firm, and I loved, absolutely loved my time there. And the reason I went into recruitment was that when I started working back in Sweden at McDonald's when I was 14 I learned, and this is why I always talk about McDonald's being the most transformative experience for me, because at McDonald's I learned my professional addictions if you will.

Or like my professional passions and what I love doing professionally. Those are three factors that has since McDonald's actually been in all my jobs of professional endeavors. So the first one is the fast pace and always having a high pace, things are happening quickly, changing quickly. It's high adrenaline, high tempo. The second one is commercial. The rush that I get from commercial endeavors, whether it's selling cheeseburgers or closing large enterprise deals or anything that is commercial. I love the, almost like revenue growth is like a gamification, like gaining points in

a game type of thing. So I love the commercial side of it. And then the third one is leadership, the human, and being able to lead and coach and grow people and orchestrate resources and get people together and have them work together as a team. So leadership was the third one. So throughout my entire professional life, that has been a thread because that's what I realized at McDonald's that I love this high tempo, I love the commercial thrill, and I love leadership and leading others.

So that's why I then went into recruitment. And the fourth side I would say which wasn't as big in McDonald's, but that became very big at Michael Page, was the independence and how much I love running my own business and being in charge of my own destiny and driving my own results and having my own P&L and team and so on. So that's really what drove me to do recruitment and be in Michael Page. And when I came in, I was obviously very low at the leaderboard, right? And I was like, I want to be number one. I want to win and I want to be the top biller, being competitive.

And obviously the only thing I could do differently from the others, I had much more years of experience and network and skill sets where I could work harder. So I started implementing my 7-11 shift, which means be at the office at 7am in the morning and don't leave before 11pm at night. And this was obviously way before hybrid work and having a laptop at home and those kind of things. So that's what I did. And became number one in the region the second year I was there. So that's what I did and became number one in the region the second year I was there. So that's something I really enjoyed as well. And again, that fast pace and the high thrill of it. So yeah, overall it was a great time and it was also where I saw the needs that then led me to start Tiger Hall around knowledge sharing, communications,

how change is driven, especially in large enterprises. And that was a very big source of inspiration for Tiger Hall. You described the fast-paced nature of your work, those 7 to 11 days filled with constant demands. I can feel the drive and dedication you had during that time, I can relate to that having been in a similar environment during my corporate days as stand-in-pours. Back then, covering the Asia region meant working 9 to 12. Not kidding, even on weekends.

But like you, I found this fast-paced and creative problem-solving extremely fulfilling. It wasn't just hard work. It was engaging and rewarding. But with that level of immersion comes stress. sometimes the kind that can weigh you down. In today's world, resilience has become almost a necessity. In your case, how did you build resilience to stay focused and keep moving forward? Whether in your personal or professional life, what approach or practice helped you push through tough times and maintain balance? tough times and maintain balance. So I think resilience is something that you can't really learn unless you're going through difficult times. And I think this is the both good and difficult part about resilience.

But like having a bunch of workshops or trainings around resilience, yeah, sure, you can teach mindset and you can teach like how to approach it when it comes. But there is no such thing as building resilience without going through hard times. And I think that's what people sometimes don't understand, that you have to go through hard times in order to build that muscle. It's like, how are you going to build any abs or biceps if you're not doing push-ups or sit-ups, right? You have to work the muscle to build it. And

that goes the same for resilience as well. So whenever I faced hardship or setbacks or difficult times, you either win or you build resilience or character as I've come to think about it nowadays. And when things don't go my way, when I fail, when things are going sideways, I'm like, right now I'm building character, I'm building resilience, I'm learning, and having that mindset when you're going through difficult times. When you're not going through difficult times, it's really hard to build resilience.

So be grateful for those difficult times and see what you can learn out of it. And also you need to see yourself coming out of it stronger, right? You need to go through those times and the difficult times to build resilience. So it really is like that muscle. So whenever you are going through hard times and difficult times, be grateful for it because that's actually the only thing that can help you build resilience. And then seeing yourself coming out of it, right? So when you see yourself like, I was okay, I managed to do that, I succeeded, I got through it. That's what builds resilience slash confidence. And that is what builds your self assurance

that you can actually get through this and it's nothing impossible. Then I think the second thing is, and I talk about this quite a lot, is identity and your self-talk and how you identify internally. So for me, for example example I identify as a resilient person. So when things happen and I need to be resilient I'm like this is who I am, this is what I was built for, and this is my identity to be resilient. So if you identify, if we take some examples right, let's say you identify as the head of marketing at product X, like your title is your identity. That's gonna be really hard if you lose that job because then you lose your identity. And same if you identify as something else that can be taken away from you, right? Then anything that can be taken away from you,

and it does, then you lose your entire identity. So base your identity on something that cannot be taken away from you that is there regardless of external circumstances, regardless of your job title, which company you work for, what investors you have, who your friends are, like just everything that is external, take that out of your internal identification and just think about who are you without all of those things. And then build your identity based on that. So for me, I've built it on resilience, on always learning, always trying my best, always working hard, always having good intentions. So that's who I am and that's how I see myself.

So if everything was taken away from me tomorrow, I would still be, I'm a resilient person with good intentions who will always learn and work hard. And that's who Nelly Wardroft is. It's not the CEO of Tiger Hall or this and that. So that's another big piece of resilience that I think is incredibly important. I like what you said about identity is so true. Many of us, whether we realize it or not, we are in some kind of identity crisis. You see it all the time. People giving themselves titles like CEO when they've just started a venture or crafting these polished personal brands on social media

that don't always align with their real actions or true values. It's like they're trying to create this facade, but underneath, they've lost the direction. They're part of a herd mentality, whether it's in their career or even in knowing who they are. And that ties directly to resilience, like you said. It's about holding on to something real, something solid. It's not just about revenue, growth percentages, and flashy titles.

It's about asking, what have I learned? Who have I met? How have I grown? So with that in mind, let's talk about your venture, Tiger Hall. Tell us as if we know nothing about it. What's the story behind this company? What problem are you solving? Who are you solving it for?

And how are you tackling it? So we're solving the problem that large enterprises have in engaging and getting buy-in from their employees during large transformations. So think of it like this, like a big enterprise is going through a culture transformation or merger or acquisition or technology implementation, like any kind of big change that is affecting a large part of the company. Then what they do today tends to be they go out, so after the strategy and planning side of things they go out and they're trying to activate this across the organization, right? What do they do? They would send math emails, so they maybe send a couple of emails a day bombarding people,

they would put up SharePoint site number 50,000. They would put something on the intranet that nobody goes to look at. They would put something in the LMS platform. And then the CEO suddenly talks about it in the town hall and people have no clue what he's talking about or she's talking about. And it's all over the place.

It's very messy. It's very difficult for employees to follow and make sense of. So the small group that has done this strategy and planning, they are like, why aren't people just getting it? Why aren't they just executing? Why don't they just get this transformation done, right? Whereas the people on the ground are like, I don't know what this transformation is about and why should I care?

And what's in it for me? And why should I do it? So there is this huge disconnect between large enterprises, say change, transformation, the people that are trying to make this transformation happen, right? And then the thousands and thousands of people on the ground. So instead of having that disjointed experience fragmented all over the place,

what TigerHole does is it allows you to create content, first of all, in very engaging formats. So let's say you have a PDF, a seven page PDF, no one is going to read that. You can upload that and it turns into a podcast. And it turns into a podcast in the local language of the person who's listening to it. So instead of having American HQ sending out those English PDF documents, suddenly you have a podcast in Cantonese or Bengali or French or any language that you want to listen to, right? So it allows for breaking through the noise instead of having all of these PDFs and emails and mass communication that people don't really read.

And then you can send that communication, engagement, capability building, training, all of it through very targeted audiences. So you can be very specific around who you target with what message. It's a lot of audience segmentation, so people only get what they are supposed to receive. So there's not this one size fits none kind of approach where you send the same thing to everyone. And then it's integrated where they work. So you would get it directly in your workflow. You don't need to go to the intranet or LMS or all over the place. You just have it where you already work, like in Microsoft Teams. And then you can give your feedback. And this is the most important part. That you have your voice heard as an employee and the change leader can then get feedback from the ground. So they can actually get feedback on how is this change received,

what are people thinking, What is the input? What's going well? What's not going well? Because it's really hard as a change leader to have that visibility across so many layers and geographies and the complexity that large organizations present. Right. So this way you can get that two-way feedback loop from all over the organization. And then the last piece is you have data.

So you have really good analytics and data on all of these things. So you see exactly what's happening. Are people reacting to it? What do they think? What is their feedback? Who is consuming it? Who isn't consuming it? What is the sentiment analysis of all of these different groups?

So as a change leader, you don't have to fly blind where it's like you send emails out and then 7% open it and you don't have to fly blind where it's like you send emails out and then 7% open it and you don't know where the rest went. And instead of having that you can have all of these analytics and data and insights. So it allows you to get much better with strategy. It can be much more agile and adjust your strategy as you're going through the transformation, which helps to increase the speed of execution and retaining top talent is a big one and also ensuring that you catch those problems early. So before the big problems become even bigger, you can actually catch them and address them

early on. So that's what Tigerall helps change leaders with. So you're running a tech platform, a software. The tech platform, yeah, correct. It's a software platform. And then we also do a bit of advisory around like communication strategies, audience segmentation, targeting of those things, but it's 80, 85% software.

And the platform is what people are buying. What triggered you to start this company in the very first place? I hate SharePoint. I think it's the most awful way of communicating. In part two tomorrow, Nellie will continue sharing her story of starting Tiger Hall, how she navigates the cultural differences across three regions, and why most change initiatives fail, and how to set up for success.

If you've ever struggled with change, whether in your career, company, or life, this series is for you. Come back and join us tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews,

check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.