Confidence Classic: Build an EPIC Workplace Culture That Drives Results with Jessica Kriegel, Chief Scientist of Workplace Culture

You would be shocked at how many organizations are not clear on the results that they're trying to achieve. There's just this kind of general idea of success and growth that is constantly being pursued without clear definition of when will we know that we've won and what does it look like to win? Those things need to be clear and aligned within an organization. Otherwise, you're on a spinning hamster wheel that you never get to the end of.

On this journey with me, each week when you join me, we are going to share, chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

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I'm ready for my close up. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with me this week. Okay. Today's guest is Jessica Kriegel. She's the chief scientist of Workplace Culture for Culture Partners, leading research and strategy and best practices for driving results through culture. For 15 plus years, Jessica has been guiding global, national, Fortune 100 and other organizations across finance, technology, real estate, and healthcare industries on the path to creating intentional cultures that accelerate performance. Imagine that. As a keynote speaker, Jessica leverages her current research in 15 plus years of global organizational culture innovation, providing leaders with the map and tools for how to build cultures that deliver results. Jessica, thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Oh, my gosh. So you guys totally caught my attention, you and your team, when you sent me a note and said, according to recent data, nearly 30% of Americans have reported being diagnosed with anxiety or depression. And more than 90% of American employees desire emotional and psychological support from their employers. I mean, that's some major, major numbers.

Yeah, it's disturbing. And people are scratching their heads, leaders on what to do about it. They're noticing the impact in the workplace as it pertains to the data that they track, like absenteeism and the actual use of the health benefits that are being offered. But it's creating a culture challenge, because culture, the way we define it, is how people think and act at work. And when your thinking is an anxiety and your actions are based in fear and you're struggling and you're depressed, that affects the way we think and act at work, which affects the people around you. And so this is a major problem for businesses. And they're just at the beginning of starting to have creative solutions that make an impact. Most people are still totally lost on what to do.

How did you get into this line of work? Like, how were you in a bad work environment?

Yes. So My background, I spent 10 years at Oracle and at Oracle I was doing this sort of culture transformation work and the longer I was there, the higher level of executive I got to work with. So at the end of my time there, I was working with the chief marketing officer, the chief operating officer. Oracle has these different general managers that are basically mini CEOs within Oracle that are acquisitions they've made that didn't get destroyed and turned into larger big Oracle, they called it. So I was working with executives at the top of their game, right? I mean, if you're in the C suite at a company like Oracle, you've made it. And what I noticed was a complete lack of understanding on how to drive culture. They were really good at how to drive results and how to drive strategy and pivot when strategy needed to pivot. I mean, Oracle's results speak for themselves, but culture in different pockets, and I'm not speaking overall, I'm speaking about different pockets that existed, struggled sometimes because it feels so touchy feely and like woo woo. And people don't know how to scale or change intentionally culture, because usually what's happening is culture is just getting created accidentally through a series of various experiences that people have. And then they create a story in their head and then there we are. So that's how I got into it. When I left Oracle, I became a chro of a technology company myself. And then I became responsible and I became the executive that I had been coaching for so long and saw how challenging it was. It was like my empathy levels went way up because I understood the stress and the conflicting motivations that exist. Right. You want to help your people, you want to do the right thing. You're also having pressure from above about driving results and all of this uncertainty in the economy and with competitive landscapes constantly shifting and new technologies, there's just so much. And so I see that anxiety and fear going up for executives as much if not more than it is for the frontline workforce.

So where do you start people when whether they're an executive that is in a leadership role and they're facing the same situation that you're describing, or they're an employee that's confronted with going to work every day. Where should people start?

Well, the first thing that we need to understand is what we're trying to accomplish. And you would be shocked at how many organizations are not clear on the results that they're trying to achieve. There's just this kind of general idea of success and growth that is constantly being pursued without clear definition. Of when will we know that we've won? And what does it look like to win? Those things need to be clear and aligned within an organization. Otherwise, you're on a spinning hamster wheel that you never get to the end of, and you don't get to then celebrate that success. Now, when I say you would be surprised, I'm talking, you know, as we've done now, consulting with the Fortune 100. I mean, you think that these executives have figured this out, but you go into an executive team. Like, for example, one company a few months ago, we walked in and we asked everyone, do you know what the number one goal is for this company? And they said, yes, it's revenue growth. I said, great, what is the revenue growth goal? And I went around the room and the chief marketing officer said, it's 5% growth. And then I went to the COO and they said, actually, it's 7% growth. And then we went to the CFO and they said, actually, it'S 6% growth. And everyone has a different opinion about what the growth number is. So we looked over at the CEO and we said, okay, what's the growth goal? And the CEO said, very funny, guy. Well, it's somewhere between 5 and 7%. And the reality is, they were all right. But the reason that they had different numbers in their head is because one goal was the number that they put in the budget. One goal is the number they told the board. One goal is the number that is the stretch goal. One goal is the number they really think is realistic. And so when you have these executives that aren't even aligned, like, how can you possibly get your team behind what the goals are? And that, I think, one clarity of results, it's actually the number one driver of engagement, and it's also the number one predictor of success and something that is very often missed.

What do you mean by driver of engagement?

When you look at engagement the way that we were looking at it in this particular study that we did about a year and a half ago, we were looking at, as people rate their culture highly or low. In the study that we did across multiple organizations, we looked at a number of different factors that helped drive their engagement up or down. Right. And the number one thing out of all of the factors that we asked them about was just being clear on what it is we're trying to achieve here. That clarity. And sometimes that looks like defining purpose and giving people a why. But that clarity of the end goal is the number one driver that stands alone above the rest is the Thing that can drive engagement forward.

So once you've gotten them to go ahead and define. All right, here is a goal we all agree upon. We're all on the same page. Where do they go from there?

Once you know what the results are, which is often a missing link, what most people do is they think about, okay, well, what do we need to do in order to get those results? And they kind of focus on the actions, right? And that we actually call the action trap. That is not what you want to do. Because if you just focus on actions in order to get the results, then you're constantly having to micromanage activity. You know, actions. Like, if I'm the head of a sales team and I know that our goal is to close $40 million in bookings this year, then if I'm just focusing on action, I'm calling the salespeople and saying, did you talk to the client? How many clients did you talk to? How did the client's call go? Did you track that client call in Salesforce, you know, that's like action management. That leads to burnout. Not just of your employees who are annoyed that you're nagging them, but it also leads to your burnout as a leader because you're having to manage activity across everyone on your team. Going back to these executives experiencing more and more stress and anxiety. So we have to eliminate that. That's playing checkers. We need to play chess. And so what you have to think is what motivates action, right? What motivates the sales guy or the sales girl to make the call, to make 10 of those calls, to track those calls and do all the activities that we kind of know need to get done. It is their beliefs. It's their mindset. It's what they think about the value that they offer to the company, about their colleagues, about whether salesforce is a useful tool or a data entry nightmare, about how many calls they need to make in order to hit their number, if that number is actually doable. It's all about the beliefs that they hold. So that's really where you want to start. Understand if these are the results that we want to achieve, what beliefs do my people need to hold in order to take the right action to get those results? And question that you, if you're a leader listening to this right now, can ask your team, is what are the commonly held beliefs across this team that may be getting in the way of us achieving those results, and what do we want those beliefs to be? Once you figure out what those kind of existing roadblock beliefs are and what they should be. Now you can start intentionally helping nurture the right beliefs that will get people to take the right action without you having to micromanage them and then ultimately will help you achieve the result. And winning is fun, right? Winning creates a lot less stress than losing and so that helps reinforce a positive feedback loop of continuing to drive results.

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Remember confidence creators I asked you to try to find your passion. So what is the way somebody finds out what the commonly held beliefs are? Because I know you know this like I do from corporate that what leaders might be saying oh these are the beliefs of the team and what actually is there's oftentimes a big gap. So how do you encourage them to undercover the truth?

Yeah, you have to ask the question and not in the form of an engagement survey. And and don't do it in an insular boardroom with just the executives present. You have to invite people to a conversation. Just imagine that you have to talk to people. You know. So often executives feel like the scope of how many people they would need to talk to to really listen to the organization is so large that they just don't do any listening. They're like I couldn't possibly get to the team so therefore that's just not going to be on my list. But having as many conversations as you can is super informative. And so this also doesn't have to be rocket science because we have facilitated tens of thousands of these conversations where we go into companies and ask what are the commonly held beliefs and what do they need to be and you pretty quickly when you have a diverse group of people in the room diverse as and they represent all the different factions of a company Right. You have some executives and some frontline workers and these team and those team and this generation and that generation, and, you know, all of the different kind of ways that employees show up in the company, the themes become pretty clear. I mean, it's very rare that when you just ask people to shout it out, I mean, give them five minutes to think about it, write it down, and then start sharing their insights. Everyone kind of comes around the same themes because there is a shared reality that they're all reflecting on, right? Not to say that there aren't outliers, but it's not as hard as it may seem to uncover what those shared beliefs are and what they need to be. Because they're shared beliefs by definition, everyone's got them. Right?

So once you've identified the shared beliefs, which I'm sure there's going to be some shortcomings versus where you would actually want them to be, how can you help people to adjust their beliefs?

Great question. So what creates our beliefs? Where do your beliefs come from? And this is not a cool workplace tool. This is actually just the way that people work. It's how humans are, right? All of our beliefs, the beliefs I have about whether I'm a dog person or a cat person, about whether I want to be a shoplifter or a keynote speaker, all of those beliefs come from the experiences that I've had up until now. So when I was a child, I had a family, I had extended family, I had schoolmates, I had experiences with my church or not going to church. Those all are belief shaping experiences. And we continue to have belief shaping experiences every day at work. Right? When my boss sends me a text message, when I go onto a town hall, when someone leans over and whispers something about that person. Like, these are all experiences that will shape my beliefs about the way that it is around here, which is what many people think culture is. It's just like that's the way we do things around here, right? So the question is now, what are the experiences that are going to shape new beliefs? So we need to be intentional about how we show up and the experiences that we create for each other. And this isn't just a management thing because, you know, I was at Oracle for 10 years and Larry Ellison did not create the culture that I experienced. Right? It was the people that I worked with day in and day out, on zoom calls, in conversations. You know, I never spoke to Larry, like he wasn't a factor. Maybe he made some decisions about the strategy and sets the tone at some esoteric level, but at an exoteric level in terms of day to day experiences, it was my colleagues. And so frontline people have just as much responsibility for culture in that way. So what experiences do we need to create in order to shape the right beliefs? That's the key question. And I can go into some examples of experiences, but ultimately it's like, what experiences are we creating for each other? That's where we start.

Yeah, Give us some examples that you have.

Yeah. So low hanging fruit, easy fun and free things that you can start today is the way that we recognize each other for the work that we do. What gets recognized and what doesn't, Right. The way that we tell stories. What stories get told on town halls or just on a conversation when we're meeting with the team and we're talking about something that happened this last week. What about feedback, right? What feedback are we giving for what works and what doesn't work? And then all the other experiences, like, does my boss log in to a zoom call when he's on vacation on the beach in Hawaii? If he does, that's an experience that leads me to a belief that he thinks that vacation isn't really vacation. You know, those are all examples of just being conscious of the way we show up that is going to shape the right belief. So what you want to do in this process is just recapping, right? You start with results, then you figure out the beliefs that you want, and then you become explicit about those beliefs, label them, name them, say, these are the beliefs that we want to hold. And so then all of your recognition and your feedback and your storytelling should tie back to those explicit beliefs that you identified. So, for example, if you want to drive a belief of taking accountability, right? If people took accountability, they would take the right action and they would get the right result. That's a very common one that our clients end up at. So if we want to drive take accountability as a belief. When I recognize someone or tell a story about someone, I'm not just going to say, they did a great job on that presentation, well done. Because that's just talking about what they did. It's not connecting the dots. I'm going to say I want to recognize them for taking accountability. And the way that they took accountability is insert what they did. And by doing that, you're going to help us achieve our key results of $40 million in bookings or whatever. The thing is. So you want to make explicit, which is often implicit. A lot of the time people just assume you figured out all the other Stuff I said good job on presentation. I assume everyone knows why that was a good presentation, how it's going to impact the organization and how that's a demonstration of the belief that I want to nurture. But, but no, people don't necessarily see that. So saying it out loud helps intentional culture creation. I mean that is culture creation in action right there.

Here's the thing that's so confusing to me. And again, I know that you understand this when you're in the job and you're doing the job and everybody's overloaded and under so much pressure and you have quarterly goals to hit and like you were saying stock price and all these variables and the economy and cuts. There are so many elements coming at someone in that day to day to actually pick their head up, to be cognizant of something like, like this seems like next level hard. How can a leader accomplish their day to day as well as rise above it and step back from it to say what is this culture? Because that's what I don't see happening.

Yeah, totally. Right. And part of the reason is because people are feeling higher levels of stress, higher levels of anxiety, and we go into fight ORF flight mode and we're not zooming out. Right. So we often focus on what's urgent instead of what's important. And this is where the balance of responsibility leans a little bit more heavily with the leadership in getting us to take the time to do that. And they need to demonstrate that in how they tell stories and how they recognize people and how they give feedback. It really needs to start with leaders in terms of kicking off that behavior so that people now see there's an expectation that all of us recognize each other and tell stories in this way and get explicit about the way that we give feedback. And leaders need to do that. This is literally your job. When you see leaders not doing that, it's lazy leadership. It's just bad leadership. Right. So then it becomes a talent management strategy or effort around do we up level these skills? Which is a lot of the work we do is really about scaling these skills with an organization so that leaders are encouraged to do it and they do know how to do it. And if they can't scale up those skills around these particular things, like these are not leaders and we need to move them out of the organization.

And so how are people able to identify when someone is just a weak leader that needs to go?

Well, I mean there's a million things. It depends on how they're a weak leader and how they need to know. There is, first of all, listening to employees and getting feedback from people is key here. But also it's if you have a culture that is aligned with results in this way, where you're being intentional about the beliefs you want to nurture and you're creating experiences accordingly, it's going to be evidenced in your processes who's doing that and who's not. Right? I mean, for example, it's not all just conversations. We have a Slack channel called recognition and people recognize each other regularly. And it's pretty clear over time who participates in that Slack channel and who doesn't and which leaders do and which leaders don't. I was just recently given feedback because it was like three months where I didn't give any feedback and I didn't give any recognition. And I'm an executive on the team, right? And the people who came to me and said, jessica, you're not providing feedback and I think that's important that you do that. They were people, they don't report into me, but they report into my peers. You know, we have created a culture in which providing feedback is a safe place. So these people weren't afraid of telling an executive like, hey, it's not okay that you haven't posted. They were welcome to it because we just have this norm of behavior because we have been intentional about it over time. Culture activation and creation, it is about consistency, right? Like, you can't just do some team building off site and expect your culture to change. You know, you get a three day high from that. Maybe you figured out your Myers Briggs and everyone's really excited about that and you went, go kart racing. That's fun, awesome. But that's not culture creation, right? Culture creation is really about consistency of how you show up. Oh, that's so good.

And so many companies spend an inordinate amount of money on these getaways and then come back and go right back to the basics and back to what you were saying earlier. Because I was a sales leader in corporate America for 25 years, just tasking leaders with the data points, the sales calls, the closes, that is how the majority of companies operate. And it just, it's such a big swing to get them to change from what you've always done. That may or may not have been getting you the results you need. I would imagine they're not getting the results and it's probably, probably easier to convince them. But what about the people that have been getting the results, just managing data points? How do you get them to See this differently.

A lot of the time data is used as a weapon in corporate America. They're not really looking into understanding and using data to uncover insights. They're using data to justify decisions and have an excuse for why they made a bet that they made to then go back if it fails and say, well, the data showed us this. It was a data mistake, you know, or whatever. So Data Incorporated America, I think can be a mess often, frankly, you know, but how you figure that out is really all about ultimately, organizations are made up of a bunch of people. Like, here's the secret that I don't talk about very often. Like, corporations aren't real, you know, they don't exist. Like it's a construct in our minds that we all operate. But really, to answer the question, to go way back to the beginning of this conversation, like the number one thing, we did research actually, when with John Frase, who's the head of labor strategies at Anchor and I partnered just a few months ago to look at 50,000 frontline workers in America. So these are the manufacturers, the healthcare workers, the people who are on the front line day to day. And we asked them a whole host of questions. The most interesting insight that came out of that was that the correlation between the two questions my management team cares about me and my management team effectively communicates with me was 0.9917. It was like a basically a one to one correlation, meaning that people feel like their managers care if their managers are effectively communicating. So if you want someone to feel cared for at work, you need to communicate with them frequently and effectively and often. The second insight we found in that is the people who did feel cared for, who did say that their managers effectively communicated with them, were three times less likely to experience stress at work. So it's really up to your relationship with your manager. And that should be intuitively true for whoever's listening. Just think back in your career when you had a manager that you didn't like and a manager that you did like and how stressed you felt in that job versus how stressed you felt in that job. I mean, the relationship with your manager is really the only true thing. You know, that is a thing that's real much more than some hierarchy structure that you exist within. And so if that relationship is broken, like, that's going to be a mental health problem. And you add that to the all the other things causing our mental health crisis in terms of, you know, just having a cell phone is traumatic. It feels like, you know, in addition to the fragmented nature of our consciousness because of what we're doing on our cell phones. It's just like this is the place where we can potentially make a difference in how we come together.

So one of the things that you mentioned was effectively communicating with the employees, right? So how can someone know? Because effective communication for me is very different than what it would look like for you. How can a leader discover what that looks like, what success could look like for that person?

So I think there's two things. There's, you know, situational leadership 101 is you understand the needs of your person. And for example, you know, even. And I feel like our frameworks are all about effective communication, right? It's storytelling, feedback, and recognition in an intentional experience that shapes a belief that you could call that effective communication. And that is a form of effective communication. But there's also nuances within that that you need to understand. For example, some people would be mortified to get recognized for great work in a public setting on the team. And other people crave that, that public adoration. There's no right or wrong. It's just different preferences. So understanding your team, I mean, that's like kind of basic, right? There's another level of effective communication, though, that I think executives in particular are falling more and more into a trap of which is corporate comms. Today, executives, when they make announcements or they talk about difficult things, their comms are so scrubbed and so overly scrutinized by a team of 10 people worried that they're going to piss someone off that it comes across as like these empty communications that are totally inauthentic. Right. I was just looking at the Dell announcement of their layoffs. They had sent out a memo, an internal email, talking about the restructure of these layoffs. And it's a big layoff. Right? There is not the word layoff anywhere in that email. And in fact, in a, you know, let's call it three page email, there's only two sentences that refer to anything remotely like a layoff. And they say some convoluted language, something like, you know, we've had to make some decisions about how to be lean, and we don't take these decisions lightly. That doesn't actually say anything about, I'm laying people off. These Dell workers are reading this email not understanding what's going on because they're so scrubbed up in an attempt to kind of ease people's fears. And they talk much more about the great opportunity for the future and, you know, positive spin. Positive spin. And I think that's Backfiring on executives. It's making people feel like, give me a break. Like, the reality is you're having a bunch of layoffs. You're trying to spin it to sound great. I'm reading the news and understanding what's really going on. And that happens on investor calls, that happens in keynotes, it happens in emails that go out. I think executives need to stop being so clean cut because it is like the Pollyanna delusion. No one's buying it anymore. And we all get information about what's really going on from a number of sources like anonymous online platforms like Glassdoor and Blind and just social media. I can watch people live, quit their jobs on social media. Now I've got more visibility into your culture than ever before. You're not controlling the narrative. I'm on like a soapbox right now. That I think is ineffective communication, to answer your question. So what is the right way?

Because as you know, that's not easily.

Like, I don't.

I'm sitting here thinking, obviously that's the wrong way. The approach that they took in that, gosh, they're not understanding empathy or putting themselves in the shoes of the people that were reading that. That is just crappy. However, they had a goal to spin it, as you said, what would be the right way or the best way to communicate it so that it would be the best for culture?

Well, I think it's situational. Let me tell you a story about what I did once. And this is a radical idea. So let me preface this by saying, I'm not saying everyone should do this every time, but it's an out of the box approach to communication about layoffs that is kind of interesting. So when I was a chro of this tech company, we were having struggles financially and the CEO in an executive closed door executive call said, we're going to have to do layoffs. So the first time an executive team hears we're going to have to do layoffs, you're months, months before the actual layoff happens. Right now you got to do a whole bunch of research on like, like, how many are we going to lay off? What's going to make sense for the balance sheet? Who are we going to lay off? How are we going to decide who we lay off? How do we make sure we don't get sued when we announce who we laid off and who we didn't lay off? And you know, there's a lot of work that goes into that. And during that time, the executives have a unspoken, assumed cone of silence where this layoff information is top secret. You can't tell anyone. And then once they're ready, they pull the plug. You know, everyone is told there's a layoff. Your last day is today. It's a shock and awe situation. It deeply affects the culture, mostly negatively every time, even for the people who are not laid off because they're watching these people that they've built connections with. So when I was a tech chro, I walked out of that meeting and I told my entire team, my whole HR team, I was like, hey, just so you know, we're going to have layoffs. It's going to happen. I don't know when, I don't know how many, I don't know who of you are going to get laid off. That that's something we're going to have to figure out. But it's happening. And now, you know, I was willing to make this experimental move as an executive because I felt like the culture at that company was like not totally, you know, pure all the time. So it's a risk that I maybe wouldn't have taken if I wasn't feeling a little bit willing to risk in that moment. Right. But I took the risk. And what was the outcome? Bunch of people on the team started looking for jobs, then some of them found jobs and left. And by the time we had to make a decision about what layoffs to have, my team wasn't affected because my team had self corrected and those people that left were not shocked. There was no shock and awe on my team. And in fact they were very grateful because they knew that I was willing to be transparent with them. And even though it may have been a little scary, they were aware of reality and truth and they knew that I wasn't trying to trick them into staying for fear that I might lose the wrong people. It's like a scarcity mindset that we keep this a secret until the last minute. If you know you're going to let people go, let everyone know and a bunch of them will leave. And then maybe you've just solved your problem. But it's a selfishness from the company's perspective that like we want to pick who goes, you know, and that then affects families and it creates a whole dynamic that is counterproductive. What if we did that? You know, that could be effective communication. There's an argument against that, but I think we need to start thinking outside of the box because of the multi directional nature of information sharing. I was on Reddit a week before the Dell layoffs were announced and people were talking about, I think layoffs are coming next week because information gets out right? So it's not as controlled as it was 30 years ago.

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I asked.

You to try to find your passion. No, it's nowhere near as controlled anymore. And to your point, once one person hears about it, it's going to be like fire around that office. And then people create their own stories. Okay, so we know why people or a CEO wouldn't want people to know because they're afraid they're going to go find other jobs and the person they want to stay is actually going to be the person person that leaves. However, isn't it true that when people aren't mentally checked into a job, they're not really feeling engaged? Aren't they looking for a job anyway?

Well, sometimes, sometimes not. I remember my very first job. I got a very bad performance review and it was my first experience with toxic culture. It's to answer one of your questions I think I must have missed. That was why I got into culture. Because I was so horrified by the way that I was treated that I thought we gotta fix this because it affected me, my mental health, it affected the way I showed up with my family that evening and the next evening and for many months. But I didn't quit because I decided to quiet quit. It wasn't called quiet quitting at the time because that term had not been invented, but I called it going dark. I just checked out. You know, I phoned it in and I waited until I got fired. I never got fired. In fact, the next year I got a glowing performance review for how well I had taken in the feedback. It was was just hysterical, bad leadership in action. But the point is that doesn't always happen. And here's an interesting dynamic that I don't think people think about. There's this false narrative that you have to pick between people and profitability as leaders, right? And when the economy's good. We're willing to invest more in people. And we know that, you know, profitability might suffer as a result of that, but it's like a good time to invest in people. When the economy's bad, we're like, forget the people. We got to focus on profitability. And we're willing for the people to suffer as a result. And that is such a false reality. Because here's the truth. If you are a CEO, and I do this with CEOs all the time, and it's a fun game. If I said to you, you have to let go of 20% of your team, but in exchange, the 80% that stay are going to be deeply invested in driving results. They're going to care. They're going to care a lot about what you're trying to accomplish here. Do you take the deal? Every single CEO takes the deal. They would love to have 80% of their workforce, but an 80% that's totally checked in, right? And so that's the magic sauce is when I'm an employee and I think about the best jobs I've ever had, the best jobs I've ever had were the jobs where I really cared, where I was totally invested in the results that we were creating. That's what I want. That's the golden goal, is to have a job where I'm so checked in that I care deeply about what we're doing. So that's the win win that everybody wants. The key is how do you get there? And we think this model, we call it the results pyramid, by the way, you know, focusing on results, figuring out what beliefs need to exist in order to drive the right action to get those results, and then intentionally creating experiences to get there. We think that begins to get at how to actually get that win win scenario.

Now, what is the difference in regards to age with employees? Because just in my experience, dealing with younger employees is so incredibly different than dealing with people closer to my age that are more senior in corporate. So how does that impact culture? How is a leader supposed to be able to manage that huge gap between different employees?

I'm so glad you asked. I actually wrote a book about this. So there's actual differences and then there's perceived differences. And the thing that has the biggest impact on culture is the perceived differences, not actual differences. So what you often see is generational quote differences is oftentimes just life stage differences. Right? When I'm in my 20s, I care more about hanging out with my social scene. When I'm in my 40s, I care more about my family when I'm in my 50s and 60s, I care more about my financial situation as I prepare for retirement. That's just true for every generation, regardless of which generation you are. What's also true is since 2,500 years ago, we have, as a human race, had the tendency to judge and dislike the next generation for some perceived difference that they have. Socrates was literally quoted as saying, the younger generation today value chatter in the place of hard work and they care too much about luxury. It's like the complaints haven't even changed about what's wrong with the younger generation. Right? So we are naturally inclined to do this to each other. And so often what we believe to be true about the other generations are stereotypes. They're total nonsense. Ageism hiding in a socially acceptable generational label. So you'll see a lot of articles about what millennials want. That's ageism. Right? But it's just not clicked that it's ageism for America anyway. So we still do it. And that perpetuates the perceived differences and creates a lot of differences. So the book that I wrote, and this was a long time ago now, was about, it was called Unfairly Labeled. And it's all about, we have to get rid of those labels. We have to stop talking about what Gen Z wants and what millennials want. Because now what's happening is we're seeing changes in the workplace, changes in employee expectations. And this is not because Generation Z is different. This is because free market capitalism has created a difference in the supply and demand economy for work culture. So there is less of a demand for toxic culture jobs. Right? There is more of a demand for thriving culture jobs. And we know that because people are sharing information more on social media, et cetera, and they're seeing what bad and what good looks like and they're wanting good jobs. Forty years ago, we didn't have as much visibility into what other companies were doing. We thought what we had was normal. We didn't have platforms to share about our discontent. And so the nature of technology shifting has created new employee expectations. And that's capitalism at work. I think that's actually awesome. But it's not because Gen Z is different. It's just because the workplace is now different. And older generation workers are also now expecting more from their employer than they ever did before. So we just have to be careful about what we buy into and what we don't buy into. But the workplace has changed, certainly. And I think you're also seeing a danger zone. We're approaching. There's increasing anti work sentiment, there's increasing unionization, there's increasing noise and complaints about the pay equity gap. And people are getting frustrated with the perceived lack of fairness in the system. And if we don't course correct, there will be some kind of boiling point where we no longer can course correct. And there's going to be some kind of monumental shift in the way that we do things. And so I think the goal here is you can save capitalism by investing in your people and caring about each other. That's the irony, right? CEOs are like, oh, I got to focus on shareholder value. This is how.

Actually it seems so obvious. However, clearly it is not. Okay, so you look at and research so many different companies out there. What percentage of companies would you say actually have healthy environments versus toxic environments?

Currently it's more healthy than you would imagine. And I don't have a number for you. I haven't done that research. But I will also say it's not like one culture, right? I mean, you look at the Johnson and Johnson culture, there's like thousands of cultures in there. And there's people on the same team who have completely different experiences of culture too. Which is why need to be more intentional about that. I think that more than ever there are people with really good intentions wanting to make it better for everyone else. I don't think that this narrative about CEOs are evil and they're trying to exploit the frontline worker is true. I think CEOs have a lot of pressure to go back to where we started, right? There's so many forces that are exerting pressure on us to deliver the needs that those forces have. Investor needs, shareholder needs, employee needs. And so having to balance all those things and trying your best to make the right decision so that you're able to get the results that are required. That's really hard. I don't think anyone is out there saying, I'm going to try and get as much as possible out of these people so that they suffer. That's just like not the reality, but that is the story. It can often feel that way when you are the person suffering. And there is some really messed up realities about the poverty line, at least in America, and what it could be and what it should be and what it is and how we pay people and what, how many jobs people need to hold in order to be able to live a lifestyle that is, you know, just has balance of some kind, you know, that all needs to get worked out. And that is Getting worked out. You're seeing it real time right now.

Do you think someone that finds themselves in a workplace that is becoming a toxic environment because, as you know, it can change over time. Their leadership changes and whatnot. They find themselves in a situation where suddenly they're noticing physically they're not doing well, they don't want to go to work, they have anxiety. Do you believe or have you seen that employees can do things to help be a part of positive change, or do you believe that they should lead those situations?

I think they can absolutely be a part of positive change. That's one of the missing steps that you're seeing right now in employees generally is how they can take accountability for a culture that they're experiencing. Because it's really easy to blame everyone else or the system or the CEO that you've never met or whomever. And accountability has been weaponized. The way we think about it is it feels like, who's at fault here? Like, who can I blame for this? Right. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out who's at fault and who we can blame and then blaming them. And it feels good, actually. But 36 years ago, the founders of my organization wrote a book called the Oz Principle, which is all about how you can de. Weaponize accountability. And what they said is, let's flip the script on what accountability really is. A new definition we could consider is is a personal choice to focus on what you can control and take the steps necessary to drive results. So when you think about it like that, you stop worrying about what your manager should have done and what your colleagues could have done and what the CEO did and all of that kind of. They call that below the line thinking. There's a line and you're either below it or above it. And below the line thinking is that blame game. Above the line is taking accountability, where you make a personal choice to focus on what you can control. So what can I control? I can control that I don't engage in gossip. I can control that I focus on the positive. I can control that I check out and I'm just not going to join as many meetings and I'm going to do the bare minimum and that's going to be good for my mental health. I can control that I leave. Right. There's a lot of things that you can do before you leave. There's also the flip side. Let me make the counter argument. Toxic bonding is a thing in corporate America where it is so bad that you become super bonded with your colleagues in that Below the line thinking. And then you all get stuck there because it's like the military, right? When you're in the trenches with someone, it's like you can't abandon your sisters and your brothers in the trenches. But like, no, you can abandon people in toxic work cultures because that will liberate them to leave too. I eventually left that tech company because I realized how toxic it was. And I liberated a whole lot of people from leaving that tech company too, because they realized, well, if the chro is leaving because it's so toxic, that's a sign maybe I should leave too. And they're all better for it. So sometimes we have a responsibility to leave, but there's usually a step before that that sometimes we skip.

I love that. Yeah, people, when they see what's possible for you, they start to believe what's possible for them. So sometimes yourself first make that next move and then watch how many people follow you. It's incredible. What do you want to leave people with? Jessica?

Today, I think that the most powerful motivator for anyone in our own well being and our own growth and work and you know, just, just human development is purpose, is understanding what our why is. And it's like the meaning of life, man's search for meaning. It's not a new idea. It's like the point of life almost. So I lean into that really hard in the workplace. And the way that I do that is I get everyone on my team to be explicit about what their personal why is not related to the job. Right. It's not about my why is to enable sales to like, no, what is your personal why? And understanding that about each person and what motivates them is important. And then to take it to kind of 2.0 is how does your personal why either get fulfilled or not? If you're here helping us with our organization's why? Those are actually the first two questions I ask in every job interview. What's your why? And here's our organization's why. Can you see how by helping us fulfill that why that you could fulfill your why? What's the link? And what you have there is purpose fit. And you know, so my purpose fit. My purpose is to serve God and others, the organization that I work for. Their purpose is to unleash the power of culture to inspire people and organizations to reach their full potential. In my head, it's an understanding. I serve God and others by unleashing the power of culture to inspire people to reach their full potential. I get that. It makes me Wake up every day and be excited about what I do. You. It's way more powerful than culture fit. Culture fit is this idea, like, you're like me and I like you, so you like me, and now we fit together. It's like, that makes me think of high school. Like, you fit in and you don't. Right. That's actually unconscious bias. It's a really bad way to make corporate decisions. And so abandon culture fit, Embrace purpose fit. You're going to have a way better workforce, and you're probably going to drive more results. Oh, my gosh.

Excellent questions. And I love that example. Love what your mission is, your purpose, and that you found that alone. And, Jessica, thank you so much for the work you're doing to make the world a better place.

No, thank you so much, and thanks for having me.

All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

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