Jerks at Work

Your Work Friends Podcast: Jerks at Work with Dr. Tessa West

Jerks are everywhere…

The micromanager. The drama queen. The sly saboteur. Toxic coworkers come in all forms—and they’re not just annoying, they’re disruptive. Ever wondered how to handle that gaslighter or micromanager in your office? Well, we’re exploring these challenging workplace dynamics with Dr. Tessa West, a psychology professor at NYU and author of "Jerks at Work."

In this episode, Dr. West shares her journey from the high-end retail world to academia, offering practical advice and engaging anecdotes that illuminate the complex nature of dealing with difficult colleagues. We unpack how to deal with jerks at work without sacrificing your sanity, success, or standards. You'll walk away with actionable strategies to not only survive but thrive in your professional environment.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

Every jerk I've talked to, because I've been brought in by a lot of companies to do de-jerkifying coaching and most of these people are actually like lovely, and you're like I was expecting a monster and I'm just getting a sad person who is shocked.

Speaker 2: 0:15

The worst kind of thing.

Speaker 3: 0:28

Mel, what's going on? Hey, y'all have a heat wave.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Yeah, we have a heat wave. Yesterday we had an advisory for the air quality. Always a fun alert to get. Fantastic Remember when New York City, though, was in the wildfires last year, you know yeah, I happened to not be home during that time, but my husband sent me pictures. The sky was just completely orange over here, so it's just wild, ah fun with climate change.

Speaker 3: 0:55

Fun with climate change, yeah, good times, yeah. Well, speaking of New York City, we talked to someone from New York City, didn't we? We?

Speaker 2: 1:02

did, we did, we did. We spoke to Tessa West, who is a professor at NYU, and we wanted to get down on the topic of work, jerkery all the jerks at work.

Speaker 3: 1:18

Yeah, this is something that I'll tell you. One of the big themes coming out of a lot of our conversations and a lot of our work, especially on the pod, is how do I deal with these people at work that we will broadly categorize as jerks? The on the pod is how do I deal with these people at work that we will broadly categorize as jerks the gaslighters, the credit stealers, the micromanagers, all the jerks that we deal with. And so we called up Dr Tessa West. She is a professor of psychology at NYU. As Mel mentioned, she's also a leading expert in the science of interpersonal communication. Mel mentioned, she's also a leading expert in the science of interpersonal communication. She has written two books One she just dropped that's very cool called Job Therapy Finding Work that Works For you, and the other, mel. What is it? Jerks at Work, jerks at Work. Dr Tessa West has literally written the book about jerks at work, the type of jerks you meet. What do you do about them? What did you?

Speaker 2: 2:06

think about this episode, Mel. I really loved it because I think we've all been jerks at work. I don't think anyone's immune to being a jerk. I think it's on a spectrum, like we say, with a number of other things. But we've all been there. We've either been one or we've experienced it, or both. It's really insightful to think through what that looks like, how that shows up and how you can deal with it.

Speaker 3: 2:28

Loved everything that Tessa walked us through in terms of the types of jerks. What do you do about it? Stick around for the round Robin, because she absolutely gave the best one-liner for how you respond to someone being a jerk that I've ever heard in my life. I'm getting it embroidered on a pillow Awesome, yeah, it's awesome.

Speaker 2: 2:47

Well, with that, here's Tessa. Welcome, Tessa, to the your Work Friends podcast. Tell us your story. How did you get into what you do?

Speaker 1: 3:06

I'm a psychology professor at New York University and I study uncomfortable social interactions. So everything from feedback conversations with your boss to having an uncomfortable interaction in the doctor's office to working with an international group of people on a team and I've been doing this for 20 some odd years. I actually got started really studying this kind of topic of how we handle uncomfortable interactions and how they play out at work by working in retail myself and selling men's shoes at Nordstrom. I have an academic life but a non-academic path to get there, and I think if anyone's ever worked retail high-end retail in downtown Santa Barbara was where I worked. That is just the sort of perfect breeding ground for all difficult people jerks at work, status climbers, customer stealers, all that juicy stuff. I joined a lab at the same time at UC Santa Barbara. That did nothing but put people in these horrifically uncomfortable situations where you're interacting with someone who is giving you dirty looks while you give a speech on why you're a good friend. I was actually the person who gave the dirty looks.

Speaker 1: 4:15

That was my job, and so I learned academically how to study these things and study the physiology underlying people's stress they're under the skin responses while living it out in my own life working in retail, and eventually brought these worlds together to study these topics in the workplace. In the last maybe five to 10 years I've really focused on those really difficult moments we have at work, trying to figure out why we're stressed, why stress threads from one person to another and what we can do about it. And so now I have a good 30 some odd years experience uncovering all the difficult things people go through in the workplace.

Speaker 2: 4:51

One. Anyone who's been in retail myself included, also in shoes, I will add that is a very interesting experience. If you've been in any sort of customer service facing role, I'm sure you've had to have the most insane conversations. So I love that. I know, francesca, and I hear often from people am I a jerk at work one, and how do I deal with jerks at work? Which inspired us to reach out to you because we saw that you wrote a whole book on jerks at work and now job therapy. So in your study I love that you won. Your job was to give people dirty looks Interesting experience.

Speaker 3: 5:28

Sorry, but I'm thinking about. First of all, I know the exact Nordstrom you worked out is the one down in, like the city center of Santa Barbara. Really, yes, I can't imagine like that clientele selling shoes, selling men's shoes, especially when you're a pretty woman as well 18.

Speaker 1: 5:45

I didn't know what I was doing at all.

Speaker 3: 5:48

The dynamics there and the idea of. I love how this started, with this idea of like, awkward dynamics. I'm just wondering how much of that started with either you feeling awkward or you feeling like this person is awkward. Was it a mutual thing or is it more of like? Why do I feel awkward in this situation?

Speaker 1: 6:04

I think at first it was very much. Why do I feel awkward? I'm in my own head a lot and I think there's a lot to play around with there. One.

Speaker 1: 6:12

I grew up in Riverside, california, which is not a fancy place. My dad was a construction worker. I was not used to interacting with these rich Montecito men who would come in and say I need shoes for my gardener and buy like $600 shoes. So there were all there's a lot of status cues going on. So one thing I ended up studying later on was how we have cross status interactions with people who are richer or poor than us or more educated, and how we leak out our social class and all these subtle ways. So I think one of the reasons why I found those interactions so uncomfortable is because I grew up very blue collar and now I'm at UC Santa Barbara selling shoes to this like rich, white, older male population and I was asked to do all kinds of really weird things. I got down on the ground and pet someone's poodle and let it lick my face while I was putting shoes on and I just thought to myself I guess this is just what you do.

Speaker 3: 7:03

I'm okay. I'm okay, this is normal.

Speaker 1: 7:06

This isn't degrading at all. Totally fine. Totally fine, I'm going to make $60. It'll be totally worth it off the sale.

Speaker 1: 7:12

So I think a lot of that awkwardness lived in my head. It came from a lack of understanding norms, not getting the hidden curriculum of how one ought to behave in front of wealthy people. I didn't get that kind of training. And was I awkward? I'm sure I was, but I think most of us walk around with a lot of it living in our heads, more so than it actually becoming a dyadic or interpersonal phenomenon, and I definitely. For me, I try to turn lemons into lemonade and try to make a whole career out of all that really uncomfortable shoe sales experience I had. But yes, I think that the awkwardness is layered on with social cues and status issues and gender dynamics. I was the only woman in whole shoe sales, like in the men's shoes. They never let women sell men's shoes. They had a bro culture. I was brought in because I worked in the store in Riverside where I was also the only woman and convinced them that I could hack it with these bros.

Speaker 3: 8:09

So there's a lot going on, yeah, but what a great story, because I don't think you're obviously not alone in this and not alone in the awkwardness, not alone in the figuring out how to work with people and what those dynamics can do, especially in a work environment.

Speaker 2: 8:22

What was one of the most surprising things that you learned through all of your work.

Speaker 1: 8:27

Yeah, I think one finding that I kept seeing over and over again and I learned this by studying physiology and behavior at the same time is that when we're the most uncomfortable and we could see this in the lab because we measured people's blood pressure so you would get those readings live and measure their heart rate when you're the most uncomfortable, when you're the most stressed, you're the nicest readings live and measure their heart rate.

Speaker 1: 8:45

When you're the most uncomfortable, when you're the most stressed, you're the nicest, most over the top version of yourself, and my colleague, wendy Menez started calling this brittle smiles effect. So like you're so great, this kind of high pitched voice over the top smiling, and what's fascinating is because you're feeling stressed. At the same time, the anxiety still comes out, but in these kind of like weird creepy ways where you smile but not with your eyes right, so you don't have a douche and smile. We have a kind of lower half of you is smiling or you're fidgeting and avoiding eye contact, but saying the right thing and so if you're on the receiving end of one of these things.

Speaker 1: 9:17

It's like the words coming out of the person's mouth are nice, they're supportive, but it's all oozing out through these anxious cues. And what we started realizing is there's the controllable behaviors what we say and then the ones that are difficult to control how we say it and those two often misalign and that can lead to very difficult communication between people. And even talking to your jerk at work, you're probably really nice to that person if you were to go up to them. And we see this in all kinds of contexts and it's a pretty universal phenomenon, also cross-culturally. It's not just in America. I've seen it in Abu Dhabi with people from 50 countries. They do the same thing. I think that's one of our more consistent tried and true findings we found.

Speaker 3: 9:56

That's fascinating.

Speaker 2: 9:59

That's so interesting because I think one. I know I've done that when I've had to present somewhere like the over nicety to people in the room. Oh my God, but it's so interesting, Just the body language that people exude. You can't hide the body language.

Speaker 1: 10:15

Yeah, you can't control it. If you tell people okay, take a deep breath, don't look anxious, it makes it way worse. We tried that. We even tried telling people your partner's not anxious. They just had a ton of coffee today, so they're a little fidgety, they're like anxious coffee, oh my God. No, it actually makes it worse. And then they see even more anxiety than is actually there. It's really hard to get rid of this. It's a super sticky phenomenon.

Speaker 3: 10:37

It's very difficult to undo you just wrote Job Therapy, which we're super stoked about, and in the book you talk about some of the sources people have in terms of the frustration with work is actually due to some of those interpersonal relationships. When I think about people looking at a job pivot or they're unhappy in their career or they're thinking this isn't working for me anymore a lot of times people think it's because I'm not doing the right job or I'm not at the right company, not necessarily about the people you're surrounding yourself with.

Speaker 1: 11:30

I think relationships are everything at work, and I mean that in a lot of ways. So one of the main things that turns on or off our work happiness is our interpersonal relationships with people, and that doesn't just include your boss or the people on your team. That includes the people that you see day in and day out. I think that even if you're an individual contributor and I hear this a lot I'm an individual contributor. I don't need relationships. Of course you do, we all do. It doesn't matter what the nature of your work is. Those dynamics are at play and we know social networking is an important part of the work process, but we don't really understand how. So that's another component is, in addition to the one-on-one interactions you have, where you learn new information. You learn the hidden curriculum. You figure out whether your kiss-up kick-downer has a widespread problem or if it's just you.

Speaker 1: 12:11

All of those things, those kind of sticky interpersonal issues, can really turn our stress on and off. And when it comes to exploring new jobs, people often think about it very structurally I want something hybrid, or I want to work in this new city, or I need a better compensation package. They don't think about the relationship part so much, even though that's actually one of the biggest predictors of what leads us to actually drift apart psychologically from our jobs is the change in interpersonal dynamics at work. But we don't focus on that. We focus on how much we're getting paid or whether we can get promoted. But those things matter, but not as much as those interpersonal relationships, and those relationships are key to doing complex things like developing a new career identity.

Speaker 1: 12:52

Like you can't do that by reading websites or taking courses to improve this and that skill. You really have to sit down for 15 minutes and talk to a stranger and say tell me what your day-to-day looks like. That's really how you develop clarity around things, like a new identity at work, and so I really encourage people even shy people, even awkward people, even people who are individual contributors to really embrace the relational component at work in lots of different ways, and I don't mean you need to be best friends with anyone at work. You can think about relationships in different ways of serving these different purposes, but they're absolutely essential to feeling good at work and feeling good about yourself. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 13:31

I've absolutely felt that right, especially when I've been in organizations for an extended period of time. Where you feel like you have the relationships, where you feel like you have the network, it's so much easier to get things done and, quite honestly, a lot of times, work is just so much more enjoyable. Yeah, but the thing we talk about a lot too in terms of career development or even getting promoted, is you have to have sponsors, you have to have a board of directors. People need to quote unquote know who you are. That doesn't just happen and that isn't typically just based on your great work. It has to deal with do people want to vouch for you? Do they like you? Do you have the relationship to your point?

Speaker 1: 14:06

Are they willing to expend social capital to?

Speaker 1: 14:09

stand up for you. You know we often don't think about how getting promoted, you know and I don't just mean like literally getting a new job title, but having someone in the room vouch for you is costly for them. You know, even if it's, even if you're good and everyone agrees you're wonderful, if they are going to put their neck out for you and argue that you should get promoted, that means that they can't do it for the next person. In academia, it's like every time the chair goes to the dean and asks for money for a person, that's one less person that they can then ask for the next time, because we have a zero-sum amount of stuff that we're working with and we have to think about. Are we earning these relationships that are helping us in the moment but also helping us build our careers out? And every recruiter, internal and external, that I talked to for this book said that they love developing relationships with people in different stages of their careers, because they will place the same person five times. It's like a real estate agent.

Speaker 1: 15:05

They will sell you a house five times over your life and it is essential for them to get to know you and know if you're going to actually stay in a job. Do they want to place you? Because they don't get a bonus if you don't stay for six months, and so they're going to place the person they know will stay because they stayed in the last thing they placed them in. And those kind of lifelong relationships are also essential for us just in terms of our whole kind of life career trajectory, and we often don't really think about those lifey relationships outside of our specific job context.

Speaker 3: 15:34

Yeah, and then you meet these people that have these massive networks of people and they're so much better off typically than people that don't. I see this a lot too. This is such a small microcosm of this, but when you see people get laid off and then all of a sudden they're starting their LinkedIn profile, or all of a sudden they're starting to reconnect back, and it's like you should have been doing this all along, or nurturing these relationships all along to have that network to fall back on, it's a very small example, but something we see all the time.

Speaker 1: 16:02

Oh yeah, like you don't maintain those relationships and you only turn to them when you're laid off or you blast your whole network one message Like please help me. Like without those interpersonal connections. It just feels like relationship spam and I think no one likes to feel like they're being spammed in any context, especially with someone they know Not at all my parents used to say like relationships are, it's like a garden, it's a reciprocal thing.

Speaker 3: 16:24

Right, you have to tend to them, you have to nurture them and you have to give to get. You can't have it be only when I need you. So nurturing those very strong relationships obviously huge, and also giving your data something that really makes meaningful careers. And then I'm wondering on the other side of it too, where what happens when those relationships turn out to be with people that are just dicks and I've had that experience too, where you're like you're a dick, you're a jerk. And I am curious about how not even neutral relationships, but adversarial, jerky relationships impact people's careers and what they think about their careers.

Speaker 1: 17:06

I think when we have these failed relationships, losses loom larger than gains and we can perseverate on a turned relationship. For years and years I've talked to people that were like I had a best friend and then he became my boss and then I overheard him talking about me in the bathroom and it killed me. I said when did that happen? 1987. I'm still thinking about it and that's normal. When we feel like someone betrays us, we really hang on to that and to the point where we maybe have a bit of a spotlight effect, where we think it's going to damage us more than it actually does and we start to get a little conspiratorial and thinking about how they can damage our networks and things like that.

Speaker 1: 17:46

One of the people I talk about in Jerks at Work is a gaslighter and they're like the masters of trying to damage your network. Right, they don't just go after you, they go after your reputation and by doing that they hit everyone. That's a node in your network. Most jerks we deal with have less power than we think they do. Even if they tell us they're full of power and full of status, a lot of it is more bark than bite, so you need to actually do the work to figure out if there's a real concern there about that reputational damage and then be proactive about not trash talking the person but just information gathering.

Speaker 1: 18:19

We often have this instinct of they're going out there saying bad things about me.

Speaker 1: 18:22

I'm going to go out there and correct that by saying bad things about them.

Speaker 1: 18:26

But stop and take a breath and think, ok, I'm just going to information gather and get the lay of the land of my own reputation so then I can correct it and not make it about them at all, even if the person deserves that kind of negative reputation.

Speaker 1: 18:39

You have to just be super careful with gossip because you just never know how it's going to be used in the future. And we all gossip and it serves an important purpose. But the retribution piece, the piece that the it inside of you really wants to go crazy, is where you just have to focus more on controlling the narrative around your own reputation, figuring out how white for the problem is, and then I'd say these relationships fail fast. If you are getting red flagged that this person is saying negative things or credit stealing or whatever, disengage as quickly as you can from that. We all have stories I have some of when I first started going too far into a relationship with someone who is weirdly competitive or had some other tick that just didn't align with me and letting that relationship stay for too long.

Speaker 1: 19:20

And I think that's where we get a little messed up at work. We think people need to be our best friends and sometimes you figure out they're not and just disengage. I think is key. But yeah, it can hurt. I still have my stories from 20 years ago I still think about so I think it's pretty normal.

Speaker 3: 19:35

I have a reoccurring dream about somebody and it's just like why won't this go away? I see your face.

Speaker 1: 19:44

I understand. I understand it's like an ex-boyfriend they got a weird breakup with and there was no closure, none.

Speaker 3: 19:51

Yeah, and I still. There's certain things. I can't listen to. A certain song You're just like oh, I am burned. You're like I can't. Nope, nope, nope, yeah, but taking away that power to your point around when you're in it, disengaging like you don't need to keep working at it. Disengage number one and number two.

Speaker 1: 20:17

Focus on your own PR and not bad-mouthing them, right, ie Taylor Swift trash-chakes itself out at some point, hopefully, or just be very strategic about the nature of the bad-mouthing. I'd say if you do go to HR, you want to bad-mouth, don't focus on your feelings about the nature of the bad mouthing. I'd say if you do go to HR, you want a bad mouth, don't focus on your feelings about the person or your kind of description of their personality. Focus on exactly what they've done. When I have conversations with leaders about difficult people, I'll say something like okay, I'm going to tell you what happened, and if I start to editorialize this a little bit, just let me know, because I don't mean to. And then followed by we had this meeting and this is what was said, leaving my emotions aside and I don't use words like they're untrustworthy or they're disrespectful. Those are very eye of the beholder and not everyone's going to agree with you about what those things look like. So I just described the behaviors and then it makes me look like a more mature person.

Speaker 2: 21:03

Stick to the facts. But all goes back to the golden rule right Is like focus on yourself.

Speaker 1: 21:13

Don't worry about others. I'm curious, why do people show up like this? I'm a firm believer that most people who are jerks don't actually know it, because it harms them a lot to not have solid networks and good reputations. I'm dealing with a jerk right now at work and we just got some feedback about the people who report to her and it's all pretty terrible and she's been here for a long time and I asked her closest colleague what's going on. He goes oh, no one tells her. No one's ever told this person what's going on and I said why not? Because she gets a little scary and defensive.

Speaker 1: 21:41

So it's like one sign that this is going to involve some conflict or a little bit of social finesse to maneuver around and everyone's like, no, thank you, they're not getting rewarded for giving her this feedback. They don't win. She's powerful. So they could actually lose social capital. And I think most of us walk into those conversations thinking I could lose a lot if this goes poorly. And what am I gaining really by being honest with this person?

Speaker 1: 22:04

And most feedback is delivered pretty poorly and it takes the form of what I just mentioned. It's things like you're not trustworthy or you're disrespectful and no one really knows what. Some of them are out to draw blood, but I think most of them aren't. They just aren't very socially perceptive either. They don't pick up on cues that maybe, like other people, are unhappy with them. Every jerk I've talked to because I've been brought in by a lot of companies to do de-jerkifying coaching and most of these people are actually like lovely and you're like I was expecting a monster and I'm just getting a sad person who is shocked the worst kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 22:52

Yeah, we talk about that all the time how the feedback just doesn't happen. Renee Brown's clear as kind is for a good reason and real time, and not just those big words, as you mentioned, but like actionable things that they can truly address, like clear feedback that's actionable, not just feelings. What's the worst kind of jerk that you've seen in the workplace?

Speaker 1: 23:16

The one that causes the most psychological damage, I would say, is the gaslighter.

Speaker 1: 23:21

And that is a word that like took on its own. It had its own moment. It's very much in the zeitgeist, but those are people who are lying with the intent to deceive on a pretty big scale and they socially isolate their victims. And so a lot of the people who've been gaslit. It's been going on for a very long time. They've been cut off from their social networks and also it's not always in the form of an insult, or you're not good enough or you're going to feel a lot of it's fiery feedback.

Speaker 1: 23:48

You're a special person. I'm only bringing in one member from the team to know about the super secret mission that we're on together. Before you know it, you've stolen company secrets and general counsel's at your door, but you had no idea. You thought you were a part of a super special secret mission. So I think people have a complicated emotional reaction to being gaslit, partly because there's a guilt that they have done some unethical things, that they felt silly, that they were talked into, and then they have no idea what other people actually think of them and who they can trust to to get an understanding of their reputation and they feel very lost and many of them, because of that, have so much trauma that they don't trust anyone ever again in any workplace. So for these folks this is really a traumatic experience. I think it's fairly rare to run into a true gaslighter. It's different than someone who lies, but that is a very damaging one.

Speaker 2: 24:40

Yeah, I've experienced that before, francesca, you have too, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 24:45

Do you think a gaslighter is like pathological?

Speaker 1: 24:47

Yeah, I think it's like access to personality disorder stuff. I think it's a lot of these are contextually based.

Speaker 1: 24:56

Jerks can be bred at work, but I feel like you have to have a special combination of some dark triad traits or whatever to really thrive, because and a lot of these gaslighters are quite good at their job- and they're very powerful and they're well-connected and they know how to frame up themselves to be protected from whatever they've asked you to do in aiding and abetting, and they usually walk out with pretty clean reputations at the end of the day and that's very frustrating for people. There's not like a sense of procedural justice.

Speaker 3: 25:29

One thing I've been having a hard time, and I am someone that is there's a special place in hell for women who don't support other women. That is my thing, and so it pains me to say this, because this is just my observation. What I have been trying to suss out, though, is most of the gaslighters I have met have been women, typically, I'd say 40 plus. I know there can be male gaslighters that are 18 years old like that, so that's fact right. What I've been trying to suss out, though, is how much of that type of behavior has been the world that they've grown up in and had to fight for and compete for in a male dominated world, yada, yada versus the pure pathology. And then where's the line where it's no, this is just who they are versus this is what they've been bred to?

Speaker 3: 26:10

do that's hard sometimes for me to suss out.

Speaker 1: 26:14

There's a lot of research on queen bee syndrome and things like that right, so you get these women in male dominated fields, and I'd also say that discrimination against women is there are no gender differences in who actually does it, and so people are like women shouldn't be discriminating against women. They do just as much as men do.

Speaker 1: 26:33

There are almost no documented kind of gender of the perceiver effects, meaning the person who does it. But when women do it, it stands out, it's much more salient and it also often takes more of a social aggression form, because the way women tend to be aggressive is much more sort of convoluted and social. And it starts when we're six years old and we learn these tactics of aggression through. Little boys hit each other, little girls gossip about each other, and there's a developmental trajectory of how we learn to be successfully aggressive that we can then take to work and the queen bees the women who've made it in these male-dominated fields. They have often suffered quite a lot. That they think earns them the right to then behave the same way. I have had a very similar experience where the people who I felt discriminated against me the most were more senior women who felt like they went through the gauntlet. It's now my turn and I need to just suck it up.

Speaker 1: 27:27

So there's a lot of kind of stereotypes about what one ought to do as a woman, when you're allowed to have babies, how you're supposed to behave and dress and no one's ever told me how to dress, except for other women showing up in job interviews. So I do think there's like a special dynamic that I think happens there with these women who have succeeded in these male dominated places.

Speaker 3: 27:47

Yeah, I like the term queen bee though, because I think that gives a nice frame for that, because it's hard Sometimes it's hard to assess. You talked about the gaslighter. In your book you write about other types of jerks at work and I'm wondering if you could give us a bit of this survey. What are the other types of jerks people meet at work?

Speaker 1: 28:05

My favorite is the kiss-up kick-downer, and this book is actually based on someone I worked with at Nordstrom's. This is why I love this person. They are very good at their job and they're super socially savvy, and so they're high on what we call status acuity. They can read the room. They can walk into a room and tell you who has status, who has respect and admiration and who doesn't. They can walk into a room and tell you who has status, who has respect and admiration and who doesn't. They can figure that out pretty quickly. So the boss tends to love them. They tend to be top performers, and if you are to complain that they are mistreating you so they kick down people at their level or beneath, you're going to get a lot of eye rolls and you're just jealous, and so they're very clever and savvy and Machiavellian and are able to get ahead through these kind of tricksy ways. They're very careful about who they gossip to and about, and they only do it in a very strategic way. And so if you have a workplace with a hierarchy which every workplace does these individuals tend to be very good at climbing up that hierarchy and then reading who has the status within that hierarchy. So that's my favorite.

Speaker 1: 29:04

I think some of the more straightforward ones are like the credit stealer who we are all probably pretty familiar with, and this person is also savvy. They tend to actually they don't just steal all their credit, they'll give you public credit for certain things so that when you then go complain it's much easier for them to say what am I talking about? I just gave them this whole speech publicly about all the hard work they've done. So credit stealers have a bulldozer type in my book as well. So this is a person who takes over meetings and agendas. They can usually work power structures behind the scenes, so you have a lot of things that end in an impasse and you're not quite sure why or what's happening, and these can all be team members.

Speaker 1: 29:43

And then I have two types of bosses. I have the micromanager, who I think most of us are familiar with, those insecure bosses that oversee all your work and they tend to do a lot but not get anything done. And then the neglectful boss, who, ironically, tends to also be a micromanager. So that's usually one person who oscillates between micromanagement and neglect. While they're micromanaging you, they're neglecting someone else, and so the neglect really gets operationalized as ignore, ignore, show up at the 11th hour, top-down control, change everything. Everyone freaks out, has a stress response and then they leave again for six months. So they go back and forth. So micromanager and neglectful boss are two people, but often one person.

Speaker 1: 30:27

And then the gaslighter who we just talked about.

Speaker 2: 30:37

I feel like I've encountered all of those in my career At the same time, sometimes all in one. I'm curious do you think every employee has been a jerk at work?

Speaker 1: 30:51

Yeah, if you've worked long enough, you are a jerk. We all have our own Achilles heel. We all have the worst version of ourselves that we can bring to work. And maybe that's a person who gets jealous and insecure and so it gets lashy outie. Or my son would say you're lashy outie. Or it's someone who feels like they need massive certainty and they're not getting it from their boss and so they hover over your Google page as you're working and they call you and you have to hide under your desk. I think we all have that version of us. When we get stressed and anxious, and some of us, that instinct is to try to overpower, to get that internal sense of control. Some of us disengage completely and become neglectful, and then some of us just have an inner instinct to be a little bit Machiavellian.

Speaker 1: 31:36

It's what we've seen, If you work in a law firm, anyone who's made partner probably is a little bit on that Machiavellian scale and thinks it's okay to kick down to climb ahead. And I think the key is just knowing what that ugliest version of you is on the inside so that you can then not make it go away but put steps in place structurally to prevent that person from coming out. But I do think we all have our inner jerk and that can be a different person at different stages of your career as well.

Speaker 1: 32:03

When you're more or less secure in a role versus completely overwhelmed, but plenty of security psychologically. But I'm a cynical person and I study the dark side of human nature and put people through really egregious social interactions to bring out the ugly version, because the nice version is not so interesting for me. But yes, I do think most of us have some inner jerk.

Speaker 2: 32:24

Yeah, I think it makes sense. Right, we're human beings, you show up that way. But I think, to your point, it's the self-awareness that's so critical, just knowing what that is what can come out. So how do you tame that, focusing on that? For employees, specifically, what are some of the ways that they can identify a jerk? Because, as you mentioned, there are covert jerks. They might not even realize that person's a jerk. And then there are some in your face jerks. One of my favorite things that you say is work jerkery, right, is this an environment full of work jerkery or not? Starting in the interview process, can they start to see that?

Speaker 1: 33:00

Yeah, I used to study first impressions. What can we get from the first 30 seconds? And actually thin slices of human behavior are actually pretty accurate predictors of the future. One thing is most work jerkery shows up a little bit ambiguous. In fact it is rare to say they're prejudiced. You don't you got to add up all these behavioral cues and then blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1: 33:27

Work jerks are a little bit like that, where you're going to have maybe a gut instinct that there's an ambiguous situation that could go either way. The first thing I tell people is do not just trust your instincts, that you can magically read what's going on in someone's mind simply by looking at their nonverbal behavior. I've done a lot of research on interpersonal accuracy and what it really takes to know what someone's thinking or feeling, and there is no magical thing. You simply have to ask, and in the case of work jerks or in an interview, you need to ask around. You need to ask networks of people. I think if you're interviewing for a job, you want to ask at stage two or three of the interview to not just talk to the hiring manager or your boss but to talk to their team members and to talk to people who've cycled out of their team at some point. You want to gather as much information as you can by people who have what's called non-overlapping social information, so they're not always in the same room at the same time with the person. They've known them at different time points in that person's career. They've known them at different jobs or on different teams and look for the signal and the noise there.

Speaker 1: 34:31

Don't trust your instinct based on what they say or their nonverbal behavior or whatever. Base it on data that you can collect. We aren't great at information gathering in an interview stage because we want to impress so badly that we just try to put our best foot forward and say the right things. But once you get far enough in the process, you should feel confident enough to ask for other connections of people and people who know those people to gain that kind of like reputational map of the individual.

Speaker 1: 34:53

What you're looking for is like cross situational consistency across these 15 different interactions, across these 15 people. When they're stressed, they do X, when they're relaxed, they do Y. And you need as much data as you can get because any one person could have a weird experience, and so you're just looking for some consistent patterns of behavior. But really don't trust your instinct. I think that's where most of us go wrong is oh, I saw them give me side eye, or they looked bored. I think they're a jerk. No, none of that stuff is actually predictive. Gather information from the networks of people in the interviews.

Speaker 2: 35:23

Okay.

Speaker 3: 35:25

Yeah, all of us with a resting bitch face appreciate that answer.

Speaker 1: 35:28

Thank you, I have an RBF. There's a science behind the RBF, folks. If your upper lip turns down when your elastic mind does, that gives you RBF. That's the magical ingredient, and so do we want to assume that everyone with a downturned upper lip is a bitch?

Speaker 2: 35:42

No, we do not. I was in a meeting once and I had a leader IME as I was presenting like fix your face.

Speaker 1: 35:49

I'm like what? That's not cool, that is bad behavior.

Speaker 2: 35:53

Yeah, I'm like I don't even know what's wrong with my face. I can't see it so cool, not helpful, yeah. Okay, I'm curious psychologically because you even mentioned something earlier. Some folks might not even ever recover from the damage that this does to them. Like, what are the long-term psychological impacts on the individual, but even teams and organizations? What happens when there's a culture of, like, jerk culture?

Speaker 1: 36:22

Yeah, I think people learn what it takes to get ahead, and the smart ones will do it, and so jerk cultures, beget jerk cultures. If a place is a place where jerks can thrive, then they will hire and they will stay there and they won't ever cycle out because nobody wants to recruit them outside of that place. And this happens with a lot of high performing jerks. There's a reason why snakes in suits is a phenomenon that we actually talk about that you get high up enough you become a little bit of a psychopath. That's not true for every organization, but it's really hard to correct an organizational cultural reputation. That can take years, and you can even wipe everyone out of the organization that was a jerk and hire a new, and it will still take forever.

Speaker 1: 37:05

We know from the science of social network and reputation spread that removing those people with a negative reputation actually does very little to change what people think of the network as a whole. And if you can think of organizations that have had Title IX issues or Me Too issues, simply getting rid of those people isn't sufficient. And it's because people know that firing is easy, but actually promoting from within and proving that you don't breed that is hard and that takes years and years. And a lot of organizations went through this with me too. They just fired all those executives that sent those nasty text messages or sexually harassed women or whatever.

Speaker 1: 37:49

That seems like too easy of a solution to most people. They think, well, why did that person get away with it for 20 years? I don't care that you're firing them now. And there's a bit of a moral licensing effect that happens. Okay, now you feel like you got rid of them. Now you're going to really go crazy because you checked off the box right, like you're feeling good about yourself, morality wise. So I think there is damage that can last years and decades. And to the individual, they're just going to be super sensitive for looking for anything that is similar to their past, jerk and even incidental similarities that have nothing to do with it or are going to cue them up. I've talked to people who go to the same hairdresser. I can't trust that person.

Speaker 1: 38:23

Or they're wearing a similar jacket or they went to the same university or are trained by the same manager 20 years ago. Incidental similarities loom large for us and we often see correlation and inferred causation from that, and so people will start to get a little bit too triggery with those things and it can really hold them back right. Or they develop lay theories about why that person treated them in a certain way that are not ever really tested or explored. But we just have our theories and then we believe them and they're idiosyncratic and we stick to them, and I think that can really lead us astray as well.

Speaker 3: 38:57

What do you do? What do you do if you have that person? Let's take my example. I have a reoccurring dream about this dumb person. I know what do I do you?

Speaker 1: 39:04

don't have any closure in that relationship. Did it just end one? I have this with like exes. It just ended one day and you never saw them. You never did the exit interview where you said all the things or it's really hard to let go of these. Like the social psychologists would call this a goal incompletion.

Speaker 3: 39:39

You didn't complete the goal of ending the relationship, and so it's this kind of subtle, incomplete goal that you have, like never jumping off a high dive, and so you're just going to perseverate on it, or it's going to like sneak into your subconscious every once in a while, and that's true for all things that we don't complete.

Speaker 3: 39:46

Should you call them up? Who is this? I don't even know who this is. No, it's super fair. Super fair, I think, even just knowing, look, it's going to pop in. That's it. Let's just know what's going to happen.

Speaker 1: 39:51

I still dream about, like people from sixth grade that I feel like I didn't have like closure on, and that's normal. It's actually totally normal. It doesn't mean that this person is still haunting you in any meaningful way. It just means that there was something incomplete that you are not able to fully move on from because you just didn't finish the goal of ending that relationship in some kind of formalized way. And that's how most relationship ends. I think that's like just how relationships are. We don't usually have some kind of light switch that goes off where it's done. It's just like a lot of ambivalence, a lot of feelings that go up and down, and then eventually we move on. But what does move on me? I don't. Yeah, it means you're still dreaming about the person, but you're functional, so it's nice.

Speaker 3: 40:34

A thousand percent. I'm glad I'm not the only one, though, so I appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 40:37

Just write them a letter saying all the things you need to say and throw it into a fire and release it.

Speaker 1: 40:43

She's going to be dreaming about the fire and talk to the fire to get the letter back Will be a worse nightmare than it started as.

Speaker 2: 40:52

Okay, scratch that All right. So with say, you're in a new job, it's the first 90 days and you're like, oh shit, I thought I did my due diligence in the interview process. I talked to people but it is clear no one gave me the real story here. What can people do? What do you do to protect yourself if you start to identify work-jerkery happening?

Speaker 1: 41:19

I think, first off, a lot of people try to go at this alone. They think that the negative treatment happens in a vacuum. And I think I've done a lot of research on what it's like to be a newcomer at work and newcomer status and the newcomer hump, and knowing what that hump is will help you strategize of what to do next. The first thing is, when you're a newcomer and you experience this, you assume that everyone around you knows it's happening and they don't care. And so first you actually need to test that assumption. Probably people don't know what's happening because they're in their own world. There's not actually an awareness of what you're up to and how you're being treated by other people, even if it happens in a meeting. Most of us spend most of our time in meetings rehearsing what we want to say next, and we almost never pay attention to what other people are actually saying. So we can remember what we said and when we were interrupted. But if you were to say, hey, mel, did you interrupt your buddy Tom, or when was he interrupted? You'd be like I don't know. All I know is when I was interrupted. So I feel like we have these spotlight effects on ourselves, so you need to break that a little bit and actually break that assumption that everyone knows what's happening except for you.

Speaker 1: 42:26

There's also a lot about norms in the workplace and hidden norms and things like that you probably aren't aware of, and so the best thing to do to learn about norms of treatment of people at work is to take what's implicit and make it explicit and just explicitly ask about how people ought to be treated.

Speaker 1: 42:41

And that sounds silly and dumb, but there could be a culture of sarcasm here or a culture of treating each other a little roughly. That is just does not sit with you well and you need to know if you're being mistreated or if this is just a normative way people act around here. I remember in academia we make people go through this like terrible two day interview process and there's a job talk that's an hour long and in some microcultures you can interrupt every three seconds and that's a good sign. It shows engagement and others. If you interrupt every three seconds, that means you're done, that means they hated the talk, and so we often have these little microcultures at work that we assume are bigger and more industry-wide than they actually are, so people could be assuming that you understand a norm that you don't because it's weirder and more idiosyncratic than they even realize.

Speaker 1: 43:28

And this is even true for jargon at work. People assume everyone in an industry uses jargon. Jargon is team-based. The five people are using the same weird words. So you want to just test your assumptions around that If it is widespread and everyone agrees it's okay behavior and you don't like that, that's your red flag. You are not going to change the whole organization and get them to all behave differently. So those are like the two key pieces of this job is probably not going to work out for you.

Speaker 1: 43:53

Widespread and everyone's okay with it, not okay with it not widespread, then you have hope. Then you can proactively work with your network or your boss or whatever. But almost everyone assumes behavior is both more widespread and more acceptable than probably others realize and they're shocked when they hear about it and a little bit surprised. So test those assumptions before you jump ship and start something else. But it is pretty normal to think you're hired into one culture and show up and get something different. I'll say all that with one major exception being. A huge problem that came up during COVID and still happening is engagement issues. You thought this would be a really engaged workplace where everyone was on board and they were active and they were in, and then you show up and like literally no one is there. That is a really tough kind of cultural level of disengagement or neglect. That is hard to fix and I wouldn't try to take that particular issue on.

Speaker 2: 44:44

What if it's your boss in those first 90 days?

Speaker 1: 44:48

Yeah, you can talk to other team members to see how they're being treated. But my favorite lay of the land networking reality check tactic for bosses is you don't want to go to your boss's boss, you want to go up and over. You want to find people who know your boss, who are at the same level as them, and so they can give you insight into this treatment. No-transcript, I have all these kinds of like little tricksy rules based on marital therapy of how to do it. But before you're even there, you want to know oh, is this what all middle managers do, or is this just mine? Going two levels up is a little bit difficult, but up and over at their level in the network is useful to just get feedback from other bosses who have a similar role as yours.

Speaker 2: 46:00

I really like that because then you're comparing and you have data to compare it against, and it isn't just the assumption that your boss is the problem, so to speak. Not saying their behavior is great if it's common either.

Speaker 1: 46:13

But yeah, but you want to know. I think when people are like, how do I know if the jerk problem is too much, I, my first question is how widespread is it? How culturally normative is it? Are they hiding their behavior Cause they know it's bad, which is a good sign for you, because that means this organization doesn't actually like it. It's so scary to deal with, but that's a good sign that it's not just the whole well has been poisoned, it's just this one person. And is it OK to give any kind of feedback to bosses and some organizations? They have a very tight hierarchy and it's completely unacceptable to ever have a real conversation with your boss that is not just about your own career path and your own performance, but about theirs. So you want a place that actually does like bite-sized, normal conversation, organic feedback across all levels.

Speaker 2: 46:59

I know we're talking about like how leaders can manage this one-on-one with folks on their team. But what do they do if they see that the team is developing this culture of jerkery together? What can they do to address it without killing?

Speaker 1: 47:15

morale on the team or trust within the team. I think you know I teach this little program called the tricky situations, and it's just a bunch of these workplace dynamics and one of them is I actually give people an example of a situation like this where you think you know who the jerk is. Bob is constantly taking on the work of senior people. It seems like there's a free rider problem at work. Why is Bob doing everyone's work, even though he's the most junior person? How do you deal with this potential free ride problem? And half the people will come to me and say, oh, clearly these senior people are taking advantage of Bob and they're offloading work. And the other half will say, oh, I've had a lot of Bobs before. These are these go-getter junior people who steal the work of senior people in an effort to climb up, and they do this in a systematic way. And so we have our lay theories of who the actual jerk is in the situation. But we should probably test that out a little bit.

Speaker 1: 48:10

I don't love the idea of bringing people in one by one and interrogating them and asking them what's going on. I actually more like to keep track of the structure of things who's doing work and when Was this work you were assigned to do or not? Let's talk about the feedback interactions you're having and focus on the little behaviors and work together with everyone as a group. One-on-one meetings end up with conspiratorial thinking often, and sometimes you eventually have to get to that, especially if HR is involved. But you want to hear. You want your whole team to hear one message from you at the same time and not assuming that the jerk is the high status person or the low status person or you even know what's going on. So I'd say, like a lot of information gathering and put your stereotypes aside of what you think is happening before you do. But I do think that teams that there's a lot of structures and systems that we can put in place to prevent jerks and not allowing things like informal networking behind the scenes to pull levers of power good old boys club networking, things like that that used to work to get people's way and so far as we continue to reinforce that and we don't have real procedural justice around rules and decision making, I think we're in trouble.

Speaker 1: 49:15

And I'd also say for bosses and leaders, if you want to make a jerk free place and you want to prevent Machiavellianism and things like that on your teams. You need to lay out super clearly what the structure is for determining raises and promotions at your organization, down to things like certain bosses don't have the status and power to do it until they've been here for five years Really clear. And then I'd say the other thing is we need more failure pipeline data so that when we aren't promoted or when we're not succeeding, we're not bitter about it. We don't start to engage in kiss up, take down behavior to get ahead. We understand that it takes five times to get this promotion and we're only on time three or we know who our social comparison others are.

Speaker 1: 49:54

So there's procedural justice around decisions that don't often favor us, because what happens when people aren't getting ahead is that's when they turn to this jerk behavior to try to do whatever it takes. And transparency, I think, can move mountains with just explaining to people, even if they don't like the rules. If they understand them, they're less likely to turn to jerk behavior to get ahead, and that's usually where we see it actually to get their way to get ahead, to pull levers of power. That's where most people turn into jerks at work.

Speaker 2: 50:20

We can see that Francesca and I talk often about the power of transparency in the workplace, because you're removing the confusion for folks immediately and they don't have to fill in the blanks and suddenly they're in survival mode every single day because they don't know what the story is or they don't have clarity on the situation. So now it's just an unsafe environment. Do you think organizations are doing enough to address jerks at work?

Speaker 1: 50:45

No, they wait till the problem crops up and then they play whack-a-mole. There's not a lot of prevention. Think about this through the lens of healthcare. Right, we wait for the heart attack to happen and then it's time to lose weight. There's not a lot of prevention and early detection and conversations to see the early red flags, to see their warning signs, and I think that's just because most of us don't know, and often the early red flags are not what ends up being the problem later. Those early signs are not often perfectly aligned with what ends up getting you reported to HR. Anxiety and stress and feeling overwhelmed is often an early red flag of micromanagement. But that could be anything. So I don't think so. I think people talk about it a lot, but they don't do a lot to actually address the issue. One of the dark reasons why is because a lot of these jerks are high performers.

Speaker 3: 51:32

At the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 51:33

We are very much yoked to performance metrics and that if you have a board, they care about that. If you're publicly traded, that's what matters, Not nice people, not so-called soft skills. And so there's good reason for people to just say I don't care about all this stuff. I have to answer the board and if our numbers stay low, I don't care. That we have jerks, we can't afford this. Bring in the Machiavellian people who will bring our numbers back up. Sorry, that was a little bit dark.

Speaker 2: 52:00

We've seen it.

Speaker 3: 52:05

Yeah, I know, there's the whole Gary Veer chat. If your best-selling salesperson is a total asshole, go in and fire him tomorrow. No one's doing that, and you can absolutely do the long-term analysis of how much that is costing you by having someone be a jerk right Turnover and we know all the stats. But that's a long-term play and we live a quarter mile at a time in corporate America. Okay, all right, tessa, we do this with all our guests. It's called Rapid Round. They're quick, short answers. They're meant to be fun. Are you ready to play Tessa? Sure, okay, six questions, so no pressure. In your opinion, who's the biggest jerk of all time?

Speaker 1: 52:52

Donald Trump, is that basic?

Speaker 3: 52:56

Depends on who you talk to that guy. Oh, that guy.

Speaker 1: 53:02

Yeah, that guy. There's no redeeming qualities, there's just not.

Speaker 3: 53:07

I can't, I can't, I can't, can't, I can't, I can't believe I know, okay, yeah we're here again. We're here here we are here, we are, here, we are, and this is why I'm looking for eu citizenship. So, looking at property in italy, looking at property in spain, just in case shit hits the fan, there you go all right, I right, I have a Canadian husband.

Speaker 1: 53:27

I'm good, I'm covered.

Speaker 3: 53:30

Nice, excellent move, excellent. Toronto's looking really good these days. That's so funny.

Speaker 1: 53:38

What's the fastest way to identify a jerk in the workplace Ask around, just ask around. Don't trust your instincts. Gather data.

Speaker 3: 53:46

What's the best one-liner response to a jerk's rude comment?

Speaker 1: 53:50

When someone's rude to you and I wish I could go back and do this the last time someone did something awful to me that I just met I would say how many other people have you said that to?

Speaker 3: 53:59

Oh, I love that.

Speaker 1: 54:04

That's great. It's a good zinger and it really gives you the power back and makes it look like you're just judging them for the behavior. But you're not internalizing it. Oh, that is the shit.

Speaker 3: 54:16

How many people have you said that? To Just give me goosebumps. I'm like, oh, that's good.

Speaker 1: 54:19

That's very good I love that. I love that For more mean girl advice, come to me yeah.

Speaker 3: 54:26

So awesome. What's the best way to get subtle revenge on a workplace jerk without getting caught?

Speaker 2: 54:31

Does that just make you the jerk?

Speaker 1: 54:33

Yeah, this is an easy one, guys. You make friends with building maintenance and you either make sure their trash never gets taken out again or you make their office incredibly hot or incredibly cold. Attack the creature comforts. Those are actually what stresses us out the most at work, and the best way to get someone to quit a job is to move their office somewhere uncomfortable or take away their parking spot. Whoa, I know how to get people to retire. That won't retire. It's parking spot and inconvenience office and a faraway bathroom that's in a weird spot or an office next to the bathroom.

Speaker 1: 55:10

Either too close or too far.

Speaker 3: 55:14

It's so simple and so brilliant. Yeah, what's your biggest pet peeve when it comes to workplace behavior? What's the one thing you're just like? Come on.

Speaker 1: 55:22

Trash talking on social media Slack or email, but will hide from you in person. I hate it when people do that. If you're gonna do it, just own it. Just do it to my face it takes a special kind of spinelessness to do that read about me and then, yeah, not, but work right next to me as you're tweeting about me I know a place that will uh mail that person poo.

Speaker 3: 55:47

I will send you that address. Just trope load if you need that. Okay, if you could give just one piece of advice to someone dealing with a difficult coworker, what would it be?

Speaker 1: 55:57

You are not alone. You're probably the 500th victim of this particular person, so don't feel like you're being isolated. Most jerks actually isolate people and make them feel very alone and that there's something wrong with them. You're not. You are probably the 500th person on the receiving end of this jerk. The best thing you can do is ask around and figure out how many. But I think that sort of feeling stupid and alone is the shame that comes along with being victimized by jerks. That we often don't talk about, especially if you're new at work and you feel like you're being bullied.

Speaker 1: 56:29

It's like back in school. Why am I being bullied? It's not about you, it's about them.

Speaker 3: 56:34

Yeah, it's nice to frame it that way, because you can honestly almost get a little bit more objective about the situation and what you can do to get yourself into a healthier place, if you know that's what this person is like and it's not about you place. If you know that's what this person is like and it's not about you. It's been so lovely to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining us. Of course, this is so fun you guys are awesome.

Speaker 1: 57:00

I love the vibe of this. I feel like I need a drink of prosecco or something in my weird cubicle right now.

Speaker 2: 57:06

Delicious. Next time, next time, come back.

Speaker 3: 57:14

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

Speaker 2: 57:29

We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends.

The Talent Fueled Enterprise

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Talent Fueled Enterprise with Mike Ohata

You can build high-performing teams and create a workplace people actually want to be part of. Just ask Mike Ohata—Fortune 15 talent leader, author of The Talent-Fueled Enterprise, and the guy talent insiders call a badass. In this episode, Mike shares how to lead with care and results, why psychological safety drives performance, and how to stop treating people like capital.

From the future of AI to why simplicity beats scale, we unpack what soulful leadership looks like in today’s world—and why it’s not just possible, but essential. If you’re ready to fuel your org with both head and heart, this one’s for you.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

It just takes a dimension of courage. And I remember one CEO kept saying the most simplistic message. He goes if we get our culture right, the rest will come. We'll win in the marketplace, we'll win clients, we'll sell bigger projects. And you could feel it. He knew in his soul what the values were. He knew in his spirit what he was after and what he saw. And you go like, yeah, I get it.

Speaker 2: 0:28

What's going on, Mel?

Speaker 3: 1:00

Not much. I feel super energized. I belong to this community, through Culture First, that hosts co-working days in the city. I just love it so much. Not to speak for you, but like me, we kind of thrive on like hive togetherness of collaborating and brainstorming. So I just get a lot of energy out of just leaving my house and sitting in a space with other people who are getting shit done and then being able to connect and ask questions. So it felt good today I did that in the city. What about you? Nice?

Speaker 2: 1:14

And by the city you mean New.

Speaker 3: 1:16

York, I mean New York. Yeah, yeah, sorry everyone.

Speaker 2: 1:18

Yeah, I got to say I don't think I have prepared myself as a parent around sports. I did not grow up playing sports Like we were in like ceramics camp and dance and piano. That's what I did. I didn't really play sports, yeah. But my son is super into sports. My husband played soccer in college. Like they're into sports. I was not prepared for the amount of practices and such like. Just for soccer, just for soccer. And he's in first grade. They have practices on Monday, games on Saturday and then this weekend there was a jamboree like a fundraiser.

Speaker 2: 1:56

I'm like this is three days three days, three days out of the week, dedicated to soccer wait until he gets into middle school and high school.

Speaker 3: 2:06

That'd be five days a week, and then you'll have a pasta dinner to raise money. I was not prepared. Oh, I know what to get you now as a gift I have lawn chairs, I do have not a lawn, not a lawn chair, not a lawn chair like one of those pop-up tents.

Speaker 2: 2:19

What do we do? What do you hell?

Speaker 3: 2:20

yeah, the pop-up tent for outside, so. So when it starts raining, you could just zip yourself in.

Speaker 2: 2:26

It has a little window Like a little drive-thru window Like what here's your snacks. Yeah, it has a little window that you can look through, you're nice and cozy. Throw Clif Bars out of it. Yes, please get me that. That's funny, that's funny Okay. That's funny, that's funny Okay.

Speaker 3: 2:41

Oh man, yeah, you're going to be busy, yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:44

Well, we had a pretty rad discussion with Mike Ohata, didn't we?

Speaker 3: 3:02

We did. Yeah, yeah, mike Ohata joined us. He's a talent executive and strategic advisor. He's worked for organizations like Microsoft and KPMG and he's the author of the Talent-Fueled Enterprise. We read the book. It was awesome, and then we got to talk to him about it.

Speaker 2: 3:11

And we think there's a lot of good knowledge nuggets for folks to take away from this conversation. The book is written and geared towards. If you're the head of HR, the head of learning and development, if you're a CEO, right, it's looking at strategically what do you want to do to make sure that your enterprise is really garnering the full potential of everybody that works there? Right? Listen, if you are in those roles, it's a must read, absolutely, but that's not really why we wanted to have Mike on. It feels like there's this conversation happening in the ether, especially around anything HR or people related that it's very polarized.

Speaker 3: 3:40

Oh, it is right now. I read something yesterday around you're not strategic. If you're a bleeding heart HR person, take some issue with these types of comments, because I think something that you and I talk about often, and something that Mike emphasized, was this need for balance, the balance of caring for people and your bottom line and how you can bring those two things together in a really effective way.

Speaker 2: 4:09

Where work and where goodness really gets done is in trying to find the common ground, is in trying to figure out what is the balance between to your very good points, profit and being really good to your people, or really understanding how you can maximize the potential of your people, and we highly recommend Mike's book With us. He walked through how can anybody, whether you're a manager, a leader of an organization, really fuel your organization with not only talent but with soul as well, and gave some really really practical advice, and it was just a fun conversation.

Speaker 3: 4:43

And, side note, there's a lot of great movie quotes and tiebacks in this book, but this is a great conversation and with that, here's Mike Ohata. Mike, we are so excited to have you with your work, friends, today, and you've written the talent-fueled enterprise, which is focusing on how businesses can thrive by really focusing in on their talent, and we'd love to start off with what inspires you to write this book having me.

Speaker 1: 5:25

I'm really excited and I'm looking forward to our conversation. I've had the fortune in coming out of professional services and the firm I work is. There's this age where you time out and you're asked to retire. In that, just this notion of being able to be liberated from your organization, the stepping back, stepping away, getting out of the organization, has allowed to really share all the things that you'd like to work on. But you don't always have the opportunity to work on and also just get up all those kind of pent up feelings and thoughts around what could have been, could be and why can't we get to them in your careers.

Speaker 1: 5:56

It's really hard sometimes to get things done because we're constrained in these systems and these are of these organizations. The other part of the inspiration it sounds super corny, but it really is the people you work with right. It's the employees in our particular firm and the partners as well. But the people are really inspiring because, at the end of the day, they are the potential right and they are the engine of the organization. And you got to step back and go. I love that we do the work that we do in HR and talent and learning, because we love the people and we want to see what we can do for them and see what they become.

Speaker 3: 6:30

So that was my starting point on how I got inspired love of people and the value of them in the workplace, and how we can make it better. Why is talent such a crucial element in a company's success? Can you explain it to our listeners, like they're five? Why?

Speaker 1: 6:52

is that the case? Talent is just one of those words we use to talk about the people in our businesses, in our organizations, and it is the word of the day. It's become a little bit of the slogan of the day too, but it also shows the recognition that people really do matter for businesses. The broader question, though, that really comes up from that is so what do you do about it? We're talking about talent because we're trying to find a better way to talk about employees, about employees. There is this kind of deep felt in our values and so forth and our feelings that people really do matter Really. They are the heart and soul of the organization, but then the organization keeps churning on doing what it's always done, and so I think it's really important for all of us to understand is that, collectively, we're all here at this place around really needing to understand how to think about talent differently?

Speaker 1: 7:46

And the other thought that goes through my mind and why it's so important, is for the last 23 plus years we've had this notion around talent as a scarce thing. We have this mindset of scarcity and we talk about the war for talent all the time. There's a lot of relevance to those models around like looking at sort of high potential, high performance, et cetera, but it's an incomplete view, and so the challenge that I've kept coming across is that if we're all looking for the same people, the same resource, the same talent, that just doesn't compute, because we're surrounded by all these people and you know this story right Like we've hired the best people and then you wind forward and go, we can't find the right talent. And I'm just how does that even work? What happened along the way? It really begins to speak to this condition around, this philosophy or this point of view that says there's only a handful of good people out there, and I'm just like that's not really a way to live, it's not a sustainable way to live.

Speaker 3: 8:39

And so, in this current framework around you know leaders talking about talent and it's super important for us to realize is that there's a vast wealth of potential in the organization. That starts with understanding all employees and creating sort of opportunities for all of us. I like the shift in the mindset right, Because every employee that you hire, you hired them because you believed that they have this high potential. So where does that change? There's a real opportunity here to support them and their continued growth and potential.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 9:10

In the book there was a theme that really resonated with me throughout. You mentioned that the talent strategy mindset that inherently values the human and the concept of I see you is super important. How can leaders and orgs show their talent, that they truly see them?

Speaker 1: 9:28

That's tough. I say it's tough because it's really easy to say do this and do that, but it's really kind of a set of practices that we all pick up every day. It's the simple things from around. You spend time regularly with your teams, with your people. You stop to say hello. It doesn't have to be super formal, but do you actually have a way, a practice, to understand what do people really want to get out of work? What do they want to get out of the job? What do they really desire a year from now, two years from now? Is it the model of performance that drives the business outcomes that drives those questions, or is it a real interest and curiosity in the manager or leader that's going to say I just want to know what's going on, but a lot of it's just connecting and building community.

Speaker 3: 10:12

Yeah, it makes me think of the real need to build psychological safety. So if a senior leader is asking what you're up to, the initial response isn't oh, am I in trouble? But more of they're coming from a place of curiosity.

Speaker 1: 10:24

Yeah, yeah. Isn't that a telling statement when people say, well, am I in trouble? Because they feel like they're not safe or they may be at risk.

Speaker 3: 10:32

Yeah, you also talk about how orgs often refer to employees as resources and the workforce as human capital, which is ultimately dehumanizing right, because it's not seeing people for who they are as humans. What changes would you recommend orgs make in regards to how they refer to their talent to bring back that humanity in the workplace?

Speaker 1: 10:57

Yeah, in general, there's nothing really wrong with the words right and selves. They're just words, and they're just words. Come and go. Really, what's going on here from a theory perspective, is just around. People are watching all day long what leaders are doing. They're watching all day long what the practices, the lived experience of the organization is, and so I think what's really important is you can use words like workforce or human capital, but really the fundamental thing is, what do people see you do? So like, for example, the really common one in which is tough and there's no easy solution or answer around this.

Speaker 1: 11:31

We have this need for a business outcome, but we're not making our plan, and I think I've heard you folks talk about this and then but you're, so what do you do when you have too many people? So the typical thing that often happens is we downsize the workforce or we right-size it, so to speak. Right, and we go through that riffing process. And I love the story that you folks talked about on taking that long view, that long game with people, that behavior and set of actions around. Taking that long view communicates so much to the organization on how you think about people and where they matter, so much to the organization on how you think about people and where they matter.

Speaker 1: 12:08

Now, at the end of the day, people get it. If we're run, like during the great recession, if we're not making it like we've got to make a choice here, but the point there is just in like how transparently clear about it. Leaders often spend so much time getting all spun up over the right words and they lost the opportunity to connect with people and I've had so many employees over the years. Someone was like I want to appreciate it. You just tell me how it is. It doesn't have to be pretty, but at least I don't have to guess what you actually need.

Speaker 1: 12:33

And I think that's what's at stake here. Now, the flip side of it, since we're HR professionals, is that there's this whole kind of HR label thing that we have to go through to make sure we say the right things. I think you can still do that. You just can't get too spun up with ourselves.

Speaker 3: 12:48

A couple of our other guests in line, I think, with this collective thinking of it's okay to be transparent. Even if you're following all the compliance, you can still connect on a human to human level. One of our guests had mentioned, for example, his approach was hey, you're not going to like this, I absolutely don't like it, and it's okay to acknowledge like for lack of a better word, so I apologize the turd in the room, so let's acknowledge it together and get through it together, but to your good point, making sure we're continuing to connect on a humanity level that these are people.

Speaker 1: 13:23

Yeah, One of the stories I remember is that I did have to reduce the number of people, and there's one particular team that got impacted and I just broke down crying, talking to them. The director like called me up after just said but I really appreciate it, but you also got to do your job and it was really just an amazing moment where you know she and the team appreciated the humanity, but you got a job to do, so Get on with it too. Back to the balance, right.

Speaker 2: 13:48

You know, it strikes me, though, the idea of being seen. You talk about people being developed holistically as well, but when we look at HR, I don't think it's set up to do that. We're set up to do more of the compliance, more of the block and tackle. When you look at the amount of funding HR teams get, it's such a small percentage of the overall funding of the organization. It's not a knock on HR leaders at all, because I think HR leaders have the best intentions. They're trying to do the best they can with what they have. There's a lot going on, yeah, and part of me wonders and I'd love to get your take on it in order to really set up or operationalize being seen, holistic development, looking at talent differently, do we have to secede from the union Meaning compliance goes over here to legal and then talent becomes a different beast in and of itself, almost like the human team or the product innovation team? We need to separate in order to really do this, or can we still go the way we're going?

Speaker 1: 14:51

Yeah, we have like this classic mindset around either or right, we have the compliance engine, all the process-based kind of work we're like the people shoveling coal in the coal fuel engine or train and we're just heads down, we just got to keep this thing moving. We're doing that work all day long and then we think, or it'd be really great if we could be focused on the people, and the reality is they're all integrated right. So then it's a matter of how you do the process work, and that's really easy to say conceptually or theoretically, but it really is. It's around how do you combine the two? So, for example, we know empathy is one of those kind of capabilities that bring the two together right. Authenticity, transparency, and when you think about those, we're all talking about those human kind of attributes that actually make us who we are. And that's the heart of it, because people get the engine part of it. There is compliance stuff that happened. There are processes we have to run. It's just that whether or not we still feel like the processes have a soul in it.

Speaker 1: 15:50

So, for example, this is one thing in one of my past jobs is I remember writing just said you know what, like it'd be really great to get transparency around what the corporation has budgeted for bonuses, because you say it's zero to 15%, but we budget it for six, right? So we're here and I'm giving a performance review and the person got 7% and they feel like they're a failure because it's not 15. 7% compared to 6% is actually pretty decent looking right In a scheme of things, I said. And then I'm talking to a professional, an employee, that's looking for $2,000 and because they're going to build a cedar deck in their backyard and they just want to buy the materials but they're going to do the labor and that money means a lot to the individual, but we don't have a way to talk about what the sort of the constraints of the system say.

Speaker 1: 16:42

Wind forward, that organization actually started saying, like here's what we think your bonus is going to be based on, what we can plan for, and you're up or down from that. Now everybody goes oh, I can live with that, but that's a place where you have the constraints of the process and the system. That needs the rigor of the financial model that's, allocating a set amount of resources and a transparency approach that allows people to then understand. Now I have a better idea of where I match up right now. Different conversation. Whether or not they like the evaluation or the assessment, that takes a lot of stress out of it and takes a lot of anxiety out of the process.

Speaker 2: 17:19

I love what you said about the soul. We have to put soul back into some of these processes Benefits, comps, conversation, even layoffs. Right, you can have soul, you can see people in those. When you see this done really well, how do the leaders or the organizations really truly view their people?

Speaker 1: 17:39

So what I generally see in organizations is that most leaders have a good concept of what they're after in terms of goodness.

Speaker 1: 17:49

They have the right concepts in place, so the messaging is right, but what they don't realize is that they themselves, the organizations, the functions, are stuck in the system of the organization and they haven't figured out how to disrupt that sort of state or to change that slowly over time.

Speaker 1: 18:05

So then we're in this place of messaging over here Because it sounds really great, but operating over here all day long, and that's the part when you look at it saying, hey, we love people, you got to go right. That's the kind of stuff that creates that dissonance in the organization. So what really has to happen is we have to talk about what the constraints are. We have to talk about what we're trying to balance out in the organization, and I think that's where I think again, our professors, our employees, they get it, they understand it, they appreciate things really, really deeply. The other kind of funny thing I think about if it really created connection and community, you would know what people feel like they need to be seen and to be understood, versus kind of stalking on fishbowl to see what kind of throwing shades going on. I do think organizations understand it at some level and they have great mechanisms, councils and so forth, pulse surveys and all that. But again, are we enamored with the process and the activity or do we really want to know what's going on?

Speaker 2: 19:06

The older I get, I will tell you. I think so much comes down to fundamentals like basics 25 years ago or something. Somebody wrote that book, everything I Needed to Know. I Learned in Kindergarten and it's this just idea of, yes, connect with people, talk to people, ask them what they need, ask them what they want. A lot of times people get really fearful of doing that because they don't know if someone's going to ask them for something they can't give or they don't know how to be perfect in that dialogue or conversation. But all they really need to do is start with care. People feel that when you start with care I get that from you, mike that you give care, energy, you give very big care, thank you. I want to talk about this idea of developing people holistically, especially when we're talking about AI. Mel and I were just talking about Klarna, for example, who they're going to lay off. What was that, mel? Like 85% of their business.

Speaker 3: 20:19

They just laid off a bunch of folks, got down to half their workforce and I believe they're hoping to get down further within the next year.

Speaker 2: 20:26

Yes, there's two energies that are happening in the world. I'm getting very woo-woo, forgive me, but right, there's this one energy of scarcity. Oh my gosh, ai is going to take jobs. We're going to start seeing a lot of organizations making big moves around completely replace humans with AI, and then you even wrote about this in the book too. Then we're looking at people who want to augment. What does that look like when this AI conversation is happening, where we can look at it as scarcity or we can look at it as augmentation? If I'm a Jane Doe employee, what does it look like in an AI world to be developed holistically?

Speaker 1: 21:03

Yeah. So there's a couple of things. One is, when it comes to AI in particular, I get the sense that a lot of business leaders feel like there's one really good question to ask around how do we adopt AI? And I think that's a question. I think it's not even the best question. I think it's a starting question and I think the exercise that we all need to take is what are the next 5, 10, 17 questions to ask around AI and the implications for the organization.

Speaker 1: 21:37

When I think about it and I step back, we've been surrounded by computer technology, computing technology, innovation for a long time. We keep talking about the speed and the disruption for decades now, and there's a point that says we're not really talking about anything new here. So what's really going on here? So the part of it says to me we should get over it in some way and then start thinking what is the intersection of AI and humans? That's one of the really key questions.

Speaker 1: 22:04

Holistically, it's going to be really around coming back again to these fundamentalists around what does it mean to actually see the employee as a person? And I actually think the answer for that really depends on the organization. That it is because different organizations are doing different things right and there's different kinds of labor and different kinds of work, and holistically might mean that we need to do things that are fun. That celebration is actually a really key part of our culture, so we may do that. Other things may be. I need the latest science, I need the latest technical knowledge and I need you to help me to get there, because that's super valuable to me as the profession that I'm in.

Speaker 3: 22:42

That's one of it.

Speaker 1: 22:42

There's a number of levers that we can use to think about seeing people holistically, but one of them is going to come down to is what are we trying to achieve with our people? And just having clarity about that. You don't have to be all things to all people, but having clarity about what we're trying to accomplish, I think, is super, super important. For example, if we think that it's really important to have a really great hiring process, let's say, focus on skills, understand really what skills you need and what the skills are in the marketplace. If you really think it's important for your organization to train and to develop those skills, then train them. If you think that retaining people is important to the organization and you want your people to understand that, then create some kind of mobility, not because you have to react to their need, but because it's really important to be thoughtful around how they're engaged across the whole organization.

Speaker 1: 23:33

The other thing in convincing people holistically is we often start off with the most basic set of needs. So where do we go when we want to make sure that you know your value? We start off with benefits and compensation, right, and you take math instead of hierarchy of needs. We're talking about things that address our abilities to make sure we have health care, that we can buy food, that we can buy shelter, rent an apartment, buy a home, and then we understand but miss sort of those kind of self-actualization things.

Speaker 1: 24:03

The things that people desire more and this gets back to the holistic thing is that people want to develop. They want to grow on some level, and that's beyond just training, because training is about skills. But there's this other appetite or other need, so to develop, they want to grow on some level, and that's beyond just training, because training is about skills, but there's this other appetite or other need, so to speak, that actually goes beyond that. And that's where I think the opportunity is to see people holistically is really understand well, what are you after Beyond kind of the work gig you got and the pay you get? What do you want out of life? Right, and the answer is going to really vary depending on the organization and the people who go into that organization. But I think the truism that we see in the research shows this and Gardner talks about this, right, and they talk about the human deal is that people are looking for a very different set of things than what people were looking at 20 years ago, for sure.

Speaker 2: 24:48

Yeah, I think about this a lot. What does the future organization need to look like in order to do this? What are some of the big ticket structural changes that would need to happen in order for this to be the employee experience?

Speaker 1: 25:03

Philosophically, the first thing that's going to happen is a mindset shift in leaders Leaders Okay, Because actually I think the structural shift will follow this ability to imagine what things could look like. So, for example, people talk a lot about workforce planning and that can mean a lot of different things. For a lot of organizations it just means resource management. But what has it happened? Or what needs to happen if you want to get structural changes around how you recruit, how you create opportunities for people is you actually have to imagine. There is a model out there, for example is that if we get people that have the right attributes and we can develop those attributes and then we can develop the skills, we can actually create a workforce that has greater agility, for example. But today's practice is keeping most of us grounded in buying today's skills and then getting all kind of worked up around tomorrow's skills. So then we get into this hyper motion around that we need to do training and rapid upskilling and we got a whole set of terms for those kinds of activities and they're all OK. They're all the OK responses and good responses. But can you imagine a system where everybody believes in the ecosystem of work? It says I may only have it for a year to three years and then you're going to move on, because people do. We know there's a lot of research that shows this, but that actually has huge implications for how we develop people.

Speaker 1: 26:25

The question for all of us is can we actually develop people in a way knowing that they're going to leave? Because if we do that, there's a whole bunch of structural changes have to happen. Like we have to rethink the work. What does it mean to have work that's being operated or executed by people who aren't there all for a long time? And we know there are certain industries, say like logistics, call centers, where, like they know what turnover looks like and so they actually have had to come up with a work model. So the work gets structured in a way that kind of fits that demographic pattern. But that's the kind of structure thing I think could potentially take place much more broadly in corporate America. It's hard to move because there's a lot of moving parts, there's a lot of day-to-day operating results that we need to deliver, and I think you can do both. You can find those areas where you can begin to slowly shift.

Speaker 2: 27:12

It's interesting I think this was in Ashley's book. This idea of an organization would be a state, a team would be a neighborhood.

Speaker 1: 27:21

It did.

Speaker 2: 27:21

And that you're much more likely to make change at the neighborhood level. And there's responsibility I would say responsibility to your very good point around the neighborhood level and I know that Mel and I wanted to talk about. What are some things that we can do at the enterprise level, at the team level, at the individual level.

Speaker 1: 27:43

Yeah, so it's a great analogy. I'll start because if you take that notion it goes right back to that idea around is the team, is the learning unit. It is also where community and connection is most tangible. So one of the things that has to happen is how do you bring that level of tangible community and connection as you go up the organization? It's what has to happen.

Speaker 1: 28:08

It's a really tough thing to say do this and it all magically happened. The really basic question that the executive team has to ask is what do we want to accomplish with our people that's going to make us a better organization tomorrow and it integrates well with the business outcomes that we're accountable for. That sounds tactical, but I would tell you that is a really hard thing to answer. When leaders can answer that and get it down to one or two things and you know what happens when one or two things comes like to seven to 13. No, really, what's like the one or two things you're going to do that actually moves your people In what direction do you want to move in?

Speaker 2: 28:49

I've been thinking a lot lately about this idea of simplicity, because when I've seen organizations do this really well, they're not doing 15 things in shallow depth. They're doing one, two, maybe three things and they're going really hard on them in terms of yes, campaign and strat and funding them, but also in process, in the way that we build workflows, the way that we talk and the language that we use, all around these things to the point where their employees can talk about it and they know it and they feel it. It's very hard to do with 10 things.

Speaker 1: 29:24

This is going to sound harsh, and it's not meant to be harsh, but it feels more like an observation. But we tend to not focus on the one or two things because I think it actually takes a lot of courage to do. It does, and it doesn't mean that leaders are feeling less powerful or sinful, it just takes a dimension of courage. And I remember one CEO who just said we kept saying and to your point is the most simplistic message. He goes if we get our culture right, the rest will come Like we'll win in the marketplace, we'll win clients, we'll sell bigger projects. And you could, just you could feel it Like he, just he knew in his soul what the values were, he knew in his spirit, like what he was after and what he saw. And you, just you go. Yeah, I get it, you didn't get spun up on what are we on now? Like 7A of the nine point strategy, on the five year plan that gets revised every six months. It wasn't known sounding like that. It was just like this really simple view of the world.

Speaker 3: 30:24

I have a question.

Speaker 1: 30:25

Sure.

Speaker 3: 30:26

How do we crack this nut? Because I feel like we hear this story consistently, that there's a need even for the CEO, to have courage. But if you're leading the organization, why do you need to have courage? You can say, no, this is how we want to do it. So what's preventing leaders from taking that stand as a collective and saying, yeah, we're all in on this, we don't need to have courage because this is what we believe, so it's not. Again. I keep feeling this, even at the leadership level, the C-suite level, this lack of psychological safety to say this is what we need and this is what we should focus on. What makes it so challenging for people to take a hard stance.

Speaker 1: 31:10

My theory around this is that organizations as systems have different or varying permissions.

Speaker 3: 31:15

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 31:16

So some organization will give a lot of permission to its leaders to have courage around how they want to drive and how they want to lead, and other organizations don't.

Speaker 1: 31:26

And I think the leaders who prosper in whatever organization they are, I think they figured out right one way or the other, either consciously, with lots of self-awareness, or they just found what was comfortable and found a way to prosper in the environment they're in. But what I would say to any leader at any level that if you're not feeling that sort of integration of yourself and your values with the organization's values, then it's something to question and to think about. Dear colleague john blumberg writes about this around the return on integrity and he talks a lot about personal values actually have to really align with the organizational values and that's a journey. But I would say sometimes what happens is that leaders are like all of us, get caught up in the systems that we're in and so they only have, or feel like they only have, certain permission to go a certain way. The transformational leader not meaning about creating transformation organization, but the leader who's transforming themselves will find a path. They'll find a way to rise above that, to transcend them.

Speaker 3: 32:29

It's just so interesting even to hear that there are certain organizations that still don't value that perspective in this day and age, with all of the research that shows when you commit to your people, you will see business results. I think I ask every guest why do you think that is? Why do you think there are still some organizations that don't see the value?

Speaker 1: 32:54

Why do you think that is? Why do you think there are still some organizations that don't see the value? It comes down again to this view around what matters most. Right in its simplest terms. And if you're someone who's wired by power and you're wired by money, and that's what gets you excited and energized, that's what gets you energized and you're going to operate that way. If you're wired a little bit differently, then you have different set of priorities and actions. And here's the thing that I think we know theoretically in all our leadership development, research and so forth is that it takes a diversity of leaders to make it happen, but most organizations tend to put in place a leader who looks just like everybody else, because that is the ethos of the system. That is what we value in the system is that we value making money, we value power, we value the political game or what have you. And again, not all organizations are wired that way. That's one pattern.

Speaker 3: 33:45

Yeah, what advice would you give to that leader that has a mismatch with their organization but they want to try to make a dent in a positive direction? What advice would you give to that person?

Speaker 1: 33:59

Yeah, I love American landscape portrait, like just because there's this notion that humans are really small and the landscape of kind of the continent was just so daunting. And without getting into sort of the historical politics around, who was here first? Because I appreciate that discussion very much but built into the psyche, I think, of what we do sometimes is around this notion around that it could be lonely, right, you could be out there foraging your way. But what's so exciting about it, I think, for the leader who's up for this, is that you can be in the worst set of circumstances and have the best time of your life Because you have this authority to tell the story that you want to tell, to cram the path or kind of create the path that you have.

Speaker 1: 34:45

And I think what the irony of this statement is that there are a whole lot of people watching, taking notes and maybe following along at the same time and I think every organization, as homogenous as it might feel, there's this huge diversity of potential in people that actually see this and want something more. That's what's so amazing is that you could be in a really tough situation, but the arc and the joy is freeing out a path through all of that, even if you don't get to the change that you would like to have gotten to. Is the change the goal or is the journey? It's the destination of the journey more important, but I would say the journey is more important Totally makes me wonder.

Speaker 2: 35:25

Just an offshoot point I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I'm on a journey myself. This idea of work because so much of work has been around quarter by quarter results, revenue, shareholder return, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's profit driven. Yeah, point blank Done. One of the things that I'm excited about AI is that it's going to force conversations around. How do we view people, how do we think about augmenting people and enable them to do their best work? Because all the other administrative schmutz could be taken care of. There's so many opportunities for those discussions. I'm optimistic about it. With what's happening in the ether, can we swing the pendulum from everything has to be around profit and rev a little bit over to people and balance it more?

Speaker 1: 36:11

Yeah, but again, we're not on either end of the pole right.

Speaker 2: 36:14

We can't be, we shouldn't be.

Speaker 1: 36:16

We're somewhere that we're trying to figure out what the balance is of both of these things, and we all live and benefit from being in a capitalist society. So, whether or not people want to admit it, we're all capitalists at some level, and that's an okay thing. The question you're on is then again, like where you're getting to is what is the balance for that, for how we think about people? So back to the ai. The question is how do we redesign work? What's tomorrow's work? Because we know tomorrow's work isn't going to be today's work. But if we only think about replacing today's work with ai and automation, we can miss the question.

Speaker 1: 36:52

Yeah, so we do that and we should be asking okay, what are we doing tomorrow? It's not today. And that part's really exciting because, look, if you look back around for these analogies, if you look back around when you had horse-drawn carriages moving people around, just think of all the technology changes that are taking place we're going to find a way. And I think, through all of this, what's really exciting is this talent discussion has come to the foreground, because we all recognize that people are really a critical part of the equation and while we think that there's slogans or initiatives to talk about workforce planning or kind of talent and culture and different things like that. And all those things indicate is that we understand there's a new equation, that we have. That part gives me a lot of hope.

Speaker 3: 37:57

This is our favorite part, Mike.

Speaker 1: 38:00

Yep, okay, I'm prepared. The fun part is.

Speaker 3: 38:03

You hopefully don't need to be so it's just a group of questions. Yes, no one word answers or a longer answer. If you're like this needs a longer response, that's totally fine. That's some of our best conversation, but we'll just go through the series and the point is first thing that pops in mind. If that sounds good, sure, okay, what are you currently reading, or I'll say listening, in case you're a fan of audiobooks.

Speaker 1: 38:28

Yeah, I am a reader because I just I absorb it sticks a little bit better. There's two things I'm currently reading. One is it's the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory by Tim Alberta. I don't know if you know this book, but it's about the Christian nationalist movement and how it's taking place. It's a long read about halfway through but it's a really fascinating bit of journalism that he's done. The other one is by a friend and colleague. It's called Leading to Greatness, by Jim Reed, who was the CHRO of Rogers in Toronto.

Speaker 3: 38:55

What song is on repeat for you? Oh?

Speaker 1: 38:59

I got two. One is a young artist named Jalen Nwunda, it's called I think it's called Come Around and Love Me, and the other one is an older one. It's a jazz tune. It's by Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson. It's called Tour's End.

Speaker 3: 39:11

Many people feel their companies don't care about their growth. From your experience, what are the top two signs that a company genuinely invests in its employees? So, like you're interviewing, you're researching, you're talking to people, what are the two big giveaways that they're truly investing in their employees?

Speaker 1: 39:31

Yeah, the way I think about this or feel about this is twofold. One is you'll hear and see an excitement and that the employees see a connection around what they're doing in their day job with who they are. The subtext of that is, or the vision that you may get a sense of is and who they're becoming Right, one which is related to excitement word, but you have this real sort of palpable sense of energy around that they're actually learning and growing, that their job is not just a job but it's actually a building block along those lines around where they want to get to. It could be career and it could be beyond career.

Speaker 3: 40:11

I love that. The thought of like their face lights up, because we've all seen that right, when you've had an interview and you ask someone about their experience, you can really you see the shift, someone who truly loves it. Okay, ai, the big elephant in the room. Ai and how it's going to impact people. What's the one thing an employee can do today to avoid being left in the dust and stay relevant? What's one thing they should just do if nothing else.

Speaker 1: 40:39

Okay. So there's a tactical thing If you're organizing, or two tactical things. If your organization's got like LinkedIn Learning, for example, or you could go on the web or what have you, you need to learn fundamentals about AI. Go and do that, it's great. The other thing, what I would do, is it's available, but use Copilot, use ChatGPT and integrate it into what you do in your day-to-day and you'll soon find out, at least in this kind of the large language model stuff. There's just so much opportunity for how it can enhance your work process and how you use your time and energy to get work done. And there's this whole thing around that. Microsoft puts out research around work, and one of the things he said, one of the skills to learn, is how you do delegation, ai delegation, which is basically how you prompt AI right, and especially in this sort of co-pilot context, and I thought that was so interesting, because they're learning how to get the answer that they feel like they're looking for by getting the right prompt.

Speaker 3: 41:39

Microsoft does offer really cool ongoing education for folks on AI, so highly recommend it for anyone. There, you go, yeah, okay. What's one thing that's giving you a lot of joy these days?

Speaker 1: 41:52

Oh, my goodness, wow. There's a lot of things, but I'm a little bit of a fitness kind of person. I have this routine every morning that I do core exercises for 30 to 40 minutes and while it's not always comfortable for me, it brings me a lot of joy because I see the reward of the habit that I've worked on. So that's probably one thing that's top of mind.

Speaker 3: 42:13

Nice, I like it. Who's a leader you really admire?

Speaker 1: 42:17

Okay. So I don't know if I have a leader that I really admire, and the reason being is that I think leaders are situational. The qualities of leaders depend on the situation they're in. That said, I'll give you an example of a leader that I do admire in the situation that he's in, and that's President Volodymyr Zelensky and what he's doing to keep Ukraine together and fight the war. Would I ask President Zelensky to run the transformation around our AI strategy for an organization? Don't know, don't know. It's a different set of capabilities, different situations. For me it's like a multiple answer, but I think there's a lot of leaders in a lot of levels. They have really fantastic qualities.

Speaker 2: 42:57

Mike, it was so great to talk with you today.

Speaker 1: 42:58

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited and I enjoyed the privilege of being able to share my thoughts and feelings with you.

Speaker 3: 43:10

Hey friends, this episode of your Work Friends was hosted by Francesca Ranieri and myself, Mel Plett.

Speaker 2: 43:16

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

Speaker 3: 43:22

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

Play at Work

Your Work Friends Podcast: Play at Work with Brandon Wetzstein

At work, play means profit…

Ping-pong tables aren’t the point. Real play drives trust, energy, and bold thinking—and the companies that embrace it are winning big. Play isn’t a perk, it’s a strategy. In a world obsessed with productivity, could play be your team's secret weapon?

Brandon Wetzstein has helped transform teams at major organizations by tapping into the power of strategic play. In this episode, he breaks down why traditional "serious" approaches often lead to mediocre solutions, and how structured play can break through conventional thinking to unlock breakthrough ideas.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

And a lot of times we need more ideas to come up with better. If you ask people for ideas, the first like one to seven or eight ideas. Everyone just comes up with the same things. They're very similar because we have a very systematic mind. For the most part, it's when you start getting to idea nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. And yeah, sometimes we need to get a little bit weird to come up with that thing. That is the brilliant idea. And the more ideas, the more creativity we can have, the more imagination, the more we can get out of our own way.

Speaker 2: 0:36

What's going on, mel? Not much is going on. It's finally chilly here. Last week we had some 80-degree weather on November 1st, which was a little strange, but we went down to the beach to enjoy it, which was really nice. How about you? Very?

Speaker 3: 0:55

nice, very nice. I have a bone to pick with every single person that I grew up with. Tell me more, okay. So we're going back and re-watching these kid movies, mainly because I have a seven-year-old, and one of the movies we watched that I just saw for the first time was Karate Kid.

Speaker 2: 1:12

I can't get over that. You're just seeing Karate Kid. First of all, Listen. When I meet your parents, I need to ask why.

Speaker 3: 1:19

Because my dad felt that the Betamax was superior technology to the VHS and there was like one rental store that actually had Betamax no bloodluster for you. It was like we finally got it a VHS when it was too late.

Speaker 2: 1:34

DVDs are coming out, but you finally got the VHS.

Speaker 3: 1:37

Yes, 100% the switch. There was like three months. Like I just saw Goonies, I just saw most of the Star.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Wars. I mean, those are pretty big ones to miss in your childhood.

Speaker 3: 1:46

Going through high school and college with everybody quoting these movies etc. And the quotes from Karate Kid were always like wax on, wax off. Yeah, why is it that no one ever talked about the ending of that movie? Because, I swear to God, you go through two hours and then all of a sudden the movie just freaking ends. That is the most abrupt ending I've ever had in my life. You're like wait, what happened? What if that bit? I would like to know why no one talked about the dumb ending of that movie.

Speaker 2: 2:15

It's the 80s. Tell you, watching 80s movies is so funny.

Speaker 3: 2:19

The choices All right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:22

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Brandon Wettstein from AnyCreate. He's just so rad. He's talking to us about play in the workplace and you and I have talked about the importance of play at work, and we're not talking about forced team building events here at all. One of the things that really stands out to me is how the play part of being at work, having fun with what you do has been beaten out of org cultures. It seems we no longer relax and get to this point where you can shut off the noise and really connect as a team and get together and just think about what's possible. But there's so many stats that show how important play is for the success of teams and for organizations. It nurtures things like critical thinking, creativity, it powers innovation, it helps really make teams feel connected. Breakdown silos increases collaboration, communication. The list goes on and on. What do you think? The thing that I loved?

Speaker 3: 3:26

about our conversation with Brandon is, when you think about play at work, automatically a lot of people think ping pong tables, play-doh, etc. But there are many ways that we can play at work. For instance, organizing work, that could be an aspect of play. If you really get into that, like if you really love to plan events or organize events, that can be an aspect of play. And really understanding what play is to you is critical. So I loved this conversation because, to your point, I think we've lost play and we can get it back. You can choose to get it back and reincorporate it into your work, even if it's not coming from your organization 100%.

Speaker 2: 4:05

This is a goodie. We leave you guys with some really good pointers on how to start thinking about play within the org, especially if you're a leader, how to start nurturing that with your own teams and the work that you do. So with that, here's Brandon. All right, brandon, could you tell us about your journey and what inspired you to start in EatCreate?

Speaker 1: 4:38

Oh yes, it's one of those things where whenever you look backwards, it all makes sense Going forward. You're like what, how did this happen? I started my career in retail, working in stores selling electronics, actually when I was in college. When I date myself here, hgtv first came out as a giant, huge TVs and that led me moving into corporate environments, again in a very retail. Most of my career was in retail, both store side and corporate.

Speaker 1: 5:03

And then there was there's like that epiphany moment that happens and for me it was running a design thinking workshop within the operations group at Target, which is one of the companies that, and that moment crystallized my purpose. And what happened in that moment is there was a person who was on my team, a person who was a little bit shy, and this person came a lot in this design thinking workshop right. Their ideas came up. It's so much information, so much energy and I always hold that moment really close to my heart because I remember how great it felt to give that person an avenue, an arena to to share, whereas in the normal space of, especially in operations, teams like I was always in operations and operators make the fun zone right.

Speaker 1: 5:47

Yeah, it's the black and white right. There's no gray, and so SOP land yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:56

This was the challenging part is how do you get creative and innovative and have some fun, have some joy and get people to come up with some crazy ideas in operations when that's not like the way that they normally work and I shouldn't say they me too, that was an operator as well, and so I just I love that moment and that was really a crystallizing piece, and so I was introduced to Lego serious play not too far after that moment and my curiosity just got to me on this and I started pulling the thread and reading some books. I never could quite figure out how to do it on my own. I wanted to try it, but I just couldn't. So I finally got certified in 2019 and I fell in love. I was like this is amazing.

Speaker 1: 6:31

This is the secret to getting groups to communicate and understand and listen to each other in a fun and playful way, and so that's why I started at 8Create and again, it's been five years now, which is just amazing to me, and I still love it. Every session I do, every workshop, every team building, bringing these methods to various teams to help them connect, communicate and collaborate differently. It's just, it's so joyful because it's this unexpected. We're going to have fun and we're going to do work like that possible. No, that doesn't make any sense, but it is and it works and it's amazingly impactful and I can't wait to do it with more and more companies hopefully the rest of my days.

Speaker 2: 7:12

Yeah, pretty nice. I didn't even know you could get certified in play. That sounds like a really fun process to go through. How was that? What was that like?

Speaker 1: 7:21

I'm certified it's very specifically in a methodology that's called Lego serious play. I did not make this up. Lego back in the late nineties was really looking at who they were as a company. They stood for creativity and imagination they still do but that's not how they were developing their business internally. We have all this creativity and imagination that we're bringing to the world and to children everywhere, but how do we bring that into our boardroom? How can we bring creativity and imagination into strategy really was the question, and then they spent a few years building this, playing with it, tweaking with it, and then they sold it as a consulting service for better part of a decade. Now, as we know of Lego today, they're not a consulting company. This is not what they do, and they know that too, and they stepped away from it in about 2010. And they did release an open source document that anyone can go read. You can go on Lego's website I believe it's legocom slash serious play. There's all sorts of information on there. However, it's not enough to read and do on your own At least, for me, it wasn't and so part of the people that ran and developed this system at Lego were basically gifted some of the IP and they created more IP around it and they created these certifications.

Speaker 1: 8:29

There's about two or three different groups out there that are very well known for certifications and they all have different strengths and backgrounds histories, but it does help to understand and see how this comes to life from someone who knows what they're doing. And then, once you have that and the idea is it's like drinking from a fire hose Once you get done, you're like, oh my gosh, I could do anything with this. There's so many applications and ways that you can use it and people use it for a lot of different things. I use it for organizations and teams mostly, but there are some people that I was certified with that use it for play therapy. There's people that half the people that were in my certification class worked in schools, various high schools, colleges, trying to get students to think differently and get out of their own way. So it really is a communication methodology that allows you to get out of your own way and bring that creativity and imagination that Lego was striving to bring to really any type of situation.

Speaker 2: 9:18

I love that. I also love that your background is in operations, because when people think of play, they think of only the forced fun, team building activities that happen. We often hear like the I don't want forced fun, but that's not what you're saying, that's not what you're talking about here.

Speaker 1: 9:36

I was introduced to it when I was working at Target, but I know that companies like NASA, the Department of Defense, google, apple there's so many organizations that have used this because it's been scientifically proven. It's not even just the playful aspect of it, but there's so many other psychology like the communication pieces, the mentally offloading information and physical objects. All of these things have different types of benefits. When you combine them, they're just new and creative ways to get people out of their own way.

Speaker 2: 10:04

Yeah, can you explain how Innate Create helps organizations really embrace play and creativity in the workplace?

Speaker 1: 10:12

Absolutely, and so the most important part of at least the workshops and the team building sessions that we do is that it's not like you're going to do this and have fun. It's we're going to create, in essence, a sandbox. We're going to create the environment that allows you to figure out how you want to play in this space, if that makes sense. So with this Lego method, that is our primary methodology. There's a couple of keys to it. One people are building stories out of Lego bricks, and when I say building stories, we're basically using metaphor and generally don't introduce it that way, because a lot of people hold on metaphor. Let's back this up a little bit. No, we're just going to create stories and we start off with a very basic build just to get them back into playing with Legos, Because for a lot of people, they maybe haven't touched Lego in a long time or they put away their kids Legos. It's not necessarily a joyful thing for them at home.

Speaker 2: 11:05

Or they're like. I just stepped on a Lego last night.

Speaker 1: 11:09

I just bombed all out of my house Exactly, but one of the key aspects of this methodology is that the builder can't be wrong and I'm going to say that again because it's so impactful.

Speaker 1: 11:20

The builder can't be wrong. And so, when you think about this, we're not building airplanes, we're not building cars and trucks. We're not building things per se, because there's certain people that I'm sure are much more attuned to building things and coming up with creative Lego ideas. But when you build stories and you can't be wrong suddenly whatever you build is up to you, and so some people build these large, elaborate things. Some people do build cars and ships, and that's fine, but some people build really abstract things that you have no idea what they mean until they tell you. And so it gives this freedom to people to express themselves in whatever way they would like, and some people will just put two pieces together and that will be their answer to a question. And to give you an example of a question we might ask and one of my favorite ones is in our team building sessions. It's just, the main focus is getting people to know each other better. They ask people to build a model that tells a story about who they are outside of work. That's it. That's it. It's that simple and there's no. You can't be wrong and you can choose right. Okay, how do you build a model of oh my gosh, what a huge topic. Do I build my hobbies? Do I build my children, my family, the fact that I have a soup pot and the crock pot, whatever, right, there's no wrong answer. And what you get is this amazing amount of ideas and thoughts, of insights, and people share what they want. And so that's where I think it really is different from most other types of team buildings, because it gives people the freedom to express themselves and share whatever they might want to share.

Speaker 1: 12:46

And it's amazing, the things that come up in these sessions, too. You find out. I did a session in California once where we found out like half the group was growing citrus, like as a whole. You're like, oh, wow, we're all growing citrus, cool, okay. So they created a little group afterwards. Another group I did in DC. We had a group of five or six people that all had adopted a dog in the past like six months, and it was just this weird thing. We're like no one knew this. So it's amazing. There's so much depth and dimensions of who we are outside of work, but we don't necessarily show up and just talk about ourselves. It's not socially acceptable and this just gives us an avenue to share a little bit, but do so in a very psychologically safe way, do so in a very easy way and, again, each person decides how much and what they would like to share.

Speaker 2: 13:30

Yeah, I love that. What's one of the most rewarding projects you've worked on since you've been in this space? Because you came from OBS, so I always think of those being the most skeptical folks coming in on this stuff, right. So is there a skeptic whose mind you changed or someone you were really nervous about? That was really rewarding once you ran this year workshop.

Speaker 1: 13:51

Yeah, one of my favorites is a two and a half or three hour session with the senior leadership team of a very large nonprofit, and we were there to really dig into communication, which is shocking. It's one of the things I get brought in to talk about a lot because communication is one of those interesting things where it's very important to talk about, but it's very sharp right. It has a lot of edges, so you have to watch out how you're going to talk about it, and so I've got 12 participants in this group and it was amazing to watch A the variety. There's a little bit of skepticism in the room. There's a little bit of skepticism in the room. There's a little bit of excitement too, though there always is, because some people like to play with Legos. But then the question when you get that level of seniority is is this fluffy or is this a waste of time? Are we actually going to get something? And I think the reason why I love it so much is A. It was amazingly impactful.

Speaker 1: 14:39

We really looked at the communication journey from a standpoint of what does world-class communication look like in a senior leadership team, and we got to a point where everyone had a chance to express their thoughts and their ideas. Using the Lego models. We looked at the negative side of things. Think of the worst team you've ever worked for. Build a model that shows what horrible communication looks like. Let's take a look at a model of what amazing communication looks like. Let's take a look at what communication looks like from a psychological safety perspective or from a candor perspective. And we started putting a lot of these lenses to it and what ended up happening is, after about two and a half three hours, we were able to really pinpoint about three different, very important point of views on this leadership team, and that were there was a group of people that was extremely frustrated with the level of psychological safety. They wanted to feel like they were able to express their opinions and their thoughts in a safe way. There was another group of people that felt like there was a responsibility in everyone in the group, needed to have a certain level of candor with each other. And then there was another person in the group this was actually the CEO who really did not necessarily disagree with those, but felt like everyone had a responsibility to really put in the legwork and the effort before bringing up ideas, thoughts or opinions.

Speaker 1: 15:56

So you get these three aspects all rotating around one another right. We need to have candor and speak our mind and speak up. We need to be able to feel safe to speak up, but we also need to put in the due diligence If we're going to bring up an opinion or a thought or an idea that we've actually thought about it right, we're not just winging it and firing from the hip. And the thing is, when you look at all three of those, they're all doable. You just have to have these expectations with each other in that reflection point, and so to be able to get to that type of information in two and a half, three hours is amazing, and to do so in such a fun and playful way.

Speaker 1: 16:30

And that was that's why that was such a favorite for me because the play aspect. It really allows people to put aside some of the group dynamics that stops us from communicating effectively. You put eight, 10, 12 people in a room. You're going to have hierarchy differences, you're going to have ego differences, you're going to have extroversion, introversion, all of these things histories, backgrounds, all of this comes into play in every type of meeting and with this play aspect, especially with this Lego serious play method that gets reduced massively, if not even eliminated, because you're so people are so focused on the model that they're building. And how do I create the story around what? My thoughts are? That it allows for a much more open expression in a very safe way, but it also keeps the tangents very much out of the way. It keeps people very focused on the topic at hand. We're not allowing ourselves to go off in one direction or another, so we can get to the topic at hand, really understand where everyone's at.

Speaker 2: 17:28

Yeah, it really cuts through some of the dynamics that might be happening right.

Speaker 2: 17:31

It removes all of the minutiae that shows up in team dynamics and it seems really powerful to come to this joint agreement in just under two hours on how you're going to operate as a team in terms of communication and idea sharing, which is really fantastic.

Speaker 2: 17:47

Francesca and I have facilitated, like you, a ton of learning and sometimes, when you're working with teams, those dynamics especially when you're talking about how are we going to operate, how do we prefer to work Like, how do we come together with different working styles and show up as a team together To your good point some of those dynamics can take the conversation off the rails and you start to go down these routes that are not productive and not getting to know. But what can we do together? So I love the concept of how this offers a level of focus and safety for everyone to share their ideas, and it's pretty impactful to come to a joint leadership agreement on this is how we're going to operate in just share their ideas, and it's pretty impactful to come to a joint leadership agreement on this is how we're going to operate in just under two hours, and everyone feels positive about that outcome because they all contributed in a way that is really beautiful.

Speaker 1: 18:35

It does From a psychological perspective. There's a couple of key things that's really fun to see. So one and this is part of the facilitation as well is when people build their model. So let's say I have my model. Of course I've got a visual of AIDS, I've got a little duck in front of me, but let's say this is my idea of like world-class communication is speaking your mind? I don't know right. I could say that that's what this, uh, sure, we'll go with that. But what happens is, as I'm talking and usually someone does build a duck they build something weird and something it looks like something a five year old might make.

Speaker 1: 19:04

People are generally looking at the model and not the person, and so what happens is that displaces the attention onto whatever the thing is and not directly at you, and so it makes it easier to talk. One because the attention is on the model itself, but also, too, because this idea is out here now, and so now I'm not talking about this thing or this opinion that's in my head, but I'm talking about this weird little toy thing. That's a pile of Legos, which is not threatening, which is easy to, it's playful. Usually there's some fun metaphors going on in there you can see some physicality, no-transcript, say in the middle of sessions wow, I didn't really need to go that deep or I didn't mean to say that much or I didn't mean to go that far, but because it's so safe to talk, right, it's usually not a regretful thing, but it's more of a reflection.

Speaker 1: 20:06

Oh, I can't believe I just said that in this group of people that I never would have said this if we were just having a verbal discussion. But it's really. I think it's empowering too, where people are like oh yeah, you know what? I'm glad I said that right, because it is what people truly think. They put time into building this model and their thoughts and their opinions. And, yeah, they get to take that psychological safety and feel a little bit better about sharing whatever it is they might be doing.

Speaker 3: 20:44

I'm wondering about how play shows up when it's not facilitated. How play shows up potentially at work, or should could show up at work, and just the dailiness of work. Why is play essential for someone at work? And just the dailiness of work. Why is play essential for someone at work in general?

Speaker 1: 21:02

Oh, there's so many. There's so many good answers to this that if you think about play, you go back to childhood. Right, and here's the fun part If you want to research, play and go read books on play, like 90% of the books on play, if not 98%, are all about kids. Because kids, that's what kids do, right, it's natural Watch children. No one needs to be taught how to play. They just go, they do it, they play pretend, they try things out, and so play gives us so many different tools. So one it allows us to try things right. And we think about everything that's been written about embracing failure. Do kids think about failure when they try stuff while playing?

Speaker 1: 21:38

No they just do, and if it doesn't work out, fine, I learned, I go on to the next thing, I go on to the next thing, I go great. I think one is trying things, you're able to try things on, You're able to play, and it gives you a way to experience something in a very low risk type of scenario. No-transcript, little bit goofy, being a little bit silly, allows you to take all of these borders that we have in our mind right, all of these boundaries, all of these walls, all of these rules, and get rid of them and start thinking about things in different ways than you might have done before. One of my favorite exercises is an improv exercise. I do this with my audience. I have people pair up and I use an animal of some kind of. One person gets to be a llama and the other person gets to be a lion. Everyone choose and I'll set a timer for 45 seconds and have one person say lions are great because X and they have to list as many things as they can and they have to say lions are great because every time so. Lions are great because they have big teeth. Lions are great because they have giant veins. Lions are great because they're king of the jungle, and after about 45 seconds, the other person's counting.

Speaker 1: 23:11

We asked the audience how many did you get? Seven, eight, nine, 10, 15, whatever the number is. But then we asked what did people say? And they all said things that were true about lions right, that they are kings of the jungle, that they have, that they eat meat, whatever that might be Like. Did anyone say that lions are great at their taxes? Did anyone say that lions are great because they wear polka dots on Halloween? Did anyone say that lions are great because they make an amazing vegetarian chili?

Speaker 1: 23:33

And everyone's, yeah, they start laughing. You're like what, wait a minute, hold on. They're like there's no rules to this, you can make up whatever you want. And so then we flip it around and we have the llamas go and we do the same exact thing, but this time take off those limitations that you put on yourself. Right, with this rule that it has to actually be true about lions, and then we watch everyone do 1.5 to 2. Times more ideas. Right, instead of going, I'm just coming out with as many ideas as possible. I'm really trying to think of what is actually true, about why it's, and so that is just an interesting framework to think of.

Speaker 1: 24:04

Okay, so now, when we're trying to be creative or innovative at work, what type of rules are we putting in our own way? And this is where that playful mindset right. How do we use play to have more fun, come up with better ideas? And a lot of times we need more ideas to come up with better. If you ask people for ideas, the first like one to seven or eight ideas. Everyone just comes up with the same things. They're very similar because we have a very systematic mind Not 100%, but for the most part it's when you start getting to idea nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. And yeah, sometimes we need to get a little bit weird to come up with that thing. That is the brilliant idea. And the more ideas, the more creativity we can have, the more imagination, the more we can get out of our own way.

Speaker 3: 24:46

You said the mindset of play. So many times when I think about mindsets it comes down to a trigger question you can ask yourself so you get into the mindset? Is there a question you can ask yourself to say how do I get into play?

Speaker 1: 24:59

Yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways to do this. One of the things that I do on my own not shockingly, I use Legos because I have them, but I will actually build out my thoughts and ideas out of like on a table. I'll build it physically, I'll say this is what I'm doing for my business plan or my marketing plan or whatever, and I'll build it out of Lego and have some fun with it. Right, and then you can come up with some ideas. So that's one aspect to you could ask a question of and this is another exercise from design thinking is to give yourself different prompts of how might I solve this If I was Walt Disney? How might I solve this If I had no money? How might I solve this If had a trillion dollars? Or if I was, pick a name, right, if I was Harvey T Firestone, how would I solve this? Or pick anyone, and just give yourself a different frame and try to get out of your own way. And I think that's the hardest part is right, we know what we know and we're in our own minds all the time. Right, we're here, we're not going anywhere, but we have to recognize when we get in our own rut. This question could be very different for different people and it could be using a physical medium, it could be framing someone else, it could be utilizing music there's so many different triggers. But having something and trying something and literally playing with it is step one. Each person is probably going to be a little bit different, but the fact that you're trying is probably that first step into figuring out how each person can make that true for themselves.

Speaker 1: 26:33

The cool other part of play is it's fun, right, it can be fun. The cool other part of play is it's fun, right, it can be fun. And I think one of the other aspects is we think about stress, and especially now we're getting much smarter about how the brain reacts to stress and what cortisol does to our creativity. And yet when we get people in a playful state, their ideas are better, they're more creative, they work better together. And one of the other aspects of play that works with especially with children and adults, is when we play with people we actually connect. Think of when you play.

Speaker 1: 27:02

There's a wonderful book out there titled Aptly Play by Dr Stuart Brown, and he outlines eight attributes of play, and one of those attributes is a diminished consciousness of self. So when we think about how we think about ourselves, we're in a stressful board meeting with eight people or 10, and how are we going to fix this thing? Everyone's stressed right, and so we're not going to come up with our best ideas when we're stressed and we're feeling under pressure. But if we can deflate that a little bit and get a little play and start building off of each other's ideas and getting that consciousness of self, instead of sitting there wondering how am I being viewed? How I speak up? Should I not speak up? Will I be judged for this? When we're playing, we're just bringing our full self forward, and so we connect better, work better together. Everything just gets better. We have that play aspect attached to it just freaking refreshing too.

Speaker 3: 27:50

like I, I have a six-year-old and it's always amazing to watch him play and to your very good point, that he doesn't give a shit about how he looks, if he's feeling, if he's dirty, if it's the right thing to do or not, and your idea around to around that diminished sense of self, or even the fact that people don't care what other people think they're just creating or in that mode. We lose that so quickly. I think about adolescence and everything else. We lose it really quickly. And then to be able to come back to yourself and your work and come back to play in your work in these little ways is just so refreshing.

Speaker 1: 28:27

There's an important thing there, right, some of us lose play, yeah, and it's in those teenage years, and I've been thinking a lot about this because I have a couple of nieces that are in that age.

Speaker 1: 28:39

We're there, you know, I think one's 12 and the other's 15 right now, and it's been really interesting because I visit them often and to watch this sort of transition, and especially from a play mindset, because, as you said before, kids are like I'm going to go play, I'm going to go do goofy things, we're going gonna go nuts. And yet I watched as the oldest started having this little bit of a divide and I think if in the I started to think about this and reflect on my own life and I'm actually curious if this was true to you too but there becomes this point where you start wanting to be an adult and for some reason, we decide that play is not part of that. And I remember going to being at the breakfast table or whatever with my parents or aunts and sitting there and yeah, so we are going to have this little more conversation. I am an adult and I'm going to not be silly and playful. And then 10 minutes later you're off playing and you're being silly.

Speaker 1: 29:32

So you create this interesting divergent path where you still want to play as a kid but you also want to be adult because you see all this cool responsibility like I can stay up later, eat what I want all these freedoms that come with adulthood, and somehow you just see this divergence happen and I think a lot of folks don't necessarily find their way back to play right, because you're also in those teenage and those adolescent years. You're trying to figure out how you fit in at school with your peers. You figure out who you are, how you dress a face full of acne or whatever's going on. You're also worried about what people think of you, that you're a little bit more protected with who you are and you're not as free as you were with that five or six year old.

Speaker 1: 30:09

this is how we're gonna play right, let's just have a fun time. I don't care what anyone thinks. Now you care what everyone thinks a lot. And so that transition we just have to find our way back to play Again. It's fun, it's joy, it's creativity, it's learning. It's learning, it's trying things, it's growing.

Speaker 1: 30:25

If you ever want to connect with people or make friends in a very quick way, go find a way to play with them. Go play on a sports team. Go play board games With adults too. One of the cool aspects of this book play is they outline different archetypes as adults, because we play different as we get older. Some people want to play sports and games and things that are still considered very play like, but to other people, things like collecting things becomes play, or collecting experiences becomes a version of play. One of my favorites is there's the planner, or the director is one of the terms that Dr Brown uses for one of the archetypes, and this is the person who loves to like plan parties or plan vacations, and they want to put all this stuff together. I'm like that's not play for me, but for some people apparently that's really fun. They can't wait to do that and that's play for them. So it's interesting as we get older too, we can recognize what play means for and and it's going to be different from person to person.

Speaker 3: 31:21

Uh, like, running is running play. It depends why you're running, how. No, I know, yeah, but to your point, some there's I have a lot of friends that that is absolutely play like they, they live for it, live for it and I would just be like shoot me in the face.

Speaker 2: 31:33

Yes, I am totally the planner for fun. It's so funny because I'm like the travel planner. I am the friend people call to find they want to go to Italy for 20 days on this type of budget. What can we make happen? And I figure it out and it's like a puzzle. I think it's fun to figure it out.

Speaker 1: 31:54

I love it. No way, some people love it.

Speaker 3: 31:59

Yeah, exactly, this is just where my joy is versus.

Speaker 1: 32:02

That's the fun. Right, as we have unique, different ways. One of the recommendations of Dr Brown, in the book too, is, as an adult, if you're not finding play, is to think about what you liked as a kid. What did you like to play? And go back to some of that stuff. Right, and maybe there's play archetypes that you've not tried. It could be. The explorer is one of the play archetypes, the collector, the artist, where just creation is fun. I think I have a lot of friends I like to cook. You know for a lot of other friends that experimentation and creating dishes, that's play. That could be fun because you're creating something, and so there's so many things that can be played that we can open our definition.

Speaker 2: 32:44

We can the play that we can open our definition. We could broaden it a little bit into just playing, pretend or goofing off or being silly. Yeah, I love that that, that you're providing this like larger framework of what play can look like and it's not just what we traditionally think of as play. For sure, absolutely was anyone else guilty of doing like weird plays with your cousins, or creating musicals and then making your family watch them. Anyone I think that's just me, just me I used to love to play like hotel or restaurant.

Speaker 3: 33:05

I used to love to organize things, puzzles like mel it's interesting to think about. There's windows to the soul throughout life and play early on window can absolutely show up in your adult life as well.

Speaker 1: 33:18

With the technology tools. Now, you know my nieces and nephews. They make movies, they record and get scripts and all of these things. One of the things that always amazes me most is they don't sit down and think about it. Let's talk about how this is going to work and make a big plan, which is what adults do. They're like no, we're just going to do it, we're just going to jump in and figure it out. It goes back to that like just no hesitation to do, and there's something empowering about that, there's something so fantastic about that. Are you guys familiar with the marshmallow spaghetti exercise? This is like a corporate thing that's been done for years.

Speaker 3: 33:51

No, tell us more.

Speaker 1: 33:53

It's an interesting exercise. You basically break up a team into groups and you have three or four people and you give them, like there's three, I would say three things. You give them like a box of spaghetti noodles, marshmallow and like some tape and that's it. And the challenge is to be like who can build the highest tower out of these spaghetti noodles and marshmallow and to spoil what basically happens.

Speaker 1: 34:14

They've done this with MBA students and like high-powered lawyers and all these different types of groups that you'd think would be really successful, and the ones who are the most successful it's five-year-olds and they come up with the tallest tower. Because what happens is the adults as they sit, they think, they talk, they debate, they go back and forth on what we should we do, what could we do, what should we do? You have a whole box of spaghetti noodles and kids just go, they just start trying stuff and they fail, they try, they fail, they try, they fail, they try, they fail, and they get so much learning done in such a short period of time that they finally get a much, much better ending, and yet we adults just talk ourselves but you're over thinkers yeah, just go do it, just try it, see what happens at the team level, day-to-day, outside of planned events.

Speaker 2: 35:14

How can leaders really set the tone for an environment where, let's be honest, there's some real boring shit we got to do, but it's a day to day or a deal with. But how can leaders foster this environment of fun or thinking without our egos or removing the over thing to everyday work problem? What can they be doing?

Speaker 1: 35:41

problem. What can they be doing? Part of that is recognizing like who who on your team might have a talent at doing this. There's a new psychometric personality exercise out there called principles this new ray, dalio, adam grant, and but there's actually a level of humor and humor is one of their traits and what's interesting is this humor trait not shocking very high end that people they're more lighthearted, they tend to want to create and make fun environments, and so I think a lot of it might be. If you're a leader, maybe that isn't your bag. Find someone whose it is and maybe give them that responsibility or ask them to help maybe create a more fun environment or create maybe it is a happy hour or a lunch or get some ideas out there. And I think work with the team too right. I think there's a general. Some communication should happen before and because there might be a team that maybe as a whole team doesn't have a lot of humor and maybe they don't want a ton of fun.

Speaker 1: 36:31

I do think that every team should have some fun. There's a level, but find that person and empower them to do that I was, I think. One of the reasons why play has been so central to what I have done in all of my jobs, no matter what role I've been in, is very early on in my career, as I work for and with a lot of people who did like to use play a lot when I worked in retail stores in in college. I consistently work with leaders. We find ways to to have fun, and so I just think there needs to be an intent and then finding the person or people with the skill set that would like to be able to do that and give it a try.

Speaker 2: 37:06

What do you recommend to the leader who wants to introduce this to their skeptical team on how they can use play to innovate or build it into the workplace? I know, obviously find the person on your team who's good at play, but what do you recommend if they've never done this before? It might not be part of the larger culture, but it's a microculture a leader would like to set up to make their team highly engaged and productive, more collaborative, more communicative. What would you recommend?

Speaker 1: 37:40

I've yet to come across this. A team of skeptics is tough, don't get me wrong. There's probably one or two skeptics in many groups, especially if I'm doing a lot of larger, like 25 to 50 person group sessions, and there's a couple in that group.

Speaker 2: 37:53

Always.

Speaker 1: 37:53

You can't avoid it. But the fun part is, especially with the Lego sessions, is it goes away almost immediately. It's amazing. So one trust that the Lego method itself, actually it'll just work on its own. Two, I think it's just asking people to be open. Come in, give it a try. There's no wrong answer. Right, you can't do wrong. You're just going to have legos. Just be yourself, right? Yeah, engage however you want to engage. I think letting people know that the expectation is just letting them be themselves is maybe it takes a little bit of pressure off. And what I've found is that the cynics usually come around about 20 minutes into the session because they're like they're not sure, but they don't want to like be the person who's just not participating. Right, and they're like, okay, fine, I'll build. My first build is always build a tower, whatever you want to build yeah hours.

Speaker 1: 38:44

but something happens when people open that bag of legos and they start playing, like little smiles come to mouth, they start getting into it and they're not competing, they're not building a thing, they're just. They can do whatever they want. And again their colleagues are smiling, people are having fun and there's something about that. We'll say on the good side of like group think right, where you get these people together and suddenly, if every, if nine out of 10 people are laughing and having a good time, that 10th is eventually right. Even if they want to resist it a little bit, they'll get into it.

Speaker 1: 39:14

And it always happens because I'm just building stuff with Legos and you got little like minig figures and at some point you just can't take yourself too seriously in that type of situation.

Speaker 2: 39:24

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 39:25

Yeah, I like that. We just talked about leaders and then I think about employees, one of the things Mel and I talk about the future of work all the time. We know deeply human connections are going to be so key and things like innovation, creativity, empathy, capabilities that are truly differentiated from AI, especially around play, because play, to me, is one of those competencies that incorporate all of these other aspects like empathy, like creativity, like innovation, wrapped in one Employees being able to advocate for play or to be able to come to work with play or know how to incorporate play, is so key. Yet a lot of people are again working in ops or in accounting or in these very kind of honestly stodgy places. So I'm curious as to if you have an employee that is working in corporate America, usa, and they really want to bring play more into it, what are the first one or two steps? I know we talked about the mindset earlier, but I am curious about what's a safe way somebody can advocate for bringing play into their personal work more.

Speaker 1: 40:37

So there's two aspects of that right. There's the individual side. It could be even starting with a colleague or two and trying something right. Maybe finding a method online or again like design thinking is also a fantastic methodology that you can take bits and pieces from to create playful, innovative, unique ways of approaching things For a broader team. If you have a team, if you're a leader, again, it's taking those baby steps, it's starting and one anchoring play and creativity and imagination to hopefully some type of core value within the organization.

Speaker 3: 41:09

Because I think that matters too. If you're just a company and all you want to do is yeah, if your values are to make money, then I don't know that play is right for you.

Speaker 1: 41:17

But if you're in a purpose-driven type organization that truly wants to excel at customer experience, employee experience, making a difference in people's lives and whatever again, whatever product service that you're in and I think most companies have this right, I think most companies have this right, I think most companies I've talked to or worked with there's a level that we want to create a place where people like to work and they create good products and services for our customers and happy employees and engaged employees mean happy and engaged customers and all of that is connected. I think if you have those, then play isn't extremely hard to get. It's finding the right methods that people can apply to, and it could be like starting small. It could be just having a little bit of fun. It could be just talking about what play actually means to people in the room. Like, how did you play? What was your favorite game as a kid? You could start with something as little as that.

Speaker 2: 42:19

Brandon, we have what we call a rapid round. It's quick questions, it could be yes or no or the first thing you think of. It could be longer too if it's oh no. I have more to say about about this. Are you open to doing a rapid round with us? Yes, do it.

Speaker 3: 42:36

I feel like I'm on a game show.

Speaker 1: 42:37

You are a game show okay to have more creativity.

Speaker 2: 42:44

Is it a solo walking situation or brainstorming situation?

Speaker 1: 42:49

Oh, it's both. I think it's both. Yeah, I am a walker, I love walking, get out, it's a physical movement. Yeah, our bodies and minds are connected. Walking for sure. But a good brainstorm is fun too, because you can bring other people.

Speaker 2: 43:04

Yeah, get that outside perspective. I feel like, francesca, you and I are brainstorming every day we go through. Oh my God. I feel like, francesca, you and I are brainstorming every day we go through. Oh my God, we're like what about this?

Speaker 3: 43:14

The problem is we have too many ideas that we have to be like stick to the plan, yeah, stick to the plan, yeah, walking brainstorm, though we would just be on fire, yeah, that's true, walking brainstorm, I love that yeah.

Speaker 2: 43:27

That's a good combo.

Speaker 1: 43:33

Is a playful leader, a better leader. I'm biased. I'm gonna say yeah, I would, but that would be by preference, I think. Maybe not in general, but for me, yes, for me yeah, I think so good, okay, best work day, pick me up play activity oh, my gosh man.

Speaker 1: 43:51

I just just because it popped in my head, I I would love to go swing on some monkey bars. I feel like that would be. If that was a thing, I would just go do it. I think generally adults are not allowed on children's playgrounds most of the time, but if there was one at my work, go to this.

Speaker 2: 44:04

You may just start a new fad. Instead of all the ping pong tables. It's a build in jungle game. I would do that.

Speaker 3: 44:12

That would be fun. Have you all tried to be? I tried the other day because my son can do pull-ups. I have no upper body strength. I'm like what happened here. What?

Speaker 2: 44:18

happened here. The last time I was at a playground I really embarrassed myself because the little animals that are like on that weird bendy thing that you like, so I got on one and flung myself off because I went a little too hard. Can creativity thrive under deadlines? Please say yes.

Speaker 1: 44:38

No, I think so. I think so Because I think sometimes pressure can be a good lever. So I think back to in my last job. I remember planning a manager summit and this was like a global thing. We're already doing it in like Barcelona and Shanghai, and they gave me like six weeks to the first one at least. But the pressure summit and this was like a global thing, we were already doing it in like Barcelona and Shanghai, and they gave me like six weeks to the first one at least. But the pressure forced me to get really creative, to understand, because we didn't have objectives or anything like that, and so it was it did. It forced me to move and try things so we could figure out what worked quickly. No, I do think so. I think there's a level of reason within that If you're like, do this tonight by 5, that's probably going to kill creativity. But yeah, if there's a little bit of time in there, I think pressure can help.

Speaker 2: 45:18

Okay, Best creativity booster music or silence.

Speaker 1: 45:26

Can I say I want to say walking. I feel like I know we said that before, but I think walking and it could be with music or without, I think that's a very personal preference.

Speaker 2: 45:34

Okay, okay, morning meetings. Would you provide coffee or games?

Speaker 1: 45:41

Ooh both Okay, yeah, again, I think you've really got to tap into the personalities. I think there's some people that are like I'm a morning person, so let's go. I want coffee and games, but I know other people that might stare daggers at me If there was no coffee.

Speaker 2: 45:56

they're like no. Game is still noon, I'm not showing up. Very cool. I appreciate you answering this rapid round. It has been super pleasurable to have you as a guest and we're so excited to share with our listeners all that they can learn from you from play Brandon. How can folks get in touch with you?

Speaker 1: 46:17

You can get in touch with me via my website. It's innatecreatescom. You can also go to brandonthelegoguycom.

Speaker 2: 46:24

Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1: 46:26

Thank you so much for having me Bless, all right, bye friend, that would be blessed.

Speaker 2: 46:29

All right, bye, friend. Hey friends, this episode of your Work Friends was hosted by Francesca Ranieri and myself, Mel Plett this episode was produced and edited by Mel Plett and myself, Francesca Ranieri.

Speaker 2: 46:42

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