Belonging at Work

Your Work Friends Podcast: Belonging at Work with Dr. Beth Kaplan

Fitting in fails…

Shrinking yourself to fit in is out. Standing in your truth is in. We spoke with belonging expert, and author of Braving the Workplace, Dr. Beth Kaplan to talk about why the old advice to “just fit in” is outdated—and honestly, damaging. We get into identity, inclusion, and how to stop molding yourself to a culture that was never built for you in the first place. Because real belonging doesn’t ask you to disappear—it asks you to show up.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

What does belonging mean to you personally in three words Don't sacrifice yourself.

Speaker 2: 0:07

Oh shit, that's good, that's good, it's good, it's good hey friend.

Speaker 3: 0:24

Hey, mel, how are you? I'm good, how are you doing? Hey, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Yeah, a couple of months ago Enzo figured out that when you whisper to Alexa, she whispers back. Well, this weekend we found out that if you ask Alexa to fart, she does and she has.

Speaker 1: 0:48

Yes, she has a whole canon of various farts, that she will fart on demand for you, which is incredible. And now I know what to teach my six-year-old nephew when I visit Florida in a few months.

Speaker 3: 0:55

You're welcome. I give you that gift. I give you that gift.

Speaker 2: 0:58

I appreciate it. Yeah, that was my Saturday. How was your weekend?

Speaker 3: 1:02

It was lovely. Thank you, it was so nice and sunny. Here I'm just enjoying spring, but I'm in the thick of wanting to throw everything out of my house. I just get in that mood of get a dumpster, let's throw it all out.

Speaker 2: 1:15

Yeah, that always feels good when you do that.

Speaker 3: 1:18

And then, four months later, you're like wait, where the hell is that? Where did that sweater go? Where did that sweater go? Well, friends, we're so excited because we're launching our episode with Dr Beth Kaplan, who is a global expert in belonging, and she is on a mission to improve belonging in the workplace in general in the world, and she joined us to talk about it. Francesca, what did you think about this episode?

Speaker 2: 1:44

Yeah, there were a lot of pieces of this episode that felt very personal, like I have felt what she had been talking about and I've also felt when I haven't.

Speaker 1: 1:55

I also felt just validated and really appreciated gaining some new insights and tools that I can take with me to help my own feeling of belonging but help other feelings of belonging as well.

Speaker 2: 2:08

Yeah, she was so good and gracious about offering small but really impactful things that everybody can do, whether you're an employee, a manager or, honestly, you're leading a company. Yeah so it doesn't have to be big, Doesn't it? Small things big difference Small things.

Speaker 1: 2:23

Yeah, it's Well everyone here's Dr Beth Kaplan.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Friends, we are super excited to have with us today Dr Beth Kaplan. Beth helps companies create a culture of belonging. She's also interested in how workplace trauma impacts our well-being and our future of work, and she's been recognized as a world-leading expert on belonging by the University of Pennsylvania and she's collaborating with them to develop a groundbreaking tool to measure belonging. She is currently the global head of leader development and enablement at Dassault Systems. Lastly, she is an author and her book Braving the Workplace will be coming out soon.

Speaker 1: 3:21

Beth, so lovely to have you here with us at your work. Friends, welcome. Thank you so much. It's great to be with you. Yeah, tell us what is belonging. How do you define belonging? So, belonging is the innate desire to be part of something larger than ourselves, without sacrificing who we are. So often I get the question of what's more important, the first part of that second sentence or the second, and they're both equally as important, right? So we've all had this overwhelming desire to be social, to be part of something, but if it comes at the cost of who we are, it's not real belonging. I felt that. I think I felt that before, francesca. Have you felt that before?

Speaker 2: 4:01

Yeah, I literally just got chills when you said that, even though I like I've heard you say that before, beth. But then when you said it again, I'm like, oh shit, that's so true. Yes, I felt it.

Speaker 1: 4:12

Yeah, the opposite of belonging is really fitting in trying to change who you are for other people. Yeah, and it never feels good when you try to force that. Ever, never. Why does this matter so much in life? It clearly matters, I think. What did they say? Community is actually more important than exercise in terms of life expectancy, right. Why does it matter so much in the workplace specifically? So it matters for so many reasons and the true reality of this one is that it extends beyond the workplace. We work so much more than any other generation.

Speaker 1: 4:45

You could debate that in history, when people used to have to hunt for their food maybe a little bit different, but at the same time, the reality in this one is that when you're happier, you're more productive. When you're able to connect with the world and feel like you can be yourself in any situation, you're going to feel that way. It gives you coping mechanisms. The serotonin alone is so healthy for us. When we don't have that, or where we feel isolated or excluded or any of the things, or like we're giving up a part of ourselves, it has very negative real-world consequences for us, for our mental, our physical, sociological well-being. Now, at the same time, it also takes a toll on everything in the workplace, from retention to all of the different measurements that you can come up with around satisfaction, but it's a real bottom line killer. When people feel like they don't belong, they either stay and they're unproductive which costs companies money, or they leave abruptly, which really kills your recruiting, and then, at the same time, when they're not productive, you lose business. You lose everything there. So the reality is that it hits all parts of the spectrum. You're obviously extremely passionate about this work.

Speaker 1: 5:56

What got you started? I think it's been with me all along. I think most of us would say that, right, a lot of people will come to me and say that everyone feels like a belonging researcher or everyone feels like a belonging storyteller because it's really rooted in our DNA. Right, it's part of everything we do. So I'm no different and for me, I had an experience in the workplace that really prompted me to evaluate how I look at myself. Was I being true to myself, and if I felt like I belonged or not? I'll keep it real.

Speaker 1: 6:26

The eventual realization was no. I didn't feel like I was being any of those things to myself, but instead of backing out and leaving, I doubled down. I made things so much harder for myself. So the second I figured that someone didn't like me who happened to be my boss at the time. It really hurt physically, right. So I think at the time it was way pre-pandemic and it was a stage where people weren't talking about things like this no loud quitting on LinkedIn, right. Or there was no quiet quitting where you could do what you had to do just to get the job done at the end of the day. So for me, I really wanted those gold stars from a boss who was never going to give them and I put myself in such harm's way that I was contemplating suicide.

Speaker 3: 7:11

That's true.

Speaker 1: 7:12

And when I told said manager, he ignored me. Wow yeah. So that was a trigger for me to get out. And not everyone's as lucky. You're not able just to pick up and leave when you want to, because there's this little thing called livelihood. Our jobs support us. So for me, I was able to make the decision that I need to leave, and it took me a good I would say eight months to a year to actually go. Yeah, I get it. What is that saying you can't win over people who are committed to misunderstanding you or not accepting you? And especially, I can only speak for myself as a perpetual people pleaser, a recovering people pleaser. It's natural, it's human nature to want to win people over when you feel like, oh, this person doesn't like me, why not, and what can I do about it?

Speaker 2: 7:57

And sometimes there's nothing you can do about it, but it does really impact you Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 8:02

And the sad part there's so many sad parts. The saddest part was I was trying desperately to win someone over who I didn't really respect. Yeah, I wouldn't take advice from him. Why was I taking criticism? Yeah, and it forced me to really look at myself. Look outside of the workplace. I was working 60 to 80 hours a week. I was losing friendships outside of work because people gave up trying to get together with me. I was doing things that were harmful, losing sleep. Hair was falling out. I was gaining weight and it was only until he ignored me, formally ignored my cries for help, that I knew I needed to leave.

Speaker 2: 8:39

I'm so sorry that happened to you. I just think it's really beautiful to see someone turning something that is so painful into something that is so powerful what you're doing to this work so thank you for that. I'm sure there are thousands of people that have felt very similar to you in terms of feeling like they didn't belong, that they were trying to assimilate into clipper culture, assimilate into the way a leader needed them to act to only not have that be reciprocated. You've been doing this work and studying this work, so you took that situation and then you went super deep in this. Yes, like a leading expert on belonging, I am wondering if we can talk about what are some of those common barriers or challenges people face in the workplace as it relates to belonging. What is that? What is that looking like for a lot of people?

Speaker 1: 9:28

I think it looks very different across the board. Right, there's a lot of diversity conversations that go around this, so when I comment, it's probably going to be a little more main sweeping. It'll hit everyone. I think one of the biggest barriers that we have is this internal talk track that we have. Right, there's this story we tell ourselves, and it's not always a realistic story. When we feel bad about ourselves, we beat ourselves up pretty badly. I think that's a really common barrier that I hear from people.

Speaker 1: 9:56

A lot of times the blame that you have is shifted onto you, from you, because you don't know where else to take it. Back in the day, I always say that back in the day it was HR, you'd go to HR. But the definition of HR has shifted, so when people have problems in the workplace they don't know where to go. You would logically think your manager, but that's not always a possibility, right? If we think about it, there are unequal playing fields. You and your managers are not equal. That's a reality. So speaking truth to power is really hard, and I think we're at a tipping point where people have been speaking truth to power and we haven't seen it go very well. So I think one of the biggest barriers are our leaders in the workplace and getting them acclimated to what it looks like. When we talk about trauma-informed workplace, so the trauma-informed workplace is really where you see things in the workplace that affect your mental and your physical health. We talk a lot about psychological safety, right? So when we don't feel safe in our environment and we're witnessing things that we need to either make just or justify on the company's behalf, that can become trauma-informed. For us is just one example, really. But who are about that? So a few things, not to disparage managers completely, but here's the reality. Have either of you ever had a manager that doubled as a psychologist? No, probably not. That's common, but from the pandemic and on, I believe that managers are being asked to take on way more, including the mental stability and health of their employees. Yeah, there's a lot of check-ins and things that managers are not able to control.

Speaker 1: 11:35

People come into the workplace with a lot of different backgrounds. Some come in and they are happy, healthy, raring and ready to go, and others unfortunately have to fake it till they get there. That's why concepts like family in the workplace are really hard. How many of you have heard anyone in the workplace ever say, oh, but we're like a family, oh, that's a red flag. It's a red flag because here's the reality. You can't fire your family. I would love to fire some of my family members. That's just not what happens. And most families are dysfunctional. Most are dysfunctional.

Speaker 1: 12:09

But when you equate family in the workplace to your personal life, who, which role do you think your boss plays in that? Right? A mom and dad? Yeah, very so. People really pay a lot of stock in that. Where some are like, no, I get it Clearly, that's not my familial ties. Others put a big point of this is me, this is who I am, and their identities start to get taken over by the workplace. So it's not I'm Beth, the mom of two. It is I'm Beth and I work at this company and this is my job.

Speaker 2: 12:41

It's been interesting watching as people are getting laid off. Yes, it's been interesting watching as people are getting laid off and they're getting laid off from companies that they have been with for five, 10, 15 plus years. And one of the things that when Mel and I talk to folks because we're on calls all the time with people when they get laid off, it is a grieving process A lot of times a deep grieving process because they did associate and identify so hard not only with the title that they had but with the company.

Speaker 2: 13:14

Because, I will argue that I think a lot of companies have positioned themselves as. You're part of this brand, you're part of this culture, you're lucky to be here, right, when you think about the safety net of your family. If your family were to disown you, you'd feel very similarly, and so I think there's this grief around, quite honestly, having that be ripped from you. And if you felt a deep sense of belonging and then all of a sudden you got laid off too, that does excuse my French. It feels like a huge mindfuck for a lot of people. Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 13:47

And for a long time that was very taboo to talk about.

Speaker 1: 13:50

It's just the reality. Trauma is trauma. You don't need to be in the fields fighting to experience PTSD. There's a lot of different ways it occurs. Workplace PTSD is a very real thing, so a lot of the people I coach and I talk to are very anxious to talk to me about it because they believe that their trauma is not as important as other forms of trauma. Trauma can really be as small as a sadness you experience and as large as something physically happening to you in the workplace. That spectrum is just so huge.

Speaker 1: 14:24

I have one person that I talked to recently who had a real hard time identifying the first time that they experienced trauma, and what we were able to bring it back to was their five-year anniversary Came and went and no one recognized it. At the same time, everyone else on that team got recognized. No, that wasn't trauma. They experienced A lot of sadness that led them into this really unproductive zone where they unfortunately, they started to put up with more that came their way. You would think it might be the opposite, but they really just were trying again to get those gold stars from their manager who they thought didn't care about them.

Speaker 1: 15:03

And what could I have done wrong? In reality, that's something the manager probably forgot. It's sad, right. Maybe the workday alert didn't go off, who knows? And that's just one of the examples. And that was a spiral that kept going and going and then the trauma really occurred when they were out of sync with their manager. And then topics of resilience came up and instead of digging into the deep roots of what was going on in the workplace, resilience was dumped on the employee base. You need to put up with these things right.

Speaker 2: 15:35

but I find this interesting too, because when I think about belonging, it was like diversity and inclusion, then it was diversity, equity, inclusion, and then it was diversity, equity, inclusion and belongings. Yes, and a lot of the examples you've been giving are right around an employee and their manager, or an employee to employee. Yet sometimes in organizations it seems like we're putting belonging at this corporate level. Yes, there's a distance, there's a distance, and I'm curious about your thoughts on belonging in these big corporate initiatives versus belonging the way we do.

Speaker 1: 16:10

So I can break it into two things. One, yeah, belonging is not all or nothing. That's a really big common misconception. You can belong to part of something and not the whole. You may feel like you belong to the company and your team but not to your manager. Or you may feel like you belong to that manager and your team but not the company. You could swap it in and out, and that's why I think ERGs are especially fantastic and troublesome at the same time, because you feel fantastic usually in those groups and they are highly beneficial for you to really be able to identify and connect with people. However, that being said, when they don't connect back to the corporate initiative or the company doesn't do anything about the struggles of these ERGs, that's a problem, right, People have a harsher or a more thwarted sense of belonging, which means a lack of belonging. Another is that belonging is not DEI, and that's probably one of the biggest.

Speaker 1: 17:06

You asked me before I might change my answer. Dei is a barrier at times to belonging because when you ask people what belonging is in the corporate world, they now say D, E and I, and they're all very important topics. They're just very different. But I would challenge you to go to any corporate report out there that says report on DEIB, anything that has a belonging. And if you can find me one metric on belonging, I'd be very surprised. It's just not the same. They're sisters, not twins at times. How are they?

Speaker 2: 17:35

measuring it? What are the typical? Sorry, I should know this and I don't.

Speaker 1: 17:39

No, it's very hard to measure belonging, so that's why I'm working with the University of Pennsylvania to create a tool around that. But no, belonging is seen as something subjective and until we're able to make it more objective, it is very difficult, unlike diversity, which is typically done through representation, but I would challenge that. I love the topic of diversity, but I really am into diversity of thought and mind. I think it's incredibly important when we're talking about representation as well, so it's very different in that sense.

Speaker 2: 18:09

Yeah, there's a lot of work to be done there right. A lot of amazing work has been done and the journey continues, absolutely, I hope it doesn't stop you too, beth.

Speaker 1: 18:18

I'd it doesn't stop you too, beth. I'd love to hear more about the work that you're doing with the University of Pennsylvania, the tool that you are working on with them, sure. So a lot of the work I do is around how we construct our sense of belonging, understanding what the roots of that are, whether it's personality or it's how you make decisions. And when I was doing my dissertation, my goodness, a few years back, one of the things we determined is that people make decisions one of three ways for themselves, for the company or for a combination of both. So, as you can guess, the healthiest combination is when you have everything at once. So most people with a true sense of belonging have that combination. When we do it just for the company, it's typically what we call sacrificial belonging. Right, we have to give something up for it. We all know the sacrifices in the workplace the ones that miss their PTO to better the company, or the ones that are missing games to produce those reports. So the other thing is, if it's just for you, there's a few different ways you look at that, but it's not always the right way to do things. So what I've done with the University of Pennsylvania is we've developed a tool that looks to see how people make their decisions around belonging, and so what we're doing is really taking a look and working with different companies to see how the reports are coming out, if it's predicting people's propensity to leave companies or if it's predicting their propensity to thrive, based on the way they construct their sense of belonging. It's really interesting. What have you learned so far with the companies that you've worked with? Were there any ah-ha's that you were like, oh, that was unexpected, or anything that just reinforced what you thought? We've learned a couple of different things. A lot of the time it's not actually been what's through the tool, but it's really through the interview process about the societal norms of the company. So personality makes a very big difference. If you are a company that builds itself upon extroverts and you are an introvert in the company, it's going to be a lot harder for you to progress. Likewise, if you're in an introverted company with introverted leaders and you are an extrovert, it's also going to feel like you are just square round. It doesn't work that way. So I think what we've learned is that companies need to pay attention to what type of employees they have and making sure that everyone can survive and thrive.

Speaker 1: 20:57

Francesca, and I talk about this often that in the workplace, the responsibility of a lot of these things are on the individual, the team and the organization. So I'd love to cover all three from your perspective and the work that you've done. Yeah, from an organization standpoint, what are some steps that organizations can take to create that culture of belonging where people are thriving? There's a lot of ways I can answer this. I think one of the things they need to do is look at their policies. That's the first thing. They need to make it a more equitable playing field.

Speaker 1: 21:27

I think that most of us can agree that belonging is typically an authenticity measured against a very specific type of worker in the workplace. It's usually white male, that's the best way to describe it. The other thing I would say, on top of policies, is making sure that you do not have a culture of imposed belonging right so everyone belongs here. That's not the case and it makes people feel really bad.

Speaker 1: 21:51

There's this concept of duck syndrome. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but no, please tell us more. So think about a little duck floating along the river. You probably met like a brisk pace. In reality, that duck is working hard to paddle its legs to look that calm and easy. And a lot of the times the workplace imposing belonging or saying everyone should feel this way because we make everyone feel included or like they should have a sense of belonging makes people feel really uneasy about themselves and when that happens it produces the sense of belonging, uncertainty, right, I don't know if it's me or the company, and let's just say you are with people that are not being honest around you or worse, you've got the corporate cheerleaders. You're not necessarily going to be like hey, francesca, I know you go to every happy hour, but do you feel like you sometimes don't belong here? So I think that's one of the things that we do in the workplace as a corporation that needs to be reconsidered.

Speaker 2: 22:48

I tell you I've probably been listening to way too much Taylor Swift lately, but there is definitely this sense of betrayal sometimes, or even companies misrepresenting themselves and they're like, oh, everyone belongs here. We're such a fun culture when you look at literally the marketing of how some of these companies present themselves. Yes, and the expectation people have right, that dissonance when people don't experience it or they feel like they have the duck syndrome. It's got to be exhausting for people.

Speaker 1: 23:16

It is exhausting. And that's not to say that companies shouldn't promote a sense of belonging. But not everyone belongs here. Yeah, I think it's a culture we have. Yeah, it's like being more authentic, even in their own advertising to say we strive to foster that environment and consistently work towards achieving it, which acknowledges that it doesn't exist 100% of the time. It's a constant effort. I think that's more authentic than what some of the messaging is usually Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 23:47

And you had mentioned the fact that what should companies and the corporate level do, maybe versus teams? Yes, I'm a corporation that's looking to foster a stronger sense of belonging. I'm going to invest a belonging at the team level or the org level because, especially these bigger companies, that's where belonging is really taken out and brought into daylight, because the corporate vision and values they always get a little altered as you go down right. Different leaders live those values differently. Organizations reflect that. So taking a look at what my organization looks like and trying to create the best possible culture, the healthiest possible culture, that's what companies can do is really acknowledge and give that autonomy to their leaders at the org level, and then that also makes it a safer space for leaders at the team level to be able to do that as well. What can leaders do in terms of creating those moments, really checking in with their people around, how they're feeling in the workplace? What are some? Something someone can implement tomorrow, right, and just start doing if they're not doing anything today? So one of my favorite things to tell leaders is to really start to know their people. That doesn't mean you know where they live and what their backyard looks like, but it means knowing what's important to them. And one of the best, easiest things that any leaders out there listening can do is they can ask their employees what they liked about their last manager and what they didn't like, because that's really important I'm pretty sure we're talking about current managers, past manager and what they didn't like, because that's really important. I'm pretty sure we're talking about current managers.

Speaker 1: 25:22

The reality is we all take our past managers with us, typically up to three. So that means your favorite manager you take them with you. Your least favorite manager you take them with you and you are measuring that current leader that you're with against those great and not so great leaders. So if you're out there and you're a leader, you're going to want to say what did you like that they did. What didn't you like? And you're going to learn so much this year I asked my team those questions. I usually update it because not everyone feels the same after a year or remembers it the same. But I had said what do you like that your last leader did?

Speaker 1: 25:56

And someone had said they kept consistent meetings so they didn't move my one-on-ones, and that made me feel really good because it gave me anxiety every time I had to reschedule and I was guilty. I was one of those people that moved them around, so I stopped doing that. And another thing that someone said that they didn't like was being praised publicly. Accepting that kudos was hard for them in public, but they really did appreciate it in a one-on-one setting when you were giving very specific feedback of what they did. Well, those are just two tips that are really helpful. At least I find I love to hear it just checking in what are your needs specifically and really personalizing it versus kind of spreading it like peanut butter as if it works for everybody, just because you think that's the right thing to do.

Speaker 1: 26:42

Absolutely. It makes me think of that lawsuit that someone had when their birthday was recognized in the workplace but they didn't want their birthday recognized, and I think that's a perfect example. I know there was a lot of jokes that came with that lawsuit, but I was like that's so valid though. That's taking care of people and understanding what they do and don't want and paying attention to that Absolutely. What's interesting about that story with the employee that didn't want a public praise? He happens to be very publicly admired, so I just assumed that this is something he was comfortable with, and he was not, and ever since we changed the way we give him feedback and praise, the whole relationship has been so much more positive.

Speaker 2: 27:24

Yeah, I love the idea of the ghost, the blasted past that we all bring, because that's so freaking true. It's so true and that question of what did you love and what didn't you like is so informative because it's so personal and it's so emotional for people too.

Speaker 1: 27:44

So emotional. I actually talked to almost all of my past managers and so it's also just a good idea to keep in touch and sometimes keep it real. He likes to tell me when maybe sometimes I'm being a little more dramatic because she's got really great frame of reference for it. Sometimes I'm being a little more dramatic because she's got really great frame of reference for it. So you know, it's not a bad idea. It doesn't mean that you have to be best friends with your bosses. Obviously, your work friends' podcasts would tell you you're not going to be best friends with everyone, and nor should you. Yeah, yeah, I think getting to know your employees is super, super important. And knowing how they are as a unit if I haven't said that already, but understanding what your package deal looks like, that's really important. Knowing my boss, knowing why I stop work at 5.30 every day and then why I may go back on it 10, is important to me. I don't want to be seen as a workaholic, but at the same time, it's my comfort level and I also don't want to miss the time while my kids are awake. I dug out it should be completely acceptable and it is, but it's probably because we had that conversation and that transparency really goes both ways. I love that.

Speaker 1: 28:47

I love to talk about employees, because leaders are in there with their people. It gets into one-on-ones and then a team level, but they're not always in all of the stuff happening with the individual employees that kind of peer-to-peer interaction and what goes on there. And sometimes for folks, leaders are a huge impact to their experience and their day-to-day, but so are their colleagues right, and sometimes those peer-to-peer relationships can really make or break that sense of belonging as well. What can individuals do to foster belonging in the workplace? So I would say boundaries are a fantastic place to start, because boundaries are two things that we can control. We can't control other people how they react to our boundaries and we can't set boundaries for others. So I always like to say that communication is kindness in this regard, and allowing people to understand you a little bit better than they may by understanding what your boundaries are and why you hold firm to them, also gives them insight into your values and what's important to you. What can someone do when they're really struggling with feeling that sense of belonging, either on their team? What can they do if they're really struggling to find that?

Speaker 1: 30:06

My first piece of advice I give everyone is to understand if the situation is real or if it's a story they're telling themselves. Our internal narrative is extremely powerful. It is and unfortunately it's usually less positive that we want it to be. I really wish that we were having a conversation where we're talking about someone that had just so much faith in themselves and that they were talking about their narrative. Oh, my goodness, I just kicked butt on that demo, or that's typically not what happens, and there's a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. So I usually tell people, aside from looking at the story we're telling ourselves and making sure that it's realistic, it's also maybe doing a gut check, but against your own mantras in life. So for me, I can share the story that I will typically over-index on things. So I try to hold myself accountable to doing what someone's asked me to do and sometimes nothing more, which is really hard for me. And if I'm really not sure about that, I might go to a peer and say did you hear it? The same way, I heard this request.

Speaker 1: 31:09

Sometimes that makes a breeding ground to open up a little differently with people and it also cuts the drama down, because you don't want to just have that friend that you commiserate with at work and that's real easy to get into that trap. If you have another person, it's the drama triangle, so it just keeps going and going. We want to make sure that when we pick co-workers that become our friends in the office, that it's people we can trust and that you typically want to limit any of the difficult conversation within that person that you trust. Personally, I love to be friends with everyone, but when it comes to people that I really will bank on, I usually maybe pick one person that maybe knows a little bit more drama about me than others yeah, someone who can also help you check yourself if needed. Right and honest yeah, is that true? Just asking, is that really true? That's right. I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 1: 32:07

There's a huge push in workplaces around bringing your authentic self. How can folks balance that need for individuality with their desire to fit in so they can be authentically them and bring and maintain that individuality while also feeling that sense of belonging? So I think the first step in doing that is understanding your values and what's important to you. So when you make decisions, you're indexing against them. Let's just say you notice bad behavior in the room.

Speaker 1: 32:33

You have Black colleagues that are not being heard, and diversity is a huge value to you, equity is a big value to you, and amplification If that's something that is going to keep you up at night, you need to speak up. I mean, let me just say that to me that is a huge value, so to me that is inherently doing the right thing. But, that being said, if that's going to happen just because other people are not amplifying their voices, it is part of my value system that I would need to be the one that stands up and says Mel just said that I really, or I love how Mel just told us that we are going to use the vending machine on the fourth floor?

Speaker 1: 33:12

I don't know, I have no good examples. This often happens to women right In meetings, where you need to step in and say that was a great point made by so-and-so. Yeah, that's right. And so I think understanding what your values are and I don't like the negative metaphors but understanding what a hill we're dying on is for us and what's not Not everything has to be a battle, right, so there are a lot of us that have the sense of justice in us and understanding what battles we should be fighting, and not If it's going to keep you up at night and it's going to eat at your soul because you've just betrayed yourself.

Speaker 1: 33:46

It's worth speaking up. Yeah, If not, one of the tricks I do is I typically hold three coins in my pocket and when I'm in a meeting, I make sure not to spend all three at once and not to speak more than that, because it's going to be really hard for me to tailor back. And so giving yourself strategies when you know you may be in a tough situation really key in the workplace. Yeah, I like that, and the three coins in your pocket is a nice reminder for folks. That's a very simple tactic to use.

Speaker 1: 34:16

It's also sensory, if you think about it. Yeah, I like that. I am wondering about different ways of working. Obviously, covid really blew up how we work, which is fantastic in so many ways, and now you have returned to office and people who are in the office and you have these hybrid working environments, and some are still 100% remote. Would you approach ways to foster belonging differently, based on the modality of how people are working? So COVID was terrible, but one of the things we got out of it is this ability to see people beyond the screen, and I think that's really important. I've always been a remote employee, so I knew I was to people. I was just sitting in this box here and then, when COVID happened, everyone was put in that position and I think it made people reevaluate where people work from and the fact that it didn't really matter. I will tell you that there is this concept of place belongingness, and place belongingness really sits with the fact that if it feels like home, it can be linked to a place. I've never been in a corporate headquarters where it's felt like home. No one serves me coffee, so no baristas at my house. That would be lovely, like sometimes it happens in the workplace and that's a luxury.

Speaker 1: 35:34

I think that people have a misconception that you need to be in an office to feel a sense of belonging, and I don't believe that's accurate and the research tells us it's not true. What does the research say about that? Because you hear all of these big organizations. A huge part of their argument for return to office is it's going to foster belonging. We've lost belonging and it feels like that's such a false narrative. What does the research say? The research says that unless it feels like home, it doesn't necessarily need to be placed belongingness. That being said, do I love to get together with my colleagues? I do, I'm one of those people that does, but that is because I'm an ambivert that leads towards the extrovert side. So I get so much energy from other people. Yeah, doers, but they just they get their stimulus from other places and that's okay. So while I do believe that people build a great sense of community while they're in the office I do it doesn't necessarily have to be done that way. And I'll tell you, almost all of my team and my organization that I manage is remote. We get along fantastic. We don't always agree, we love disagreeing, we love the debate, but it doesn't break our sense of belonging to be remote. I do think there are certain jobs where that collaboration in person is important, right, but I just happen to be in a space where it's not as firm and we believe that working from the office could also mean you're at a client or other places where you are set up and need to have those interactions, but, no, it does not give you a stronger sense of longing to be in an office.

Speaker 1: 37:17

We have, I think, what? Four, now maybe five generations in the workplace, which impacts so many things. We talk about individualization in their needs and that personalization. How do generational differences and especially in the time we're in now, like? How does that impact belonging in the workplace? So we have a lot of generations at once, as you mentioned, right, you've got the boomers, who really will challenge less when it comes to management and authority, because your job and your boss are sacred in a sense, and you've got the Gen Xers, who are still a little more likely to please I'm a Gen Xer, but at the same time, we'll take far less to get it done and we're not necessarily the purpose-driven generation that is currently in the work, coming up in the workplace where they've been taught that they can bring their authentic selves to work and they should bold people to standards that are different than maybe the millennials that came before them, that a little bit more different change in the way that we work. So I think all of those generations together learn from one another.

Speaker 1: 38:27

I think in the beginning it felt a little problematic, but I think it's forcing people out of their comfort zone, which helps everyone grow just a lot differently than we have in the past.

Speaker 1: 38:37

I would go as far as to say that the next generation will be probably Generation T, which is all around transition and how we deal with the world and look at it differently. So I honestly think all of this is bringing phenomenal diversity of thought that didn't exist necessarily before. I couldn't agree more. It just seems like it's a really good conversation that seems to be happening among everybody about how to make work better together Absolutely, and these were things we weren't talking about. So it is very interesting. We're also getting into different things that we didn't before when it comes to these generations. Like, we have grandparents now in the workplace and if you think about it before, people would retire early than they do now. So you didn't have that frame of reference, you have people working longer than they ever have and these shifts in generation and family responsibility are really shaping a different way that we look at the workplace.

Speaker 2: 39:33

I'm personally completely for it. Outside of like humans being humans, there's no reason why we shouldn't have been striving for a very deep sense of belonging all along. It's exciting to see this evolve, especially over the last, I'd say, five years, where it's been a big part of this discussion. I do want to talk about where is this going, but before I ask you that and I really appreciate having your insights in this because you're so researched on it, You're a practitioner of this I feel like you're the best person to ask this question and I'm going to ask you to give a grade Grade scale A, B, C, D, F, right Corporate America how well do organizations in corporate America foster belonging?

Speaker 1: 40:16

In America B minus.

Speaker 2: 40:21

B minus. Rationale for the great. Rationale for the great.

Speaker 1: 40:25

Because a B is positive but depending on how you look at it, some people think it's really negative in this cultural perfectionism that we have and others are completely satisfied by it. I thought about dropping it down, but the C being average, I think I still think it's a bit above average because the awareness layer is there. I don't talk to people and have to talk about why belonging is important anymore If you're just accusing to people about what it is and how we got to where we are with it. So I'd say solid.

Speaker 2: 40:58

B minus.

Speaker 1: 40:59

I like that answer.

Speaker 2: 41:00

I like that answer. I feel like most employees would answer that too.

Speaker 1: 41:04

I'd agree. I usually think that people are going to answer lower and they don't. I think a lot of it also is because people are nervous to tell the truth. They are, yeah, nervously trying to get back to their employer.

Speaker 2: 41:16

I also am wondering, because there's such a morphing of our values towards work too, I wonder if people are taking the pressure off of organizations to be everything to them. Now I'm looking at this more transactually, or I'm looking at this as a Mel. I'm sorry, I'm going to use this analogy again. I'm not looking at you as someone I want to marry. I'm looking at you as someone I want to have a good time with tonight.

Speaker 1: 41:37

So it's like the pressure's off a little bit, my hope is because people realize they don't have to get their sense of belonging from work. Yeah, so we have this concept of dissimilated belonging, where you don't necessarily need to be a cultural ambassador. Some people just want to do their jobs and go home. Yeah, that has to be okay. We have to make that okay and I think this new generation does that, yeah, in a sense for us. So I want to say that's becoming a bit more mainstream, that people don't need to get their satisfaction and their purpose from work. Yeah, that's the generation I think that we'll see come in as well. It's so healthy, that's such a new healthy outlook. We'll see come in as well. It's so healthy, that's such a new healthy outlook.

Speaker 1: 42:13

Because we're all Gen X on this call, you know, like that was a transition I think we probably all made over time. But it's nice to see that people are not moving away from putting their whole identity into the work Absolutely. And then there's these companies that are shifting their values to be really about the work they're doing and not necessarily the destinations for belonging, which is huge. The company I work for, I have to say I'm proud because we really do look at powering smarter treatments for patients, and so, if you really break that down, that's a phenomenal aspiration and we really work very hard to it and we really work very hard to it. You would never say in our values that we have to feel a certain way or do a certain thing or act the way to get there, and for us that takes a lot of pressure off of things, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 43:01

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 43:02

I also think it's an accurate representation. Yeah, this is my thing. Can we get back to accurate representation? I'm not judging you on what you're saying you are. What I'm asking you to do is be honest about who you are so you give an accurate representation. That's my play. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. All right, so this is exciting. Mel and I were talking about this the other day, because I don't know about you, beth, but you feel the energy shifting, especially this year around work around speed. This year around work around speed, around change, around everything. And belonging has made wonderful progress in terms of educating people about value, what it is, and I'm curious about, when we look at the next five years, how do you see the concept of belonging evolve? How do you see the needs for employees and organizations evolve? What does the next five years of this work look like?

Speaker 1: 43:55

What I hope it looks like, I should say, is that it is a place where people don't have to sacrifice who they are to be themselves. I think part of braving the workplace is being yourself every day in a world that tells you to be something else. So I'm hoping that the workplace in five years is more representative of your towns and the people on the streets. That's a really aspirational goal I have for the workplace, and I also hope that people can understand themselves a little better and don't feel as pressured to be all of the things all of the shoulds, the coulds and woods that the rest of the world would like us to be.

Speaker 2: 44:33

I love that I love that you talked about how leaders can create a sense of belonging. I'm curious about making teams more representative of our work environment. They're more representatives of the way that our towns look like. Is there anything that you would have that a manager could do, a leader could do, to say I really want to make sure that I can start to achieve that now.

Speaker 1: 44:53

I think it's looking at your team and the diversity on your team. Are people in your meetings nodding their heads or are they arguing comfortably with you? Are they debating? Do they speak up or are they just laughing at your corny jokes? I think that's the things I listen to at least. I think it's important to really be able to be in a team that communicates dissent.

Speaker 3: 45:17

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 45:17

I think it's also important to share experiences with one another. You're not going to share everything, and nor is it appropriate to share everything in the workplace, but there's certain life moments that we all have, and being able to comfortably speak to them at the appropriate level of detail is really important, and I think that's why people feel such a pull to go back to the office, because you do those things without thinking about them. We always talk around about the water cooler and talking about the latest episode of whatever you watch, but it goes deeper than that. It really does. It's a little harder to hide your emotions in an office yeah, absolutely, it's not very acceptable, and that's it really does. It's a little harder to hide your emotions in an office yeah, absolutely, very acceptable. And that's what people miss. I think they miss that sense of camaraderie, and we don't necessarily need to be a person for that. We just need to understand how to break down barriers that are preventing us from doing that.

Speaker 3: 46:04

Yeah, love it, love it.

Speaker 2: 46:31

Rapid round.

Speaker 1: 46:32

Yes, we're going to do rapid round. I promise this is painless, okay, and it's just possible. It's meant to be fun. Some of our best conversation happens here and the goal is to answer pretty quickly, like your very first thought that comes to mind. And if you want to expound upon it, absolutely you can, so we'll leave that up to you. And if you want to expound upon it, absolutely you can, so we'll leave that up to you. Sound good, perfect, okay. What is the best belonging initiative you've seen so far? The best belonging initiatives I've seen so far is through Brene Brown, who talks about braving the wilderness and the ability to be yourself and the comfort and bravery to be yourself. What does belonging mean to you personally in three words Don't sacrifice yourself.

Speaker 3: 47:23

Oh shit.

Speaker 2: 47:23

That's good, it's good, it's good. I see merch, beth. I see a lot of merch happening.

Speaker 1: 47:30

What are the top three factors that make a community and we see work as another kind of community feel inclusive? Inclusive is what other people allow for you to be, versus belonging is what you decide for yourself, okay. So if I'm talking about inclusive, I would say it's transparency, I would say it's care, and care is a really big spectrum, right? Care is thoughtfulness and it's also speaking your name in a room of opportunity. And care can also be boundaries, and maybe I would go with boundaries, now that we're talking about that as well. I think inclusive, having that level of boundaries, promotes all the things we just spoke about. And with that and that, because that was inclusiveness, now flip it with belonging. So what are the top three factors that make a community feel like others belong? Individuality, like others belong, individuality I'm going to go with care, because we know care is the number one influence that a manager can do to make their employees feel like they belong. And trust I like it. Okay, trusting ourselves and trusting others yeah, the trusting. Trusting yourself first, of course, so important, but it's also trusting others too, in that everyone starts with positive intent. That's right.

Speaker 1: 48:55

Yeah, if you could recommend one book, movie, article on this topic of belonging for someone, something that's deeply resonated with you and you're like I need you to see that, read that, listen to that. What would you recommend to someone today? It's a really tough one. Bell Hooks has a lot of phenomenal topics around belonging. Maya Angelou is probably my idol when it comes to this conversation, because she presented belonging in the best, truest way. Belonging to nothing and everything at the same time is just magical. When you can be that free to belong to nothing, you belong to everything. So I'm going to go with bell hooks and Maya Angelou. I love it. That's really powerful. When you belong to nothing, you belong to everything. That's right. If you could have every company do just one thing differently tomorrow, what would that be? Get to know their employees and what matters to them. How about?

Speaker 2: 50:02

leaders the same and individuals be.

Speaker 1: 50:11

If I could have one wand and I would wave it around, it would be for people to be kinder to themselves.

Speaker 1: 50:15

It really would be.

Speaker 1: 50:16

I think we put a lot of harsh, in harsh words, harsh feelings out there.

Speaker 1: 50:22

A lot of it just creates this crazy level of uncertainty and anxiety and then, a lot of the times, the exclusive nature of that is isolating and stressful, and that's a lot of the times we keep it to ourselves until it just boils over and you either explode or, unfortunately, all of the physical ramifications come into play, because we know that this becomes physically painful when we feel like we have a thwarted sense of belonging and it's unfortunate that belonging is an antecedent to suicide. When we feel like we have a thwarted sense of belonging and it's unfortunate that belonging is an antecedent to suicide. When we feel like the world is better off without us or we find that we don't believe we're making a difference for ourselves and others. So I would love to see people be kinder to themselves overall. I think that's such a really good message. I'll share my best friend if I'm like down on myself, which I think we're all guilty of it trying to get better at it, but it's the first.

Speaker 1: 51:17

Of course, you're your own worst critic. My best friend will say hey, don't talk about my friend like that. We just stop. So it's just little things like when you're talking about yourself, be like hey, don't talk about you like that. I think it's good. I think that Thank you so much for this and for your authenticity and for sharing all of this good research with us and tips with us on how to have better belonging at work, and we cannot wait to read your book when it comes out soon. Thank you, and thank you for the phenomenal work you're doing on this podcast. I bet you people tune in and they just love it because you both seem like you're friends with the podcast guests. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3: 52:07

Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends.

Spotting Trustworthy Employers

Your Work Friends Podcast: Spotting Trustworthy Employers with Adam Horne

Job advertisements sell dreams…

But reality? That’s another story. Job descriptions, interviews, Glassdoor reviews—there’s truth in the subtext. Adam Horne, co-founder of Open Org is on a mission: to build a more trusted, transparent world of work. So, we wanted to get him on the pod to talk about how in the hell do you do that? Turns out, it's not only doable (let's start with employees having ZERO surprises around biggies like compensation, benefits, etc), but, when done authentically - can improve (like majorly improve) hiring, retention and overall health of an organization.  

Our conversation covers aligning internal and external transparency, the costs of cultural mismatches and the unintentional humor (or not) of hiring managers who promise more than they deliver.  Most importantly, this episode is loaded with practical advice for creating genuine, transparent work environments. If you want to avoid the smoke and mirrors and find a workplace that walks the talk, don’t miss this one.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

So we're of the view that there needs to be some sort of level of openness and transparency to call yourself transparent to a degree, and we provide that level of structure, but we don't necessarily prescribe where that transparency should be and necessarily how deep that should go. So the way that I try and talk about it with companies is work on defining it for yourself first. What does that look like? And that for me, starts of understanding, like why is this word important? If you're putting on your career site or your job ads or just putting it out there, there's got to be a reason why you're saying it, and if there's not, it's just an empty word.

Speaker 2: 0:48

Mel, good Monday to you. Good Monday to you, yes. Yes, I'm going to start saying that. It just feels like a thing, it feels like it could be a thing Feels like Shakespeare Good morrow is good morrow thing, I don't know.

Speaker 3: 0:59

I'm making that up.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Good morrow is a thing, that's a thing.

Speaker 3: 1:03

Good morrow Good morrow to you.

Speaker 2: 1:07

Well, I'm stoked to talk about Adam Horn. Adam Horn is the co-founder of OpenOrg, and what I love about the work OpenOrg is doing is they're on a pretty cool mission to rebuild trust by bringing clarity to the world of work, and they're doing that by making sure that people have zero surprises at work, like when you're interviewing for a job. They want you to have zero surprises around things like comp, culture, benefits and career development, and Mel and I were really taken with what they're doing and we had a chance to talk to him. And Mel, what did you think of that conversation?

Speaker 3: 1:40

I thought it was refreshing. It was really eye-opening to hear the perspective from Adam and his experiences working with organizations and truly the benefits of transparency, which feels like a no-duh situation, but not a lot of orgs are doing it, so I'm just really excited by this work.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:02

The other thing I really liked, too, was his twist on this. This is not open Oregon Adam dictating what transparency needs to look like they're really working with organizations to say, hey, what is authentic, what works for them, what works for you? Yeah, it's a really cool way of thinking about the zero surprise game for employees and whether they're coming into a company or whether they're in a company as well.

Speaker 3: 2:25

And the bottom line for your business.

Speaker 2: 2:27

A thousand percent Packed within this discussion are things that organizations can do, what individuals can do and what can you do if you're leading a team and you want to be more transparent, even if your organization might not be. So here's our conversation with Adam Horne. Adam Horne, welcome to the pod. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for having me on. It's awesome.

Speaker 2: 3:00

Yeah, adam, you've had a really interesting career, right. You've started multiple organizations. Now you're pulling into OpenOrg. You're a new father as well too, so you've got like a lot going on, probably trying to get some sleep here and there. Just super curious as to how did you even get into this work? How did you get to where you are today?

Speaker 1: 3:20

Yeah, I gave up on sleep a long time ago.

Speaker 1: 3:23

It's like this way, my latest uh child is my third and I've got three under six now and I've navigated the, the three kids and businesses etc over the the period of having COVID and stuff going on as well. So yeah, it's been interesting the last sort of four or five years, to be honest. But yeah, my, my career as a whole over the last sort of 12, 13 years is is all centered around people and talent. So nine of those 12 years as a founder or co-founder myself as well. So I've navigated the complexities and challenges of being a founder and trying to build and run a business, always bootstrapped, always anywhere between sort of five employees up to 70, 80 employees so that size but challenging in its own way but also a lot of that time actively working with clients externally on their hiring and their people strategy. So over that time I've had a lot of exposure to working with startups or scale-ups all over the world hundreds of them over the years and have, from a hiring perspective in particular, I've seen a very clear difference in terms of how companies benefit from being transparent or not. I've worked with some really open, transparent companies and you just tell when you walk through the door and you settle in that this is a very open, transparent environment. I've got resources, information landing on my lap and your job becomes very easy, regardless of what you're doing, but particularly when you are in that role where you're dealing with bringing new people into the business, being able to offer clarity and depth to candidates and applicants before they join, you see the benefit of that when they walk through the door it's really clear and things like attrition, retention, all of those sort of key metrics that businesses look at to try and point them towards some level of organizational health, feel really clear, really nice.

Speaker 1: 5:09

I've also had the benefit on the flip side, of working with companies that are incredibly secretive, some by design but some just through pure chaos and uncertainty and lack of communication. But as an example, I've been parachuted into businesses before where I've been told I'm not allowed to know what funding round we've just done because it's a bit secretive. So if candidates ask an interview, just tell them. You can't let them know. And I've been given about 10 different values from different employees who don't really know what values the business has.

Speaker 1: 5:39

So that end of the spectrum effectively in terms of the way businesses operate and you can still hire, you can still get people through the door, but I've seen what happens after people join and then, generally speaking, you've got that sort of revolving door type situation in those types of business and you see the struggles and the cost and the time it's been trying to just maintain headcount, let alone grow. So over that time I've had a really clear view on what transparent culture looks like and what that benefit is from being more transparent, and I've been lucky enough, whilst running my own businesses alongside that, to be able to pull that experience into how I build my own companies as well, and I've always defaulted to my own level of transparent, my own level of open, and it's worked incredibly well for me. So that, as a bit bit of a backstory, is where I come to today as regards to launching OpenOrg.

Speaker 2: 6:28

We want to talk about OpenOrg because we've seen this conversation about how transparent organizations are evolved, especially, I feel like, over the last and I could be wrong on the numbers, but it feels like especially over the last four years. Five years. Is you need to put this information out there or this is now the expectation? So I'm loving these conversations around now. Transparency is the expectation from a marketplace perspective. So, Adam, what does OpenOrg do?

Speaker 1: 6:51

The way we come in to it really is. I co-founded OpenOrg with an old friend of mine and we've known each other for 12 years, so we've had this talk track for 12 years, even about the world of work and culture and how it's broken and one day we'll fix it. And we've talked I don't want to name names, but talked about the damage that toxic review sites do to employers and to applicants and so on and so forth and how one day we'll find a new way to rebuild trust in terms of that intersection between you know, applying to a role and starting in the right type of business for you. So that's where a lot of the conversation about open org has come up and that's exactly where we sit. We want to get to the point with open org where we can help companies not just become internally transparent with their employees.

Speaker 1: 7:34

That's a really good, healthy place to be, but it only does so much for us. You've got to mirror as much of that as possible externally. There's some things you maybe aren't comfortable doing and that's fine as a limit, but there's no benefit just to being internally transparent For us. There's huge benefits to opening that door a little bit more and showing people under the bonnet, showing people exactly what they're going to be getting when they come in, because without that, people are coming into your business with the wrong expectations. Without that, people are coming into your business with the wrong expectations. So Open Org operates exactly that intersection of employer brand hiring and both internal and external transparency and trying to help employers get more aligned across that spectrum to build healthier alignment across that entire employee journey.

Speaker 2: 8:21

It's interesting when you look at why you should really think about transparency as an organization. I'd like to take it from the employee side a little bit more and also from the organization side, because one of the things you talk about is really to have employees have zero, zero surprises. When you start a new job and I personally felt that I think we all have right where you thought you were getting into a gig, you thought it was one thing, and then into it you're like, oh hell, this is this is not this at all. You talked about this a little bit earlier, but I'm wondering if you can walk us through what the benefits are to have zero surprises as an employee so much across that entire life cycle.

Speaker 1: 8:57

If you look at some of the sort of stats and the research out there around people leaving new hires leaving roles within the first 90 days or so, I think there's a stat out there and I take them with a pinch of salt because you hear different things and different things, but there's so much research on this ultimately around how many people leave roles. I think it's something like 30% of new hires leave roles within 90 days. Such a waste of time for everyone. Such a waste of time for everyone the money you spend interviewing, hiring, the time you spend in the salaries for paying all of that stuff to get into that. It's such a waste of time for everyone involved. And then you have to start again to rehire all because and most of those people leaving site misalignment on cultural role as one of the big reasons for them leaving. And then there's other studies out there that link to that.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Four in ten hiring managers have admitted to lying to candidates about a role or a culture or how business operates. So lying yeah, they actually these are the hiring managers actually admit to lying about this and this is like a resume builder survey study that you can go out there and find online. That's just the people who admit to it. It there's probably more over and above that who haven't admitted to it, but again, just at that interview stage, in terms of attracting talent, attracting candidates, there's a whole lot of problems going on there. So there's a time factor that is being wasted here. There's cost, there's money. There's also well-being and mental health involved here, particularly for the candidates and the employees, but also for the hiring managers, and my co-founder, john, has had this himself as a hiring manager in a larger corporate business, hiring people knowing that he's selling the wrong version of what people are going to get. But he's in this corporate environment where he's just feeling like he has to hire and grow and his own well-being and mental health took real damage because of that, which led to him leaving because of that situation too.

Speaker 1: 10:49

So there's a lot of reasons why transparency really is important in building trust at that early stage. But then, when you look inside the business internally, day to day, there's so many things that point to the benefits of of being transparent and opening, communicative with individuals when it comes. But once they're in, the benefit of being transparent and communicative with your employees is really important as well when you're thinking about to use layman terms like getting everyone aligned and on the same page. That's a lot of what ceos talk about wanting to get and wanting to see. That's all about communication and getting people aligned and understanding where are we going, what are we doing, and that can boil down to so many different things internally in terms of what transparency does look like, and that will differ for different people, but the benefits are there when it comes to productivity, performance, profitability. The research is out there.

Speaker 2: 11:41

What do you think really drives organizations to not be transparent, because we see this so much, especially as you get in these big behemoth organizations. There are some that do this, okay, but I would argue that most of for us, the fortune 500, I don't know if they do this really well. What is holding organizations back from being transparent?

Speaker 1: 12:04

Lots of different factors that could be founder mentality. Obviously that's probably more prevalent in smaller businesses. But if you have a more traditional CEO founder who doesn't believe in seeing employees is that they're equal ultimately and understanding the power of employee could bring when you think about things like co-creation and just communication, they see them as workers rather than, again, equals. That creates silos immediately in how companies are structured and how hierarchies work and those silos immediately cause problems with communication and what's shared and what's not shared. So there's a founder ce leadership mentality, mindset thing that is really common and we see that so much with the people leaders we speak to.

Speaker 1: 12:48

There are some instances where companies in fairness are operating in certain industries or environments where they can't share certain information and that's completely fair. But I think what I see happen there is, if they're operating in this sort of environment or industry where it's a little bit more secretive or confidential, that stops them being transparent in ways that they still could be. They suddenly put the shutters down and they use it almost as an excuse to say we can't share this, so it means we can't share anything else. We try and find ways of showing them actually there's still some really relevant information you can still share.

Speaker 1: 13:21

That's safe and okay, but the default to being closed and secretive because of that and I guess the other one probably is some companies that have just grown either very quickly or very slowly over time, with a certain mindset, with a certain culture, and it's almost too much for them to unravel now, particularly in a larger corporate sort of environment. You've got problems with pay equality and equity across the entire business. Where do you start? How do we unravel that? What do we do? It's almost easier just to keep pushing on in the direction we're going and hope that it never causes us too many problems or assume that if it does cause us problems, it's going to be cheaper for us than having to rework all of this and rebalance salaries and so that there's some companies that may be too far down the road to care about it.

Speaker 2: 14:08

It's just like that big nod of Christmas lights or something that you're like we're just not even going to handle.

Speaker 3: 14:14

Just walk away slowly. Oh gosh, adam. It's so shocking, as someone who worked in talent acquisition, to hear that hiring managers would lie in an interview. And I would say why? Just why, because people are going to find out as soon as they start the job. So it's just an interesting choice to me.

Speaker 1: 14:37

Yeah, I think there's pressure from above. Particularly when you work in a larger corporate type environment, I think you probably are more likely to just feel this pressure from above to hit targets when it comes to hiring for your team. You just do what you need to do to get people through the door and you probably have more resources around you as well, so you don't think about the cost. And when it comes to time that's invested in hiring, you've got a TA team that will. Yeah, they do. They just do their magic stuff in the background and you don't really appreciate how much work goes into that as a hiring manager sometimes. So there's lots of again reasons why people might do it. But yeah, I was shocked to see that as well.

Speaker 2: 15:14

I think I've lied. I think I've lied. Have you? Yeah, I think I have not. Let me ask you all this Is this a lie? Like when you feel like you're probably out the door anyway, but you're hiring people and you're like, yeah, the culture is great.

Speaker 3: 15:29

I actually won't say that. If someone asks me interesting, I will just what's the culture like and I've been honest.

Speaker 1: 15:36

I'll give you the good, the bad and the ugly, because I think you deserve to know it so I had this conversation with someone recently who's a I won't again name names because it's a bit of a delicate one, but it was a people leader. I think there was an m&a event. Their business has been acquired, everything would change. They were basically checked out and said I'm committed to moving on. Now everything's changed. That's not what we've built anyway, because they're in a people lead a role. They were heavily involved in hiring and interviewing.

Speaker 1: 16:04

So we that touched on that discussion of what should I be doing, and I guess my advice was similar to the. What Melza said there is that the most positive thing you can do now is try and make sure that anyone else that walks through that door and joins that business is aligned, because even though you don't think it's a great place to work anymore for you, it doesn't mean it's terrible for everyone, and there are still people out there who really will align with that culture. Even if you think it's crazy, it doesn't make any sense, there are people who might like it. So do what you can to present facts and, rather than being opinionated, try and talk explicitly about what culture looks like here, which I think actually is what so many companies don't actually understand at the starting point is like what is culture here? How do we describe it and understand it, rather than giving an opinion on how fun it is here?

Speaker 3: 16:57

Either happy hours yeah, yeah understood, yeah we have a foosball table. No, I'm just kidding that pods. No, and it's interesting because the cost I thought I read this week that what they previously thought the cost of making the wrong hire was significantly low to compare, comparing to what the actual true cost of that is. And, adam, I'm sure you must have some number that you know about. What is the cost of that at times? What could it be up to?

Speaker 1: 17:25

Yeah, I again chatted about this yesterday. I can't really give you a figure because I just keep seeing all these different figures out there, in different, yeah, but it's high. The one that seems to stick in my mind is up to two thirds of someone's salary to replace. So if someone's on $90,000 a year, it could cost you 60k to just replace them. And again circling back to the benefits of being open and transparent, the more you can share up front, it's not just about getting people aligned to the right culture. It's not just about getting people aligned and to the right culture. But there's so many benefits around onboarding and ramp up time and getting people to a point where they are more productive in the early days within your business. So companies are always looking at like how can we shorten that ramp up time so that people are effectively making us money sooner, which is completely fair? How do we do that? The more share, the more you provide up front, the quicker that happens.

Speaker 3: 18:37

What does a good open culture look like from your perspective?

Speaker 1: 18:43

that's a really interesting question. It's really hard to answer as well, because people ask us quite a lot like how do you define transparency? And this is the whole world that we're in. So we, we don't define it. We were very keen from the outset to make sure that we aren't the ones trying to define what transparent looks like.

Speaker 1: 19:01

That's part of the problem for me, like some of these awards and accolades out there that you can win about we've got great culture or a great place to work. The problem is you're prescribing to someone else's view of what good looks like You're jumping through hoops and like ticking boxes view of what good looks like you're jumping through hoops and like ticking boxes. So we're of the view that there needs to be some sort of level of openness and transparency to call yourself transparent to a degree, and we provide that level of structure, which I won't dive too deeply into, but we've got an assessment and a framework companies can follow. So we do have some level of it, but we don't necessarily prescribe where that transparency should be and necessarily how deep that should go. So the way that I try and talk about it with companies is work on defining it for yourself first. What does that look like? And there's a very high level journey that, for me, starts with understanding like why is this word important? If you're putting on your career site or your job ads or just putting it out there, there's got to be a reason why you're saying it, and if there's not, it's just an empty word. So where I tend to see it, there's two paths.

Speaker 1: 20:00

Typically, when it does work well is it's either heavily linked to your product, your value prop idea you're doing something that's bringing transparency to your customers or whatever that might be, via a platform or a product, and you can lean into transparency as a business yourself, which works really well or it ties heavily into your values and when you dig a little bit deeper and understand what those values are and why, that's when you can start to work with companies to help them understand what they should be leaning into and what they should be sharing more of.

Speaker 1: 20:28

I'll give you an example. Company I worked with recently talked a lot about they believe their strength is in having a diverse team, but they offered nothing around diversity, no transparency externally around what diversity looked like for them. I talked to them about the fact that they talk about strength and diversity and this is a really core value for them. That's an opportunity to be transparent and double down in that particular area. So, long story short, transparency is going to mean different things to different people, but I ask companies to look at their culture, their values, intrinsically to that, and look at where they can double down. You don't have to share everything across the entire spectrum, but think about what it means to your business, find ways you can double down and over index in certain ways, and that starts building a little bit of meaning behind the word for you as well.

Speaker 3: 21:13

So it's more personalized, depending on your business. I know at OpenOrg you're going in. You're taking a look at this with them, so it might not necessarily be like this is what good looks like. But in terms of leading practices, for example, what would something like open compensation what's a leading practice you might recommend, regardless of that company's personal mission? What advice would you offer?

Speaker 1: 21:41

We've still got some like minimum standards that we would say people should try and attain and get to, and then the optional. This is how you elevate it if you want to go crazy and go for it basically buffer style but for us, the minimum expectation, ideally, is to get to the point where you can comfortably put a salary or a salary band on a job advert when you're hiring. Now that, for us, is really important because you're then providing some external transparency, building trust with talent, reverse engineering that. How do we get to that stage? There's a lot of work that goes into that before you can get to that stage. So you've got to work on your compensation philosophy, your bands and your levels.

Speaker 1: 22:19

How do we benchmark our salaries? Where do we get that data from? We encourage companies to share that internally as well, as much as you possibly can, and if you can't, that's okay, but as an absolute minimum, what people really want to see is how is this decision being made? Whatever I I'm being paid, that's fine.

Speaker 1: 22:38

How have you come up with that decision? What data have you used and where have you got it from and how has that been assessed? So it's the why and the how behind the decision is actually really key for me as a minimum requirement. People don't care about what their colleagues being paid, necessarily, as long as they can see what they're being paid is fair and they feel that that lines up with what they should be getting paid. That's really key. So again, minimum expectation provide the how and the why behind the decisions with the things like pay and hopefully get to the point where you can comfortably put a salary on an advert and not have chaos ensue internally where people are reapplying for their own jobs because they see that you're paying someone else 30k more.

Speaker 3: 23:18

I never really understood why that isn't public information, because people are going to find out anyway, because they talk about it. So it's interesting to me that they don't share the process, because it is an in-depth process to go through salary band review each year and it's good for folks when they're talking about their year end and bonus and seeing where they're at and if they have room to grow. It's a good discussion to have with your people.

Speaker 1: 23:43

It's hard work and it takes a long time and that puts a lot of companies off and it won't suddenly mean that everything goes perfectly. You're still going to have some really tough, awkward, tricky conversations with employees who are unhappy about what they're paid, why they're paid it. It's not going to make everything go away, but it builds so much trust as a starting point so that when you have that conversation, people feel like they trust you. They can see it, it's open and it's a starting point for a conversation effectively. And you've got that backup. Most businesses have done their working out. They've got some data source behind them. That should build some confidence in you to have that conversation and say, look, we haven't just plucked this from thin air, this is what we've used, so share it.

Speaker 3: 24:24

It's honest and it helps others really understand the process, because I think if you're not in comp, it does feel like a mystery. Did you just throw a dart at the dartboard and pick this number? So it's good to include that. What about some leading practices in terms of company culture?

Speaker 1: 24:40

yeah, so we culture is one of the pillars under our framework and it's probably like one of the broader ones. What we try and get companies to do is really think about what does culture mean here? What does it look like? Because I think the default for a lot of companies when you look at career pages is like we've got great culture and then there's like a picture of a team playing like crazy golf or whatever they're doing on a team social and that like sums up culture on the face of it. And we're trying to get companies to start moving away from that.

Speaker 1: 25:07

Don't start sharing like all the positive employee stories of it's fun to work here, it's great. Start sharing some facts and reality around, like how do we succeed as a team? What is the sort of unique DNA or blend of how we work, our ways of work that enable us to work well together and succeed? And how do we learn? How do we fail? How do we thrive? How do we like communicate?

Speaker 1: 25:28

There's so much you can gain from understanding how a team communicates day to day. Is it synchronous? Asynchronous Boundaries have reset to communicate. Communicates day to day. Is it synchronous? Asynchronous boundaries have reset to communicate. It might seem like a lot of information, but you can get that across to people really nicely on on wiki or careers page or a job advert.

Speaker 1: 25:46

The companies that do this well do really well and they hire people who succeed really well in their business. So for us, that's culture. It's thinking more about operational excellence rather than that word culture. And when you start breaking it down like that and thinking in that way, you can actually look at some of those areas around communication and documentation and meetings. That's one of the areas under our culture pillar is encouraging companies to talk more about their approach to meetings. Engineers in particular, and others as well. Now, to be honest with you, really benefit and enjoy having blocks of time for like, deep work and focus. They don't want to be sucked into six hours of meetings a day. So start talking to people more about your approach to meetings as a business and people have the opportunity to opt in or out. That's like what we refer to as culture, rather than the coffee, the beanbags, all the other stuff.

Speaker 3: 26:38

Yeah, that's how we work around here. Right, that's all good stuff to highlight. What about benefits? How do you feel about leading practices there?

Speaker 1: 26:46

Yeah, another bugbear, and this is hard right. Like you can only get so much information on some careers page, for example, or a job advert, but they have defaulted over time to just being a little bit vague and shiny and like you can't really see much. So you see, like competitive salary mentioned, like just go a little bit deeper, even if it's an extra line to say we benchmark and pay on the 75th percentile. You can't just say it's competitive and that's going to suddenly mean it's competitive to everyone. Someone could be working for the you know business that pays 90th. Someone could be working for somewhere that's 30th.

Speaker 1: 27:20

You can't just say that and have it apply to everyone. So just add some meaning. So, generally speaking, best practice on benefits when we work with companies and look at this is just really I don't want to say tearing apart, that sounds a bit aggressive but like line by line, going through each benefit that they've listed and actually looking at how can you elevate that and add a little bit more clarity to what that is. And I think maternity leave, paternity leave, is a big one. So many companies write enhanced parental leave.

Speaker 3: 27:48

What does that even mean?

Speaker 1: 27:50

A week and if so, how much? Buy or would you offer 12 months full pay? Just tell people what it is. Actually, it's not a deal breaker for most people. It just helps them understand and plan ahead and think what does that mean for me financially if I do join here and I do decide to have a child? And it's not a deal breaker, but it helps set expectations and it's one of those things, famously, that's always been really hard to find out before you join a business.

Speaker 3: 28:14

Yeah, it's so interesting to me because my experience in organizations one that I was interviewing with or to have worked with although there's information provided, it's so high level and so vague and usually it's not until you get to the offer stage where someone will finally meet with you to get into the details. And I always think that's a disservice, Because if you're just exploring an organization, you want to be able to say what does this exactly look like, so everyone's happy in the end, You're not waiting all the way through.

Speaker 1: 28:44

Six interviews have happened, You've wasted five hours of everyone's time, You're at the offer stage and you lose that candidate because they didn't like the benefit package that they're getting Another example and one company that does this really well and you some might argue it's a bit overkill, but health insurance might work differently in the uk to the us. I don't know whether it's a little bit more comprehensive and everything's covered regardless, but absolutely not over here, like even if you have insurance.

Speaker 2: 29:11

It's absolutely like it's garbage. It's garbage.

Speaker 1: 29:14

I don't want to say I made the assumption. But it's the same here as well. There are some companies that say we offer health cover. Great, on the face of it, brilliant, I'm excited. But then you join and you realize, okay, it's just for me, it's not for my family. I didn't realize that. Or you realize, okay, I've got a very specific, rare condition that's not covered by this particular policy, so that's not a benefit to me. Now, and there's a company called Juro and others do this as well, but I know about Juro. You can, on their notion, you can dig deep on their benefits, click into their health cover and actually look at the exact policy document that they've got for their business. And it's long, it's in depth, but you can actually go and find out.

Speaker 1: 29:51

Is my specific condition covered, which is great.

Speaker 3: 29:54

Yeah, that's fantastic because that's the stuff people need to know when they're moving, especially when it impacts your family, as you mentioned, if you find out after the fact. Oh wait, that actually happened to a friend of mine where she found out with her new job, it only extends to her, it doesn't extend to her family.

Speaker 2: 30:10

So, yeah, I think a lot of organizations are doing really cool things too. I worked for an organization where, after I had my son, they flew my breast milk like overnight yeah Back to my house, which was like $800 a pop, and they did that for every single mother. And that, to me, is I don't know why you guys aren't screaming this from the effing rooftops. Yeah, there's also stuff that the organization could be screaming from the rooftops and they're not. Yeah, there's also stuff that the organization could be screaming from the rooftops and they're not.

Speaker 1: 30:39

Yeah, and this is again it's personal choice in terms of how much effort you want to put into it, but there are companies that will have. You know that we call them handbooks in the UK and try not to refer to it too heavily as handbook in the US, because it's a slightly different, slightly more legal document in the US, but like a wiki or a resource hub for employees effectively to be able to go and dig deep and look at this stuff. And you can keep it high level and say we offer enhanced parental leave. Or you can really provide a heap of depth on parental leave and not just like what do we give parents, but what does returning from maternity leave look like? How do we help you and support you and all that entire journey? There are some companies that do incredibly well, so it's not like to disparage everyone, but the majority don't scratch the surface.

Speaker 3: 31:27

What about with professional development is typically it's not something people think of as falling under benefits, but it's also something that you hope, as an employee, you continue to get, because then you feel that organization is invested in you, they're invested your growth. They want you to succeed. What does a good leading practice look like in terms of transparency around how much an organization is investing in your career development?

Speaker 1: 31:51

yeah, this is again. This you've just said those words as well. I think is like there's such a standard phrase on career sites of like we invest in people and we've got world-class career. If you're going to say that you've got world-class like career investment, whatever that might look like, show it like don't just dangle a carrot and then don't offer anything over and above that.

Speaker 1: 32:12

Really show what you offer people and give some clarity as to what that looked like on a a couple of levels. There's a few things on that. If you're going to list it as a benefit, again, something that we see a lot of companies do is dangle a carrot to say L&D budget, but again just a few more words to say what that budget is. It takes no effort and really helps people understand what they're going to be getting here. So there's tiny little tangible changes companies can go and make that really make a big difference to people. I think the deeper work and the work behind the scenes to really elevate that is looking in depth at how you progress and promote and keep people growing within your business. So career development frameworks is something that seems to be missing in the loss of companies, I think, probably for a reason. It's often it's hard to build. Sometimes if you're a bigger company and get everything in place and something that works and it ties heavily into performance, calibration and compensation and again you've got that big ball of christmas lights whatever we're talking about earlier that you can't unpick.

Speaker 1: 33:14

So career, when we look at the data of all the companies that take our assessment to understand, almost like a heat map of what companies do and don't share.

Speaker 1: 33:24

Career development uh, frameworks are always in the red, but for the large majority of companies they don't even share anything internally.

Speaker 1: 33:30

So there's a lot of companies out there saying we invest in people, but then you walk through the door and you don't have visibility of what's my next step look like or how can I move internally. So, again on our framework, one of our 35 areas that we zone in on and talk with companies about is sharing more information around internal mobility. So can you even share some basic data with people to say that this x percent of people moved internally last year, whether it's latently or vertically for promotion? That gives you a real indication as to like how people move within your business and how people can grow. So anyway, there's a lot of deeper work in depth you can go into there, but I think getting that internal clarity is helpful to people. And then, once you've got it, why wouldn't you share it? There's a few reasons here and there, but you should. And again, there's a couple of companies out there that do really well at just flipping their their internal documentation external.

Speaker 1: 34:26

And then, and it's amazing, who's doing this really well there's a company called cleo in the uk who I don't know. If you've come across a platform called progression fyi really cool, check out progressionfyi. They have their whole platform is about helping companies to build career development frameworks and using their platform. But progression fyi is also like a collective open source career development frameworks that companies share publicly. So clio have got theirs on there. They've shared it publicly and you can go on and look at all their engineering pathways, the salary bands attached to every single role, criteria for progressing.

Speaker 1: 35:04

They've got such a great name, particularly in the UK, for this stuff. And another one is Learnably, who again might not be well known outside of the UK because they're relatively small tech startup scale up, but Learnably are like an LMSms platform, so they major on development and growth for employees and they really drink their own champagne because of that. Going back to what we were talking about earlier with defining what transparency means to you, that a huge part of their value prop is about lnd and growth. So they've decided to major on being transparent about career development at learnably. If you're going to join us, we're going to make sure you know what you're going to get and how you're going to grow, and everything they've done has been crafted around that whole idea of lnd, because that's fed into their, their entire value prop as well where do you see this going in the next five years?

Speaker 1: 36:15

yeah, I am in a bubble. I have to admit that we operate a lot more at the startup scale up end of the spectrum. So companies anywhere from 20, 30 employees up to a couple of thousand starting to get larger. But we don't work with many 30, 40, 50,000 employee businesses and I get they're probably not going to be making the drastic changes anytime soon to how they operate and how they communicate. That's a lot harder. But certainly there's so many earlier stage businesses coming through. It precede stage.

Speaker 1: 36:45

I know a lot of founding teams who support what we're doing. They're a bit early stage to fully embrace and have a lot of this work verified because they haven't started hiring yet. But you see the mindset and the passion and the belief there and I'm not saying every founder coming through is like Gen Z. A lot of them are. A lot of them are coming into this world of work setting up their own companies now and then we will talk about the fact that Gen Z have. Everyone cares about transparency and trust, but Gen Z are more demanding. They care more deeply about it. It's a really important part of how they work, deeply about it. It's a really important part of how they work and they're building their own businesses now with this as a core value. So five years time I'd expect to see, particularly in the startup scale up world, businesses that do default more to transparency, whatever that means to them. They're at least able to say we're transparent and we've defined what that means, and if that's okay, because if it doesn't align with you, then fine, but it will align with certain people and and we're healthy and etc. Etc.

Speaker 1: 37:41

I'd like to see, hopefully, some good progression around pay transparency in particular. There's obviously a lot of movement in the US legally, so that's going to make some sort of change, I'm sure, and then there's some incoming changes across the EU as well. So what's sad is that either side of the UK right now we've got some legal waves happening, which is really enforcing some change, which is great, but nothing in the UK at the moment. So we'll see if we follow suit. But certainly on the pay front, that will change and I think as a knock-on effect to that, going back to what we talked about earlier, I'd heavily to. Pay is performance in career development. You can't suddenly become transparent about pay without giving people some context around how that ties into career development and levels and and how, then, they're going to be assessed to get to that next level, so that, as a trio is going to have to advance together? For me, um, as best as possible anyway yeah, that makes total sense.

Speaker 3: 38:38

I know you're as you say, you're in this the bubble, but with the, the gen z, really coming in and leading the wave of this bubble, those startups could become either clients or partners to these larger organizations. Do you think their approach to transparency may have an influence on some of these large organizations in the future?

Speaker 1: 39:01

I hope so. I hope so. As much as I don't operate so heavily in the large corporate world. As much as I don't operate so heavily in the large corporate world, I have to say some of the larger organizations out there are the ones actually doing better when it comes to things like pay transparency and visibility on career development, probably because they've got the resources there as well to do it from like a people team perspective. But particularly in the UK, the public organizations you like the NHS and you can apply to jobs and you know exactly what grade you're going to be at, what salary you're going to be at. Everyone's on the same, salary gets paid the same. There is visibility in a lot of the public organizations here which I imagine is maybe similar in the US.

Speaker 3: 39:40

It's similar. Yeah, the US government actually does transparency well.

Speaker 1: 39:44

Exactly, yeah, and there are things that you can give a little bit of a hat tip, so you just actually you know what, that there is the structure in place and similarly big consulting firms in the uk and imagine it maybe again similar in the us, like your pwc's, your ey's, etc. They've been around so long, they've got their structure so firmly set that, whilst they may not have the perfect culture for everyone, that's okay. People know what they're getting when they join. They know what they're not going to get and also the grading and the pace is like how you progress in those types of businesses is fairly clear to people and well known because they've been around for so long. So I'm I'm always wary of disparaging like large companies too much, because actually there's some things that they do really well that actually startups and scale-ups could learn from as well. Where they tend to get things wrong maybe is things like communication and day-to-day internal culture starts to get go wrong there because they become this sort of size where things start falling apart.

Speaker 2: 40:38

From that point of view, so funny with this conversation around transparency and even just like your relationship with work. I can't help but think about it like a really any relationship you have with a person, Meaning and I know we've talked about this. But when I think about dating or getting into a relationship with someone, if you're not honest or if you misrepresent yourself from the jump, you're going to have a problem. And when we think about any kind of dating scenario, if you would be like, yeah, they said that they really wanted to have X, Y and Z, but then they didn't, and we talked about how how can people start to get more transparent up above right, Especially at the org level? But I'm thinking here about where this really comes down to is individuals, how individuals are feeling as they're moving through these organizations. I'm thinking here about where this really comes down to is individuals, how individuals are feeling as they're moving through these organizations.

Speaker 2: 41:31

And I'm wondering if we can really double down on if you're a manager or if you're an employee and you're sitting in an organization that may have some opportunity. Everybody has some opportunity Individually. I have some opportunity, have some opportunity for transparency, but you really want to be this person that shows up well for your team or shows up in a way that you feel you need to as a manager. What can a manager do, agnostic of the organization, to drive transparency and drive that kind of honesty on their team?

Speaker 1: 42:06

Yeah, it's very tough. I think in some respects in smaller organizations it's more down to mindset of founder CEO. They're probably still close enough to the individual employees day to day for them to be the driving factor here. I think maybe when you get into larger organizations and most people have never ever met the ceo or know really what they look like or who they are, there is more of an opportunity possibly for managers, middle level managers, more senior managers, to try and direct and formulate some level of team level transparency. Everyone knows that as companies get larger, culture and values becomes lost on a broader level because you end up with your microcultures and across the entire business. You do have this opportunity to form your own microculture, microverse within your team. So if managers do care deeply enough about it and not to say that they're going to suddenly change the entire business and how the business operates, but there are steps that they can take to start understanding how they can build more trust with their team.

Speaker 1: 43:04

And again, this is a whole nother podcast episode, I'm sure, but managers are highly underdeveloped, under supported, under trained.

Speaker 1: 43:12

I think the latest stat that's flowing around now is like 82 percent of managers are accidental managers, like it's completely broken in terms of how management even works itself, and so most managers don't know where to start when it comes to how to manage a team and how to communicate with them, and et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 43:30

So, in terms of like steps you can take, we're building an open manager handbook with our community now building it together like a building public community exercise, which is really cool, but that's going to be filled with a heap of like resources, guidance on like how to build trust with the team, how to communicate with the team, how to run effective one on ones, but all with a lens of how to build trust with the team, how to communicate with the team, how to run effective one-on-ones, but all with a lens of how to do it in an open, transparent way.

Speaker 1: 43:54

It's tricky because some of it will go against the grain a little bit, potentially with what you're being told you are allowed to share and aren't allowed to share. But if you're not able to be transparent ie share the reality you can at least be clear with what you are and aren't allowed to share. So there's a bit of a difference between clarity and transparency. So even if you don't have the information to share with them, you can tell them what you can share and what you do and don't know, and that in itself is at least building some trust with your team.

Speaker 2: 44:21

I've been in. I think most of us have situations where you're leading a team and you're going through something really tumultuous layoffs, budget cuts, the business isn't doing well, et cetera and I've worked with people, colleagues and peers that have been like all you need to say is that you absolutely trust the direction of the company. You're behind this 100% and we're going to move on, and I have found that when I've tried that tactic earlier on in my career, it goes over like a fart in church because people, what they want to know to your very good point is I don't need you to tell me everything, but I need to trust that you're going to tell me what you can and you're going to keep me updated and we're going to go through this together. Yeah, people don't expect you to tell them everything. They don't even expect you necessarily to tell how you're feeling about it, but they need to be able to trust that you've got their best interests and that you're going to keep them updated as they go along.

Speaker 1: 45:17

Yeah, and you've got two examples of companies that do a relatively good job on this. Again, in terms of again, this probably has to be something that is ideally fed from higher up, but maybe it could be implemented in a larger organization by a middle manager. There's a company I mentioned earlier called euro. They're really intentional as a leadership team as how they will approach crisis types scenarios, whatever that might be. Layoffs interestingly, an interesting one, because you can see a layoff coming so you can plan for it. You could think about our comms plan how we're going to approach it. Weirdly, there's no argument real argument for companies doing a really bad job on this because they they always see it coming, they always have time to plan for it and they have the opportunity to communicate it if they want to. But there are things that happen that you can't control and euro was one example. They were backed by, if you remember, the silicon valley bank issue that happened a while ago.

Speaker 1: 46:06

Yeah, everyone sort of just forgot about that a little bit. So sorry if I've given anyone ptsd, but that happened and that affected juro and within minutes of that news being announced, juro's ceo was on slack. The entire business couldn't give them an answer as to what's coming, but there was at least communication there immediately to say this has happened. We could be affected. We will keep you posted and I can't remember exactly how many updates they were given, but there was continual updates very regularly throughout the entire weekend. No expectation for employees to read this, but it all happened over a weekend, didn't it? I think from memory and yeah, that's do committed to slacking the entire business all weekend about what was going on that that sort of level of intentional communication calms nerves, makes people feel involved, looked after as safe as they possibly can be and informed, and they're an incredible business. You have to work hard at that, but that's really great.

Speaker 1: 47:01

Another example, slightly different, is someone like gitlab, who a lot of people know and accept as the most transparent company in the world. If you go on their handbook, when they talk about transparency as one of their values, they're very clear about why it's a value. They're very clear about what they do share and they give you examples of the things they share. But interestingly, there's a line in there that says there are some things we don't share and when we don't share them, we publicly document what that is and why. So you can click a link and they'll tell you exactly what they don't share with people and the reasons for not sharing that information as well. And that is like perfect scenario, like defining transparency but building expectations with employees to understand and get some context for why certain things aren't being shared.

Speaker 2: 47:48

I think that education is equally important. Right, there are some things that it is in everybody's best interest not to share at a certain point in time. Right, there just is in business. But I think the ability to say this is it and to be very upfront about it again, it's so. People know what to expect, they know what they're getting into. Yeah, it's really that. Know what to expect, they know what they're getting into. Yeah, it's really that clear yeah.

Speaker 3: 48:10

It's also just acknowledging going back to the example about the Silicon Valley Bay, it's acknowledging something is happening. We know what's happening. We don't have all the facts, but we're going to communicate to you. So people aren't like trying to fill in the blank. That's what always happens, right? They fill in their own blanks. Conspiracy theories spread throughout an organization, and then it just now you're fighting that and the real information, and then no one believes the real information when you finally give it. So I love these examples.

Speaker 1: 48:38

The comfort it must build of thinking okay, my CEO is on it, like you don't communicate anything. If an employee sees it, that news, and they haven't heard from their CEO on the weekend, they might sit there and think should I tell them about this? Do you think they've seen the news yet? Or, knowing that your CEO is slacking you on the weekends about something like this, I think yeah, the trust in that leader must just be through the roof.

Speaker 2: 48:59

Yeah absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that I think is really important is being able to control what you can control. Is being able to control what you can control and, as an employee, you're either interviewing for a job. Maybe you're sitting internally at an organization and you're wondering what could I be looking at in terms of this organization? And I'm wondering what would you tell people You're best friends interviewing for a job? What would you tell them in terms of figuring out what that company really is?

Speaker 1: 49:26

Yeah, I haven't ever had to answer that. To be honest, we do a few things to try and help folks a little bit as much, as our advice usually is trained more on helping the companies rather than because we think if we can help the companies do better, that will automatically help employees and candidates. But I spend a lot of time personally looking at career sites and job adverts and I think I've gotten very good at just cutting through the rubbish. Basically, that's there, the buzzwords, the vagueness that actually a lot of people maybe read and take for granted and take as accepted. So encouraging people to not just see the words transparent on a career page but actually, if you see that, take that as a signal that you should be looking for some level of openness or something further that gives you an idea. Or, if someone's got a core value of diversity, start understanding whether they share anything about diversity or the commitments, failings, whatever that might be. So just try and think a bit deeper and go a bit deeper on that. That's like the high level stuff. There's basic things on the job adverts that people should be looking for some clarity on and most people do, frankly, is like thinking about like compensation and flexible working, like when will I be working? Where will I be working and can you think deeper around like policy on?

Speaker 1: 50:36

Someone just says hybrid three days a week. What does that actually mean? Their questions you won't have answered pre-application, but taking that into an interview to actually like really dig deeper on that and understand is it just three days a week or is it a monday, tuesday, friday, like whatever that might be? We built and shared what we call like our interview question index and which is like an open resource on our website and it's I think it's 60 or 70 questions. We just we did it for fun, to be honest, but like opportunity for people to understand that the tougher questions they could ask employers and interview to dig deeper on things like culture, like understanding, like, and what one of the questions on there is like why did the last three people leave this team?

Speaker 1: 51:14

Or what was the last mistake your ceo admitted to which I got some flack for and people said you should be a bit softer with that like and maybe like. So maybe someone could ask what was the last thing your ceo shared you that they learned, which for me became a bit fluffy. It could be like I've read a book and learned this, so I want to understand how open are CEOs and leaders about their own mistakes, their own vulnerabilities? It gives you a real indication of psychological safety and how people communicate and share information, and if an interviewer can't give you certain information, it's not necessarily that you should run for the hills, but it might give you a bit of an indication as to how communication and information is shared in that business. If they haven't even genuinely been given the information themselves. As a recruiter of 12, 13 years, that would signal some alarm bells in my head alarm bells in my head.

Speaker 3: 52:08

Yeah, I always tell people to ask the question what brought you here and what keeps you here? Because it's the what keeps you here, where the honesty starts to come out for folks, or if you see them. Oh, I don't know yeah, yeah, that pause tell is telling yeah, there's.

Speaker 1: 52:20

Sometimes I have to, like really work hard to find out why I'm still, why I'm still in this business is, but then and even the danger with that is there's almost very opinionated. So what, what's keeping someone else in the business might not be the thing that keeps you there as well, but understanding it's hard, because so many of these things could be linked to opinion. But again, understanding, like, who is the last person that failed to thrive here and why? Like what are the factors that leads to failure in this company, rather than always saying, like, why am I going to love it here? What do do you do for fun? Like always trying to find all the fun stuff. Understand who doesn't thrive and help you understand whether that might, you know, connect the dots for you as well.

Speaker 2: 52:59

I think it's really important to dive way deeper than most people do in their interviews and to not be afraid to ask those questions. I've had many conversations with people that they really want to know X, y and Z, but they're afraid to ask or they feel like if they ask then they're going to get penalized somehow in the interview process. And I feel like these are questions that you should be asking to really get a sense of what is the organization like, but also if you're getting any kind of pushback about those questions or even asking those questions, that's also information as well.

Speaker 3: 53:33

That's when a rejection is protection. Yes, ultimately.

Speaker 1: 53:39

The hard thing right now, at this moment in time, is it's such a hard thing to advise on because they're ultimately braver questions for people to ask, slightly scarier ones, and the mindset that so many people are in right now is I've just got to find a job.

Speaker 1: 53:53

So, like at the moment, people are just trying to find, prioritize finding jobs, even if they're not perfect, and it was a similar back in 2020 with, with covid, people were joining companies as a stepping stone, knowing I just need security for now and when the market improves then I'll move. So right now, this stuff isn't always a priority for people, but I've known a good few people in the last number of months who have jumped to jobs just for a job's sake and they've left them in weeks. There's no point in joining a business and going through onboarding and ramp up and hope if your gut is telling you that this is not the right place, because nine times out of ten it won't happen and you're better off still investing your energy and your time into trying to find the right place. But it is hard.

Speaker 2: 54:35

It's a really tricky time to be doing that and I hate to put it on an employee to say you've got to go through this journey, but I think it's really great, though, that people have these tools and these questions to ask to see what situation are they getting into, what's?

Speaker 1: 54:47

really sad is it's often the TA teams and the recruiters who get the flack for this. They're useless at giving me the information I need. They're really vague and the poor recruiter that's nine times out of 10, they just haven't been given the information. I've had this myself, like not being told what funding round we just done. How am I going to do my job properly if the leadership team won't give me the basic information I need to interview? So it's not usually the TA team's fault. Honestly. They don't sit there openly trying to hide things. It's just we're working with what we've got. But again, it's a huge indication really of like how does communication happen in this business?

Speaker 2: 55:20

A thousand percent, yeah, and quite honestly, most TA teams are armed with the sexy ass information and all the information they can have so they can get those folks through the door. So if they don't have it, again I think that's a really great call out that it might not be as clear in the organization. The other thing is, if the hiring manager we talk about this sometimes there's a difference between talent acquisition, like your recruiter, and then the person that's actually going to be quote, unquote, your boss, and if either of those people don't have that information, or I think it'd be very interesting if they give you different information as well, again, I think it's just, it's a big archaeological dig.

Speaker 3: 55:56

Put on your curiosity and critical thinking hat during the interview process the rapid round, here we go adam, no pressure, by the way, try to make this as fun as possible and not terrifying. So terrible, at least yeah, all right, I going to dive right in. Some of these could be yes or no, or true or false, and some might have broader explanation, and that's totally okay. I wanted to ask of the open org companies that you are working with, are there similar characteristics that you see in their leadership teams?

Speaker 1: 56:44

yes, I can divulge a little bit more if you want yeah of course. Relatively progressive, a younger generation less precious about titles and flatter hierarchies and structures in their business.

Speaker 3: 56:58

Okay, what is the next lever being added to the list above? We talked about comp benefits, career development, culture. What else might get added?

Speaker 1: 57:10

Flexibility is another thing that I think is just such a big topic at the moment the lack of clarity on are we working from home? Is it return to office? How does that look? Is it different things to different employees? There's a lot of problems around that at the moment. So, like clarity on that should be really simple, but it's terrible at the moment, so that should be a big one.

Speaker 3: 57:34

Okay, okay. We see a lot of large organizations today talking about social impact, environmental impact. Do you think, given the age of climate change, that companies should be transparent about their environmental impact, even if it's not flattering?

Speaker 1: 57:45

Yeah, I do so. The gen z, gen z, sorry big topic for them around, like esg and environment and climate. So it's a big thing that a lot of them are looking for, apparently, from employers when they join companies. So it will signal to me that the longer that it goes on and the worst things get out there, the more important this is for companies to talk about. The downsides is the pressure of greenwashing, etc. And everyone's talking about just doing something or trying to make it look as good as possible, and that's happened with diversity over the last few years. Definitely is like huge calls to do more on diversity, but it's become very performative. So yes, definitely, but but be careful okay, okay.

Speaker 3: 58:25

Do you think social media is going to make companies be more transparent or just more cautious?

Speaker 1: 58:31

hopefully both, hopefully both. So a trait I see from the really transparent companies that I follow and watch is very vocal ceos. On linkedin, for example, they post regularly. They post about whatever they want and they're not afraid to to either be vulnerable and share failings but also like really celebrate stuff. And it's interesting the the slightly larger or secretive companies. You never hear from a ceo and the fact that they don't post about anything starts making you think are they waiting for someone to comment on a post and call them out? And this happened with bupa very recently. The ce CEO posted about an award they won for women in their leadership team and there was a comment made that went viral and it all blew up. So more cautious if you're not able to be fully transparent, but hopefully that transparency will remove the need to be cautious.

Speaker 3: 59:22

Okay, true or false? Every company should have a public fact sheet about how they operate, true, okay? And is there such a thing as too much transparency?

Speaker 1: 59:37

There could be. Arguably no, but in certain instances there could be. And again it's a bit like the greenwashing example just now. Don't make it become like a performative exercise just for pr. Make it like embeddable. Don't overreach.

Speaker 3: 59:51

As soon as you can't model certain behaviors, it will start to fall apart what's one organization either one that you're working with or one publicly that you've seen do this really well, like you think they're a pillar example of good transparency.

Speaker 1: 1:00:14

A company called PostHog. Posthog is a small-ish tech business in the UK. I won't drone on because I'll talk about it for hours, but check out PostHog. They've got a public handbook. They share their roadmap. Their CEO is posting on LinkedIn all the time. That's so open, so transparent. They're amazing.

Speaker 2: 1:00:26

Adam. I love the work you all are doing. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends.

Workplace Cult of Disruption

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Problem with Change with Ashley Goodall

Change is worshipped in the workplace…

But at what cost? From reorgs to reinvention, disruption has become the workplace religion. For the past 10 years, organizations have not only been incented and are, seemingly addicted to change and disrupting their companies. Mergers, acquisitions, new leadership teams, new technologies, new strategies, new, new, new.   How do we get to this place where it really feels like we're all working constantly in a cult of disruption?

Ashley Goodall helps us unpack how we got here, why it’s exhausting everyone, and what leaders should be doing instead to create meaningful progress. Spoiler: there’s a better way.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

A sensible, healthy, capitalist, profit-maximizing organization will ask itself the question how can we help our employees do their best work first?

Speaker 2: 0:27

Hello friend.

Speaker 3: 0:29

Well, it's June. It's June in 2024. It is.

Speaker 2: 0:33

It's happening?

Speaker 3: 0:34

Do you guys go to the beach? Yes, we do go to the beach, so we live about an hour and a half two hours from the beach when you drive there. I swear to God, this is where they film all the car commercials because you can get on some really nice like serpentining switchbacky roads. They're all tree lined. You just imagine the Porsche commercial with the back tire kicking up leaves and that kind of stuff. It's a beautiful, beautiful drive and you live on the beach.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Well, I wish I lived on it live five like five minutes away. We just got our beach pass. I like to go early in the morning when no one's there, so I'll typically be there early and then I stay until noon and head out when all the people show up. Do you have an umbrella and stuff? If I stay there past noon, if it's going to be a full day thing, I have one of those tents that you, you. It has like a little window in the back and you see like I'll hang my legs out, but I am too Casper, the friendly ghost, to be out in that sun. I got melasma so bad one year. It looked like I had dirt on my forehead. What'd?

Speaker 3: 1:39

you do to get that off Like you're like right now? Yeah, Just eventually eventually rubbed off.

Speaker 2: 1:45

It just looked like I had a straight up patch of dirt on my forehead, like ash.

Speaker 3: 1:49

Wednesday was all here in the name of the father and the son. Yeah, oh, that's really funny, thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Thank god for chemicals we are here because we met with leadership expert, consultant and author of several books, but the latest book, the Problem with Change, ashley Goodall.

Speaker 3: 2:11

He's held executive positions at Deloitte and at Cisco, heading up people organizations. Full disclosure Mel and I have both worked with Ashley in the past when our paths all crossed at Deloitte. What Ashley is really wonderful at is thinking about how humans can thrive in the workplace. And in order to do that, what do they need, mel? Stability, stability. I'll tell you, mel. When I read this book, I had two very distinct feelings. One was just total delight because the way the case was written around what work feels like right now was so absurd and so fucking accurate, at the same time that I was laughing through half of the book because I'm like, right, it was so relatable I'm thinking, yeah, man, I could have written these stories too, because this is a hundred percent the experience.

Speaker 3: 3:02

Yeah, especially in the last 10 years. You and I were talking like it doesn't feel like it's always been this way, but the last 10 years it's just gotten more and more and more.

Speaker 2: 3:11

Yeah, and change for change's sake not necessarily meaningful change, and it can feel that way sometimes that it's not meaningful, it's just to do it.

Speaker 3: 3:21

The other very distinct emotion I got was a massive sense of urgency, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to have Ashley on the pod, because it really does feel and the data is in that organizations are not only incented to disrupt and incented to change, ie, bring in mergers, re-strategize, reorg, bring new leaders in. Not only are they incented to do that, but they're almost addicted to it. How do we get to this place where it really feels like we're all working constantly in a cult of disruption? Because that all has a massive human toll, that all has a massive negative impact on companies' bottom line, and so we wanted to bring Ashley in to talk about this. And then what the hell do we do about it?

Speaker 2: 4:10

Yeah, Well, with that. Where's Ashley?

Speaker 3: 4:30

Ashley, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Speaker 1: 4:34

It's lovely to be here with you both.

Speaker 3: 4:36

Nice to see you. It's been a while. It's been a while.

Speaker 1: 4:40

I think it must be on the cusp of double-digit years, but we're all basically the same people we were.

Speaker 3: 4:46

A thousand percent. Maybe a little wiser, wiser Maybe.

Speaker 1: 4:52

A little calmer. Yeah, certainly smarter. We're definitely smarter than we were.

Speaker 3: 4:57

And we went through the plague. There's that.

Speaker 1: 4:59

Okay, and that's true. Yes, that's true, yeah, so yay, for the last 10 years.

Speaker 3: 5:03

Yeah, we're going to talk about cheat. One of the things that really struck me with this book was this life in the blender. While I was reading it, I was just like this has been my last 10 years of work, where here comes a merger and acquisition. We're going to re-strategize something. Oh, by the way, now we're going to switch up the leadership team. Oh hi, here's the management consulting firm coming in and they're in the era of the CHRO or they're in the era of the CEO, and now they're going to put their stamp on it. This was something that was like every 10 years, and then it was every five years, and now it's every two to three years, and there are some companies that it's almost every year. They're re-strategizing and it's just so much change that it makes it impossible to feel like you can get anything done, and there's like this massive human toll on it too. One of the things you talk about with the life in the blender is this idea that change doesn't equal improvement.

Speaker 1: 5:58

There's an experiment that I don't write about in the book, involving rats and pellets, so we should probably chat about rats and pellets for a quick. I'll do it, I'll do it.

Speaker 1: 6:06

And I haven't looked it up recently, but I know how it goes. So it goes like this you put a rat in a cage and there's a little lever or, as I say where I come from, a lever, and if the rat presses the lever or the lever, it gets a pellet of food sometimes and other times it doesn't. And so you can do this nice control condition and you can see how often does the rat press the lever if every time it presses it gets food, how often does it press it if it never gets food? And how often does it press it if it never gets food? And how often does it press it if it sometimes gets food. And the result is that the rat that always gets food doesn't press the lever very much because it just presses it when it's hungry and then goes off and has a rat nap somewhere. The rat that never gets food gives up really quickly because rats aren't stupid. The rat that sometimes gets food presses the lever like a maniac because it's like the spontaneous, the occasional reward drives this crazy behavior.

Speaker 1: 7:13

And in a way, listening to your narrative of we used to do change a little bit and now we've done it more, and then we've done it more. It's like we've only got one damn lever at work. It worked a couple of times a few years ago. Has anyone else got any ideas? I don't know. Let's press it again, shall we? It didn't work that time. Let's press it again. It still didn't work. And the rest of us now the rat metaphor fails a little bit are on the other end of the lever somewhere.

Speaker 1: 7:41

I think this idea of constant change, reinvention, transformation, disruption has become the only idea about how to run a company, which doesn't mean it never works. I think there's plenty of evidence that we've gone past the point where it's helping, certainly to the extent that we're doing it today. The irony of all of this is the godfather of disruption, if you like, is Clayton Christensen, who writes a book in 1997 called the Innovator's Dilemma, where he says the young upstarts companies will eat the lunch of the old, established companies because they have a different series of economic constraints and they have many more degrees of freedom, and so they can innovate and innovate, and innovate and innovate. And all of a sudden they go from a crappy product at a ridiculous price point with new customers to customers who suddenly flip from the established players to them because all of a sudden the price point got a little bit better. They got a minimum set of features and everyone can see the upside and hallelujah.

Speaker 1: 8:44

So if you're a big company, be really worried because the upstarts are going to going to take your business away. And everyone goes oh yes, kodak, yes, blockbuster, and you recite the litany of names, of which there are like there aren't 20, but anyway, um, but then you, if you actually read that book all the way to the end, you discover what his prescription is. And his prescription is if you're a big company, you're worried about being disrupted. What you should do is you take a small group of people, separate them from the company, either spin them out or make them a special product team, put them in a different place, wall them off. Give them a guaranteed budget. Give them a guaranteed budget. Give them a very clear mission. Keep a tight group of people. Don't change direction for a while, leave them alone and they will do the innovating for you. And what's that? That stability?

Speaker 3: 9:35

that's stability on both ends.

Speaker 1: 9:37

It's a stability in the legacy corp and in the incubator the innovators dilemma, said differently, is how can we create more stability at work? But no one has ever, to my knowledge, said that's what that book is about. It's actually a book about stability and you know we turn it into catchphrases and it's disrupt everything and disrupt yourself and fail fast and move fast and break things and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. And here we are having a detailed conversation about how miserable change is at work. I don't think anyone ever intended that we get to this point, but I think we're massively in it now and I think we've got to come up with some different things.

Speaker 2: 10:15

This has a serious impact. This life in the blender is throwing so much around and if businesses are in this hamster wheel of every year you're making a change and you don't have the time or the runway to see the impact of that change and whether it's working before you change it again. So now it's this vicious cycle of the blender. Does it become critical that organizations start to create psychologically safe environments where people can say, hey, this is not a good idea. Do you think the C-suite is open to that? Or boardrooms are open to that?

Speaker 1: 10:49

So I wrote the book, partly out of the sneaking suspicion that C-suites were not aware of all of this. We need to raise our awareness of all of this stuff. Psychological safety is an interesting one. It's a real thing. It's very clear in the literature. That's a thing.

Speaker 1: 11:09

In our discussion of some of the other sort of psychological impacts of change, we can lose sight of the connection between the environment of work and the performance of humans, and it's too easy for people to go you know what. Suck it up. It's called work for a reason. We haven't created these institutions to make you lot happy. You don't get to feel good every day, you don't get to have your mental health and your psychological safety and all of these things, because this is the school of hard knocks. So I think the most important thing to do the whole time is to go listen. You could choose to create a healthy, supportive environment, because that's a good thing to do and you're a human too. But if that argument doesn't get you there, these things are what lead to performance or non-performance.

Speaker 1: 12:03

It is a silly way to run a company to subject it to life in the blender, to constant change, because what you're doing is removing the ability of your people to solve things for you or massively, ironically to innovate. Innovation doesn't come from change, it comes from stability. It comes from a predictable set of relationships and environments and rituals and rhythms that allow people to go all right. I don't have to worry about a whole bunch of stuff. I can focus my time and attention and creativity on a well-understood problem without having to worry that in three weeks' time, I'll have a new boss and I've got to explain what I'm doing to them, and then, three weeks after that, I'll have some other thing and some other thing, and some other thing and some other thing.

Speaker 1: 12:49

So the prescription for all of this is, for sure, change less, have a higher bar on all of this stuff. Understand that we are playing with fire here. Understand that the fire is not people's upset but people's performance. Understand you're dealing with that. And then, sure, we've got to change once in a while. But people have got to learn what stability looks like at work, what the inoculation is against change. And we've got to be very deliberate at creating stability at work, because as soon as you say that to anybody, as soon as you say, how about some stability? The people who are humans go. Oh yeah, that sounds really nice.

Speaker 2: 13:38

Relief right your shoulders drop.

Speaker 1: 13:42

I think that's the world people are imagining, where they say you know what? I believe in change. They're imagining a world where change comes, improvement comes from stability. That's what we're actually all trying to reach for.

Speaker 3: 13:56

Out of curiosity, when you talk to leaders that are sitting at a C-level and you're talking about this case for stability right, the problem with change the case for stability right, the problem would change the case for stability, what is?

Speaker 1: 14:07

their reaction. The ones I talk to, feel the tension between the pressure to change and the need to look after people. I haven't run into many people who would name it stability. So I think what I took away and again, I interviewed people up and down organizations for the book there are people who see quite clearly in executive positions the downside of change. We just haven't given them words and techniques for the counterforce thing. But the folks I spoke to, or the folks I speak to, are not going oh goodness me, I've got to turn down change and dial up stability. They're saying I've got to turn down change. And then what? And is there a way we need to teach leaders, we need to tell stories that the stuff that we all want in the changey change actually comes from the stability. And the stuff that we want in the changey change is performance. Innovation actually comes from stability more often.

Speaker 1: 15:21

It is not to do the jobs for them or tell them how to do their jobs or decide for them how their jobs are best to be done, or tell them how to do their jobs or decide for them how their jobs are best to be done. It is to pin back your ears and listen and look and offer and support and help. And again, the role of an organization is to support its employees in doing their best work, which doesn't start with ignoring the employees and deciding what best work looks like. It starts with paying attention to the employees and how best work happens and where it comes from and back to stability. It leads you to teams. It leads you to ritual. It leads you to helping build people's competence. It leads you to a whole bunch of stuff. But you don't follow the path to any of those things if you don't first understand that a sensible, healthy, capitalist, profit-maximizing organization will ask itself the question how can we help our employees do their best work?

Speaker 3: 16:24

first, Work first. So much of this I am wondering is this on the capability of leaders. When I think about the people that are making the decisions about the change, the transformation, in my experience a lot of those people have MBB firms in their ears telling them this is what your competition's doing, this is what the market's doing. They have pressures from various stakeholders the stock market, the board. You have to keep up. You have to keep up. Some of the reason why we're here is because leaders have the lack of capability to lead.

Speaker 1: 17:06

We can offer a couple of candidate explanations. Right, one is that leaders are living in an ecosystem that demands this stuff and the ecosystem you've named, I think, many of the bits of it. There is a stock market and, by the way, the stock market isn't a person, but the people who analyze the stock market are people, and they've learned that shareholder value is the most important thing. Then there are the people who tell the CEOs what to do, and they're the activist investors and the consultants and the investment bankers, by the way, and they've been brought up in all of this and you keep going down the chain to who are all the decision makers and what are the unwritten truths or, in many cases, the written scale quotes truths of this world, and a lot of it is. We have to maximize shareholder value, even though we can't measure it over any sort of decent time frame or human time frame. At any rate, you run into the sort of idea that you have to take dramatic action, and if you're not taking dramatic action, somebody else will and your competitors will. So there's a lot of reinforcement of a set of ideas and not a lot of people standing up and going hang on a second.

Speaker 1: 18:31

But the alternate concept of work might be run an organization so that its employees can offer their best and reason up from that, up and out from that idea. Up and out from that idea, and that's not crazy in terms of looking after the interests of owners or the interests of customers or the interests of God, help us employees. But that's not the place we live today. We live in a place where there are certain accepted truths about how you run a company and you get to look after the employee stuff until you feel it conflicts with the set of accepted truths, at which point you snap back into the set of accepted truths and you do the layoff and you do the restructuring and you do the spinoff and you do the spin-in, the spin in, and in between them you say words like people are our greatest asset, and everybody rolls their eyes and they put up with it because apparently not many people can think of a different way of doing all of this. But yeah, there is an ecosystem component to all of this, I think.

Speaker 3: 19:40

My concern with that is when that ecosystem is running on quarters like we need to see improvement. We need to see impact financially within the next three months. That's the way almost every organization is living right now. I've seen so many organizations do this as of late. They're needing to make an impact. One of the lever levers is absolutely change and another one is dump the people, get rid of these people. How do you think most organizations view people, view their employees?

Speaker 1: 20:15

I think that many leaders are actually sincerely torn because they can see enough of the ecosystem and they can see enough of the humans and they know that the layoff isn't a wonderful thing to do. And they probably know in the back of their minds that if you do the layoff and the market doesn't like it, that will be the wrong outcome. But if you do the layoff and the market likes it for a couple of days, that will be the right outcome. And they probably also know at the same time that's not the leader they set out to be when they were more junior. I think if you give leaders the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine a leader sincerely and honestly conflicted about all of this. My point would be, to the extent that's true, could you choose option B once in a while? Could you actually choose the people once in a while, or could we have a conversation about starting with the people once in a while, as opposed to the needs of the machine must always drive what we do, because we can't stop the machine, because it's something, sooner or later you go. The machine is us. Come on, folks, we can decide to stop the machine. One way to stop the machine is to take your company private. For goodness sakes, it was Francesca.

Speaker 1: 21:54

You and I have a history at Deloitte, and Deloitte does not worry about what's going on this quarter with nearly the intensity that public companies do, and so Deloitte, in a way, has a different attitude, and private companies have a different attitude to their investors which, by the way, is weird because they're more intimate with their investors, because most of the investors are the partners who are walking up and down the corridors every day. So it's like the private company world has a closer relationship with its owners, which allows them to be long-term thinkers Isn't that strange? Which allows them to be long-term thinkers, isn't that strange? And that the public company world has a much more arm's length relationship with many of its investors at least, which forces them to do short-term things. It's because there isn't a relationship there. It does strike me that when you change the context in which leaders are asked to make decisions, then they can tilt more towards people. I remember one of the things I was most impressed by in my time at Deloitte was what Deloitte did in the Great Recession.

Speaker 3: 23:02

I know that I use this story. Yeah, tell the story, because this is that you tell the story. You tell the story. We'll see if we're telling the same story. It'd be funny.

Speaker 1: 23:11

Fabulous, there were two great stories, yeah yeah, so mine is that deloitte said look, there are some storm clouds on the horizon. So what we would do if we were to do the usual thing would be fire a whole bunch of people and try and weather the storm and then, probably in a couple of years, we'll hire them back again. But that's silly, isn't it? Because we're going to upturn a whole bunch of lives and already things are pretty bad because it's 2008. And we know what was going on in 2008. And so we'll upturn a bunch of lives and then we'll have a whole bunch of hiring costs that we don't need. So we're going to go.

Speaker 1: 23:48

The quote, the phrase I always remember was we're going to go long on people and we're going to carry those extra costs and we're going to take it out of the partners pockets, and the partners will support this, and the partners did support this. And we are going to put people first so that when the storm passes we are more strongly positioned to face into the future. And it worked, and it was just massively sensible. And it shouldn't be the only example I can think of that in the last quarter century. That's the thing that really upsets me.

Speaker 1: 24:26

I'm sure there are other examples that I haven't come across yet, but that's a terrifyingly rare thing for a company to do, and I think if a public company did that today, they would be in all sorts of trouble because the ecosystem would go you people are crazy and the activist investor would show up and go. I'm going to have a proxy fight with you guys now, because you shouldn't be allowed to run this company and the institutional investors would go. You just sank the stock price, so blah blah, blah, blah blah. Was that your story?

Speaker 3: 24:54

No, it wasn't my story. But during the same amount of time and I might be getting these wrong right, big fish stories periodically might have embellished, but during the same time.

Speaker 1: 25:06

Did you say big fish as a verb?

Speaker 3: 25:08

I did. That works, I know, there you go Big fish. Okay, so 2008,. Right, so they went long on people. Another way I remember them going long on people was deciding to build Deloitte University, oh yeah, so not only are we going to go long on people by holding our people and keeping them, but we're also asking for a capital call of the partners, and if you don't know what that is, hey, partners, I need everyone to cough up I'm making this up $100,000 to build a corporate university which, by the way, this was not something that people were doing, because we want this to be this cultural hub to invest in people. As a evidence, proof point of going along on people, again, while everyone was cutting, they went long, and the thing that I think about, though, is that was 2008. It was a recent example.

Speaker 1: 25:59

Our listeners need to write in.

Speaker 3: 26:01

Yes.

Speaker 1: 26:03

Goodness me gosh, how old do I sound. Write in on an envelope, put a stamp on it. Goodness me gosh, how old do I sound. Write in on an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it to us at PO Box, goodness knows what. There are quite a few firms that have gone private recently because they want to exit the quarter-by-quarter ecosystem, the activist-investor ecosystem. There are probably other examples out there of having greater freedom as a private organization. But the answer to all of this can't be go private. It can't be. If you're a large company, that means you've got to find hundreds of billions of dollars. The answer to all of this has got to be have better companies. Yes, people have better companies. How are we going to do that?

Speaker 3: 26:42

Yeah, or going back to every once in a while not even all the time, but every once in a while going along on your people, like making that courageous decision potentially to go along or getting good at the difference between change and improvement.

Speaker 1: 26:56

Everyone's interested in improvement. That's fine. That's actually what the activist people want and the consultants want and the investment bankers want and the analysts want. They actually want improvement, but we've just lost the ability to distinguish between change and improvement. So every change looks like a good change and off we go. How can we make things better?

Speaker 1: 27:29

You have to start with the recognition that change and improvement aren't the same thing. I think people at work know that and most people know a half-baked idea fairly quickly when they see it coming baked idea fairly quickly when they see it coming. And it is career suicide to raise your hand more than a couple of times. So the serious point here is we cannot say in organizations tell us if this is a bad idea, because we've created again a power structure and ecosystem where it's hard for people to tell you. If you're a leader, you've got to get curious and you've got to get skeptical about all of this stuff and you have to think much harder about whether I am in change creating. As you mentioned a moment ago, mel learned helplessness. So people have such a lack of control that all they feel like doing is phoning it in every day, or you're creating anxiety, control that all they feel like doing is phoning it in every day, or you're creating anxiety, or you're upsetting teams, or you're disturbing people's sense of place or meaning or any of those things. But we have to teach leaders, they have to be the ones doing this, and we have to explain what no one has ever explained to them before that this stuff ain't always a good thing and it has some very serious psychological consequences. And if you're in the business of improving an organization, then very serious psychological consequences are things that generally you want to avoid. We need to train leaders massively more intensively and massively differently than we do it today, because we've all seen this Most leadership training in organizations is a sort of afterthought and we very often give people the job of a leader before we train them to do the job of a leader.

Speaker 1: 29:15

And you don't do this for surgeons or for pilots or for anyone who's got somebody else's life in their hands, or for any job where it's really important to be good at it, but somehow we do it for leaders as though, yeah, the leader thing. Look, you were the best of the people at doing the follower job. So we gave you the leader job and the trainings in six months, and meanwhile, here are some articles all about change and disruption. You'll enjoy them Off, you go, good luck. And then what's the person? Do they look around and go? What are all the other leaders doing? They're doing reorgs. They're doing disruption oh dear, I'd better do that as well. And we again perpetuate a cycle of leadership capabilities you were asking Francesca a little while ago about. Is this about leadership capability? I think for sure. It's about leadership training, it's about leadership selection, it's about leadership support. It's about the leadership infrastructure and ecosystem of our organizations in a very significant way.

Speaker 3: 30:15

If I could add one to it and I'd be curious about your reaction to this the cohesion of the leadership team as well. I've seen senior leadership teams where the loudest voice in the room gets the win, and if you can't dissent, or if you can't at least understand how to work together as a leadership team, I don't think your organization has a chance. When you look at leadership teams that don't have a healthy cohesion or a healthy dissent ability, your organization is pretty screwed.

Speaker 1: 30:42

And what does that team therefore lack? It lacks a sense of belonging, it lacks a sense of place, it lacks a sense of meaning, it lacks a sense of certainty, it lacks a sense of predictability, it lacks a sense of control. It is a failing team because the place where all of the things that we're talking about either thrive or wither is on a team. And, yeah, if the top team doesn't experience stability, doesn't know how to foster its own stability, then, yeah, good luck everybody else.

Speaker 2: 31:16

It's interesting, especially if stability is the name of the game, right? One of the use cases is around the onboarding of leaders. When you think about a leader's first 90 days either a new in an organization or just new in their role there is this expectation that they've changed something, that they've innovated on something. Do we start there? Is that the lowest denominator to say stop having this expectation for new leaders?

Speaker 1: 31:41

It is part of the ecosystem thing as well, isn't it? Because we teach people to come in and make change in the first 90 days. Therefore, change is the thing that leaders do. Therefore, new leaders must come and make change. It would be a lovely and fascinating exercise to say to a leader all right, in your first 90 days, I want you to discover everything that's working and elevate those things and explain to everybody why.

Speaker 1: 32:10

Those are examples of the sorts of things you, as a leader, want to build in an organization and just completely flip the script. If you flipped it that way, you would be building massive stability for people, which goes here's who we are eternally. Here's how we do our work eternally. Here's what we value eternally. Here's who we seek to serve eternally. We're going to keep all of those, honor those, elevate those, preserve those, and over here, x and Y. We need to find a better way of doing these things. Can you help? For me at least, that's a very psychologically healthy way of beginning a narrative that feels like an improvement narrative, not a change narrative. Now, this whole conversation is about a hell of a lot more than the narrative, but it is interesting to just try on a few words for size and see how they make you feel as a leader or as an employee, and to see if we've actually put the emphasis on the wrong syllable when it comes to all. Things change and we should emphasize some stability too.

Speaker 1: 33:47

So Mel and I like to do this thing with our guests called rapid round, ideally quick short answers.

Speaker 3: 33:50

However, if you met me, I know I understand, I get it, I get. But this is the thing, this if we need to go off, we need to go off on the scenic route. That's the point. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. All right, are you ready to play ash Ashley?

Speaker 1: 34:00

The medium quick, medium rapid round. Yes, I am.

Speaker 2: 34:04

We're not willing to take a stand on anything. Hopefully this is a fun one for you. In your book you mentioned the word disrupt. Gets folks extra bonus biz dude points which crack me up. What buzzwords would you like to see die off already?

Speaker 1: 34:24

you like to see die off already. Strategic, which is not considered a buzzword, but is affixed to the front of far too many things to make them sound better than they are and to paper over a lot of very lazy thinking. So you just have to call it an asset. It's not a strategic asset. You have to call it an investment, not a strategic investment, and we can save a few syllables from the world.

Speaker 2: 34:43

I appreciate it. Let's simplify. What new buzzwords are on the horizon that you're like? Let's stop this immediately, before this catches on.

Speaker 1: 34:53

AI is getting.

Speaker 2: 34:54

Oh.

Speaker 1: 34:54

Jesus up to everything.

Speaker 2: 34:56

Truly.

Speaker 1: 34:57

And some things that are AI, which is a thing, but plenty of things that aren't AI and that are actually just math or an algorithm, but it's AI, this and AI, this and AI, this and AI is the new blockchain, because a few years ago it was we'll do this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain, and sooner or later, you just want to go shut up and sooner or later, you just want to go shut up. Ai is terrifying, I think for me certainly, because it seems to remove humans from a lot of necessarily human interactions, and you've got to ask yourself where does that point to? But I don't think we help by affixing AI on the front of things that aren't AI-like.

Speaker 3: 35:38

All right. What would you like to see CEOs do more of? Lesson how about less of? What would you like to see them do? Less of?

Speaker 1: 35:53

Change for the sake of change. By the way, can I go back now? I'm going to go back to my prior answer Listen. There is an art to listen I don't just mean be conversationally savvy. Create the systems and structures to understand the experience of work on the front lines and then pay attention to that so that there is like an infrastructure that needs to happen yeah, but listening to occur I love that answer.

Speaker 3: 36:14

There's a very deep schism a lot of times between the front line and leadership and, quite honestly, we have all the tools Qualtrics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah to do that efficiently. It's just listen to it and maybe do something with it. Would be nice too.

Speaker 1: 36:28

But you have to make it a priority and you have to realize that the things that people tell you are not the whole story.

Speaker 3: 36:33

Fair. Yeah, All right. Same question for CHROs, our chief HR officers. A lot of times they are in the ear of the CEO and the people voice sometimes, but what would you like to see them do more of?

Speaker 1: 36:56

I wrote a chapter about it in the book Advocate for Employees. And again, that's a hard thing because of the business decisions we want to make and not necessarily come up to the C-suite and go. You shouldn't do this because this will create uncertainty, anxiety, unbelonging displacement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. You shouldn't do it. But I would like to see CHROs feel the necessity of doing that more. And, by the way, to give another answer to one of the prior quickfire questions, which is now a slow fire question, I'd like to see CEOs demand that of their heads of HR more. I'd like to see more CEOs go. You know what we actually do, really need to change the balance on the people stuff. And so, head of hr, that's on you, and if you come and tell me we've got the balance wrong, I'm gonna listen to you yes or no?

Speaker 3: 37:53

do you believe most hr organizations are working in benefit of their people?

Speaker 1: 37:57

I think they're missing a few things, like if you look at the way HR is structured. It's structured to support business leaders. Mainly it's structured around business priorities. I've spent countless hours sitting in HR off sites where HR says, all right, as good citizens of life in the blender, we're going to change our strategy. What should the new strategy be? And someone around the table goes we should start with the business strategy and then we should figure out the people implications of the business strategy and that will tell us the HR strategy won't hit. That's an incomplete answer. Yes, it is, because the other part is what do the humans need? And the humans don't need the business strategy. The humans need the conditions of human performance. So those are things we could bring those into the conversation. We could bring those into the strategy.

Speaker 1: 38:45

I would love a stability governance organization in a company. What would stability governance look like? You can imagine HR playing that role. It doesn't at the moment. How do we train leaders, how do we listen and how do we deploy ourselves so that we understand the experience on the front lines? Because, again, most of the time you have to be a business of a certain size to get one HR person who has then massively run off their feet trying to keep up with the leaders charging around doing the business strategy stuff. Their feet trying to keep up with the leaders charging around doing the business strategy stuff. We've got to figure out a way of rethinking that so that we expand HR's portfolio to include the conditions of human performance, because, goodness me, those should live somewhere in our organizational construct.

Speaker 3: 39:34

Yeah, and right now it's like learning and development. Sometimes it's looking at the talent management team and being like aren't you doing that? Are you doing that? Because I'm not doing that, that's not my domain, so it doesn't feel like it's something that is its own entity and needs to be its own entity.

Speaker 1: 39:46

And there's a little bit more to continue my very long answer to this now.

Speaker 1: 39:50

Not at all quick fire. This is the slow fire round that. When HR talks about performance, we get very quickly to performance management and skills and all the things that we can capture in spreadsheets and that the software gives us. But if you go and talk to people on the front lines about what are the ingredients of performance, they go a leader who talks to me in language I understand, a sense of predictability and a set of relationships on my team and there is no line item budget in HR for those things. So the definition of performance needs to be agreed and understood, because HR doesn't actually map to those things. Hr maps to things that you hand money to vendors for, and those things are good organizational administration things, but if you think that those are the same as performance things, then you have a very strange idea of what performance looks like.

Speaker 3: 40:55

Ashley, thanks so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure seeing you and chatting.

Speaker 1: 41:00

Lovely, lovely to catch up, and let's do this again soon.

Speaker 3: 41:03

Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends, Thanks Fred.

The Human Debt of Tech at Work

Your Work Friends Podcast: Human Debt with Duena Blomstrom

Humans aren’t just resources…

But we’ve been treating them like they are. We sat down with Duena Blomstrom, author and Human Debt expert, to unpack what happens when companies prioritize speed, systems, and output over emotional wellbeing—and how to fix it. If your workplace is running on burnout, blurred boundaries, and broken trust, this conversation is the reset you didn’t know you needed.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

I'm wondering if you can explain it to our listeners like a five-year-old. What is human debt?

Speaker 2: 0:07

To five-year-olds it would be difficult because they would have to assume that the enterprise is an honest place where good things should have happened. So I can't do that, but I can explain it to a 35-year-old.

Speaker 1: 0:19

Let's do it, let's do it, let's do it. What's going on, mel, hey, hey, how's it going?

Speaker 3: 0:39

It's good. It's good. I cannot believe we are almost a month away from fall.

Speaker 1: 0:45

I know we are 40 days left of summer, though Plenty of time. Did you get your beach day in? Not a day.

Speaker 3: 0:53

I did get two hours, but Robbie and I are planning a trip to Block Island, which, for those of you who don't know, is off the coast of Rhode Island. It's gorgeous, and that will be our beach day, hopefully at the end of this month. How about you? Very nice, very nice.

Speaker 1: 1:09

We are taking a trip up to Mount Rainier, which, yeah, I don't know if anyone else does this. We've lived in Portland for about four years now and I looked at a map the other day and was like wow, mount St Helens is like an hour and a half away, never been. Was like wow, mount.

Speaker 1: 1:24

St Helens is like an hour and a half away. Never been right. Mount Rainier, super close like these, beautiful, you know experiences and we're just like we want to go to JCrew this weekend. So like, yeah, we are. So we rented like a cool cabin. The Airbnb market around Mountain Towns is just stunning. I mean funny. Also, you can you can rent someone's trailer, you can rent a yurt, you can rent, you know, a cabin that looks like it's totally set up to be instagrammable, that kind of stuff I've always wanted to stay in a yurt.

Speaker 3: 1:54

I don't know what it is, I'm like same such a fun tent I'm not a camping person.

Speaker 1: 2:00

I love to hike and be outdoors and I want to be in a room with a whack, yeah a yurt is the nice middle ground.

Speaker 3: 2:06

It's like a nice middle ground between a tent and a house.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Yeah, yeah. Do you think you could just buy a yurt on Amazon? You could buy anything on Amazon.

Speaker 3: 2:15

I know, like Timu, I've not ordered anything from Timu, have you?

Speaker 1: 2:19

No, but I really want to just to see what comes. I do too.

Speaker 3: 2:23

You know what it makes me wonder. I have the funniest story when my niece was going through this donut obsession for like ever, as you do, as you do, and I saw this donut chair on Amazon and I thought it was like a person-sized donut chair and then she got it for her birthday and it was a chair for her cell phone. So I imagine this shopping experience at Timo is kind of like me not paying attention to the dimensions of her donut chair.

Speaker 1: 2:51

That's why I want it. That's why I want it. Like, did you just spend $150 on a thing for yourself?

Speaker 3: 2:55

Yeah, it was like the dumbest thing ever, yeah, oh that's funny, god, I love shit like that. Yeah, I'm a big fan.

Speaker 1: 3:02

Mystery packages, mystery packages. Aren't you a big fan of, like the mystery bags, like $5, what's in the bag. It could be anything Like such a sucker for that Huge.

Speaker 3: 3:12

Where do people get those? You know like those mail bins, like unclaimed mail, and then they just buy an entire pallet.

Speaker 1: 3:25

I want to in on a palette with you Nordstrom returns, amazon returns. What do you get? What are you going to get? Yeah, oh, we got to do this. Yeah, when we make our first million, we'll get a palette.

Speaker 3: 3:31

We'll do a live unboxing.

Speaker 1: 3:35

It's irregular jeans. We have 45 packs of irregular jeans. These are our dreams $501 sunglasses. Yes, oh God, I love every minute of it. Well, no, we talked to someone super duper cool this summer.

Speaker 3: 3:53

Oh, yes, duena, I love her. Yeah, yeah, tell us about Duena doing things that don't take care of their people and their employees. And her whole discussion was on how to recognize if you have human debt. Every organization, just like tech debt, has human debt, and she was addressing ways that you can recognize it and ways that you can address it. It's a really interesting concept that we need to start talking about more. And she's done a million other things. She has a podcast called Mero Spicy at Work Tech, not People is a book that she's written. She's a keynote speaker. She's just an overall powerhouse.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Talk about a renaissance woman that's out there just doing good.

Speaker 3: 4:55

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:56

And has done good too. Right, human debt is one of those things where, if you don't know the term, when you have her explain what it is, what happened to me is like oh, I have felt this, I know exactly what this is, when you feel like the reciprocity and the relationship with your organization is off balance massively. I loved talking about what it looks like and feels like with her, but also, and probably most importantly, what can we do about it as organizations and, most importantly, as individuals? Because it starts with us one-on-one.

Speaker 3: 5:30

One-on-one we're humans at the end of the day, we're humans. I'm only human. Sorry for the woo-woo everyone. That's who we are. I love everything about this. She's just fantastic. So we hope that you get a lot out of this episode, folks, and let us know what you think. Here's to one-off Welcome friends.

Speaker 3: 6:14

We are super excited to welcome Dwayna Blomstrom. She is the author of Emotional Banking, people Before Tech, the Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age and an upcoming book called Tech-Led Culture. She is also an international keynote speaker, the co-founder of Tech-Led Culture People, not Tech companies that are really offering a human work platform, providing a framework to usher in a new tech-led culture of humanity in the workplace. She is one of the top voices on LinkedIn. She has an amazing newsletter that I follow the Future of Agile, as well as Chasing Psychological Safety. She's also a podcaster, like us. She's the co-host of NeuroSpicy at Work, which I'm excited to listen to.

Speaker 3: 6:58

The Secret Society of Human Work Advocates the People in Tech podcast, tech-led Culture and, married to Tech Duenna, that's a lot. So we just want to say wow, you've accomplished quite a great deal in influencing the working world in general in a very positive way. I love that you're calling out how we need to prioritize humanity in the workplace. Tell us, how did you get started in this space? What really inspired you to get started in this space?

Speaker 2: 7:29

Oh, only that. Let's see, that's an easy one to start with. We should have started with the harder ones. I don't think I've had any kind of inspiration. I didn't want to get started in this space at all. I don't know really many people that woke up going. I shall be in this space. So I think, like all of us, I just happened into it. I happened to see what looked to me like vast injustices and I had to do something about them.

Speaker 2: 7:56

I don't think I ever chose anything and I don't know if I might ask you what is this path we're talking about? What exactly have I chosen? Because if you ask me, none of the things have really been the ones that I've necessarily went after, but the things that have happened to me. I hear this a lot from other people that are AUADHD and have worked in the business world. I feel like careers have never been designed. We just fell where we fell and then we put all of our passion into something, learned all of the things, possibly got bored with that particular topic and moved on to the next.

Speaker 2: 8:32

Industry Happened to me a couple of times. I would say I started in psychology, obviously, but then I very quickly moved into business and did kind of technology and got excited when the internet boomed, when the financial technology side of things boomed, and learned everything there was to learn about it. But then the more I I put my head into it, the more I realized these are bigger human issues and I had to get my head out of the small holes. I was so pleased tinkering in, like every other autistic person that I have employed in my life not everybody else and yeah, I didn't choose anything. It's become a vocation, more than a day-to-day nine-to-five.

Speaker 3: 9:15

Yeah, that makes sense. I can totally relate. Francesca and I often talk about how we fell into our roles and then you just become the expert while you're doing it and quickly get bored and move on to the next. What's the next thing? So that makes total sense to me.

Speaker 2: 9:30

No one I don't believe wakes up at five and goes. I desperately want to be the uh back-end developer of apis. It's not a life-saving. It's very hard to attach the meaning to it, but we find other things at work that do that and I don't think there's anyone in the workplace that's not hundred thousand percent burning for something.

Speaker 1: 9:54

It's an interesting. People feel that. They feel that either that line between I'm not passionate about my work, but I'm doing this for the money and I'm doing this to bring home a paycheck, or they're burning out or they're feeling all of the impacts of the way that organizations are set up. And one of the concepts you talk about is human debt, and I love that. I'm wondering if you can explain it to our listeners like a five-year-old. What is human debt?

Speaker 2: 10:24

like a five-year-old. What is human debt To five-year-olds? It would be difficult because they would have to assume that the enterprise is an honest place where good things should have happened. So I can't do that, but I can explain it to a 35-year-old.

Speaker 2: 10:37

Let's do it, let's do it and there's probably different explanations to a 25-year-old, a 35-year-old, a 55-year-old and so on, but for everyone we should have done right. As employers, we should have done a set of things. As organizations, we should have come to the table in a certain fashion when we offer whatever it is that we offer in this contract of work, and those things haven't happened. So I'll expand in a second. It's every time that the organization hasn't done the things that they should have done and by those taking care of their employees in monetary and emotional fashion. So, for instance, all the things that most organizations will tell you they have but they don't really have. All of your failed dni programs. All of your stages of leadership with no explanation. All of the times when they should have been respectful to the conversation and the communication and never happened. All of the times when we promised our people a promotion and then we forgot, as if it never really was going to materialize anyways. All of the times when we presided over unpleasant and bullish behaviors, because think of a wrong in the workplace and think how it has never been addressed and think that will become your debt as an organization, because the more of these instances that you have as an organization where you have failed your people. Most of these are not going to be recorded anywhere, but they will exist in something like the, and I never thought about it until right now, but it's almost the antithesis of culture. It's an anti-culture vessel in the back of everyone's mind going. These motherfuckers have effed other people up. It may not have been me, but it has happened here. You know.

Speaker 2: 12:35

What happens is you then sit on an organization that has a debt and you can decide to pay it off and start treating your people better, figure out what they hate you for and when, and then make them love you again, or you can decide to ignore it, which is the case for a vast majority of most enterprises today. You can pretend it's not a problem. You can better your retention programs instead or put more money in position. I don't know what else we're doing than that, if I'm honest. So if you as an organization decide to not pay off this human debt, what happens eventually is that you become unviable. I believe that they will not be around. I'm not saying we should never get debt, right? If I'm talking to particularly your listeners must be Americans. You're fine with that. Question is when do we start paying this off?

Speaker 1: 13:23

Yeah, it was super fair. When I was growing up, my parents always talked about this idea of reciprocity and relationships. Right, Even on a one-to-one level. You are going to have moments where you're going to withdraw from the emotional bank account and you're going to have moments where you're going to have to deposit in the emotional bank account, and sometimes it's going to be uneven, but ideally, in the long arc, you have a balanced bank account. And this is one of these concepts where I feel like this happens on an individual level To your very good point. It happens on an organizational level and you feel it. You feel it, that's right.

Speaker 2: 13:57

Yeah, everyone knows it Exactly that I'm saying and what you said, that when you said you feel it. We know what we're all about, everyone knows. And it's that email we didn't answer. It's that person. We told them to have themselves in a corner because they weren't their fault, it was the bloody system or whatever. It's that time when we didn't keep a promise. It's that time when we didn't help a friend or we let them fall on a sword, becoming debts that you carry. As a human, workplace should care about those bits, because I'm not a different human, but outside of that, we're not entities that exist. Why would the workplace as well that claims it has regulated method in which it will not, if you over, do that to you is my question. So I'm on a work path with human debt in general, but the one at work is just shameful if you ask me I am curious about, on an organizational level, what are they supposed to do?

Speaker 2: 14:56

Fair question. It's massive. What is anyone supposed to do?

Speaker 1: 14:59

I don't know. Yeah, be cooler, be a nicer person. I don't know. Don't be a dick.

Speaker 2: 15:04

I'm a dick. That is the answer. But regulating against dickery is not the answer. Making people genuinely not biddicks is probably the answer. And if they genuinely wanted to do something, then there would be no employee that wasn't through a level of Communist Party from 1955, re-education camps of what the bloody hell an emotion is, because that's the level we need to get our leadership through before we will be able to engage with this very new generation that speaks emotions like that.

Speaker 2: 15:37

And if you are in a leadership position or you are engaged in teamwork and you haven't had it that to me doesn't recommend you to exist in the workplace at all, because what they're using, and what we're all using, is this lack of education to say I don't quite know, we don't quite engage like that at work. So, in between the armor of professionalism and this insanity of I don't know much about emotions I'm not a psychologist how am I supposed to engage any better? What happens is we cannot communicate and we cannot collaborate at work and we sure as fuck cannot lead anybody. That's the problem we have. If you're losing money anywhere the workplace you're losing on the fuckers you're keeping who are lying. You don't have emotions. If we're going to keep them. We can't just flush these people out.

Speaker 2: 16:22

I remember starting in the business world and everyone telling me to not worry in banking. We don't need to change all the systems In time, we'll just replace them with the people and everything. Come on, these guys only have one more board meeting. The amount of times I heard that you'd be surprised. That's not the way to be doing life. I am not supposed to wait anyone out to die because it's uncomfortable for me to speak about real things.

Speaker 1: 16:46

We hear it all the time, though All the time. He's not going anywhere. Blah, blah, blah, Like it happens all the time.

Speaker 2: 16:53

But people are using it as excuses.

Speaker 3: 16:56

Yeah, they absolutely are.

Speaker 1: 16:57

What's fascinating about this, though, is that, when you look at all of the research about great leadership, great team dynamics, innovation, engagement, it harkens on those things that people are emotionally intelligent, that they do make space for things like psychological safety, like that they understand their own limitations, and all of those things make for great performance, but it also means that you need to get your own shit together. Do you understand how you operate? Do you understand where your pitfalls are? Do you understand how you need to flex for your team? And vice versa? I think our leaders in organizations that grew up with my joke is, they grew up with this like Shackleton view of leadership, which is I'm strong, I have no emotions, I'm going to just push my way through, as opposed to really thinking about what works to lead people through what we're going through, what we're about to go through.

Speaker 2: 17:52

And.

Speaker 1: 17:52

I know Mel's probably so sick of hearing me say this, but there is not a person on the planet that has led through what we're going through and what we're about to go through. When you think about the speed of business, when you think about AI the amount of wars happening cultural and on the ground. When you think about AI, the amount of wars happening cultural and on the ground it's too much for a lot of people and to deny your humanity in that versus to lean into it, is not the right move.

Speaker 2: 18:15

But we have done it in the workplace for the last X amount of years. We need such a blank slate reset. You asked me earlier what needs to happen. What needs to happen is everyone needs to shut down, come back with a new plan. That's what needs to happen.

Speaker 3: 18:29

In addition to blowing up the workplace, people need to blow up the concept of what work means in their life. Right, there's a reset that needs to happen on a personal level as well as the organizational level.

Speaker 2: 18:43

You hit the nail on the head Disconnect between what work can and is and should be. It's not even a genuine, open conversation. Big concepts are up in the air. Who am I? What is work? What is the point of me as a human? What if your worth as a human is never about how much money you make?

Speaker 2: 19:01

What if we start remunerating people on being emotionally intelligent or remunerating people on being kind intelligent or remunerating people on being kind or taking up someone else's work for a second instead, because we haven't taught them the right things, in particular men, the same men that we are upset at.

Speaker 2: 19:17

How very dare they be a shithead and whatever shit. We put them there and we said all you need to do is tell me what to do and then I will execute on it. And no, that isn't, isn't the ask? The ask is that you check yourself, that you sit with being uncomfortable, that you understand your emotions, that you communicate efficiently, that you care about me. Those are the asks. With that said, there are companies out there, there are enterprises out there, there are combinations of people out there and groups that have gathered in a way that allow them to see each other, that allow them to get psychological safety to be real teams to go real fast, and those are the people that will get us out of the workplace if we don't want to also match them, not AI or anybody else. So literally, being a human is the only USB we're going to be asked to bring.

Speaker 3: 20:07

Yeah, we don't have anything if we don't have our humanity. We just talked about AI, and one thing we do know is that maintaining our humanity and bringing our full human selves is going to be more important than anything. So you talk a lot about tech debt. What is tech debt?

Speaker 2: 20:34

That's easier when you write code, when you're heart of heart as a programmer. That you could have potentially written it a little bit better is the only way to put it. You could have tested it more or you could have double checked something. But what has been prized in the software development world has always been speed of delivery. So the first answer you get off of Google is the one you get in. I'm joking, it's not quite that easy, but it takes a little bit more than that to be a programmer, but not a whole lot more, let me tell you.

Speaker 2: 21:01

That said, it's a natural thing to incur technical debt as you write, because if you write code fast, some of it won't work, some of it will get old, some of it will need a rewrite. What happens when you have a lot of this code that's not brilliant accumulating, is that you have to do a full rewrite of your code base, and anyone in technology knows that's the kiss of death for any CTO or any team attempting to exist. So you don't want to get to a place where you have to throw away everything you've written. When it comes to tech debt, it comes to bite you and your system stops working if you don't start fixing it. So the same way that they're supposed to be going back and fixing bits and pieces of that tech debt where it will make sense, so that the entire thing doesn't crash, that is how I'm saying we should be doing it in terms of human debt in the enterprise and let's start in the emotional intelligence, because it is an emergency. I I was desperately afraid of this in the ending of all my books. If we are to take a leaflet from the tech industry, we'll have to change culture everywhere else, because in the tech industry, by hook or by crook, we've invented this crap called agile, and this crap called agile means many things to many people, but what it essentially means is that you have some autonomy and you have some goodwill. That's what it means, and when you have those two things, you do things with other people. That's literally all that it means.

Speaker 2: 22:20

And because you cannot make technology as an individual contributor anymore, they have had to produce the thing. Let me tell you where else it didn't wasn't needed. Everywhere else, because the workplace is still made of a hundred billion individual contributors. So in the technology side, if you don't collaborate, you don't end up with any code. If you don't do the pair programming. You don't have the thing that's being paired properly On the other side. If your workplace is horrible and your workmate is an asshole, you still do it. You still show up to not take any blame for anything and to be the hero and to deliver the project. We have workplaces that are carried by millions of desperate, adulting individual contributors. The workplace doesn't exist. The workplace and the business place is a lie. We don't have that. We just have some conventions that we are happy to avail ourselves of for different reasons. So those are the ones we need to get to, because they are not something to be proud of to leave the next generation.

Speaker 2: 23:24

You feel it in the ether, what we hear from folks who are still in corporate, consistently it's just like I know that the people that are blessed and still in and for a long while it was they're going to be out, weren't they? But now I'm telling you that the out is out. These people are the outliners now, the people that are convinced that what existed come back. The same exact structure, the same exact. The same exact structure, the same exact conversation, the same exact fears of being authentic. No one's going to notice I don't quite understand anything. No one's going to notice I'm not quite engaging humanly properly. That's not happening anymore and I am genuinely worried for anyone who thinks we're wrong and we'll all calm down.

Speaker 3: 24:03

It won't. It feels like it's just going to amp up. I'd love to hear, especially with all this talk of AI. I'm wondering what your point of view is on how employers and employees, during this change, can get ahead of the human debt side of things. What can they do? Because we know the tech change is here and increasing. How can they get ahead of that human debt when it does start?

Speaker 2: 24:26

happening. I want to believe that, as society, we'll be at the place that we can go. Not everybody needs to show up to work, and not everyone needs to have a nine to five job. Everyone else can go read or make paintings. There is no need for jobs to be created. We don't need to fear AI. If AI shows up and AI takes all our jobs, that's brilliant. Then we all can lazy about. That's not going to, unfortunately, happen in our lifetime. It would be nice, it would be great, but not going to happen. So what will happen is, though no one will be employable if you don't bring yourself to work every day.

Speaker 2: 25:05

I remember when I was in college, I wrote a thesis on always being on, and I was like, so proud of myself. All you need to do is always being on, and I was like, so proud of myself. All you need to do is always be on, and then you'll be so focused and so in flow. Everything will be fine, literally. I remember my professor going God, this is not. This is not going to work. You're going to have to go back to the drawing board because you're describing ADHD. Can you go back home and calm down? But so I'm not saying that everyone's going to like me, right, not everyone can be on, but you're like don't mask a hundred percent, you can't mask forever exactly that.

Speaker 2: 25:40

Yeah, so when we say mask, we mean in the workplace in particular. When we say it in in a private fashion, we just mean that those of us that are not neurotypical spend our entire lives attempting to be like the neurotypicals. Possibly, if you ask me, we should just ask for the neurotypicals to try more to be like us. But that's just me. But we do that. We attempt to pretend we are neurotypical.

Speaker 2: 26:05

But that happens at work as well, when people mask their true emotion and they employ a process called impression management, which is essentially attempting to appear in a certain fashion in front of your peers. But when you do that, you are not authentic, you are not genuinely giving your opinion. You are are attempting to control the narrative in a fashion that will not help a team function, so it's not a desirable behavior. When you're attempting to create a team dynamic, it's really not a desirable behavior in any fashion other than when people want to wear pink. It's the only impression management I'm fine with is for pretty. Anything else is not for pretty and it's for hiding. Should not exist either in personal or workplaces, simply because it makes our lives harder and it makes other people suffer.

Speaker 3: 26:58

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I'm so happy to hear the discussions had started around bringing your authentic self to work and workplaces trying to really create spaces where that's okay. No one's getting it 100%, but the fact that some workplaces are even trying to do that and foster that is so incredibly important.

Speaker 2: 27:22

So it's good to see, I say this a lot the organizations that do have psychological safety are not the organizations that are chasing it. They're the organizations that have built it to begin with and then have guarded it. Guarding it is an everyday work. Let's be honest. The work that is needed of humans at work is the same work that's needed of us every day, with our spouses, with our children, with our parents, with our friends. The same work. Be honest, be kind, be always putting yourself into somebody else's shoes. Same way. Does anyone want to do it, even at home? No, we're equals to our own family. Why would we extend that kind of kindness to strangers at work? So, the more that the world implodes, the more that we are afraid we're dying, the more that we are in defense mode, the less psychological, the less a team, the less a workplace the less there's any point to this conversation.

Speaker 1: 28:19

I think about this a lot. I've been on a journey the last several months around how do I want to reimagine my life and how I live my life? One of the North Stars is am I doing this out of love and to be a better version of myself for other people, for myself? Or am I doing this out of ego? And this idea of this constant pull of? Is this out of love or is this out of ego? And sometimes you want to do things out of ego. I get that. But for the most part I'm trying really hard to have a very simple vision of do it out of love, even if it doesn't make sense, even if it's not good for my career. It's out of love Because at this point I don't know what else to do, and as I'm listening to you when I'm feeling like, is that kind of the mantra that we all need to be? Not that I, that's all.

Speaker 2: 29:00

That's all. That's all and it's. They should have started with what you started and they should end with what you're ending now, which is what when you started, you explained you there's reciprocity in there's a rupture and repair and there's a reciprocity, and when you fuck people up, you then have to come back up and put more in that. That's how you do repair. You put more that coin from bloody dr phil's jar, if no one knows any other reference, you would remember dr phil's love jar, if nothing else. Or some people might remember vick's from the Orange County Housewives they all had the love jar like that. Have a fucking love jar and stop taking shit out of it instead of putting crap into it, because you'll fuck up your life and your work life.

Speaker 2: 29:42

I think it's the easiest advice, but we all know that it reduces all the way to don't be a dick, the method to not be a dick, I think, and to minimize those instances when you go for the ego instead of the love. I don't know if it's any good, but it's an intense daily pressure. I will tell you that these days I just have to go. What do I think is the right thing to do? What do I genuinely believe is the right thing to do and, like you say, you won't always do it. Sometimes you'll be like, fuck, the right thing to do. I've been doing the right thing continuously. My significant statement is the right thing to do.

Speaker 3: 30:17

Okay, go fuck it up, but some days and most days you would have tried, and it's a handful of questions, some are yet. They can be yes or no, but the hope is it's your. Whatever your immediate reaction is to this question or your immediate answer, I will tell you that you're giving palpitations to people who are AUADHD.

Speaker 2: 30:55

No, I'm joking, I'll be fine.

Speaker 3: 30:56

I'm sorry, I'm joking, I'll be 100% fine, I'm curious now Go ahead In terms of human debt, because you've seen examples of who's really fucking it up and who's doing it really well. Who do you feel is getting this right?

Speaker 2: 31:15

It's getting it right. Google started by doing it right. That's why they came up with the idea. They sort of found it at the same time that Amy has repopularized it. It's not something that Amy Edmondson has come up with, it's not something that Google has come up with, but psychological safety will forever be intrinsically connected to Google. That doesn't make Google a psychologically safe company today, necessarily. They have pockets of amazingness and pockets of absolute shit, like everyone else, but, with that said, they are an absolute good company to look at.

Speaker 2: 31:44

The second example I have and it's surprising to most people is fucking Amazon, and it's Amazon corporate. It's Amazon corporate working practices. Let's put it that way. I look at what they're doing in terms of collaboration internally, where we make software, and it's insanely smart. It's probably the only place where you have good acknowledgement of the fact that work doesn't happen like we thought it does. A famous example is the fact that they use written memos that they all bloody read first before the conversation starts. So we all have the same bloody context Very, very basic.

Speaker 2: 32:22

And then, lastly, and most interestingly so, somewhere around March, jeff Bezos came out after eight billion years where we thought he died or something. He was busy being in love. Some of us used to be back in the day, and so he came back saying we are doing no structured meetings anymore. I'm sorry, what we know when we show up, we know what we show up for. And then I remind everyone that they have to do mind wandering, which, yes, I can just see all the wondering which, yes, I can just see all the um, various developers going oh my god, now what mind wandering. They want my feelings to wander somewhere as well.

Speaker 2: 33:01

So completely get it why. It's woohoo for some people, but it's a hundred percent the truth. You only come in to get an answer when you've had five minutes of mind wandering, and what most work meetings manage to do, which is insane, is attempt to fit a little bit of mind wandering in the. And what most work meetings manage to do, which is insane, is attempt to fit a little bit of mind-wandering in the middle of an insane work meeting. And because he doesn't have an exact end time, it allows people to actually be creative and try to apply themselves to a problem. These are execs at Amazon, so maybe we get people treated like execs at Amazon and then we let their minds wander. How about that?

Speaker 3: 33:34

Can companies afford to ignore this human debt?

Speaker 2: 33:39

Companies are non-existent. There is a real of a concept organizations and companies are just as serious as Santa Claus has been saying this for 10,000 years. They cannot afford it, but they don't care because they can't care or afford or do anything. They don't exist as a thing. I I keep saying this to the child anytime he gets up in arms about corporations there isn't this thing. This thing doesn't exist. The thing you're upset against does not exist. There's no five people that have sat down and decided this and are gonna do this.

Speaker 2: 34:10

Things happen in the business world in virtue of inertia and in virtue of the taxation episode. We're in a movie that's not being ran by a company. So no, they can't afford it, but they don't care that they can't afford it, and more and more companies are going to drop off and the ones that won't. At the end of the day, we all know which we started talking about. The bloat companies are practically an extended social service. These days. They know they've not audited which of their teams is doing anything after a certain size right? Big organizations know that they are half paying the state by keeping these people that are useless. It's an insane model. Hopefully we'll walk away from it one day. If we don't't, they will simply stop being viable. I think when they are up against companies that are doing whatever they can to do better yeah, this is more moving to a personal side of things.

Speaker 3: 35:06

What are you reading and or listening to right now that you're really excited about?

Speaker 2: 35:12

I I'm really excited about brushing up on my Spanish, which has been a lot better than I thought it was. I am surprised every day when one of my team doesn't know something and I'm like that means X and they're like, can you stop just flaunting your Spanish? So I do need to learn some proper grammar. So that's what I'm reading continuously. I'm trying to catch up on Spanish. Proper grammar. So that's what I'm reading continuously.

Speaker 2: 35:34

I'm trying to catch up on spanish and, if I'm also honest, I'm reading the most I can about the effect of being a leader and a neurodivergent leader in the workplace who has teenagers and children who are alphabet mafia.

Speaker 2: 35:51

It's a really important bit that I think we have completely neglected. We've just started a new podcast called tears of dopamine, and it's literally just us talking to other parents of trans and gay kids who have had to themselves go through major and horrendous things. I can't begin to tell you and I won't because I let them tell their story Most of them will have their voices covered because they have exact jobs that they are desperate to keep, but some of them have been willing to give us their courage and use their voice and their professional standards. So you'll hear professional standing. So you'll hear of a few names, but the rest of us, the rest of us that have these kids that we are just trying to keep alive and happy, and have never talked to each other about it, shame on us, and shame on us for not opening the conversation from here on. So we have to start working on it. Let us know if you need any.

Speaker 3: 36:49

I love that. It's so important to have that community just to start the conversation and to support one another through it. What are you most excited about for this next year?

Speaker 2: 37:15

about and I'm not taking that in any trivial fashion after having been acquiring some ptsd last year and after having seen my child go through horrible things, it's a big deal for us and we've worked really hard at re-establishing our mental stability, like I say, and our therapist would be very proud if we could just uh, be happy for a minute.

Speaker 3: 37:31

Yeah, yeah, it's important. We appreciate you and all the work you're doing Duana.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Thank you so much, you guys. It's been an amazing opportunity. You guys Both beautiful, beautiful humans and souls Really appreciate you. I don't know if you're a hugger, but I'm hugging you.

Speaker 1: 37:44

I'm so excited.

Speaker 2: 37:45

I can't wait to actually genuinely hug you guys, because I cannot wait to hug you.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Truly, I I cannot wait to play a game. I look forward to it. I will look forward to it. Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends.

Trauma-Informed Leadership

Your Work Friends Podcast: Trauma-Informed Leadership with Deborah Lee

Safety builds trust…

And leaders shape the spaces we work in. In an era where employee wellbeing is paramount, leaders are increasingly recognizing the need for more compassionate and psychologically safe work environments. 

But what if I told you that over 80% of people globally have experienced some form of trauma? This statistic, underscores the urgent need for trauma-informed leadership in our workplaces. With guest expert Deborah Lee, we unpack what trauma-informed leadership means, why it matters, and how to lead in a way that heals—not harms.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone building trust, culture, or change, and for any leader wanting to create healthy workplaces.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

Statistics show that over 80% of people have been through some kind of trauma globally, so none of us will ever be able to really escape trauma. Once you've lived a life, you've gone through trauma, and that informs how we perform at work. It informs how we show up at work and even as a leader, it informs how you lead.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Hi friends, hey Mel, hey Debra, what's going on?

Speaker 1: 0:39

I'm having the time of my life talking to the both of you right now, so really excited. We get that a lot. We get that a lot.

Speaker 2: 0:44

We get that a lot Same Listener friends.

Speaker 3: 0:48

with us today is Deborah Lee. She is the founder of Creature A and they specialize in creating mindful and trauma-informed workplaces, and we are super excited to learn from Deborah today all about embodied leadership and trauma-informed workplace leadership. So, debra, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that lovely introduction, mel. I'm really excited to be talking with the both of you today, happy to share in any way that I can.

Speaker 3: 1:18

Let's dive right in. We would love to hear a little more about your personal journey here. How did you get into trauma-informed care and a focus on embodied leadership?

Speaker 1: 1:28

Yeah, just to share my personal journey. I walked out of an abusive relationship in 2021. And when I went to the various institutions that you would normally expect to get support and help like law enforcement, hospital, even church institutions I just found that people weren't really understanding the gravity of the situation or dealing with it with the urgency that was required, and oftentimes I felt like there were real gaps that were met and issues around like justice and support and people were really understanding what was at stake. And even then, the main people that I got help from ultimately were people who had a lot of experience in the area of trauma, for example, a social worker who has witnessed a lot of these sorts of cases of domestic violence, and she could actually break down to me what were some of the processes involved. And then, when I understood a lot of these dynamics were about power and about control. That's when my eyes were open and I was able to have a really clearer picture of how to move forward with my life. And then, in the process of it, I could use that lens, understand why people relate it to other people a certain way, for example in a conversation, why people might just, for example, not even address the questions that's raised or move on to another subject or be dismissive or use jokes or sarcasm to deflect, and I did a lot of research around emotional abuse. I did a lot of research around trauma and one of the books that really changed my life was the book the Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, who is a psychiatrist who has been on the forefront of trauma for over 30 years. He's treated all sorts of patients with any number of mental health issues, from bipolar disorder to borderline personality disorder and major depressive episodes, and one of the things that really left a very deep impression on me is that a lot of the common core roots of all of these mental health disorders is the fact that all of them have what you call complex post-traumatic stress disorder. So this is a bit different from the classic PTSD, as you know, like maybe you get into an accident and then you lose a limb and then your life is forever changed.

Speaker 1: 3:53

Cptsd is something that arises within relationship and in these relationships where there's an imbalance of power, there's often abuse or emotional neglect, often abuse or emotional neglect. And a lot of this starts in your early childhood and it's shaped by your caregivers and how you relate to them, the coping mechanisms you developed as a child to be able to survive in an environment that maybe was abusive or was emotionally neglectful, and this has an impact on how you relate to others in life and your attachment styles later on as an adult, and even the choices that you make. Neuroscience has shown that it actually has a real and felt impact on your brain functioning, so you can think about how that affects the prefrontal cortex, how a person makes decisions and even things like who they get attached to, how they find a life partner, for example, and so reading this book really helped me understand myself, my own life trajectory, and it also helped me understand what it means to be cut off from a sense of embodied living, what it means to be cut off from the messages that your body is signaling to you, because it's so easy to intellectualize and just live up here. When, as a child, you were filled with anxiety and anguish right in an environment that was unstable or chaotic and nobody was there to address it for you, nobody was there to help you make sense of it. So you learn to cut it off, and this is what Bessel van der Kolk talks about in his book. They get.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Survivors of complex post-traumatic stress disorder get so used to these unremitting signals of anxiety and distress from a very young age, and because they don't have any other option, they can't pick and choose their caregivers or pluck themselves out of an environment that is destructive or filled with chaos and abuse. They don't get that choice right. So what they have to do at the end of the day is learn to dissociate, and so you develop those coping mechanisms, and it's very helpful for when you're a kid and you just need to survive. But as an adult it could mean that you become like dismissive, cut off, not in touch with your, your feelings, emotionally tone, deaf to yourself, and even in your relationships at work or even within intimate relationships, you develop trauma based responses and you might be familiar with fight, flight, freeze, and then there's also fawn right, that's another one, and then the two that are like more emergent, discovered by the National Institute for Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. Expounds upon is Attached, cry for Help, and then the final one is Collapse and Submit. So a lot of these ways that people behave.

Speaker 1: 6:41

If you really trace it back over time and look at their trauma map, it's rooted a lot in unresolved things that happened in the past, and the key thing to note is that, even though you may have gone through a lot of abuse when you're a kid, you could still be very high functioning, you could still really perform in life.

Speaker 1: 7:01

But what might happen to you at one point is that something happens there are a few things that could happen to you, something life-changing or you have a trigger and then suddenly you start to unravel, and then that's when people are forced in many ways to confront their own trauma, to confront their own unresolved issues from the past.

Speaker 1: 7:21

And so that brought me to a space of wanting to. First of all, my experience as an abuse survivor and going through the various institutions and seeing the gaps there. That's what got me asking questions. And then, when I understood the mind-body connection, when I read the Body Keeps the Score, is when I really realized, hey, this is a very valuable roadmap for others to have, not just to support other people, but even to understand their own selves, because I think the tendency for a lot of people is just to end up finding fault with themselves and like blaming themselves and beating themselves up, which you know it's not very helpful, and, at the end of the day, until you can extend a kindness to yourself, it's actually very hard to extend that same kindness to other people in a meaningful way.

Speaker 3: 8:07

Yeah, I'm really sorry that you experienced something like that. What inspired you, I guess, to take what you learned about yourself and that understanding and bring that into the workplace?

Speaker 1: 8:22

I think once you go through something like that, you can't unsee it, Things through a very different lens, and then you understand power dynamics. In a way there's a before and after, when you are in a position where you have been traumatized by an intimate partner, and then you see how the systems reinforce injustice around it and how the truth gets completely obfuscated at times. You realize once you see, you see it I started to see things in a way that maybe a lot of people miss. And then you see this playing out at workplaces and then you understand whoa hostile and you would not expect that, even in a corporate setting. And I just realized that whatever you're not dealing with in your personal life, it will spill out into your work life. As much as you might try to like put your mask up, it finds its way to seep out.

Speaker 1: 9:13

And I realized that, at the end of the day, what people seek at work is still human connection, and that is what creates more productive workplaces. I hesitate to use that word productive, because I don't want people to just focus on that as the bottom line. But at the end of the day, like when there's a culture of collaboration, when there's a culture of trust and safety, psychological safety, and when people are able to feel free to bring their whole selves to work. Once those foundations are set in place, it actually creates a much, much healthier workplace where people actually look forward to going to work, because you're not going to work to be a machine. You're going to work because you want to feel a sense of meaning, enjoyment in what you do and connection with other people on your team, and so a trauma-informed workplace will equip you to be able to have those key fundamentals and to be able to connect with your co-workers in a way that's meaningful and enjoyable.

Speaker 3: 10:10

Yeah, we talk about that all the time.

Speaker 2: 10:12

I feel like we have this really old archetype of power because, to your point, a lot of abusive relationships.

Speaker 2: 10:18

The dynamic is about power and the way we leverage power, the way we embody power at work, the archetype of the leader as control and command, and I know obviously we have a lot more definitions of leadership now. I get that. But the way organizations are structured, the ways of working around organizations and, quite honestly, even what we promote in organizations around people that come across as confident, strong, by any means necessarily like those things still are incented. And so it's an interesting discussion on power, because I feel like there's still very much an old archetype of power living, breathing foundationally in corporate America. It's evolving. It's not every place, I get it, but it's still pretty old school.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Yeah, I think it's hard to run away from that. I think in all human relations, even if you look at animals, there's always some kind of hierarchy. You look at apes, chimpanzees, you see how the hierarchy it's almost intrinsic. My company is called Creature Ray, by the way. I named it Creature Ray because I wanted to capture the nuances around how people are.

Speaker 1: 11:25

We're social animals and in some ways conditioned to behave like that. It's like survival of the fittest. But then also the social element means that as humans, as a more highly evolved species, we look for something more than just that kind of old school power structure that animals have. We look for connection, we look for authenticity, we look for meaning and purpose, and that's what differentiates us from a chip right, a chip just interested only in where its next meal is coming from or who it's going to mate with. But as human beings there's something deeper than that, and I think that's where we're talking about a trauma-informed workplace where we understand that we're not just here to work, but we're also here because we're seeking ways of relating to each other. That is effective for the work, but it also is meaningful for us as human beings.

Speaker 3: 12:17

Yeah, how did your experiences really shape your understanding of leadership in the workplace, the power dynamics that we're going through, what made you focus in the leadership space specifically when I started doing?

Speaker 1: 12:32

a lot of research around abuses, around organizational culture, around workplace bullying, around just even gaslighting and psychopathic behavior. That's when I realized, hey, hey, there needs to be. Number one a very clear understanding of trauma, what it is, trauma-informed care, as well as like policies and guidelines as to how to support people. Number one we've been through that within the workplace, because statistics show that over 80 percent of people have been through some kind of trauma globally. So none of us will ever be able to really escape trauma.

Speaker 1: 13:06

Once you've lived a life, you've gone through trauma. And that informs how we perform at work. It informs how we show up at work and even as a leader, it informs how you lead. So if you went through all these things yourself and you're like I earned my stripes this way and you never work through how, in some ways, it shaped and maybe even traumatized you, then you're going to be like I'm going to inflict that on other people. You may not consciously think that, but that's what you're going to act out right until and until and unless you work through your own stuff or you gain the awareness around what trauma informed care is, what trauma is, maybe drawn out your own trauma map and understand the mind-body connection. Practice good self-care. It's really hard for you to show up as a leader. That is not course, especially if that's how you were groomed into becoming a leader.

Speaker 3: 14:00

Yeah, I am a huge proponent of therapy. Therapy is good for everyone, especially when you hear statistics like 80% of people globally have experienced some level of trauma and there's always. I know this seems like a cliche quote that gets passed around all the time, but it's like being aware of everyone's going through something. But there's real impact there, because I think to your point. When you're in psychologically unsafe environments in the workplace, you're consistently being re-traumatized.

Speaker 1: 14:28

And the real danger is not being able to identify it.

Speaker 3: 14:31

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Like when you're so stuck in it it's hard for you to even see it, and then you might even start blaming yourself or internalizing it. One of the key ways that even in the legal profession right like how they train a lot of these young, bright-eyed lawyers is inculcate into them a sense of you're never good enough. But they don't tell you that straight out, but they set the bar like here, and then when you reach it for it, it's a sense that keeps getting reinforced and then it's almost like brainwashing.

Speaker 3: 14:58

The goalposts constantly move and then they're always questioning their abilities. Like you see that in so many different work environments, and it's almost like an emotional abuse that happens over and over. We hear it often, francesca, you and I just covered some headlines recently where it was talking about there's that right to disconnect law that's been passed in some global locations, but the US is considering it, or they're at least watching it very closely, because people have said it's like a badge of honor to be in burnout to get to where they are, but it's those environments that continue to perpetuate this. You're not good enough. You need to work harder. You need to work 80-hour weeks to succeed.

Speaker 2: 15:42

It's just not sustainable, and we're seeing it with the well-being numbers. We've been following well-being numbers for a while. Well-being just keeps dropping and dropping and dropping. There's a lot of factors to that. But to your very good point, debra, if you have leaders that don't understand how to not re-traumatize people constantly, it's not going to get any better. There's no safety net.

Speaker 1: 16:05

And how do they not re-traumatize people unless they themselves, on some level, have worked through their own trauma?

Speaker 3: 16:08

yeah, yeah gotta do the work can you explain what embodied leadership means in simple terms? Explain it to us like we're five. What are the characteristics of an embodied leader?

Speaker 1: 16:31

So basically an embodied leader is somebody who is aware of the mind-body connection and has done the work and gotten the psychoeducation around that, who takes care of himself and shows up at work with presence and authenticity. I don't know if that's simple enough for a five-year-old maybe a very smart five-year-old.

Speaker 3: 16:55

It's one of my favorite subreddits. Explained to me like I'm five, I just think, okay, if you can do that, it's a great way to say it. That was great.

Speaker 1: 17:03

I really highly recommend, if you're a leader, to do the work, because you're going to have so much impact on the team, the teams that you lead, the clients that you meet and just everybody that comes into your sphere.

Speaker 2: 17:16

There's a statistic that the person that has the most impact on your mental health is most likely not your spouse. It's your manager.

Speaker 1: 17:22

Yes, yes, and I have seen that your boss has the biggest impact on your mental health, and it is absolutely true.

Speaker 1: 17:29

I can tell you from personal experience that that's definitely true and it really shapes the way that you show up at work. It really shapes your values even because, at the end of the day, a lot of us just want to do a good job right. A lot of us want to show up in the best way that we can with good work ethic. We want to please our bosses right. If their values are like very different from yours, if their style of leadership is coercive, your psyche is going to take a beating.

Speaker 3: 18:00

Think about the statement that's commonplace, that is really sad is, and even the memes and jokes. You see it all the time like memes and jokes about oh I've got the Sunday scaries. I'm ready for the day when that doesn't exist anymore for people in the workplace.

Speaker 2: 18:15

The thing that makes me really nervous, when leaders haven't done the work to your great point, when they don't operate with trauma-informed care. These people have your livelihood on the line because their evaluation of your performance, of how you show up, is directly tied to your salary, your benefits sometimes, and so it can feel there's so much at stake on this one person and on this one relationship. And if that's not trauma-informed, or if that person's not handling that with care, woof. So what is trauma-informed? Or if that person's not handling that with care woof. So what is trauma-informed care, especially as a manager? What is it?

Speaker 1: 18:52

Trauma-informed care is basically understanding that most of us have some kind of trauma and understanding that sometimes, especially when we're in a situation where there's a lot of stress or there are triggers involved, that we might act out our trauma. So what does that mean? It means that you might respond in any one of those six ways that I mentioned earlier Fight, flight, freeze, fawn attach, cry for help, collapse and submit the ones that all of us know about. Fight flight, freeze, yeah. And I think that as human beings, on a very kind of day-to-day basis, relational level, we recognize that we can intuit at times, like without, maybe on a non-verbal basis, like when somebody is in freeze, yeah, yeah, maybe over a phone call, when somebody is just completely silent, you're like hello, are you there, is everything okay? So that you can't see there's that element where the nonverbal effect is not there. So trauma informed care just basically provides you a framework for relating to people in a way where you don't immediately start associating behavior with character or what's wrong with you, so to speak, as to what happened to you, right? So it's not saying that we need to know your entire life history or we need to know intimate details, but we want to know in the present what's triggering you, what is making it hard for you to show up fully, for example, to just be present or to ask questions that show that you're engaged and leaning into the work.

Speaker 1: 20:33

So if somebody's not doing that, instead of just saying oh, she's lazy, or like she's not good enough for this role, or she's being passive, aggressive or whatever story you want to attach to their behavior, go beyond that. Dig a little deeper. Create some level of psychological safety and connection and vulnerability right. Show up as a leader for your team. If you can show some degree of vulnerability, your team is going to respond to that. And just now you mentioned the old school way of leadership, right? So people in many ways led to believe that you cannot show vulnerability as a leader, but studies have shown that what promotes connection, what promotes a sense of workplace well-being, is when leaders are able to to have good boundaries but at the same time, have some vulnerability, so that you're not just that strong leader who has everything in place and uses coercive means to get everybody into action, but you're showing up as a real, authentic person, and that's what people connect with, that's what people resonate with, that's what people relate to.

Speaker 2: 21:45

One of the things I think about a lot is just being genuinely interested in what your team is about. What motivates them to your very good point. What does their life look like? Again, you don't need their whole history, but maybe you need to know they're a single mom, or they're caring for a parent with Alzheimer's, or they're neurodivergent and whatever it is. Genuinely being curious, not as to your point, not assuming that if they're acting a certain way that they're bad, but maybe something else is going on. And then digging deeper, I love that idea. Yeah, you mentioned the fight or flight, the phrase. I think we know what. Those are. Right, those are the ones we already know. But I'm curious about fawn collapse and submit and it's a touch cry right A touch cry for help.

Speaker 2: 22:24

Yeah, what does fun look like? Because when I hear that I'm like doing this, I'm like I see that sometimes where you see people like playing with their hair constantly in meeting. Is that what are those three look like? Because I don't know if I know.

Speaker 1: 22:37

That's funny. I love that you shared about that. I can see why you would think that. So, basically, fun is as his name suggests. It's like fawning behavior. It sounds a bit playful, but essentially fawning behavior.

Speaker 1: 22:49

It sounds a bit playful, but essentially fawning means you are in some ways overextending your boundaries and pushing yourself into the background to accommodate somebody else, like you're trying to win somebody's favor. A little bit different from fight, flight, freeze, because that's mediated more by the amygdala, which is the like this emotional center in your brain, and that's very um, visceral. It'sygdala, which is like this emotional center in your brain, and that's very visceral. It's a very visceral reaction. But fawn is actually more mediated by the prefrontal cortex, so there's a lot of even strategy that goes into it.

Speaker 1: 23:17

I love that you brought that up about the hair, because over the centuries it's been shown that women, because of, in many ways, our weakest stature physically I'm talking about physically just we have less muscle mass than men and so we've had to find ways to protect ourselves. And so then that's what a lot of women have over the centuries, used fawning as a strategy to cope within a very patriarchal system, not to say that men don't do it too, because men do it. There's usually an imbalance of power when people fawn right, because a lot of bosses respond to that.

Speaker 2: 23:54

Oh yeah, because it can feel good. Right, yes, yeah, you're coming over to their side. What about collapse and submit? What is that?

Speaker 1: 24:01

So collapse and submit is when you basically just fold over every single time, right, like anytime. Anybody says anything. There's no pushback, there's no accountability, there's no kind of like negotiation, there are no hard conversations, but it's just okay. Okay, sure. Sure, it's a bit different from Fawn, right? So Fawn is a little bit more like there's some strategy to it, where you're thinking actively, what is this person like? You're anticipating his needs like, you're planning almost your moves like five steps ahead. There's a lot of thinking that goes into it. Where you're like, and also in intuiting, you know the other person's needs ahead of yours, right. But collapse and submit is just, basically, if you can think of folding, you just keep folding. In a card game, for example, you don't play a card, you just fold. Yeah, that sounds exhausting, yeah, it's. It's like you've given up you've given up, basically.

Speaker 1: 24:56

You've basically given up, so that that is collapse and submit, and then yeah, that's a cry yeah, yeah, attach, cry for help, so that if you can think of a baby and how babies are like so vulnerable because of their neediness and the helplessness they engender, like extra care and protection from good care from caregivers that actually take the job seriously. Obviously, if it gets to a point where there's too much of that, it can cause burnout in a relationship, right, and it can damage the relationship in the person that is defaulting to that trauma response. It can lead to them losing a sense of self as well, because what happens is learned helplessness, right? So instead of being able to have the presence of mind, to give yourself space to come back to yourself and then think through the problem and then think about how you're going to engage people, what resources you need, who you're going to ask for help for, to think about it in like a calm and like maybe more pragmatic way. But if your default is just to attach to somebody and cry to them for help, then you develop a pattern of learned helplessness over time.

Speaker 1: 25:57

And this can even be within intimate relationships. It can be within professional relationships, right, where one person's always like more than happy to help, more than happy to be the voice of reason, more than happy to be the savior, so to speak. Right, and then the other person is oh, I need your help, and there's nothing wrong with asking for help. I just want to underline that. But if it's become to the point where it's learned helplessness, then that's when you're talking more about this trauma response of attached cry for help I had someone in my life that their father was massively abusive throughout their entire life and their trauma response was absolutely freeze, anytime there was massive conflict, just freeze, literally, physically, vocally.

Speaker 2: 26:42

It was like, yeah, I am. I'm curious if that was always going to be their trauma response, no matter what. So if you have, your trauma response is like the one you always go to, or do people have different trauma responses for different situations?

Speaker 1: 26:57

Yeah, so you can actually have more than one type of default trauma. I do have a boundaries PDF like an embody and boundaries PDF to give away that people can access through a link If they sign up.

Speaker 1: 27:10

They can get it delivered into the inbox. I actually, in that PDF, elaborate more on the symptoms of each bucket of trauma responses. And to your question about your friend who tended to default to freeze, she might actually have other trauma responses as well, but maybe it just didn't manifest in those times that you were with her in her family. It might have been a lot more adaptive for her to just freeze up and so that might have been her, her default. But all I have to say is that a lot of it is just conditioning and how we learn to adapt in an environment. Right. A lot of it is survival. What trauma response works best for that specific environment?

Speaker 1: 27:52

In very combative environments, fight is going to be the trauma response that comes out. Where you're very active, you're very quick to hit back hard, you're very vocal. So that's your developed trauma response. But also consider that the role that you play within the family of origin affects how you cope with conflict. Right. So it's like in families there are sometimes what you call the black sheep or the peacemaker, the golden child, and all of these categories, frameworks for thinking about your trauma response, can shape the various tools that you lean on in order to survive the way that your nervous system adapts and adjusts to survive in that kind of environment.

Speaker 2: 28:36

We know that this is how people might react and they might react in multiple situations. We also know that, to your very good point, 80% of people have some sort of trauma response that they're coming to the workplace with. What do managers need to look out for when we're looking at trauma in terms of the signs here? What should they be looking out for? To be more of an embodied leader or have that trauma response?

Speaker 1: 28:59

So one of the things that you want to look out for is like startle reflexes. So let's say, if you like, come up to your employee and then he or she's very jumpy and they're like that right, or they look checked out, or they're not performing up to the usual standard, they've lost a spark. These are all indicators that they're not their usual selves. Right, you hired them for a reason. Hopefully you had a face-to-face interview at least, and then that's the persona they presented. Yes, I agree, you get to know them better. A reason Hopefully you had a face-to-face interview at least, and then that's the persona they presented. Yes, I agree, you get to know them better over time. But at the same time, there's a baseline self that they bring to work and if they are moving beyond or away from that and not performing up to standard, they're not showing up in the way that you expect and you're asking questions.

Speaker 1: 29:47

It's important to engage your employee. It's important to make time for them. It's important to make them feel safe enough to approach you with their concerns, because they don't have all the answers. There might be other employees in the workplace that's bullying them or making it hard for them to get the job done? Are you, as a boss, creating enough psychological safety as to where they feel like they can confide in you without being branded as a troublemaker and sometimes as a boss? You also have to be a bit more of a coach, and that says to coach them up to that standard and tell them very clearly this is what I expect from you. Let me know if there are things that you need my help on, or if you just have questions or the issues that you're dealing with that I can advocate for you in any way I would. Your employee just needs to know that you have their back. You're not going to throw them under the bus. That is one of the key things that the employees want to feel.

Speaker 2: 30:47

Sometimes it feels as a leader and as a manager. It can feel so complex what you need to do to manage teams and you need to be this perfect person, but at the end of the day, it sounds like what they really need is to feel safe.

Speaker 1: 30:59

Yeah, psychological safety is key, and then obviously, from there we can branch it out to how do you create that psychological safety, right? So we talk about emotional intelligence, and then this brings up somatic intelligence as well, where, if you've done the work and if you're self-aware, there's a mind-body connection. So then you're more aware of how you show up, you're more aware of, hey, when I'm communicating, how do I look? Right, because, like 70% of our communication is nonverbal. So I could be saying all this stuff, but if I look a certain way, people are like not sure if I'm gonna reach out to her.

Speaker 1: 31:34

So a lot of things are contingent on you being, as a leader, aware of the mind-body connection, aware of what self-care looks like, aware of good boundaries and how to lead with a style of leadership that engenders that sense of psychological safety. And part of that is also understanding that every employee is different. There's no cut and paste formula like communication styles, like some people need a more like directive simple, succinct and clear way of communicating, and then some people might respond to a more relational way of communicating. And then some people might respond to a more relational way of communicating. And I'm not saying that you have to be like this magician to read and intuit all these things, but the interesting thing is that once you are able to be more connected within yourself on an intuitive level, you will find that the connection on an individual basis is something that flows naturally.

Speaker 2: 32:26

Yeah, it's not's honestly just be interested in your employees figure this stuff out, have the trust in their relationship Anybody that's ever worked for me. I am absolutely not the perfect person, but one of the things I always hope people feel is that sense of trust and safety and I think if you engender that with people genuinely and you genuinely care for people, you can biff so hard on stuff and they will forgive you for it because they know ultimately the important stuff you did yeah, exactly, and in fact, just because you biff on people, it doesn't mean that's bad, in fact, because because people appreciate honest feedback and people know that they're not perfect.

Speaker 1: 33:06

Nobody wants to just be recognized for this one side of who they are. That's like saccharine. We don't want that. We're whole people and we all have nice and nasty sides. So when somebody can embrace that in us and call it out even or try to hold us accountable, we actually feel loved On a very deep level. There's a sense of being known and seen and accepted. So that's something that I don't think that, as leaders, we should shy away from.

Speaker 3: 33:42

I'd love to talk about who's getting this right. There are workplaces who are focusing on this. In your experience, what are some examples of companies that are excelling in trauma-informed care and embodied leadership?

Speaker 1: 33:56

They may not use the words trauma-informed care or even embodied leadership. There are definitely companies that do lead with a focus on mental wellness and they do promote psychological safety and an environment where you can be open. They promote mental health days off where you just take a day to disconnect because you need it for your mental health. They provide employee assistant programs which are comprehensive and trauma-informed, sometimes like they're trauma-informed interventions. So the companies that immediately come to mind are definitely Google, and then also Salesforce and then Mel. This is where we met which is Culture.

Speaker 1: 34:36

First I just love Culture.

Speaker 3: 34:38

First it's not fun for them.

Speaker 1: 34:40

But I'm just sharing from my perspective that when I show up there, it's always welcoming People are always sensitive and it just creates an environment where real relationships can be formed, where it's not about, oh, let's just put up a work front, and it's not about just discussions and transactional relationships. It's about actual relationship and that's where real mental wellness comes. Like you're talking about, let's say, if you have a trauma history, right, and all you knew in the past was like abuse or like emotional neglect and so on and so forth, right, what can change that? Being in an environment like culture first, for example, yeah, where people show up authentically, where you're, if you welcome, you feel met and you feel like there's potential like for deeper relationships and yeah. So these are some of the companies that come to mind when you talk about, uh, trauma-informed and psychologically safe workplaces I love the again.

Speaker 3: 35:37

Not a formal plug for culture first, but yes, that's where we met and they're awesome and I'm a good example of that is so funny and this, the slack group that we're a part of with that group is such one. It's an excellent community for anyone who's interested in joining and I have not been active in Slack for a few weeks because of another project and someone from Culture First reached out to see if I was okay, which is super nice, I'm like there's a ton of people in here, but okay, yeah, like just it's the little extra step, right.

Speaker 1: 36:05

Just as an example of something like that and that's how I just wanted to add to that, mel, because it brought up something so bessel vender coat actually said is one of his most famous quotes is like trauma is not being seen, heard or felt.

Speaker 1: 36:16

Right, obviously, many different types of definitions, but that's to me one of the most succinct ways to express what it feels like to live in an environment where you're this ongoing trauma. You just never acknowledged your emotional needs and never met, and it's like you're not seen, you're not heard, you're not felt, and in our generation, children were literally meant to be seen and not heard. Brought up that way, when there's a certain amount of, like, emotional neglect and trauma that comes with that, where you're not given the tools to process certain things that happen to you. And so even that little gesture where somebody from culture first reached out to you and said, hey, just checked in with you, are you okay? It's acknowledging, yeah, that hey, I just want to know if you're okay, like what's going on, and that they see you, they noticed you, and that speaks volumes. There's a small gesture, but it speaks volumes 100.

Speaker 3: 37:11

And then to your statement. I'm like wait is all of gen x and millennials. Are we just all 100 percent tremendous and trump dies from rvc? Did not heard it's the woke generation.

Speaker 1: 37:23

When you're woke, you're just you. You're gonna say say stuff. You're going to say stuff, 100%.

Speaker 3: 37:27

So our generation's working to break the cycle right. Yeah, yeah. What role? Obviously, francesca and I both come from talent development backgrounds and leadership development. What role does continuous education and training play in building and sustaining trauma-informed workplaces?

Speaker 1: 37:47

In the realm of continuous education and training, one of the key things that I can think about is raising awareness around what trauma-informed care is, what trauma is, creating that language. Speak around it right so that people are able to bring that into work and be more cognizant of it. Even when I talk about somatics, a lot of people don't know what that is. When you're able to bring that into the working vocabulary and help people understand, hey, I'm having back pain here. A lot of our physical ailments are not just isolated. A lot of them are rooted in relational issues that were never resolved, or like psychological just psychological issues that come about as, or like psychological just psychological issues that come about as a result of things that are happening in within relationship or things that happen to you that you never were able to process. Just to give you a little picture, for example, in my own personal life, like I struggle with depression for throughout my marriage, I struggle with ibs irritable bowel syndrome for the entirety of my marriage and I also struggled with insomnia throughout my marriage, like for 10 years, and I tried many times to do whatever I could to get out of all these things and to deal with it within three months of walking out of that destructive marriage. All of it just went away. Naturally, I tried so hard to get off antidepressants, you know, for 10 years and I couldn't. So that, I think, speaks volumes about the impact that all of these unresolved issues, relationally or unprocessed emotions and traumas has on the body. Why I totally believe the body does keep the score. It's sending you messages. And when you're able to develop within the workplace a shared understanding of what, for example, something like somatics is, what, for example, body sensations are Like. When you feel like a pain here, what is it Left in your left chest? That's heartbreak oftentimes. Or when you feel a lump here in your throat, what's that? It could be that maybe you're feeling sad, or that there's stuff that you want to say that you've held back for so long you've had to silence yourself and that accumulates here. There's a pain that comes up. So once people are more cognizant of, hey, your body is sending you messages. It's not just all on your head. There's an actual, real and felt impact of these occurrences within relationship or within your life. Traumatic experiences you've been through that accumulate within the body Once you're able to create a shared understanding and create more awareness around how these things can be managed or dealt with or how people can be supported through these things, through these traumas, then it creates a more open and compassionate workplace where people don't feel like they have to wear masks all the time in order to survive, but they can actually be open and they can actually ask for help and be vulnerable and people can show up for each other, where you can even be silly, like talking about Slack.

Speaker 1: 40:40

I wrote in my other life I'm a mermaid, and I was just being playful at that time. My second singer-songwriter album I shared earlier I'm a musician too is called Mermaid, and it documents my journey out of that relationship. I did a lot of healing through just composing music, writing out my thoughts into lyric, and so the mermaid symbolizes freedom, it symbolizes death, breaking free, and so then I just wrote that, and then somebody responded and she was like, hey, you should check out the mermaid festival yes, it's so fun.

Speaker 3: 41:11

I've been in it twice. I did the parade.

Speaker 1: 41:14

Wait, okay, I will send you pictures after this recording, francesca, I was like what which?

Speaker 3: 41:21

I've been in the parade twice. When I lived in new york city annually, I used to go and with my friends and we were in the mermaid parade.

Speaker 1: 41:30

Yes, and it's so fun. I haven't gone for it yet because I think it had recently just passed by and I was still in New Jersey at a time, but I'm just going to definitely attend it next year. And, yeah, it's nice that people acknowledge these little quirks and little bits for attention in some ways, so it's like people respond to that and if you connect it, yeah, yeah it's fun little community it truly, with the body keeping the score.

Speaker 3: 41:52

I remember I once left a really toxic work environment and within the first week, the first thing I did is I booked a deep tissue massage. It first of all, I felt like I just had lumps on my shoulders and the woman was like, oh my God, is this hurting you? I was like, yes, in the best way possible, get it out of here. And then I took the hardest sleep, for it felt like 48 hours I just everything was releasing and within three months I did not have any of that pain, the body pain.

Speaker 3: 42:30

So it's just so relatable Like how it really does show up for you Question for both of you, and it might.

Speaker 2: 42:37

I tend to like to simplify things, distill them down and really be simple, but I'm wondering if and I've never thought about this way but does all this come down to? As a person, as a leader, like you need to feel, be felt, seen and heard yourself. What does that look like for you? Have you done the work to do that and then be able to feel, see and hear the people around you? Does it all come down to do it for yourself and then do it for other people?

Speaker 1: 43:06

Yeah. So that's a really great point that you raise Francesca, because ultimately, at the end of the day, you can't give to others what you don't give to yourself. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 43:15

You can fake it a little bit, but I don't think you really can.

Speaker 1: 43:18

Yeah, it builds up after a while. If all you're doing is putting up a mask, you're just going to be rolling around in resentment. Yeah, be rolling around in resentment and you're going to feel like burnt out and you're going to be pissed. When that, you can try to hide that, but like it's just going to seep out and it's going to be experienced on a felt level. What should leaders?

Speaker 3: 43:37

know what's one step, if they do nothing else, that someone can take tomorrow to start to really practice this embodied leadership and start to build more trauma awareness within the workplace. What's one thing that they can implement?

Speaker 1: 43:58

I definitely think that the first thing that I would start with is reflection and I know that might be a little bit off center for the fact that we've been talking about trauma-informed care all the while, but giving yourself that space to reflect, it actually helps you to come back to your body. It helps, in some ways, your body to catch up with your mind, or vice versa as well, because sometimes the body often knows things ahead of time and then it takes a while for the mind to register it. So, when you give yourself space and time to reflect, maybe take the time off, go on like a trip, something that's not agenda-based, right, where you give yourself that space and time to reflect, and then you'll be able to think maybe, oh, how have I been responding in this situation? Are there certain patterns, in a way that I relate, and then from there you can think about what you want for your team or what you want for yourself as a leader, and then look at the various options available to you.

Speaker 1: 44:54

Or should I talk to my boss, for example? Should I talk? Should I engage a therapist or coach? Or should I call up a good friend or read a book, like all these things? There are a multitude of ways to be an effective leader, to be more trauma-informed, but if it's just another list thing on a list of things to do, it's good. You're not going to show up with presence and authenticity. You're going to be like let's just get it done now and it's not going to be authentic. It's not going to come from a place of being fed. So give yourself that space and the time to reflect on where you are, who you are and where you want to go.

Speaker 3: 45:31

Reflection. I feel like it's such a missed opportunity for everybody because the environment, the world we live in today. It can be easy to not take that time, so it's a good reminder. That's the place to start Debra. We like to close out every episode with Rapid Round. It's yes, no one word answers usually, but feel free to give more if you're like this warrants more. So.

Speaker 1: 46:07

I'm going to give it to you. Are you ready? Yes, I'm excited.

Speaker 3: 46:09

Okay. Is it possible for every workplace to become trauma informed?

Speaker 1: 46:16

Yes, I do think it's possible, because ultimately, being trauma informed is just being more aware about your humanity and how you can connect to other humans in a way that is meaningful and how you can connect to other humans in a way that is meaningful.

Speaker 3: 46:31

Yeah, you hear that folks Pay attention to humanity at work.

Speaker 1: 46:36

Should trauma-informed care be a mandatory part of leadership training? I wouldn't want to go as far as to say it's mandatory. One of the key tenets of trauma-informed care is choice. So I think ultimately people have to be able to opt into that. But I do think that if people understood the benefits of trauma-informed care and how it leads to a more cohesive and innovative workplace where people feel safe and it's more fun, it's more engaging, it's just a more positive environment to be in. And how can you get the most out of your time at work? You're going to spend like 40 to 80 hours of time at a place working on something. Don't you want it to be enjoyable? Don't you want it to be meaningful and engaging? So those are the key benefits of trauma-informed care, and then add to that productivity, and there you have your answer.

Speaker 3: 47:19

Yeah, what I'm hearing is it's a good high opt-in if you can do it Strongly encouraged. I'm not saying it's required or mandatory, but Are leaders who practice embodied leadership more successful in retaining talent? 100%, yes, okay, and what is your go-to leadership practice to nurture embodied leadership?

Speaker 1: 47:47

go-to leadership practice to nurture embodied leadership. So just now I mentioned reflection, so that's a key part of my life. Every morning when I wake up, I craft out some time for myself half an hour to sometimes even an hour to spend time on just spiritual material, a devotional that I read. I'm big in my faith, so I spend time on doing things that feed my spirit, feed my soul. Music is a big part of that too. Writing, journaling those are all practices that I keep so that I can, in many ways, stay sane in a world where you're like so many things are constantly vying for your attention and then you have to keep prioritizing things. That's definitely one thing that I would recommend to leaders.

Speaker 1: 48:25

I think regular therapy, regular coaching sessions that's also really helpful, and there are so many resources and tools out there, books you can read it's really important to stay connected. As a person, I'm an introvert, right, I can spend hours on end on my own, but it's actually not really healthy to isolate yourself for long periods of time, because being around other people actually does help you in some ways to come back to yourself. After this podcast, I know I'm going to be energized to do other things, so that that's been my experience talking to people, having some conversations, having another part of my mind opened up, like it gives me inspiration to do more. It gives me the impetus to move forward because that engagement itself is a set, gives me a sense of meaning and purpose I just so appreciate you joining us to talk about this.

Speaker 1: 49:19

Oh yeah, I know I really loved chatting with you guys and I just love the vibe. You guys really keep it real and that's really what's needed. But especially when you talk about, like corporate life, because oftentimes people feel like, oh, I can't say this, I can't do this, and it's just. You keep it real and I think it's so important.

Speaker 3: 49:37

Thanks, hey, friends, this episode of your Work Friends was hosted by Francesca Ranieri and myself, mel Platt.

Speaker 2: 49:44

This episode was produced and edited by Mel Plett and myself, Francesca Ranieri.

Speaker 3: 49:49

Our theme music is by Pink Zebra and you can follow us over on all of our social media platforms Instagram, tiktok, youtube and, if you're so inclined, join us over on LinkedIn in our large and growing community, and you can email us at friend at your work, friendscom, or visit us on yourworkfriends.com. Also, folks, please like, subscribe and leave a review. If you enjoyed this episode, and if you really enjoyed it, please share with a work friend or two. Thanks, thank you.

Rethinking Work & Workplace Culture

Your Work Friends Podcast: Why are we here? Rethinking Work & Workplace Culture with Jennifer Moss

Work is broken…

Burnout is at an all-time high. Engagement is at an all-time low. And work? Well, it’s not working for a lot of us. In this episode, we sit down with Jennifer Moss, workplace culture expert and author of Why Are We Here?, to talk about why so many of us feel unfulfilled at work—and what leaders actually need to do to fix it. We bust the biggest myths about workplace wellbeing, talk about why hope (yes, hope) is a leadership strategy, and dig into why Gen Z is side-eyeing corporate life.

If you’ve ever thought, “Is this really all there is?”—you’re not alone. Let’s rethink work, together.

Listen or watch the full episode here

---

Speaker 1: 0:00

Okay, finish this sentence. Work should feel more like blank and less like blank.

Speaker 2: 0:06

More like fuel for you know your sense of accomplishment, Less like a grind Damn right.

Speaker 1: 0:15

Love it, Love it hey, welcome to your work, friend. I'm francesca ranieri and I'm mel plett. Mel, what's going?

Speaker 3: 0:37

on. You know, spring is springing and it's sprung. Almost. Last week was the arctic, the cold here, but this week it is sunshine almost until 6 30 so, and I hear the birds chirping. I will take it. How about? What's going on with you?

Speaker 1: 0:55

say what you will about portland in the winter. We've had a very sunny winter for portland, but what most people might not know about port is in the winter the moss turns like an electric green. It's like almost fluorescent. So it's just a very cool time to be here. I love it. Yeah, pretty yeah. Yeah, I got to enjoy the nature. You know, got to enjoy the nature you do.

Speaker 3: 1:18

I think I'm one of those sad sufferers the seasonal affective disorder. I have one of those lamps. Have you seen those lamps that help you slowly wake up with the sunshine? I use that. I need the atmosphere to feel sunshine included.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Totally get it. Completely get it, completely get it. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:38

Well, we met with Jennifer Moss. Jennifer is a workplace expert, harvard Business Review columnist, author of Unlocking Happiness at Work, author of the Burnout Epidemic and now her new book, why Are we here? And it's all about creating workplace cultures where everyone wants to work and we just had such a fantastic conversation with her, Francesca. What did you think about this conversation?

Speaker 1: 2:06

Yeah, I was stoked to talk to Jennifer because she is, to me, the leading person to look at on burnout. Any of the work that Jennifer does it is absolutely locked and loaded with the latest research on things. To have her answer the question around how do you create a culture that people actually want to show up for was really interesting. The book is fascinating. She is someone that you know how you meet people like. They're so accomplished and they're so freaking good at what they do, and then they're just a very cool person on top of that. Jennifer Moss.

Speaker 3: 2:39

Yeah, 100%. She was amazing. I couldn't agree with you more. You and I talk about this all the time COVID and then our own life experiences and things that happen outside of work have really reprioritized what is meaningful for us and where our priorities stand, our values going forward, and I think so many people are going through kind of that level setting and gut check for themselves. What I really loved about Jennifer's book and I do want to read a quote that she started with that made me really think about what most people are going through. She mentions that people aren't less ambitious or lazy, we're just feeling uninspired, and that really stood out to me and I was like, yes, 100%. She's weaving together all of these really big concepts about work and providing tangible things that you can do today for yourself, for your team, to make workplaces that are inspiring.

Speaker 1: 3:35

It's practical, tangible, and most of the things that she talks about in the book and with us are things you can do in 20 minutes or less, sold in 20 minutes or less, 20 minutes or less, 20 minutes or less, 20 minutes or less. Like, come on, let's go, let's go, let's do this.

Speaker 3: 3:49

Yeah Well, friends with that, here's Jennifer Moss.

Speaker 2: 4:26

Jen, I'm going to jump right in here. What is the biggest myth about workplace idea? That you can't have one without the other. If you invest in well-being and you invest in employee happiness that somehow that's just like a nice to have and you're a human-centered leader and I think it's an ego thing like I'm just doing this for you because it's so important that people are happy and I'm a hero for that and instead it's really if you're a capitalist, if you want to be competitive you know I'm a hero for that and instead it's really if you're a capitalist, if you want to be competitive, if you want to have a really you know, future ready organization you invest in well-being.

Speaker 3: 4:55

I love to hear you say that, because I think back to the days where, when work-life balance was the thing and people were like who needs that? Like it's a badge of honor to just drive yourself into the ground, but it's bad for business, right?

Speaker 2: 5:09

It is bad for business and I wrote this article for Harvard Business Review that I think it went viral because people felt really connected to this idea of toxic productivity and the title was let's End Toxic Productivity. There is this heroic attitude towards people that don't sleep and they don't eat and they don't even take time to go pee, they just work all the time. It's like they're the high performing people and that's just because they feel like that's what they have to do to be able to be promoted. It's not anyone's real desire, but it's become something we celebrate and we need to get better at. Looking at rest is not a four letter word that. It is actually good for all of us and it makes us more productive and leads to lots of good business outcomes.

Speaker 3: 5:54

Listen, I am all for bringing back the afternoon nap. Anyone a fan from kindergarten? I feel like that was a good refresher, so let's build that in. You write that work is fundamentally broken. How did we get here?

Speaker 2: 6:11

This is a long time coming. You know, the office is 550 years old. We have sort of behaved in the same way, around that same framework. I mean we went from seven days a week to six to five, so now we're in the five zone, which has been the last hundred years. But you know, nothing's really changed about work and going into the office and it being very transactional.

Speaker 2: 6:34

But I say, since the advent of the car phone, where we were able to move our work into the new office which was our car, that changed work from a transactional relationship to a social contract. You're asking us to bring work into our home, into our personal life. You know that really breaks the expectation, and so we've had this unwinding of what our expectation of work has been and also the demands on us to be working all the time with all these blurred lines. And there was a point in the pandemic which crises do? They exacerbate all those existing problems that were there, that were boiling and exploded them, and so in the last five years it's like we went from breaking to broken and now we have to figure out a new framework for work.

Speaker 3: 7:28

Well, throughout the book, you really explored why so many of us are feeling unfulfilled at work. Do you think this is a modern problem, or is this something we've always struggled with?

Speaker 2: 7:41

When you look at Gallup's engagement data, it sort of stayed the same. We are at the worst level of active disengagement levels that we've seen in a decade, so it's extraordinarily bad now. As far as how many people are actually happy at work, it always really has stayed in that. You know, globally around 13, 15 percent and in the it's 30-ish Canada same thing, but so there's really a huge swath of the workforce that hasn't really been happy at work. But what I believe is that we had a different expectation of it before and we knew part of it was going to be a grind and there was generations that felt like, okay, that's just part of work is that it's not going to always be enjoyable, and I'm okay with that. I have different expectations from a different identity and your identity about what you did was more important than, say, pay or work-life balance or some of those other things. So our frame of reference in the last five years has really changed, and so things like flexibility used to be a perk, now it's a right. We look at being able to not be sick at work. You know, like expecting not to be burned out. That has definitely become more of an expectation, and yet we're seeing higher levels of burnout than we ever have, even since peak pandemic. And you know, we're asking more of work and work is asking more of us, and so I think we're becoming more disconnected.

Speaker 2: 9:11

Each group is being more disconnected from the other, like this data point that I had in the book on the purpose gap. You see, 85% of executives really do see and they feel their purpose. They say they live their purpose every day, whereas only 15% of frontline managers and employees feel their purpose every day. We've lost the expectation of work and we have a new frame of reference. And also, when you're trusted with something like everyone was allowed to work remotely. We did really well with that. There was investments in well-being, which was really great. There was investments in DEI, which felt really good. Employees felt like, okay, here's the moment where we're going to turn the corner and there's going to be respect and there's going to be an understanding of our needs, there's going to be empathy and compassion. And then, five years later, and all of those things are being clawed back, it feels like. And then, five years later, and all of those things are being clawed back, it feels like, oh, now I don't feel as much hope.

Speaker 1: 10:38

And so I think that's been catastrophic to levels of engagement and happiness at work. Why are we here? It's such a well-researched book, it covers a ton of ground and I'm wondering if you can talk about the three key areas leaders really need to approach differently.

Speaker 2: 10:46

Key areas leaders really need to approach differently. How I ended up really thinking about this book is that I really do think it's a stacking kind of on, based on the first part, which are foundations, and then it's addressing the novel challenges, because it's a whole new framework. We're in the multiverse of work. We've skipped, you know, timeline. We're not even the future of work, so that's sort of in this business challenges that we have to face. And then the third part is you great data point a few days ago, which was amazing, that showed that the entire workforce is pretty much feeling the same way, that leaders that have hope are what they need right now. But it's really hope, purpose and community. So feeling a sense of mattering and feeling like you have friends.

Speaker 2: 11:39

You know that work isn't just like going to school without our gym or recess. There's actually like kibitzing, like you talk about, and fun and joy. And then there's novel challenges that we need to deal with. I talk about, from a sense of compassion, freedom and openness. And compassion is really how do I take my empathy into, and that act of listening into, action with AI, fear of becoming obsolete, this sense of I hear you but I'm not doing anything about it, and this is why we need compassion, you know. Then we have freedom.

Speaker 2: 12:11

The idea of flexibility is so focused on where, but how can we maybe think about it for the 60% of the non-remote enabled workforce, why and with whom, and what we do and when we do it? There's lots of ways that we can create flexibility for that group, and just freedom is such a fundamental part of who we are, and when that strips away, we will resist it to our death. I mean, it is baked into us, and so the way that people are tackling these return to office mandates are just terrible. And then you know openness is generational divides. We need to be listening to each just terrible. And then you know openness is generational divides. We need to be listening to each other more and belonging and recognition is really, how can we have a shared vision if we can't pull people together? We're going to have just a siloed vision and that, no, we know that doesn't work. So it's about pulling people together in a sense of belonging for all of us to work better together.

Speaker 1: 13:03

I think each of those stacks is so important, think each of those stacks is so important and each of those layers is so important. And we're not going to go through all the stacks on this episode, but we do want to double click into a few of them that just seem so critical and so anchoring. And I want to talk about hope first because, I will be honest, I read the Gallup research last week, read your book as well, and I was thinking. The first time I read I was like we've grown up professionally saying hope is not a strategy in the book. And now Gallup also validates it. It's actually scientifically proven to be a strategy and you can operationalize hope. I'm curious about hope. When we are wondering why we are here, hope is the answer. Why is that?

Speaker 2: 13:44

And it's amazing because I spent some time and you would have read the book where I talked to senior leaders in the military that say hope is their only strategy, and they say you know, think about it. You're sending people out on a mission that could risk their lives and if they don't feel hopeful, they are not going to even sign up for that. Sign up for that or they're not going to be able to achieve their mission because they don't see the point of it. They don't see that there's a potential for them to hit that goal. It's too risky, and so you extrapolate that across any organization. That's the same way about asking people to risk when it comes to ideas or innovation or, you know, being being psychologically safe.

Speaker 2: 14:26

All of those things are dependent on people feeling like that. What they do is actually going to come to some sort of fruition, or it's going to be helpful, or they can see themselves in the future of their organization. You don't have hope. You do not get anyone on board with AI, and this is why we see one in two of the global workforce now saying they have AI anxiety. Hope is super fundamental and I actually feel like it's the economic tool that we need if we're really looking at solving big policy problems. We're talking about women, and this whole fertility crisis is a big conversation we're having all the time, and so you see countries putting in a whole bunch of money for women at work four-day work week in Korea and these types of things but when you actually talk to women and families that are talking about why they're putting off having children, they say I don't see a world where I can bring a child into it is heavy and it's not financial incentives that we need to give people now.

Speaker 2: 15:36

It's hope. This is the economic driver that we all need across organizations, societally and globally, and until we really get to that upstream kind of thinking about it, we're still going to be in crisis in the next 20 years.

Speaker 1: 15:51

I want to double click on this because we talk to a lot of folks, especially at the middle management level, that are burnt out. They feel like they've been asked to do more. Just like you said. They're feeling that discrepancy between feeling purpose and being like what purpose you know. And so when you say hope is the strategy, and then we have middle managers that are feeling just how the hell am I supposed to have hope? What does hope look like for me as a middle manager? How do I show up with hope when I've got 55,000 things going on? How do you respond?

Speaker 2: 16:23

to that. So I love that you've asked me this, because hope is actually one of the easiest skills that we can build, and so much of the book is changing culture in 20 minutes or less. Like I've been saying, it's just these 20 minute meetings here, these incremental shifts over here. It's not a big value change. It's actually middle managers are the ones that are the most empowered to make these changes. And when you think about hope, it's really based on Snyder's hope theory and this is what I've talked about for many, many years.

Speaker 2: 16:51

It's this idea of having goals. So really focus in your team around setting goals and not five-year goals. But how do we set daily, weekly, monthly goals that lead up to that year, that lead up to that big career pathing five years? And then the second part is having pathways. So you're planning your goals, but do you have a plan B? Do you have a plan C? Do you have a plan Z? Having secondary and tertiary plans around your goals makes you feel like that one goal, if I don't hit it this way, I have all this other backup. I've had all this other planning to hit that goal. And then it's about agency. We need autonomy in hitting those goals.

Speaker 2: 17:34

Google does a great job co-creating goals, talking with peers. Peers celebrate. It's fluid, it's just challenging enough that you feel like you've accomplished something, but not so challenging that you could never accomplish it, and not too easy that you feel like, oh well, that was easy. So you don't feel that sense of accomplishment when you reach it. All of this builds up cognitive hope day to day.

Speaker 2: 17:57

And you know, lululemon is really good I was their happiness strategy strategist way back and they do a good job of having these BHAGs, these big, hairy, audacious goals. But then they also have they celebrate the small wins. So that weekly goal or the monthly goal, the manager can be like, yeah, like sticker, you know, like here's a gift card at the end of you know you achieving this two month goal or this quarterly goal, like these are the things that we, we need to help people do, because subconsciously it builds up our hope capacity or cognitive hope, and the more hope we feel, the more we feel like we can accomplish bigger goals. And then the more risk-taking we are, the more innovative we are, the more cohesive we are with the rest of our team because we're you know, we're working, we're gelling together in a really helpful kind of way it just breeds such a good social contagion of hope across the culture.

Speaker 1: 18:49

Yeah, I love that. I know you've talked about it in some of your past books too. But that idea of chunking things out for your folks and it doesn't need to be the beehives we all love the beehives and the moonshots and it's all sexy, sexy but sometimes it just comes down to those small wins until you get the bigger wins and chunking it for your folks. Oh, I talk about purpose too, because we talked about hope and then you pull up into purpose right, that's that second element of that strong foundation that you talk about when it feels like your org is on the fourth reorg and you actually don't know where the hell it's going. But you're leading a team and you're like, all right, here's our purpose. Like, how do you do that in that 20 minute sprint?

Speaker 2: 19:31

This is a really key, I think, when you ask me of, like, what are the things that we get wrong about leadership and culture? Sorry, this is another place where we fall short a lot of, and it's because of the purpose gap. A lot of the people in that executive role feel very connected to the big mission statement. They feel it like they're in it. But most of the workforce doesn't really care about the big mission statement. They're not thinking about the vision every day, they're really in the work and sometimes that work can feel very monotonous, really boring, and so you want to stop trying to make it so far away from people. You want to tie the day-to-day work into things that people care about, and you do this in this way. That's very practical and I've watched this intervention and tried it across organizations and it's been incredible. But it's 20 minutes of a non-work-related check-in where you ask what lit you up, what stressed you out and what can we do for each other to make next week easier. So the lighting up piece managers are able to kind of get clues into what excites people. You know, what do you care about? Does it really matter that your kids are in a good school? Do you care about watching Broadway films. You have a passion for going to New York once a year and seeing all the Broadway films. I mean, these are things where it should seem innocuous but it's actually. It's really great data.

Speaker 2: 20:51

This is where you're like how do I motivate people and connect their day-to-day tasks to that thing? You know, and if and then when you look, you know at the stress stressors. People aren't going to say what they're stressed out about to their boss in day, week one or week two Absolutely not. You're putting on the front. You know it takes months actually, but that consistency and frequency and managers showing up every week saying I'm still going to ask and I'm still going to share my stressors, that vulnerability and leadership opens up psychological safety amongst the team.

Speaker 2: 21:24

So people then start sharing, like what is going on, and if you create an open space, people will tell you this is what I need, this is what's holding me back from connecting to my purpose or doing what makes me feel good every day. And so over time, consistency and frequency builds trust and then you get to use this and then the quick win piece is the hope building. So every single week you're helping each other cohesively in this team building thing like helping each other to solve problems, and so work gets easier, gets more fun, it's less toxic, it's also less exhausting and you can help each other. You learn these small ways that you can tactically help each other with workload and so overall, you start to feel like your work has more meaning, it matters more. You feel more aligned with your motivators and your purpose to the day-to-day tasks and it changes so much of how people feel about their work and how it contributes and makes an impact.

Speaker 1: 22:25

I love that too, because at the end of the day sometimes I think about if you distill down what everybody just really basically needs at a human level. It's just to be seen.

Speaker 1: 22:36

Or for someone to be interested, genuinely, like what does light you up? Or what are you about, you and me together, human to human. It's like simple, elegant questioning that really helps you, as a manager, understand and get the data to your point, but also enable someone to feel seen. We've all had leaders where we felt that potentially, hopefully you have, and you have had leaders where they don't give a shit. You know what I'm saying. They don't care. Yeah, they don't care, and you're kind of dying for them to ask or just be interested, like do you even know me?

Speaker 1: 23:06

I had a leader one time asking me how my kids are doing, after I'd worked with them for four months. I have a kid, I don't have two, and it was you know. It's like those moments where it's like you're not even in this. This is so transactional for you. I love that on the one-on-one. And the other thing I want to ask about you talk about the importance of friendships at work. Mel and I actually fun fact we're work friends and then we started this podcast and so we know the value of work friendships. But I'm wondering how organizations can facilitate community more like the idea of the true community.

Speaker 2: 23:39

This has always been something that I've been so interested in is this community piece, because going to work and not having that person a person, just a single person there, that's all you need. But people that don't have that. It's just a very miserable experience for them and I wrote about that in the burnout epidemic like a toxic, unhappy group of people that you work with can actually reduce your lifespan, like that's how detrimental it is on your mental health and well-being. So you need to have that person or else work just does, just feels really lonely. And what's happened in the last five years? And everyone wants to blame it on remote work. But I don't think that that's the case and I've shared really the data to say it's not remote work that has impacted relationships. We've been dealing with lowliness at work for a long time but it's that we have organizations that just focus on simplex relationships which are transactional, like you said. It's that I need you for this. It's basically a shared services and that's how you interact. But organizations that really focus on building multiplex relationships where it's. I know you and I know that you have a kid, not two kids or three kids, and I know that this is where that non-work related checking comes in handy because it's about developing more robust relationships that create bonds.

Speaker 2: 25:08

Five years, especially with these return to office mandates when people go back into the office, it's not like they're spending more time doing what we should be doing, which is collaborating and connecting with each other and bringing back rituals.

Speaker 2: 25:16

You know, I love that Atlassian has the hackathon every quarter, and there's companies that do a really good job of pulling people together to do cool stuff and they build relationships.

Speaker 2: 25:27

We've lost a lot of investment in team building and networking and a lot of that social piece, that social binding, is gone, and so right now, the way that we've developed friends would be different than you and Mel, which would be organic. It used to be like you'd walk in the office and maybe you were friends with someone in marketing, maybe you talked to someone in accounting. You'd have ways of having conversations with lots of different people. We've continued to hear in the data is that it's very siloed now, so we only care about our team. We don't know anything going on across the rest of the organization and the thing that I used to look for which was compatibility and you know if you made me laugh or we were both interested in cool movies. Now we're looking for conscientiousness and accountability. Those are the traits we're looking for in our friendships, which is very, it's very the ones to go dancing on Friday night with their accountable, conscientious friend Like no line.

Speaker 1: 26:27

So that didn't even accumulate with our country.

Speaker 2: 26:30

I guess that sounds fun.

Speaker 2: 26:32

That's it. We're only looking to have relationships at work that will continue to foster better work and to me, like that is the thing that we need to rework is bringing people back into spaces where, like I was talking in the book about the third space making it like Starbucks, where you're going there to debate and discuss and be connected and then you go home or wherever, to your own little world to do the heads down stuff. But right now, going into work is just like a replica of working from home and that's not building any sort of friendship or community that anyone really cares about.

Speaker 1: 27:12

It's interesting, though. I mean companies could totally reimagine those spaces to be more communal or like office, as an amenity to foster that organic relationship building or get back to it.

Speaker 2: 27:23

Yeah, and we're so time starved and we're so burned out that our social tank is really, you know, has been depleted and so again, it's like hygiene. We need to, we need to manage overwork, we need to create space for people to actually connect. You know, in the again, the 20 minutes or less. Cornell research in the book said 20 minutes of having lunch with one person once a week completely changed the dynamic of organizations. They found that morale was improved, job satisfaction increased, people made less mistakes, which I thought was really interesting. Their work performance improved. And that was 20 minutes of just having lunch away from your desk once a week. It's super simple again, but these are the things that create incremental network effect, that we're all kind of doing some of these pieces of the puzzle. Eventually the culture will flourish would be.

Speaker 1: 28:29

I would have the 20 minutes, the lunch away from my desk more, but I would invite someone from an accounting or the gallon marketing or whatever just to network more earlier on and just go to lunch with people more. I wish I would have done that. It's so nourishing.

Speaker 3: 28:38

It's so special. I worked in a big law firm when I first started out in New York and we did have that. We had a lunch crew and they had a cafeteria, but everyone knew everyone. It was a mixture of administrative staff. Paralegals, even like the lunch staff crew, would come in and eat with us and it was one massive table. There were 25 of us every single day. That's what we looked forward to and we talked about everything but work and it just made our week, but it made work better. And to this day, and it just made our week, but it made work better. And to this day, even though that firm's long gone they merged with someone else, the building's been taken over, but there's a Facebook group of alumni from that workplace down from everyone to security, to all that crew, because that's how close we were. It was like a very special environment which you don't see anymore.

Speaker 2: 29:24

Really, I love that, Mel. I love that because in the book I shared a case study of this person I interviewed at a tech company and he met with a lot of his coworkers and people in the building for lunch. They were pulled back on a project that ended up making them having to work all these long hours and slowly but surely they abandoned their lunch and he said that his team started dropping out and moving to competitors, and even in the exit interviews for me it just felt like we stopped having lunch, we stopped caring about each other. It's more than that. It's more to a lot of people, and he ended up after six years being on a track to be in a high position in that organization, left to a competitor and he initiated the lunches in the in his other place and it became this whole popular thing again.

Speaker 2: 30:12

It's so much more than people realize it's. It's the pausing, it's the connecting, it's the not talking about work, it's developing these depths of bonds that sustain and and we're not investing in that anymore because we're thinking 20 minutes, oh well, that means I have to leave 20 minutes late, I'm going to be stuck in traffic. It just means more work. When I come home at night I'll be in my pajamas working till midnight. When you're burned out, when you have that kind of toxic productivity, you don't engage in 20 minute lunches.

Speaker 3: 30:43

Now, I also am a fan of in virtual environments, because I do think you could do this in a virtual environment, like having a fun weekly debate on something random like is a hot dog a sandwich? Put it up on. Teams for everyone to contribute to the conversation, right, like how do you get what's a weekly question? But like, get creative, what can you do to engage everybody across the org?

Speaker 2: 31:04

Yeah, Is pot fruit considered to be acceptable on a pizza? Yes, no, it is a good question. Yeah, you have lots of debate, but I do think it needs to be levity, you know, and about all of the new challenges, and boy do we have them.

Speaker 3: 31:47

Ai, multi-generational workforce I think we just read something recently about Gen Z doesn't even want what we have, so there's a whole problem there. The backlash on DEI, the backlash on remote work, extensive burnout as you write about. Employee happiness is just continuing to drop. When you think about all of these new challenges, what's the one thing workplaces need to focus on now to overcome the competition against all of these things when they're trying to create a good culture?

Speaker 2: 32:19

One of the things I keep telling leaders that I work with is why do you feel, like, five years into this complete cataclysmic shift in work, that you're supposed to have it figured out? I mean, no one even knows what hybrid is Like. Why is it two or three days a week? We don't even know. Hybrid could be four times a year. Hybrid could mean lots of different things, and there is this kind of ego, I think, around us needing to have this thing sorted and wanting to just put the pandemic and now poly crisis on some sort of back burner and not think about it. And so I've been saying the one thing that leaders need to do is just let go of all of that sort of that expectation and recognize with self-awareness that we are in a completely different mindset.

Speaker 2: 33:07

Behavioral, you know, the behavioral mindset of this workforce today is clearly different. The priorities have shifted. We have Gen Zs that do see us as terrible models for what work looks like. You know most of us burning out, all of us resigning, saying we hate work, we're not great models, and so of course they're going to say I don't want that and they're going to find new avenues.

Speaker 2: 33:30

We're losing our mature workers. They're retiring early at a pace that we've never seen before, and they say I don't really fit into this workforce, it's changed. So let's get on top of that and say, okay, let's be agile, let's iterate, let's test, let's see if this works and if it doesn't, that's okay. We're going to be just much more fluid in the way that we build our strategies until we feel like, over time, I feel like we're in the pilot stage of this experiment that you know, when you look at 550 years old for the office, we're looking at a pretty long time before we're going to get any of this kind of mapped out. So for me it's about self awareness, agility and pausing and kind of coming up with a new plan.

Speaker 3: 34:21

Yeah, well, it's also like will we really ever have this all mapped out? Or is this just start being okay with the unknown and working together to be like I don't know either, and we'll figure it out together?

Speaker 2: 34:49

I love that you say that, because even five-year strategies right now, when we have Gen AI and what's changed we have to imagine that that's going to be five years where the things that we thought were going to happen have been totally changed around, and so that is really. It is understanding that we're in a state of uncertainty and will be for quite some time now. That's why, if you really want to be successful, it is managing through change and learning how to do that much better. Unfortunately, we just see a demographic of CEOs. Most of them are male, most of them are in their 60s, and it's been very difficult. We've seen just that like trying to shift over into especially what Gen Zs are asking for. That feels so foreign, it feels so far away from the way that they were professionally raised. So I have empathy for both groups, but we do need to connect somewhere, because having divisions, that and us being that far apart in our goals, there's no way we can hit those plans, that vision, if we don't start talking to each other.

Speaker 3: 35:45

Yeah, if we can't find common ground, it is moving to a danger zone. I think last week Francesca and I were, we were covering new week new headlines and we read something around how it was like 73 percent of Gen Z's that were polled Don't quote me on this, because I think it was somewhere around there where they were mentioning they don't even want the job. Like we're heading for a manager meltdown this year, in fact, because they can't find common ground and what they see is what they don't want. But, as you mentioned, it's deeply affecting the future of organizations and business. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, how can we start to find common ground?

Speaker 2: 36:24

I say first across the organization. Even managers can do this. How often do you express frustration with an entire generation and how often do we have conversations like oh, I'm so frustrated like my boomer, my Xer, whatever bandager, usually Xers are boomers. Everyone's a boomer if they're over the age of like 45. So it's like how does my Xer.

Speaker 1: 36:50

I don't appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 36:51

That I do not appreciate being I don't like being lumped in there but, I'm here but to get everyone on to say I'm a boomer, so it's like anyone over a certain age. It's kind of like this exasperation. And yet then we see this rise of youngism. We've never seen it this harsh before, where young people are coming into the office and it's basically like they're already defied as lazy. And if they do ask for things like respectful hours so that they can have friends, I mean they're just trying to meet people and develop relationships that might be long lasting, so they can have family and plan their lives. But if you're working 60 or 70 hours a week, it's just not appropriate for anything else in your life. The fact that they're asking for this with this perception that they're just lazy, it seems like what they're asking for is just so, gen Z, that puts people off. They're opting out of the workforce. Because of it. They're willing to accept an extraordinarily less amount of pay. All the data showing it's up to 37 percent less pay to have work life balance. So for them they're not like Xers and boomers were where it was by the house get married, have kids, so you have all these golden handcuffs tying you to your job. They're putting off buying homes later because of financial the situation that they're in. They just don't have that. They're living longer with their parents, they're not getting married, they're not having kids, so their ability to be mobile and take less pay makes it so we're not holding onto them, and with the same carrot. And that means having to be flexible.

Speaker 2: 38:28

And so I keep telling managers just like audit your language, audit the narratives that go on in your organization. Try to remove those things that really do separate you. Auditing your language really changes how you feel about another group, and I should also say the youngest generation. Their whole point is to push back on the status quo, like that's what you expect. Every generation does that. Why are we surprised that this generation is pushing back on the status quo, like that's what you expect. Every generation does that. Why are we surprised that this generation is pushing back on the status quo Like this is their job, this is every generation's job is to question whether the generation before them have done the right job. You know, societally and politically and economically, and every generation's done that. So here we have another generation that's just coming in to tell us we're doing a bad job. That's the way it goes.

Speaker 3: 39:20

I feel like Gen Z's role is actually to remind us that we're all human beings in here for a finite amount of time, so maybe we should all stop prioritizing work as the number one priority.

Speaker 2: 39:31

I love it. I say Gen Z's say well-being is not antithetical to work ethic. They say that loud and clear and I fully agree with that. So it's probably why I have maybe my bias to say let's listen to Gen Zs because you know, maybe they're pushing the pendulum really far in one direction, but that's the only way that we're going to have change, that sort of meets in the middle. So let's let them do that and then figure out a way that sort of marries all worlds.

Speaker 3: 39:59

Couldn't agree more. Another big topic is AI, and you talk about the fear of becoming obsolete. So how can leaders navigate all of what's happening in AI today and really kind of squash the FOBO that's happening for their teams?

Speaker 2: 40:19

So I love the term FOBO. I mean Gallup really stripped it with that one. You know I love JOMO the joy of missing out. That's one of my favorite. Fobo is a good one too.

Speaker 2: 40:29

The data is showing that it's really increasing, and it's increasing a lot for younger cohorts. It used to be automation, so mature workers were ones that were most threat. You saw that obsolescence really coming out in that group. But our younger generation are feeling it, and a lot of that is that we've got again like hyperbolic language. We're in a mass extinction event I robot and everything's going to fall apart, or it's 300 million jobs are going to be lost, or or then it's everything's rosy with AI. Everything's going to be great. You know we're going to, they're going to be our pilot and you won't have to work again, and I don't like the idea of people not wanting to work or not working again. A, that's an economic catastrophe, because how are we going to care for everyone not working? And B, just from a human standpoint, we get a lot of fuel from work, and so what?

Speaker 2: 41:22

I have this LinkedIn course that I basically took that chapter of FOBO and brought that in to say how do we create AI enthusiasm instead of AI anxiety, because it's here and that's the reality and so we need to normalize it. We need to talk about how ubiquitous AI is in the rest of our lives so it isn't so scary. We need to make sure that people feel skilled up and not overlooking mature workers, because we're seeing that they're getting constantly overlooked for training in AI. It's kind of like both of them are giving up and yet pretty robust research looked at mature workers and said and there was 40% of them that said I would stay longer if I had this continued training, if I felt like you were training me up to handle this, but I'm overlooked constantly. So there's things that we need to do around training and just preparedness. We also want to create curious cultures.

Speaker 2: 42:18

Have a once a month meeting around some new experimentation that you had with AI. You share it back with the team. It can be personal or professional. You can have some personal, some professional so you can talk about oh, I did this trick and I used AI and now I've been able to do my work faster. It's been great.

Speaker 2: 42:34

So that's really important is create experimentation, and I would say the most important part and this is probably at the executive leadership level is we need to deliver on the promise of AI. So the promise of AI was that you will have your mundane tasks taken away and then you will have really creative, cool work that you get to do. A lot of people that I've interviewed are saying I had the mundane stuff taken away, but now I have extreme boredom and I'm not getting any of that. So there's a promise undelivered. And then also Gen AI is supposed to save us time, so if we're finished our project early, we should be given that time back.

Speaker 2: 43:14

It shouldn't be that we're just adding more productivity when it's supposed to create efficiencies. So these are two things at the policy level that I think executive leaders need to say. Are we delivering on the promise of AI in these two areas? And maybe it's changing the way we measure productivity. It's more around goals, not hours, and so that's at the GDP level that we need to be looking at that. But just even in organizations, we can change policies to make the promise of AI feel like it's worth investing in for employees.

Speaker 1: 43:48

I'm wondering if most organizations even have mapped out what the promise of AI was to their employees, because they're very focused on stakeholders shareholders but not viewing their employees as stakeholders and or saying this is what AI can do for you. Like, I don't feel like a lot of organizations have explicitly said that or put that in their EBP as either it's a major problem.

Speaker 2: 44:13

A major problem. The Microsoft Trends report that came out in collaboration with LinkedIn found that 60% of CEOs don't believe that there's a strategy, and so this is what happened, and there was this really interesting report, too, that showed that technology wasn't even on the radar of sort of business disruptions up until the last two years, and it went from not even being on the top set of stressors that CEOs were feeling to sixth place and then in a year to first place. This last year was like first place biggest disruptors to business, and so everyone's really just adopted AI. Because I need to adopt AI, I need to show that I'm competitive, but with no. I need to show that I'm competitive but with no strategy, and you need to know your why before you adopt AI. Know your why before you adopt AI, so then you can then communicate that, and that lends to managers being able to communicate the why. I'm curious about what organizations or are there?

Speaker 1: 45:17

organizations that are getting this right. I'm curious about what organizations, or are there organizations that are getting this right?

Speaker 2: 45:33

Yeah, there are. There's just so much right now that I'm seeing that are, you know, are making it difficult for people to stay on track with some of that investment. I talked about Bain and Company in the book. I mean they're doing things like even just cold rooms for women that have menopause, for example. It seems again so simple, like just having spaces that you can work in that are cooler.

Speaker 2: 45:58

But for me as a perimenopausal 47-year-old, I had the worst brain fog in writing this last book in the first six months and I actually felt like I'm not supposed to be a writer anymore. The amount of questioning of my capacity and my efficacy was really wild. And then it was going to my doctor and she was able to just say I think you're going through perimenopause, and that was such a weight lifted. I really did feel like I was not good at my job anymore and I think of women at this age peak career my job anymore, and I think of women at this age peak career feeling ineffective. And so there are organizations that are saying we can't have that. We need to do things that are more responsible for women.

Speaker 2: 46:44

We still are seeing, which I feel is like these big declines in keeping women in the workforce. We're at the thinnest executive pipeline that we've seen yet in history. For the first time in a decade, global CEOs of women have gone down, and it was already like a shit number in the first place. I think it was 11 and a half percent. Now it's 10 and a half percent yeah, celebrating incremental gains.

Speaker 2: 47:08

I'm very over that, and so I think work isn't working for women. We need diverse thinking. We've demonstrated in Anita Williams Woolley's work at Google that collective intelligence increases when you have more female gender representation on teams. I want people to start looking at this as this is a business strategy, not a benevolent strategy. This is not to be benevolent. I'm not being an ally, I'm being a capitalist when I in my executive pipeline, and so the more we can look at it as a business imperative versus a benevolence imperative, the more we'll. I think we'll put that into the strategic priority set, and right now it just it's a lot about allyship and doing good and not seeing diversity in represented in leadership is actually being really good for business, and the more that we can change that narrative and talk about it in that way, the less it's something that can be cut out, and I do think that, and you would have read in the book that I do think the way we've done it so far hasn't been really successful.

Speaker 1: 48:14

What I've always tried to reconcile is the data, even though these programs haven't been around for that long. When you look at the history of work, I appreciate that, of how powerful your ROI is on inclusion, belonging women in leadership roles, diversity, happiness at work. I mean all of the things that you're talking about. Hope, purpose, right, the data is there, the return on investment is there, hard dollars, and you can make the monetary case for all of this and I'm wondering is it the narrative around? We need to start talking about hard dollars on this all the time, when we talk about this stuff to sell it more. What is this flip in the narrative? I can't figure it out you know what.

Speaker 2: 49:06

It's always going to be a bottom line issue and as we start to see a deficit in our talents resources and this is what I think Anita in the book that I love that she shared is just like we're wasting this incredible talent pool and no one seems to really care that it's slipping away.

Speaker 2: 49:28

And what I'm seeing is and I think it's actually, in a lot of ways, maybe beneficial to women is that women are saying I'm seeing is and I think it's actually, in a lot of ways, maybe beneficial to women is that women are saying I'm going to start to build up my own IP, I'm going to start up my own companies and, because they are so good at it, they're going to create their own space and they're going to start to demonstrate that they don't really need that other infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 49:50

And we're going to create this whole economy of women leading organizations and actually having patents and having opportunities for other women, because women will hire more women, because you hire like, and so, as that starts to break ground, which we are seeing, we're seeing so many more women move into part-time roles so that they can work on some of these other things. We are seeing like IP for women increase. We are seeing women opt out of workplaces that are not inclusive and moving to organizations that are, so they're demonstrating with their feet, and so the more that becomes something. That is a bottom line issue, which might take a while to show up maybe irrationally optimistic of me, but the data feels like it supports it, that that's what's going to start to happen and we're going to see this very different shift in this economy for women.

Speaker 3: 50:45

Well, it's funny, francesca and I just did a whole thing. I mean, women drive the global economy. We own almost all of the purchasing power globally and a recent article said if you, you know, if the economy is running well, you might want to start by thinking women today, and one of the stats that recently came out was, in 2023 alone, 49% of small businesses for the first time, more women than men are starting small businesses. So I think, yeah, I mean, the stats are showing they're leaving in droves because they're leaving places where they're not considered. They aren't.

Speaker 2: 51:21

And policies like return to office are actually extremely exclusive for women, and until we're solving the second shift and making sure that unpaid labor is balanced across both teams in the family, this is the only option for women. So those exclusive policies women are just like. That's not what I want. The core heart of the book is that we faced our mortality as a collective, and what happens to the brain when you face your mortality is you actually start to subconsciously reprioritize things that are about legacy leaving. It's more about what matters you know in the world, what matters to you as a human being, and so for women it was. They felt years of just having to take care of their family, protect them from such risk.

Speaker 2: 52:13

It was a very strong emotional experience for a lot of families and women in particular, and so now they're looking at it after they face their finitude. They're like this thing that I'm doing, that's toxic, that does not include me, that does not care about me. I don't really see that as something that in when a life is short mentality that I can accept anymore, and when you're not faced with that, you really don't see that there is something that's sort of like happening very quickly. You don't have the same urgency on it, but that experience and polycrisis has put urgency on us to leave legacies, put urgency on us to do more with our lives, and so for the people that are pro-social, for the people that care about the world and care about these things, they're looking at work as not something that matters as much, but they're still equally ambitious, and that's the thing that's cool about women. They're like how do I make work fit into my life instead of trying to fit into work's expectation of me, and I think that's like where it's going to be really cool.

Speaker 2: 53:17

I have gone back a few times to Riyadh. So Saudi Arabia has this real focus on 2030 women empowerment goals. So I also think other countries are going to go. Ok, we always looked at that country as being so far behind, it wasn't progressive, and they're putting this huge investment in women right now because they do understand it from an economic standpoint If one of the things that Saudi Arabia does understand is wealth and how to build wealth, and they are just looking at women as their builders of wealth right now.

Speaker 3: 54:02

All right, jennifer, we're going to move into a rapid round. This is not a pop quiz. It's meant to be fun and to get a little more versatile. To get to know you, we'll start with the work question. It's 2030. What do you think work's going to look like? This is such a great question.

Speaker 2: 54:20

It's going to look the same, but I do think that we're going to see incremental differences in a more pro-social way.

Speaker 1: 54:34

Okay, finish this sentence. For companies to build work cultures everyone wants. Leaders need to model the behavior.

Speaker 2: 54:42

Employees can't be what they can't see. Leaders need to model the behavior.

Speaker 1: 54:47

Next sentence Work should feel more like blank and less like blank.

Speaker 2: 54:53

More like fuel for you know your sense of accomplishment. Less like a grind Damn right.

Speaker 3: 55:03

Not it? What music are you listening to right now?

Speaker 2: 55:07

I'm super into Olivia Dean. I don't know if you've heard her, but she's so good and she has a song called Dive. I would highly recommend it. But she just became super well known because I guess she has a song on the Bridget Jones new movie, so people are learning about her. But she's great, okay.

Speaker 3: 55:30

Is Dive one of your favorite songs from her, or do you have a favorite that's like on repeat?

Speaker 2: 55:34

Well, Lola Young does the song Messy, which I really like, and she does a version of it which I love. But Dive, yeah, there's something about it that's sort of catchy and lovely, but a lot of her songs are like that and I really like Bakar B-A-K-A-R. If you just want to have a good vibes hang out in your car and feel like kind of like moving your shoulders, yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker 3: 55:58

Got to get some jams for my Trader Joe's parking lot. My bell Going on All right. What are you reading?

Speaker 2: 56:04

right now. Oh, so I like almost solely read fiction, which is hilarious as a nonfiction writer. But I'm reading Coco Meller's book. I don't know if you have heard of her. She's really good. It's oh God I just blanked on the book on the name it's Frankenstein and oh God, I can't remember. But it's really such a fun little book and she's got cool. I don't know really cool ways of thinking about characters. And I'm also reading James, which is this cool book that is. So I read multiple books at the same time and I'm always reading. I have a book with me, I carry it with me all the time, I read constantly Like I'm a super reader. And James is the idea of Reed telling the story of Huck Finn from Jim's point of view.

Speaker 3: 56:55

How fun it's really so far.

Speaker 2: 56:57

It's really neat. So one sort of beachy reads and then the other is like I got to have some meat in my brain, okay, okay.

Speaker 3: 57:06

Who do you personally really admire?

Speaker 2: 57:10

It's a really good question because there's lots of people that I really do admire, but you know, I would say my mom. So my mom was the first nurse practitioner in all of Canada and she's in the books, you know and she didn't ever talk about her stuff because she was a nurse and a nurse practitioner and so you kind of would come home. She had told me later on in life that she would come home and she had, like, had to deal with really traumatic, awful things, especially in a lot of car accidents in rural towns where she lived. And even when we moved, you know, to Canada, like to Eastern Canada, what happened was just like this sense of, I don't know, having to come home and be a good mom and also have to deal with all this stuff. And when she moved, she had to give up being a nurse practitioner because there did not exist in Ontario. So she was like, ok, well then I'll figure something else out.

Speaker 2: 58:09

She was very resilient, so she ended up teaching nursing at McMaster University, which was huge, and then working in ICU at McMaster University McMaster Hospital, which one of like it's a sick kids hospital, so they do just great work and then she decided that she wanted to stop nursing and started her own manufacturing company and sold quilts and had like multiple stores and a whole bunch of sewers working for her as like the final stage in her life. And I just feel, like you know, as a person that we never thought was the entrepreneur, I realized she was and she just didn't just do things like in small ways, she just did things in big ways, but she was so quiet about it and it wasn't until later on that I went wow, like you have subconsciously been my person that I've admired, that I've tried to mirror my life after Okay, Last one what's one piece of advice you want everyone to have?

Speaker 2: 59:10

This has been hugely beneficial for me, because I didn't learn this until I burned out and it's. You can have anything, not everything, and it's always about a series of choices and we constantly want to have everything and you can have anything. You just need to choose in your priority structure what matters most and when. You have that really figured out in your priority structure what matters most and when you have that really figured out that anything feels like everything.

Speaker 3: 59:40

I love it, thank you, thanks for sharing with us.

Speaker 2: 59:42

Yeah, I love it. So easy to talk to you. Oh, it's pleasant. You have fun. Yes, it's great.

Speaker 3: 59:52

This episode was produced, edited and all things by us myself, Mel Plett and Francesca Ranieri. Our music is by Pink Zebra and if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at yourworkfriends.com, but you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page and we have the TikToks and Instagrams. So please join us in the socials and if you like this and you've benefited from this episode and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. Bye, friends.