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

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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.

Belonging & Unhiding at Work

Your Work Friends Podcast: Belonging & Unhiding at Work with Dr. Beth Kaplan & Ruth Rathblott

At work, we tweak our tone, filter our stories, and sideline parts of ourselves to fit in—and it’s exhausting. In this live episode, we’re joined by Ruth Rathblott, TEDx speaker and bestselling author, and Dr. Beth Kaplan, researcher and author of Braving the Workplace, to talk about the hidden labor of self-editing and why it’s costing us more than we think.

We dig into the emotional toll of always managing perceptions, the difference between fitting in and belonging, and what it takes to create workplaces where people can show up without shrinking and hiding. Whether you’re leading teams or just trying to feel like yourself from 9 to 5, this conversation will hit home.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

Most of us are hiding something about ourselves and it's exhausting and it's lonely and we come up with a narrative that we think we're the only ones.

Speaker 2: 0:23

Hello friends, I am Mel and this is your Work, friends, and with me is my co-host, francesca.

Speaker 3: 0:32

Hello.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Okay, great introduction. And today we are so lucky to have two amazing experts with us and we're talking about belonging and unhiding at work. We're going to dive into what belonging and unhiding mean, what they look like in action, why people hide, the true costs of hiding, how to incorporate strategies to nurture belonging and unhiding in the workplace, especially in this climate. And we're going to leave some room for some listener Q&A, and our experts are going to give us their bold predictions on the way out. So let me introduce these lovely folks. With us is Ruth Rothblatt. She is my mentor through the National Speakers Association, but she is also an esteemed TEDx speaker, executive coach, consultant, bestselling, author of three books Single-Handedly Learning to Unhide and Embrace Connection and Unhide and Seek Live your Best Life, do your Best Work. She also was published in Time everybody, so check that out. She's acknowledged for her expertise in unlocking individual and team potential and just all around rad human being.

Speaker 2: 1:42

And also with us is Dr Beth Kaplan. She is the author of Braving the Workplace, which officially launched today. Get this book, it's amazing. She has also been recognized as a must read by the Next Big Idea Club. She's a researcher, writer, thought leader. She's worked with organizations like Salesforce, the University of Pennsylvania, georgetown University and the Carnegie Foundation. She's also developing a groundbreaking belonging tool with the University of Pennsylvania, georgetown University and the Carnegie Foundation. She's also developing a groundbreaking belonging tool with the University of Pennsylvania which will measure belonging and propensity to thrive. Welcome to you both and thanks for joining us today. Thank you, great to be with you.

Speaker 1: 2:19

Yeah, thanks for having this. I'm excited for this conversation.

Speaker 2: 2:23

Yes, Very awesome. I'd love to jump in right away and just learning more about your personal stories, how you got started in this work, what inspired you to start this work. So tell me a little bit more about you guys. Beth, I'll start with you.

Speaker 4: 2:38

Sure so excited to be with all of you today. And, yes, it is launch day, so how exciting is that? Thank you so much for cheering me on. So, believe it or not, I didn't set out to study belonging. However, like most researchers who studied their own trauma, I set out to understand why so many people, myself included, felt like they had to prove their worth just to exist in certain spaces, and the more I researched, the clearer it became belonging. It's always about belonging, and belonging is so complex and everyone has their own definition. So, for me, my exciting gift to the world was redefining and being able to give new tools and a language to something that's a little bit more complex than most of us understand. So, to me, I look at belonging as the innate desire to be part of something larger than ourselves, without sacrificing who we are.

Speaker 2: 3:30

I like it. I like the. Let's not sacrifice ourselves for the greater good? Oh, absolutely. How about you, Ruth?

Speaker 1: 3:36

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in terms of what Beth was just saying that resonates so deeply. I also did not start out to talk about unhiding in my life. I probably was the furthest from wanting to do that, as someone who hid for 25 years a big part of myself. I actually started in the nonprofit space. I was a nonprofit leader and CEO who was focused on young people and helping them express themselves, helping them think about college access and college success, mentoring and education, and it wasn't until I was in a conversation about actually DEI that I started to realize I had been hiding a huge part of myself and I had not shared that with the world. I hadn't shared it with myself, so I had been.

Speaker 1: 4:26

I was born with a disability. I hadn't shared it with myself, so I had been. I was born with a disability. I was born with a limb difference and for your listeners that means I was born missing my left hand, part of my left hand, and when I was 13, I started tucking it in my pocket. When you go off to a new high school, I think some of us have those flashes of what high school can feel like, where it's oh, I have to fit in. Do I make friends? Am I going to get along with people? Who am I going to sit with at lunch? Like all those feelings of high school. And I started hiding at that time and didn't realize the impact it was having on how I was showing up, how I was connecting with people, and didn't even know there was a tool or a conversation or word that could help unhide.

Speaker 1: 5:10

And so that's where I've spent the last few years really delving into that research, delving into what was the process of unhiding and then finding out honestly, beth and Mel and Francesca, that most of us are hiding something about ourselves, and it's exhausting and it's lonely and we come up with a narrative that we think we're the only ones.

Speaker 2: 5:31

Yeah, I don't think we are. I think that's, ruth I, why I love what you're doing so much, because you can't have belonging without unhiding yourself too. So I'm so excited to talk about how these things align together. And yeah, I think we've all can relate to that feeling of not belonging through high school for sure, but some I used to joke often that corporate environments can often feel like high school, where there are certainly cliques or in groups and out groups and navigating political landmines and then, for various reasons, to fit into those groups, you change yourself. I tried to hide my New England accent, but someone called out the R that I add on idea, just little things like that. I think we all do things to try to hide who we are. But today is the purpose of today is like how do we get people comfortable with thinking about belonging differently and what that could look like and how to unhide themselves? So I appreciate it. I'm going to hand it over to Francesca. She's going to dive into how we define it. So thanks.

Speaker 3: 6:30

I think both of these topics are so important in and of themselves, and I know, beth, you started by talking about how belonging is this innate desire to be something or to be part of something bigger than ourselves, without sacrificing ourselves, yes, which I think is your contribution there is there without sacrificing ourselves, which is critical, right. And then I think the unhiding piece, too, I'm curious about just to ground ourselves on how both of these things show up at work, the belonging piece and the unhiding piece. And, beth, I guess we're taking your definition. Is there anything in addition to your core definition about how this shows up at work?

Speaker 4: 7:09

Yeah, there's a lot to say here, and what's really most interesting and probably most confusing to people is they think the opposite of belonging is exclusion. That's one of the biggest misconceptions in the workplace, when in reality, the opposite of belonging is fitting in. Misconceptions in the workplace when in reality the opposite of belonging is fitting in. And why I believe that with so much passion is because fitting in means giving up a part of yourself to be part of something else. Where belonging doesn't require you to give up who you are, it means being who you are right.

Speaker 4: 7:40

A lot of us in the workplace in particular will hide. A lot of us in the workplace in particular will hide, as we know, different parts. They may mask or they may cover or flat out just hide, and we think it's going to make us feel like we belong harder, and that's just not true. It never ends well. I think Ruth's story is so brilliant and so powerful because, a it's real, b all of us can relate to something. And C we understand it right. So I'm sure, ruth, for you all of this is advanced common sense, because you've been living with it forever. And for listeners out there, there's probably something that you feel that you're hiding as well, or you're trying so hard to fit in that you're sacrificing what makes you, and that's going to take a toll. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 8:30

Ruth, are you seeing that too, as you're looking at like on hiding at work too? How are you seeing this come to fruition for people?

Speaker 1: 8:36

Yeah, I think it's what and, beth, you started it so perfectly in terms of that sacrificing yourself part, because that's where it shows up. And I think the other piece that, francesca, you were intimating also is that need to be in corporate. And how is it, how are you fitting in? Because that's a piece that we're told often like we want you to be a good culture fit, we want you to fit in. So that means sometimes sacrificing a piece of yourself, right, or downplaying a piece of yourself or covering a piece of yourself, and for some it actually means to what you said, beth. It means hiding part of yourself, and that comes from we all have a need to want to be accepted right. There's the acceptance piece to this, and I think about it in terms of why I look at.

Speaker 1: 9:22

What's the underlying piece of that? It comes from a fear of rejection, a fear of judgment, a fear of Really. I had a friend recently who said to me I haven't shared part of my health diagnosis out loud because I'm afraid of being pitied. So there's that fear there too. A lot of this is wrapped up in shame, this idea of if I share this part of myself, someone will reject me, someone will judge me. Someone won't give me a promotion because of it. I won't be seen as a leader. I've had women even in 2025, who don't share that they have kids at work because they're afraid of someone saying they're into their motherhood, they care more about their kids. They're not really on track for promotion. So I'm not going to share that part. And that's sacrificing yourself. That is absolutely sacrificing yourself to fit in, to go home. So I do. I think about it, how it shows up.

Speaker 1: 10:18

I think the other piece I would add on is in the workplace. Many of us were taught a very old school mentality around leadership and a framework around leadership. We were taught that you're not supposed to share things about yourself. You're supposed to keep people at arm's length. You're supposed to be, not be vulnerable and not share challenges. You're supposed to be strong, and the definition of strong was the idea of a mask of armor around yourself. And so that plays in, because then that's how our employees see us. So then they can't make mistakes, either because they're afraid oh, I'm going to be, I'm going to upset them or I'm not going to. I need to be perfect. There's a full affection piece to unhiding yeah, oh go ahead, beth, sorry, no, I was just thinking about you.

Speaker 4: 11:03

made me think, ruth, about duck syndrome. Right, that's when you start to see certain things evolve like duck syndrome, where people make it look so effortless and then they're peddling their little feet so hard to keep up in the name of resilience at times or fitting in or all the things, and we're all hardwired for deep human connection, but there's something about us that makes us feel unworthy of it. That seems to feel like the universal work experience these days.

Speaker 3: 11:30

Which is totally nuts, because I think about the archetype of leadership, ruth, that you were talking about, and what it takes to get there, beth, in terms of the duck syndrome, and it feels like we've all grown up in this archetype of the sports leader, the coach or the war hero. Right, you have to be Shackleton or you have to be the freaking coach from Miracle on Ice. It's one of these two.

Speaker 3: 11:52

And when you unpack any of those things. Yes, they demonstrated these certain behaviors, but then, behind the scenes, they were masking shit too, and so this is all built on a farce from Get.

Speaker 4: 12:04

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is you said something that caught my attention. We would like to mirror these performance coaches, but here's the thing Performance coaches are invested in their athletes' health and their well-being. Where they'll stop you if you're overdoing it or you're going to burn yourself out. Workplace rewards it. The more sweat and tears you put into it, you're getting promoted, girl. And the thing is it makes us want to work harder and we also think that our sacrifice will make us belong harder, and that's why sacrificial belonging makes sense to most people. It's giving up a part of yourself, consciously or subconsciously, for the greater good and, spoiler alert, it never works. Never. It doesn't make you feel any better.

Speaker 1: 12:48

No. And to add on to that too, I think there's a piece around. A symptom of it is also overachieving right or overcompensating. This need to keep the duck feet going, or sometimes even to loud yourself with in terms of this is how much I'm doing Like this is how much I'm constantly overachieving or overcompensating so that I get ahead, so that nobody will look at that other part of myself that I'm hiding in some ways, and also then I don't have to share it with anyone, I can overcompensate for it and it's exhausting when you think about psychological safety and its role in nurturing belonging or creating spaces where people can unhide.

Speaker 2: 13:43

What does that? What does good psychological safety look like in the workplace?

Speaker 4: 13:47

to support it it's a good question. I think psychological safety is the feeling of being safe, no matter what environment you are to be able to speak up to speak your truth, to speak truth to power, and I think it's all the things. The interesting thing is, in order to have a strong sense of belonging, psychological safety needs to be table stakes. It doesn't mean you'll necessarily have that sense of belonging or maybe this aspirational sense of belonging that you may be searching for, but you really can't go through the workplace feeling that belonging uncertainty, for example which is the silent killer and feel safe at the same time. Those thoughts don't exist together and most psychological safety is based on a positive. So when you're starting with a negative and you're trying to combat it with negative forces, like sacrifice or any thwarted feelings in general, it's going to end badly, yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:44

It's funny when I speak, I often ask people, the organizer, I say what does success look like? When I finish the speech, what will?

Speaker 4: 14:53

it look like.

Speaker 1: 14:53

They say oh, there's an awareness raised that people will feel like they're digging into themselves but also their coworkers. And then one organizer said to me it would be great if everyone could unhide something. And I said absolutely not. And she said what do you mean? I said I'm not trying to create a Jerry Springer viral moment here with people. That's not the goal. I want people to feel safe. I said the only way that I will even consider doing this is if the leader, the CEO, goes first. And the organizer said that's never going to happen.

Speaker 1: 15:31

I said I know, so why would we expect others to unhide if it's not safe? Because I really spend a lot of time in my space thinking about how was I as a leader, when did I create that psychological safety for others? When did I model it myself in terms of creating that space? Because it is about leaders going first in terms of creating psychological safety, being vulnerable, creating that safe place. And I think the thing that I sorry I would just add on to this is the idea of sometimes we hide and it keeps people feeling comfortable and safe. Also, there is a payoff to hiding in terms of creating safety and psychological safety for others, sometimes because maybe it's too much, and so I think about it on both ends. Why do we hide? And then, how are those around us? How are we creating that safe, comfortable space for them?

Speaker 4: 16:25

Absolutely. I'm going to chime in because we do those things on purpose, because the hiding sometimes feels better than facing something head on that may feel really uncomfortable. I talk about this a lot in the book about the different disorders that are related to the workplace, and one of them happens to be avoidance disorder, and I would raise my hand and tell you that I'm amongst the worst, in fact, in a way that makes every leader that I've ever had feel better about me. There's sometimes when I've had leaders in the past I haven't maybe talked to them for a month or so and a one-on-one will come up and I'm like there's just too much to say and they're so busy. So I'll go to them and I'll cancel and I'll be like I don't have that much and you're busy, they love it. It's almost like it's addictive. The last leader I had that I said that and I did that with said to me you, just you're the best.

Speaker 4: 17:14

I can't understand how I got so lucky and, truthfully, what I had to force myself to the next time was to let her know that I was avoiding her and it was incredibly uncomfortable because she did nothing to warrant it. I need to also make that very clear it was on me. It was a story I was telling myself that she was too busy, that I wasn't as important, that she had bigger fish to fry. I could keep going and going, but the reality of the situation is that I was not comfortable communicating with her because so much time kept passing. So I'm sure there's other people out there that are listening. That may get that very well and, like I said, it's often rewarded because you're giving time back in someone's mind.

Speaker 2: 18:00

I think we've all been there, right when we're like, I just don't want to bother them, so I'm not going to ask. I'll suffer in silence over here it's fine, but death by a million, it's fine where the hell am I going with this Is where is the line Like?

Speaker 3: 18:26

if it's psychological safety, like a bell curve right when you want to create as much safety for people to feel like they're comfortable, but not too much safety where they're too comfortable. Does this make sense?

Speaker 4: 18:36

Yes, it does, because there's comfort, and then there's also self-awareness. A lot of times people ask me that all the time, is it safe to bring your authentic self to work? Yes, but you should not be in spots that you shouldn't be loyal, in spots that your brain can't get you out of. And it's the same thing with psychological safety. Knowing and being self-aware has to accompany it. It really does. There's things that are just not appropriate, and those are typically not necessarily related to your identity.

Speaker 2: 19:07

Or necessarily right for the workplace. That's right, yeah, when you think about a professional environment versus a personal environment.

Speaker 3: 19:15

Ruth, do you feel like you could bring your authentic self to work?

Speaker 1: 19:18

No, and I you know what. I don't even actually always advise it quite yet, because I think that we're not totally set up for it. I think that sometimes in the workplace we don't have the coaches and the supports and the leaders who are willing to go first and the support that it requires, because what it may mean to bring my authentic self to work if I'm someone and maybe it's one of your listeners as well is bringing my depression forward right.

Speaker 1: 19:44

That authentic self. It may mean the caretaking responsibilities that I have at home, that I'm afraid to tell somebody that because somebody is going to say, oh, you know what, you're more interested in taking care of your child or your parent or your child or somebody in your life, and so I'm not totally convinced that we're there yet. I would love that to be the North Star, where we could bring our best selves to work, because that's what I'm invested in is how do we bring our best selves to work? I will say, even with that though there's a caveat to me in terms of my work that I talk about strategic hiding that sometimes feels okay to hide part of yourself because it's not advantageous to whether you're in a lawsuit or you're in a negotiation or you're in something that bringing your authentic self would damage or hurt you in terms of that space. So I think about it as strategic hiding. How do we allow for ourselves to discern when we unhide, when we create that space for ourselves? Is it a safe environment?

Speaker 1: 20:48

I was at a speed dating thing recently and I was thinking about my hand and did it feel safe to share it with people in a seven minute cycle where you're going around and checking in. Did it feel safe in that moment? It's about having agency, about when do we choose to unhide, when do we choose to hide. So I get the choice of when do I share that out? And I think that's the same with any aspect, whether it's we hide parts of our past, whether it's we hide parts of our present, or even I've had people share that they hide parts of their dreams and aspirations. So it's that when do we share it so that we can feel supported? That's when I think about spreading, and how is it holding us back? What are some of?

Speaker 2: 21:30

the like signals that someone can look for or kind of pay attention for to or for in order to make those split decision thing, split decisions around whether it's safe to unhide, or what does that look like for both of you?

Speaker 4: 21:50

That's a really great question. So I, through the conversation, I was thinking about one of the types of belonging which is called dissimulated belonging, and it's confusing to people. Truthfully, dissimulated belonging is when you do feel a sense of belonging, but maybe not in the context you're in. Let's just say that Ruth is a phenomenal employee, but she's just not the corporate cheerleader and, by the way, she doesn't want to be and she's happy. But we all know the workplace wants corporate cheerleaders. We want everyone rolling out the drink cart for happy hour and we want everyone to be able to go after work. After you've just spent nine hours with your nearest and dearest and spend another five hours with them, and there's some people that get their purpose outside of work, which sounds blasphemous to some of us. So dissimulated belonging is a great example of people that are very happy with their sense of belonging, right, and they may just need to get out of there because why not? But it's never acceptable to say that right.

Speaker 4: 22:45

I hear time and time again there was a work event and I need to go work out after work, but I lied and I said I have to get home because my commute is too long and I'm going to pick up work when I get home and then everyone's like oh, that makes sense.

Speaker 4: 22:58

And why should we have to hide the fact that we don't necessarily want to be a workhorse, because that's what gets us promoted, or to be seen better in people's eyes. It's really sad when the state of the world is that that is a factor in promotion. I know you both know this very well. I think what we used to say in the early 2000s which makes me cringe every time is we would be at the promotion table with I don't know, it might've been like a 50 bucks. Then now it's two bucks or four bucks and we'd be like can you get a drink with him? Guys, remember that one or dissimulated belongers. They have a sense of belonging. It's just not in your workplace and, by the way, they don't feel bad about it. It's usually everyone around them and that's yeah.

Speaker 3: 23:46

I've also had the. They're accused of not really being in it. If they don't go to the happy hour, or it's like this. It's a, and then it becomes a culture fit issue. Oh, they don't really want it.

Speaker 4: 23:55

Some people also don't want to hang with their boss after work. Yeah, boss is not. It's never the most comfortable situation and it doesn't matter how close you are, because sometimes that's even harder in that right. So I think that's one great example of hiding that takes place. That's appropriate, because we're not all built the same and we all get different motivations, and most of us don't like to share when it's not work that it's their motivating factor.

Speaker 1: 24:23

Yeah, sometimes bosses don't want to go to the happy hour. Oh yeah, so I totally understand that, and sometimes they do, and then they're like nobody wants me here. But, I think the other piece to some of this is, as leaders and managers, we focus a lot on performance.

Speaker 1: 24:40

We focus on productivity and sometimes we forget about people Right, and we make a lot of assumptions about behavior rather than checking in, and so I'm a big proponent of what do those pause check-ins look like, right, when you first sit down with someone with your full agenda, how do you create space to find out how they are, how you can support them? How do you slow it down a little bit? Because I think again, I sometimes I own my leadership style for years. How do we slow it down a little bit so that we can have the conversation about how are you doing? How can I support you? What's going on?

Speaker 1: 25:16

I'm noticing some things in your work, just so people have a space, a safe space, to be able to talk about it, and that it's consistent, because there's definitely research out there. That's talking about consistency, and there's also research about I think I guess the first piece to all of this Francesca and Mel and Beth is naming it right. So we have to be able to name that. Hiding is universal. Most of us are doing it at some point.

Speaker 1: 25:39

What does it look like? How is it holding you back? Deloitte did a study 60% of people are hiding. Randstadt, the HR survey, did a survey recently that said that 68% of Gen Z the ones that have all the apps and all the social media that we think oh, they're out there all the time they talk about 68% of them are hiding and they don't trust their leaders to unhide too, so they just keep their noses down in their work and they're like I'll get through it. That is not existence, that is not freedom, that is not joy, that is not belonging.

Speaker 2: 26:10

It's got to be really bad for business too, when you think about it, right, because what are you missing out on by not nurturing these types of environments? I'm going to hand it over to Francesca to talk about that, because I'd love to hear about the cost.

Speaker 3: 26:24

Yeah, I'm going to start, I'm going to try to say I want to separate these two because I'm curious if there is a difference in the cost. And I'm going to start, ruth, with you, without a hiding piece of it what is the cost of hiding at work? And you can take that from the employee, from the org, from the manager. What's the cost?

Speaker 1: 26:39

Yeah, I think there's a personal cost and I think there's a professional cost. I like to split them. The personal cost is it's exhausting. It takes a toll on our mental and our physical health. That is a big piece of it. It is lonely in terms of you think you're the only one, so you sit there and you're like, oh, nobody's going to understand this. So there's this loneliness, isolation piece to it. And then there's also feeling disconnected. That's that belonging piece that I think Beth talks about and I want to even hear more and dig into that piece. So there's that personal piece.

Speaker 1: 27:10

And then from a professional piece, when we're hiding, we don't feel as engaged right Our company, even as leaders, we're not as engaged. We don't feel the same sense of loyalty to the company that we're working for. The retention suffers. That's a big piece of when you're hiding.

Speaker 1: 27:26

And then the last piece, which I think is probably one of the most critical pieces in terms of the bottom line of any business, is innovation. Innovation suffers when you are so sitting there worried about how much if somebody finds out this thing about me, or wow, I didn't go to the right school, or my education's not high enough, or my finances aren't what they're supposed to be, or my relationship status. It is preoccupying your mind that you don't get a chance to be as innovative and as creative as you need to be, and I can tell you, as someone who was born with a difference, I spent my life being creative, but when I hid that, that got taken away because I was so spent so much time in that other space of hiding, and so that retention, that engagement and that innovation are lacking, and even our leadership then lacks because we don't feel connected to our teams.

Speaker 3: 28:20

Yeah, and those are big costs and all things that are absolutely needed, right, yeah?

Speaker 4: 28:26

So I can tell you that employee engagement costs the US anywhere between $450 and $550 billion annually. That's pretty sad and crazy. And if we want to dive a little deeper, when it's loneliness driven or stress related in particular, it costs $154 billion annually are stress-related in particular, it costs $154 billion annually. That's just unbelievable. It feels like the things we're putting in place are really killing a fly with a hammer. There's nothing more to that, and a lot of the times these things could be fixed with just simple care. That's what's scary.

Speaker 4: 29:00

Employees that feel excluded are 50% more likely to leave than those who feel a strong sense of belonging. Okay, so we think about this. We think of belonging uncertainty, which I always call the silent killer, which leads to presenteeism, where employees are physically present, they're all mentally checked out, and there's so many varieties of disengagement when care costs us very little and I always say to people that feel like unhiding or belonging is a bit hokier because it has anything to do with emotions Then if you don't want to, if you want to look at it in a bottom lines numbers kind of game, then look at the disengagement and look how much it's costing you. We used to say something like it costs one to two times a person's salary and now they're estimating it's four times. Oh wow, because it goes beyond the onboarding and the retention, the recruiting and the different efforts. It cycles back to the top level vision and problems the company's face.

Speaker 3: 29:56

All those like the 2x, the 3x, the 4x numbers. I think what's interesting about those is one is that scales right. It scales from individual contributor up to exact right and I believe me, I've met disengaged C-level folks. This isn't just a manager or a frontline person, this is all the way to the top, which is massive. The other thing I'm curious about, too, is especially when you have a leader who's disengaged, a leader that doesn't feel like they belong, like that's got to cast a shadow in an organization. I just I can't. I cannot believe that you could have a disengaged leader or someone that doesn't feel like they belong or someone that feels like they're hiding, yet they're creating an organization that has that.

Speaker 4: 30:38

Do you see that? Yeah, it's in the research that I've done. What happens to the leader, and I will say this. So psychological safety does focus around the fact that the leader needs to build that safety, but what happens when the leader needs to build it for themselves?

Speaker 4: 30:52

I often feel like the workplace demands so much of leaders, and what about their safety? That being said, I know that the leaders are mostly causing the harm, so I'm not naive in that sense. But when leaders themselves don't feel a sense of belonging, it permeates in so many different ways, including a lot of armchair therapy. That happens with your subordinates who don't know what they're doing. And since people look to their leaders in times of change, yes, it's killing the innovation that Ruth talked about but it's also can be really soul crushing because, unfortunately, people think their leaders are better than them. They look to their leaders to know more than them, and that's just not always the case.

Speaker 4: 31:31

That's why, in truthfulness, we talked about leadership training. But I'll tell you, I'm one of those people that never received leadership training until I was like 10 to 15 years. In. Leaders are typically made, not born, that way, and so most of us were promoted because we were just really good at our jobs. So there's this unfair standard, and now, especially, most workplaces expect their leaders to have an element of psychology that we've never been trained for.

Speaker 3: 31:59

Yeah, nor do we have time for right. It's Mel and I are pulling the longitudinal data on, like the amount of direct reports managers have right now has almost doubled Like you have more to do. You have more resources or more direct reports, more on your plate, and now, all of a sudden, you need to be a therapist and maybe you went through manager training and you're not getting leadership training until you're a VP or an SVP or an EVP, so everyone in between is like fighting for themselves, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 32:29

And the workforce is changing too.

Speaker 1: 32:32

In terms of newer to the workforce, there is a level of transparency that they're demanding from leadership in a very interesting and intense way, really political correct here. That's a piece of it. And then also, you have, for the first time, one of the blessings of what came out of COVID is the opportunity to talk about mental health for the first time, especially as leaders, and honestly even owning it for themselves, right, and being able to talk about it. And yet how? To your point, leaders are required to do a lot right now and employees are demanding, and yet we have this old, this way that we were trained, if we did get training, or even if we just watched leaders ahead of us. In terms of that osmosis, training of this is the way leaders are supposed to be, and it hasn't caught up in terms of how and that's why, where I spend my time, even like you, beth, thinking about graduate schools, right, or even where that college is thinking about what do leaders need and what are they going to need in terms of this work?

Speaker 3: 33:33

And organizationally, how do we set up systems that they can actually operate within too? It's like the two different components of it for sure, right.

Speaker 4: 33:40

Think about all the return to work, all the things that leaders have to deal with. If you're a leader who works from home and then you have because you're in a remote office, then you have to enforce other people Right After. You've just talked about the fact of how great it is to have no commute or the things that you can get done or how you're supplementing that time with things that are healthy for you, and then you have to take that away from others.

Speaker 2: 34:03

It's pretty taxing things that are healthy for you and then you have to take that away from others.

Speaker 2: 34:07

It's pretty taxing. It's funny when we were coming out of COVID we had a friend share a story with us like the catalyst, as we started to talk about building this podcast, which the first episode idea officially was something like Gucci sweaters and lake house dreams, because I think our friend mentioned they were in an all handshands meeting about returning to office while the leader was in their second lake house talking about being at their lake house wearing a very expensive Gucci sweater and just not thinking about the impact on folks with what that does for their team. Love to hear what you can do as an individual, if, if you're a leader, or really what orgs should be doing. So we talked a little bit about individual right and what it means to bring your authentic self and how you can evaluate that. But what other advice would you give to individuals here who are struggling with hiding or struggling with belonging? What advice would you give or strategies to those individuals? Ruth, you want to go first.

Speaker 1: 35:29

No, you can go first. I definitely have a framework, so I'm ready for that.

Speaker 4: 35:33

So if we're talking about individuals, I like to say that you control the narrative. So everyone wants one-on-one time with their leaders. Build the agenda, make sure that you're taking control of that. I often say the exact same thing to leaders is that's your employees' time with you. So, while you may come into the meeting with at least like 15 checklist items you need to do because you need to report to someone else that's their time with you. Your job in that meeting is to meet them where they're at.

Speaker 4: 36:04

The number one thing that our employees want from leaders is care. Right, it's not, I wish. Every single time I hear this, people are like oh trust, oh respect, and it's always care. And care has a really large spectrum thoughtfulness, candor, advocacy. There's so many components to it. And when you tell, when you as an individual go to your manager and you're able to have a conversation with them about what it means to be successful in role, it also is a wake-up call for them to say what is successful as a leader, right, how are people going to want to follow me?

Speaker 4: 36:40

So I always say to individuals is to build the agenda and to make sure that your leaders are sticking with it. At the same time, leaders, when you're opening up your calls with people, the first thing on your mouth should be what can I do for you? What interference can I remove? And as you walk through that agenda with them, start to also remember what's important to that person. You need to get to know them outside of this little Zoom box here and you need to be able to know what's important. And that may be. You may be thinking to yourself I don't know what they do on the weekends and I don't know what's important to them, but that's not what I mean. What values do they have? What do they like about their jobs? And make sure at all costs that you do something that helps light them up.

Speaker 3: 37:23

Really huge.

Speaker 4: 37:24

You want to always make sure that you're doing things that show them that you know who they are, and that's really one of the biggest things that helps change our sense of longing in the workplace.

Speaker 1: 37:36

Ruth, yeah, and I think where Beth and I definitely overlap is that it's a choice, right. It's a powerful choice that you get to make, and I think that holds true with unhiding as well. And for me there's a four-step framework that I created in whether it's an individual, or I was just meeting with someone who inherited a really toxic quote, unquote team and I said try this framework. And so the first step is acknowledging it, right Only, like creating a space of awareness, like whether it's again as an individual or whether it's a leader or whether it's managing a team. It's the idea of acknowledge what's happening, like create awareness, and I, you can do that through journaling, you can do that through therapy, through meditation, through just taking a silent moment to be a little bit what I call self-centered, right, like centering on yourself and think about that space. The second piece to it is inviting someone in, and I imagine when I say that second step, somebody immediately comes to your mind, right, somebody, whether it's an HR leader, whether it's your manager, whether it's a coworker, whether it's a friend, to say, hey, here's what's happening. When that person came to me with a toxic work environment, I said what's beautiful about what you're doing is you're inviting each person in one-on-one, not making this a group, collective thing, but starting to talk about individual behavior, talking about inviting them in. Here's what I'm seeing, same with hiding how am I showing up? What am I holding back? How is hiding, holding me back and inviting that one person in that you can share that with? I imagine the people I think about as the cheat sheet is somebody who shows empathy, somebody who asks questions with kindness and curiosity, someone who's willing to reveal a little bit about themselves and share their own journey with you, someone who asks questions. That's the person I'd be looking for in that second step.

Speaker 1: 39:34

The third step, after you've acknowledged it and you've invited someone in, is about how do you then build community? And we've all seen those employee resource groups or business resource groups. They actually can If you step back. They have a lot of power because there's a shared experience in terms of people who have gone through them. There you can find meetups and community organizations, finding spaces where you don't feel so alone in this. These steps are small, but they're powerful.

Speaker 1: 40:04

And then the fourth step is scaring out your own journey so that somebody else can see themselves in you and they can start on their own journey of unhiding. They can start on their own journey. That same leader who said I have this toxic work environment, start on their own journey. That same leader who said I have this toxic work environment. I said, once you've gotten through a lot of it and gotten your team to the place they need to be, I can imagine and I would probably bet money on this, and I don't bet money easily but that there is another team within the organization that could use what you just did to their benefit in terms of creating their team and improving their team. So, sharing out that story so that somebody else can learn and start their own journey, and mapping it out, that's where I think about unhiding.

Speaker 2: 40:46

I think that's really powerful. And what you were just sharing actually made me think of Beth One identifying the one person to share it with. So I love Ruth like that. How do you identify that person? What are the markers? But then, beth, it made me think of your story with your boss. What, just bringing it back to that personal story, what gave you the courage to finally share, what made it safe for you the avoidance.

Speaker 4: 41:11

For me, what made it safe was probably less to do about her and more to do about me. I was just going, I was going out of my mind. I I'm so tired of being so nervous before every one-on-one, and I did wind up telling her that and she was like me. I'm the one who makes you nervous, and we had a great conversation around it. I'm like you make everyone nervous. She's like you've got thick skin and at the same time, maybe I didn't.

Speaker 4: 41:39

When it comes to her, and what she had told me which was really wonderful and showed me care, maybe not in the direction she was meaning it was that she sees me as a person that she wants to build thicker, even thicker skin with. So every single time I go to hide, she's going to stop me. So every single time I go to hide, she's going to stop me. And it's not because she wants to control me. It's because she really wants me to be a better version of myself, because I told her I need to be a better version. So she's not controlling me or making me be something I'm not. She's, in fact, bringing out a better part of me and let's be honest, isn't that why we all got into leadership?

Speaker 4: 42:15

Because you want to coach and grow people? I did for the money, yeah, because you love filling out a million forms. That's right. It just does it for you, but that's it, and I think what was really fascinating is that changed our entire dynamic. It really did. I think that most people weren't very honest with her and they were just yesing her and I think, out of everyone I've ever met, she's the last person you do that with and most of our leaders don't want to be. Yes, they really do want honesty from people, but her entire conversation that's just not always easy to do. Yeah, Scary.

Speaker 3: 42:51

The one thing I have always thought about as a leader is it's really those one-on-ones are so important and when you start moving them or canceling them, or if somebody starts canceling them with me, that's like a non-negotiable Like we are. This is your time, this is sacred time, Because I think that in and of itself shows care just to keep those consistent and keep those on the calendar. So it's meaningful to you as the leader as well.

Speaker 4: 43:20

Oh yeah, consistency is care. That's absolutely true. Honestly, one of my best and brightest I've ever had the fortune of leading said that to me. He said you give me such anxiety because you move meetings. And I know that you have valid reasons and I thought to myself oh my goodness, an excuse, no matter how many, how valid, is a bad book. And I've never moved that person's one-on-one, and it's been years and years and, by the way, we still talk about it. He still can't believe what the impact had and as a leader, I had no idea. So, leaders, if you're out there listening, don't change your one-on-one times as much as you can keep them consistent.

Speaker 1: 44:06

It means the world to people, yeah, and if you put your hand up to say I just need five minutes, go find the person after the five minutes so that they can know that you do want to see them and care about find them. Yeah, because I think we also. I think what you're also touching on, beth, is especially in the example you gave is sometimes we have that unreliable narrator in our head right that tells us that this person is this or I'm this to them, or like we don't, and we don't pause to check it out. We don't stop and get the actual this is a tough one actual, accurate information. Yes, I didn't add another A on there, but that's a piece of it is this unreliable narrator who is giving us false information, sometimes trying to keep us safe because, oh, maybe that boss was super scary at times or maybe you know what you weren't ready for a meeting, but it's the idea of yeah, how do we check out that unreliable narrator?

Speaker 2: 44:56

I always ask my coaching clients to ask themselves what evidence do I have to show this is true? What evidence do you have? And often when they pause to think about that, they're like you know what? I really don't have evidence to prove that. So it's such a just even that one question can help with that. I'd love to move to like organization-wide, because leaders will wait for the the last because they get dumped on everything. So, from an org standpoint because I do think it starts at the org level, they set the tone right. When you think about how organizations can implement either strategies or policy, workplace policies around, how we work around here, what are some things that they can do to better foster environments where people have greater belonging or can feel safe to unhide. What does that look like? Or what have you seen? That's good.

Speaker 4: 45:48

I would take a look at taking all the unwritten rules and writing them down. It's one of the first things I say. It's the easiest low-hanging fruit Things like PTO. It's the easiest low-hanging fruit Things like PTO, which is meant to de-stress people, stresses them out terribly. Oh, my goodness, I had three weeks before, but the second I take more than one week. Someone jumps all over me. There's so many things that just need a bit of clarification, because clear is kind. So all the unwritten rules and all the social contracts start breaking them and writing them down.

Speaker 1: 46:20

And I think I would add on to it unwritten rules and all the social contracts, start breaking them and writing them down, and I think I would add on to it, I guess, the thing that as you're talking about like organizations, though, are people right. So it's like leader. I do look at leaders and I do think about leadership, and I think it's a two-way street. If leaders are willing, if we're asking leaders to be vulnerable and do all these things, employees have to meet us also halfway, right, like it has to be. It's a two way street, and I do. I think that there's a space around training.

Speaker 1: 46:48

I do think that there's a space, like it's the dirty little secret that even most CEOs I know have executive coaches. Right, there's a reason for it, and yet they don't talk about it, because it's like the idea that, oh, you're weak if you have that, or you don't know what you're doing, and yet why is it such a dirty little secret? Why are people hiding it? Like it's that space of this is. Actually it's like people who go to therapy being like, oh, I don't want to talk about going to therapy, it actually makes you stronger. So we can start to normalize leadership, executive coaching and training and what those pieces and starting with people. That's why going back to colleges and education around leadership is so important, because that's that informs the organization, because an organization is just as a typically just a spreadsheet or a what do you call it A hierarchy and or building. It's actually who's in there and are they thinking about these topics that we're bringing up today?

Speaker 2: 47:42

Because they're critical. They really are. I agree with you. I think recently I think it was Culture Amp they put out an article, that famous quote oh, people don't leave organizations, they leave their direct managers. They did further research on that and found that even if you had the worst manager or the best manager in the world, you're more likely to leave if senior leadership doesn't model the behavior that supports leaders. So, like, when I think of like organization wide, I think of that like C-suite senior leadership team, that really it starts with them from the top. And I couldn't agree with you more, Ruth, about I wish coaching just started from the day you join through the day you leave as an alumni, Like it's just like therapy, like it just supports you to be better and to be better with other people.

Speaker 1: 48:27

And then sometimes isn't seen as it shouldn't be seen as a punishment, like you're not punished because you actually see an executive coach, or we recommend that. It's the idea of yeah, and I'm even I don't know if I'm totally even convinced that it's always about senior leadership. Sometimes it is. It's the training about how do we value the space. Yeah, I think there's a lot here to unpack.

Speaker 3: 48:49

I actually feel like, given what is going on in the world right now, I would arm every C-level executive with a coach, with a therapist, if they were ready for it and if they wanted it. But I do not understand how you can go through and lead an organization in these times and not need both of those services at least every three to six months. I really don't. Yeah, thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Speaker 2: 49:25

Okay, we have a few listener Q&As and we have about nine minutes left. We'll get to that and then we'll close off on some bold predictions. How does that sound? Love it.

Speaker 3: 49:30

All right, francesca, I am great. We have four questions that came in. I will do my best to read them and then whoever would like to answer them. Fantastic, here we go. I've been told to bring my full self to work, but when I speak up or show more personality, I sometimes feel like it backfires. I worry about being judged or seen as unprofessional. How can I balance authenticity with workplace expectations?

Speaker 1: 49:52

I can try this one.

Speaker 1: 49:54

This is where I spend time. I do. I think it's about finding a culture fit in terms of your authentic self. Where will they value that space of you? And if they're not valuing it, I'm not saying you have to leave every job, but are there spaces within that organization that you can be your best self? Because I don't even know if it's.

Speaker 1: 50:12

Again, authentic is the right word. I think it's how do you bring your best self where you get the support you need? And if you're not getting it from a manager or your coworkers, are there other opportunities to find it? And have you asked? Have you gone through the process of asking?

Speaker 1: 50:26

And again, it's not trying to make it a viral moment, it's about trying to think about taking those small steps. So how can you get the support you need around that best self or where you need support? So it's I think about it as small steps and thinking about where are those safe environments where you can be vulnerable or where others are modeling that? And then leaning into those employee resource groups, leaning into the spaces or coworkers where you can and, if all else fails, find a new job. And I'm not saying that lightly, I am serious when I say it is find a culture fit where they do appreciate the different perspectives and different experiences that you bring, because that's the work. The North Star here is how do we create workplaces where they do value different experiences and different perspectives?

Speaker 3: 51:15

I also love that you said about asking too, because I think a lot of times people think it's just going to show up or arrive or be obvious, and so much of the time you have to do a little digging before you start looking. Potentially too, beth, anything to add to that?

Speaker 4: 51:30

I always say that if you're worried about the way you're coming across or the way you're showing up, ask advice or ask someone, one person that you trust, whether that's your leader or it's a trusted friend how am I showing up? Because I'm getting a little anxious when I say X, y or Z, do a little gut check, never hurts, yeah.

Speaker 3: 51:47

Yeah, love it. These are small, very doable things that can really have a very big impact. I love that. All right, I'm going to pull this over to you, beth, for the first one, because we're talking about belonging. My company talks a lot about belonging, but in practice it feels like only certain types of people truly fit in. I'm not sure if I'm being too sensitive or if there's a real issue. How can employees tell if a workplace genuinely supports authenticity, and what should they do if they don't feel safe being themselves? I'll start with you, beth.

Speaker 4: 52:16

Been there, done that. So I always like to say, when I talk about it a lot in the book, what does alignment look like, or misalignment? If a company is telling you that their biggest values are trust, respect and the color purple right, there's so many different things Are they wearing purple? Do they trust one another and they're respecting? So when it becomes lip service, that's when we all have that deep disconnect. So you have to really determine whether or not you feel that pull or you feel aligned to it.

Speaker 4: 52:47

If you're not feeling it there, then you really have some things to think about. Whether you're, you know, like when you become in an impasse, our first instinct is to quit. Right, but livelihood is tied to our jobs. That's not realistic for everyone and here's the problem If we don't resolve it within the last place we left, it's going to come with us to every other job.

Speaker 4: 53:08

Okay, so I talk a lot about some nasty bosses I've had in the past and I've talked about the fact that one still follows me. They do, he does, and I can't help it, and I've even made strides to reach out to him and it feels like I was kind to someone that punched me in the face, if that makes sense. So there's ways to do it that you feel that you are going with your gut and you're trusting yourself, but quitting is not one of them, unfortunately. In this situation, I would do a little bit more of a deeper analysis around what the fit looks like against your values and then, if it's not a fit, then I would slowly start to look, because if it's eroding your sense of self or your worth or your identity or your sense of mattering, those are all triggers that it is time to leave. You just need to do it in a time and a space that's going to make your life easier.

Speaker 3: 53:59

All right, I'm going to do one last question just for the sake of time here. Sure, let's get into politics. Just kidding, okay. With the current political climate and companies pulling back on DEI efforts which we know, sometimes belonging and hiding is lumped in there with DEI sometimes I've noticed a shift in how belonging and inclusion are talked about, or not talked about, at work. How should employees and leaders navigate these changes while still advocating for workplaces where everyone feels valued?

Speaker 4: 54:28

So my first bet is to stop shifting to belonging and I know that's really funny from a belonging researcher. But when we impose belonging, there's a whole lot of performance belonging that starts to happen. Right, and, by the way, corporations are not that creative. But when we impose belonging, there's a whole lot of performance belonging that starts to happen. Right, and, by the way, corporations are not that creative. If I hear one more you belong here slogan as the theme of 2025, because the thing is, it's not that easy and belonging is not something that others decide for you. That's inclusion.

Speaker 4: 54:54

So if you want to make it a more inclusive environment, I welcome it. If you want to tell people they belong, I caution you, because that is a beautiful sentiment, but it's not always the case. And then employees feel really bad or like it's just them or something's wrong with them and that's not the outcome we want for them, right? I don't think companies set out to ruin people's lives I don't but at the same time, those are the outcomes. So I personally think and I do have research that really pulls them apart from one another Diversity, equity, inclusion, equality they're all so important. Don't lump them together and don't call them belonging just because you want to really substitute for something that is being unfortunately torn away from people.

Speaker 3: 55:37

Yeah, that's a brilliant point, ruth. What would you add there?

Speaker 1: 55:41

Yeah, I would recognize that this is happening. I think that's a so I'm glad you asked the question because if it hadn't come up, I think that it impacts both the work that Beth and I do and also the work that you are doing, mel and Francesca. In terms of DEI specifically and I think that's it's funny I was on a panel a year ago and it was before a lot of this real serious backlash. There was beginning backlash that we've been feeling and people feeling excluded in some ways. What DEI didn't do well is it had some people feeling excluded from the conversation and there was a really powerful speaker that I was on the panel with and he said you know what?

Speaker 1: 56:17

I'm going to start calling it a humanity practice, because nobody can start to argue with that, and I thought that was really beautiful because we are all about humanity. We're about different. How do we start to again value those different perspectives and those different experiences from employees and to leaders and to the organization? How do we start to really create space for that? Because that is going to drive business, that is going to be the impact on innovation and creativity, that impacts retention and engagement. Those differences that we bring are actually the gifts that we have. So I know that DEI, quote, unquote is going away and this kind of falls into the last my bold prediction. But I'm going to these bold predictions.

Speaker 2: 57:22

I have some targeted questions first. So, ruth, I don't know if we'll get to it right away, but I want to save it, so we have to make time for that. Five years from now, guys are workplaces getting this right. What do you think?

Speaker 1: 57:39

Think about 2020 to 2025, right. What do you think? Think about 2020 to 2025, right, that's a five-year segment, right. What did we get right and what did we not? Based on a huge pandemic. So I think about culture that way too.

Speaker 4: 57:51

What are we going?

Speaker 1: 57:51

to oh, that's a tough one. I don't know. I don't. I think if you had asked me yeah, if you had asked us a month ago, maybe six weeks ago.

Speaker 1: 58:06

I'd be different. Maybe I don't. I think that there's going to be a. I think we are going to get it right, because I yeah, I'm going to be positive on this one, I'm going to own it, because I think there are enough of us that are upset and seeing what's happening and we've had a taste of what it can look like to value difference and what it can be like to feel like we are included. And I'm scared to say, beth, but we have a taste of it, right, so we can't go back. When you see something, you can't unsee it, and so we've seen a taste of what it is. And I think that there are enough of us that keep pushing the envelope and don't get scared, because that fear is real, even not wanting to sign up for a website and putting a fake address. I've been doing that lately because I'm scared of that, but I'm like, no, that's not the way we push forward. So I'm going to say, yes, we're on the road to getting it right.

Speaker 2: 58:57

I'm going to contact you in five years. No, what do you think?

Speaker 4: 59:02

Seth, I think it's going to require a lot of bravery, and I think bravery in the workplace is being yourself every day in a world that tells you to be someone else or something different. So I am one of the most positive people you're going to meet. It hurts me deeply to say that. I think it might get a little worse before it gets better, and what I hope that happens to Ruth's point is we all kick our own asses a little bit out there to make sure that we are the change. I'm not really a cliche person. It's all coming out in cliches, but the thing is. In order for us to really achieve that bravery, we have to stand in our own truth and we have to be able to pull together, because the thing is, we need to also acknowledge that we're in it together.

Speaker 4: 59:42

Yeah that's it. It does not win whether, when you, until you stop sacrificing who you are and you help the other people around you, do just the same thing.

Speaker 1: 59:51

Yeah, and that's really the goal of unhiding right Is standing in truth. That is truly it, because you can't really. We say we want to get to know people and accept them, but unless you fully know me, you can't accept me. That's part of the journey.

Speaker 2: 1:00:05

There's this sign in Key West. I saw it everywhere. It was like one humankind or something like that. But going back to your humanity point, ruth, it's yes. At the end of the day, we're all human beings, so how do we can just support each other at that level as like human beings? Okay, this is my second bold prediction question for you both. What's one radical change If you could wave a magic wand tomorrow? What's one radical change that you would have companies make? No small tweaks, only a bold move. What would that one thing be?

Speaker 4: 1:00:38

I'm going to say valuing diversity of thought.

Speaker 1: 1:00:42

Okay, I'm going to say having an unhiding manifesto that every organization, just like we did with other lenses of diversity, that we put up manifestos, that this one actually believes in the idea of valuing difference and allowing for that space and naming it, because, again, we can say all the things we want, unless we name it, it doesn't happen.

Speaker 2: 1:01:04

Okay, I want to now get back to Ruth. What's your bold prediction that you wanted to share?

Speaker 1: 1:01:12

I absolutely believe, given return to office, given the backlash with DEI, given where we are in terms of this conversation around belonging and inclusion and we have a workforce that's coming in demanding transparency I absolutely believe there is a new model of leadership that is right there, that we can grab onto and that we are building, because I don't think the leadership of yesterday works anymore and the one for the future is almost too far for us. What do we need right now? And to me, that's unhidden leadership. That is a new model of leadership and it's different than authentic leadership. It's different than bold leadership and all of the terms. It's the idea of how do you create space for others to be themselves, to be their best selves.

Speaker 2: 1:02:00

I like it.

Speaker 4: 1:02:01

Beth, what about you? What's your final bold? I wrote down, I wrote human-centric leadership.

Speaker 2: 1:02:04

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 1:02:05

We're on the same wavelength and I think it's because here's the thing. I do believe we are in a trauma-informed workplace. That's what the state of the workplace looks like, and for so long it's been so taboo. And talking about the trauma that people feel is just not enough. They feel like their trauma is less than, and that's just not the truth. And is it appropriate always to discuss all the trauma? No, not at all. But human centric leadership that is able to balance productivity with human need is really. Where is the prediction I think we're going to get to?

Speaker 2: 1:02:46

I hope we all start to just demand it more. So let's get there together. I appreciate you both so much. Thank you for joining us today. This was super helpful. We're going to sign off, but listen, I'm going to share our socials. You can find us on yourworkfriendscom. Also on this YouTube channel if you subscribe. We have a LinkedIn community If you're over on the professional side and you want to join the conversation over there. But you can also find us on Instagram and TikTok. You should definitely check out Ruth's books and you should definitely check out Dr Beth Kaplan's new book. They are awesome. You can follow them on LinkedIn and also on Instagram. We're tagging them and everything. So please go find them and follow them for more great advice in this area. And just thank you for joining us tonight and with that, francesca. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Speaker 3: 1:03:33

Just Beth and Ruth had a big publishing week. Beth, your book went out. Ruth, you went into time this week. This is big. We will post both of these, as Mel said, in our show notes. Read them. Required reading.

Speaker 4: 1:03:47

Thank you. Thank you both so much, and Ruth, you're brilliant, so thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:03:51

We're on the same page. I can't wait. We're in it together.

Speaker 4: 1:03:54

That's right.

The Ego Equation for Leadership Success

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Ego Equation with Dan Springer

Impact over ego, thats the mantra for true leadership success.

What if the key to great leadership isn't confidence or charisma, but checking your ego? Former DocuSign CEO Dan Springer shares his Ego Equation and how humility, hard work, and self-awareness drive results that actually last.

So, what makes great leaders different—and how do you measure it?

(Skills ÷ Ego) ^ Work = Success.

Dan shares leadership lessons from decades in tech, including how ego almost derailed his career and what changed after a layoff turned into a leadership awakening.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

I try to define ego as

Speaker 2: 0:02

High ego is putting yourself as the primary, putting yourself first, and low ego, which is preferred in this context, is someone that puts the organization or the greater goals or family. It could be. Any type of organization you're involved with puts that first.

Speaker 1: 0:32

We brought Dan Springer on to talk about leadership and ego, and he's probably one of the best people to talk about this with, because this guy has ran mega organizations as a CEO, as a board member. He's genuinely a really nice guy and, more than that, he knows how to get returns in a business and really create these workplaces that people love to work at. If you ask anybody who's worked under Dan Springer, they loved where they were working, and so we wanted to figure out what was it that made him who he is and what did he attribute to his leadership success? And what he talked about was ego.

Speaker 3: 1:12

Yeah, he was such a great example of somebody who can focus on the human in the workplace while also having very successful business results, and how those two things went hand in hand together. Yeah, there is some secret sauce that he shared with us. That's pretty awesome.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Totally agree. Dan Springer is the former CEO of DocuSign. He's also still on the board. He's an incredibly seasoned tech leader with decades of experience scaling some of the biggest names in SaaS like Responsys, teleo, nextcard, and. He began his career at McKinsey was a partner there. He's led billion-dollar exits, built high-growth teams and knows firsthand how ego can make or break great leadership. And you're right, mel. He brought this refreshingly honest take on what it really takes to lead well.

Speaker 3: 1:59

I think this is one of my favorite episodes so far and one of my favorite guests. The insights he brought were really valuable and others will get value out of this too.

Speaker 1: 2:07

It wasn't his Dave Matthews story.

Speaker 3: 2:10

I did love Dave Matthews as a fellow DMV. The fun fact in Connecticut I was at the Meadows with my friend for a DMV when there was an entire flipping of the cars and arson back in the 90s what the hell? At a Dave Matthews concert. It got out of control. I don't know what happened and we parked in a McDonald's parking lot. This is just a side story you can take out, but it got towed and we hitchhiked with some randos to go find our car at the Impel lot.

Speaker 1: 2:41

Listen my favorite Dave Matthews story, can I tell you, yeah. So there is something I celebrate every year, which is the anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band tour bus. Oh, the bridges in Chicago. And if you don't know this story, Mel, can I tell this story? Yes.

Speaker 3: 2:56

They're probably like please not again, just when we're not brought up, so I've never been in Chicago.

Speaker 1: 3:02

There's the river in Chicago and then it dumps out into the lake and over the river are a series of bridges that are grated and they can lift up and down so tall boats can go through to the lake Keyword grated. The other thing I want everyone to know about Chicago is it's a massive architecture town, so they have these wonderful architectural cruises. If you ever go to Chicago you have to go on them. They're fantastic and you can see all of the different buildings and the stories behind them, etc. They are typically open boats, so think about massive kind of pontoon boats looking up and admiring all the skyscrapers.

Speaker 1: 3:37

On this very warm summer day there was an architectural boat cruise cruising down the river looking at all the skyscrapers and at the same time the Dave Matthews Band tour bus was going over one of these graded bridges and the bus driver accidentally decided to dump the toilet out and it dumped all over this architectural horror boat. So it is one of the most disgusting stories, but also one of the funniest stories on the planet. I love to tell it just because it's so man dave matthews, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3: 4:11

If you were on that boat, the universe was just like f you, in particular today. What like?

Speaker 1: 4:18

but you've got some explaining. I love talking with dan, not only about the dave matthews story, but about his experience and how he's really looked at ego in this equation. If you don't know, dan, he's also a mathematician back liberal arts major, which I love, but he has this idea of how do you manage ego with skills and hard work. How do you pull that into balance to really set yourself up for success and to set your team up for success as well?

Speaker 3: 4:42

And you can do this equation yourself tomorrow to gut check your own ego. Yep, good tool, right away, great tool, and with that here's Dan Dan.

Speaker 1: 5:04

how are you today?

Speaker 2: 5:05

I'm doing great Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Great, absolutely All right. I want to get you right into this. We're here to talk about ego and leadership and your background. I'm so excited for it.

Speaker 3: 5:14

All right, we want to start in understanding your origin story around the whole concept of so and ego and the role ego has played, and so I'd love to understand how your own relationship with your own ego evolved throughout your professional career.

Speaker 2: 5:29

I've been called by many, particularly as a young man, to have prodigious ego, so I guess this is a good topic. The simplest construct around that I try to define ego is high ego is putting yourself as the primary, putting yourself first in the context. It could be your family, it could be your office, it could be your company, it could be your sports team, whatever it is. And low ego, which is preferred in this context, is someone that puts the organization or the greater goals. Or, again, it could be family, it could be any type of organization you're involved with puts that first.

Speaker 2: 6:01

And my own origin story, I think, is a good, healthy, I mean growing up with the world being presented to me.

Speaker 2: 6:10

In a certain way. It was when I was growing up I was pretty egocentric. I think I was pretty focused on Dan, and although I had wonderful role models like my mom, my hero, who demonstrated to me by putting me first, been really dedicated to whichever life to me, I probably should have seen that sooner, but I was a little slow on the uptake and somewhere, probably in my late 20s, I at least became aware of the fact that I was a little bit of a selfish person or a selfish SOB, maybe it would be more accurate. And then professionally I started to figure that out a little bit in leading people. But it wasn't until I had my first son that I think I really figured out that it wasn't about me. And once you have that ability to love someone more than you love yourself, it opens up your ability to just be much less egocentric in everything you do. So that was probably my. So I was. I'm embarrassed to say that now, but early thirties before I probably got to a reasonably evolved sense of ego.

Speaker 3: 7:13

Yeah, that makes sense, right, our brains aren't even fully formed until we're about 24, I think so to make good decisions and things like that. So it's totally understandable. We're in the non-judgment zone, by the way.

Speaker 2: 7:22

All right.

Speaker 3: 7:22

So having your son obviously major pivotal moment. What other kind of pivotal moments did you have that really transformed your understanding of ego, especially in leadership?

Speaker 2: 7:33

Yeah, so two, actually One before I had my son in my first job managing people. So I worked for the phone company. I was a forecaster, a econometrician, I did modeling and I showed up and they didn't have sophistication at Pacific Valley at that time. So I quickly got promoted less than a year in my first job as a college and I was now managing people. My parents' age that had been professional forecasters but didn't have some of the technical skills I had, and I quickly realized how bad I was at the job.

Speaker 2: 7:59

But I couldn't figure out for the longest time why. And it was because I was a little jerk. I couldn't figure out for the longest time why. And it was because I was a little jerk. And who's this little jerk telling me he's experienced and good people with probably a condescending ear if we want to be honest about it. But I eventually got that feedback so I did get a snippet. Being a jerk is not the best archetype of manager that you probably want to have. Then I think fast forward to probably having a son. But the it was one period that I think was really powerful for me, where I started to respect how wonderful some of the people we work with are and I ran a company you've never heard of called Tellio. It was my first time as the CEO and I ran it into the ground.

Speaker 2: 8:38

we sold it for 50 bucks to our Donnelly maybe a little more, not very much money, and so that's why you've never heard of it and I will bury the details of the company. It's important to me but it won't be to your audience. But something happened is right after I joined. It was like it was a dire situation and we had to do a slight restructuring. It was a small company but we had to do a layoff and I had never done that in a role, in a manager role, in a manager role. I've been a consultant at McKinsey, so I've been around a little bit of cost cutting. And that night after the layoff I was in my office late and four of the guys that had been laid off were standing outside the doors like a glass door looking in and they knocked and they came in and for a minute I had this thought are they telling you to beat the crap out of?

Speaker 2: 9:19

me, I can figure out why they don't want to stay around and these four guys sat down and they just asked to check in on how I was doing and they said they could tell how difficult it had been for me to go through the layoff their layoff, not my layoff, their layoff that they were worried about me and I'll tell you for the next couple of years.

Speaker 2: 9:40

That was this incredible strong feeling.

Speaker 2: 9:42

Every time I thought about it it made me feel worse, obviously, because these are the greatest human beings that could get laid off and they're worried about the guy that just came in to be their boss, that had to carry out the action.

Speaker 2: 9:53

And two, it just made me realize how wonderful people can be and it's just always stuck with me as a message that we have a responsibility when we lead an organization for those people, a responsibility when we lead an organization for those people, and I vowed I would never it hasn't happened yet, but it could never have a layoff of people who were doing their job well and were losing their opportunity because leadership in this case me failed to provide the opportunity. So don't overhire, don't get into that situation and when you have it. It's a painful lesson, but it was hugely eye-opening for me against the quality of people and the really serious responsibility we have as leaders for the people that work for us, and not everyone feels that way. I think it's really important If you're not feeling that way, not caring that much about your people, what are you doing in management?

Speaker 3: 10:40

Yeah, you have to think about the whole person and get down to humanity. At the end of the day, we are bigger than our jobs, so life is bigger than that.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Yeah. So Mel and I didn't go to math school. Dan, we did not go to math school. I know you did. I know you were being a jerk to the Yellow Pages people. Let's talk about how you were a jerk, dan. No, I'm just kidding. I was sitting there thinking like you were 30. I think I was like 35 before I got that that lesson around. Don't be a total asshole to people. But one of the things that I love about what you've come up with is an ego equation or an equation how to think about ego, because we have all these stories around. It's about how smart you are, it is about your strategy and you're playing five degree chess over here. Or maybe it's about the fact that you work your ass off. I'm wondering if you can talk about the mathy equation. You have to think about ego and work and skills as it relates to success.

Speaker 2: 11:39

It's a little bit geeky. Sure, it's only geeky when you put numbers to it. Conceptually, even liberal arts majors like myself even though I was a math and liberal arts college people we can really grasp these concepts. The simple expression which I've used in this so like sewing needle and thread is you have your skills that are usually highly correlated to the fortune you were given with your smarts and your ability to build skills. And then you have your ego.

Speaker 2: 12:04

As I mentioned earlier is your ability to control your focus on yourself versus to the broader organization, and then, as you said, how hard you work. And the equation for the geeks out there like myself is you take those skills that you have, the S, you divide it by your ego, so you want to have less ego, obviously. Then you take that and you raise it to the power of how hard you work. And if you do play around with little numbers I generally use one to five and you assess yourself. I'll give you my own self-assessment, so yeah, and then we're, we're on this spectrum think of this bell curve spectrum, not a one to five.

Speaker 2: 12:38

When it comes to skills that have been built, I think I'm a four. Most of my life asserted I was a five, but we can get to the ego point. I just had a lot of good fortunes. It's not so much that I'm smarter than other people or more skill, I just showed up in some really good situations that made me look good. So I've had a lot of serendipity. And then the ego. And again I don't think I was ever a five.

Speaker 2: 13:02

On the ego, Maybe I was a four. There's a distribution curve and there's other people out there that could be pretty condescending, jerk like two, but I was probably in the four zone. I'm down to about a two in my self-assessment. So I'm pretty good not the best, but I'm pretty good at trying to really put the organization first and get out of my own ego and then on how hard I work. It's four or five. I've been a five at times. Sustaining five is very difficult but I think I'm a good, solid four.

Speaker 2: 13:27

So if you use the four, two, four, you say four divided by two is two. You raise that to the power of four and you get two, four, eight, 16. And that's pretty good. And, of course, when you're a competitive person, like I am, you play this game and you go. Okay, what I really want to do is be a five over a one. Raise it to the it. Just, it really probably doesn't happen very often and, quite frankly, if you have people operating with a high ego, you do the math. If you're around a one, it doesn't matter how hard you work. You're not going to get the number any better. If you're below one, it's effective. A person working really hard has all focused on themselves could actually be a detriment to an organization. So that's how I think about the formula and have to chat about each of the elements more, but I use that in evaluating people and thinking about how effective they can be in our organization.

Speaker 1: 14:17

Let me ask you this so you're 16 and you're so score. Is there a range? Let's say you're building out a C-suite, for example, or you're building out whatever and you're trying to gauge where people are at what's considered like a good score.

Speaker 2: 14:32

16 is good and again, it's my form. I'm not going to create a system that I have a terrible outcome in.

Speaker 2: 14:38

And you're like, wow, I really need work, I have to change the model. But 16 is good, have to change the model there. The 16 is good and the real challenge is it's the most of us, of course, most situation. I'm talking about me as a software exec to 16. Um, by the way, the only place I've ever been better is actually in in in sports, and the reason is and this is that you're really fortunate if you have this makeup my whole life, life I played sports all through college, division III college, but still some of my college soccer and lacrosse teams.

Speaker 2: 15:09

But all through school, all through every team I ever played on, I don't think I was ever the most skilled player on my team and I had just enough self-knowledge to know. I think sometimes I was one of the better players I knew. I was never the most skilled player on any, whether it was football, soccer, basketball, cross, whatever but nobody worked harder.

Speaker 2: 15:31

I don't believe anyone on any team I was ever on. I know it was a pretty aggressive statement to make, but I can't. How are you going to know? How are you going to refute it?

Speaker 3: 15:38

anyway, Ever Sounds a little like. Ego Sounds a little like ego.

Speaker 2: 15:43

Yeah, I hadn't thought about it that way. Can you have ego about how hard you work? Maybe, and I do think if you look at the stats score you'll always see not as many points but a lot of assists from Dan's work, and that was the joy I had as being a playmaker and trying to make other people score and succeed. So in sports it's the only time I've ever been ever better than I have as a profession. But I would just clearly say 16 is taking me a career to get to. I was realistically a one-two, probably most of my career because of the ego that suppresses the ratio of the smarts, and so if you had a team of 16s, that would be a killer team.

Speaker 2: 16:22

Everyone could get their egos down. Some people might get it by a five and a three. You're playing the different modes, but yeah, it's all about getting that balance right.

Speaker 1: 16:30

Is there ever a situation where you need to have hot ego?

Speaker 2: 16:34

Yeah, and again, the problem with the definition of the word ego in general. There could be a lot of different nuances and interpretations of that, and I think they can be healthy ego for sure, in the construct that I'm defining. I don't think so. I think it's optimal is to be a team player, because not only does it help the team's output, but then it forces other people, because of that behavior you exhibit, to do the same. People want to be drawn, I think, to something bigger than themselves, and if other people lead that way, it makes it easier. So you have a knockoff effect on other people when you bring down your ego and some cultures can get to the place where that happens. But just to be clear, there's high-performing cultures that have high ego.

Speaker 2: 17:12

I worked at McKinsey. There are investment banks, I would tell you. Most of them is a model where people are fighting, particularly in banks, for their compensation. It's a big thing, it's a let me show you how great I was and the deals I got done. Therefore, I deserve more compensation in that model. By definition, I think you should answer your question. That's supposed to be a high ego place. Now, over time, that can have become destructive, and yeah, but I think that's the balance. Leadership and that kind of organization has to figure out a way to maintain that competitiveness around individual performance and at the same time still figure out how do we have some collegial nature that we can build a firm together.

Speaker 1: 17:53

You've taken your career where it is based on this model. You see it and evaluate your teams based on this model. We doubled down on ego, but I would love to understand what do you think about skills? And when you think about hard work, what would you recommend people consider when they're looking at upping those potentially? Just to balance out the equation.

Speaker 2: 18:14

One thing I tell you about the skills side, the hardest part about skills, it's the one I think we can do the least Now it doesn't mean you can't take classes and get training things, but core thing that drives and in fact you didn't ask if I stole this idea. There's no SEW, quite like the way I do it. But this construct of these sort of three forces in determining how effective people are in their work was stolen from a guy I worked with at McKinsey years ago, an Australian guy, clemenger, and he actually initially his thinking was it wasn't skills, it was smarts. It's also smarts are trainable. It's a very McKinsey way to think about it. Right, and he'd been a career McKinsey Was we just want smart people, because smart people will figure out problems, but they'll also figure out how to learn and grow To some extent your clock speed.

Speaker 2: 18:59

You can work on it. You're born with what you got. Thank or don't thank your parents, but you got what you got. So that one is much harder for people to control. And I would tell you the best thing you can do to either quote unquote improve your smarts or your skills it's the learning you get, it's taking wisdom from your experiences. So what makes you smarter, effectively or more skilled is the fact that you have ability to take feedback and say, oh, I got to move a little bit over this way, so that's probably the most important piece, except that a lot of it is going to be.

Speaker 2: 19:28

You're given processing capability and then the one is applying yourself, and if you just do more and you're active, it goes back to the work. How hard you work. If you take on opportunities. Every time you have a chance to do something new and different, you do it and then you listen and learn about how you did. That's the best thing I think you can do to improve your sort of smart skills and on work, that's probably the least complex, right?

Speaker 2: 19:51

And it's just how will you apply yourself? It's definitely about working smarter, not just harder, although I sometimes think we use the excuse of working smart, not hard, to not fully deploy ourselves and really invest ourselves in the things we're working on. But that could be personal, professional, across the board. We often know when we're just showing up and there's days sometimes where that's all you can muster, just showing up. But if you find yourself only just showing up a lot of the time, you're probably not in the right place, because you just don't have that enthusiasm for your work to allow you to get up to a four or maybe even a five on how hard you work.

Speaker 1: 20:29

Yeah, it's interesting when you have those where you. Is it context you know what I'm saying Like when you're in a situation I know when you were at DocuSign or Responsys, for example, too, it felt like that was like these magical times, right, these magical cultures where you wanted to show up, right, it's the context of it, or is it the individual that's always going to have that lens, or is it a combination of both? I think it could be situational, right.

Speaker 2: 20:52

Yeah, but your point about the magical times what makes people remember times as magical is because they work really hard with a group of people they respect and care for and built a great album, and when you do that, it bonds people. I think we were chatting the other day and I told you that there was this 10-year reunion of people from when we sold Responses to Oracle and I thought the whole idea was a little wacky in the first place, to be completely honest with you, and then, when hundreds of people showed up and said it was a really special way for them to be back with people, it felt more like a college reunion than a company had been part of. You had something special and that culture that you were part of will always be important to you.

Speaker 1: 21:37

It's the power of when you have this in masses, right, when everybody is pulling in their weight or has a high SO score, right. That's the power of that too. Come to think about it, I don't think I've ever had a magical work experience where I phoned it in or where I was very egocentric, or like I was the smartest person in the freaking room, like that never, ever happened. I think that's common.

Speaker 2: 21:58

I think that experience you're describing is probably common and I would say there are times, particularly in technology industry, where you get on a wave and you probably could continue to have great success with phoning it in a little bit, although be careful, because when you're riding that kind of wave it's going to crash at some point. But I would tell you, I bet it's not a magical experience. I think it's very difficult, if you didn't really work hard at something, to truly enjoy the success and the outcome, because it's not as important, it's not as special to you as if you know that you really applied yourself fully.

Speaker 1: 22:32

Yeah, you got to be invested.

Speaker 3: 22:46

Something that really resonates with me with what you said, because, as another former athlete but I will say I was D1. Just rubbing it in a little, just a little, but I was a rower, so it doesn't really count as a former athlete, throughout my life, one of the things that I heard time and time again from my coaches and like you, I was never the best, but what I always got was the heart award. Because when you're the one giving heart and in my mind, when I keep hearing you say hard work, that's what I keep hearing.

Speaker 3: 23:12

Oh, the people who give heart, like you have the heart in it. Is that what you mean when you say hard work absolutely?

Speaker 2: 23:18

and in fact it's funny. I was thinking about your point about crew. It actually is a great example because, if you think about again, I never rode crew in any close to semblance of a real way, but oddly enough, I went to a strange high school in Seattle that happened to have crew, which is unusual, particularly unusual. Then on the West Coast, I'm going to start and for the next six, about six minutes, I'm going to get increasingly uncomfortable to the point that my body's going to hate what I'm doing and I'm going to collapse in exhaustion and you go and that's what we do every time and that's our form, and there's probably some track and field things that are like that a little bit, and it's the only one you do in unison, depending on three other, seven other I guess, four and eight if you count. But what a crazy bond that people must have with the team when you go through that.

Speaker 2: 24:17

You've probably seen it, but you see the boys in the boat. There's a movie from the book the Boys in the Boat. The book was better than the movie. Usually Not always, but usually it's the University of Washington men's crew that won the Olympic gold medal in 1936. No-transcript.

Speaker 3: 24:53

Oh, I loved crew. By the way, I think when I talked to any of my teammates, most of us did it so we could watch the sunrise before class, because it was just a fun experience at 5 am.

Speaker 3: 25:03

I wanted to go back to those high-performance work cultures, because we've all worked in them, right, like I worked in big law. We work cultures because we've all worked in them, right, like I worked in big law. We've worked in the big four, all of those things. Do you think something has to happen in terms of, like performance management? Performance management set up in a way to be egocentric or to build ego, because there's always this kind of back and forth? Do you brag about the work you've done and that impacts your potential bonus and your raise or your opportunities for growth, but none of us get our work done, necessarily as individual contributors. Even when you're an individual contributor, you still need others to complete your work, and so do you think there's an opportunity for organizations to think differently about performance management and how you brag about the things you've done while also bringing along everyone else who helped you get there?

Speaker 2: 25:50

I think so. Yeah, and I'll tell you the first thing. There's certain things in business life that are close to universally. True. There's probably none that are quite, but there's two I want to talk to One related to your question, but first I'll do the other one.

Speaker 2: 26:03

It's amazing how what we learned in kindergarten is so important for what we do in life. Saying please, saying thank you and saying I'm sorry when appropriate is the simplest thing to do, and when we don't do it oftentimes it leads to fairly significant conflict and problems. I'm not saying it always solves everything, but at least creates the opportunity and the space to be successful. And one of the things that I think is really corollary to that is about teams that you described. And if you say we instead of I, first of all people know.

Speaker 2: 26:40

So if you're so worried that you have to be clear that you did something, the detraction that you're going to get from your colleague to everyone else I need you to point out that it was you Way swaps, any extra benefit you might get in bonus time or what you're just got, is my opinion.

Speaker 2: 26:55

But if you do that chest beating and you do it around a wee, it's amazing how everyone gives you license to brag all you want because it's about wee, and if you figure out a way to try to give the credit in a credible way to other people, because we've all seen the bullshit, the fake oh, thank the little people, because it wasn't me and you just look and you're like, okay, that not only gets you the credit for having delivered the great results that your team's done, but, more importantly, that we language makes everyone else feel great and it sets us up for another success, because now everyone wants to do it again. So you're also building followership from teams. So I think that's the answer to the question is just be a we oriented and get away from needing to point out what people probably already know when you've done something great.

Speaker 1: 27:55

Yeah, I'll tell you too, where I've seen people be really successful is with that we language and that authentic we language like you talked about, with their team, and also cross-functionally as well. When you can be we, when you're reaching across the aisle with finance and HR and marketing and you're going at it we as one, that is hugely powerful, especially as you're going up in the ranks.

Speaker 2: 28:17

And I would also tell you I think it's powerful when you're the hardest grader on yourself. A lot of people say they're the hardest grader on themselves, they're toughest on themselves. I don't always find that to be the case and I find if you can do that and get a reputation amongst your colleagues for being tougher on yourself than you are on them, it's a really exponentially improving opportunity. I'll give you one sort of dumb example. But at Responsys I had this thing where I tried to change the way we thought about performance reviews. So we did everything out of 100. It's just just like a hundred. But a hundred was perfect Pretty hard to be perfect and I was CEO for 10 years at Responsys. I had twice a year had a review and I would submit my self-assessment, just like I would have all my managers first submit a self-assessment, and I never had a hundred. I never got above low nineties and we had a couple of quarters that led to a half year performance that you would say those were pretty good and I had a board that would push back and say come on, this has got to be a hundred percent and I'm like a hundred, how can you get a hundred? But what would happen is I'd come in and say, yeah, I think I had an 82. And they'd be this is crazy. You at least have a 90. We have to argue this up to a 90. Think about that.

Speaker 2: 29:28

Normally my experiences before that was the other way around. I think I'm about 115. And then someone else has to say, god, we really think he's about a 90, but now we've got to say he's an 80 to try to compromise. So it just totally changes that. Every single executive my direct reports at responses but one and I'll get to the one in a second Over time grasped that and said this is the way I want it to be.

Speaker 2: 29:54

I want to be in a situation when I come in tougher on myself and my manager was me says no, I think better than that. Those conversations are so rewarding and I did. One executive who was very talented and a great executive and he had grown up in a sense of I'm above 100%, everything I do is above 100%, and the math major in me says there is no above 100%. It's impossible to be above 100% Asymptomically. Approaching 100% on most things is almost impossible, and so that mentality to get out of that I got all Ben Antonio, but I got everyone else there and it was I think it was a big part of our culture that then went down and trickled down wherever what it was saying like. Let me be tougher on myself.

Speaker 1: 30:39

Let me ask you this In those moments, did you want to rate yourself 100? In the back of your mind, were you like I actually was 100, but I'm going to put it in myself at a 91? Or were you like, no, I was genuinely in 91, you wasn't you can't what's truth I think there's times where I thought I was pretty damn good.

Speaker 2: 30:56

Yeah, we had a lot of challenges too, but the early parts of the company was a complete turnaround. There was some, I think. You know I often talk I'll give you a. Let me answer your question, then I'll give you them. Yeah, there were times when I thought I was great, but because I defined it it as 100%. It's just yeah, you can't.

Speaker 2: 31:12

One of my pet peeves when people say I gave 110%, you don't have 110. There is no 110. And I appreciate what the construct they're trying to say pushing yourself. No, it's like the crew thing, like my 100% is to get us there in six minutes. I got us in five minutes and 55 seconds. I did more than a hundred percent. Well, you just reset. What a hundred percent is? That's new love.

Speaker 2: 31:32

But but that concept, yes, there are probably some times when I might've been a little bit I don't know too cute by half about saying no, the IPO was great, it just wasn't really the accomplishment I wanted for the company. I think we could have done better. Or my last time I sold the company at the highest multiple SaaS offer company I'd ever had. That was a pretty good outcome. Ceo should feel good, the whole team should feel good about that. But there were some things that just weren't quite optimized in those periods and I think it's important to always tell yourself that the grade you would give yourself is lower than the grade you'd give the company If you're the CEO or general manager for your business, because telling people I'm better than you are and I'm pulling us up, it's a hugely odd message to send, and you and I have talked about this before.

Speaker 2: 32:21

I think the leadership model I try to think about is the inverted pyramid. Instead of a CEO at the top and then all these people coming down, I say the job of a leader is to make everyone else on the team successful. So you should think about it as an inverted leadership model. And the simple example is that if you think about a company, particularly if it gets to scale, even if you have a lot of self-confidence, managed ego I have a lot of self-confidence. The best I could be at a company of scale let's say there's a thousand employees maybe I could be as good as three or four people. I would have to just be in my A game constantly. Best case, I could be as good as three or four actually, but if I could make each of those thousand people 10% better, that's like hundreds of people you've added of good work, so it just swamps it, and so if you get your mindset to think like that versus to think top, down ones, so it just swamps it.

Speaker 2: 33:09

And so if you get your mindset to think like that, versus to think top down, I think it helps you to achieve.

Speaker 3: 33:15

I like the we, not me, concept over there. Yeah, when you think about how leaders can accurately assess where they fall on this scale, can they accurately self-assess, or does it require some external measurements? I'm the only one that can self-assess.

Speaker 2: 33:32

You're the only one Awesome, sorry, sorry. Of course, everyone can do your own self-assessment. In fact, doing a self-assessment is great. More valuable for most of us probably two is to ask the people you work with, ask your colleagues, ask the team you manage, ask your manager hey, how do you think about me? In this format, and that would be the fun exercise. If you're doing it as a management team, I should do this actually my next gig. You should actually just ask everyone to do that assessment for everyone on the team and then you give people the sense of here's what you said about you and here's what the rest of us said about you.

Speaker 2: 34:04

In each of these dimensions, I think it could be really powerful way, and I'll tell you that the hard part about it is assessing. You try to think about assessing people when you don't have a lot of data. Most people, if you work with colleagues and you ask people oh yeah, francesca, usually people have a pretty similar view. The hard part is like when you're interviewing someone and you meet them and you say, hey, should we hire this person? You're trying to assess how successful they'll be. It's much harder to figure out some of these things. There's some things that are typically around the smarts and skills. People have degrees and things, or people have a track record where they've delivered tremendous performance. So you see some areas where you can get that.

Speaker 2: 34:41

The ego one, of course, is the hardest one, although the work one is interesting because a lot of people tout how hard they work and again they're just about working hard. It's about working smart. Sometimes you can't completely rock that. You get a better sense from other people, but the ego one is the hardest one and the way I'll give you my fun interview question. I love to ask people. If it were you, mel, I would say hey. So, mel, if I had in the room everyone that you've been working with for the last five years, but you weren't there and I said to them what's really great about what Mel does? What would they say? And then you answered that question and then, when I'm finished, I said, hey, if I asked that same group, what are the things Mel should be working on? What are some areas where you know Mel could be a little more effective?

Speaker 2: 35:27

What would they say to that? And of course, everyone loves the first question. First of all, they'd say I'm the smartest person. They give you, as they should. You're giving them a softball to say what's great about you, yeah. But the second question is interesting because there's basically three buckets of answers and some people are in tune with issues that they're working on and they've gotten feedback in the past. Maybe they've made some improvement, they know there's more, and that's a really thoughtful and great answer. Another answer is I don't think they have anything to say. Look, that would be it.

Speaker 3: 36:01

Look at what we're saying. Such a weird response.

Speaker 2: 36:02

Really they just have. No, they actually just they've never dawned on them that people might not think they're perfect and they may be great but just like. That's an indication that we ought to be probing further how effective they are in teams if it's never sort of done. But the worst answer of all is what I call the faux answer. And the faux answer is let me tell you what they'd say Now. First of all, they say I work too hard and carrying the load of the whole team makes everyone feel terrible because I do so much more than everyone else, and that's a real problem for people.

Speaker 2: 36:38

And they give two or three things that you're like the most ridiculous fake critique of all time. Then you actually realize this person's smart. They probably have some awareness of things that they could work on and be better, but they're manipulative and they're full of shit and they're basically going to say let me tell you how I can smooth that. That's actually indicative to me. They could be skilled and there might be certain roles where that sort of ability to communicate and feel if they're going to be an actor or something you might say that's a great skill, to be able to have right To improvise that answer. But to be a colleague, that's a person that's I'm going to be wary, I'm going to be wary. Can they really dedicate themselves to a mission to work with other people? So that's a great question to ask.

Speaker 3: 37:17

I love that question, Someone who worked in talent acquisition. I think it's such a smart question to ask because I've heard also those rehearsed answers and you're like, oh OK, yeah, I don't know about that. What are some ways? I guess, when you think about warning signs Because I would see that as a warning sign, just as you did but when someone's in the job, what are some of the warning signs that indicate ego might be creeping up or interfering with their leadership effectiveness?

Speaker 2: 37:43

Core issue of where an ego is a problem is usually not in someone's self-led efforts around their interactions with the team, and so I think where we see people who are less effective team members and aren't able to the company or the team first, that's where you see it and you see it from their colleagues. And what do I be careful about? I'm a big believer in things like 360 feedback. I'm not actually a huge believer in massive programmatic you have your talent, background, sort of solutions but I think the discipline of getting feedback in a thoughtful, targeted way, as opposed to just lots of forms that people start filling out in a shitty way, is not, honestly, the key to success. It is in a thoughtful way, given the person and the individual. You as a manager do work, but getting that feedback from folks is great. One thing to be careful about is just because other people are unhappy with someone or complain about someone doesn't mean they're the problem. Are unhappy with someone or complain about someone doesn't mean they're the problem. A lot of times we ask someone to carry some pretty heavy water and drive some pretty aggressive performance and some people might not like that and they might say that's a bad person. A lot of times. Let's get this at.

Speaker 2: 38:45

Docusign or CPL would say they're not living the DocuSign values. They were very important. We had this really strong set of values. Docu DocSend's an amazing company and it's got some things that are really strong. By the way, we've had some challenges last couple of years. Some of those values have allowed us, I think, to maintain more success. But it's really easy to pull the values card and say I don't like the way Mel's doing that and so I'm going to say throw the value set. I'd be really careful that the person that's willing to throw that might not just be doing well, they might be actually saying the scrutiny and management I'm getting is making me uncomfortable. And the person is trying to give me aggressive feedback and somehow I missed the memo that said feedback is a gift and since I didn't think feedback was a gift, I think the person's riding me really hard, but actually they're trying to make me better. So get feedback but make sure you're triangulating and then get observations yourself. That's how I'd propose attacking that role.

Speaker 1: 39:41

Okay, here's a question. I feel like we have a lot of representations of ego in the extreme. I've seen very high up leaders, board members, ceos, it could be even a manager. I've seen individual contributors and they're so egocentric they're bordering on narcissistic or maybe they are or just a straight psycho. We've all worked for them. What do you like? Some of those environments incent that, incent that behavior, reward that behavior. If you're in an organization that you feel like that's happening, or you're walking into a culture where that day that's happening, how do you start to advocate for more of this balance? How do you operate as yourself? If you're someone that isn't that way and likes to operate with more of the balance, do you go? What do you do? What's the play there?

Speaker 2: 40:29

So, the first thing is why? Why do you want to do what you're describing you want to do? Do you diagnose that there's a problem in the company? You see a performance challenge happening at some point, or we have a nutrition problem because we have some people's behaviors driving good people out. I'd like to try to understand what the thing I'm trying to fix is before I take my remedy. But in general, I'm a big believer in we motivate people with incentive structures. Some of those are financial incentive structures, some of the praise, all sorts of levels that we have for incentives for people. And so if you're driving behavior and you're seeing it not just one individual, but you're seeing it more creep into your business in a way that you think it's not healthy, I'd look at your incentive structure.

Speaker 2: 41:08

And so one of the phenomenas is you might say we have a lot of individual achievement awards. Let's go to a team award and a company could take a bonus approach and say it's subjectively based on each individual's performance. Or you could say we're going to have a total team outcome. These are our top three goals, and if we achieve them we all win in that award, and if we don't, that's one lever. But I think that kind of concept is thinking about what you've put in place in your organization to drive the behavior you're driving. And the other one and this is one that I don't understand why more people don't do it other than you know. I have some conflict avoidance in my own nature, so I understand it's a human phenomenon. We often avoid conflict, francesca, less you than the rest of us. You're so nice.

Speaker 2: 41:52

You spiked on that in a good way, but the answer is talk about it. I don't know. We have this thing where everyone's in a closed room secretly saying, oh, Billy's doing this and Susie's doing this. Hey, Billy, Susie, people think you're being a jerk and I don't know why. That's not who I think you are. So let's go show them that's wrong and what are the things we're going to do together to have it? And I think, same thing Not everyone accepts feedback as a gift at the beginning, but you have to explain to them.

Speaker 2: 42:18

You want to be successful here. You're going to work with me in addressing this feedback and I think you would find most people 90%-ish people if they know that you care about them and they know that you respect them, they will take that feedback and they will want to be better. And there's some people who just can't take it or see it feels too personal and they have to say it's not me, it's the person that's complaining. Understand that there's a cycle. You go through that process. Past that, I think most people can say you know what? I want to be better, I want to be more effective, so I want to work on it.

Speaker 1: 42:52

Yeah, Mel and I are. We're writing a book and we just came out of research and that's the number one thing around being feeling like you're being respected and valued. You cannot have feedback, trust, development, conversation, anything without that. That is the base, for you have to have that mutual respect and that mutual value, and I think it's something that we overlook or we assume it's just there yeah, right and we've never had a goddamn conversation about it.

Speaker 2: 43:20

Yeah, and I'll, yeah. Um, and you have data. And so what happens when you have data? You sometimes that ad is just nobody cares what you know until they know that you care. And so if you're there, you say I got all this information, make you better. I'm like, are you trying to make better? If you're there and you say I got all this information to make you better, I'm like are you trying to make better? Are you setting me up for failure? Like when I understand that you're. When you show up to tell me something, it's because you care about me and you care about the success of what we're building together. Yeah, then I really do want to know, I want to understand, I care about this feedback that's going to make me better.

Speaker 1: 43:49

Yeah, I think starting with care is such a huge thing. Starting with care might be your answer to my next question, which is I'm dead. It's a little crazy out there these days, but it's a little uncertain. Yeah, hashtag tariffs, speaking of incentive structures as opposed to sticks. I am curious, though if you're a leader, especially if you're a C-level executive, and you have the entire company on your shoulders and you're trying to navigate uncertainty it could be now, it could be in the future, I don't care, but I am curious about how you protect that balance of your ego as you're going through that, because I have to believe that it might be up and down, depending on what situation you're in, what win you have, what punch you just took in the phase. How do you maintain and balance that ego when you are just in a blitzkrieg of bullshit?

Speaker 2: 44:40

Yeah, two things. One, it was harder for me to insightfully answer that question today because I'm at a place where I've had so much good fortune in my career and I've gotten a lot of boost. That makes me feel good about myself professionally, and not that I don't have things I'm constantly working on, for sure, but I've been so fortunate that I don't walk around with a chip on my shoulder that I, you know, because of this crisis or some other, I either need to prove myself. I do feel like I need to prove myself every day, but I don't feel like I'm coming from a defensive way of doing that and proving myself. So that makes it easier. But if I go back a couple IPOs ago, yeah, I think it's a real challenge.

Speaker 2: 45:20

I think what you're describing is absolutely a challenge, and the more that the market gets crazy your market, whatever that is it's easy to feel like it's unfair and lashing out and attacking, and then sometimes even the people that are close to you. You should be pulling together. Some people are critical of them. We're blaming. You know the blame game. If you just sold more, we wouldn't have this problem. So it's your fault.

Speaker 2: 45:42

Sales is fault, which has been a huge issue, by the way, in enterprise software the last couple of years, the number of companies, because I spent a lot of time talking to people about running more software companies that say a company is great, the only problem is our sales team. If we just had a new head of sales, it's going to be great. I'm like really, because every software company is saying the same thing. Is it really just the sales leaders? I don't think so, and so I do think the hard thing when everything is going crazy like that is to just go back and say what can I control and what can I not? I can't control tariffs, I can't control any of these things. I have to make decisions based on the fact that some externalities are there and those external factors are happening. But I have to go back to our team and say I don't know what the outcome is. I just can't tell you what the outcome is going to be, but I can tell you what the inputs are and we're going our very best at doing it in the way we believe and at the quality that we believe we can deliver for our customers, for employees, whatever. And let's just do that, because that's what we can control, and I know it's the same thing like stock price is a phenomenon.

Speaker 2: 46:41

Companies go public and every CEO gives the same speech, or pretty much every CEO. Guys, we can't control the stock price. You shouldn't be spending time looking at the stock price. That response is early on. I made this thing. I said I'm not going to look at the stock price except for Friday afternoon every week. I will not look at the stock If you ask me about it. I don't want to know. I don't care. I don't want to know what the stock price is. What am I going to do on any given day? How are you.

Speaker 1: 47:06

This is a backward.

Speaker 2: 47:07

This isn't that. Leaving is a backward indicator. We got to be focused on our business and getting people out of that mindset. Actually, one thing we did response is we had the IPO and we didn't go ring the bell in New York. We did the IPO. We came back to the office and we were with the office and the people and the day after IPO we said let's play Sales to do. We got product to build. We got customers to take care of. We said what happened to go public yesterday? It's fun and Our customers take care of it. What happened to go public yesterday? It was fun and we should all feel good about it. It was a nice accomplishment. Back to work, because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the context of what we have to do every day. I'm sure we care about it and create liquidity for people. Lots of wonderful things that happen. I'm not against celebrating. I'm all about celebrating. Why do we have the opportunity to celebrate?

Speaker 3: 48:03

Because, because we did these other things really well for the last several years, so let's keep doing those things. Looking back at your younger self and what you know now, what do you wish you could tell your younger self?

Speaker 2: 48:10

I think probably a couple things. One is I didn't have a lot of patience, I was in a hurry and I think it's okay to be moving fast, but I think I would tell myself as part of that smell the roses, enjoy the time, enjoy the experiences you're having, and I sometimes skip things to get on to the next, and sometimes I think that's a mistake a lot of us make. And life it's not the end, it's the journey and really making sure you enjoy the journey. And that probably is mostly then around investing in relationships, and not necessarily just like your most important relationship, but the people you know that are just wonderful. It could be colleagues, could be friends, any number of places. Really take advantage of those personal relationships. That is what life is fun to do. So that'd be number one.

Speaker 2: 48:59

Number two, and there's no question, after the practice speech I gave you on this topic earlier, I would tell myself to chill, cool my jets a little bit about then and realize that the joy I was going to get in life, the real joy I have, comes from seeing other people being successful, and I had to accumulate a certain amount of professional success and personal success before I could start to do that. So I missed a lot of years of a lot of joy I could have had. I think I had little snippets of it. I'm not a total jerk. I did care about the people I worked with but it was all in the lens of they could be successful to make me more successful. And if I think I could have just appreciated them more for them and been better for them, starting that sooner I would get a lot more joy. So those would probably be the two things. There's probably a lot of things I would tell myself, but those would be the. Those would be the.

Speaker 3: 49:52

I like it. The second one, especially when you think of giving their best advice to emerging leaders, that's like a big takeaway that they can start today. Okay.

Speaker 1: 49:59

Rapid round questions. You can answer these with one word or a sentence, or however long you want. Sometimes these are our most interesting questions. Are you ready to play? I'm ready to play. Okay, it is 2030. What does work look like? Work will be very similar to what it is today in the post-COVID world Very similar.

Speaker 2: 50:25

All right, interesting. No, I should elaborate. I thought I was supposed to do rapid fire.

Speaker 1: 50:28

Wait, now, I want to know the answer. Wait, why do you think it's going to be similar? Why do you think it's going to be similar?

Speaker 2: 50:35

I think we've had a lot of transformational change going into and coming out of COVID and I think the amount of change in the way we work, assimilate is limited. We're humans and we have our patterns and we have our trends. So I think we've gotten to this place. I don't think it's exactly equilibrium, but in terms of our people going to be in the office, are they going to be remote, I think we're getting to that zone of where we're going to be. I would add, I think artificial intelligence will change the way we work, but I think it's going to be less impact. It'll be massively impactful on business, less impactful on people than I think we realize, because we're adaptable and the things that get automated and then we do things as humans that can't be automated. So I don't think that will change as much as some people are forecasting in the next five years.

Speaker 2: 51:15

Are you an AI optimist? I'm an optimist, for sure. Yeah, I definitely. I have my I call it terminator awareness of what's happening. I just don't see it. I really don't. Maybe it's my. I'm an optimist. I'm also. My faith in humanity is pretty high. Yeah, I'm pretty optimistic.

Speaker 1: 51:31

That's good. There's a lot of really awesome possibility there. I'm stoked for it. I'm stoked for it. Yeah, what music are you listening to right now?

Speaker 2: 51:39

I've been listening to Dave Matthews almost nonstop the last 10 days. Nothing wrong with a little DMV. We had Dave come to an event. Jane Goodall introduced him to me. We did an event at DocuSign. He is the funniest person I've ever been on stage with. If he was an actor, I don't know if you know this before he became a musician he was an actor.

Speaker 2: 51:59

He's been in a number of films since he's become famous, but he is just the funniest. He has the driest, quick-witted sense of humor that I never would have fully understood, even though I've been a fan for years and then joined C&M on stage, so Dave was the bomb Best session ever. At any event, Get out. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 52:18

I always read him as like either really awkward to talk to or making like really uncomfortable jokes period.

Speaker 3: 52:26

Yeah, I got the impression. He seems like a good call.

Speaker 2: 52:29

So he roasted me in front. He had the DocuSign employee base and customers and he was constantly making fun of me in a way that the docuside employee based and customers and he was constantly making fun of me in a way that, of course, that audience love oh sure so you know he knew his audience.

Speaker 2: 52:40

Um, yeah, he's a musical genius. So you're right, sometimes there's oddities with people who are creative geniuses. Uh, there's some of that awkwardness. He's so genuine. I'll just say one little snippet. We should move past dave matthews, but he moved to seattle from charlottesville where they really got going. So he lives in in the seattle area and up until this is about five years ago, he just moved out of a one bathroom house with his three children and his wife and he was just like, yeah, and driving his 1970 something volvo, he's just a guy, that's like.

Speaker 2: 53:13

I don't have any heirs. He's just the same person that I think he wanted to be ever since he was probably 20 or something like that. Yeah, he's a treasure.

Speaker 1: 53:22

See that story restores my faith in humanity. Honestly Like that's it. Okay, what are you reading? What are you reading?

Speaker 2: 53:29

So I just finished reading something I half read. It was embarrassing Principles by Ray Dalio, which is a tome of a big book. But the exciting thing that I just started reading again and I think I read it before. But I'm embarrassed. I can remember his Profiles in Courage. It was a Pulitzer Prize winning, jfk wrote it and it's one of those books that everyone knows about, but then you just maybe never read. And anyway, jillian got it for me and I saw it at a bookstore. He's a bookstore and I'm reading it and he's a gifted writer, in addition to being such a special politician.

Speaker 1: 54:05

It's also interesting to go back, even if you have read something way back, to go back and reread it. All right, here's my last question for you. What piece of advice would you give someone? What's your best piece of advice for them?

Speaker 2: 54:15

Oh, if it's mildly professional advice I suppose there's other realms, but I guess this would fit more broadly is in life the key is to find I used to be a consultant, so I like to do everything in two by two matrices. It is to find the combination of the things that you're good at and the things you like doing and get into that upper right corner. And I think the biggest thing that people sometimes forget is the things you like, and I think we're naturally drawn to. We get positive feedback on the things we're good at, but finding that intersection of the things you really love doing, that's the thing that you need to focus on.

Speaker 1: 54:48

It makes it really enjoyable, right? I look forward to it.

Speaker 3: 54:50

Cool, love it. We appreciate you being with us today. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2: 54:53

Me as well. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3: 55:00

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. Thank you.

Managerial Sabotage

Your Work Friends Podcast: Managerial Sabotage with Davide Rice, People Managing People

Today’s managers are feeling the squeeze from above, below, and all sides. In this episode, David Rice, Executive Editor at People Managing People, joins us to share what it really feels like to be a modern day manager. From the lack of formal training to the growing expectations from executives and teams, we talk about why the role is harder than ever and what can actually help.

Whether you're deep in the middle or just stepping into the manager role, you’ll find practical ways to build connection, navigate pressure, and move forward with more clarity and confidence in a rapidly changing world.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

The thing that disturbs me and keeps me up at night is the fact that, essentially, at this point, ascending into management ranks is an experience akin to being sabotaged. It's almost a betrayal in some ways.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Welcome to your Work Friends. I'm Francesca and I'm Mel. We're breaking down work, so you get ahead, Mel. You and I talk a lot about the state of the workplace. Actually, every single day we're talking about what's happening with work, what's happening with jobs, and one of the things that we just keep coming back to is what the hell is going on with the manager and the manager role.

Speaker 3: 0:51

We've covered it several times in New Week New Headlines First of all. Managers are in the sandwich, the classic corporate sandwich between executive leadership and then their employees, and they're getting dumped on every which way. We covered an article several months back talking about this is the crisis year of the manager, because we see orgs ripping them out, which we both have expressed as a dumb move for many reasons. And the other piece there is the younger people don't want the gig because it's a thinkless job right now being a manager.

Speaker 2: 1:28

It's hard, right, it's hard and to your very good point, that's getting attacked from all sides and we wanted to bring in somebody that hears about what the hell is really going on Real street conversation with the manager. So we brought in David Rice. David is the executive editor of People Managing People, where he's looking at the stories that are happening in the workplace specifically around management, and he's really trying to get at, with people managing people, the heart of the issues that are faced not only by HR professionals but by employees too. So we thought, because he's getting this great overview of what's going on in the ether, he can be a very good person to get the very real street, very raw, very honest perspective on what's going on with managers.

Speaker 3: 2:12

Yeah, a lot of insightful conversation. I also, side note, love all of his videos, so if you're not following David on LinkedIn, you should be and check out his weekly videos.

Speaker 2: 2:23

David is very dry, he is very no bullshit, but he's spot on, so we hope you enjoy this conversation with that. Here's David.

Speaker 3: 2:44

David, it's so good to see you. All right, David.

Speaker 2: 2:47

Again, thanks so much for joining us today. We're super stoked to talk about the state of managers In our part of the world. Mel and I are hearing from managers. We're reading the news about managers. They're getting it from all sides. We're flattening, we're taking managers out. Apparently, ai is now coming for your job all this good jazz. Like it's a. It's a crazy time to be a manager, and especially in your role as the executive editor at People Managing People. What are you hearing? What are you seeing? What is the world of the manager looking like right now? And I'm curious what's keeping you up at night?

Speaker 1: 3:20

as it relates to managers these days, I think the thing that, like disturbs me and keeps me up at night is the fact that, like, essentially at this point, ascending into management ranks is an experience akin to being sabotaged, right, like it's almost a betrayal in some ways, like if you think about the fact that 82% of managers received no formal training. So it's just here, go do this really difficult thing. I'm not going to help you do it. And even the whole way that you were successful, you got into this because you were, in theory, good at something. So is this how we're going to reward success and high performance? Is here's this new challenge that I'm just not going to help you with. And I don't care. I guess I don't care if you're good at it or not.

Speaker 1: 4:09

As somebody who spends a lot of time talking about leadership and how to create success and how to innovate and inspire people to do new things, how can we do that to managers? It's just disturbing, right? It would be like trying to train your pets to go to the bathroom outside but never open the door. What do you want them to do? I don't understand. So what are we doing? There's a lot in this world that I'm like what are we doing? But when I think about business, that's the thing that I just. It blows my mind and makes me want to pull my hair out.

Speaker 2: 4:49

Yeah I mean to your point is we're not setting them up for success at all. If there's a development piece, 82% of people aren't even getting trained. Mel and I absolutely know that to be true. Very few organizations are doing that and even if they are, it's not necessarily that they're developing them the right way, because managing is a very different skill than individual contributor. It's a completely different turn. We know it's one of the hardest roles to step into. If you ask most people in their career ladder, that flip up into manager was way harder than that flip up into executive.

Speaker 1: 5:19

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:19

Because it's just so different and I love your analogy. So we're basically saying, yeah, this is what you need to do, but we're not allowing you to do it or we're not setting you up for success to do it, ie opening the door. Is there anything that gives you hope? Because we absolutely agree on that reality. But is there anything where you're like? But this is interesting.

Speaker 1: 5:37

Yeah, I think the thing that gives me hope is there's a lot of people coming together around common experiences right now, common goals, desires. I think 2025, when we look back on it in a couple of years will be like a pivotal year for community building. That's my hope, that's one of the things that I really wanted to see from this year and for changing the way we think about traditional dynamics. So, whether that's how we use something like LinkedIn or how we approach going to a conference or interacting with each other online which obviously I think could use an overhaul but I'm seeing a lot of people agree on what they see Like we all agree that this is happening to managers, right, and we know what we want to change.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I think there's not as much difference in philosophy or the spectrum of thought around this. There is about a bunch of other issues, right. So I think it's a little different in that we want to build thought around this. There is about a bunch of other issues, right. So I think it's a little different in that we want to build community around this, and that's a skill that we need to learn in and of itself, and so I think it's going to be good for us to come together on that stuff and identify the things that we want. We've all been sold a lot of well, I'll say this bullshit narratives about either management or what it means to be a leader. There's a lot of this like alpha talk and I have no time for it, but it's one of those things that like pervades the leadership space. I just think it's going to be short-lived and we're all going to come together and identify some things. The need for managers maybe we'll get into this as we go, but I don't think that the need for managers is going to disappear.

Speaker 2: 7:10

I want to talk about that community piece real quick. Community Are you seeing community inside organizations or are you seeing people actually going outside organizations to find that community because it's the only place they're getting it?

Speaker 1: 7:24

I think both. I think it's cool to see community within organizations because people are. We talk about, we always talk about like peer-to-peer learning, but I think more and more people are realizing like I can go to this person and get some kind of value, especially around AI, right, I think that people are seeing the things that their coworkers are doing with it and they're going whoa, I didn't know you could do that. Teach me how to do that. So they're learning a lot of things from each other and that, in and of itself, is building internal community.

Speaker 1: 7:51

But I also think, with all these layoffs and the things that you see, trust is low. In some ways there's loyalty, but in other ways people are like whoa, they ain't going to be loyal to me, so why should I be loyal to them? They ain't going to be loyal to me, so why should I be loyal to them? And they want to go out and build their communities outside of it. So they're going to the thing they're trying to build their networks. They're going to people that they have common visions with and engaging more.

Speaker 1: 8:13

We're seeing that activity that even you see in slack communities, right, there's more and more of that popping up and there's a lot more groups out there identifying that and going, hey, I think we can create this community. The facilitation of that is increasing as well, so there's more options and there's more desire to take advantage of it. It just gets infused into sort of the culture and the way that we all think I've got to be part of one of these things so that I can continue to grow, because the organization's not going to help me do it necessarily. I think that is a thing that's coming out now, but I ultimately think that it's a good thing. It's something that we all need to do anyways.

Speaker 2: 8:51

There's this overall sentiment for managers right now that, like I'm on my own and so I gotta figure this out, either through community or internally or externally, because my faith that my company is gonna be doing it for me or my leader is going to be doing it for me is nil. Am I reading that right? Is that what you're hearing and feeling?

Speaker 1: 9:25

who's above you to help you. It's generally like either director, like VPs or executives who have no time or desire to help you figure out your challenges and problems right. They're just not going to step in and help you. And so who are you going to turn? Yeah, you have to go to other people that are having a common experience and build some sort of rapport or understanding. You have to find out what tools are you using to understand these problems better. Where are you getting your advice from that kind of thing? And that's one of the things that we see, partially because we seek to be the thing that you would go to. Naturally, when we are successful, we find that people are gaining value from what we're doing. That is part of what's driving. It is like amongst managers. And then you see, like the flattening of organizations right, they're firing managers left and right, so it's. I don't even think they care if I succeed or not.

Speaker 2: 10:11

If I don't, they'll just use it as a reason to cut my salary from the books and, I guess, get ai to do it yeah, yeah, which is funny the deloitte human capital trends just came out, which a lot of times is thought of as one of the key indicators for where human performance, human capital consulting, is going right in all these organizations. And they just were like psych should be on, you shouldn't be taking this manager layer and I'm like no shit Sherlock.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Let's not, yeah, so it's figure.

Speaker 2: 10:42

Yeah, having 67 direct reports as a VP didn't work. I'm shocked.

Speaker 1: 10:48

I'm sure.

Speaker 3: 10:49

Yeah, it's painful, we just covered a few weeks back that, like Gen Z, has no interest in even moving into the management role, and there's obviously a much better way that people can be preparing people to be in this role. Ideally, from the time you step in the door as a junior level employee, you're gaining this training before you. From the time you step in the door as a junior level employee, you're gaining this training before you even make it to that step. Right, so it isn't this big surprise or big shift. You cover so many different organizations, so you see excellent use cases and really bad use cases. What do you see being done really well?

Speaker 1: 11:17

It's tough to say, because I'd probably say so-and-so is doing it right now, and then two weeks from now they flatten half the thing. So-and-so is doing it right now, and then two weeks from now, they flattened half the.

Speaker 3: 11:26

Thing.

Speaker 1: 11:26

Yeah, it's tough to say who's getting it right and who's getting it wrong. If you're looking at it like okay, no-transcript, and you're actually giving them tools to do that, then you're doing it right. One thing I've always said is, from the pandemic time, nobody ever adjusted. Nobody ever adjusted what they were doing to manage differently. Right, we went to remote. They didn't know how to do that. That's part of the reasons why there's a lot of reasons why they want to force people back into offices that are not great, but one of them is they never learned how to do this any other way, still doing things by the idea of butts in seats. And then you realize, oh, the increase in things like employee monitoring software. We talk about that all the time because it's one of the things we do reviews on our website but you see the increase in that and you're like, is that healthy? Is that any better than just looking at butts in seats? No, it's not a gauge of productivity. They got these like mouse jigglers and all these weird gadgets you can buy to fake productivity, if that's how you're going to measure productivity.

Speaker 1: 12:29

And so the ones that are doing it right, I think, are like look, you got to shift to like measuring output reasonably, measuring outcomes responsibly. Those are like two of the key things. Don't get lost on a goal. You can create this really big inflated expectation and think that's reasonable or responsible. It's not. It's about figuring out. Okay, what does productivity actually look like? Meaningful productivity, not just like completing tasks or creating a huge volume of work, because you can create a huge volume of work. But if it all sucks, what's the difference? It's not going to move the needle. We've got all these traditional quotas and traditional ways of thinking about things like productivity, things like business impact. We've got to get away from it being so role-specific, it being quota specific. I would say in a lot of cases, a lot of it is like volume of what people are doing rather than the velocity or the value of what they're doing. So the ones that are thinking ahead and trying to change that are doing it right.

Speaker 3: 13:35

Yeah, thinking about more meaningful impact than just like checking the box. And we hear it all the time, francesca and I get people reaching out to us. They're feeling the squeeze at the top from the executives that they're reporting up to, or they're a manager, their senior manager, who's getting it from the executive right.

Speaker 3: 13:53

And then they're also dealing with the emotions of their own team and the things that they're experiencing in the day to day. So they're just what's that song Stuck in the Middle with you? They're just really all stuck in this kind of hellish landscape of the middle being pulled in a million directions but also not feeling cared for in either way. If someone's in that space right now, what advice do you have for them if they're in the squeeze?

Speaker 1: 14:19

Yeah, it's tough right, because we're in this period where executive demands are just so out of touch with the experience and the reality of the lives people are living. They could use this moment to gain trust and instead they've used it to put in RTO orders and talk about 60-hour work weeks. A lot of what we're seeing, especially when they start yapping in the media, just erodes people's image of what leadership is right. So if you're in that space, I think the thing that you got to do is basically do whatever you can to increase transparency about what's going on in the org, what's going on with roles and I know transparency is one of those words that gets overused to the point that it means something different to everybody but just try to be real with people about what's happening. Respect them as adults. Okay, what's going on with their roles? What skills do they need? Just be human about it. Be real.

Speaker 1: 15:12

Everybody's terrified that a layoff is coming all the time. Now they're responding to what they see out in the world and what they want to see is you being a human being with them. They can't trust you more than the AI. If you feel like some soulless corporate suit, right, they might as well just listen to the all-knowing robot overlord that's going to own their future. That's why Gen Z wants to go to the AI instead of their manager. So you've got to find a way to establish good faith. You've got an find a way to establish like good faith. You've got an employee population right now that has no faith in leadership, and then you end up, if you don't do this right, you end up looking like a shill for people who are out there saying all these things in the media, or people who are just maybe not understanding the basics of their existence essentially, and it damages your ability to establish a relationship or trust with them.

Speaker 2: 16:08

Why do you think people don't do this? Mel and I, in our research, we talk a lot about the boss-employee-boss relationship, because it is a relationship I'm curious about. Why don't you think managers show up as a human? What's going on there?

Speaker 1: 16:22

I think there's a couple of reasons. One is the manager is expected to deliver certain things from the business, certain outcomes, and so it gets a little bit like it's not like they have any shortage of meetings and work to do themselves, so they're already bogged down and they've got a lot of pressure from the business to deliver results bogged down and they've got a lot of pressure from the business to deliver results. On top of that, you're talking about a couple of generations that have been, I would say, systematically weaponized against each other by media narratives. Right, everything is Gen Z this, but for a long time it was millennials and their damn avocado toast. Right, everything's just.

Speaker 1: 17:07

Oh, this group is awful, awful, and what you end up with is like a group of people. They kind of look at each other weird to begin with, and then you've got really big shifts that happen because of technology. Right, like millennials and gen z, they don't like phone calls, they don't even want to go to meetings. Yeah, we were talking about somebody on the phone. Just text me, or couldn't this meeting have been an email? How many times have you heard that? But it's an old fashioned way to get together. Talk about it, just settle it, and so you're not communicating to people how they want to be communicated to.

Speaker 1: 17:34

In a lot of cases, you're not understanding their culture, essentially because there's age differences or different ways of doing things that you grew up with. Because when you grew up, that didn't exist, like when I entered the workforce, slack wasn't a thing, it just didn't exist. We did everything by email. But you combine all that together and you've got a place where people just don't understand each other.

Speaker 1: 17:57

I feel like and managers, if they are typically a little bit more advanced in their career right now you're probably talking about somebody in their mid-30s to late-40s, let's say, a 24-year-old those experiences are wildly different, right, and their expectations are wildly different. You interpret things at work differently, and now they're being polarized by everything. Oh, I don't understand them and their pronouns and those like that. It's constantly one thing after another to highlight our differences, never our commonalities. We never talk about the things that we experience the same way. We never talk about the things that affect us in the same way. So that's why there is no trust For managers. It's going to have to be a conscious effort on your part to sit down, make a lot of eye contact.

Speaker 1: 18:49

Really, you know what I mean Not an awkward amount, but be present with somebody, be in the room with them, see them as a person, learn about things like energy and body language and personal dynamics, what it is that might be sitting between you and somebody that you're finding it difficult to connect with. Those are the things like as a manager. This job is going to become less and less about technical skills, I'm convinced, because a lot of all the technical stuff you'll just be able to do it with AI. The thing that's going to differentiate you as a manager is your ability to connect to another human being and to see within them what it is you can do to help them achieve that. But it's not easy to do and it's inherently awkward for groups that are different like that, I would say.

Speaker 1: 19:36

Easy, but it's simple it doesn't actually require too much technical thought.

Speaker 2: 19:44

It doesn't, and it's so fun because to point out, like commonalities right, there's way more that we have in common.

Speaker 3: 19:48

humans really don't need a lot, they really don't there seems to be a huge missed opportunity we've reported on, like the silver tsunami that's coming in 2030 and all the the knowledge that we should be learning, but is there a huge missed opportunity happening right now for organizations to have more intergenerational connections and community building to help bridge that gap and have that conversation, especially as we're going through these major transitions? Is that a space where companies should really be focusing?

Speaker 1: 20:21

I would say yes. Here's the challenge, though. We're basically like conditioned to distrust each other, right? So, like older folks, they don't want to trust Gen Z because they're entitled or lazy or whatever the stereotypes they peddle about them. And you've got like the OK boomer side to it where it's just oh, here they go, and we spend all this time thinking about our differences. There's not a lot of motivation to go. Okay, maybe he doesn't get this AI thing, but he was in the workforce when the internet came about and that must've been a huge shift. What lessons did he learn from that? They're not motivated to ask that question because inherently, you'd have to be interested in them or see their value, see their humanity, and everything that we do is meant to polarize and tear us apart, but it's hard to create something totally different within the walls of your organization when the broader culture is constantly peppering people with this narrative of difference. It makes it difficult for us to learn from each other unless there's some other connector.

Speaker 1: 21:24

We did a thing at work. We were just messing around with Sora when it came out, and my team and I we were like, what if we did this with it? I said, well, have it, make me the Pope. And then it did and I was like, oh my God, that's hilarious. That looks ridiculous. Now make it, make all of you my cardinals. So I did that and it was ridiculous. And then we were like, okay, now give all the cardinals blowout hairstyles. And the images were so funny. We were all laughing so hard. I can't remember the last time we all laughed this hard together, but it was lovely. It was like we had a great bonding moment out of it that I ended up making this video.

Speaker 1: 22:06

But I thought to myself you could use that, though In terms of management. You can use that to create all kinds of experiences, to change people's narratives about each other. If you got somebody from Gen Z guiding somebody from Gen X or a baby boomer through that experience and they're joking around and working through it together to make the funniest, goofiest, stupidest thing they can make, well, all of a sudden, in that moment, you are just like two human beings having a good time, and that should be okay. At work, us learn from each other and figure out. Okay, I don't agree with them on everything, but maybe Tom over there, maybe he has an idea about how this could work. That's what we need. We need that institutional knowledge to transfer somehow, and it can't just be through SOPs and internal documentation.

Speaker 3: 22:58

Right, like it's going to have to be that conversation.

Speaker 1: 23:00

Yeah, it has to be. That's the only way. That's really the only way people are going to remember it or actually apply it.

Speaker 3: 23:12

We talked a little bit about, organizations are ripping out the middle, and now we also see there's definitely well, let's not do that and it's just a turmoil across the board. What does all of this mean for someone who maybe has invested years of their life so far just to reach the manager level, and now they've made it, and this is the year they're experiencing? What does this all mean for them? What advice would you give to someone who's in that place?

Speaker 1: 23:41

does this all mean for them? What advice would you give to someone who's in that place? It's difficult, right? Like you spent 10 years trying to climb the ladder and then now the ladder has been abandoned and about to fall over, with you on it, right?

Speaker 3: 23:51

Yeah, it's like the top rungs are gone, the bottom that you were on are gone and now you're just hanging on.

Speaker 1: 23:57

You're like the whole thing rotted out from under me, yeah, but it does mean that you're going to have to be as flexible as you can when it comes to things like upskilling, showing your skills differently, finding ways to play the game in a different way, showcasing your impact essentially on any project or whatever it is that you're working on, ascend in an organization. I'm looking really hard at how I can showcase my outcomes and basically build narratives about how I've been a driving force behind whatever it is we were trying to do and how I integrate tech into my skillset. So you want to be really flexible around that. I work in an editorial space. Right, we are, I would say, in general, we are, I would say, in general, a curmudgeonly bunch. Anyways, editors are not lighthearted and high-spirited people.

Speaker 1: 24:49

most of the time there's always a lot of resistance to anything.

Speaker 2: 24:52

You guys don't have a fun committee there's no fun committee.

Speaker 1: 25:00

The fun committee is occasionally get together, have a few drinks and have a big bitch session. You're constantly trying to understand things in a different way or look at it in a different way, and a lot of this AI stuff does make you go oh, what is this? Oh God. But one of the things that's been tough for everybody is that, essentially, the job as it was five years ago doesn't exist anymore. The term editor is actually starting to mean something different, and you've got to be comfortable with that. You got to be prepared to integrate tech into it. However, you're going to do it, and this is not just our roles. This is across the spectrum of roles within the workforce, whether it's marketing or you're doing coding. The things that you thought were going to be central or core to your work aren't necessarily that anymore, and you're going to have to figure out how you're going to be flexible and adaptable and learn to use this stuff to do it better, quicker, in different ways than you've ever done it before.

Speaker 3: 25:52

Francesca I think I used to say this to you a long time ago where I was, like everyone needs to start to tap into their inner Madonna, who has painted herself like a million times over the last 40 years Got to tap into that right Reinvention.

Speaker 1: 26:09

Yeah, don't be attached to your title. Be attached to things that matter. Your salary matters, it's how you pay your bills. Your title is not how you pay your bills. I've always said you can call me the head schmuck in charge, I don't care. Call me whatever you want. This is what I want to make. This is what I want my benefits package to look like those concrete things that make my life possible. That's what I'm after. You can call me whatever you want, I don't care.

Speaker 3: 26:38

And don't let work define your self-worth.

Speaker 1: 26:40

You shouldn't even really connect it to your worth at all, like at all. One of the things that we did recently was we did a survey about the TV show Severance. We did a survey asking would you get the procedure?

Speaker 2: 26:54

What is Severance about for those that don't?

Speaker 1: 26:56

know. So, essentially, severance is a dystopian workplace drama, in which this company called Lumen Industries, I think it is has created a way so that you can sever your personality between work and your private life, so when you're at work, you don't remember anything about your private life, and when you're in your private life, you don't remember anything about work. It's called your innie and your outie, right, and so you live these two completely separate lives, not knowing, and you just know that you have to go like here at this time kind of thing. So I asked people would you do it? I had been asked by a UK journalist in response to a UK survey that found that 12% of the UK population would do it. So I was like let's see if we can find out a little bit more about the US and Canada. So we did our own version of it, and, for us, 20% said either definitely or they probably would 20%. Wow, 20%.

Speaker 1: 27:52

Here's the really disturbing part, though. We asked people what would be the amount of money that you would need to consider, and almost 70 gave a price only 30. I wouldn't do it for any amount of money. Almost 70 had an amount in which they were like yeah, I'll do it for that I was like oh man, what does that say say about us, when we're at with work, how we're connected to it? People aren't seeing value between what they learn at work and applying it into their life. Every experience I've had informs who I am as a person. That includes what happened at work, not just the stuff that was outside of it. But I think other people aren't maybe seeing the connection or aren't seeing the value of the connection, and that's a little disturbing and sad, quite frankly.

Speaker 2: 28:41

Let's extrapolate that to the US population that 20% of the population wants to hasa dollar amount figure that they would go for to sever their work. Mind it's actually almost a benefit, yeah, To cause yourself a traumatic brain injury.

Speaker 1: 28:57

It's actually almost a benefit, yeah, to cause yourself a traumatic brain injury. That's essentially what it is, if you think about it.

Speaker 2: 29:03

Yeah, it brings a really interesting question around what's the biggest thing that needs to change? If you could change one thing that would make the role of a manager more palatable right now, or at least not want to have to sever some sort of autonomy. Basically, what would need to change?

Speaker 1: 29:26

This isn't just a workplace thing. This is how we all serve, and I'm not to get too political here, but too much of our lives is now dedicated to serving capitalism. Essentially, that's really what it is. This idea that labor unions are bad was the beginning of the end for reasonable behavior about work. And you think about the way Europe constructs work and what their expectations are for people. It's very pretty reasonable.

Speaker 1: 29:59

But in the United States your life is work. Your value to the society is tied to whether or not you have a job and what you do within that job, how much money you make, how much you consume. All of our lives is essentially in some service to capitalism when you really break it down and that would have to change culturally in order for this to get totally better. Because what people are really trying to block out when they answer that question is the way in which they serve it, and they'd almost rather just not remember it than have to deal with all the demands of it and trying to make it match their personal values, Because that's hard. A lot of organizations really don't. How often are you going to find a job that matches your personal values? If you I don't know care about the planet. It's hard Culturally. We just have to shift away from your purpose is to serve the machine, and I don't know if that's going to happen.

Speaker 2: 30:57

I think these Gen B kids are gonna do it.

Speaker 1: 30:59

I have a lot of faith in them. I do? I have a lot they've had a real I'm not gonna put up with this shit kind of attitude and I'm like good for you guys. You know children are our future, yeah we'll see how alpha does when they get there.

Speaker 3: 31:28

We do this thing called wrap it round, where we'll ask you a question. You can respond yes, no or elaborate if you feel so. How do you?

Speaker 1: 31:36

feel All right. Yeah, I'm going to ask anybody I work with. I'm super long-winded all the time, so I'm always going to elaborate.

Speaker 3: 31:43

Let's do that. This is where the juice comes, so we love it. So it's 2030.

Speaker 1: 31:52

What's work going to look like? Well, haven't you heard? We're all going to be wandering around trying to figure out what our purpose is in life. Least you listen to bill gates, right? I do think it'll be very mechanical, like in all respects, like robots will be in the workplace. They've made it to agi the white collar jobs. I don't know if they'll exist or not.

Speaker 1: 32:09

There's this cool thing going around. It's called like ai 2027.com, and somebody ran like a simulation based on all current events and everything, and it was very, I don't know to say, enlightening or disturbing, but it was interesting. Let's just put it that way. I don't know, will white collar jobs exist in five years? Maybe, but this goes all the way up to the ceo, right, because strategy is a skill like it'll do that better, it'll do decision making better, supposedly. Yeah, creative tasks you go right down the list, and they may even do some of the blue collar stuff too, better too. I was saying to somebody recently that old saying plumbers rule the world. They do, I don't, I do, they do. And I don't know if it'll do plumbing as well.

Speaker 3: 32:51

So maybe plumbing is the thing to get into someone who lives in an old house in new england. I don't know if AI is going to be able to navigate it like Joe.

Speaker 1: 33:02

Yeah, because Joe has just been rigging that thing for years.

Speaker 3: 33:06

He's been in every janky house. He knows how to navigate around here. It's so interesting you say that as you respond about Shopify's CEO, who is asking everyone to justify hiring for humans and to showcase what they consider to use AI first before they put in human bodies.

Speaker 2: 33:24

We're always trying to see that. I read that same memo.

Speaker 3: 33:27

Yeah, yeah, okay, let's move on to something a little more fun, a little more personal. What music are you listening to right now? What's hyping you up?

Speaker 1: 33:36

It's spring and I'm going through this like reliving of my college music listening, and I'm listening to a lot of like early to mid 2000s indie hip hop at the moment Indie hip hop. Yeah, what do you?

Speaker 2: 33:47

consider indie hip hop.

Speaker 1: 33:49

Oh God, jedi mind tricks and yeah, like stuff that was like not on the radio at the time, so it was like very, we used to call it underground. Now they just label it indie, same thing as they do with rock music.

Speaker 3: 34:04

What are you reading or listening to right now?

Speaker 1: 34:08

I started this book called the Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It's about American history. They present it as seasons it's like 80 to 100 year cycles, and it presents the idea that we are currently in a historical winter, which is a very difficult time, and spring will eventually come. But it breaks down the last hundred years as like examples of these seasons. I can't speak too much about it. I've only just started it.

Speaker 3: 34:34

It's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting to see the patterns and maybe what to look out for.

Speaker 1: 34:39

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 34:40

Now I'm curious did you get to the part where are we in winter, Because it feels like we're like Minnesota January.

Speaker 1: 34:47

I think we're all just to that point where it's like the post-Christmas depression.

Speaker 3: 34:54

Like I got bills and I'm on a holiday hangover.

Speaker 1: 34:58

You're just like I don't know. At least the football playoffs are on. I can just eat chicken wings whenever I want.

Speaker 3: 35:07

Who do you really admire?

Speaker 1: 35:09

Former Liverpool FC manager, jurgen Klopp, is one of my favorite people in the world. I look up to him a great deal, not just because I'm a big supporter of the football club itself, but because he's an incredible example of what a leader could be, and he's just an example of how to transform culture and, honestly, just a lovely human being.

Speaker 3: 35:30

Okay, what's a piece of advice you wish everyone knew?

Speaker 1: 35:35

I was once given a really valuable piece of advice that I think is great for leaders and really anyone working with other human beings to remember, and it's that you can't expect something you've learned through experience to be common sense for somebody else. And it's just one of those things like you think why wouldn't they do that? So you didn't know how to do that. Always, like, eventually, you learn that because you broke the thing or you made the mistake, and so don't expect anybody else to just know that because you think it's a thing that you're supposed to know.

Speaker 2: 36:16

All right, David, so awesome to talk with you today. Thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker 1: 36:19

Yeah, yeah, I hope I didn't ramble, too much. No, it's awesome?

Speaker 3: 36:22

Not at all, not at all. And hey, how can our listeners best connect with you Of?

Speaker 1: 36:26

course, you can get in touch with me on LinkedIn. I'm easy enough to find on there. Be sure to check out to the People Managing People podcast. I'm the host on there. If you come over to peoplemanagingpeoplecom, you can get signed up for the newsletter and I'm always sending on a regular basis, a couple of times a week, different messages from us, and then come to one of our events. That's what I really recommend. Our next one is dedicated to RTO mandates. It's on April 24th, but, yeah, give me a follow and don't hesitate to reach out. Awesome, all right, thanks for being here.

Speaker 2: 36:56

Thank you to reach out Awesome.

Speaker 1: 36:56

All right, thanks for being here, thank you.

Speaker 3: 36:59

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.

Overcoming the Broken Rung

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Broken Rung with Lareina Yee

The Broken Rung isn’t just a metaphor—it’s the career barrier keeping women from advancing from day one. We sat down with Lareina Yee, Senior Partner at McKinsey and co-author of The Broken Rung, to talk about why fixing this early career promotion gap could close the gender equity gap in a single generation.

We cover the data, the hidden career tax women face, the power of experience capital, and why sponsorship—not mentorship—is the game-changer leaders need to embrace now. Whether you are navigating your own career or leading others, this is a must-listen playbook for how to advance, advocate, and unlock opportunity at every level.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

I'm Mel Plett, talent strategist coach and someone who survived big law, big four and more than a few broken org charts. I'm Francesca.

Speaker 2: 0:07

I've led people strategy at Nike and Deloitte. I like my advice how I like my coffee strong and no bullshit.

Speaker 1: 0:11

We host your work, friends. The podcast that breaks work down, so you stay ahead.

Speaker 2: 0:15

We talk work stuff, the human stuff, the awkward messy, what the f*** is actually happening stuff. Each week we drop new episodes with real talk, smart guests, fresh insights and straight up advice. Hit play. We've got you Ahas and ahas and, yeah, the occasional F-bomb or two. We had a really interesting conversation, we did.

Speaker 1: 0:48

We were able to speak with Lorena Yee, one of the co-authors of the Broken Rung. Lorena is a senior partner at McKinsey Company and she advises companies on growth technology and transformation. She also co-founded the Women in the Workplace Study with leaninorg. That's what made us reach out to her, as we were fascinated. We covered that a few months ago in New Week New Headlines and then, obviously, the Broken Rung book came out and in that report they're highlighting all of the challenges that women are facing in corporate America.

Speaker 1: 1:22

Lorena also chairs McKinsey's Technology Council and hosts the podcast At the Edge, where she talks about technology trends. And then, beyond her professional role, she's a mom of three and she serves on the board of San Francisco's Ballet. But this was an awesome episode. She is talking about one of the earliest career barriers that women face, which is this broken rung and ways that we can overcome it together. In this book I think you and I both said it was covered cover to cover with yellow highlighter from all of the stats that we were reading- yeah, I ran out of highlighter while I was reading this book.

Speaker 2: 1:56

The thing for me is we've had the glass ceiling. We know pay parity is not there yet and probably won't be for our lifetime, and what was so interesting was this early career issue that they have really nailed on. Even if you're not early career, even if you're not a woman, the thing about this book is it is a playbook for how to get ahead in your career If you're a woman, if you're a man, if you're gender non-binary. This book is absolutely packed with how do you get ahead when you have everything against you, and it is a must read for anybody, especially in corporate America. We love talking with her. We focus a lot about women here, but I think it can apply to anybody.

Speaker 1: 2:42

One of the things that really stood out to me is this isn't just a playbook. If you're in your early career, it's identifying when this starts, but it is. It does give you information, no matter where you are, whether you're just starting out, you're in the messy middle or if you're like towards the end of in thinking about your next move. She gives you ways that you can think about how to level up. The other thing for me that was so interesting was the concept of if we were able to fix this broken rung at the start of a woman's career, then we could have parity in a generation versus 150 plus years. So that, to me, was super powerful. I'm just going to read a quote from the book Lorena mentioned was this is not just a women's issue, as you point out. It's an issue for our whole society and the global economy. So read the book, listen to the episode. Here's Lorena.

Speaker 2: 3:46

All right, loretta. For those of us that haven't heard about this concept of the broken run, I'm wondering if you can explain it to our listeners, like a five-year-old. What?

Speaker 3: 3:55

is the broken run. You start work, you landed the job and you find that pretty much men and women are pretty equal. When you look around the room, right, 48% women entering the corporate pipeline in the United States, for example, and similarly globally. But guess what? Time for the first promotion. And here's the rub For every 100 men who have the odds of getting that promotion, only 81 women see those same odds of advancement. And that's the broken rung. That very first step on the career ladder is broken and it comes up fast.

Speaker 2: 4:33

What was so interesting to me so much of the time we're thinking about women, advancement, we're thinking about it manager on up, how do we get people to a C-suite or a VP? Because it's happening at this manager level. We're not getting people into these upper echelons. And I thought what's so interesting about your research is that this is happening very early and if you don't nail it early or don't look at it early, it has this kind of compounding effect on your career. What about that keeps you up at night?

Speaker 3: 5:05

your career. What about that keeps you up at night? All of it. By focusing on the broken rung, I wouldn't want to take attention away from the fact that people will call that middle layer, francesca, like the messy middle, the frozen middle, that piece of it or the glass ceiling. Let's be clear that still exists, and whilst we've made progress in corporate America, as an example, when I founded Women in the Workplace, we were 19% women reporting to CEOs at the C-suite. Now we're at 29%, so we're really close to 30. So that's great, but we're all really good at math. That's not parity, that's not 50%, that doesn't represent the population. So we've got challenges across the whole talent pipeline or ladder, however you want to visualize it.

Speaker 3: 5:49

I think the challenge with the middle, though the math, is that you've already lost a lot of women, or they've gotten stuck or they're stalled. It's not entirely clear exactly what happens to all those women, because some of them don't leave the workforce altogether, but let's just say largely stalled and stuck. So you are already in the middle, dealing with probably something around 37% women. You're already dealing with a smaller population, trying to put it in slates, so you're just so many steps behind, and I do think to the early broken rung.

Speaker 3: 6:25

I do think it catches women by surprise and it may even happen and they didn't even realize it, because it's not like an exam where they publish the results. You don't know where you are on the curve and it may have been a delay by a year, six months, two years, or maybe you decided to go somewhere else and so some of these types of things may not be completely perceptible, but I think when you talk to women over the course of 20, 30 years in work and they think back, they're like huh. And when we look at the data year over year, it shows that same phenomenon. Maybe it's 84 women, maybe it's 81, maybe 79. It's bouncing around a little bit, but it's nowhere near parity.

Speaker 2: 7:06

I want to dive into that. Why that first promotion? Why is that so critical for people to really focus on?

Speaker 3: 7:15

There are a lot of things. One, if you just think of a merit-based view, you want to actually be rewarded for the work you do. So there's a simple thing. There's also financially. You're not just working to work for the benefit of society and you may feel very mission oriented, you may feel very purpose filled and you may feel incredible pride for what you do, but you're also there for your economic earnings. And to earn less through differences in promotion is another type of tax on top of a general phenomenon we see in terms of a wage disparity between women and men. It's another form. But the other thing is let's just think about a talented woman who, by and large women graduate at higher rates than men for undergraduate degrees and by and large, with higher GPAs. And so you've got a talented woman. She's doing all the right things and missing maybe by a year, maybe two or three years, that first promotion is missing her ability to reach her full professional potential, and careers in life are long and those delays have almost compound effects over time.

Speaker 2: 8:32

And we haven't even hit motherhood yet. This is the thing that I read in the book the idea of the motherhood tax, where we'll talk about it a little bit longer. But for every kid that someone has, they get taxed. More and more Theirathers get a bonus for having kids. It's phenomenal, it's absolutely phenomenal.

Speaker 3: 8:50

I mean, we've all been in the meeting where the mom is rushing to go to the soccer game and everyone's like okay, fine, maybe even non-event, not even like eyebrow raising. And then the guy is I've got to go. Same thing, I've got to go, I've got to get to the soccer game at 430. And people are like high five, you're amazing. And, by the way, do I think it's amazing that dad is leaving for the soccer game, a hundred percent, I'm just saying that. I equally think it's a high five moment for the woman to leave as well.

Speaker 1: 9:17

Yeah, it is. Eye roll for the woman oh, gotta go again. And then for the guy it's good for you, you're such a good dad. Yeah, you're a leader. You're a leader. I want to talk about experience capital. That was one of my favorite parts of the book because I agree it's totally needed. But can you share with our listeners what is experience capital?

Speaker 3: 9:40

What's that concept?

Speaker 3: 9:41

So the punchline is 50% of your lifetime earnings come from what you gain on the job, and the reason this is important is you look at many women and, as I mentioned earlier, women outperform in school, they graduate at higher rates, particularly in the United States, and oftentimes they're graduating with higher GPAs and so they have done the first part really well.

Speaker 3: 10:06

But when we just look at representation nevermind how the experience feels, which we have a lot of data on as well, it's women are not succeeding to their potential in the workplace, at least if you look at representation, right, and so the idea of experience capital is if you were really great at school, how do you apply what helped you be wonderful at school to managing intentionally your portfolio of experiences that drive both the economic outcomes for you, your livelihood, but also your professional opportunities, and so you think about choosing your major, choosing your classes, getting an A. How do you be purposeful in making those decisions, in accumulating the experiences that matter, not just the job in front of you, which certainly is important, but what is the accumulation of experience over time, and can you get it earlier? Because it pays to get it earlier often, and bigger.

Speaker 1: 11:13

Can you do that in a way that sets you up really well for a lifetime of work? One of the things that you called out that I really love too was, as part of gaining that experience capital, was making sure you gain some of that experience capital, unlike the P&L side of the house and like really being deep into the business. So for anyone listening, p&l, profit and loss, that's one example. But what are some of those examples of like business side? So, say you're, I have a very strong HR background, by the way, but to be in strategic HR, I had to get that experience pretty early. So how can folks who aren't traditionally like on that business side, how can they gain that very important business experience capital and what does that mean? How is it different when you think about the experience capital you do gain? How does that differently set them up financially down the road?

Speaker 3: 12:00

Sure, Well, let's take your career as an example, and I might be getting parts of that wrong, but you have a passion for HR and a lot of women will connect with work to where they feel purpose, where they feel talent and being an aspiring alley, which is a P&L role maybe sales, maybe product, maybe in a business unit. That experience GM. But it is to say that having that experience short long at some point will make you better at whatever you want to do. The other thing is if you aspire to be a CEO to the chip tracker idea, the pink chip one year we looked at it, 95% of the CEOs that year we looked at it all came from P&L. So like virtually impossible, very unlikely, that if you haven't had P&L experience and you realize, understandably, halfway through your career that you aspire to be a CEO, this is going to be a central part. So that's one experience. Another piece of experience capital is entrepreneurship and people think that's just being a founder and yes, that's amazing. Both of you have founded this. That's entrepreneurship. But I bet both of you also were entrepreneurs in the companies that you were in before and it's a huge skill that makes a difference. How do you take initiative, how do you lead? How do you invent Versus? Here's the thing that I was given and I've checked all the boxes, so entrepreneurship is a huge piece.

Speaker 3: 13:50

The other thing that we talk about is skill differentiation. We call that bold moves, and so if you look at one job to a next job and it could be within the same company right, You're doing different roles. Bold moves are where you do a 25% or more skill difference between your former job and your new job, and women who take two, three big bold moves over their career have outsized impact, both economically as well as their ability to progress. So there are more, but just maybe to pause, take a deep breath. There are a lot of things we can do that are super concrete that help us build experience capital. And if you're young in your career gosh, you got to build that early and often. And if you're a little older in your career you know me, or like middle age, think about the experience capital you need to maybe pivot or do something new or to expand even more opportunities. It's a huge piece.

Speaker 1: 14:47

I appreciate that because I think a lot of folks forget that you can have an entrepreneurial experience while you're in an organization. It's like looking for those project opportunities where you can gain that skill set. For somebody who might be more of an introvert I'm an ambivert right, so it takes a lot of effort to reach out for those experiences and that sort of thing. Maybe they don't have a flashy or visible role. What's a way that they can start to advocate for themselves, to begin to build that experience capital?

Speaker 3: 15:19

I think, first of all, you've got to play to your strengths. So you may see someone who's an extrovert, very charismatic, maybe an athlete, so she happens to play golf which tends to be helpful in a male world and you're not in all cases. She's out in the golf course and you're just like that's not me and first of all, good for her, she should go with all those strengths. But you're like that's not me and first of all, good for her, she should go with all the strengths, right. But you're like how do I meet other people if I'm different? So I think there's one thing which is to know yourself and build off your strengths.

Speaker 3: 15:54

I remember early in my career being in consulting. My strength was the data and the analysis that I was doing and part of the credibility was really just the work itself. But the work is a basis to have a conversation with others and a basis to build trust. And then you start maybe building a relationship and entrepreneurship is following up. I remember meeting just this amazing executive and I was like you're just so like you're a role model, and I didn't say that. But then I remember just keeping in touch with her over time. Not a ton, I was whatever, maybe 10 levels more junior to her, but I remember when I was leaving Asia, moving back to the US, she was the last person that I had kind of coffee with who was a client, before I left. You've got to do it in your own style, but I think you do need to be purposeful and, for those who are analytic, write it down. Write down who do you work with, who you have a connection and network with, who have you worked with before that you could rekindle. If you're kind of customer or client facing, or if you're supply chain facing, who's outside of your organization and also maybe people from school. So how do you think about building those networks? And just make sure that we know that women tend to have more narrow, more junior networks. Just make sure that over time it's not going to happen overnight, but over time you invest in building some more senior networks.

Speaker 3: 17:28

I know one guy that I talked to joined this nonprofit board and I invested my personal time and I spent time and had lunch with every single board member, all of which were at least a decade more advanced in their career than me, and I built this local network. He said so when you join a board, you join a nonprofit board. This is what you should do, and I was like I didn't even think about that. I'm so busy just trying to get through my day. It didn't occur to me to like schedule lunch with each person on the board, get to know them, build a relationship. And it was true. I looked at the list and I was like I am the most junior person from a professional person on this board, so there are lots of ways you can do it, yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:10

I think it's. Yeah, finding your little avenue is going to be the most important. What works for you. I think folks sometimes can equate being outgoing as the folks who get the opportunity, but you don't have to fit that niche to get the same kind of experience capital you're talking about.

Speaker 3: 18:24

And some really senior people are quite introverted themselves, right? So that's not, you would find a connection.

Speaker 1: 18:34

Yeah, you'll find some kinsmanship in that, for sure. I wanted to talk about the sponsorship versus mentorship because something that really stood out to me in the Women in the Workplace report was that women are overly mentored and we're undersponsored significantly. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Speaker 3: 18:56

Yeah. So one thing is maybe just to define the difference, because sometimes I just feel like we don't have the facts to make the decision. So mentorship is Francesca, you're my mentor, I identify with you. You go to coffee. If I have a bad day or something didn't happen quite right on a project, you empathize and you give me some suggestions on how to think about it. But, mel, if you're my sponsor, you do everything Francesca does. But you also open windows and doors for me and that may be as explicit as you are actually putting me up for promotion, but it could be more everyday actions. Like Mel, you say Lorena, I know you've been working really hard on this. Why don't you come to the meeting and why don't you present? And I remember there's this really amazing sponsor we do a sponsor award at McKinsey and one of the winners.

Speaker 3: 19:54

There's this story that he faked a bloody nose because he knew that the client was like, wanted him to be there. He faked a bloody nose and he wants her to go so that the woman partner who is up for senior partner would present but also be seen as like super senior. It's like he was an actor. Everybody thought he had a bloody nose, medical reason to leave, but no bloody nose. He actually was just creating truly an opportunity for her to shine. By the way, she became one of the co-leaders of the client and all these great things happen.

Speaker 3: 20:29

You can do that on a Tuesday at four, on a Friday at nine. These are not hard things and so when you think about, and if you're senior and you're listening to this, how do you open doors and windows for others? But it can be very subtle things that help and it can be really being there in the moment to say this person should be on the slate and really helping you get promoted or keeping in touch with you and offering you an opportunity somewhere else. Women are just under-sponsored and maybe also it's not as clear how to develop sponsor relationships. But I think it's like women. If you put your mind to it, you can do it.

Speaker 1: 21:07

If you realize this is something that's as important as delivering your quota or whatever your MBOs are or OKRs, and you think about it as something you do a little bit every quarter over time you'll have a really powerful senior network something that stood out to me in the book was and I'm paraphrasing, but it was essentially the biggest issue with this broken rung is, once the first rung is broken, it just has this compounding sort of domino effect, right, because now there's less women at each stage to continue to sponsor other women up. But men can be sponsors too not trying to leave them out of the conversation, right? And the other powerful thing that you said in the book was that if we can repair this first rung, it'll help us repair all of the subsequent rungs, which could help us really fix this issue or bring parity within a generation, which is huge because that within one generation is 10 years versus 150 years. But how important is sponsorship, or what level of does sponsorship play, and the importance of fixing that first rung?

Speaker 3: 22:23

All of the above. So if 70% of the C-suite are men, then it's really important that men are sponsors in your network to percent women at the starting gate. And then we dropped down in the middle and the VP layers down to 38, et cetera, et cetera, and at the top for the SVP layers and the C-suite, we are at 29%. So it's almost like a math thing because you just have fewer women in the talent pool overall. So if I were to say I'd like to see equal men and women on the slate, that's actually something that is a little hard to accomplish because you actually have maybe a third, maybe 40% each level. You have fewer women. And so I think if we sometimes what we talk about for companies that are trying to work on this is you have a funnel, you need to have a pipe. So a really healthy company starts with a percentage of women and you would have that same percentage mirrored across all the talent levels. That would be really healthy.

Speaker 3: 23:47

Many years ago I met a tech company who was like it's just so hard, et cetera, et cetera. The classic we don't have engineers. But one thing we told them that really surprised them. I said you have a top beginning funnel problem. Yeah, you're at something.

Speaker 3: 24:00

I think they were maybe 38, 37% women at the entry, so that's not good, but interestingly enough, they had that pipe. I said so you're doing something right really well, which most of your peers are not, which is you're able to retain them. You do have a bit of a drop off at the top, but that's really amazing. So for you, if you actually could fix the entry level, you clearly have a culture that supports women in a very natural way. You are in great shape and they were like gosh. I thought we were going to have this meeting. You're going to be an awful report card and I said, yeah, I mean you're starting out ranks not so good, but actually there's some really good stuff there. For companies that want to change, you have to just take a look at your data and say, just as you would any kind of business problem, where would be the two or three most important interventions? Where, if I fix this, it would really change in one generation? And I think for companies who are very determined to do this, it's possible.

Speaker 1: 25:02

It's interesting too, speaking of what companies can do, because you mentioned, mckinsey has their sponsorship award, which I love to hear, and we've worked in talent forever, so you always hear about the mentorship program, but rarely do I hear about a formal sponsorship program. What have you seen work really well in terms of programs that support the sponsorship for this kind of success?

Speaker 3: 25:25

I think, a couple things. It's important to say that whilst women tend to feel over-mentored, under-sponsored, there are men who also feel this way. If you de-average it, maybe the men who don't have the classic archetypical attributes or men of color. So there can be, when you de-average, lots of people need this. So a couple of things. One is going from a spiritual agreement that sponsorship is a good idea to actually creating a program. So program means that you actually define mentorship, sponsorship. Program means that you actually track the data. For some you may actually hold them accountable, not like a quota, like you have to have X number of sponsor ease or mentors, but as part of how you think have to have X number of sponsorees or mentors, but as part of how you think of good leadership, as part of the equation. If you have the data, if you have the qualitative and what you value gets measured in some way.

Speaker 3: 26:19

So I'm not suggesting like a one for one. You only get promoted if you're a sponsor. We all know that and you all both know very well. Like when you think about leadership, there's a way that kind of goes into your reviews and potentially your compensation, your feedback, how you're viewed. I think you build it in yeah, you built it in a hundred percent and then you may have some programs that kind of activate it.

Speaker 3: 26:43

But I think you really commit to a culture of sponsorship, which the insane thing to me is it helps. It's like your classic all boats rise, everyone benefits everyone. And if there are women, as the human population will have, who are not good sponsors, it's good. They will, as leaders, learn to be good sponsors. Men will learn to be good sponsors and sometimes for men and I've seen this when they see their data and they realize they don't have a single woman that they sponsor, they will autocorrect that themselves. It's not like they woke up and said how can I not have any women as sponsors? Sometimes data is like an incredible amount of sunlight for people to do the right thing.

Speaker 2: 27:42

I want to talk about motherhood and navigating career transitions with motherhood. You mentioned in the book that motherhood could actually be a boost to your career, and it's not something we typically hear. Can you talk a little bit more about how it can boost your career?

Speaker 3: 27:58

Yeah, so that's not an easy thing. In the chapter we do really spend a bit of time on Claudia Goldman's Nobel Prize economist. We do want to make sure that a lot of the research that she's done gets proper understanding in terms of biases towards women and terms of a motherhood penalty and all of those things. With that said, it is hard. I think part of it was squeezing out and looking at stories where women can succeed inside of it and, for me, also a little bit of a search for the urban legend to see if it's true. So one of the stories that you saw was a woman.

Speaker 3: 28:38

The phrase that I've always used is make sure you pack a round trip ticket, not just to leave to go on parental leave, but also to come back and to come back with intention. Leave to go on parental leave, but also to come back and to come back with intention. Part of that would be building your network and thinking about your skills, moderating your time, all these types of things. And one of the stories in the book is a woman who was a rising star lawyer. As she had her first kid, she made the decision to actually be a full-time mom. She's an amazing mom raised three boys. 14 years into that, she exercised her round trip ticket. She went back and she did a reboarding program. Some companies, not all, offer this, but LinkedIn offered it. She got back into the workforce and is a rising star lawyer at LinkedIn and I just think this concept that we measure it in very zero one ways Okay, I had the baby, I'm having the baby, I take my paid maternity or parental leave, I come back. I think there are variations to make that work for you. So that's one story that I was very inspired by.

Speaker 3: 29:45

The other thing is would you use the policies as ingredients to bake your own cake, would you say? Look, in my company there's the parental leave and I see a lot of mostly dual career couples. We see a lot more of women and men under 40 are dual career, whereas baby boomers tend to be more like a single person leading the household. Let's use the woman and the partner's parental leave to maximize it. How do we, how do we go slow, go fast across that portfolio? Like really sharing with your partner the chutes and ladders of a career? We see also like how do you use some of the part-time? How to use rotations to kickstart your next bold move, like maybe you're like, okay, I'm going to do the thing that I really know how to do in an excellent way and I'm going to do it at 80%, but then actually, when my littlest one is in school, hits three, I'm going to take a bold move and I'm going to do this. Or, by the way, I'm going to actually invest in a bunch of technology skills and pilots and things because I'm going to make a bold move.

Speaker 3: 30:54

And these are just like excessive examples. How do you apply really intentional thinking to that time as opposed to gosh? This is just the discount time. And also back to the network point, I think and I don't think this is as much in the book, but I think having a peer network when you're a young mom at least for me personally I see you nodding, being able to call someone who was working full time, who had kids under 10, like me, and just to say I've had the hardest week in that time. I didn't need a sponsor, I didn't need a mentor, I just needed a friend to say, yeah, it's really hard with you.

Speaker 2: 31:41

Yeah, it's tough, right. I remember this is a little bit maybe TMI, but I always go there is. I remember I was at the point where I was breastfeeding and I was still working and shipping my milk back until it was really great about that, like freezing it and shipping it back home, which is amazing and lovely. But I remember just feeling touched out, vultured because I was getting it at work and I was literally having the call with her while my pump was going and I felt totally okay with it.

Speaker 3: 32:06

But she knew both of my lives and you really do need that, that feeling of someone gets you A little grace Like I think you have to set the pace of your own career versus expect others, and both of you have done that in your careers. But there may be times where you're like I'm going 60 miles an hour and by the way I've structured it and my expectations are that, and then there are times I'm doubling down and going super fast and I'm going to do a bold move and a this and a that, and so I don't. I don't think it's a linear climb and actually when we look at men who are very successful underneath it, it wasn't so I just. When we look at men who are very successful underneath it, it wasn't so I just I think it's. We try. Sometimes perfection can be the enemy of progress. That phrase and maybe redefine what perfection is.

Speaker 3: 32:58

At certain moments of your career, I took a really long first parental leave and I was really fortunate to be in a dual career situation so I could afford to. But I was really young, I wasn't even 30 yet and I really I just wanted to learn how to be a mom for a while. I wanted to take nine months off and at that time paid leave was not six weeks, single digits or something like that that's also betting on yourself and taking a risk. It's saying I'm confident that when I'm ready to go back, that job will be there and I may have missed something. But I actually, as a gift not just to my child but also to myself, would like to learn how to be a mom for a bit and enjoy it.

Speaker 2: 33:47

The beautiful thing about the book, though, is it does give you the playbook, for if you're going to make those choices which are totally great to make that there are other moves you can make that won't make that choice, just like a lifelong decision to write. I feel like this idea of these are your options, these are the ways you can put it in sixth gear, pull it down to third gear, make a right turn, make a left turn and create a beautiful career for yourself and a great life too, because I feel like I'm not saying you can balance everything all the time and have everything you want, but you can sure as hell be way more intentional about it and get to where you want to go in a way that maybe was linear to your point.

Speaker 3: 34:34

And some of those basics matter. I remember we talk about negotiation. People always think negotiation is just your pay, by the way, women tend not to negotiate. So, hi, pro tip, do negotiate. But negotiation is also other types of things.

Speaker 3: 34:46

So I remember because we didn't have at the time this was 22 years ago we didn't have the type of programs and I was actually not even in the United States, and so I remember talking to the office manager and saying look, I know that this isn't the typical thing, but I'd really like to take nine months, maybe more off, but I actually am super committed to coming back and I will stay in touch. And when I came back, they were like that's hard and consulting, and you were flying out. And I said, look, just for my first thing, back for my first month, can you just help me do something local so that I just don't get straight on an airplane and whatever that is, I'll do it. Any industry, any team, that would be such a gift and that's part of negotiating how you come back. He said got it, let's do. That Turns out to the entrepreneurship we were working on something that became a huge local client and because I worked on it and worked really hard with all these other folks, some of which I didn't know already.

Speaker 3: 35:54

We actually had all these sort of. I had a year where I didn't get on the airplane, and part of it is a little bit of a little bit of luck, a little bit of negotiating, asking that's. That's a positive negotiation. I will work really hard, but could you help me not reduce travel just for a little bit, and then we'll sort it out. Just give me a sec to rebase. I'm still the person that you loved and valued before. I didn't think at the time. It takes courage to do that, but it does take some courage to have that conversation and you do need to work in an environment where that conversation would be received well, not to make too much of the example, but I do think in the book there are all these women who make it work in spite of, and so there's a lot of data, mel, as you mentioned, but for me I think the stories are just really inspirational about what are the tactical things they did to get from A to B.

Speaker 2: 36:49

Yeah, a lot of great moves. I think it's required reading, quite honestly, to think about how do you really own your career, and own your career as a woman? Just you got to read up.

Speaker 1: 37:00

You got to read up. Keeping it simple for our listeners, especially those who might be like am I already part of the broken rung? Do I need to address this? What's one thing they can do next week to get back on track?

Speaker 3: 37:16

reframe. You're not off track. You are always on track and there's always opportunity in front of you, and betting on yourself is always a good bet. So look ahead and what's your next move? Do you want to go to the power alley? Do you want to exercise entrepreneurship? Do you want to build in the skills that matter for the future, the 12 million occupations that we know will shift by 2030. Do you want to increase your network? Pick one, pick one, just pick one and get started.

Speaker 1: 37:53

I love that. I love that concept that you're never off track. You're never off track. Yeah, we're just all taking fun side quests.

Speaker 3: 38:04

How much you have already. Yeah, I, your portfolio just may look a little different than that guy next door to you, and that's okay. Really, what are you good at? What do you have? Where does that point you? And then start opening the windows and doors yourself. Go get people to help you. Yeah, I love it. You can do it.

Speaker 1: 38:28

What about leaders? If you're a leader leading a team and this is information new and for maybe it's new information for somebody listening today what's something that they can take away or start to do to analyze and make sure that they're being a good sponsor or they're recognizing that they might be holding people back. How can they support not holding them back or pushing them forward?

Speaker 3: 38:54

The first thing is to maybe just mark a couple of like a piece of data or story that that honestly struck you very authentically. Doesn't need to be many, just one or two. And I would go share that with a man and a woman on your team and just say I was reading this since stopped me in my tracks. What do you think? Do you think we have a fair workplace? Do you feel the opportunities are the same? And the man might say I feel over-mentored, under-sponsored. You're like that's good feedback, but pro tip, does any of this resonate with you? I just start with that. Just start locally, in your own community and neighborhood.

Speaker 1: 39:40

Starting the conversation. Let's just have the conversation.

Speaker 3: 39:50

Yeah, and I think the other thing a leader can de-risk what feel like high stakes conversations, and opening to have the conversation, to listen, to learn, is huge. There's a story of a woman who was in the creative arts. She was in performing arts in New York and she had an underlying mindset that if you are creative it's okay to be disorganized, because that kind of comes with being creative. And she didn't even know that this was an underlying mindset. But she was super disorganized and she had her baby a couple months old and for women who remember or who have had babies in that early stage, there's very few windows. If you live in New York City, you can get that baby outside and take the baby for a walk before the baby needs to eat and nap. And so she missed the whole window because she was so disorganized. She was like, oh my God, where's the diapers? Where's this, where's that? She missed the window and she was so disorganized she's like, oh my God, where's the diapers? Where's this, where's that? She missed the window. And then the baby's crying and she describes and I've talked to her about this also personally she describes looking at this wonderful child's face and saying, kiddo, this isn't going to work.

Speaker 3: 40:53

So not only that's a point of deep failure, like I think for me.

Speaker 3: 40:57

I'm like, oh my god, I would have been in a ball and tears and like that just sounds awful and we've all been there.

Speaker 3: 41:04

Anyway, the reason I mentioned this is because it's a very relatable moment. But from that moment, not only does she become really good at organizing, she builds a business to organize other executives, both men and women. She writes two New York Times bestseller books or more, and she has this whole career where she actually helps people with their operating models, with their leadership. But it starts with the wedge of what was a point of failure became a point of strength, became a point of building a business, became a point of giving to others and helping others not organize how they get their walks for their babies, but like thinking about how the softer skills help you be a better leader, the full set of softer skills. And she's no longer in performing arts, she's in corporate America and I just I also just wanted to share that sometimes both men and women are so afraid to make a mistake and there's a lot in the zeitgeist about that. But I do think you never know, like, how do you take that in as a pivot point to something else we'll run on.

Speaker 1: 42:26

I'm gonna start with some high-level questions. They can be one word responses, or one sentence, two sentences, whatever you feel most confident with, but the whole point is just to get your immediate reaction to the question. Okay, ready to dive in, ready? Okay, it's 2030. What's work going to look like? It will be AI powered. Okay, what's one thing about corporate culture you'd like to see disappear for good? Bias, thank you. What's the greatest opportunity that most organizations are missing out on right now?

Speaker 3: 42:57

Women, young women, even better answer.

Speaker 1: 43:02

What music are you listening to right now?

Speaker 3: 43:05

Oh, I really like Bruno Mars and his collaborations, many of which are women artists, but I do really love the collaborations.

Speaker 1: 43:13

I like his new stuff too. It's like fun, yeah, so good. What are you reading, and that could be physically reading or listening to an audio book right now?

Speaker 3: 43:25

I am obsessed with AI podcasts, so yeah.

Speaker 1: 43:29

What's your favorite AI podcast? What do you recommend?

Speaker 3: 43:32

Oh, I really like no Priors and Training Data from Sequoia and the Possible podcast. And of course, I think everyone in tech listens to Hard Fork. I'd be remiss not to mention Hard Fork, but that's kind of obvious.

Speaker 2: 43:47

Love that.

Speaker 1: 43:50

Perfect, who do?

Speaker 3: 43:54

you really admire the 11% women CEOs of the world Each and every one of them. For everything that they're doing and for being a pioneer Awesome.

Speaker 1: 44:07

We recommend all the time on this podcast that people start to follow. I'm sure you do, but the organization Pink Chip that's tracking all of the global female CEOs and their success. So, yeah, any chance I can to plug it, I like to bring it back up. Good plug. Yeah, what's a piece of advice you want everyone to know?

Speaker 3: 44:26

Build your networks make sure they're powerful networks and people who are going to be your personal board of directors. I love that.

Speaker 1: 44:34

All right. Last thing, where can listeners follow? You stay abreast of all of the goodness and new research that you have coming out on this topic. What's the what's the best? Obviously, read the book. We're going to link to that but how can they continue to stay informed beyond reading the book?

Speaker 3: 44:53

All of our gender and research. On mckinseycom, you can search under my name or just search under the topics. We have 10 years of women in the workplace, so there's a lot of data in there. And I'm on LinkedIn and I've been trying to be better at posting thoughts and sharing things that are interesting. You all can give me the feedback. You're like, nah, it's not really working, but it'd be good if you were more. But I'm focused on LinkedIn me the feedback. You're like nah, it's not really working, but it'd be good if you were more but I'm focused on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: 45:26

This has been so lovely. Lorena, thank you for joining us. Oh, thank you. Both Appreciate you. 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 yourworkfriendscom, 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.

The Power of Mattering

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Power of Mattering with Zach Mercurio

This episode is for anyone who has ever questioned their worth or forgotten the impact they have on others. We sat down with Zach Mercurio to explore what happens when people truly feel seen, valued, and significant. Whether you are the one needing the reminder or the one in a position to give it, this conversation unpacks why mattering is not soft, it is essential.

From how we lead and collaborate to how we show up for our families and friends, we all rise when people know they count. If you have been feeling invisible or want to create spaces where others feel seen, this is the episode to hit play.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:05

I'm Mel Plett, talent strategist coach and someone who survived Big Law, big Four and more than a few broken org charts.

Speaker 2: 0:11

I'm Francesca. I've led people strategy at Nike and Deloitte. I like my advice how I like my coffee strong and no bullshit. We host your work friends, the podcast that breaks work down so you stay ahead. We talk work stuff. The human stuff, the awkward messy, what the f*** is actually happening, stuff Each week we drop new episodes with real talk, smart guests, fresh insights and straight-up advice Hit, play. We've got you, yeah, the occasional F-bomb or two.

Speaker 1: 0:37

Hey, this is your Work, friends podcast. I'm Mel Plett and I'm Francesca Ranieri. We're breaking down work, so you stay ahead, Francesca. What's going on?

Speaker 3: 0:50

Not much. Summer's full rolling Went to an airplane house.

Speaker 1: 0:53

You sent me those pictures of the airplane house and I'm intrigued. I want to see the inside. Sounds interesting.

Speaker 3: 0:59

Yeah, For those that don't know, in the Portland area there's a guy that. For those that don't know, in the Portland area, there's a guy that I think it's a 727 that he took apart and rebuilt in the woods and you can go up to this airplane that is now his house. My understanding is that he's also going to be building one in Japan as well, but it's actually really cool because he lets anybody on his property you can go and stand on the wing. Would you ever want to live in a plane?

Speaker 1: 1:27

I could see myself living in a plane. If it was gutted and you made it into something really cool, why not? Who?

Speaker 3: 1:31

cares. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like a prefab home yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Yeah, why not I don't know If you could turn a school bus into a home.

Speaker 3: 1:40

There's options here Recycling.

Speaker 1: 1:44

Yes, that is the name of the game. Okay, we sat down with Zach Mercurio, who recently published his book the Power of Mattering, which just blew me away. Zach is a researcher, an author, a speaker, and he specializes in purposeful leadership, mattering, meaningful work and positive org psychology. He wrote the Power of Mattering how Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance, and he also wrote the Invisible Leader Transforming your Life, your Work and your Org, and the Power of Authentic Purpose. And he's worked with hundreds of organizations worldwide, including teams at JP Morgan, delta, marriott International, the National Park Service, the Army and more. And his work, his research on meaningful work, has been awarded by ATD, the Academy of Management and the Academy of Human Resource Development. And I don't know about you, but this book just blew me away in how much people don't see how they matter right now. This book just blew me away in how much people don't see how they matter.

Speaker 3: 2:45

Right now, I'll tell you, for the majority of the book, I had, like, almost felt like I was going to cry, like I was feeling so emotional about it. And it's because, at the end of the day and what Zach talks about is, even from the very first moments of your life, you want to feel like you matter. You need to know that you matter and, by the way, that does not change ever. Yet there's so many of us walking around feeling like we don't matter at all. You'll hear Zach talk about this, but just so you understand the difference also between belonging and inclusion and mattering belonging is being asked to be a part of the team, inclusion is getting to play the game, and mattering is knowing how you contribute, knowing how you're significant to the team, and that's the difference. It's the knowing of how you offer value, how you're significant and feeling. That's the difference. We've got opportunities to do that every day, all day, for everybody in your life.

Speaker 1: 3:51

For everybody. Yeah, Personally and professionally. And listen, the squishy stuff matters. People don't want to talk about the squish, but the squishy stuff is what drives organizations. You need to give a shit. Stuff is what drives organizations. You need to give a shit and it's different than belonging. It's actually you seeing why you matter. I love the example he also gives about NASA and laddering, and everyone from the janitor up through the astronaut knew how they contributed to getting a man on the moon and it got me thinking how are we doing that for our own teams and our people at work, Even if it's on a project? How are you letting them know how their contribution even if they're doing the design of the deck, like how does that contribute to the overall results and why? It not just how it contributes, but why it matters and why their role in this matters? I would say, on my own reflection, I wish I did more of that. It's something I definitely will be paying a lot more attention to.

Speaker 3: 4:49

Yeah, yeah, I think the I feel like I tried to do this and I feel like I should have done it even more no-transcript, no-transcript, no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 45:17

Okay, these can be one word answers. They could be a sentence. We could dive in further wherever it goes. All right, it's 2030. What's work going to look like?

Speaker 4: 45:26

There's two ways it could go. So one, the bosses are getting the power back right now because the talent market has shifted. You know it was more pro employee, Now it's more in favor of employers right now, and whatever bosses do with this newfound power will change the experience of working I, whatever bosses do with this newfound power will change the experience of no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 57:09

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 yourworkfriendscom, but you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page and we have the TikToks and Instagram. 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.

The Work of Your Life

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Work of Your Life with Joan Burke

Culture isn’t a checkbox, it’s the secret weapon behind every high-performing organization. Join HR visionary Joan Burke as she unveils her ‘Work of Your Life’ blueprint from DocuSign to Responsys, showing you how to transform managers into master coaches, ignite engagement, and make retention your ultimate growth engine.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

So if you really care about the success of your organization, if you care about revenue, then you got to care about the people who are leading the organization and your talent. It is a no-brainer.

Speaker 2: 0:24

Welcome to your Work. Friends. I'm Francesca and I'm Mel, and we're breaking down work so you get ahead. For those of you that don't know, every year, mel and I sit down and think about what are the topics that we want to talk about, and then we think about the guests we want, and we're always looking for people that are actively in it. They're either a really deep subject matter expert, they're on the line in the seat doing the role and they're really able to think about how you get some of this stuff done. So we can always make work better, and one of the things that we were always wondering about are how do you create these cultures where people feel like they can really do their best work? And that brought us to Joan Burke.

Speaker 2: 1:02

Joan, if you don't know, her is just a real deal CHRO. She is now a board member, she's an advisor. She's been a chief people officer at places like DocuSign, marketo Responses. She's been a CHRO at small companies, major companies, in multiple different industries. She's been there, she's done that and she's been able to create these cultures where people can do the work of their lives, and we wanted to talk to her about how she did that. What did you think of this conversation, mel?

Speaker 3: 1:34

I loved it because as an HR person lifelong HR person like Joan I really appreciate the hard line that she took in every interview, which was she's human-centered and it's human first and if that doesn't align then it's not the right fit for her. And because of that alignment she's been able to go in and build these beautiful workplaces. I'm just really inspired by the legacy she leaves behind and the message it leaves for others.

Speaker 2: 1:59

It takes a whole village to create a culture where people feel like they can do the work of their lives. Joan gives you the playbook for how she did this, what needed to be in play at DocuSign, at Responsys. She's. Also gave us some tips If you're not in these types of companies, what you can do yourselves to create the work of your life and if you're interviewing, what you can look for and some questions you can ask to see if a company is going to enable you to do the work of your life. This conversation, to me, was just fantastic. Joan's the real deal, and with that, here's Joan.

Speaker 3: 2:41

At DocuSign, you really created something super special, right? It was a culture where that employee experience enabled a lot of folks to, as you call it, do the work of their lives. In today's environment, things are changing. How do you make the business case to do that today?

Speaker 1: 3:02

So the business case is the same as the business case was when we did it in DocuSign. I joined them in 2017. Even though it's an employer's market, the best talent always has options. You should never walk away from that or feel as though I have to prioritize revenue. I have to prioritize this and I don't have time or this isn't important. It is as important now as it was when we were doing it.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Now, when we were doing it hyper competitive, the market was crazy. Everybody's trying to get good talent. Now. I would say it's important to do that because you need to keep your good talent. The pendulum will swing. It will go from being an employer's market to being an employee's market at some point in time, and the companies that invest in their people now, when that happens, they're not going to see them walking out the door. They're going to have an increase in retention and I think it's a false narrative to say it's an either or. If you're going to prioritize a business, you're going to prioritize people. So it's absolutely as important now as it was seven years ago, when the market was very different than it is today.

Speaker 3: 4:07

Francesca and I often say people fuel your business. So absolutely Both are so super important right Well, at the end of the day, if you think about it, revenue happens because you've got great talent.

Speaker 1: 4:17

These things do not happen on their own. It always is people that are responsible for that success in organizations, always.

Speaker 3: 4:24

Oh, and they're the base of the business.

Speaker 2: 4:26

Yeah, so you have a very good point. I think the thing that won't change is that people want to be able to do work and do the good work and to do the work of their lives. I don't think that's going to change. I really don't that intrinsic need want desire. At DocuSign. That was what you were really striving for people to have is had some great partnerships in the leadership team there.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Certainly Dan Springer, the CEO, scott Ulrich, who was initially the CMO, became the COO. These are people who totally got it and we thought really long and hard about how do we differentiate DocuSign and so candidate is going to be looking at a number of different companies. What is going to make them want to come to DocuSign? If a candidate is going to be looking at a number of different companies, what is going to make them want to come to DocuSign versus go to Adobe, go to Google? How do we make sure, also, that the values that we stood for authentically DocuSign and not ones that you could go to any website and pick up the words and they're fine, but there's nothing special about it? This is where the working life came in. This is what we said. People, as you just said, francesca, people want to do great work. Employees do not come to work to do a crappy job. They don't. They don't come to work to do a boring job. They come to work because they want to succeed, they want to contribute and they want to do a great job. So we thought, looking back, when people view their career, what we hoped is that people would say donkey, sign. That's where I did the work of my life. This was a marketing thing, because Scott is a great marketer. We intentionally didn't say the best work of your life, because you don't need best. It's like the work of your life. That vacation I had the time of my life, so we had to operationalize it. We had to bring it to life and we talked about it as being actually really important and, in many ways, a personal statement. I, joe, wouldn't know what one of my employees' work of their life was until I spent time with them and we understood how we were going to help that person get there and what were the opportunities, what was the development? And then, when it came time to do our low engagement surveys, one of the questions we always ask is are you doing the work of your life? If you're not doing the work of your life, what do you need from the company? What do you need from your manager to do the work of your life? We put it into self-evaluations. We put it into feedback. It was an employment brand for us. Your recruiters are going to go to job fairs, they're going to have a booth, they're going to have a banner. It might as well be something cool that makes some sense, and it did. Our recruiters would say people would go by and say, whoa, work your Life, what's that all about?

Speaker 1: 7:18

There were a lot of components to the work of your life. We also invested very heavily in our managers in terms of developing and training them. We had a work your life management program that was based on four pillars. That were pillars that we believe were unique to DocuSign, that we want to help be our managers. So it was very real and I'll give you an example. I was on LinkedIn the other day and there's a woman who I hired, probably about six months before I left DocuSign day, and there's a woman who I hired probably about six months before I left DocuSign. She just left now. So we're talking three years ago. She was talking about going into the organization, but when she was talking about DocuSign, she said I did the work of my life. So I thought, wow, it stuck. It stuck, at least for people who were there. I think when we created that program, the work your life starts up.

Speaker 2: 8:04

That, to me, is a real test. It's one of the real tests of how do you have a brand that you know sticks, and one is just people using the language, which is huge. And what I love about the work you did, whenever I think about a brand and thinking about if you're going to say we want you to be able to do the work of your life no-transcript DocuSign stood for, which is an environment and the climate.

Speaker 1: 8:59

And we say DocuSign helps people, it saves paper, paper saves trees. So we're all about DocuSign for forests. And I would talk to candidates and I could see the excitement, enthusiasm when I would say let me tell you what we're about, let me tell you about this work you're doing, let me tell you how much we care about the environment in the world. There were a lot of really great components of the DocuSign culture that kind of came together in a way that I think made people feel really good about the organization. And one of the things you might ask is how did you know that it really delivered results for the company? And I think it's hard to take up one program and say, okay, I could connect the dots and this is the exact revenue we got from this because of that. But I can tell you that every time we did anything around this, anytime we talked about the work-year life and when we would fortunately for us get great reviews from our employees on Glassdoor, we saw an incredible spike in the number of resumes that were coming in. People want to work for a company that they feel good about.

Speaker 1: 10:02

Dan Springer is the CEO. His approval rating on Glassdoor was 98. We were always in like the top 15 companies in technology. That's how we can say it made a difference because our employees cared about writing great reviews, and those are the only reviews we cared about. Docusend was not a pay-to-play company. We were not going to ever be informed. We were never going to pay to be part of some sort of a best place to work. That's what we felt the real value was.

Speaker 2: 10:30

That's what our employees really said. Yeah, out of curiosity, the day-to-day feel like the vibe. I am very much on vibes lately, joan, when you think about the vibe at Dacusign when the work of your life was hitting on all pistons After launch.

Speaker 1: 10:50

It's embedded in the DNA. What did it feel like, just as a leader and an employee? Once they got it and that was a more from an employee communication perspective we would do mid-year feedback sessions. So it wasn't about evaluations, it was just feedback, and they were having conversations with their managers and we would really target those disingenuous about work your life, figure out whether this is working for people. So there was some excitement, enthusiasm. We went into a pandemic and the world changed overnight in March of 2020. Now, I would say, because we had built such a foundation with our employees about caring about them, about their development, about work your life, we were able to carry that through during the pandemic.

Speaker 1: 11:32

For any sheep people officer, I will tell you that in that 47-year career I had the hardest work I ever did was running a people organization during the pandemic. Yeah, trying to figure out how do we best support our employees through their mental health, through daycare. Hiring managers get comfortable around hiring people over Zoom, where they're like I never hired somebody I didn't meet in person. You better do it because somebody else is going to hire them. So I think we took the same level of care during that period.

Speaker 1: 12:04

It looked a little different. It was around support. There was a lot of different things we did to help our employees be successful and it paid off, I would say, in states. So the work shifted a bit and I used to say the companies that are win when this pandemic is over are the companies where the employees feel really good and felt very taken care of during that period. And DocuSign did it. And the reason why DocuSign did it it was a leadership team that actually believed that this was ultimately what's good for the employees. It's going to be good for the company.

Speaker 2: 12:38

Yeah, it sounds like, even in, I would say, a crisis situation, which COVID, especially in HR it was. I'm just going to say bonkers, absolutely bonkers. Right, but I love the fact that lens to enable people to do the work of your life, to truly care for people. It sounds like you're making decisions through that lens. It didn't change just because we were going through a very traumatic time.

Speaker 1: 13:00

You feel like you turned the volume up on that care during that time turned it up and we saw the feedback that we got in our employee engagement surveys, which we did at least two a year or more. The last survey that we did, we got 6,000 comments in that survey 6,000 comments and Dan and I would read every single one of those comments. He'd read them. I was going to read them. There was no way I was not going to be a patient animal reading those comments. But they actually produce so much more richness than really just the raw data and we heard people talk about how well they felt supported by their manager, and not just from a corporate perspective, and not just the programs and the benefits that we put in place, which were all new.

Speaker 1: 13:47

During that period we were able to really pressure test that the work we were doing and the decisions we were making and the investments we were making in again these benefits and trying to make it easy for people to take care of their kids and work from home and have Zoom and parents who were ill, and it was thank you, Francesca. It was a bonkers period, there's no other word for it. And then, if you think about it, we went from that to the great resignation right which can I say something that lasted about 15 minutes, Like really that was done and now the pendulum has swollen completely the other way. So one of the things I would say is think about the time you're in and what you need to do, but know that things change and can change very quickly. You don't abandon all the things that matter to you, that are important to your organization, just because you can and you can.

Speaker 2: 14:46

Out of curiosity, how important is it to have your peer group, the CMO, the CTO, any of the C's your CEO or your board? How important is it to have them on board when you're trying to make these kind of decisions and, probably more importantly, stick to the plan when shit's hitting the fan? How important is that so?

Speaker 1: 15:05

well, I critical. If the only people who are enthused about these programs that are willing to keep them alive, as the HR team, that's doomed, it's just never going to work. But having that consistency when the shit hits the fan, you're still not going to walk away from your principles and your values as an organization. You're still going to invest in employees, you're still going to care about the development, you're still going to give them feedback. You cannot do that without the leadership involved. The reason why I think we were so successful at DocuSign is because Dan was so authentic in both belief in these programs and talked about it. We did all hands meetings every quarter and during COVID we did a lot more of them just to make sure we stayed connected to people. He never abandoned the things that were like the pillars of who we were as an organization.

Speaker 3: 16:04

You've done this several times over now DocuSign. You did this at Responsys. What was the secret sauce? You have to have the CEO.

Speaker 1: 16:11

If you don't have the CEO, then it's going to be lips of risk, because that's who people look to, that's their coming to door, that's where they're getting their insight and their messaging. And it has to be authentic. It cannot be lips of risk because people see through falsehoods and I always say the most important leadership is authentic leadership. It's be who you are and with all those organizations I've had really authentic leaders who would speak to the programs, who would talk about the importance of employees in the team and helping them be successful. It worked. But if you don't have that, I would say it's running uphill Everything dies If HR is running it.

Speaker 3: 16:49

you have to have that buy-in. Let's say your CEO is a skeptic. How do you fight through that skepticism?

Speaker 1: 16:57

You kind of build a business case right and the business case is talent drives success. It just does. And even in a bad job market, which we're in right now, the best talent always has options, always has options, how bad it is, they always do. So if you really care about the successful organization, if you care about revenue, then you got to care about the people who are leading the organization and your talent. It is a no-brainer in some ways. And here's what I am excited about.

Speaker 1: 17:25

I feel like in many organizations and particularly I'm working with some VCs they get it, they totally get it, and where a lot in the past you might say, oh VCs, I don't want their portfolio companies to spend a lot of money on marketing and HR, I'm seeing VCs actually pushing their portfolio companies and these are companies of maybe $30 to $50 million of revenue to hire that cheap people officer sooner than a lot of founders are ready to do, because founders, by the most part, they don't want to spend money. So I am extremely encouraged about that. I'm also seeing a lot of enthusiasm for people going to these smaller private companies and not so much like the big companies the Googles, the Metas that people went to. They're feeling like they're getting an opportunity to really be very hands-on, to be part of a successful organization, to see where their contribution is actually making a difference on a daily basis, with less bureaucracy, maybe less politics. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity for people to seek out these smaller private organizations.

Speaker 3: 18:34

I coach a lot of folks who are being impacted by layoffs right now, so I'm seeing that trend as well. Even if they came from these big megas, they're looking at smaller orgs where they can actually feel the impact that they have. So that's tracking. When you think of pushback on budgets, we hear a lot around. Budgets are tightening up with everything that's happening with AI. Leadership's very focused on short-term results. Someone making the business case. What advice would you give to them?

Speaker 1: 18:59

I would say that the Work of your Life program at DocSign it was not a heavy investment at all. These were things we were already doing. We're already doing performance reviews. We were already doing employee engagement surveys. We already cared about what people felt on Glassdoor. We were already going to job fairs. It's not true that these things cost a lot of money. Get that off the table. Just say it's bullshit. Right here there is investment, for sure is when you're investing in developing people and particularly leaders. So when we created the Work your Life Management Program, that was an investment. We again decided that it was really extremely important to us to have great managers in the company. We needed to put together programs, we needed to design them, we needed to facilitate them. So there were certain places where you may be able to say, okay, I'm going to cut back a little bit on this one and maybe use some different approaches where I don't spend quite the same money, but caring about your corporate culture, being articulate about your corporate culture and reinforcing your corporate culture it doesn't cost money.

Speaker 3: 20:02

Those human components, those day-to-day interactions. That's free. You can change that tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 20:09

One of the things that we did at DocuSign is we had a mentor program and everybody wanted mentors, right. So we're like, all right, how are we going to make this, operationalize this and make this make sense? And we realized, when you ask somebody to be your mentor, it's a big deal right, and it's time this is going to take. But one of the things that we did, which is like a skinny version of a mentor program, is we said anybody will go and have a cup of coffee with you Half hour Well, great. So if somebody called me up and said, john, I was watching the all-hands meeting last month, I think you did a great job with the presentation. I'm really trying to work out skills. Can we have a cup of coffee in half hour and just talk about that? It's like absolutely so. There are ways to just skivvy back certain programs and things that are less intense or maybe not so time consuming and not so expensive. You just gotta be a little bit thoughtful and creative about it.

Speaker 3: 20:59

If your budget's tight, what are the three areas? You'd say? This is where you double down.

Speaker 1: 21:05

It's really about helping grow people. Managers we always cared about how we help individual contributors grow and succeed too. But at the end of the day, if I had a dollar of investment, I'm going to put 75 cents of it against managers and 25 cents against the individual contributors, because I know that ultimately the value that those individual contributors are going to get is because they've got a better manager who cares about their development, who cares about their career, who thinks about not just job opportunities but actually assignments that are going to help them grow and develop. And I always say that the most powerful thing we can do to help people grow is put them, give them on-job assignments to see how they stretch, see how they grow. The investment you make on the individual contributor side pays off by really overinvesting, maybe in the managers.

Speaker 3: 21:51

I love to hear it because I was just at a conference where a room full of people, when we asked how many people invested in their manager's training and development, maybe 5% of the room raised their hand, which was really disheartening to see. So you heard it here, folks 75 cents for your managers.

Speaker 2: 22:09

It's nuts to me. I'm going to make a Catholic Italian reference here, but you can cut this. So in Italian cooking, a lot of dishes start with the trinity, which is the onion, the carrot and the celery. It is the substance that makes everything right, it's the base, mirepoix, if you will. And I always think the trinity of talent development is onboarding, manager development and coaching. If you had to pick three and manager development, you're very good. Point, joan, 75 cents of that, right. The biggest onion little bit of carrot, little bit of celery. The onion is the manager development. The data's there, the results are there. You could do absolutely no formal training whatsoever, but if you had an amazing manager, you're set.

Speaker 1: 22:54

I love that. I've never heard about the Trinity Battalion cooking. I'm going to use that. Seriously, no gosh, God, really no. We grew up Irish. My mother was Italian. That's great.

Speaker 2: 23:04

There you go, there you go. We're big fans. We're big fans. Let's say you're an employee, you don't have this. What can somebody do as an individual contributor, no matter what their circumstance? Create the work of their life for themselves.

Speaker 1: 23:16

Oh man, that's a tough one. Yeah, I know they're not in a powerful position to be able to do that, which many people are not. Sometimes I say find it elsewhere, and I'm not saying leave your job right. For some people it might be leave your job, but for many others that's unrealistic. It just is not the right market for people to do that.

Speaker 1: 23:39

But find your tribe right. Find the people who are like-minded, who have the same sets of values. Find that network where, through connection and through conversations and through learnings about how people are dealing with those challenges inside their organizations, that you can take back for yourself to be able to say I'm not getting from my company, but I am getting what I need from this group of people up there. One of the things that's difficult is developing a network is hard, it takes a lot of work, but it can be so rewarding. I remember during the pandemic I had this network of about 20 chief people officers and we met every week for like just an hour and it was the good, bad and the ugly advice in terms of the thing that was working, the things that weren't working. It was so important, it was so powerful that if you don't have that if you can find a way to create that, I'm just, I have just always thought that could be incredibly rewarding to just have whatever mind appears.

Speaker 2: 24:44

It's interesting to see what other people are doing commiserate on the good, bad and ugly, because that's every job. There's always things. There's something so important about being part of a community. Just like, you're not alone in this, no matter what stage you are in your career, because there's a lot of human messy feelings that go along with every single stage in your career.

Speaker 1: 25:02

Absolutely. I could go into depth with DiWalt on this call about those crappy jobs I had and how hard they were and the lesson I learned and how I hoped during that period. And that's like experiences, right. The other thing I would say is you can create a network of people who have similar values at you but are at different stages of their career, so have seen the work and experienced it and can look back and say, all right, let me tell you, when I was in my 30s, the world was different, but a lot of the experiences and the challenges that you have there's definitely similarities. So here's how I cultivate people for all different generations and I think you'll find it very worthwhile. Best advice.

Speaker 2: 25:48

Curious about. On the flip of this, where you're interviewing for a company, what are the tells? What are the tells that say this is a great culture, this is a culture that's going to support you in doing the work of your life? Are there tells people can see from the outside?

Speaker 1: 26:02

There are. You want to make sure that it's not just the recruiters who are telling you that story. Their job is to serve a certain organization. You need to drill down. So when you're talking to an organization and hopefully having a number of different interviews with people so you get a good sense of that company and some of them would be peers, some of them would be a manager is that you're paying very good attention to what they're saying and you're actually teasing out from them whether or not what you're hearing from these recruiters if in fact they're real McCoy.

Speaker 1: 26:30

And then you check out Glassdoor, you check out Blind, you look at what people are saying inside the organization to know whether it's for real or whether it is just give talk. So you got to do your own homework and it does help, as I said, if you know your why and you can actually articulate your why, to have the people sitting across from you, from the company, explain why your why is either going to work or not work in this company. You should put them on the spot a little bit in a nice kind of way. That's how you tease this out, right.

Speaker 3: 27:02

What were some of your go-to questions? To tease it out.

Speaker 1: 27:05

Well, I think the biggest thing would be to say tell me what people three layers down this organization are saying about this company. Tell me what you're hearing from your teams. And if I was to just go around right now and go from desk to desk and just kind of casually stop and ask people questions what is it like to work here? What would they tell me? Would they tell it to? What would they say? And ask those questions and say what are your employee engagement scores? What are people saying about the employee experience here? Have you seen progress or are things going backwards? So it's just doing a lot of due diligence and interviewing the people in the company as much as they're interviewing you with you.

Speaker 3: 27:53

There's what you ask in the interview, but then there's what really happened when you get there on day one, your first 90 days in a company. How do you further tease this out? Like, how do you figure out who are the secret decision makers? What are the things that are going to make it a better experience? What are your questions in those first 90 to help you?

Speaker 1: 28:08

Who are the savvy insiders? You got to figure them out and some of that is asking. Again, it's asking a lot of people, a lot of questions and owning your own onboarding right. So it isn't just I'm the manager, here's the playbook, you have the free people to talk to. It's like all right. I got to drill down even more. I want to speak with these four people over here. I want to know more about what's going on in the IT department, not relying on a routine onboarding process, but create something for yourself that's robust.

Speaker 1: 28:43

And I would also say, as an insider from Chief People Officer perspective, onboarding is so important. Those first 90 days, those first six months, it's how you show up, because you want to know what's going on, but you want people to know you. My mother used to say it's not who you know, it's who knows you that matters. And that's really right, mom, that's what I would do. I would be really thoughtful about who I wanted to meet with and just make it happen. Just make it happen. And people don't say no, they really don't, you're new to the organization, they want to meet the new person.

Speaker 2: 29:17

I'll tell you I have a few regrets looking back on my career, A few. There's times where I'm like I should not have handled that the way I did I did. Life goes on. You learn right, you live, you learn. But one of the red thread regrets or if I could do it over again is I wish I would have done what you just suggested, which was get out there and meet people, Ask for the coffee, Get a habit of just asking for the coffee. Even when I was an individual contributor, I wish I would have done that, because it makes it so much more easy and enjoyable to get work done.

Speaker 1: 29:50

Absolutely, absolutely. That is part of working your life right. It's just feeling like you're part of an organization that you're connected to. Connections are so important. At the end of the day, we look back and say, did I feel like I made a difference here and who are the people that I can look and say, oh my God, look at the tribe. I was able to be part of that built up, part of something. Completely agree with you, francesca. Very important.

Speaker 3: 30:11

What you created super valuable and, I think, unfortunately a lot of ways, unique, and I hope you get to a place where this is more the standard and not the exception. How can we get there?

Speaker 1: 30:23

Back to what I was saying earlier about the pendulum swinging.

Speaker 1: 30:26

People and leaders could be mindful of the fact that things are going to change and the companies that continue to be committed throughout a sluggish job market and challenging competitive environment, they stay true to who they are. They're the ones who are going to win at the end of the day. They're the ones who are not going to lose their talent. Let's think about this. On the other side, all of those law firms that capitulated to the administration and actually in many ways destroyed their brand, hurt their culture and their values, and they've had some of their top lawyers who are walking out the door saying I'm not going to be part of this Law students who got out of law school. They don't want to interview with those organizations. So there's a big price to pay for abandoning what managed you as an organization just because you can or because the times are tough. In fact, when the times are tough is when you really need to double down and just be even more vigilant about what matters to you and how you want to run your organization.

Speaker 3: 31:41

Joan, are you up for some rapid round questions?

Speaker 1: 31:46

I am ready.

Speaker 3: 31:48

This can be one word answers. This can be as long as you'd like to take it, but really quick. Whatever comes to top of mind, Okay jumping in. It's 2030. What's your prediction about what work looks like?

Speaker 1: 32:03

One exciting thing is, I think we're all going to have AI agents who are going to be reading our emails for us and making our travel plans and maybe scheduling our doctor's appointments. So those are things I'm super excited about. But I want to answer that question by saying here's what I hope. I hope that by 2030, the human-centered jobs are more valued and are higher compensated, and by that I mean the teachers, the EMTs, the caregivers, the therapists. I hope that AI will have helped automate so much of the roles that can be automated that we will really see the need for these people to be doing the great job that they do. That's my hope. I like that.

Speaker 3: 32:46

That's a good one. What is one?

Speaker 1: 32:51

thing about corporate culture that you'd like to just see die already. Personality assessments, color, myers-briggs Dis I like to see them all go far away. I believe that they label people, and I have seen them do more damage inside an organization than them.

Speaker 3: 33:08

I agree with you. I think they're fun and it's interesting if it's like personal introspection. But too often they can be weaponized and people make them their whole personality when that's not the intent.

Speaker 1: 33:19

Let me just tell you I was talking to somebody who was leaving the organization and they were looking for their next role. We were talking and they said they did colors in their organization. This person said every single person on the HR leadership team was a red. So that kind of said you're not a red, you're probably not going to be on the HR leadership team. Anyway, that is a bugaboo of mine which I've actually had for some time.

Speaker 3: 33:39

Okay, what is the greatest opportunity that orgs are actually missing out on?

Speaker 1: 33:45

So I think it's cross-functional data. Data exists in silos inside organizations. First of all, we know it's not pristine and I think part of this whole going to AI is going to be like cleaning up data and making it good. But if companies can use the power of cross-functional information, they're going to be able to streamline decision-making, become way more efficient as organizations.

Speaker 3: 34:12

How many times have we all worked in an organization and found out three other departments are working on a similar project Exactly? A little more personal. What's on your playlist right now? What music are you listening to?

Speaker 1: 34:24

So I'm listening to a guy named Leif Volderweck Okay, check him out. One of his songs I really like Transatlantic Flight. I also love Kim Petraeus. She does a version of the old Kate Bush song Running Up that Hill, and if you like that song and there's many different versions of it I would say check out her version of it and her video of doing it at Outside Lands in San Francisco in 2022. She's so cool and it's just completely joyful. And then I'm a big fan of Florence, yeah.

Speaker 3: 34:57

I love her. You did a really beautiful collaboration. Do you know the artist Blood Orange? Yes, have you heard her collaboration with him? I have not. So this is a great tip. Very good, put that in your as Francesca says, be in your bonnet for this weekend. Go look it up, it's really good. What are you reading right now?

Speaker 1: 35:16

It could be audiobook or old school pages, so I'm an old school pages person, so right now I'm reading the Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich person, so right now I'm reading the Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. I stopped on the Pulitzer, I think, in 2020. But I would say that the book that I've loved the most that I've read in the last eight months has been James by Percival Everett, and I would highly recommend that book.

Speaker 3: 35:36

What do you really admire? Could be personal, professional.

Speaker 1: 35:40

There's so many people in my life and historically I admire, but I'm going to pick one person Right now. I'm going to pick Laura Steinem. We need to stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us talking about and reporting on women's issues, on reproductive rights, on equal pay, on health care. And the thing I love about her, she's 91 years old. She's still with us. She absolutely never sold out. She's my shout out, she's my hero right now.

Speaker 3: 36:15

What's one piece of advice that you've received, or just something that's your personal piece of advice that you want someone to know you would give everybody today?

Speaker 1: 36:24

If I could pick a couple, because there's career and then there's personal. So if I think about career advice, I want to say careers are long. Mine was very long, was 47 years long, and that means that you're going to have some jobs that are crappy jobs, and, rather than running away from them, a lot of those crappy jobs are incredibly important and meaningful. They're either the lessons you needed to learn, they're people you needed to know, or, in one case, it was a ticket I needed to punch. It was experience. I needed to get that next job, which was my goal, and so embrace the crappy jobs. They're going to happen the way of life.

Speaker 1: 37:07

The other thing I would say, though, from a career perspective, is know your brand and who you are. Know your why, know what is important to you. So let me give you an example. When I would meet with CEOs and I was doing job interviews for chief people officer roles, I would always say to them I believe the best human resources, I believe my job as the head of human resources is to help managers be the best managers they can be. Only people who work for me at HR is my team, the rest of the people who work for managers and how they feel about the organization is oftentimes how they feel about their managers. Do they feel like they're getting feedback and they're being coached and they're being developed? So I would say, if you don't agree with that, perfectly fine, but that means I'm not the right person for you, I'm not right for the role. Go hire somebody else. So that's just an example of a philosophy that I developed early on that stayed true for me throughout my career and I would use it as an evaluation tool as I was deciding where I was going to go next. And then the personal advice and this is not profound. Everybody on this who's listening to this has probably heard this, but it's a lesson that we don't always take to heart, and I can even give you a recent example that I did not, and I regret it. Make sure you tell the people in your life who have been meaningful to you, who you've learned from, what they've done and how they've helped you, and be specific.

Speaker 1: 38:36

When I was starting my career many years ago, I was at a large financial services company in Boston and as a very junior person, I had the opportunity to work with the CEO of that company, and it was remarkable that I had that opportunity because he was here and I was like and I got to know him and we worked on a few projects and I learned so much from him and I had so many great stories about this person as a human, as a leader. Two months ago he died at 98 years old and I wrote his wife a note and I said I want to tell you stories about your husband that come from a young professional. And I told her these stories. She wrote back to me and she said it was very profound for her to hear these and she said they were so jizzing with Jim.

Speaker 1: 39:22

The stories were so Jim and she said I wish he could have read this. And I'm like I wish I could have written it. I wish I had written it. So don't wait till that person's gone and you're telling their spouse. It's great to tell their spouse, but let them know when you have the opportunity.

Speaker 2: 39:37

What a gift to give someone to bring the spirit of their loved one back through the story. That's a really beautiful gift to give someone. Joan, it's been awesome to chat with you today. Tell us where people can find you.

Speaker 1: 39:51

I'm on LinkedIn Also. I'm part of the Chief People Officer Forum, so if there's anybody who is a Chief People Officer and wants to join a network, to build community and wants to quarter, have topics of interest and experts who are going to be able to talk about topics, we've got one coming up next week and it's all like AI. What is this going to mean for you people, officers?

Speaker 2: 40:10

We will link to your LinkedIn and the CPO forum. There's nothing stronger than community, so definitely check that out, joan. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you, joan.

Speaker 3: 40:19

It was great to be with you. This episode was produced, edited and all things by us myself, Mel Plett and Francesco 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. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. Bye friends.

More Human in the Age of AI

Your Work Friends Podcast: More Human in the Age of AI with Jacqueline Carter

We’re all being told to master AI, but what if the real secret to thriving at work is doubling down on what makes us human?

In this episode, we talk with Jacqueline Carter, author of More Human, about how leaders can build their edge through awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by tech changes or unsure how to lead right now, this one’s for you. It’s not either/or. It’s not about keeping up. It’s about choosing to start with human.

Listen or watch the full episode here

---

Speaker 1: 0:00

It's like a lot of organizations right now. It's like they're rolling out high-end Ferraris but not teaching anybody how to drive, and that's just a waste of money.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Welcome to your Work Friends. I'm Francesca and I'm Mel. We are breaking down work, so you get ahead, mel. What's the good word?

Speaker 3: 0:31

I'm heading to Rhode Island and excited for that. How about you? Very nice, pretty chill over here, pretty chill over here. I showed Robbie the picture of Enzo on the first day of first grade and the last day of first grade of Enzo on the first day of first grade and the last day of first grade.

Speaker 2: 0:46

For those of you who don't know, I have a seven-year-old. He started first grade with a shaved head. He ended first grade with this mop of curls, a gold chain. Dressed in all black, he either looks like he's a sophomore in college, at USC, or is going to start really getting into creed sometime soon. I don't know. It's all over the map.

Speaker 3: 1:03

I love his style evolution.

Speaker 2: 1:05

We let him dress the way he wants to. He picks out all of that. He asks for a chain. We got it from TJ Maxx or something. It's not like he has a real gold chain or anything like that, but it's interesting watching your kid make choices.

Speaker 3: 1:18

Yeah, it's just fun to watch their personalities evolve. I don't know, I think it's really cool, but I do too.

Speaker 2: 1:24

I will allow him to wear anything but sketchers. My child will not be wearing sketchers. What's your beef with sketchers? I just I cannot, I like cannot stand that brand. I don't know what it is it's like a joke it's like a joke.

Speaker 2: 1:42

I don't like a joke. I don't appreciate it. I don't. It's not real, I need it to be. Oh my God, every once in a while, especially when he was younger, he'd pick some up and some of them had. They would light up underneath and I'm like, absolutely not Like. I will let my kid wear the craziest shit, except for Skechers. Absolutely not.

Speaker 3: 2:03

No, I love it Speaking shit except for Skechers? Absolutely not. No, I love it Speaking of style. We launched some merch on our website. We are independent and we want to keep it that way, but if you feel so inclined, check out some of the merch that we put up there. We thought there's some pretty cool designs over there. To check Any purchase that you make helps us stay operational, so appreciate your support and you get a cool hat or sweatshirt or something.

Speaker 2: 2:28

Good hats for summer sunscreen. That all works out. It's all good stuff.

Speaker 3: 2:31

We had such a great conversation earlier this week with Jacqueline Carter. She's an author, speaker, a senior partner and a director for the North America Potential Project. She's an expert in leadership, development, mindsets and corporate culture and she just came out with this book More Human. This is an opportunity right for us to lean into our humanity in the workplace and really see AI as a partner, but also taking some precaution as we go through this evolution. What did you take away from this conversation?

Speaker 2: 3:07

We've been talking about the future of work and AI and even things like oh, we have to lean into our deeply human skills for the last 10 years. This is not something that's new. What I think is so different about what Jacqueline and More Human, the book and the potential project are talking about is they're making it really easy to lean into those more human skills that you really need to. In this conversation and also in the book, jacqueline outlines this trifecta of how to make yourself a more human leader. As technology takes on more and more of work. How do you lean into that humanity, that trifecta being awareness, wisdom and compassion, and I love that, because you and I have both seen this these deeply human skills as a laundry list of 30, 40, 50. And you're just like Jesus Christ. How many do I have? These are the top three. If you're going to do any, do these?

Speaker 3: 4:00

Yeah, I really liked that. I also liked the concept of moving away from either or. You could either have AI or humans. You can't have both, but this is a both and conversation. There's just a lot of power in that. Everybody's going through this shift. I don't think I get any news alerts that don't involve AI in the title these days, but if you and your team are moving through, this is a definite book to check out With that. We think you should check this conversation out. So here's Jacqueline.

Speaker 2: 4:50

So I think every day, maybe multiple times a day, I'm asking somebody, sometimes jokingly what timeline are we living in? Because it just feels like some fascinating times for various reasons, but really amazing times for opportunity. And I'm looking at this moment in time around AI, this moment in time around humanity. What made you see this as a moment in time, as like a fork in the road, especially for leadership?

Speaker 1: 5:17

So, as you guys know, I'm part of an organization that's a potential project.

Speaker 1: 5:21

We are a research and leadership development organization.

Speaker 1: 5:24

We've been focusing on researching and supporting leaders and global companies to be able to enhance their potential for the past 15 years, and what we're really excited about is we really do see this is an amazing moment in time in terms of human leadership and when we look at it, we really see that with artificial intelligence and, specifically, of course, generative AI, we have the opportunity to really make this major shift from management, which none of us really liked to be able to lift, into leadership, which is really about elevating our ability to be able to enable other people to realize more of their potential.

Speaker 1: 6:02

And if and I think that's the big if we're able to navigate this, we really see a potential opportunity for a future of work that is really quite inspiring and, I think, one that could be really quite hopeful and flush with possibilities. At the same time, we also see a lot of darkness, and I think that's really why it's never been more important to be a leader, and it's never been more important, as a leader, to be able to lean into the kind of choices that we need to make about the future of leadership.

Speaker 2: 6:32

One of the things I'm curious about is you mentioned these more human kind of aspects of things. Like we have this opportunity to really reach this different level of leadership potential. How do you define more human in an AI-powered world? What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 6:47

We come at it very much from a research and data perspective. So what we've done, like I said, over the past 15 years has really distilled what we see as being three core qualities of leadership excellence in terms of being able to bring the best of our human potential. And they're going to sound simple but simple is not easy. And they're going to sound like common sense, but common sense is not always common practice. So, fundamentally, a first core quality is awareness being able to be aware of what's going on internally and also aware of what's going on around.

Speaker 1: 7:16

The second core quality is wisdom, and this is very different than knowledge, but wisdom is basically the discerning capacity of mind, to be able to discern what's happening so that I can make wise choices.

Speaker 1: 7:27

And the third core quality is compassion, and compassion the way we define it is to be able to do the really hard things that we need to do as leaders, but to be able to do them in a human way.

Speaker 1: 7:37

So when I operate with compassion, say, I'm able to give really tough feedback, but do it in a way that helps you to be able to hear it, so that it supports you in your development journey, as opposed to you feeling degraded and depressed, and what we see from a data perspective is that only 16% of leaders are really ready to be able to lean into these core skills that we believe are critical in the age of AI. 60% have potential, but 24% probably really shouldn't be leaders. I think we've all seen leaders that have been promoted because they had great technical skills, but they really don't have these human skills that we know are critical for the future not only be able to leverage the benefits of AI and overcome the risks, but we know there's going to be massive transformation in the world of work in the coming years and we need leaders who can really lean into those human elements to be able to guide the workforce and create the work context of the future.

Speaker 2: 8:33

First of all, those data points resonate. I think all of us that have worked especially in corporate you're like, yeah, that tracks, that tracks. Maybe you haven't had a leader that leads with awareness, wisdom and compassion, or maybe you had one and you remember them for the rest of your life. Right, they just make or break your work experience. We're not seeing a lot of organizations invest in what we will call these deeply human skills. Yet, to your very good point, only a small percentage of people are ready. Most people aren't getting trained in those. I'm curious about that moment in time where the mindset shifts, where people start to pull in that direction. What does that look like? What's that mindset shift that separates someone that has that AI augmented leader trifecta of awareness, wisdom and compassion? What is that shift that people are making?

Speaker 1: 9:24

Yeah, I do love that you point out that not enough organizations are investing in it, and that's one of the things that we feel very privileged is we, of course, work with many global companies that are actually prioritizing the human development aspect in parallel with the AI advancements, and I think when we see organizations that say, yes, we've got to be able to roll out the technology, but at the same time, we want to make sure that we emphasize the human, the way that we see that, it's like a lot of organizations right now.

Speaker 1: 9:51

It's like they're rolling out high-end Ferraris but not teaching anybody how to drive, and that's just dumb, that's just a waste of money. And so the light bulb for us really goes on for leaders is when you know these aspects of awareness, wisdom and compassion and that's why I said they're common sense is because, when you dive into them, we all innately have these capabilities it's whether we have the permission to be able to develop them, the permission to be able to see the benefit and we again look at it very much from a research and data perspective Leaders that have these high awareness, wisdom and compassion are able to create the conditions where people feel more empowered, where greater trust, greater performance, greater job engagement, when you create the conditions where people know that there's a prize at the end and, at the same time, you give them a path to be able to support them in that development.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Oh, I can develop compassion. Yeah, I may have a set point where I'm good or not good, but there's a journey and I can see how to be able to take that journey and to be able to be supported along the way.

Speaker 2: 10:51

Yeah, yeah, I really love to. By the way, that it's three. Having been in talent development my entire career and we've been seeing this deeply human skills that you're going to need. It's a laundry list. It's typically a laundry list of at least 10. And to be able to have this distilled down into a framework of look, this is the three that will reap the most benefits that you really need to be focusing on Huge One question that might be a little controversial. I'm going to just ask it. Here we go. All these organizations are investing heavily in tech but not in the human aspect of it. Buying a Ferrari and not having someone know how to drive, would you say. People need to invest in the human first, or they are better suited to invest in teaching people how to drive first before they buy the car?

Speaker 1: 11:39

I love the question because one of the other things that we found in our research and it was a little bit surprising to us was that if you just like and we call them human purists so let's say, if you just invest in the human, which we were like, yay, this would be so great.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Imagine an organization that just invested in the human and we're like this would be awesome. But the reality is that the smartest human being is a little bit smarter when they leverage AI, so it really does have to be a both and and. That was, I think, one of the key insights that we came is this paradox. So the journey, we believe you need to start with the human, because if the human, like great tools in unskilled hands are not great tools, like you can do a lot of damage with a hammer or you can build a house with a hammer, so you need to be able to have the right skills. So you need to invest in the human development. But the opportunity now is to augment these great human capacities that we have. But we can augment them with AI. My awareness enhances when I leverage AI. My wisdom enhances when I leverage AI. My compassion even enhances when I leverage AI. So it's really a both and from our perspective.

Speaker 3: 13:10

I'd love to drill down further into what each of these look like in practice, alongside AI, because in the book there were some really good case studies, if that's okay. Yeah, awareness, when you think about that skill set, that human capability what does that look like daily, alongside the use of AI tools?

Speaker 1: 13:28

Absolutely. Definitions are always important, because awareness can sound like a really big word, but the way that we look at awareness is the ability to, like I said, be aware of what's going on internally and, at the same time, be aware, to the extent that I can, of what's going on externally, and we know. Let's just take a simple example situational awareness. Right, it's been for many leaders for a long time. We've been told that not everybody is the same and so we need to be able to be situational. And Mel, what you like is different, francesca, than what you like, but that's really hard. Like, how can I, as a mere human, be able to really keep track of oh? Can I, as a mere human, be able to really keep track of? Oh, when I communicate to Mel, it's a little bit different than when I communicate to other members of my team. And these are the kinds of things that AI is really good at. Ai is really good at being able to track what Mel is, what's important to you, what kind of messages resonate with you as opposed to what would be useful for other employees, and so again, and that's why that awareness of being able to be more aware of what's happening with my employees what's important to them can really then enhance me. My awareness is lifted. And these are just some examples.

Speaker 1: 14:33

But we also see, like sentiment analysis. I sent out an email to my organization. Ai tools can let me know was it opened, did anybody read it, how long did they read it for when they responded? If they responded, what was the? Did anybody read it? How long did they read it for when they responded? If they responded, what was the sentiment associated with that response? And this is gold, because this can then enable me to be able to enhance my ability to communicate more effectively. And I think these are just some examples. But that's again from an external perspective. But then from an internal perspective, ai can help to be able to challenge me on maybe my biases, on my limitations, on my blind spots, to be able to support me in a development journey if I'm open to that. So these are just again some of the ways, but we just see it's a really an amazing tool to be able to support enhancing my awareness.

Speaker 3: 15:19

Awareness and wisdom and compassion are all critically important right For the future for this to be successful. But it stood out to me. It felt like compassion might be more of the linchpin here, because I think you had mentioned it's the one thing that AI can't replicate. What crystallized that for you from your research?

Speaker 1: 15:39

Yeah, and I would say the way that we see awareness, wisdom, compassion, they're all linked right. It's how, neurologically, how the theory of mind, how the mind works, like we perceive, then we discern and then we respond, and so very much that responsive capacity of mind in an ideal world for leaders that want to be effective, is compassion right To do those hard things and do it in a human way. And what's super interesting is that we really have been with great interest following the advances of AI. We know that right now, people actually prefer and sometimes feel like an AI chatbot is more empathetic than a busy leader, right, which is not surprising, because an AI chatbot has all the time in the world to say oh Mel, I'm so sorry that you're having that problem, how can I help? It isn't rushed to be able to get to the next meeting.

Speaker 1: 16:30

But the key thing and I think the reason why, mel, to your question, why it's the most important is because, even as AI gets better and better at being able to mimic human emotions, it's programmed, of course, with all the intelligence that we know around emotional intelligence, around human psychology, human behavior. Fundamentally, human beings were social beings. We feel each other, we thrive based on each other and fundamentally, even though and this was so interesting what the research shows is, even though people found that the AI chatbot was more engaging, they felt empty inside, they felt fooled when they found out that it was an AI chatbot, because, fundamentally, human beings prefer messy but authentic other human beings than perfect, programmatic, empathetic AI.

Speaker 3: 17:17

Yeah, of course, in the news, just like when video games were villainized, right, you think of some of the horror stories that are also coming out as well, because AI is essentially acting as a mirror of the person who's using it. It's interesting. I'm curious about these three pillars, because you mentioned what was it? 16% have these skills and 60% can use some training on it. That's a pretty big gap, and then 24%, who are never going to get there. Of these three pillars, which do you feel people struggle with the most?

Speaker 1: 17:49

Yeah, I love that question and maybe I'll just say this, and I hope it's okay but what we did find is, within that 16% one, in four women, only one in 10 men.

Speaker 1: 17:58

That's a whole nother podcast. I just wanted to say, yeah, exactly, very interesting data. It's really interesting around that 60%. A couple of things that surprised us. Sometimes a non-result is as interesting as a result.

Speaker 1: 18:12

One of the things that was surprised us is we were surprised that there wasn't more differential around level, so we expected to see a real difference in seniority and, specifically, around wisdom. We just made the assumption that people that were and, by the way, I should say that data that I shared that's not based on leaders rating themselves, that is, employees rating their leaders. So this is in the eyes of the employees. So, based on 360 data, do I see you, as a leader, as being able to demonstrate these qualities of awareness, wisdom and compassion, which is quite different than when leaders rate themselves? So what's interesting is that. I would say, though, that still, our experience working with leaders is that most more senior leaders have figured out how to manage their mind, how to manage their time, which is a lot around the importance of awareness. Do I know what to focus on? When am I able to read the tea leaves, to be able to say this is most important and I can let this go. Most of them have a good North Star, which is really around that wisdom capacity, and that's why it is the one that we emphasize.

Speaker 1: 19:15

I do think especially more senior leaders struggle with the compassion piece, and oftentimes what we do see, and what's really interesting, is that we see, as leaders rise in ranks, their ability to engage in a compassionate way in the eyes of their employees goes lower, and that we find really interesting.

Speaker 1: 19:33

And it makes sense because, of course, as you rise in ranks, you're making bigger decisions that affect more people, you have a bigger span of control and you don't necessarily have those same touch points, and so it makes sense that a leader might be seen as being less compassionate. But the key thing is that we also see leaders that use that as an excuse, and what we see is there's a real opportunity because we know, just because you have a big span of control, we know that doesn't mean that you can't show up with compassion. That compassion piece is probably the one that all leaders can develop and I would say, at more lower levels of leaders, we do see a lot of that awareness. Right, it is that starting point, because you can't really dive into wisdom and compassion if you don't have good awareness about what might be getting in your way, if you can't manage your mind and manage your time. We were surprised that there wasn't more differential by seniority, but that is our experience working with many leaders over the past decade.

Speaker 3: 20:27

It's really interesting to see that, but I could also see why it's probably the lowest with compassion just given when you grow, If your organization isn't going to give you opportunities to nurture these things while we're going through this massive technological shift at work. What are simple ways people can start to nurture these things while we're going through this massive technological shift?

Speaker 1: 20:50

of work. What are simple ways people can start to nurture these three qualities in themselves today? Yeah, yeah, I love that question and I've always been inspired by the quote be the change you want to be in the world If you want to be a good human being, which is really around. What these skills are? Be present, be wise, be caring and those are, I think, key things in terms of your own brand. And, of course, there's a lot of resources. Of course, our book is one resource to be able to provide some practical tools around it.

Speaker 1: 21:13

Probably the starting point is really around the intentionality, and we oftentimes, when we work with leaders, we look to be able to have simple brain hacks to be able to help you In this moment. Like, what's your intention? And right now? My intention is to be of service. That's my intention. If you ask me a question, I'm going to try to be of best service, and just those simple things can really help us as leaders. When I show up for my team, it's like I just want to be present and I want to be able to be able to support everybody in the best way possible. I'm just going to be a good listener. Whatever it is, the starting point for all of us is really around setting our intentions and using that as our North Star, because we know being a leader today is really hard. Let's be real, yeah.

Speaker 3: 21:56

I think if that's all you can do is set the intention and always go in with that's always a good starting point.

Speaker 1: 22:01

Then afterwards have opportunities for reflection, say how did I do? And then you get that learning cycle. So these were my intentions, this is how I wanted to show up in this meeting and then to give myself the space and the grace to be able to say, okay, how did I do, what did I learn? What do I want to implement for tomorrow?

Speaker 2: 22:19

I want to talk a little bit more about the both end, the both end because I feel like there is this reality, especially with folks right now.

Speaker 2: 22:28

their companies are probably like get to know AI, understand AI, your job's not going to go away. The person who knows how to use AI is going to take your job. We're hearing all of the tropes and we know that those folks that lean into these really more human skills are the ones that are really going to thrive, not only for themselves, but, honestly, for their team. Who wouldn't want to work with a leader like that? I'm curious about how people can start to tiptoe into this, especially that both end thinking and really make the power of AI and our human capabilities work.

Speaker 1: 23:00

It's really the best marriage of mind and machine and the way that we look at it, and this was really based on hundreds of interviews that we did and also our data collection but when we looked at each of these different qualities, there's a really nice kind of both and aspect of looking well, what's the best of tech and what's the best of human, and so, for awareness, the way that we framed it is in terms of AI is amazing at content, like more content than any of us could ever grasp, but human beings are amazing at context. Why am I here? What's important? What are my intentions, what else is going on, what else is relevant? And that ability to be able to marry that context setting with then leveraging content is a way to be able to get the best of both.

Speaker 1: 23:44

On the wisdom side, ai is amazing. Any question that you have, it'll give you an answer. And what humans, though, are really good at if we have the time and space is really good at being curious, beginner's mind like to being able to think outside the box and our critical thinking to be able to. When we get an answer from AI, I'm not really sure that's a good answer. What would be another question.

Speaker 1: 24:04

So this marriage of questions and answers is a way to again really have that both and thinking. And then, on the compassion side, the way that we looked at the both and was really human beings fundamentally are able to connect with their ability to care, their ability to create trust, their ability to look at you and say I care about you, you're important to me, and to be able to lead with heart. And AI, like I said, it's programmed with all of the best knowledge of human behavior, emotional intelligence, and so another both end is to be able to say okay, I care about you guys, and how can I be able to use that care and leverage AI to be able to help me? Because we have to have a difficult conversation or we need to move an agenda forward and I don't know where to start, but I want to be able to engage us in that process, and so those are some of the key things that we really see as being a way to be able to marriage the best of both minds and the best of both technology.

Speaker 2: 24:56

Do you see that changing as AI gets more eugenic and gets smarter? Do you see this changing or do you see these are evergreen?

Speaker 1: 25:06

It was one of the questions that we asked and that we continue to ask in our research, and so far we do see that these are evergreen, and that's why I think it's so interesting is that even though AI is getting better at, let's say, context, it still doesn't have the amazing wealth of understanding and experience that a human does.

Speaker 1: 25:27

And I think that even when we look at agentic AI like it still is at this point in time and again we're looking at a horizon of the next three to five years it still needs to be told what to do, it still needs to have ground rules and it still is limited in terms of what it can do. And even though it's got a really big box, still is limited in terms of what it can do. And even though it's about a really big box, thinking outside that box is still something that is in the realm really of still of us mere mortals. So, at least for the next three to five years, we see these as evergreen and hopefully that, leading with heart, our aspiration, our hope is that will always be augment with AI, but something that is evergreen in terms of bringing out the best of our human leadership.

Speaker 2: 26:08

I also am really taken with your finding about even though AI can communicate with emotion, if you will people. When they found out that the bot or the chatbot was a chatbot, they were left feeling empty. I'm very taken with the fact that people still innately want a human right and I wonder if that's never going to change, even when AI becomes like minority report and singularity and all this good jazz. I wonder if there's some sort of magic, juju, that we're always going to want a human, no matter what, and these things are always going to be the case.

Speaker 1: 26:40

Yeah, I deeply hope so, and I do think that is the case. The problem, though, is that these are at risk Our human connectivity. We know that there's an epidemic of loneliness and this was before Gen AI came out and we know that organizations that are heavily AI dependent people feel even less connected and more lonely. Why? For a number of reasons. One, because people overuse the technology. Right, they use the technology to be able to send a message that really should be a conversation, but we also know that because, when an organization that's heavily embedded with AI, people aren't asking each other questions. They're using AI to be able to ask the questions, so they're not turning to their neighbors.

Speaker 1: 27:21

And the other thing, critical thinking. We know that 74, the recent study this wasn't ours, but a recent study showed 74% of leaders are so overwhelmed that they would prefer to have a chatbot make their decisions, and that's scary, but real right, and so I think that the problem right now is that our awareness, our wisdom and compassion is under threat because of AI it's creating. We're more distracted. We have the risk of, I will say, instead of being wiser, actually being dumber if we delegate our decisions to AI, and being more disconnected and what we really need to do, and I think that's why conversations like this are so important. We need to be really intentional about overcoming these real risks of artificial intelligence, so that we were able to leverage the benefits and not get sucked into kind of the dark side of where the future of work could be going if we're not careful.

Speaker 2: 28:13

Yeah, yeah, I wonder what you'd recommend. Let's say somebody is I'll take myself, for example, and I know a lot of people I talk to are the same way right, they have a large language model. They're using gpt, cloud perplexity, whatever doesn't matter, they're using that. It's their little assistant on this side. They're using it more and more each day.

Speaker 2: 28:34

they're reaping the benefits of the efficiency of it and maybe, slowly, they're talking to humans less and less by 30 minutes yeah, how do they like break that cycle potentially and or make sure that they're like carving out space for more of the more human attributes? Like you know how people have phone addictions, it's just put it away.

Speaker 1: 28:55

You walk away from it.

Speaker 2: 28:56

What what do people need to be really thinking about, so they don't get into the trap of only using their large language model?

Speaker 1: 29:04

First of all, I love the question because I do agree. We do know that people are addicted to their phones Many programs actually that we do with leaders. One of the most simplest intervention that we do is we take away their devices and you should see the looks on their faces Like it's just we've taken out their heart, like how could you like what? I'm going to be disconnected. And it's so interesting that they actually do go through withdrawal symptoms because they're not like, oh my gosh, what if somebody needs me? And it's really interesting.

Speaker 1: 29:31

Many of us are addicted to our technology and I do think that with these tools, because they are the large language models, as you said, they talk to us really nicely, they're designed to please, they're really engaging, to be able to have conversations with, and they never get mad at us like real human beings, real colleagues do, and they're designed to suck us in. These are money, these are not altruistic devices that have been created for the best of intentions, and so they're designed to suck us in all different kinds of ways. So what I love about your question is that we need to be able to make sure that we stay in the driver's seat. Back to the Ferrari analogy, we need to be able to make sure that we stay in the driver's seat. Back to the Ferrari analogy we need to be able to make sure that we're in the driver's seat of our technology and that we recognize, because many of us think we're smarter than our smartphones and we're not Like.

Speaker 1: 30:16

Our smartphones are designed to be addictive and until we wake up to that fact, we'll say, oh, I'm not addicted to my phone. It's like all right, let me take it away. Oh, wait a minute. So I think that we need to be aware that these tools are designed to be able to suck us in and really promote use, which, again, is wonderful because they're really useful to be able to help support us in our daily activities. We need to be really practical. Like you say put the device away, get up, go for a walk, put the device away, have a conversation, put the device away, have a conversation, put the device away, take some time for reflection in terms of your to enhance your creativity, enhance your ability to be able to think outside the box. So I think that you need brain hacks to be able to help you to not get sucked into the technology, because they're designed to be addictive. They put us in echo chambers, and that's another risk that we need to be intentional about to overcome.

Speaker 2: 31:07

Yeah, yeah. It's a very odd feeling when you realize you are addicted to your phone, even the muscle memory of reaching for your phone the other day. I have Claude and I have chat GPT and I have found I have started going straight there as opposed to wait. What do I really think? What do I really need to be researching? And so it's almost not getting rid of the muscle or not making sure I have atrophy or like human atrophy or addiction, and it is a job that is a very intentional practice, but I think it's needed, yeah.

Speaker 1: 31:41

What I loved about what you said is exactly that it's got to be a practice. Exactly, it's so easy, let's say, I've got to brainstorm, I need to write a new article, and it's so easy to go into whatever tool that you're using and say, all right, write an article for me in the style of HBR. I could even write an article that Jacqueline Carter would write in HBR, because it does have access to the web and it's so tempting to the web and it's so tempting. What I loved about what you said is no, I've got to force myself. It's like going to the gym. I've got to force myself to make sure I continue to go to the gym.

Speaker 1: 32:11

And that's the other analogy that we use oftentimes when we're talking about AI and how it can augment. It's like looking at it like an exoskeleton, right, so an exoskeleton. We know that it helps us to be able to enhance our strength. And AI can be like an exoskeleton that can really help us to augment our mind and augment our heart. But if we don't, at the same time, develop our mind and our heart, it's going to atrophy. If we just let that exoskeleton do all the work, our muscles will atrophy.

Speaker 1: 32:41

And I think what you said is exactly. It's a practice to be wait a minute. What do I think? How would I write this article? Wait a minute, what do I know before I go to my tool? What would be a good way to be able to create this presentation or to be able to have this conversation and then augment with the tool to be able to help you but don't lose the muscle? And I think that's exactly it. We're really at risk of losing some of these core, fundamental muscles, like critical thinking, like emotional intelligence, because we're over relying on our technology.

Speaker 3: 33:12

The addiction to your phone is so real. I don't know if I don't remember where I saw this, but someone mentioned if you start to have this little indent on your pinky finger where you hold your phone, that means like you forever have changed like the bone structure of your finger from where you hold your cell phone and like you forever have changed like the bone structure of your finger from where you hold your cell phone. And I looked down and I was like, is that a dent? And I started to slowly back away. For anyone listening, check your pinky when you think about getting into some of those ethical guardrails, as we're talking about not letting these muscles atrophy. We're introducing this to teams. Francesca and I are trying to advise folks on, like how to introduce this to your team without fear, like testing and learning in a safe way. Given everything that you've researched, what's like a one sentence AI policy for a leadership?

Speaker 1: 34:01

team. Oh, I love that One sentence. Policy I would say is human in the driver's seat is do not, do not allow these tools to overcome your human judgment, your human responsibility, your human accountability, and be aware of the seductive nature of these technologies to be able to to delegate decisions. If I was going to have one word policy, it would be always human in the driver's seat. And then, of course, you said just one. But I do think we are deeply concerned about considerations about using these technologies in terms of the environmental impact. We are concerned about data security and privacy, which is already a concern. It was a concern before artificial intelligence and now all of this information. And who's storing this information? How is it being used? So there's a long list, but the one is the human in the driver's seat.

Speaker 3: 34:53

By the way, the smartest policy possible when you're looking at that workday class action lawsuit, exactly, yeah, okay, I love to hear it when you think about the case studies, because you had multiple that were highlighted in the book, case studies that during your research that kept you up at night could be good or bad, but was there one case study in particular that kept you up at night?

Speaker 1: 35:14

There was one. We didn't put it in the book. So we had the privilege of being able to talk to chief people officers, chief learning officers, ceos as well as tech leaders, chief learning officers, ceos as well as tech leaders. And probably the story that scared us the most and we were shocked by this and I will not say the name of the company, but it was a story we were sitting down with the chief human resource officer of a global technology company and she told us a story about a senior executive in the organization that had been basically deep faked by somebody posing as the CEO of that company and was about to transfer millions of dollars and it scared the bejeebies out of us and this was actually like a year and a half ago and I think it gets back to.

Speaker 1: 36:02

We all think that we're smarter than our smartphones, we think we're smarter than our devices, but this it was just. It was unbelievable because I would think, oh, that would never happen to me. And when and when she talked about this case, like the guy had emails from his CEO, he had text messages, he had video little snippets telling him he was on a secret project and not to tell anybody about it and it had been an extensive scam that had been over multiple months, and this guy had absolutely no idea and he had been completely hoodwinked by it and it was just like whoa, that was yeah. So that was really scary.

Speaker 3: 36:39

Yeah, as the video continues to get better and better On TikTok right. Has anyone seen the fake Tom Cruise? Oh, fake, Tom Cruise is crazy.

Speaker 1: 36:49

What is this? And I think it's great. Yeah, it is really scary, and I do think that we are so susceptible to, if we see something, even if somebody says that it's created by artificial intelligence, we have a tough time unseeing it. It's part of our neurology, right, like we trust what we see and that is how our brain has been designed and wired over so many centuries, and so, even if somebody says, oh yeah, that was fake, it's no, it still sticks with us because we saw it, so it's real. And so I think one of the bigger, larger concerns that we have is just around the continued what's real, what's not real, fact versus fiction, but not only that like how we are so influenced by our quote, unquote peers, our tribes and how. Again, social media and I think that's one of the things that we focused a lot on.

Speaker 1: 37:37

Human beings have always had an amazing history of introducing new technologies without necessarily looking at the negative potential consequences.

Speaker 1: 37:45

Social media was designed to make us better connected, and how's that working out?

Speaker 1: 37:50

Email was supposed to save us a ton of time, I don't know, and so I think that's for us. One of the big things is that really started to scare us when we started to look at this technology is how fast it's moving, how fast it's being pushed, like every organization right now and if they're not, they should be is pushing adoption of AI, and they should right, because they got to get ahead all their competitors, so every organization is pushing adoption, but I don't think we're spending enough time thinking about wait a minute like what are the potential consequences of this adoption and are we taking the time to pause and say what are we potentially at risk? And that's really a lot of the work that we do with leaders is we talk about the adoption and how to be able to embrace it and we talk about I think, francesca, to your point like how to have the brain hacks that you say, put away the device. Let's just make sure I'm still using that muscle that I have as a good leader, as a good human being.

Speaker 3: 39:04

Okay, Jacqueline, are you up for some rapid round?

Speaker 1: 39:07

I am. I'm a little bit scared, honestly, Mel, because I don't know what's coming. But bring it on, I love it.

Speaker 3: 39:12

I promise these are harmless and fun, and hopefully you will have fun with them too. Okay, it is 2030, not far off, by the way. What's work going?

Speaker 1: 39:22

to look like no idea. Very simple Anybody that tells you that they know what the future of work looks like is making things up. I can tell you two things, though, that I know for sure about the future of work in 2030. The first thing is it is fundamentally AI enabled and it doesn't look anything like what we see it as today. And the second thing and this is both my prediction and also my aspiration, so there's a little bit of hopefulness is that those of us that are able to double down on the best of our humanity will be the ones that are thriving in the world of work in 2030.

Speaker 3: 39:57

I love to hear that. What's one thing about corporate culture? You're ready to see die already. You're actually excited it might be gone by 2030.

Speaker 1: 40:07

I do think that there are so many.

Speaker 1: 40:09

You guys, of course, have been around the halls of corporate, of the corporate world, for so long.

Speaker 1: 40:14

There are so many bureaucratic tendencies box checking, ticking, activities reports that nobody reads, emails that are just out of control, activities reports that nobody reads, emails that are just out of control. And I guess I am really excited about the opportunity for us to rethink work so that what work really becomes is the opportunity for us to really thrive in terms of human connection, ultimately, the opportunity for us to be able to inspire each other, to be able to connect with each other. That's the way we get great ideas, that's the way we build trust, that's the way we engage our customers in a way that makes them feel, wow, these are awesome people to work with, and I just think there are still so many bureaucratic elements of work today that we've been talking about for years to be able to let go of. So I hope to see those shift, and probably I'll say one thing is meetings where nobody knows why they're there and there's no agenda and everybody thinks it's a waste of time. Any time we can do that, let's do it now.

Speaker 3: 41:12

There was a tool that was out a few years ago. Francesca and I were like how do we tap into this? That used to tell people. I forget who is using it, but I read this article where one organization, anytime they set up a meeting, it told you the potential cost of that meeting based on who was in the room.

Speaker 1: 41:28

And I'm like genius we all need that Nice and of course, it's something we can get into. But a lot of AI tools, if we use them well, like they, can give us a summary. Was this a good use of time? Did everybody contribute what?

Speaker 1: 41:40

were some things that could this. There's a great tool right now that you can say could this meeting have been an email? Ai can really help us to be able to look at the quality of our human interaction and help us to be able to lean more into that. If we use it well, if we use it that's the key word.

Speaker 3: 41:59

You might have already answered this, but I want to ask just in case you have a different response but what is the greatest opportunity most organizations are missing out on right now?

Speaker 1: 42:08

Yeah, human potential. I think that right now, there is so much focus on AI and, of course, we just wrote a book and we're doing research on it and I think there's so much focus on the technology and organizations are missing out on and they're investing and organizations I get it like they're investing so much money on the technology they're missing out on the opportunity to really develop and support and leverage the best of our human capabilities, and that is what's gonna enable us to be able to use these tools well and be able to get the return on investment of these amazing technologies.

Speaker 3: 42:43

Yeah, okay, it's getting a little personal. What music are you listening to right now? What's on your playlist?

Speaker 1: 42:50

Oh my gosh. Okay, that was a real I. It's so funny. I have to say that I was just with a girlfriend over the weekend and we were laughing about like eighties music that we still love to be able to go back to as a go-to, and so I have to say I'd love to try to pretend that I'm hip and current, but people would laugh at me if I tried to pretend that yeah, 80s, 90s, those are my go-to. But I love, actually I love Pink these days. I don't know why. She just really is inspiring to me and I guess she's current. So maybe that would be my lead into modern music tech in this age, my lead into modern music tech in this age Perfect.

Speaker 3: 43:26

I'm not going to judge your 80s and 90s because I'm right along with you. I was listening to Cyndi Lauper yesterday on my drive Girls just want to have fun.

Speaker 1: 43:31

How can you go wrong with?

Speaker 3: 43:32

that no judgment. What are you reading right now? It could be an audio book. It could be like the old school turn the page. What's on your reading docket?

Speaker 1: 43:43

I'll tell you what book I just finished which I just loved. I just finished Nexus and I am old school, I have tried, I travel all the time and I tried to use audiobooks and I just I love actually. I'm a tactile reader, I just love being able to like actually, and so Nexus is a really thick book, and so carrying it around has been a real chore, but that means every time I open it up and I just loved it.

Speaker 1: 44:05

I think that he that I think that he provides such a fantastic, interesting insight on democracy and information technology and and just recognizing some real risks that we're facing with these new technologies and and, of course, the state of the world. And so I love books like that, so it's a great read. Okay, who do you really admire? Love books like that? So it's a great read. Okay, who do you really admire? Oh my gosh, there's so many people that I admire.

Speaker 1: 44:31

As soon as you said that, I guess that's what Rapid Fire is all about the first person that came to mind is Michelle Obama she just came to mind but I also, I guess, in my work I've been so privileged to work with senior leaders and I could name so many of them but particularly chief people officers right now that are really in a challenging position where they know the future of work, as we've talked about, is going to radically change and they need to hold that space where there's so much fear and, at the same time, and they need to be honest, because there are changes coming in terms of workforce transformation and anyway so I just I really admire a lot of the chief people officers, so a big shout out to all of them that are standing in this space of, at this major inflection point, work and being able to lead with courage, with care, but also with clarity and with integrity and with integrity.

Speaker 3: 45:26

Yeah, I know HR always has the tough job right. Because, you're in the sandwich between the board and the employees and what that looks like. You're always in the middle, but always with the best intentions, hopefully, and if they read your book, for sure they'll have some good guidance there. What's a piece of advice that you want everyone to know?

Speaker 1: 45:50

I think that was such a good question. I think lean in. I think that it is at least in my career and my life, I've always trusted my gut, even when I was afraid, and I always liked the definition of courage is to step into places that scare you, and I think that there is a lot for us to be fearful of, whether it's fearful of social rejection right, there's so much tension in terms of having a tough conversation or whether it's concerns about will I have the skills that I need in the future, and I guess, just yeah, leaning into the places that scare you and recognizing that you're not alone and being willing to have courage and take risks and I'm not saying I always do that, but that's advice I try to give myself and hopefully maybe that'll be helpful for others.

Speaker 3: 46:32

Yeah, I think it's good advice, right Like we're in a time where we're all learning, so now's a good time to have that courage. Where can listeners stay in touch with you? Stay in touch with what you're doing? What's the best way to stay connected?

Speaker 1: 46:45

Yeah, absolutely. You can follow me and find me on LinkedIn and please feel free to reach out. But also, as I said, I represent an amazing organization, potential Project, wwwpotentialprojectcom and a lot of the research that I shared is freely available. So if you don't want to buy the book, that's okay, but a lot of the research we post on our website and we love to, and you can also follow us on Potential Project, where we share, because this is an ongoing research and insights and, yeah, a great way just to be able to keep in touch and reach out.

Speaker 3: 47:15

Perfect, and we'll link to all of that in our show notes too, so folks can get easy access to that. Thanks for joining us today, jacqueline.

Speaker 1: 47:29

Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 47:29

I just love this conversation and thank you so much for both being intentional and also really future focused in our discussion today. Appreciate it. 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 Instagram, 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.