S2E31: Engagement is Broken, a Workhuman Radio Interview

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Cy Wakeman.

All right, welcome back to Work Human Radio. I am your host, Todd Schneck, joined by my friend and colleague, Mike Wood. Mike, our agenda today with our guest is simple. All we have to do is say hello.

Yeah, well, I'm gonna say hello.

And we're gonna learn an awful lot just by things she could pull out of the thin air. It's always one of my favorite conversations at Work Human.

Yes, Cy Wakeman, welcome back to the program.

Thank you. I feel like it's homecoming. It's like family reunion. I love it. I look forward to this.

So Cy, do you want to tell kind of people out there who may not know who you are? The 4 people? The 3 people out there that may not know who you are.

Work Human made me famous. Seriously. I was an unknown entity before Mike invited me on the podcast.

I am a drama researcher, and I work in the realm of leadership, trying to modernize leadership philosophy to one that will actually work, and to give people tools and techniques that they'll actually use. And so, I'm a drama researcher.

I study how much drama there is in the workplace, how much emotional waste we put up with, and consider it just the cost of doing business.

All right, so we interviewed you here a year ago, and we talked about drama in the workplace. A year on later, how are we doing? Are we making progress? Is there less? Is there more drama in the workplace? Are we making any kind of progress?

organizations that are using our research to modernize the workplace actually are making profound progress. What they're finding is that using some of those techniques and upcycling the amount of time that goes into drama by using kind of better thinking, better mental processes, they see almost instant results. The folks who are still really working and using traditional leadership, it just continues to get worse. It just continues to get worse. And our biggest problem is we're so over-indexed on engagement. And engagement's awesome, but people are so emotionally blackmailed trying to buy the love of their employees, that engagement without accountability is creating entitlement.

And so employees are getting less accountable and more angry. And now we're starting to see this weird trend where they're weaponizing some really cool concepts, like, I was at an organization who rolled out psychological safety. Who would not want psychological safety?

Pretty good thing to have.

Exactly. And people weaponized it. When you're telling me something I don't want to hear about myself, I just claim I got triggered.

Engagement surveys—

Well, you talking about it is a microaggression for me.

Venting in engagement surveys is like venting in form of a survey. But yeah, it's like the organization is working so hard to not be offensive and microaggress. And where's the accountability for us humans to say, you know what, I'm also gonna make myself pretty hard to insult?

Because the ego will see everything as insult. The ego sees insult where there isn't any.

How dare he talk to me like that?

Todd did not open the door for me when I came in. Like, what kind of way is that to greet someone?

You just offended me.

We should just microaggress each other this whole podcast.

Well, you know, on that topic of microaggressions, I mean, we are human. I mean, the whole point of this conference is to bring humanity to the workplace. I mean, we're not perfect people. I cut myself shaving for the first time in years this morning. We make mistakes, we do silly things. That's part of our humanity, and sometimes you just interact with people in a way that would be considered aggressive, even if there's no intention. So, I mean, how do you deal with that?

I think it's a shared accountability approach. Me personally, being an accountable person, I am growing every Every day to understand my unconscious biases, to understand some things maybe I've used without a sense of knowledge about how they could be offensive to entire groups of people. So number one, I grow, evolve. I'm involved in my own evolution. I'm trying to become a better person. And I have a human condition. And I will screw this up, but only daily. What I need from other people is grace and tolerance. that call me up to greatness, that are loving, and they're like, Sal, you might not have realized that this could be something you might want to look at and make a better choice. I don't have to walk through the world perfectly. But if I'm well-loved, and I'm always searching and being an accountable person and trying to regulate myself to create the best environment ever, perfect. But it's got to be greeted with a group who also are in what I call higher consciousness, where not everything is an insult. Mm-hmm. But when we're seeing the world through ego, then you're threat, and I need to let you know where you're wrong, and you need to— you'll be insulted by what I shared. And instead of meeting people at this kind of higher place— my favorite quote from Rumi, Sufi poet, is, out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. And what I'm trying to do in the workplace is say, there's this field out beyond this judgment, and let's Let's learn but not weaponize. Let's, you know, change is coming, but what's my part in that?

So I want to tackle a little bit into that weaponization, because I see every day on social media there's a culture of uproar. We are going to get in so much trouble for this, Mike. Someone is offended by something every day. And at what point do you draw the line and say, you know what, that wasn't that big of a deal, let's move on together? So how can we move beyond this whole, like, culturization of I mean, some people are victims, but trying to be the victim in everything and just calling the cops on someone barbecuing in your backyard.

Who happens to be more brown than you. So a couple of things I want to talk about, because there's micro— and I'm not an expert in this. So we're doing a podcast on things that I'm not an expert in, but my opinion, my expertise.

If you want Cy's course on microaggressions, just go to cywakeman.com.

Do not. So on the one hand, we've got to look at the macro versus the micro. On the macro, We have some things that have really disadvantaged others. And as someone who grew up with a lot of privilege, I just woke up. I'm like, I thought I had the hard road. I'm the first college graduate in my family. I'm the one who struggled. I'm the female who got underpaid and started my own business. And then on the macro, I had to wake up and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I have so much privilege. And we've got to look at the systems that are systematically limiting for others and really acknowledge that, you know, we didn't all just end up here. On the micro, we've gotta grow people's ability to move through the world in what I call a higher level of consciousness. So it's like you have this light switch on your forehead. When it's toggled down, you're in ego. Your suffering comes, in your mind, from your circumstances, and your circumstances are the reasons you can't succeed. And the ego eats anger for lunch. It sees insult where there isn't any. And so I'm easily offended. Well, who wants to try and take risks and be innovative with people easily offended?

No.

So what if I could notice something, give you the benefit of the doubt that your heart is awesome, and that you didn't mean that as the offensive way that I could take it? What if I just stepped out of my story and just said, oh my gosh, I think we could interact differently. And I ask you, did you mean something by that, or did you know that at times that is something that after a while gets difficult to work with. And could you do me a favor and just work with me a bit differently? And we all still love each other and we, like, move on. It's like if you want to wake somebody up in the morning, and we're all trying to wake up to higher levels of consciousness here, I hope. Everybody's trying to evolve. The worst way to wake somebody up is with a bucket of cold water. Instead, it's kind of like, let me be a gentle snooze alarm of temple bells. And I'll give you some insight, wake you up a little bit. You're gonna snooze back off. I'll be a light A wake-up call. And everybody has their own path.

Yeah, the 5th or 6th time you'll get up.

I really believe that when we're in lower levels of consciousness, we're seeing everything as a threat, and everything is personalized, and things become weaponized, and everything has a meaning. This happens, and then I add the story, this means that. If I could just go, this happened, and never add the story, this means that, one, my own suffering would go away. And if something was a trend, then with all the love in my heart, I could just pull somebody aside and say, I'm I'm just wondering if we might evolve together and learn a bit more about what this could mean to larger groups of people. But the key in all of this is love, higher consciousness, and let's be in a relationship together.

You are a masterclass in having tough conversations.

Yeah, well, there's that. There's that. You know, as a marriage counselor, people need to understand how to make a repair attempt and how to receive even a crappy repair attempt. So let's say I just, like, I totally offended Todd and told him his awesome place in Chicago just wasn't all that and a bag of chips.

Oh, this is how you're doing it.

Yeah, I made a condo joke about people who sell out and live above helicopters and materialistic. Anyway.

You can keep going.

Yeah, should I just keep—

Oh yeah, this is a lot of fun.

This is so only jealousy, right? So if I realize that that probably was me not being as intentional or not speaking my heart, because a lot of times we just speak our head, right? My repair An apology attempt has some components to it that everybody needs to know how to do. One, you go, I'm sorry. And then 2, you get specific. I spoke in a joking manner about something that was very serious, and you've worked hard for, and is a dream come true for you. You say you're sorry. You speak very specifically. And then you show insight. I realize that when I'm feeling less secure and don't really understand situations, I tend to joke it off. And I find that offensive. And then you make an amends. I really want to do better by you. And then you ask the person, what could I do that would make this right by you? And if they give you something you can do, then you do it. That's a complete repair attempt. We just have to teach mostly husbands, sometimes wives, these repair attempts. But here's the other thing. They only work if the person receiving the repair attempt works as hard at receiving and accepting it as they can, even when it's crappy. I'm like, I'm really sorry, honey. Show insight. I will not accept it until you show insight, right? You're never gonna get back together. But if even everybody's like, yeah, that was kind of a stupid, mean thing to say. If somebody leans towards you, lean back. And here's what's happening is too many people are not leaning towards one another, 'cause that's vulnerability. We're gonna hear from Brené tomorrow about some killer stuff. Cool. They lean back because they're in ego, and they're like, oh no, you just didn't. And then they move, and they get into the story about what this means, and then they go collude with other people and reinforce their victim story about you. And then pretty soon we have this huge workplace drama that could have just been settled by grace, tolerance, education, evolution. Does that make sense?

Grace.

I feel like I'm preaching. Preaching and teaching, baby.

I'm just thinking about all the mistakes I make at home with my wife that like I need to apologize for. And, and, uh, yeah.

Well, how many of those problems at home, at the workplace, could be solved by just throwing out a little grace or being kind? You know what I mean? It's not hard.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Right, right, right. Well, let's shift to engagement. Uh, you're delivering a presentation here at WorkHuman around engagement. I've heard you say that engagement's broken. I mean, there's so many different issues here. I think it's one of those things a lot of organizations say, we're going to install engagement and check a box and we've done that. There are probably— the other problem with it for me is that if you ask 10 people what is engagement, you get 10 different answers. Talk to us about what you're delivering in this presentation and kind of your initial thoughts on engagement. I'm sure it will lead to some further discussion.

Some good discussion. So I am all for engagement. When I first heard, though, about the concept of engagement early on, I became a leader, and they're like, Sai, OK, you're responsible for keeping all your people happy, and we're going to measure that. And my bonus was based on my engagement levels. And I'm like, time out. I was a therapist turned leader. And I'm like, I'm responsible for making other people happy? That's called codependency. No, you can't make another person happy. Happiness is a choice. Shawn Achor's work— didn't we have Shawn here last year? Yep.

work is your circumstances aren't the determinant of your happiness level.

It's the amount of accountability you take. So at first, I was concerned. I'm like, I can't be responsible for engagement. And I thought, well, wait a minute. It's based on accountability. I can foster accountability. Bam. We'll have good engagement scores. That's great. But I saw people start to over-rotate on engagement scores. And they pretended that every voice had the same vote. So when you take an engagement survey or pulse survey, every vote counts the same. You could be on performance plan, one foot out the door, or you could be my best employee ever, and your vote counts the same. And I thought, well, your data's corrupted. And we differentiate everywhere— when we pay, when we bonus, when we fire— we differentiate except in our work on engagement. And the reason this is important is your data gets corrupted. You're trying to please everybody. And here's the one thing I know as a counselor— the same behavior can't please a high accountable and a low accountable at the same time. And so if you're trying to please everybody, The voices of your victims will get louder, because you're giving them an anonymous way to bring things forward. So how many of you do things anonymously that you would never do publicly?

Yeah, I mean, you spoke about this yesterday, that we should get rid of the whole anonymous thing.

I agree.

I 100% agree.

No, I want places for people to call in that have power differentiation, you know, that if you're being abused or—

But if you're gonna trash something, put your name behind it.

Yeah, put your name behind it.

You know, stand behind what you say.

Well, that's my biggest deal, is what I'm trying to do is bring accountability back into A shared situation. So if we're sitting around, and I want you to have my opinion, and the way I bring it up is unprocessed, insulting, with limited knowledge about where the company's going, and then I'm mad that nobody takes it, I'm like, no, wait. How can I make it succinct? How can I make sure I'm aware, and willing, and involved? How can I bring this to the table in the most professional way possible with the best data for people to act on it? Most of us have gotten to the point where it's like, everybody bring— anything to the table. But I want people to ask themselves and self-regulate, is what I'm bringing to the table add to the clarity or the chaos?

Is what I'm bringing to the table— will it actually add value? My opinion is it won't work. My energy needs to go towards how to make it work. Is my expertise telling you how we can, or am I always bringing why we can't?

And that's the piece we've missed out on. We're into engagement, but we're not into accountability. And so that's where all this entitlement's coming from.

We have people calling CEOs anonymously to complain about parking That call, as CEO salary, it could be a $2,000 call because you didn't like parking. Where can somebody commission that type of resources? It's nothing to do with how much I value you as a human.

Accountability is one of those ideas, though. I mean, I think there's almost 2 separate conversations. There's holding yourself personally accountable, which is another 3-hour conversation with you. But then there's the organizational accountability, which I think still, unfortunately, there's too much of that where most people view that as a punitive exercise. How do we begin— how do we turn that around to where it's becomes an exciting or growing and learning exercise?

Well, so accountability is not a dirty word, and a lot of people don't really understand accountability. Accountability doesn't even begin with the organization, weirdly enough. It begins with the individual, where buy-in is actually a verb. I buy in. And then where the organization can come in, where it's not punitive, is the organization can teach resilience and really help you.

And what's resilience? This is where humans come together. The most resilient people have the biggest network of positive relationships. And they ask for help early and often.

They're vulnerable, ask for help, and they have big relationships. The power of an organization isn't the hierarchy. It is the connection of the humans inside and outside of the organization so that I have the biggest crowdsource ever. So I have my own Google of humans. I have human Google. Wow. I have an issue. I just human Google it with all of my network. And so it's not punitive. Here's the deal where it gets punitive. I'm not all in. And I'm not resilient. I don't overcome barriers with connection and with crowdsourcing. So when it comes time for ownership— that's the third part of accountability— ownership hurts. Instead of having a healthy sense of guilt or pride, ownership is personal.

Feedback, personal. But you know what? When feedback feels punitive or personal, it's because it's personal. You weren't all in. And you didn't use this incredible human connection. You just cowboyed it. Or— Cowgirl'd it. And so I'm giving you some feedback about your results, and you're taking it personal, and you should take it personal, because if you haven't figured out by now, this is your part in this mess.

Yeah, and if— kind of building off of that, when you build up this network of humans, you build up this network of people who have different experiences that may have— let's say you're having trouble getting a mortgage or something like that. Yeah. You could talk to your network, and there could be someone saying, oh, I had that same problem. Here's how I got through it.

Exactly. It's the big cross-source. Now, the key to resilience is having a network of positive relationships. So there's twofold here. Don't network with the victims.

Nope.

So when you call them up for a solution, they're like, oh, that happened to me too. That's why I transferred out from that company. I wrote a horrible thing on Glassdoor because I hate— it's like—

They sound just like that.

Yeah, do not. Yeah, that's my voice, my victim voice. And make sure your relationships are positive, which means that when I put a call out there, not that Cy Wakeman is perfect, but most people I think would say, you know what, Sy tracked me down to make sure I had this. And Sy was willing to do this. And so it's positive, meaning that when I make a call, they call me back quickly because they're like, you know what? Sy's always helped me out. The bank account is pretty full emotionally, to use some of Covey's work. And most of us— that's where the accountability comes in. The first 2 steps of accountability are I buy in. Buy in is a verb. I choose to commit. And then I have a network of positive relationships I get vulnerable. I ask for help most often. So when it comes to ownership, I'm all ears. Like, I was all in. I did what I could come up with. If you have some feedback— and how you make it less punitive is instead of giving tons of feedback— David Rock last year said the best, only welcome feedback is ones I asked for, right? Mm-hmm. And instead of the feedback that you give a bunch, we know from our research feedback should be really short. and self-reflection long. And so if we're evolving together, my job isn't to tell you who you should be and how you should act. My job is to say, I'm gonna hold space for you to take a look at this. Don't take my word for it. Check it out for yourself. Because the least punitive thing we want to get to is continuous learning and the evolution together. So that we have 10 years together. You know all the times I've stumbled and screwed up daily. You've given me a bunch of grace. You've called me to grace. You haven't enabled me, or colluded, or let me blame other people. You just held space while I sat with it. I'm like, OK, I can do better, be better. And that's— I mean, there's just so many components to that, rather than trying to buy people's love through engagement.

One of the worst things that I've ever experienced is unsolicited negative feedback. Isn't it nice? Just the person that just wants to point out something that you did wrong.

And probably, it usually comes from the ego, because unsolicited negative feedback is, I am judging you, and I have a grudge, and I just thought it's time for you to know. Yeah, thanks. Yeah.

Thanks. Great way to start my day.

Even if the feedback isn't lovely, it can still be, here's your numbers for the month. What do you make of that? Self-reflect. What would you like to change in your approach? Self-reflect. What can I help you with? You're still gonna get fired if you don't make your numbers next month, but—

Or at least know what's coming. You know, like, OK, we're gonna talk about X, Y, and Z, and then you kind of have an idea of what's coming. But if someone just stops you, hey, I want to tell you what you did wrong. Yeah.

But you know what, Mike? Even in that situation, I would coach you to say there are no victims in the world. So even though somebody gives me the crappiest feedback out of the blue, super negative, if I let it, it will hit my ego and be totally dismissed. So even in that situation, what if I had the grace enough and the tolerance enough to say, you know what, even though the vehicle it came in just wasn't my favorite— Mm-hmm. I have a responsibility, and it always takes two to tango. You might err in giving me feedback poorly. I still have a responsibility where I could say, let me put my energy in finding out how that is true rather than the energy I'm putting into finding out how it isn't true.

There's still an opportunity there.

Yeah, there's still a big opportunity. And that's what most people don't realize with feedback. They work hard to find out how it is not true. That's the ego. And so if you want to practice this, have people give you feedback that they think you have to deny and practice practice accepting it. Somebody said to me, I've got feedback you can't accept. I'm like, I always will figure out how it fits. I know any feedback you give me is true.

And that's a challenge for all of our listeners out there. If you have negative feedback—

Exactly. Give it to Sy. Somebody said, you know, Sy, you're a murderer, thinking I'd have to go, oh, you know, I'm not a murderer. But if you're open-minded, you know what? I can find that. I can find that I'm a murderer. Now, on the joking side, I might go back to my college days and say, I've I might have drank and blacked out, unlike many people in the Supreme Court, but I did. I drank and blacked out. And I'm like, I drank at the time, so there could be an unsolved mystery in Des Moines, Iowa for the 6 hours I don't remember. I've murdered people's reputation.

Oh, okay.

Now that I've started to understand the bias of the people we have in the criminal system on death row and how biased we are Towards, you know, certain groups. I voted for a governor who afterwards put in the death penalty. My vote was— the more I can find this, right, that my vote may have played a part in that, the more peacefully I can live and the more open-minded I can be that you can give me any feedback and it just doesn't have to hurt. So there's always something you can do if you're in a higher level of consciousness. Yeah. You can move through the world more skillfully and peacefully.

Mm-hmm. Well, great wisdom. And I wish we had more time to dive into the ego because it's— most people, I don't think, really understand They don't understand how often their ego is playing them. Yeah, they really, really don't. And that, that may be subject for a future dialogue with Cy. But unfortunately, Cy, we're out of time for today. Should anyone need to connect with you and ask you any questions, learn more about your work, where do they go?

I would head to social media. It's @cywakeeman, C-Y-W-A-K-E-M-A-N, on every social media channel. And if you want to go straight to it, I've got a No Ego podcast myself on every platform. We have an incredible YouTube channel, backslash Cy Wakeeman, and we do We do a weird thing in our company. We give it all away. Every week we just feed the masses. So hopefully we covered something in our rambling today that people find useful.

And quick before we go, kudos to you on your leadership on social media. Yeah, you're— there are a lot of self-proclaimed influencers and leaders out there, but you are a legit one. Oh, thanks, Todd. And whose counsel and advice I, uh, I take to heart. So grateful for your leadership there.

Thank you.

Cy Wakeman, the founder of Reality-Based Leadership, bestselling author, international speaker, just all-around great gal. Great to have you on the show again.

Thanks, Todd. Mike, love it.

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman.