Inside Move America Initiative: Culture in Action with Alicia Hart and Jeanine Charlton

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and we've got a couple special guests who we'll introduce in a moment. In April, we had the opportunity to speak with Matt Dyer, CEO of Merchants Fleet, about building community and connection in business. That conversation introduced us to the company's Move America Initiative.
Matt described Move America as a multi-year vision to help customers win, sell, and remain productive, but he also emphasized something essential.
Even the strongest strategy cannot succeed unless the how is equally strong.
The how here includes culture, values, leadership, behavior, empathy, communication, and the ability to connect every employee to the direction of the organization, things we love to talk about here. Today, we are continuing that conversation with two of the initiative's internal sponsors, and we will explore why culture cannot belong to one function alone, and how leaders across an organization create that alignment, and what it takes to turn a strategic vision into daily behavior. Tullio, introduce our guests today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:28)
My pleasure. Our guests today are Alicia Hart, Chief People Officer, and Jeanine Charlton, Chief Technology Officer at Merchants Fleet.
Alicia leads the people side of the organization, helping shape employee experience, leadership development, engagement, and cultural systems that support sustainable growth. While Jeanine brings the perspective of a senior operational and enterprise leader who helps champion Move America across the organization. Her involvement reflects a critical principle behind this initiative, which is culture is not simply HR's responsibility.
Every leader has a role in aligning teams, modeling values, and connecting strategy to execution. Together, Alicia and Jeanine offer a powerful view into how Move America becomes more than a company message. How it becomes shared ownership, leadership behavior, and culture in action. Alicia and Jeanine, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast. It's going to be a great follow up to our conversation with Matt.

**Jeanine Charlton** (2:31)
Thank you. Great to be here.

**Alicia Hart** (2:32)
Thank you for having us. Excited to be here.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:35)
So Alicia, maybe cue this up for us a little bit.
Let our audience in on kind of the Move America Initiative. And from a people and culture perspective, what does Move America mean inside the organization as well?

**Alicia Hart** (2:49)
Yeah, so Jeanine and I were chatting beforehand. And this was one of our highlights of our careers at Merchants being a part of this and co-leading this together. And Moving America really was designed for us to answer a simple question for all employees and our clients for that matter. So how do we help people understand where we're going? Why does it matter to them? And how are they going to contribute to getting us there? And we got to do this in a really unique way. We partnered with a group called The Storytellers. And the result of that was a six-chapter narrative, a story that we could all connect to. And it really reflected the merchant's journey, you know, where we come from, where we're going, how we're going to get there. And it did it in a very unique way, in a way that all employees could experience through visuals, through exercises, through a really important launch. And I think what was really special about that and unique is that it was done so through, the launch was handled through our leaders. So our leaders delivered these stories about this narrative to all of our employees, so as leaders across the organization, so everyone could see themselves in it.
And that's really where I think that cultural aspect came from. Because it wasn't just, you know, here's our strategy and here's what we're going to do. It was, here's where we've been, here's where we're going through the eyes of employees across the company.
So it helped in a number of ways, and I'm excited we're going to get to share a lot of that. It's been really transformational, a lot of fun, and has had a huge impact on our culture.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:41)
Yeah, doing it through a story sort of narrative is much, resonates much more and sticks with people much more than, you know, like the three or four words on the wall, right? Or something like that, where it's just, there's that disconnect and it's not as easy to follow until you like put yourself in the shoes.

**Jeanine Charlton** (4:57)
Yeah, what was really, if I could add to it too, Stephen, I think what was really kind of, I think, powerful for me is just seeing, you know, we had probably 300 people come together in one room. We had rented out a big kind of conference room where we brought people together, the visual experience that we created about having kind of a portal to the future and we asked employees to write down kind of their vision for the company on a go-forward basis and they created these cards and we got to read some of these cards, Alicia and I, and it was just a great way to get people really engaged and, you know, to have their voice kind of matter kind of throughout this experience. So it was just a very engaging event and, you know, the receptivity of our employees to do something like this was something really special.