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The Whole Human at Work · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: The feeling I had of like, who am I to be able to have my perfect day?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like is that I can I do I deserve that?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Do should I even ask for that?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: It felt it was weird how like um selfish, embarrassing if it felt to even articulate that.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, now I'm doing that.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't feel selfish and it doesn't feel embarrassing.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: It feels awesome.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: All right, I'm joined today by Dr.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Laura Hamill.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Dr.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: Laura is an organizational psychologist and business leader.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: She focuses on the intersection of science and HR.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: Her PhD is in industrial and organizational psychology from Old Dominion University, and she's also got a BA in psychology from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: A little bit about her professional background.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: She was a co-founder at LimeAid, an organization that many of you are going to be familiar with already.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: And she has the interesting dual role there of being chief science officer and chief people officer, which is a pretty rare combination, I'm sure.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: She's worked as director of people research at Microsoft and these days is the owner of Paris Phoenix Group.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Laura's research is focused on employee well-being, employee engagement, and organizational culture.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: You might think the fact that Laura used to work at Microsoft would mean that we overlapped before.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Strangely, um, Laura used to live just a couple of blocks away from me, and I probably saw her walking a golden retriever one time.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but now we do know each other and we're a couple of thousand miles apart.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I just guess that's the world we live in today.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the pod, Laura.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for having me, Paul.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's kind of funny, huh?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really close neighbors, but didn't know each other.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that probably says a lot about society.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Seriously.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and also the rain, right?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Being inside too much.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, all right.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: Let's start with employee well-being.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, really simple question to kick us off here.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: Why should an employer care about the well-being of employees?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: Period.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, for a long time there wasn't a lot of care.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, that is very true.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of an understatement, right?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of actually thinking about the human being that was inside the employee was not common, right?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: For us to acknowledge that people are full people and they have lives outside of work and that they're complex and there's lots of different components to them, right?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't, we didn't care about that for a long time.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm just thrilled to say that I have seen that really radically shift.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I had the privilege of you mentioned, um, helping to start Limeade.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we started Limeade a long time ago, um, before people were talking, before COVID and before people were talking about um well-being in general.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And um, when we were first starting, people kind of confused us with focusing on wellness, um, and which is sort of like a dirty word in my head because it shouldn't be, but um, it's a little bit too focused on what's wrong with people, right?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like lose weight, stop smoking, don't get in an accident.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and what we're talking about instead is how do you have a high quality of life, right?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: That how do you have the best life you can have?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so in my time starting Limeade, we would go and try to sell the product, and people would laugh at us and say, this is ridiculous.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: This has nothing to do with anything, we don't care about it.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now, fast forward, and it I mean, it's not been that long, people, most organizations understand that they should care about the well-being of their employees.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: So um, I think the pandemic taught a lot of organizations that they had to they had to care.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: But before that, we were starting to see that, oh gosh, if I actually show authentically to my employees that I care about them as human beings, guess what?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: They care back for the organization, right?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's this much more of a mutual commitment that starts to be demonstrated when you actually care about people as human beings.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that's at the kind of most basic level is that I see you, I care about you, and that gets reciprocated back from the employee.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I've I just am just thrilled that we've seen that kind of shift.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's it's really interesting.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: We work with companies that are all across the uh all across the United States and increasingly across the world.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: And we we still to this day we see a a difference in terms of between some companies and other companies in terms of how they think about uh about their employees.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and there's still a few out there that think about this as being some kind of like well, I don't know some hippie thing.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: Is a recent comment that I had that I had a had a CEO city.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: So uh so I I'm really curious about the evidence, qualitative or quantitative, um, that is there that this does have meaningful impact.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: What have you seen in terms of evidence either in Lymate or elsewhere?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that what's really cool is that now there's starting to be more and more and more evidence of the connection between well-being and outcomes organizations might care about.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's an important kind of um in-between layer, which is probably what you're about to get to.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the connection between well-being and employee engagement.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we've known for a long time that when people are engaged at work, when they have that deep connection to their work, when they feel that extra energy about their work, it's good for them and it's good for the business, right?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: That tends to be that energy creates better results.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: You get higher levels of customer satisfaction, customer, customer sat, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, innovation, like really any business result you might care about.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's been a study that's been linked with employee engagement, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we've known for a long time that employee engagement is something we want to increase.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: The problem, though, is we've been focusing a long time on this idea of more, you know, like keep going, you gotta win.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And really what that's done is led to a lot more of an emphasis or more of a outcome of burnout, right?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had more and more people who are like, I can't keep doing this, I can't sustain these levels of performance and killing myself every day.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so that kind of overemphasis most organizations have had on engagement and more and more and more without a focus on well-being has been kind of part of the problem.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And now we're starting to realize you need both of those things.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: You need well-being and employee engagement really together if you want to sustain high levels of performance.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that to me is a really important kind of combination to be thinking about is this idea of I use the analogy of um engagement as kind of being the engine, right?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: The engine that runs an organization.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's the it's everything happens through that engine, but well-being is the fuel, right?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well-being is the way that we sustain that, that we keep going.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so we have to re keep refueling.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: We have to find ways to take a break and make sure that the engine is actually healthy.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that combination of caring about people as whole people, meaning caring about their physical health, their emotional health, caring about, you know, what happens from the uh outside of work, can help us have employees who really feel engaged at work if we if we really authentically care about their well-being.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, I don't really separate those two too much.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's really that they have to to work hand in hand.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I think that I was part of the kind of um era at work where we were focusing just on engagement, right?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And like you wanted to find that person.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: I literally I was hired at um Microsoft because I had a twinkle in my eye.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you were just trying to hire the people who had that energy and that drive.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you just wanted to keep hiring those people and not do much after they actually worked there to support them and to help them keep going, right?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's all about hiring those go-getters.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that was the focus.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so I am glad now that we have moved more towards saying, okay, yeah, engagement still matters, but we also have to realize these are human beings here and they can't sustain that kind of go, you know, all the way throttle down all the time for endless periods of time.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to care about them as human beings too.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, those those two kind of go hand in hand.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we'll get on to the engagement piece of it um specifically in a moment here, but there's something you mentioned there that I really want to uh want to touch on, which is the the employee that you hire.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: If that employee is with you for any lengthy period of time, that employee is gonna go on a journey, and not all of that journey is gonna be sunshine and roses.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um we often, when we work with people, we sometimes have a little bit of a hard conversation with them when we start talking about how they should think about their um their medium term.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because a lot of people they think about short term, how do I how do I keep going?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: How do I keep going faster?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: Encouraged by their companies in many cases, like how to keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: And we encourage them to talk about, okay, well, let's say that you're gonna be still in work in 20 years' time or in 30 years' time or in 40 years' time.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: What's gonna happen over the course of that next 10 years or 20 years or 30 years or 40 years?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what's likely to happen is you're probably gonna have at some point some crappy personal health outcome that you've got to deal with.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Your parent, if you don't, your parents are.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: If that doesn't you're gonna have some challenges with your kids.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: And if you look forward 10 years versus look back 10 years, then statistically it's much more likely that that you're gonna have a higher proportion of of challenges going forward 10 years than you did the previous year, because personally you're gonna be 10 years older.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so the reason that we have those conversations with people is we try to encourage them to take a view of themselves uh it to be like how do you sustainably behave, right?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: How do you how do you work in such a way that you've got an effort that you can sustain over a long period of time?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: If you do so, you can be effective inside the companies.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well I think companies need to do the same thing, right?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: If you're gonna ideally, if you want to retain people, you've got to understand that the human beings that you're gonna retain are going to face challenges and they're gonna have ups and downs and so on.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to bring it up with you specifically because I know, based on you know, having seen you speak and you talk about your personal journey, that you've had some of those challenges yourself.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about that a little bit?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think that is kind of like maybe the definition of realizing you're an adult, right?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: When you when you to the point and you say, Oh, I get it now that there are ups and downs, and everybody has ups and downs, right?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually uh that's what life is.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that there's this naive view when I was younger, is like, no, no, no, I'm gonna control my life so well that it's gonna be perfect, right?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's not gonna be anything hard about my life because I'm gonna figure it all out.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the you know, kind of the realization is like, oh yeah, everybody has things that are hard, right?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Including me.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I definitely, I mean, I you've heard kind of the long version.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, I I've had different things that have happened to me in my life that um I would say aren't awful by any means, but that were challenging in terms of like me deciding what I wanted to do from a career perspective.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, some of the things that I can think of that are maybe noteworthy is after I had um kids.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: When I had um, I have two kids, one of them is 23 and one's 19.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: So they are definitely on their own now, mostly.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but when they were really little, it was hard.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it was interesting because it wasn't right when I had them, right?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't right when I gave birth birth to them.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually when they were old enough to start telling me the impact that I was having on them by working all the time.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that was when I was working at Microsoft and I didn't see them.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was daycare and a nanny that saw them more than I did.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I wasn't there for dinner most nights.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe, maybe a few nights, but not most nights during the week.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just really hard.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the the thing, the clincher for me is when my son one day said to me, I think by that point he was probably thinking four or five years old.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And he um looked at me one day and said, Mommy, why do you worry all the time?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just heartbreaking.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't believe it.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: He could see me, right?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: He saw what was really going on.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, damn it, I thought I was hiding that really well.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I wasn't.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that to me was like the start of I've got to change something.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to, I've got to make a change.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so I decided to to leave that job and and start my own consulting practice with a really having just a low kind of expectation, really.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to be able to pay my bills.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have any like great expectation that I was gonna do anything that interesting or innovative.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: It ended up that I I really did.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I had uh just an amazing experience when I um started my consulting business the first time.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: So this was a long time ago in 2006.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's where I met the um the person who started Limey.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: We that was we kind of created the company in um the Bellevue Public Library.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: At that time, which was pretty funny, there were signs on the doors um of Bellevue Public Library that said no startups.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: There were so many people.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody wanted to pay for WeWack or something like that.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go get your own space.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Don't pick up the carols of Bellevue Public Library with your startup.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we would, I would have so many um books and articles, it looked like we were in school, right?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because we were really studying the science of well-being as kind of the start, the start of the company.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: So uh yeah, anyway.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that there have been different times in my life where I've had to make changes, I guess, is sort of the the net of it.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and those changes for me have been really cool, like scary, scary, but also then ending up being really awesome.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And like the last change I made was I left Lymate.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that was really hard, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: As one of the kind of people who started the company and and really feel I felt such a deep connection to that place.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it was just not working for me anymore.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was um really from a kind of emotional well-being perspective and a physical well-being perspective.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: It just, I just didn't, I sort of dreaded my days.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't want to live my life in a way that I dreaded the next day, you know.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I decided to leave.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it took me a while to get kind of my feet underneath me, but I did.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And now I'm doing some really fun stuff and doing things that make me get excited about my days.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I think sort of the net of it is like trying to figure out how to what needs to change, right?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And how you have just kind of the the gumption to go do it.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's uh I I think that last piece of it.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember when you were speaking event that I was at and you were talking about uh the sort of dreaded feeling you get on a on a Sunday when you're when you're gonna go back to work on a Monday.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes it's difficult to differentiate with whether that's just having a bad week or a bad month, or that's the universe telling you something.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: But sometimes um it's really important to listen to those signals and use it as a as an opportunity to go do something else.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I mean, that's where well-being comes in too, right?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because the I really believe you there are physical symptoms signals that you're getting.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like I had tonight, really bad tinnitus in one of my ears.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And talk about a signal, right?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, clang, clang.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like this is clearly a signal from my body, right?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: That I need to be listening.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of times we don't listen to those and we don't make that connection um with how we're really feeling inside with the with the signals that we're getting from our bodies, you know, that we need to we need to change something.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's all good.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I and the the point of view that I give on that is that um so this is something I'm observing myself, but this is something that you um that we've also seen in some of the people that we work with.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes using kind of traditional measures as to what should be right and should be good um confuses us a little bit.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: I remember when I was working on uh at Microsoft myself and I was doing some work there, whereby on those all those traditional measures, the stuff that's in Dan like Dan Punk uh Dan Pink's book, you know, Drive where it's uh autonomy, mastery, and purpose, I kind of had a ton of all three.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, and yet there was something there was something missing for me.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that is that's gonna make it harder to read those signals if if on paper everything looks right.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: If you have, let's say, for example, you have the perfect job, you wanted to be X for your entire life, you wanted to work for this company your entire life, and now you're there and now you're living the dream, and that doesn't feel right.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: It almost feels like selfish that you would move on from that into something else.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: And you can kind of imagine your friends talking to you and saying, wait a minute, you're crazy.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: You've got this great job with this great company.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you do why would you do that?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: So to like push through that and read the signals then that can be particularly challenging.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that made me think of something that happened to me right around the time I was thinking about um leaving Limeid.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the selfish, the word selfish um was like that that really like hit me when you said that because there was like almost this hesitation for me to like articulate what I really wanted, because it to your point of like being so connected to what I thought I should be and I thought I should want.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And my therapist said to me, Why don't you just design?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because I kept focusing on this idea of like dreading my day.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so she said, Why don't you design like what would your perfect day be?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Oh, can I do that?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And like it was so funny that a way I was like almost embarrassed to to say like what my perfect day would be that because I think it was the inference of, well, would people say I don't care about my profession?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Would people say, well, who does she think she is to be able to say that?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because my perfect day has a lot to do with I'm an early riser, but I like to take my time getting ready.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: I like to take my time drinking coffee.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to, I would love to be able to work out in the morning, right?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so all these things that like, oh, could I say that?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Can I do that?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, maybe I don't want to have meetings all day.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I just want to have like a few meetings in a day.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, maybe I even want to take the time to eat lunch.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: What an idea, you know, like um, so anyway, I it was quite an exercise and uh exercise, and it was interesting.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was less about the exercise of writing that down, but the feeling I had of like, who am I to be able to have my perfect day?
• 19:53
  unknown: Yeah.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like it's I can I do I deserve that?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Do should I even ask for that?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: It felt it was weird how like um selfish, embarrassing if it felt to even articulate that.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly, now I'm doing that and it doesn't feel selfish and it doesn't feel embarrassing.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: It feels awesome.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's a whole bunch of privilege that's built into that, right?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And many, many years of many, many years of working hard to get to the point where I can have a consulting practice, you know, that allows me to do that, right?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to pretend that that isn't true, but it's pretty darn awesome to go from a place of just constantly trying to like keep your head above water to a place where I feel like a human being again, you know.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think it's important to say, I mean, we're not claiming here that it's it, we're not claiming here that that just because you want to live on a 60-foot yacht that that means automatically you will.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: Or any of those things.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: And you point out, right?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: There is a it's we're we're talking about very first world problems here, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, it still if you if you can't even acknowledge to yourself what it is that you want or what it is that you're looking for, then it's very difficult to design an environment around you that give that gives you that.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's something else I wanted to that I was just thinking of as you were as you were touching on uh on those themes, um which was really kind of I would say uh the connection between what we've just been talking about and what and designing an environment in the way that you want it to be designed, and employee engagement.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it's pretty clear, as you point out, that um that how people work and the nature of of the of the work arrangements that people have can be closely aligned to their employee engagement.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I've read I'm sure you have too.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: Many people have, many of our listeners will have uh have read it as well.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: These Gallup surveys that come out each year that look at employee engagement.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: The figures are always terrible.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: And bobbing.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: And they seem to dip as well.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um what do you think of those surveys?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think it's real that employee engagement is really as low as is uh as is claimed?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: And aside from what we've been talking about, is it really possible to improve employee engagement from the perspective of an employer?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I think those are real.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think it's dropping.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: I do believe our whole relationship with work is something that maybe in 50 years we'll look back at it and say, wow, isn't that wild the way that happened, right?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Just think about the way I thought about how I was going to work when I was young.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea was just get a really well-paying job and just go there every day, right?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna work my ass off and I'm gonna, everything's gonna be peachy.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just such a simplistic view of what I thought work was gonna be.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I put up with a lot of crap.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a lot of crap.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, lots of discrimination, lots of sexual harassment.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I have stories, right?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And most people do, most women especially do.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: And um, there were a lot of really crappy things that I really think my daughter would not put up with, right?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: She just wouldn't.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think that we're realizing that all our hopes and dreams are not gonna come true by just finding that one special place that's gonna fulfill all of our career, you know, dreams.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: I really think our our shift is happening around what we think we're gonna get from work.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so because of that, I think we're just a little disillusioned, right?
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: We're just feeling a little bit like, oh yeah, I'm not doing that.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not giving all of that energy.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm gonna be a little more critical of the real experience that I'm having in this place and be honest.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it and a lot of organizations are so, there's a lot of ways that organizations are still really dysfunctional, right?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: I just continue to be shocked at the most basic ways that organizations aren't aligned, they're not communicating, they're not uh coordinated.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and also, I mean, this is a maybe a little um niche kind of problem, but the way jobs are designed, I mean, there is no job design anymore.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and used to be in the olden days, I felt like there's a job and here's the responsibilities and here's the handoffs.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: And now what I see, and it might be because I'm work with a lot of tech companies too, but it's not those, this is not a job.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: Anything that you that we can pile on is a job until you say uncle, right?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Until you say no more.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's just more and more and more and more.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think people have just gotten to the point of being like, why would I, why would I do this?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Why would I put all of this time and effort in and not really feel like I'm getting a lot back?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just feel like that's kind of a long way of saying, I feel like our relationship with work has changed so much.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we just aren't really striving to even have those high levels of engagement um as employees in a lot of ways.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that that is um, that's just kind of what I think is going on.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: I still think we should be striving for engagement.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: I still think we should be measuring it.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I still, but I I really wanted want to see it coupled more with well-being, as I mentioned before.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you and I both have a lot of experience working with tech companies, and I've observed a few things that are very much in line with what you're talking about.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: One thing I would say is that I mean it's not always the case, but um tech managers inside tech companies are frequently individual contributors who have just reached a point where they're gonna take on management responsibilities.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: In many cases, they don't even have any interest in people management.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: They're just uh they're just in it.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um and even if they are interested in it, they have very little experience and very little training in it.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: And in quotes, because they're smart, then they're supposed to be able to uh supposed to be able to figure that out.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: And in many cases, the smarts that they have have got nothing to do with uh with how you manage manage teams.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's part of the problem.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing, as well, is you point out as really eloquently, I think, is this whole business about what we're expected to do.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um and a job description in many tech jobs is almost meaningless.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just like a it's a collection of it's just a collection of word solid words.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then you just wind up and show up doing stuff.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And in the meantime, your manager is loading stuff on uh on you and then questioning why you're not getting everything done, and your CEO is every year showing up saying, All right, things are moving faster, we gotta do more with less, we gotta do more with less, we gotta do more with less.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and the the result, the expectations at the from the board go up and up and up and up, right?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I mean I didn't used to think this, but I do now.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's kind of insulting.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you if you go to your workforce and you say, All right, everybody, we've got to do more with less, what you're really saying is, I don't think you were working hard last year.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't I I don't I I don't I think you've got at least 20% more in the tank, or I think you're spending too much time with your family, or I think that that you're not giving enough to your company.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: We used to call it in our team I was in, we used to call it fet uh a concept of this similar to this that kind of collects the two together is something called fetch the rock, whereby the manager would say, I need you to go fetch that rock.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: Not tell you about anything, where it was, what it was, anything.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: Just need you to go fetch a rock.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: You'd wander off, you haul this rock, you put it on your back, you bring it all the way back, you'd present it, and then the manager would go, not that rock.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it's so and there's so much of that inside tech companies.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: I completely agree.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to um just high to highlight this point.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um some of the work that we've done recently um was getting single-word feedback from employees as to what's the one word that comes to mind um when uh in relation to your job.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's it.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: No other additional instructions.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh the most I'm looking at in front of me here, the most common words were uh confusing, ambiguous, unstructured, unclear, chaotic, and lonely.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that isn't that awful?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Awful.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I'm talking about, right?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: When I said dysfunctional.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just the most basic ideas of what are our goals and who's doing what, and how is it how do we come together and how do we stay coordinated and how do we work on projects together?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: It just seems like maybe it's just the companies I'm working with.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the companies I I have the you know ability to work with, it there's just struggles in the most basic ways.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so just thinking about how that impacts the human beings that work there, right?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: Those words just tell it all, tell such a story of that.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: I did um a study, I guess it's been a couple of years now, but I was asking, um, I think we had like 5,000 participants.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was a big survey kind of around the world.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we were asking people like, what's your the biggest cause of stress for you at work?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of similar, but it didn't have just one word.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and my mind was blown because we had a like a list of things to choose from that were awful things, right?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like my manager's, you know, treats me poorly and um toxic work culture and like a whole bunch of different things.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: The number one by far that was probably I think three times more frequently picked than the next one down was too much work.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just it's like all the other things that were on that list, like there's a HR department or HR person to deal with those things, you know?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like but that one, I don't feel like we even talk about too much work.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: We don't even talk about like what is a job anymore.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and how do we make that just functional?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm so with you on that.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: Who in a company um makes sure that we don't do too much work?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that sounds really strange, but think about it like from like we want our employees to perform.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in the world of sports, coaches work all the time with athletes to make sure that they're not over-training.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: So who's doing that in the workplace?
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'd I'd say nobody.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they're doing the opposite.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of people who are doing the opposite.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Their job is to add more.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: My job is to grind people into the ground.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: That kind of thing.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I I I want to briefly take us into a tangential area, but I think it's one that is related.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um last few months we've been doing a lot of work around researching what I colloquially call me versus we.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's a descriptor that we use to describe, if you like, the tension between optimizing for self and optimizing the team.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I just mentioned sports.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: The mental model that we use for this is actually sports teams.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: So if you think about let's say basketball and soccer and things like that, there are countless examples of basketball teams and soccer teams where if you were to look at the list of players, you would you'd say that is the collection of the best individual players in the league.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna win the league, no doubt about it.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then the season starts and they almost inevitably don't because what they are are teams of high performing individuals versus uh high performing uh teams.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm really curious about this as a workplace dynamic, right?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Especially as we have a tendency, particularly in the US, to reward individual individual achievement, individual accomplishment over contributing, uh, over contributing to teams.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing the organization really wants is high-performing teams and a high performing organization.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: So what are your thoughts about that tension and how you go about ensuring that uh employees are actually part of high-performing teams?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: I love the me and we idea because it's to me, it's a very simple phrase that describes so much, right?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: And even when we're talking about topics like inclusion, me and me is a really good way to talk about that balance, right?
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be included as a part of the bit the bigger collective, but you also want to be seen for who you are individually, right?
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I love the me and we um piece of that.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Where I go, which is probably not surprising to you, is that I really focus on how the culture of the organization is emphasizing the me in this scenario that you just described.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because to me, that's what is missing in a lot of our efforts when we're trying to sort of improve something or fix something in an organization, we keep it at the climate level, right?
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: We keep it at the level, the things that we can see and the things that are like, let's just set better goals and let's teach managers how to work together better.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: And those things are great, right?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Those are great things to do.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: But when you dig deeper and you find out, oh, well, the reason why none of those efforts work is because what's truly valued at the end of the day goes against that.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was kind of what what you were um emphasizing there in the kind of individual versus team.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: So many organizations truly are about you competing against your team members, right?
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: You shining brighter than the people around you because that's what matters.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking for that spring um twinkle in your eye, right?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking for that special thing that's different about you.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Go to your horn.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see who is the superstar here, right?
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: So when you kind of dig into the layers of culture and you you really start to see what is it that's value?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: We value people being rock stars.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And you could take, I mean, I don't mean to berate Microsoft, but you know, thinking about Bill Gates, it's all about Bill Gates, right?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of fundamental.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: His brilliance is the way he thinks was core to who Microsoft is.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're looking for the next one, right?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: The next special person.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so that propagates that individualism a lot.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so what is it in the culture if you're trying to focus more on the team?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what's the the similarity, the similar construct from a cultural perspective, right?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: How do we think about all of the things that need to be in place culturally for people to be reinforced to help each other?
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, there's so much so much more than just competition versus collaboration.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's a big part of it, right?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: But the collaboration you could break down on so many levels, right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Which could be a lot about um trust, could be a lot about psychological safety, could be a lot about kind of feeling like you're part of the bigger purpose of this organization, that you matter to this place, that you feel included, right?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: A sense of belonging.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's multiple kind of cultural attributes that I would want to dig into to see which of those are alive and well in order to kind of support that team performance.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Or are we working against the tension of truly valuing things that are more about competition, tooting your horn, being special, saving the day, being a hero, right?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: So there are that's the kind of level I'd want to go to is just dig into what's truly valued.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what's tricky about all of this culture work is that a lot of the messages we get about what's truly valued are when we look to the people who've made it in the organization, right?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: We look to readers, we look to power to really understand what's valued.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what's really almost kind of circular about the culture problem or the culture conversation, is that many times people who are in positions of power are the ones who are kind of helping us decide how to be, how to behave.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: We look to them to see kind of what kind of behaviors which we should we demonstrate.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: But they're also part of the system.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: They feel like they've made it, right?
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's not a lot of motivation for people in leadership positions to change the system.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's reinforcing them, right?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is what's really tricky to me about culture is the role of power in the in the conversation, in the conversation and in the work.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that's what one of the reasons why it's so hard, right, to actually change culture is that it's it requires the powerful, but a lot of times the powerful are too bought into the system, right?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: Don't want to change it.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that's a long answer, Paul.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: No, and a really, a really great one.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it reminds me of a a a conversation that a an online conversation has been having recently about this, because um, the more that I work in this sphere, the more convinced I become that is that a lot that what is broadly accepted, even in you know, even in MBAs, a lot of what is broadly accepted as being leadership traits or you know, attributes of great leaders and things like that is really a distillation of the way in which leaders who were almost all white men behaved historically in successful companies.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it ignored the fact that you had a whole bunch of other leaders that were behav that had many of those attributes as well, and their companies were not successful.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's what I call, um, and I'm uh he probably won't end up being a guest on my podcast because I I slam a little bit, but it's what I call the good to great problem, which is that it's full of um of basically, let's look at all these companies that have been successful and find the traits associated with the leaders in the in those companies.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_02: Even though I agree with some of the statements that are in there, just that exercise of like singling out these companies and then and then highlighting behaviors in those people ignores the fact that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of companies that have not been successful.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, many of those companies that were featured in that are now not successful are now not successful.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: So we we collect together this set of these highly masculine traits of like raw power and decisiveness.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, we we almost downplay things like listening and empathy and things like that, which are at least or is more valuable, but we don't highlight them because historically that's not how we've seen a leader like a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, or go back all the way through to, you know, back to the 1920s.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's not those are not the traits that we saw in those men.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: And to your point, it becomes such a machine, right?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Of just us assuming and thinking that's the way, that's the way it's supposed to be, right?
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard really hard to break out of that.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what's so hard to me and makes me sad about culture work in general.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, so much of it requires the people, the powerful, to be involved in that work, to be able to see it, to be able to be have humility and to be able to be open to other perspectives, other other models than what they had access to, to what than what they saw.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'll never forget I was um I did a presentation um at a big healthcare system, and there was a luncheon afterwards, and I sat next to the COO, and it was a big hospital system that had it was all men.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: I should take that back.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was one woman.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so this guy sat next to me, super nice, and he could tell he was like a little bit of a skeptic.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking about well-being and how important it was.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he said to me, you know, I think I get it, Laura.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think what I get what you're saying, but I didn't have anybody who like treated me that way.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: There was nobody who I worked with who like cared about me and thought about me as a human being.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, I just don't know if I know how to do it, you know?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like to then it's like, oh, that is a big part of this too, right?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Is what the people who've been in power have had as role models.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they don't, they haven't had a lot of access to other other ways of thinking.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's start, let's start wrapping us up here.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: Organizational culture, that last layer.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_02: We've we've eased into it already.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you mentioned that organizational culture is very important, but elusive.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I'm curious specifically, what do you mean when you're saying elusive?
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if it is elusive, can we how can we how can we manage, measure, do anything around the around something that is deliberately elusive?
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly it, Paul.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of the big problem.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what I'm writing my book on, right?
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is organizational culture.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I am all about this topic.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: I love and it's it is the the very nature and characteristics of culture that make it so damn hard to change.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this is why we really most organizations struggle with it.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's probably 10 different reasons, but I'll just share a couple.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: First, it's culture is really abstract, right?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: We often don't have the language to describe an organization's culture.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, sometimes it's we sort of have a feeling about it, but the words, like the level of it, intensity of it, we can't really quite put our fingers on, right?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so the language within an organization is hard.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: But then when you think across organizations and try to compare that language, it's just a mess, right?
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have a good taxonomy, dictionary, way of describing culture in really consistent ways.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: So the abstract nature of culture is one reason.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, another reason around this is that it is um when you start in an organization, it's very apparent, right?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: You can you can see it, it slaps you in the face.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh my gosh, they do that here.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa, I had no idea.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, people don't ask questions at company meetings, and I just asked one.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: So you learn fast, right?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: When you started an organization about kind of how things are done.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that's mind-blowing to me about it is how fast you become part of the culture, so much so that you don't even see it anymore.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that is another huge problem, right?
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you can see it, it's more easy to think about how you might change it.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: But once you can't see it anymore, it's like, what do you mean, change our culture?
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why would we do that?
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't even know what you're talking about.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the analogy I'd like to use is the idea of like a fish in water, right?
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: Water is core to you know a fish's existence.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, I don't know for sure if a fish knows it's swimming in water, right?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: The culture is the water we swim in, and it's so part of what we do and who we are in organizations that we oftentimes can't even see it.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: So that's another one.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think another, I'll do one more, even though there's many, many more, but the third one is that it's all relative.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the thing that just sort of kills me about culture books in general, right?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: You get the Netflix book, you get, you know, every every big company that's had any success with culture writes a book and says, this is the way you do it.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, it just doesn't work that way, right?
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's all relative to the organization and all of the kind of ecosystem the organization is in.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not really that there's a good culture or a bad culture.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's really relative to what you're trying to do.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so it could be helping our, you know, our culture could be helping us achieve our strategy, or it could be holding us back from our achieving our strategy, but it's relative to us.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the there's no cookie cutter, right?
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no cookie cutter that you can just and everybody can, you know, have a great culture.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so those are just a couple of the reasons why it's elusive and so hard for us to get our hands wrapped around.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and but at the same time, we know how critical it is that you have a culture that's you know aligned with what you're trying to do, or or you just won't do it, right?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, over and over again, I see that organizations, when they're having some issues, there's just this big kind of in-your-face disconnect between what the culture is and what they're trying to achieve.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's I it's not subtle, right?
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's big, really obvious disconnects.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: So many unanswered uh questions because I haven't had a chance to ask them because we've been talking, which has been fantastic.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: Let's uh let's do another one of these.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and maybe we should time it for when the book for when the book is about to come out, and we can talk about um many, many more of these these issues.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: So much so complicated areas, and really, really great to talk to you about them today, Laura.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining the podcast.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much, Paul.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: That was really fun.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: I am with you.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: We could keep going.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: Music is by Dolo Records.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us reach more people.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.