417. The Art of Respectful Disagreement w/ Justin Jones-Fosu

Welcome to episode 417 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Justin Jones Fosu, author of I Respectfully Disagree.

Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Justin Jones Fosu. As CEO of Work Meaningful, Justin is the driving force behind a movement that empowers organizations across the Globe, delivering over 50 keynote addresses a year on the pivotal topics of meaningful work and inclusion. His mission is to ignite a transformation in corporate culture, guiding organizations and individuals to ascend to their peak potential through mastery of mindset, purpose and performance. Justin has written multiple books including your why Matters now, the Inclusive Mindset and his latest, I Respectfully Disagree how to have Difficult Conversations in a Divided World, which we're going to be digging in on in today's episode.

Really quickly.

Before we get into that conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Justin and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 417. Now let's jump right in. Justin Jones Fosu, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Woohoo.

Thank you so much, Melina.

Yes, we've been, we've been singing, we've been doing our happy dances over here as we're excited to be chatting and I'm so delighted to have you here with me today. For everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about your background and the work that you do?

Yeah, so I like long walks on the beach. No, I'm joking. But I am a proud husband and proud papa of 4.5 high energy kids. No, we are not pregnant but have a rapper Doodle who's 65 pounds. And I am founder and CEO of Work Meaningful, which we celebrated 17 years going on 18 years of business. We study the intersection of meaningful work, employee experience and inclusion. And so just came out with. I respectfully disagree and I'm pumped, excited, energized by the impact that's already happening.

Absolutely. And I think it's. I would love to just dig in a little bit on this idea of, you know, choosing meaningful work as a title that really means something. Right. That's intentional choice there. What does meaningful work mean to you?

Yeah, so meaningful work is where I'm doing something that is fulfilling, that it brings me joy. And one of the things, as we studied and looked at a lot of the research around, like Meaningful work was one of the top 10 things for millennials, was one of the top three for Gen Z. But it was always about kind of this external thing, it was about manager, the mission of the company, all these things. As we dug deeper into the research, there's great research by Ruziniewski and Dutton in 2001, original job crafting research. What we ended up doing is taking some of that and repurposing it in what we call the three rhythm model. About three ways that we can actually bring meaning to our work. Because the focus was finding meaning, which implied external of you, versus bringing meaning, which is internal. And so the three rhythms that we really dive deeper into this perspective, rhythm, how we choose to see things, the task rhythm, what we choose to do in the relationship rhythm, who we choose to engage. And those are three research based ways that we can be able to bring meaning to our work.

So it sounds like focusing on individuals within the organizations, being able to find what meaningful work is for them versus just being, you know, mission driven, thinking about being meaningful at that like core, central corporate level.

Yeah. So organizations can always choose to be mission oriented, connect what individuals do to the larger mission. But one of the things that we really dive deep in is that it's up to the individual to engage. Right. One of the fallacies is that organizations can create employee engagement. No, they can't. Right. They can just create the greenhouse effect that people can best engage themselves. Because I've seen some of the top highly engaged companies and there's still people who are disengaged. And so our focus is on focusing on who the only person that we can control. And so as an individual, I can show up no matter what. I mean, there's a great article about dirty work and finding meaning and dirty work and people who did cleaned out the gutters or cleaned out sewer systems or factory workers. And it still showed how they were able to engage meaningful work based upon the people that they did it with. And so it's always up to us, no matter what situation, no matter leadership, compensation, benefits, what organization we're in, that we can choose to bring meaning to our work.

Absolutely. I love that it's the same as, like, you know, you can't create for someone to be motivated. Right. You can't make them have motivation. You're tapping into motivation, but you're not manifesting it out of nothing. We're having to.

It's so good because it's like, you know, when you find these places, it's almost the implication of around meaningful work is that, oh, this place is mission driven, or they donated this amount of money to such and such, and I'm now engaged in meaningful work rather than. And that's true from an organizational perspective, that could be very, very true. But it also. We can engage in meaningful work from here, from our hearts. And there's so many. I mean, I'm not, you know, we don't have to dive deep into it, but I remember meeting this guy named Joseph at the Charlotte airport, and I try my best to thank people who aren't normally appreciated. So I went up to him. He was singing to himself, smiling. And I went up to him and said, hey, I just want to say thank you so much for your hard work, the efforts you bring, you've made my airport experience better. But his response back to me blew my mind. He was like, oh, I love what I do. And he was like, I want to make the airport a better place. And he was like, I end up taking the trash downstairs. And even the stuff people put that's recyclable in the trash, I separate it because. And he dropped his jewel on me, Melina. He was like, did you know that there's more trash in the Pacific Ocean than the size of the state of Texas? And I'm just like, wait, wait a minute. This guy is literally picking up trash in the Charlotte airport. And you could tell his why was so big that he felt and truly engaged in meaningful work. And so it's not about. It's not about what we do. It's all about how we choose to see it.

Definitely. And I love that. And we can still help, like you're saying, people to see deeper meaning for and open up, you know, eyes to be able to see something that maybe they wouldn't have seen on their own. And when we can tap into something that really resonates for someone, whatever makes it meaningful for them is, you know, can still be valuable to the organization and to the larger teams and all of these aspects as we get to be more engaged. And it feels like, you know, we're excited to be going to work regardless of what that job happens to be.

Yeah, absolutely. From a leadership perspective, Our challenge is what we call the greenhouse effect. Right. It's creating the optimal environment where people can fully engage. And so part of that is tying what they do to a large mission, tying what they do to the end user, tying how this actually impacts. But it has to actually be genuine. I've seen some people try to tie. Well, we do this, but none of their culture suggests that they're after the impact rather than just the revenue. And so it has to be truly genuine. But leaders, we can always attach what people do and directly the ultimate impact that it has on end user and. Or the ultimate mission of the organization, definitely.

So as we transition into the space of respectfully disagreeing with people, we of course would think, you know, for it.

To feel meaningful for us to be happy at work.

Everyone should be nice all the time. We never disagree. That's the goal, right? The aspiration.

Actually, I don't think it is the goal. I mean, to your point, I know you're being facetious, but a lot of people feel like that's the way, like, oh, there's never going to be conflict. Conflict's not bad. Unhealthy, conflict is bad. I have learned so much. We've have better output, we've had better results on our team because I'm very intentional challenging my team to challenge me to debunk this, to talk about how this won't work and that that healthy friction actually creates something better. I mean it's one of the. I had a, during my MBA process, I had a really cool professor, like a dead poet society type of professor, the late Robin Williams. And he would do stuff like have us sit in the middle of a circle for 10 minutes, not do anything and write a 10 page paper. But the best book that he had us read was a book called Dialogue the Art of Thinking Together. And that was so transformative to me because it was not about how do I convince a person of A or how does B convince other person of B, it's how do we create C together. And truly that's one of the principles and pillars of respectful disagreement.

I love that and I'm such a big fan. I'll link in the show notes we recently had. Melena Vinsky was on talking about mind wandering and the value that comes from just taking that space like you're saying and we can all be in. There's that shared moment to take a breath and to be getting through all of our own thoughts to then have that conversation. Right. Is what I kind of take from, from what you're what you're saying there. And so all that being said though, I think so many companies and people within them are and families and all the things, right? We're, we're pushing to this space of harmony and if we're not happy and smiling, at least externally all the time, then something is wrong. And knowing that often in that passive aggressive saying something behind people's backs, that disrespectful agreement, you know, space that there's so much going on that I think people just sort of forget about and put off into the side when it feels like we should be happy all the time. And as you said, if there's no conflict, I really love when Dominic Packer was on the show talking about his book the Power of Us and we were talking about the power of dissent and how it's actually very difficult. People have to be engaged to be willing to dissent. And if they don't care, they're not going to be bringing something up that could be potentially problematic and whatnot. And so having an engaged workforce that has that meaningful work, right. They feel like they're a part of it. Bringing up areas where they do disagree and say, hey, let's have this conversation, let's talk about it is actually a sign of health in so many ways that you're an investment in the Greater Good.

Yeah, 100%. I think when people feel like they can bring their full selves to work, when they feel like what they're doing matters, right? When they feel like the leader has created a space where their voice counts. Because oftentimes leaders, and we've seen this over and over again, they really just want people to rubber stamp what their decision is because we haven't trained leaders how to change their beat, right? And so we do this thing. I'm dual citizen of Ghana, United States and so I have the drum you can see behind me. And so normally the best individual contributors are like just killing it with a great beat. But then we make them leaders and we don't train them to shift their approach. So now they're as a leader, they're still doing ah ah, ah ah versus our now goal as a leader is just to simply keep rhythm so that other are able to engage in their own unique approach and to shine in that way. And so as leaders, what do we do? Part of our job is to create a space where we're not asking people to rubber stamp our ideas, we're orchestrating ideas and friction and culture to create best outcomes on our projects and our teams so that people don't operate from this place of what you called disrespectful agreement. And that's one of the things that we didn't even realize we were trying to solve. We were just simply trying to solve this disrespectful disagreement where it's like, you're stupid. You're wrong. I can't stand you. I don't like your sweater. Right. Actually, I do like your sweater. But instead, what we've done is this whole place of disrespectful agreement. We've created places on our teams where people don't speak up, where they don't challenge the status quo, because when they do, we initially and immediately just beat them down with, oh, I don't think that's a good idea. Versus being more curious by asking more questions, by better engaging. And so I think those are some great things that leaders can do to create those cultures on their teams where they encourage friction, encourage curiosity from others.

Great for someone who's in a company. Right. And they're realizing, oh, no, we have a too nice of a culture. And we are having. We are running rampant with this disrespectful agreement. Let's say, what are some tips? So we definitely don't want to be pushing into disrespectful disagreement. Right where we don't want to be going there. But what are some steps for people as they're trying to change? Whether it's just starting with themselves or they're thinking toward their teams, depending on what level of influence they have within the organization, to help shift from a culture of disrespectful agreement to respectful disagreement or good job.

Yep, perfect.

I'm not looking at the chart.

So I'll approach it from two ways. I'll approach it from the leader and approach it from the individual.

Great.

So for leaders, there's three things that we really strongly encourage. Number one, to model the behavior. We can't stress that enough of modeling how we create the spaces to allow people to disagree with us and actually to reward them. And I'm not talking about compensation, all the kind of stuff. But when somebody, if you're a millionaire, you say, you know what? I actually disagree with that statement. As a leader, instead of immediately beating them down, I'm like, oh, tell me more about that. And then coming back to that conversation to show how that disagreement actually helped us come up with a better result. So number one is model the behavior. Number two is to actually reward that behavior. But then number three, and this is the thing is to actively seek out disagreement, to actually ask for people to give me a different perspective on that. Could somebody share an opportunity that is different than what we've come up with? Is there something that we're missing when we have leaders creating and ask those questions and reward people for being able to respond to those? Because sometimes people are testing the water. They're like, if I disagree, are they going to hit my hand or they're going to say something? But we have to actively reward that. So that's from a leadership perspective. From an individual perspective, there are things that we can do. And this actually applies to leaders too. But I want to apply for an individual, one of our first pillars, from our five pillars of bridging the divide is challenge your perspective. And in challenging your perspective, one of the things that we found is that even myself, I was confining myself to my circles of comfort. And I remember my mom, one of the first black female air traffic controllers in the Air Force. She would tell the story about how she'd be stationed in Japan for two years and there were some soldiers in that same two year time frame that never left base. And she's like, Justin, I don't want you to be like that. I don't want you to never leave your home base, to not experience the beauty of people and cultures around you. But Molina, I realized I wasn't doing it because it was easy to stay within my circles of comfort. It was easy to talk with people who agreed with me. It was easy to not challenge my self perceived beliefs. And I created something to challenge that. And I called it. At that time it was called the six month challenge that we now call the Circles of Grace challenge. And it simply is this. Every 6 to 12 months I challenge myself to go to events, experiences and, or engage with people in either which I don't know a lot about or I disagree with. Now you can do that at your company, with employee resource groups, or talking to somebody who you know has an ideological difference, or even breaking down the silos. If you're in marketing and talking to somebody in finance and, and asking them about their job and their roles and the priorities, those are practical ways that we can begin to lean in and hear the stories and perspectives of others. Now why is this important is because the more we exercise those muscles, the more we hear from other people about their disagreements about their perspectives, the easier it is when we're actually in those moments of disagreement to engage with people and to choose to lean in, to hear their story, hear their perspective before we Initially jump in to either state agreement, disagreement and. Or to, to completely dismiss what the other person says altogether.

Absolutely. And I think so much even just you don't have to agree to be having the conversation. Right. And it's okay to just say something along the lines of.

Well, that's interesting. Tell me more about that.

Yes, absolutely. It's so powerful because I love kind of the research behind this and the science, you know that the concept of evolution, of asymmetric insights. Right. If that we can come to this understanding that which is essentially, I think that I'm really complex to understand that. No, you would never get me. I'm just too challenging to understand. But I really get you. I understand you. You're pretty simple to understand. And when we come from this understanding that we're all very complex individuals, that there's not one mold of everyone. This is why I did my TedX was don't take the exit on people. Because we often we operate on autopilot and so Monday through Friday we take this exit. One day we're supposed to go straight, but what do we do? We take the exit. Right. Because our brains want to conserve energy for things it thinks, it doesn't know. And so when we get second or third hand information, it categorizes it for future use. And then we end up right before we're about to engage them in an authentic way, we take the exit and we go to those categorizations that we filed for later use. But what if we drove towards some really amazing humans and challenging your perspective and creating a process to do that is one of those practical ways to hear people's stories intentionally and challenge the intentionality of our brains and conserving energy. But that's just 1, 1, 1, 1 way we can do that.

Oh for sure. On that illusion of asymmetric insight. And I'm so glad you brought it up. I had it in my notes to ask you about too because we've talked about it on the show, of course, and I have it in my books as well. And I always say too is like to know that you're not a three dimensional creature living in a two dimensional world. Right. It may feel like that a lot of the time. Right. Everyone has more dimension that you think and people don't necessarily see and you're giving yourself a little bit extra maybe than what, what should go there. So I could of course chat with you all day about all the things. If we have one more, you know, juicy tidbit before we wrap up the conversation for people today. And of course, we'll link to your book. I respectfully disagree in the notes and all this great stuff you're talking about. But what's one other thing you think people should really know as they are moving forward with their day?

The importance of cognitive reframing. I think that it's essential. And the reason I say that is because there's some folks that will only tell you stuff that they've gotten over. But I'm going to tell you something I still struggle with. So anytime I see a black woman who's specifically dating or married to a white male, my automatic reaction conditioned response comes in, oh, there's not enough good brothers for you. Now, I know, Melina, that people can love who they want to love and all these things, but it doesn't erase the decades of conditioning I received from some members of my community, some members of my family. And that's sometimes the issue I have when we have these types of conversations. We think just because we had the thought that that's the issue. The real issue is what do we do with it once we have the thought. Right? And so one of the things I began doing is now I challenge myself to operate in a space of cognitive reframing, right? So if I see a black woman with a white male, automatic condition response comes in. And now I'll become the romance novelist of all times, right? And I start creating this story like they were probably walking alongside the river, and they looked into each other's eyes and they were like, when I see your smile, right, like fireworks are playing. And I start chuckling to myself in that moment. It literally just happened last weekend as I was traveling to New York. But I realized something. While that's great, and I was beginning to shift and think about it differently and maybe how they met this way and think about it from a unique approach. I realized it wasn't enough to create fictitious stories. I needed to hear the real ones. And so I would encourage people to choose to listen and hear people's stories. Just because you hear their stories and even what you said fully acknowledge them, does not mean that you fully agree. And so engaging true cognitive reframing, one of those things is also choosing to hear the stories and engage with the complexities of people, because we're all uniquely different.

Definitely.

And, you know, take a moment to.

Ask the question right to you. You could just go say, oh, I.

Noticed you two walking together, and I.

Was inspired to come over and wanted to say hi.

Right.

It's. It feels a little bit Scary, but it can change so, so much for be sure. And they more often than not, they want to have the conversation. I'm going to link to my episode with Nick Epley talking about conversations on the subway and how we can have powerful engagement with people that is I think, really well tied into what we've been talking about here today. So thank you so much for that. And as people I know are wanting to start that process with you, right, they want to go ask you a question, to engage and, and to follow.

You and the amazing work you're doing.

You know, what's their best way to.

To reach out, to connect, to follow you.

Where should they go to do those things?

Yeah, the two places I love the most. One is howtorespectfully disagree.com and coming on there is our quiz about where you are on the disagreement continuum, but then also on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I love engaging on there. I'm Justin Jones Fosu on there and so I'd love to have a conversation even if you disagree with what I have to say.

Perfect.

Well, we will of course link to that in the show notes, both of those and the book and everything. And just thank you again so much, Justin, for joining me me on the show today.

And shout out to our mutual friend Marcy Rader for making the intro. Thanks, Marcy.

Yes.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you again to Justin Jones Fosu for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I love anything to do with motivation. And I find the idea that meaningful work can be so personalized to be really empowering. In working with leaders over the years, I know that it can often feel like you're out on an island, like you don't have enough influence or that you can't make an impact until you have more power, authority or employees. What I love about this conversation with Justin is that it shows how you don't have to wait until you can change a full company policy or narrative or brand focus. You can make your own work more meaningful, whatever it is, at any time you want to, and you can empower those around you to be able to do the same. That type of focus and passion will create ripples that can be so much more positive than you can even imagine right now. As you do more meaningful work, it's bound to mean you show up differently, that others can feel it. Maybe they're more inclined to want to work with you on a project or to take your suggestion in a meeting or, or to recommend you for a promotion. Whatever it is, I love that you can start now and it will make a difference. And the other big piece from this conversation is of course in that focus on the opportunities to respectfully disagree with others. Whether you have been disrespectfully agreeing or disrespectfully disagreeing, or more likely a mix of both, I encourage you to do a little something each day to start seeing that difference. It will have to be conscious and thoughtful at first and it may feel difficult, but it's worth it. Who is one person you can respectfully disagree with this week?

Go try it out.

And of course, when you do come let Justin and I know how it went by sharing it with us on social media. You can find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. To make it easy, there are links for you to connect with both Justin and I in the show Notes, which also include links to my top relationships, related past episodes and books, including I Respectfully Disagree, Ways to get in touch with Justin, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 417 and thank you again to Justin Jones Fosu for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.