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Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, the co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the penultimate episode in this series of Thinkers 50 Radar webinars where we’re celebrating the most exciting new voices in the world of management thinking. Back in January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar List for 2025, 30 rising stars in management thinking, and we’ll be hearing from another one of them today. But we’d also like to hear from you. We like to make these sessions as interactive as possible, so please do let us know where you are joining us from, and put your questions and your comments in the chat box.

This year’s Radar List is brought to you in partnership with ATD, the Association of Talent Development, and developing talent is a topic we will be exploring today and over the coming weeks, including of course the implications of AI in the workplace, and many other challenges and opportunities facing leaders and organisations. My co-host today is John Coné. John has worked in talent development for more than 50 years he tells me, it’s hard to believe. During that time he’s served as a chief learning officer, a vice president of HR, and on the boards of nonprofit and for-profit learning companies and organisations, including ATD. He currently serves as the catalyst of ATD’s Chief Talent Development Officer Group. John, great to see you.

John Coné:

Thank you, Des. It’s great to be here, and I’m excited to introduce our guest today. Dr. George Ward is the Persol Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, and a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford. He will be joining INSEAD as an assistant professor in June. His research focuses on various markers of employee wellbeing, such as happiness, satisfaction, stress and purpose. He studies how these aspects of workplace wellbeing are influenced, for better or worse, by different management and organisational practices, as well as how they ultimately affect outcomes for firms like productivity, turnover, and recruitment. George is particularly interested in the future of work and how we can design jobs that work for people’s wellbeing. He is the co-author with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve of Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance. Welcome, George.

George Ward:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, George, welcome and congratulations on the Thinkers50 Radar recognition. 

George Ward:

Thank you very much.

 

What is workplace wellbeing?

Des Dearlove:

This topic we’re talking about today is very, very important. We know that, and we fully support your view on it, I think. But let’s start with a definition. I mean, what exactly is workplace wellbeing?

George Ward:

Yeah, it’s a good place to start. I think whenever you’re talking about almost anything, it’s good to start with trying to be clear on what we’re talking about, but I think in this particular case it’s even more important given that over the last few years there’s been a lot written about workplace wellbeing, a lot spoken about workplace wellbeing, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm and interest, which is great. But I think from speaking to people, what happens is people try and find out more, and research more and see what’s happening, but can get a little lost in the cacophony of voices in this space.

People have different definitions, different approaches and so on. So, we wanted to be, in this book, extremely clear on what we think workplace wellbeing is, and as John said, what influences and how it affects worker and firm outcomes. So, we see it quite simply as how people think about their work and how they feel at work. So, it has multiple components, so you can think of an evaluative component, which is more of a cognitive overall judgment about how things are going in your job, so that’s usually measured by something like job satisfaction. That’s how you think about your work.

On the other hand, there’s also the day-to-day experience of work, the positive and negative emotions that people feel while they’re at work. So, that’s the how we feel at work. And then there’s also a final piece, which is what’s usually referred to as a eudaimonic component, which goes back to Aristotle, and it’s more to do with the sense of purpose and meaning that we derive from work. So, you have evaluative experiential, or hedonic, or emotional, however you want to call it, and then there’s this eudaimonic piece as well.

John Coné:

I’m interested in how you got started thinking about this. What drew you to this area of research? What’s the backstory?

George Ward:

It depends how far you want to go back really, but as I’ve always been interested in wellbeing. So I did a master’s degree many years ago in public policy, which isn’t overly related to this. But I remember when I was scratching around for a dissertation topic at the end of the year, I was looking at what to do and I read a few papers, and stumbled across a few that were in the space of the economics of happiness, if you like. And I was just amazed that you can quantify these things, you can get data on them and you can study them. No one had really ever told me that before, they’d never come across it. And I thought, “That’s very interesting, let’s have a look at that.”

And then I ended up doing the dissertation, actually with Jan as the thesis advisor, that’s how we got to know each other, on the relationship between economic growth and happiness. And then I went on to work in that space. I originally worked mostly on things like public policy and political behaviour in particular. So, in my earlier career I had a few papers looking at the extent to which you can predict voting behavior and election results using happiness and other emotional data. But over time got more and more interested in the workplace, jobs, and workers and firms, and that led me to then go on and do a PhD in a business school. I went to the Sloan School of Management at MIT in their Institute for Work and Employment Research, where you really dig down into workplace issues. And most of that PhD was essentially on the downstream effects of happiness and other aspects of wellbeing on worker and firm outcomes. So, things like recruitment, productivity and so on. And that, I guess, brings us up to the present day.

Proving the link between happiness and productivity

Des Dearlove:

Well, one of the things I love about the book, let’s stay with happiness, I mean, it’s a good place to be, one of the things I love about the book is the rigour. I mean, I think this is a subject, as you suggested, that people can get a bit lost in and people haven’t always had the data. I mean, we’d like to think that there’s cause and effect, and correlation sometimes, but we haven’t always had the data. I mean, in your research, as I understand it, shows a strong link between happiness and productivity, which I think is good news, but how did you go about proving the link?

George Ward:

So, it’s tough. I mean, clearly these things can work in both directions. So, that gives you this problem of reverse causality, so if I’m being very productive I may enjoy that and I may get happy-

Des Dearlove:

That’ll make you happy, yeah.

George Ward:

… on the other hand, you may have just what you might call omitted variable bias, it’s just that your happiness is correlated with a bunch of other stuff that may also be correlated with how productive you are. So, it’s a very tricky one to isolate and people have been doing this, I mean, we look in the book and I discussed in a few other papers, that there’s work on happiness and productivity broadly understood going back to the 1910s, 1920s. So, this has long been something that people have been interested in, and I think it makes sense because it has such profound implications for how firms should treat their workers and the extent to which they should see them as an asset that can give them a competitive advantage.

And so, there’s a lot of correlational work over the years. And then, better than that you get longitudinal work, which is looking at repeated measures of wellbeing and productivity over time. So, you’re looking within a person over time, so you’re not comparing one person with another, you’re comparing me today versus me next week. And then there’s also, starting in about the 1980s, 1990s, some really great work where they went into the lab. So, there you can be much more careful about productivity, about causality because you can run experiments, but it’s tricky to do. What those experiments tended to do was to split respondents into two groups randomly chosen. So, you’ve got a causal experiment on your hands.

And then, the challenge then is to try and make one group happier, and some of the most famous experiments in this space have tended to use things like comedy clips. So, you get one group to watch a comedy clip, the other group watches a fairly neutral video for five minutes. So, one group is in a good mood, one’s in a neutral mood, and then you get them to do some sort of productivity task. Of course, this is quite an artificial setting, but the key is to try and drill down and get to the causal effect. In those studies, you tend to find that the people who have been randomly chosen to be put into a good mood tend to be more productive on these stylised tasks. The problem is that’s nice, but does it translate to the real world where there’s all sorts of other things happening and productivity is much more multifaceted, and so on.

So, what Jan and I did with a colleague, Clement Bellet, who’s at Erasmus University, we actually studied call centre workers at BT – British Telecom here in the UK. And we had the data on all the call centres up and down the UK, so quite a few call centres with very different –  and I’ll say in a second a bit more about why that’s important – and we sent a weekly email survey to try and gauge people’s mood over a six-month period. So, that already gets you to this longitudinal piece so you can study their moods as they go up and down over time. And the nice thing about studying call centre workers is that you can measure all sorts of things that are happening, length of call, customer satisfaction, how many calls they’re taking. And in particular in that paper we look at sales performance, which is a hard-nosed outcome that you can measure.

And we find that as workers are in better moods they do sell more, the challenge is trying to nail down that causality again. And there’s two things that are important there, one is that when we went to visit one of these call centres we noticed that they’re very different in architecture, which sounds like a slightly irrelevant factor, but they go all the way from warehouse-style buildings which have no windows on the side, to big, tall, almost all glass towers. And the other thing about the UK, I don’t know if you’ve spent much time here, is that the weather is famously bad but it’s also very variable week to week, but also place to place even within the same week. So, even when we’re looking in the same week it can be miserable in one region and quite nice in another region.

This is what you call, like, a quasi experiment, so it gives you some variation to play with, that you’re trying to get it randomly or quasi randomly induced moods to see what happens to their productivity. And the nice thing that we find there is that when on very sunny days people are happier than when they’re not on sunny days. And the neat thing is that you can really nail down whether this is causal or not because that only really works when people are in buildings with windows. In these buildings with no windows, there’s just no effective weather – kind of sunniness – on productivity at all, which gives you confidence it’s not as tight, if you like, as a pure experiment in the lab, but you’re working in the real world trying to get a field causal statement.

And there you really find that on sunnier days people report being happier, they sell more, but that’s only when there’s windows. It was a long study, it took years to do, and it’s published in Management Science, we’re very happy to say, and that was a chapter of my dissertation at MIT, but I think it gets us closer to really showing that in the real world that these lab-based causal effects do translate.

John Coné:

Well George, since we can’t control the sunshine, I know we’re anxious to get to talking about the things that we can do, but before we do, there’s a phrase that’s in vogue in the United States right now. Is the juice worth the squeeze? The question that it begs is how significant is the boost that you can get in productivity from happiness?

George Ward:

Yeah, and I think it’s a hugely important question. So as I say, there’s been decades of work on the relationship between happiness and other measures of wellbeing and productivity. There’s also been work on wellbeing and turnover. And I myself also have a paper on wellbeing and recruitment, so happier companies may be more likely to be able to attract workers in the first place. And these three things we talk about as pathways to performance for the firm. So, you have productivity effects, recruitment effects and retention effects. And there’s been work, including our own, on each of those three, but by themselves they don’t really constitute what you might call a business case for wellbeing. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good for the firm, because there’s a huge issue of costs.

And this often gets overlooked because what we often do in academia is do quite tight studies on one thing without thinking of the bigger picture. And really to get at this business case, what you have to do is look at the more macro level at the level of either business units or of firms. So, you want to be comparing at a much greater level, because implicit in that you’re taking care of the cost issue. And what we do is we look in the book at the relationship between workplace wellbeing, measured in the way that I discussed earlier, the evaluative, hedonic and eudaimonic, and firm profitability and stock market performance. We’re able to do that by measuring wellbeing using a large scale crowdsourced survey together, we collaborated with indeed.com, the extremely large jobs website, to collect data over multiple years on job satisfaction, happiness, stress, and purpose.

And we have about, I think, I don’t want to get the number wrong, but certainly more than 15 million, maybe more by now, surveys. And the really neat thing about that is that it allows you to measure at the company level these things, which usually are only ever measured at the individual level. And when we compared it across companies, you find that happier companies are more profitable and they do tend to have higher stock market valuations over time. So that gets us, I think closer to this business case, taking into account the issue of costs.

Des Dearlove:

So in the book, and let’s just remind ourselves the book is Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance. And in the book, I mean, it’s great we’re talking about this, hopefully making this correlation between happiness and productivity, but you do highlight, and I think a lot of us are aware of it, that a sizable portion, proportion of employees are not happy at work. I mean, how big a problem, how sizable is that?

George Ward:

So it’s difficult to measure, first of all. The large scale crowdsourced data is great for comparing across companies, not as good for measuring the absolute level. For that you want to use a more standard traditional survey using a nationally representative sample. And the answer is boring actually, it’s not drastically low and it’s not drastically high. I think there’s a lot of people who like to get a headline of saying, “Everyone is miserable at work.” And we do find there is a sizable portion of people who are really struggling at work, but it’s not this gigantic horror story. There’s a full distribution of people who are doing well at work, people who are struggling, and people who are in the middle, and that’s true at the individual level but also at the company level.

So, you get this distribution of firms, it’s not the case that everyone is miserable and all firms are miserable. And this is actually I think quite an interesting thing that even within industries, so as I say, we can measure wellbeing for I think 90 or 100,000 firms in the U.S. for example, and you might think that why some firms are happier than others is going to be largely down to things like industry. So, tech workers are going to be much happier than food prep and retail workers, and we do find that’s the case for theoretically sensible reasons. But I think what’s much more interesting is that a huge amount of the variation, so a lot of the differences, are actually within industry.

So, even within pretty tightly defined sectors of the economy you have firms doing well and you have firms doing badly on wellbeing. So, even in tough industries there are still quite a few companies doing quite well on job satisfaction, purpose, happiness and stress. And in the much more generally high wellbeing industries, there are some firms getting it horribly wrong. So, there’s a lot of differences across firms which point to the direction of this being an organisationally influenced thing, and by extension, potentially strategically important thing for firms to think about.

Wellbeing is not just “an HR problem”

John Coné:

George, I was looking at the chat and there’ve been some comments from Jeanette and Koro, and others saying, “Well, happiness is very personal, very individual.” And at a certain level I know that’s undeniable, but in your book you suggest that there are structural aspects of the workplace, like organisational culture or job design, that are actually more influential on employee wellbeing than anything that you would do at an individual level. Can you talk some more about that?

George Ward:

Yeah, and when we’re pointing towards structural issues like that, we’re not saying that there’s no personal aspect to wellbeing, of course there is, and we actually asked people in a survey at one stage, “Who is responsible for your wellbeing at work?” And I want to get the question waiting round, but we essentially gave people 100 points to distribute across the individual, line manager, HR, C-suite and CEO, and for who’s responsible? And about I think about 45, something like that, percent, went to the individual. So, people do themselves recognise that “part of my wellbeing is me.” But then there’s also this other piece which is organisational. “It matters how my job is designed, how I’m managed on a day-to-day basis, how much I’m paid, what the hours are, what my scheduling is, how predictable that scheduling is,” and so on and so forth.

And those things also matter. One of the interesting things there was that I think we often think about when we look, think about the organisational piece of this, instinctively think, “Oh, that’s an HR problem,” but actually HR people have a lot of stuff to be getting on with and play a hugely important role in firms. And I think it’s a mistake to think of it entirely as an HR problem. Really, when you’re thinking about it as related to structural issues of work, how it’s managed and organised, you have to think much more broadly about who’s responsible at the firm. So, line managers have a huge influence on people’s wellbeing as do the leadership of the firm who set the tone and can set organisational policies on a broader scale. And so, it’s responsibility is distributed across multiple stakeholders.

How can we influence wellbeing at work?

Des Dearlove:

And I mean, you mentioned the role of leaders and managers. Have you found certain management and leadership styles and practices are more effective in boosting employee wellbeing and performance? Are there any patterns to this stuff?

George Ward:

Yeah. So in the book, so I guess just as a helpful piece of background, just as the general structure of the book, if you like. So, it’s split into, get it right, four main parts. The first is what is workplace wellbeing, how do we measure it, and what’s the current state of things? The second piece is then we think, “Okay, we know what wellbeing is and we can measure it, what influences it?” And then, Part 3 we think, “What are the downstream effects of wellbeing on workers and then also on firms?” And then, Part 4 is about the future of work, and perhaps we’ll get there later on.

So, what we’re talking here about is this Part 2 piece, which is what influences wellbeing at work? And there’s I think two pieces to it. One is just how do we explain differences across people and across firms, what is it? And then, there’s the “can we change those things”? Can we change it? Can we intervene in the workplace with different policies and practices? And that’s I think what you’re asking here. And we think there’s broadly two ways of thinking about this. One is that you can try to intervene directly to improve wellbeing, and that’s usually wellness programs, you might think of mindfulness apps, free gym membership, whatever else it might be. And these things are all good and are helpful to people.

But then there’s the indirect route which is to think, “Okay, we have the drivers of wellbeing,” things like relationships at work, earnings and benefits, scheduling, risk, health, safety, employee development, training, whatever else, these things that are driving wellbeing, “Can we intervene instead on them?” Which is a bit of a mindset shift in how we think about wellbeing. It’s not thinking directly, “Okay, let’s go straight to wellbeing,” it’s, “Can we change what is influencing wellbeing in order to try and improve it?” And we think that you can get a bit more mileage out of that.

And I think we have to start taking more seriously these more structural issues, because the wellness programs, as I say, I have nothing against wellness programs at all. There’s a lot of good evidence that mindfulness or doing exercise are undeniably good for your wellbeing. One of the issues is that when wellness programs are particularly given, usually given to people within firms, it’s often the people who need them the least that take them. So, huge selection issue. And there’ve been several large scale experiments in companies that have shown this, is that you offer free gym membership to people, it’s usually the people who will go to the gym anyway get their gym paid for and other people don’t go.

So, I think if you’re going to go down this route you have to think quite carefully about how to design these programs. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with subsidising people’s gym membership, that can be great. It can be a retention device and so on. But when we’re really trying to think seriously about how do we boost wellbeing for the whole company, you are better off trying to take seriously how work is managed and organised. So, that’s what we’re trying to argue in the book. And it’s a slightly glib example if you like, but you could imagine a firm that has a problem with stress, they have highly stressed workers, largely because of scheduling issues, deadlines, the way that line managers treat their workers and so on.

In order to deal with that, do you want to try and think about the scheduling and the deadlines, and how work’s being managed? Or do you want to add a stress reduction app on the side but keep everything the same? There’s nothing wrong with the stress reduction app in conjunction with dealing with these other things, it probably would be the best thing to do overall. But I think just offering the piece on the side whilst ignoring the more structural issues is not going to be particularly helpful, and it actually can just annoy people. It can even backfire. So, what we’re trying to argue in the book is that we should be thinking much more about this indirect route and we have what’s called, we go through the academic and practitioner literature on each of these drivers to try and think, “Okay, what’s the best evidence for the kinds of interventions, policies and changes that can influence each?”

Introducing the D-R-I-V-E-R framework

And we looked through I think several thousand papers in a systematic literature review, and we summarised some of the best ones in the book, but there’s also freely downloadable elsewhere as part of the World Wellbeing Movement, what’s called the Workplace Wellbeing Playbook, where we try and bring together the best evidence on each of these things. I should say that they’re grouped by driver, and this is a little bit cheesy but we think in the book of the drivers, there’s the D-R-I-V-E-R, there’s development and training, there’s relationships, independence and flexibility, variety and fulfillment, earnings and benefits, and risk, health and safety. So of course, you can try and characterise a job or a workplace across hundreds or thousands of parameters, it’s tricky to distill things down, and of course there are different ways of doing it.

But that, broadly speaking, gets us to be able to think about something a little bit more analytically. If we’re going to think about how to improve wellbeing at work, you have to first of all try to think about what it is that’s influencing wellbeing in a relative sense. So, you’re not just saying, “Earnings are important,” or, “Flexibility is important,” or, “Belonging, feeling of belonging and inclusion is important.” You really want to know the relative importance, because only then can you think about, “Okay, if I spend this much of my budget trying to improve it, how much am I going to improve wellbeing?” So, if you’re going to start thinking analytically about costs and benefits, we really need to know what’s driving wellbeing and how much is it going to cost to improve. And so to that, you do have to start to think a little bit more abstractly about trying to quantify aspects of the workplace and then go from there.

Des Dearlove:

I think your point about tackling problems at source rather than trying to fix them afterwards, I mean, it’s the great lesson of, I think healthcare is that we understand that we’re better off encouraging people to have healthy lives rather than trying to fix them or cure them. If we can create healthy cultures and healthy workplaces, it’s that much easier.

John Coné:

You mentioned that a lot of the things that drive happiness, or the lack thereof, are systemic and organisational, and not the purview of HR. Having said that, and knowing that a lot of people on this session are HR people, it seems to fall to the HR function to point these things out to the organisation. So, given that that’s what we need to do, and your comment that you really need to understand the relative impact of various things that you can do, what in your experience are – based on your research – are those that have the highest impact? What are the most effective ways for companies to improve employee wellbeing, and therefore happiness?

George Ward:

Yeah, and I think you’re quite right on the HR issue. I think one overlooked function of HR professionals is this what we might call the bridging function, is bringing together stakeholders in other parts of the company to try and solve issues as opposed to just things just getting shunted onto them and then forgotten. So, I think that’s hugely important and we should be thinking more about that. On your second question, there’s the two issues. There’s what is it that explains differences in happiness of these driver things, these six drivers? And when we do that, when we run those analyses, what we call a driver analysis, we find that feelings of relationships at work, including things like belonging relationships with coworkers, relationships with management tend to be the most important thing in influencing people’s wellbeing.

That’s not to say other things aren’t important. Earnings and benefits, so income and happiness is a huge academic literature going back decades on that, that’s important. It is generally true that people who have higher income, higher wages are happier and more satisfied at work. The thing is that’s true, but it’s just not as strong an effect as some of these other aspects. So with income, there’s often two camps I often hear, one is income doesn’t matter and it has nothing to do with happiness. And there’s the more economics campaign, where more where I come from, which is … just equates them to be the same thing.

And the truth is somewhere in the middle. Income is important, particularly at the lower end of the income distribution. So, raising wages of low wage workers even a little bit can have quite a strong effect, but giving an extra small raise to someone who’s already making 100, 200 grand is not going to have much of an effect on their job satisfaction. So income is important, but much more important is people’s relationships at work, which tends to come out as the most important driver from this driver analysis. But that’s more conceptual, that’s things like belonging or earnings and benefits generally, or autonomy at work are a little bit more abstract, but they’re interesting to think about in terms of what drives wellbeing. But then you can think about how do we intervene on each of those drivers, and that’s where you get into slightly more concrete policies and practices.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, I was going to ask you, can we get concrete? Have you seen successful examples of policies or company initiatives that have really made an improved worker wellbeing? I mean, it’s always dangerous to point to best practice because you put someone on a pedestal and they fall off, but are there examples that you can talk about, companies perhaps or organisations where you see some of these best practices at work?

George Ward:

Yeah. One thing I’ll say before that is that there isn’t a best fit. So, I think it’s important to, in your organisation, measure and then do some sort of driver analysis to try and work out what it is that’s causing low levels of wellbeing, and then go from there. So, the solution for one company is not going to be the same for another, so there isn’t one fantastic culture or one set of management practices, but nevertheless we … One example, for example, comes from a really nice paper from, actually from my PhD supervisor, Erin Kelly, and some of her co-authors a few years ago, where they had this thing called the STAR program at a large tech company that had a lot of issues to do with work-life balance, scheduling and flexibility.

And that was relatively simple, a series of collaborative workshops with management and workers together, essentially here’s a problem, here’s what’s gone wrong, how can we come up with a plan together and stick to it going forward? And it’s a little more complicated than that, but the STAR program, which worked to improve wellbeing and reduce burnout, and also had some positive effects on productivity. There were some other programs, a really nice paper from a firm in Turkey I think it was, where again, a collaborative workshop on relational culture within the firm, how people are really relating to each other, both co-workers, and co-workers and management. And I think one of the themes of these, the more workshop-y kinds of intervention is that they tend to have a point to them and they tend to be collaborative with both workers and management, and they’re trying to solve a problem.

They’re not, “We’re going to sit here and listen to an outside speaker tell us about what we should be doing, or giving us a lecture on some more abstract construct.” They tend to be more focused and bring everyone together, and it’s about making a plan, “How do we go forwards and improve work life?” Of course, not everything’s going to be solved by these one two day workshops and no one would ever think that. A lot of other things are also important, and are much more the purview of management, scheduling is hugely important. You’d be amazed, particularly in the U.S., at how work is scheduled, particularly for low wage workers, that you don’t know your … You have these huge long shifts, you don’t know how many hours you’re going to get this week, you don’t even know how many hours or what time you’re going to start two days in advance, and it’s just hugely damaging for people’s wellbeing.

You can’t plan your private life around that, you can’t plan childcare, you sometimes get sent home halfway through a shift if demand isn’t high enough. Amazing practices, which are technically beneficial for firms in terms of productivity, so these scheduling systems have been designed entirely with efficiency as the main outcome. So, they’ve been designed by engineers somewhere in quite an abstract way is how do we maximise their efficiency with entirely forgetting that if it makes your workers miserable in the process, that’s also going to feed into the system, but they don’t build that into their model.

And so, that’s a surprising one that is hugely important. A lot of these things are not. I know sometimes when I say we need to think more indirectly about and take seriously structural aspects of how work is managed and organised, and that sounds scary because you think, “Okay, we’d prefer just to have a workshop for a day.” But it’s actually, a lot of these things are not gigantic. They’re not hugely costly. We’re not talking about completely changing the structure of work, but giving workers more of a say in how they do their jobs for example, can be hugely important. Just involving people in the process of management.

You’d be amazed also the effects of just communication. So, even if you’re not actually directly consulting on every issue, just keeping people in the loop about what’s happening can have quite strong effects on worker wellbeing, even when things are going badly. They know what’s going on and they know that things may be going south in some situations, keeping people in the loop and with just basic communication can go a long way. So, we talk about many more things in the book and I’m scattergunning a little bit here, but a lot of these things can go a long way to improve wellbeing.

John Coné:

George, let’s take it in the other direction. You’ve already talked a lot about the fact that many organisations are focused on treating the symptoms of unhappiness rather than looking at prevention. Are there other common mistakes that companies make when they say, “Hey, we need to do something about this, we need to act”?

George Ward:

Yeah. So as I say, one common mistake is just not really thinking clearly enough at the start about what workplace wellbeing is. So, when Jan and I have gone in and spoken to managers in firms in the past, what tends to happen is, even this is in firms that are interested in wellbeing and are rightly doing things, and they’re engaged, which is fantastic, and they’ll often show us a dashboard of measures in their firm which they consider to be workplace wellbeing, and they have all sorts of things in there. So, it can include things like job satisfaction and happiness, which is great, but then you also have work-life balance, wages, flexibility, autonomy, whatever else it might be. And these things are all just lumped in, into this huge wellbeing index. Basically anything good you can think about, about a job or a workplace, and then we’ll measure that.

I think a really, it’s subtle but hugely important mindset shift is to think about wellbeing as an outcome tightly defined as how we think about and feel at work, and then thinking about all these other aspects of work as the drivers of wellbeing. And only then can you start to think about, “Okay, what can I intervene on in a cost-effective way that might influence wellbeing?” Otherwise, you’re just lost, staring at a dashboard, trying to improve anything we can in any direction. So, I think taking a step back, measuring wellbeing in a thoughtful way where we’re actually thinking about what’s the construct we’re trying to measure and how can we do it, using a survey or whatever else, and then doing some sort of driver analysis to try and get to the root cause of what’s going wrong and then thinking about interventions on that particular thing that’s going wrong.

So, I think it’s not racing into just thinking, “What can we do? There’s a problem, let’s change things.” You’ve got to think about, “What’s actually gone wrong here, how can we change it in a cost-effective way?” And then when you do that, measuring whether it’s worked or not, which I mean, it sounds crazy to say it but a lot of people don’t, is that you then want to, preferably if you can, roll it out on a small part of the firm to begin with, see if it’s working before you then roll it out to the whole firm, and tweak it as you go. So, it’s trying to build an evidence base for what works essentially as opposed to just racing to change things.

How can we measure wellbeing?

John Coné:

This was going to be a later question, so forgive me Des, but you mentioned measurement. And at least here in the U.S., net promoter score has become the thing, the way that we decide we’re going to measure employee happiness. Is that the way to go, or are there other better ways to measure it?

George Ward:

In the book we suggest a very simple survey module, which people are very free to use, which measures job satisfaction, negative emotions, positive emotions and meaning and purpose at work, to try and get at a more academically-based definition of it. Net promoter score is an interesting one. So, I’ve said before that one major issue, one mistake that people make is lumping workplace wellbeing together with the drivers. So, we want to split wellbeing from what’s driving it. I think here the issue is splitting wellbeing from its downstream consequences. So, one consequence is productivity, another one is turnover, and another one is engagement and loyalty, which I think is more what net promoter score is getting at. It seems to be a downstream consequence of how much I’m enjoying my job and how satisfied I am, would I then recommend it to others? People sometimes then equate wellbeing with are you considering leaving within a year? Would you recommend it? These are all interesting and important things to measure, but I don’t think they’re wellbeing, I think they’re downstream consequences of it.

Des Dearlove:

George, you were just now you were talking about, you’re talking meaning and purpose at work. Can organisations retrofit that? Do you think an organisation can change its culture to become more purpose-driven, or does it have to be built that way from the start? We hear about these start-ups and they’re going to change the world, but a lot of people aren’t working for the exciting startups, but we should assume that they’re doing something important and valuable. So, perhaps it’s a case of uncovering the purpose and making it more easy for people to connect with it, but what do you say?

George Ward:

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it’s not just with meaning and purpose, people I think, when I say with friends and family and so on, say I study workplace wellbeing, their mind immediately goes to Google and ping-pong tables, and nice lattes for free, and whatever else. What we find in the book, as I said earlier, is that even within these tough industries like retail, restaurants and so on, which generally have lower levels of wellbeing, there are some firms that have much higher wellbeing than others, even facing the same business environment with the same kind of similar set of workers and so on. So, there’s something possible here. These things are not determined entirely from the outside, there are things that organisations can do.

And the fact that within these highly defined segments, that the fact that some people are doing well suggests that these things are possible and that you can change. We also find that workplace wellbeing at the company level is relatively stable over time, but does move. I mean, it’s not something that’s going to shift around month to month, but equally it’s not just flat. Things can change and cultures can change. I mean, that’s been shown I think in, I haven’t myself done as much work on culture, there are fantastic experts that are particularly interested in corporate culture, and one of the findings there I believe is that these things can and do change over time. So, it’s thinking about it in a way, but it’s not how can we change it next week? That’s my point.

It’s they take time and effort to change, but they are nevertheless changeable. And the fact that we see these differences across firms and across time is testament to that fact. And I think we often think, it’s an interesting cognitive thing, we often think, “Okay, can we improve this culture? I’ve never been in a place that’s improved, these things aren’t malleable.” But I think most people have worked in or known someone who’s worked in a place that’s good that’s deteriorated in terms of culture as new management have come in, or one new manager has come in and ruined things or whatever else it might be. So, I think that’s testament I think, again to the fact that these things can change.

Des Dearlove:

One question that stood out for me earlier is do you conflate worry with stress? Someone was asking specifically, did you in the book look at the impact of worry on wellbeing?

George Ward:

Yeah. So, in the book we use this large scale survey where we were able to measure only four questions, so job satisfaction, happiness, stress and purpose. So, there you’re constrained to have one question on positive emotions, one on negative emotions. That’s often the case, I think also for firms and HR professionals, that you don’t have infinite survey time so we wanted to try and distill things down. But of course, there are other positive and negative emotions, negative emotions in particular can be quite varied. So, we think about stress, which is different to anxiety, which is different to worry, which is different to frustration, boredom, anger. And in an ideal world, if you have more survey time, it would be great to measure those and think about the drivers of those separately. We’re not at all saying that stress is the same as worry, those things can be quite different.

The distinction between worry and anxiety is a little more fuzzy, but certainly stress, and worry, and anxiety can be quite different.

The impact of workplace wellbeing on employee retention

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Another question here is, I mean, you’ve mentioned retention a couple of times and the fact that you’ve done some research in that area. The question here is has there been any correlation in companies between wellbeing and when you measure retention?

George Ward:

Yeah. So again, using this large scale data set where we have tens of thousands of companies, we can … Look, there’s multiple ways of doing this. One interesting thing is it depends a little bit on the country you’re looking at. I was surprised years ago when I first found this out, that in the U.S. there isn’t company level data very well available on turnover, it’s not required to be reported. But if you look at publicly traded firms, a lot of them do report it in their company annual reports. So, we got together all the data that we could from company annual reports on voluntary turnover rates, and looked at the correlation with our measures of workplace wellbeing. And you find that companies with low levels of wellbeing have much higher voluntary turnover rates. That’s true in the cross-sectional comparison, but also in terms of predicting future turnover in one year to the next or one quarter to the next.

So, that’s at the company level, so yes. At the individual level, another interesting thing you can do is look. So, on indeed.com where we’re doing this survey, for example, you can look at people’s responses to the wellbeing questions, and then looking at their behaviour on the site in the next days. So, people with low wellbeing tend to be searching more intensely for doing more searches, spending more time on the site. They are applying for more jobs, looking at more jobs, which suggests again, gets to this wellbeing and turnover relationship. And that’s just using this platform data, there’s been studies over the years looking particularly within firms where you can actually get administrative data on who’s leaving and who’s not. And tends to be the case that job satisfaction in particular, but also more emotional and purpose measures do predict whether people are more likely to stay or not.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, thank you for that, and thank you for the question.

George Ward:

I’ll just say on that as well. So, I say we’ve talked a lot about productivity, we’ve talked about retention. There’s also this third potential pathway through which you might expect happier companies to have better financial performance, and that is recruitment. And that’s more and more important as you get more and more websites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and there’s various others now, that what it’s like to work at different companies, people got that information through social networks and through general reputation, but it wasn’t as well known. But now it’s much more well known what it’s like working at different companies. It’s much more easy to find.

I mean, it used be you’d have to dig around, ask people, and you weren’t sure whether it was true, or you got essentially a glossy brochure from the company where every company was a fantastic great employer, and that was information controlled by them. And increasingly wellbeing will become an issue of recruitment, trying to attract workers. And I was, again, one of my dissertation chapters for the PhD, was an experiment on Indeed. So, randomly essentially. So, on Indeed we measure wellbeing, and each company has a wellbeing score which gets displayed on the website so people can see, and they help them make decisions in their job search. But we can turn that on and off in an A/B test to see whether it has a behavioural effect on what people are doing on the site and whether they’re more likely to apply. And in particular for low wellbeing companies, when you reveal that information it can discourage people from applying. And when you reveal that a company is particularly happy or high satisfaction, high purpose, that does attract more applications. So, that’s a third channel I would get in there.

Workplace wellbeing in the future of work

John Coné:

I know we may have a couple of more questions from the group that we want to get to, but I would feel terrible if this ended and I didn’t get the chance to ask you, are there trends that you see that are shaping the future of workplace wellbeing?

George Ward:

Yeah. So, I’d say the final part of the book is all about wellbeing and the future of work, and we were particularly interested in technology for obvious reasons, and that part of that is generative AI, but part of it is also just software machine learning or more standard robotics. So, we can think about automotive technologies. So, one of the chapters we sat down, I remember this, to think about, okay, we have generative AI, how is that going to affect wellbeing? And of course, what we’re trying to say in the book is if you want to think about what’s affecting wellbeing, we have to think about the drivers of wellbeing. So, how is it going to affect relationships? How is it going to affect development and training? How is it going to affect risk, health and safety, or earnings and benefits?

So we go through, and the fascinating thing was we went through each of these and think, “Okay, is it going to have a positive effect or a negative effect?” And for each and every driver, you could argue it both ways. So, the key takeaway I think, is that technology isn’t deterministic, it doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It’s designed by humans and it’s implemented within firms by humans who make decisions about how we’re going to use this technology. And depending how it’s used, it could have positive or negative effects. So, you can think in terms of relationships, for example, the development of things like Zoom and other email, whatever else it might be, other technologies have allowed people to build relationships within firms even when they’re distributed across the world potentially.

But equally you could imagine that technologies could isolate workers and strip out any interaction with either customers or other coworkers. And so, it all depends how this technology is designed and how it’s implemented within firms. So, how do we adopt it within our situation? So, there is no particular answer, which I know is disappointing. We’d love to be able to say, “AI is going to improve wellbeing at work,” or, “AI is going to be a disaster for wellbeing.” Everything depends how we use the technology. And I think one of the issues is … At the moment I’m a little bit pessimistic, so I think most …

My sense is at the moment the people who are in the room when this is being decided are entirely engineers, who are fantastic, but they’re often not thinking, it’s not their fault, they’ve often been told just to optimise on efficiency. And not only is that a mistake, not only is it not good for workers, which we should care about in their own right, and I’ve said in the past, I should mention actually now, that we talk about the business case for wellbeing. We argue in the book we don’t necessarily need a business case for wellbeing. There’s also a very strong prior human case for wellbeing, but it’s also nice to have a business case as well. But it would be nice if we should also, for general societal reasons, be thinking about how can we use technology to make work better?

But also if we just try and design technology and adopt it within firms entirely trying to optimise on efficiency, you’re going to miss out on all these loops within the system where if you’re leading people to have miserable work lives that it’s going to cause productivity and retention issues in the meantime. So, I’m a little pessimistic at the moment, but not because I think AI will destroy workplace wellbeing. It doesn’t have to, there are ways of using this technology to improve people’s work lives. It’s going to be tough to do.

Challenging the trade-off between wellbeing and business results

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. I mean, you’re almost referring to the short-term versus the long-term here. Something I wanted to ask you is how can companies balance short-term productivity goals with long-term investments in employee health, wellbeing, growth? I mean, we hear about this epidemic of burnout, and I think we all have anecdotal evidence of that. We talk to people, we are experiencing it. Because burnout doesn’t necessarily happen overnight. Someone might appear to be functioning and be a high performer indeed for years, and then all of a sudden they hit a wall. But it’s because their wellbeing hasn’t been attended to, they haven’t been given the agency themselves. And there was a lot of chat in the chat box I noticed earlier people talking about it being a very personal thing. And of course, agency is so important, I think you mentioned earlier, people who don’t have power over their own shifts, it’s very stressful the less power you have. I think we know that from previous research that the lower down-

George Ward:

Absolutely.

Des Dearlove:

… the organisation, the more you feel it. So, how does an organisation get those two things to dance?

George Ward:

Yeah, it’s not straightforward, but I think one thing is that I don’t think it’s necessarily … It’s always framed as a trade-off, that either we can have productivity or we can have wellbeing. And I think it’s a mindset that isn’t quite right and doesn’t tally with the decades of research on the topic. And it’s an interesting thing that it hasn’t filtered through to management thinking on the ground, that attending to workers wellbeing doesn’t necessarily have to come at the sacrifice of productivity. That’s not to say that you don’t want to get too Pollyanna-ish about it, that spending all of your budget on making your workers as delighted as possible isn’t going to work. But in general, it’s trying to get people away from this zero-sum thinking that your happiness is … My workers are too happy, therefore I must be losing something in terms of productivity. And it’s ingrained unfortunately into quite a few people, and it’s not necessarily a trade-off.

Des Dearlove:

No, I think that’s a really important point, that binary thinking is often what gets us into these problems. I mean, you see that in lots of walks of life. John, I’m going to give you the last question because I know you have a last question that you want to ask.

John Coné:

My last question is, if an organisation had to focus on just one thing, one initiative to improve wellbeing, what would you tell the people in this session, “Go back and do this”?

George Ward:

That is tricky. I think, measure wellbeing in the first place. I know it’s not an exciting one, but you can only really start to think about issues of wellbeing in the organisation and what’s causing them if you measure it. If you’re not, you’re just guessing.

Des Dearlove:

Fantastic. Well, that’s a good place to end. We like hard empirical evidence, and that’s a good starting point. I’m afraid that’s all we have time for. Huge thanks to our special guest, Dr. George Ward, to you all for tuning in. This is the Thinkers 50 Radar webinar in collaboration with the Association of Talent Development, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and John Coné. Please join us again on the 4th of June, same time, same place for the final, sadly, the final episode in this series of Thinkers 50 Radar when our special guest will be communications expert Matt Abrahams, lecturer at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You Are Put On the Spot, and we’ll be putting him on the spot. So, please tune in and join us then.

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Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the second in the new series of Thinkers50 Radar webinars, celebrating the most exciting new voices in the world of management thinking. In January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar List for 2025, 30 rising stars in management thinking, and we’ll be hearing from another one of them today. But we’d also like to hear from you. We like to make these sessions as interactive as we possibly can. So please, do let us know where you are joining us from and put your questions in the chat box. Now, this year’s Radar List is brought to you in partnership with ATD, The Association of Talent Development, and developing talent is a topic we will be exploring today and over the coming weeks, including of course, the implications of AI in the workplace and the many other challenges and opportunities facing leaders and organisations.

My co-host today is John Coné. John has worked in talent development for, it’s hard to believe, John, but for more than 50 years. During that time, he serves as chief learning officer, a vice president of HR, and on the boards of non-profit and for-profit learning companies and organisations, including ATD. He currently serves as catalyst of ATD’s Chief Talent Development Officer Group. John, it’s great to see you.

John Coné:

Good to see you, Des. It’s great to be here, and I’m very excited about our guest today. It is my great pleasure to introduce today’s distinguished guest, Dr. Winnie Jiang. Dr. Jiang is a leading researcher in organisational behaviour and career development with particular focus on how individuals navigate career transitions, how they find meaning in their work, and adapt to changing professional landscapes. As an esteemed professor at INSEAD, she’s contributed groundbreaking insights into how personal identity, work relationships, and leadership shape our experiences at work. Her research has been published in top academic journals and our expertise as highly sought after by organisations that are aiming to create purpose-driven work environments. Today, she’s going to be sharing her invaluable insights on finding meaning at work, helping us to better understand how organisations and individuals cultivate careers that are both fulfilling and impactful. So please join me in giving a warm virtual welcome to Dr. Winnie Jiang.

Winnie Jiang:

Thank you. Thank you.

Des Dearlove:

Winnie, welcome, welcome. And congratulations on the Thinkers50 Radar recognition.

Winnie Jiang:

Thank you.

Des Dearlove:

Listen. First, let’s kind of get an idea of where you are coming from. So I’m going to start with a very general question. What initially drew you to research workplace purpose and career transitions?

Winnie Jiang:

Sure. Many people have asked me these questions and I always said it goes back to when I was in college. Actually, one day I was reading a book called Working by Studs Terkel, maybe many of you have heard of him, and I came across this passage in the opening chapter that just really struck me, and it’s still to this day one of my favourite descriptions about people’s experiences with their work. So I would just read it here. He wrote, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a sort of live rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying,” and I was just really intrigued after reading it and started wondering all these questions, why do some people find deeper meaning in their work while others feel like they’re just enduring it? What makes work feel purposeful?

And that curiosity eventually led me to research how people understand and create meaning in their careers. And that interest in career transitions, which is the second part of your question, is a natural extension of that actually. So as I study how people pursue meaning in their work, I noticed patterns often, meaning seeking involves career changes. People will leave jobs that don’t align with who they are and seek out work that does, but I also saw other more complicated sides to this. What happens when someone has already found deeply meaningful work, but external forces such as sociopolitical changes, which is happening a lot right now, and job losses driven by technologies, AI, automation, these forces that you mentioned, what if these external forces disrupt that path that they have committed to pursuing? How do they then move forward? How do they rebuild the sense of purpose when the work they love is no longer viable?

So in many ways, I guess my research started really with just a single quote that I read in a book, but then it has grown into something I see as a much bigger, which is a way to understand how people navigate meaning and identities in a constantly changing world of work.

John Coné:

When you talk about different kinds of career transitions, and I’m wondering about that in the context of all the change that’s going on now, the changes in how people even define careers, the decline of the traditional career ladder and lifelong jobs, and I should say people working till they’re older. Our transitions, have they changed a lot?

Des Dearlove:

See, John’s asking that because we know about working until we’re older. John and I, we are in that slot. So yeah, please.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah. Well, when I talk about career transitions, I’m referring to really a whole range of changes people go through in their work lives. Some transitions, as I mentioned earlier, are voluntary. So people leaving a job to pursue something more meaningful, they may switch industries and professions completely or starting their own business. Other kind of transitions are forced upon them and maybe their industry is shrinking, which they don’t want to face, but unfortunately have to navigate, and their job is automated or become redundant or some unexpected life circumstances push them into rethinking their career path. As you said, career transitions today really look different from how they were looking in the past. The idea of climbing a stable career ladder where you stay in one company, move up over time, and retire with a pension, it might still be the case for some, but it isn’t the reality, I think, for a growing number of people anymore.

And instead, careers now are more fluid, unstable, and unpredictable. So people are more open, more likely to switch jobs, even entire industries, professions, and some are piecing together multiple careers over a lifetime and others are working, as you said, well past retirement age in the traditional term of a retirement age, either by choice or necessity. So my research really tries to unpack all these kind of transitions, what drives these transitions, how people make meaning from the different transitions, how they rebuild a sense of purpose in their work when their career takes an unexpected turn or even expected turn, I think it will still require them to rebuild the sense of purpose, because sometimes they may have expected to find some meaning, but it may not turn out the way they want.

Des Dearlove:

When he introduced you, John mentioned some of your research touches on personal identity. What role does personal identity play in shaping career choices and how do people reshape their identities during transitions? Because I guess we don’t just have a single kind of working identity.

Identity and career transitions

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think maybe it’s helpful to start with the simple definition of what identity is. At this core, our identity is our own answer to the question, “Who am I?” So what will be your own answers to this question? And the answer will shape a lot of our career decisions, what kind of work we choose, how much time we want to dedicate to the work, the kinds of people we want to work with, and even the impact we hope to have through the work we do. So when people choose a career, it is about, I think, making an identity statement about who they are, what they value, and where they belong in the world. So our personal answers to the question, who we are, who am I, is directly shaping all these choices we make about our careers.

To the second part of your question, how do people reshape their identities, during a career transition, the sense of identity can be shaken, sometimes even completely upended. If someone has spent years in a profession and suddenly has to leave either involuntarily because of layoffs, or voluntarily because they’re just burning out, or shift in life priorities, they don’t just lose a job, they can feel like they’re actually losing a part of themselves because that work they have been involved in previous has become who they are, and it was their answers to who they are, these identity questions that led them to initially choose that work as the career. So that’s what makes career changes so unsettling. It’s not just about finding another job, it’s about asking, “Who am I now or next?” So when it comes to the question of how do people reshape their identities during these transitions, I think a lot of it comes down to, I think, that’s my research focus, meaning. How do they make meaning of these transitions? What do they think these transitions actually mean?

Some people are able to reframe these transitions not as starting over again or having to sort of start from the bottom again in any new line of work or industry, but instead they see that it means they’re evolving. So it’s not that their identity has to stop in some way, that their previous identity has to be left behind. Instead, they frame it as they’re evolving in some way. So they look for threads of continuity between their old work and their new path. Take a journalist as an example, and this journalist who becomes a corporate lawyer, and he doesn’t see this transition as abandoning his journalistic experiences from his successful prior career that he had to leave. Instead, he’s using the investigative and communication abilities he has built before in a different way.

And this example actually comes from my research with Amy Wrzesniewski, who when we were doing this research, she was my doctoral advisor at Yale, and now she’s a faculty at Wharton. And we studied journalists who were forced to leave their profession, a job many of them deeply loved and saw as a calling. So their identity is really rooted in being a journalist, but we found that when journalism is undergoing decline and destabilisation and forced many to leave this profession, some of them were able to reinvent themselves quite effectively. They move into fields like PR, law, academia and continue to build a meaningful career in a very different field. But others, they just could not imagine doing anything else but journalism, so they found ways to stay and persist, often taking on freelance work even if it meant financial instability. So you can see that the former group have successfully reshaped their professional identity, while the latter didn’t seem to be able to do that.

And what explained this difference in our research, it shows that it came down to a process of meaning-making that we call meaning-fixness. Some journalists have a very fixed view of making meaning or thinking what makes their work meaningful. They believe that only journalism could give them that sense of purpose, but the other journalists who had a more successful sort of experience reshaping their professional identity, they had a more flexible way of meaning-making. Instead of tying their sense of purpose to the job, the role of being journalists, they tied it to the variety of activities they love, like storytelling, doing investigative work, interviewing, writing. These things that could also exist in other careers too.

So the more we can see meaning as something we can carry with us rather than something that’s tied to a single role, the more hopeful and adaptable we can be when life throws us a curveball and when we have to especially embark on some involuntary career transition. So this is how I see how people can reshape their identities, that sometimes it really comes down to how they make meaning of the transitions that they have to engage in.

Des Dearlove:

John, just I might just cut in just a couple of comments on that because a couple of things come to mind. One is the parallel with fixed mindset and growth mindset in terms of how you approach a challenge, and the other thought that was going through my head as you were speaking is I’m often amused when people talk about people having a midlife crisis or a mid-career crisis, because the other way of flipping that is it can be a mid-career opportunity. You get a chance to relaunch yourself, to take those transferable skills and apply them in different ways and do more interesting stuff. So a lot of it does come down to, as you were indicating to, how you frame these things. John, I took your slot there to ask a question. 

John Coné:

I was actually going to follow up. The question I was going to ask I think you’ve started to answer. I was going to ask you about the key factors that help employees find meaning in these transitions, and you mentioned reframing is one approach, and you mentioned finding threads of continuity, but I’m wondering are there other key things that help people find meaning in these transitions and other barriers that hold them back from doing that?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, of course. So a lot of research has been done by both myself and my other colleagues who are interested in this domain of meaning-making at work, and we identify a lot of factors that shape whether people find their work meaningful, and they generally fall into two big categories, the contextual factors, which are things about the job itself or the work environment, and the individual factors, things about the person doing the job. So on the contextual side, some jobs and work environments seem to be more conducive, and naturally allow people to find meaning in it. This is work, for example, that allows people to actually see by themselves the impact they can have, whether it’s helping a client, so that they can see the beneficiaries, that their work is influencing, solving a tough problem that actually helps someone make someone smile. This visual, directly seeing the impact in a visual way, and contributing to something bigger than themselves. And this work tends to feel more meaningful.

There are also jobs that offer interesting and challenging tasks as they can spark a sense of purpose by pushing people to grow. And of course, that is autonomy, flexibility, a strong sense of camaraderie, all play a big role. And in general, when people feel valued and supported at work, they’re more likely to see their work as meaningful. So there’s a lot of research that has demonstrated the important impact of having the conducive meaning-making working environment. But I think what’s also interesting is to find out this other research done by my colleagues, also myself, that suggests meaning isn’t just about the job itself. There are also big individual differences in how people experience meaning at work and create meaning at work. Some people seem naturally better at finding or creating meaning no matter what they do.

So research has shown that even in jobs that seem extremely repetitive, exhausting, or undervalued, sociologists sometimes refer to these jobs as dirty work as they’re physically, morally, relationally dirty, but there are people who can find deep fulfillment even in these kind of jobs that we normally do not expect anyone to be able to find meaning. And these people, they find ways to reframe their tasks in a way that makes them personally feel that this is a meaningful job that’s worthwhile and personally significant.

So I recently watched an interview with the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, which made me believe he’s someone that actually falls into this category. In that interview, he said for him it’s easier to fall in love with things he’s doing, he does, rather than finding what he loves, and he said he’s fallen in love with many things he has done. He’s been a dishwasher and he loves it. He’s been a busboy, loves it. Someone delivering papers, newspapers, he loves it. Being a waiter. He loves it. So he said literally in the interview, he loves every single job he’s ever had, and now he loves every single day at NVIDIA. So there are people like that who say these things and who seem to be able to love or find meaning in anything they do, and this is confirmed by our research. We indeed find just a subset and subgroup of people in any kind of job that seems just more resilient and positive and always able to find some meaning out of what they have.

And now on the flip side, since you asked about barriers, what can get in the way of finding meaning in work, there are also both the contextual and the personal barriers, and contextually related to what I mentioned earlier, and a big one is disconnect from your direct impact. When people never get to see how their work efforts actually can make a difference, it’s hard to stay motivated. And lack of autonomy is another big barrier, to when people feel they’re being micromanaged, stuck in rigid systems, struggle to take ownership over their work and they will struggle to find it meaningful. And then there is, as probably common sense, caustic work environments, no matter how meaningful a job could be, if people feel unappreciated, overworked, or disrespected, that sense of purpose will get overshadowed by frustrations over these treatments.

The six sources of workplace meaning

And on a personal level, I think the barrier for many people to find meaning to not become people like Jensen Huang, who somehow was able to love everything he does. Many people, I guess, overlook the fact that meaning can come from very variety of different sources. It doesn’t always have to be about making a huge social impact, though that’s great if your job has that and it’s there. So in a recent research I conducted with my pre-doctoral student at INSEAD, so at INSEAD we have this pre-doctoral program that allows students just to explore whether academic career is a good fit for them. And with this student, Shaun Chang, we surveyed over 400 working adults and just asking them in their view, what makes their current jobs feel worth doing or meaningful, and the answers we got, and we analysed them and actually identified six key sources of meaning that we summarise as, first, livelihood. That means that while your job can be meaningful because it helps you meet financial goals. So it brings financial resources and that is a source of meaning. In fact, for many people, that’s a very important source of meaning. And second, community. It creates a sense of belonging and connection with others. Stimulation. It challenges and develops you. Recognition, it makes you feel acknowledged and valued. Impact. It allows you to make a positive difference. And the last one might be surprising for many people, which we call rejuvenation, as work can also provide a break from personal life stress and can serve as a source of structure and focus.

So it may catch you off guard, but many participants in this study said that during tough times in their personal lives, like going through divorce, sickness, or death of loved ones, they want to go back to work. Work gave them a sense of stability and even a refuge from the stress and griefs that they’re going through in their personal life. So there are more ways to find meaning than we often realise. So I think what’s really powerful to keep in mind is that meaning isn’t just something you find or expect that there will be there at your work. It is something you can actually create. By recognising and combining these different sources, you can turn your job into valuable, meaningful part of your life. Companies definitely should design jobs that can foster meaning and conducive to meaning and purpose-making, but individuals also need to realise they have the power to shape their own experience of their work.

Des Dearlove:

We’re going to obviously pursue some of these issues that you’ve raised in a second, but one of the things I love about these webinars is how global they are in terms… I mean, I’m sure you read, Winnie is joining us from Singapore, but we have people… I was just looking through the chat. We have people joining us from Colorado; from Wales; from Montreal; from Jakarta; from Tulsa; from Minnesota; from Iran; from Copenhagen; we even have somebody who’s flying at the moment who’s over Spain somewhere; Durban, South Africa; Helsinki; Switzerland; Wisconsin; London. It’s just a real cornucopia of different points of view.

And please do put your questions, because we want to take your questions and we will be putting some of your questions to Winnie, so please stick your questions into the comments section and we will come to them. But before we do that, I have to ask, Winnie, you’ve laid it out beautifully, but what can we do to kind of foster a culture where employees feel a strong sense of purpose in their roles? How can organisations and leaders perhaps help people make that connection, and also how does that impact on obviously important things like retention?

Purpose identification and purpose infusion

Winnie Jiang:

Sure. Yeah, at INSEAD, I created and I have been teaching this session called The Purpose-Driven Leadership, and when developing this course, I thought a lot about the question you just asked, and building on the research I’ve done and decades of research my other colleagues also have done on finding meaning at work, and my answer at this point is that it definitely starts with leadership, not just at the top, but at every level starts with leaders developing the capabilities to identify and effectively infuse into employees purpose that feels authentic, personal and relevant to everyone involved. Maybe actually, I think it will be helpful to use an example, and this example is actually my personal story. So when I started teaching my very first MBA class at INSEAD, I was just 26 years old, fresh out of my PhD at Yale, and many of my students were older than me with years of real-world experience managing people, and yet there I was, Asian woman, 26 years old, standing in front of them trying to teach them about leadership.

So it really didn’t feel credible, and I had huge imposter syndrome and self-doubt bubbling up. So why should they listen to me? And I knew I couldn’t just tell them, “Oh. Hey, your purpose here is to learn from me.” That would’ve felt forced, and frankly, it’s just unconvincing. They would just laugh and leave the class and nobody will stay to, I guess, to listen. But INSEAD students are nicer than that, but still, I just don’t feel that’s a credible reason for them to be here. Instead, I think I was reflecting on what I have learned from my own research and what I can do to actually give them a truly relevant, authentic, genuine reason to be there, and that is the purpose, the real purpose for them to be here that can actually keep them there.

So I took this approach. I told them, “This is my very first class. You are my very first group of students. Whether you realise it or not, you will play an incredibly important role in my career and my life, and I will always remember you. I commit to giving you my absolute best in this class, and I hope you will commit to also being fully present and engaged and also giving me your honest feedback after each class to help me grow as a professor,” and I generally felt that way. It’s not that I made this up, because I really, really do feel to one of my more senior colleagues at INSEAD, they already have hundreds of thousands of students over these years, and they probably won’t remember any one of them, but I will remember every single one of the students in my first class. So I told them that and then they played an incredibly important role in my career development, and any experience they had in the class, the feedback they would give me, I would take that seriously.

So after that, I think something shifted, really. Afterwards, the classroom wasn’t just about me teaching them, and it was really about us creating something meaningful together, and they weren’t just students, they were playing, again, like I said, an essential role in shaping a young professor’s career. And the energy in the room just transformed. They participated fully, they challenged each other’s ideas, including my own ideas, and just engaged deeply. And at the end of the course, they even nominated me for a best teaching award at INSEAD, and to this day, I’m still deeply grateful for that first group of students I had. I remember every single one of them indeed and just that experience altogether.

As I think this experience shows you that purpose is a sense that has to be felt, and that starts with the leaders. I think in that setting, it’s not a traditional work setting, but it shows you that you are something that has the power to drive how people feel in that setting, and it starts with the leaders developing the capability of what I now call purpose identification and purpose infusion. So you need to first identify what is the purpose that can really make everyone involved in that group, in that setting, feel related, feel that is personally meaningful and important, and then how do you infuse that in every one of them?

So the ability to identify what actually matters and can be meaningful to everyone involved in a given setting and infuse that into the people and the environment. And when people see how their role contributes to something or some people beyond themselves, they will invest more in their work, they form stronger connections with everyone in the team, and then, yes, I do believe that has a direct positive impact on retention. I guess nobody quit my class and stays through, so I think that’s one evidence to show that it matters. And I think, yeah, a short answer to your question, right now, I think, is for leaders to develop the capability of purpose identification and infusion.

The future of meaningful work

John Coné:

Winnie, I’m looking in the chat and I’m seeing references to things like generational differences in the workforce, remote and hybrid work, even a recent comment about a seeming erosion of loyalty from employees. What do you see as the trends that are going to be shaping the future of meaningful work and career?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, I really love this question. I find it very important. In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome more people to join the discussion and share their thoughts, and I will start by sharing my perspectives in the hope of encouraging others to do the same. So when I first started doing the research on journalists that I mentioned earlier, which is how journalists were navigating their career transitions, that was back in 2016, and I was a second year doctoral student at Yale, and I was just looking for data related to occupations undergoing destabilisation or disruption. And I came across data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US showing that of the top 10 professions facing the biggest declines, journalism was the only one on the list that required a bachelor’s degree, and so all the other jobs do not require bachelor’s degrees, and journalism is the only one on the list that requires a bachelor’s degree.

And fast-forward now almost a decade later, and I think we’re going to see, probably we’re already seeing more and more professions that require higher education, at least a bachelor’s degree, facing similar disruptions like 10 years or longer ago, what journalists were facing. So when people have invested so much time and effort into a career, it’s not easy to just pivot or find new meaning in their work, and in some ways, the challenges that journalists were facing back then might soon be the reality for a lot more professionals. So I do think this could be a trend. We are going to see a lot more professionals with the higher educational degrees and credentials facing issues related to career disruptions and have to build meaningful careers in their own way, so not following the traditional career path anymore.

And I was actually discussing this recently with my colleague, Phanish Puranam, who just published a fantastic book. I recommend everybody to check it out. It’s called Re-Humanize. It’s about how organisations can stay human-centered in an age where AI and algorithms are automating more and more jobs. And we got into this conversation about how individuals can still build meaningful careers when jobs they’ve just started to feel attached to, could be automated tomorrow. So it’s kind of like… Maybe it’s not a very appropriate metaphor, but I think it’s really like when you start getting invested in a romantic relationship and just as things are getting serious, the other person tells you, “No. Oh, it’s not a good time to continue,” and it stings the first time, but imagine it keeps happening over and over. As AI technology advances, I think more people will probably, just as they start to commit to a career, and then some automation or technology changes happen, and they will have to think about reinvention of their career again.

So the reality is that the future of meaningful work, I think, is going to be about more than just avoiding job displacement, it’s going to be about individuals taking control and creating their own jobs and finding or building meaning in those jobs they create. I think right now the public discourse is focused a lot on job loss, job disruption, which is important, and we should discuss those topics, but I think maybe we should also think about paying more attention and spending more time discussing job creation.

John Coné:

Winnie, I was going to mention, I was just looking at the World Economic Forum report and it says over the next five years, AI will essentially end 92 million jobs, but it will create 149 million new jobs that never existed before. So it’s really right in line with what you’re talking about.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah. Yeah, I’m glad to hear that. I’ll need to check out that report you were mentioning. So yeah, maybe people are indeed talking about job creation, but I wasn’t seeing that in the media as much as I think it should be. I think we should be talking even more about it. What are the jobs that should be created and in the future it’s going to be crucial for people to claim their own ability or power to create work that not only supports themselves, but also serves other people, and same for the future of career development, I think it will be less about following the traditional path of choosing a major or industry or job, I think. That was the path I took, look at the list of majors possible or being offered in college, you try to predict and assess which one will be growing in the next four decades that we still need to be working, or which one will be less likely to become redundant.

So that’s about sort of a predicting, “Okay, what are the current jobs that seem more viable during the time that we are alive?” But it actually will be more about creating your own meaningful jobs, creating jobs that align with our own interests and aspirations, talents, competences, as well as provide something valuable to other people. I think increasingly people need the ability not only to find meaning in jobs for themselves, but also communicate to others why this job is meaningful, so be able to sort of sell the meaning to the broader audiences.

Des Dearlove:

We’re going to take some questions, got some great questions coming in. You mentioned just now individuals taking control and creating meaning. We’ve got a question from Elisabeth, and it’s a very nicely phrased question, so I’m going to read it. It’s quite long. “We often hear about the essential role in leaders creating a culture that values meaning,” – We’ve been talking about that – “But what if someone’s in a workplace that doesn’t foster this? What can colleagues on the floor do?” – I mean, peers I guess rather than managers – “either to create grassroots movements, sort of a bottom-up movement or even just make everyday life meaningful? In essence, create meaning in the face of adverse circumstances?” Not everybody’s in that wonderful culture that we would like to think that our organisations create. Not all leaders are doing that. What do you do if you’re stuck with perhaps not the ideal situation in terms of who’s leading you?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question, and I think by asking that question, you’re already showing that you’re claiming control and trying to leverage the power you have as individuals to make a job more meaningful. So I think there could be, for example, if the organisation does not support formal events that facilitate the peer sharing, informal social gatherings that facilitate this kind of meaning-making. Maybe you could bring the list of sources that I shared earlier, livelihood, community, stimulation, recognition, impact, rejuvenation, and have each other talk about where they find meaning in the current job they’re doing. Maybe you’ll be very surprised to find that some people, who you don’t really engage in this kind of conversation on a daily work basis with, but when you are in an informal social gathering, they’ll share with you what are the sources that make the work feel meaningful and worthwhile to them. So I think these informal social gatherings could be a way to do it. Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. I’m going to bring another question in because the questions are flowing in. I mean, we touched on this, John touched on this, but how do… A question coming in from LinkedIn. “How do cultural and generational differences shape our expectation of finding meaning through work?” I’m not sure that my parents expected their work to be meaningful all the time, but I think people now have a higher expectation. Do you see differences between different generations and even different national cultures?

Winnie Jiang:

Oh. Yeah, I do. As I said, across generations and cultures. I’m originally from China and my parents will… When I actually tell them what I do in my job, what I study in my PhD, they were like, “What? And you can get paid by doing that?” They were very distanced, because to them, they are in this traditional sort of ideology about career development. They just stay in one organisation and they retire and get a pension. So there are definitely, I think, generational differences within China, but I think there are also cross-cultural differences. So at INSEAD, our classroom is usually extremely diverse. There’s not a single dominant nationality or language being spoken. We all teach and speak, communicate English, but people, all of them almost, speak English with some accents, and you’ll see in the classroom discussion the emergence of these cultural differences, and I think it’s okay. It is fine.

I think with the media and technology, even people in cultures that are probably still embracing the more traditional kind of career development will have exposure to cultures that embrace different kinds of meaningful career development, and I think that’s great actually. You are exposed to different perspectives, and I think it is really helpful in some sense that it creates a sort of balance. To me, I really care when my job provides stimulation, community, recognition, impact, rejuvenation. I seem to care less just about livelihood, but my parents will come in and say, “Well, livelihood is important,” and that actually gave me a different perspective that maybe my job is pretty decent. It is pretty good.

And so I think it helps sort of to remind people that there are indeed the different sources of meaning, and maybe we need to think about sometimes we can re-weight that when the path to leave the current job and find some alternatives is more difficult, and maybe it’s actually better to stay and develop new sources of meaning that do not seem too important to us initially, but actually, are important to other people, and that helps us realise they could also become important to us. So I think it’s actually a good thing that we recognise these differences.

Des Dearlove:

Keep the questions coming. We’ve got another sort 10 minutes or so of Winnie’s time, so please do pitch in with your questions. There’s a lot of people agreeing with what you’re saying, Winnie. It’d be nice to see somebody perhaps disagreeing or having a different point of view. But I want to ask you one more thing, and then I’m going to revert to John, because I know he’s got lots of questions too. When you were speaking earlier, as I understood, you were talking about meaning is something we do together, meaning-making. It’s not something we just do. It sort of can happen and it does happen in the spaces in between us, and I thought that was just a really interesting point.

And there’s one of the questions, I’ve lost it now in the thread that it’s gone back so far, but someone was asking about what role do community and connection with each other play in creating meaning at work? And apologies to the person’s question… Oh, there we go. Yeah. But that sense that the meaning isn’t just something we project. And you talked earlier about getting better at explaining what the meaning is and explaining it possibly to ourselves as well as others.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah. So at the community and connection with others, it’s an important source of meaning for many, many people, but not everybody… I think what my research is showing, not everybody sees that as kind of a necessary source of meaning. You mentioned hybrid work, remote work. Actually, many people love it and found that when they’re working remotely or in a hybrid way, the work feels more meaningful because it enhances some other thing which they care more about, which is autonomy, flexibility, and time with family. So I think it helps to reflect on yourselves, which sources that I mentioned just now, which sources of this meaning matter more to you, actually play a bigger role in helping you feel that what you do is meaningful? Again, I mentioned livelihood; community, which is connection to others, like the question referenced to; stimulation, the work you do in your job challenges, develops you; and the recognition, it makes you feel acknowledged, valued; and the impact, it allows you to make a positive difference. Rejuvenation helps you to take a break from the everyday stress sometimes you feel in your daily lives.

As a new parent myself, so I have a three year old and an 18 months old at home. I love going to work. So the chaos at home on its own just makes me feel that working in any job is extremely meaningful, because it allows me to take some personal time and take some time for myself. So I think it could help to reflect a bit by yourself at the current stage of your life because it can change, it can evolve depending on which life stage you are at. I think five years from today, I probably will not feel that rejuvenation from work, taking personal breaks from family by working is as important, so it could change. So at this current stage of your life, which sources of this meaning actually play a bigger role for you and how to align that with the work you do or the career you plan to build.

Building a purpose-driven culture

John Coné:

Winnie, I know a number of the people who are in this conversation are likely people who are in human resources or in talent development inside of an organisation, and I’m wondering what your advice is to them on the things that they can be focusing on to help the individuals in their organisation find more meaning and to help their organisation be one where people can find more meaning. What can professionals and human resources do?

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, that’s a great question too. So I mentioned, ideally, you want every leader in the organisations to have the capability of purpose, identification and infusion. So they sort of view this purpose on a daily basis and help people continue to feel this sense of meaning on a daily basis. So I think providing some kind of work purpose identification and infusion, and to show them the power of purpose-building and give them the toolkits to build this purpose-driven culture is an important way. In terms of individual career development, I think you could think about, for example, mentorship programs. I think mentorships can play an important role in terms of providing information and emotional support, but I think that in this kind of a changing world of work, the traditional idea of mentorship where a more experienced person hands down with them based on their own career path is becoming less relevant.

So nowadays, the organisations to help people find their own purpose, take control of their own meaning-making. The mentors need to play a role in terms of they’re not just offering answers, like what traditionally mentors do, they should be asking the right questions. And I think mentors should be playing more of a cheerleading role, encouraging the mentees to think outside the box, try new things, even create their own opportunities, instead of thinking of mentorship as a way of help us find purpose and direction, maybe we should see as a source of support and encouragement to explore or create purpose and direction. And I think organisations can provide an environment that facilitates people to think of themselves as individuals that have the capability and power to create this purposeful job and create these purpose-driven careers.

So in a sense that instead of drifting, which means now people fall into roles, take the next promotion because it’s offered or stay in jobs out of habit rather than intention, now I think HR managers or talent leaders want to help people and organisations become more intentional about their careers, and that is to navigate or drive their career development. They help them create space for reflection, structure, exploration, and real conversations about growth. So I think when people feel that their organisations can turn them and recognise that they have their own power to drive their careers, to navigate their career rather than drift in their career, once they have this sort of sense of power and ownership, they will feel more purposeful in the organisation.

So I think probably I would summarise as, one, providing leaders the opportunity to develop the capabilities in building purpose, identifying purpose, and infusing purpose in the workplace, and also providing these opportunities for everybody at work, everybody in the organisations to navigate and drive their career. And so I think I will focus on these two domains because that can really build a workforce in the organisations that everybody feels that they are leading their own career in a purposeful way rather than just drifting through it.

John Coné:

I think that’s really, really important. Right now in organisations there’s this tendency to talk about you’re in charge of your own career, but then we leave you on your own instead of, as you say, providing opportunities, providing the space, providing tools that help them be intentional. I think that’s a great point.

Winnie Jiang:

Yeah, I think there are really very different, sort of specific, ways to do that. I think first, in terms of building intentional career, companies need to move beyond the idea that career growth just means climbing the corporate ladder, and not everyone wants to or should aim for the next level, and some people could find fulfillment in just staying where they are, deepening their expertise, and others actually thrive in more lateral moves that expose them to new functions, and some might even want to take a step back temporarily to recalibrate their priorities. So I think talent leaders should normalise these multiple ways of transitions within the organisation so that people don’t feel like there’s only one right way to progress, to proceed, and that will truly make them feel that they’re driving their own career rather than sort of following the traditional career ladder.

And second, I think what comes to mind also is that organisations need to be proactive about career development. Maybe many organisations are already doing it, but I think it’s really important to emphasise that career planning shouldn’t just happen during annual reviews, and companies can build in structured career conversations, check-ins that go beyond performance and focus on where someone wants to go and how they can get there. So I think more importantly, leaders should encourage career experimentation, give employees opportunities to try out different roles, shadow their colleagues, to take on stretch projects, even side gigs. Sometimes I think the best way to figure out what’s next is to test drive these possibilities in a low risk rate and organisations, and their leaders should encourage that. Now, I think it will be good for not just the employees themselves, also for the organisations, because increasingly, organisations need these employees to help them create jobs in their organisations that are making them, I think, more adaptable in this new world of work.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, now I’m going to throw in a bit of a curveball. You mentioned recalibrating careers. By coincidence, I was listening to a TED Talk earlier and the guy was saying that his whole career and life changed when one day he was driving home and he realised that his life had become about selling more shampoo, and he had this moment where he just thought, “Oh, no. That’s the meaning in my life.” We’ve got a good question from Anna, which relates to this. She’s saying, “By trying to find meaning in work, are we trying to make ourselves feel better because some work or that some work is actually harmful to us or harmful to the planet?” Sometimes the meaning isn’t there, and perhaps we need to be honest with ourselves, and maybe it might be time for… This individual on the TED Talk took himself off and went to Africa and started working for an NGO because he was looking for more meaning than selling shampoo.

Winnie Jiang:

It’s really important I think to, like you said, be honest with ourselves, and if you feel that it is really betraying yourself to try to find meaning in whatever you’re currently doing, then I think your feeling is telling you something, that you probably need to consider a change. So I think you are the one that can really give yourself the answer you need, and I think it’s, again, coming down to that self-reflection. You need to listen to what your gut feeling sometimes is telling you. So I think it’s really important to point out that, yeah, you shouldn’t force yourself to finding if it really, really feels wrong. I think that’s an important message actually.

Des Dearlove:

We probably have time for one more question. John, I’m going to give you the dibs on that.

John Coné:

Oh, I appreciate that. Well, it’s the easy one. If you could give one piece of advice to an organisation that’s trying to create meaning in a purpose-driven culture, what would you tell them, “Do this one thing.”?

Winnie Jiang:

Wow. Well, I guess… Yeah, I guess I’ll go back to what I said earlier when I was teaching purpose-driven leadership at INSEAD. I think over and over again, I emphasise that purpose has to be felt. It’s not something that is strategically built. It has to be truly felt, genuinely, authentically, relatable to everyone involved, and then I think that takes deep reflection for the leaders to engage in, to be able to identify that purpose that can be actually felt by everyone and to infuse that into everybody. When I teach this, I also keep going back to the example that I share about how I make the first group of students I was teaching feel that they are actually engaging in something quite meaningful. They’re not just learning from someone that seems very inexperienced, but they’re actually helping this person grow in their career. Well, I guess the one piece of advice that I want to give organisations, the leaders, find that purpose that can be felt by everybody, and that creates the power for everybody to engage and unlock their talents.

Des Dearlove:

Fantastic. I think that’s brilliant what you did in the classroom. I think all leaders could learn from that in terms of asking people to help create meaning and making it meaningful in terms of developing the talent of somebody else who’s perhaps in the leadership role. Well, I’m afraid that is all we have time for. Huge thanks to our guest, Winnie Jiang, and to you, our audience, who contributes so much. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we hope you’ll join us again. This is a Thinkers50 Radar webinar in collaboration with the Association of Talent Development, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and John Coné. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Thinkers50 Radar.

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Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to Mind Matters, our special series of webinars to mark Mental Health Awareness Month brought to you in collaboration with our friends at Silicon Guild. Now, this is the fourth and final webinar in this special series. Recordings of the previous webinars are available on the Thinkers50 channel on YouTube, and this one will also be available as soon as we can get it up there.

The title of today’s session is Leaders Speak Up, Unlocking Mental Health in the Workplace. Our moderator and the instigator for the Mind Matters series is Morra Aarons-Mele. Morra is the author of The Anxious Achiever and host of The Anxious Achiever podcast. She was also shortlisted for the 2023 Thinkers50 Leadership Award.

Today, Morra is joined by three very special guests. Megan Reitz is Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and Adjunct Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School, and a Thinkers50 Ranked Thinker. She’s the author of several books including Speak Out, Listen Up: How to Have Conversations That Matter, Speak Up, and The Appropriate Mind Time.

Amy Edmondson is Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, renowned for her world-leading research into the concept of psychological safety. She’s the author of The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong. She’s topped the last two Thinkers50 rankings as the most influential management thinker in the world.

Finally, last but certainly not least, Peter Sims is a best-selling author and the founder and chairman of BLK SHP Inc, a place and platform for making small bets and building new ventures. He’s also the co-author of the best-selling book True North with Bill George, which was selected as one of the top 25 leadership books of all time. His second book, Little Bets, was selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of the six best advice books for entrepreneurs. Now, that’s really not bad for someone who describes himself as an accidental author. Peter was also part of the team that started Giving Tuesday, the global philanthropic movement that has raised 10 billion in over 100 countries for social good causes.

Welcome one and all and everyone tuning in from around the world. We do like to hear from you, so please let us know where you are joining us from, share your questions and insights and reflections.

Morra, as ever, the floor is yours.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you, Des. Good morning, good afternoon. I just couldn’t start out… I’m in such a good mood today. I’m wearing green in honour of my Boston Celtics, I don’t know if any of you are NBA fans, who swept… Yes, Amy. Yes… who swept the Eastern Conference finals and are headed to the NBA finals, and I’m in a very good mood this morning, so just had to share.

Speaking up. What is it about speaking up that unlocks connection among people, among teams? What is it about speaking up that can unlock better mental health at work and on teams? How do we do it well? Why is it so hard? Why do we feel we risk so much when we do? And most importantly for today, what is the leader’s role in speaking up and getting personal about their own mental health and their own struggles in order to make speaking up and being heard easier for the people on their team?

We’re going to dive into all that. I hope that we will get practical as well as stir up some big thoughts with this group. It is amazing to see all of you: Zurich, Cape Town, Switzerland, Toronto, Gothenburg, all over the world. Tell us where you’re from. Ask us questions. I promise I will get to your questions. As usual, we’re going to go round robin with our speakers. I may take moderator’s privilege, and then we will get to your questions.

I just want to start with this really quick thing about what happens when we connect, especially through story. You’ve probably heard that we are wired for story. Do you know that when you hear a story unfold from another person, your brainwaves actually start to sync up with those of the storyteller? This is from Uri Hasson at Princeton. He says, “It’s as though I’m trying to make your brain similar to mine in areas that really capture the meaning, the situation, the schema, the context of the world. We make meaning, share context, and learn from challenges through story and through speaking up.” And so that’s why I’m so thrilled to have you all here to tell us about your work and your stories.

I’m going to start with Megan.

Megan Reitz:

Thank you very much. Thanks, Morra. Hello everybody. I’m saying good afternoon from a beautifully sunny Barcelona, so I’m also in a good mood being here. It’s one of my favourite cities. This topic of mental health is incredibly close to my heart, and it is hugely important the way we speak up about mental health. To state the obvious, it costs lives or saves lives. It’s that clear.

I suppose I’ve got three things that I’d kick off with really. One is, of course, a leader’s role in speaking up and enabling others to speak up around mental health is hugely important. I’ll come back to these. Secondly, but not if it’s performative. Actions speak louder than words. Thirdly, our actions and our words are situated in a system that has certain rules of the game that make it incredibly difficult for us to connect in a way that improves mental health. As well as looking at the leader’s role and the conversation inside an organisation, we have some serious questions to ask about the system as a whole.

Just to come back to each one of those. The first one, obviously what a leader says, what a leader doesn’t say even more so, gets replicated across the organisation. Their role is hugely important, and their role in inadvertently silencing conversations is worth paying attention to. Yes, speaking up, but also the blind spot that we, myself and John Higgins, who’s my co-researcher, we’ve really been exploring over the last 10 years is the fact that as you get more senior or if you get more into a powerful position, whatever that might be, even if it’s not hierarchical, you are likely to go into what we call an optimism bubble.

That means you’ll overestimate the degree to which people are speaking up around you. You’ll overestimate your listening skills and you’ll overestimate how approachable you are. We’ve surveyed about 21 or 22,000 employees now, and the data of how that happens as you go up an organisation is really pretty clear. The first thing is, probably, leaders might already think that they’re having quite good conversations in the workplace. Or that at least classic phrase: my door is always open. Of course people can speak up about it. It’s fine. It’s fine.

That’s the first thing we need to crack and we need to say actually, possibly, it’s not as easy if you don’t have the same labels on your head, with the power and with leadership labels. We might have to do a lot more work than we realise to really help people feel at ease and to speak up.

In particular, I would mention in this first point how we respond when people speak up about mental health is… Well, it defines whether somebody else will speak up afterwards. All it takes, and I’ve seen this happen, is for a leader to look rather puzzled or frustrated or unsure when somebody does bring up a topic that’s tricky, and that will really figure in everybody’s minds. They’ll be like, “Right, we won’t talk about that again.” Our response as a leader really impacts the habits, conversations that we have in an organisation. That’s the first point.

The second point is when I read the title of this session, leaders should embrace mental health. I must admit, because I work a lot at various conferences in the run-up to conferences, and I had this image of a HR or corporate communications person with a leader sat in front of them rather harried and hurried saying, “Right, make sure you embrace your mental health on stage.”

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’ve seen that happen. Yes.

Megan Reitz:

Yes, exactly.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Insert vulnerable anecdote here.

Megan Reitz:

Precisely, so please come up with something in your background that will cover mental health. But it’s got a bit between these. Don’t make it too far this way or don’t make it too… Can you embrace it on stage, please? Employees see straight through that.

Amy Edmondson:

And be authentic.

Megan Reitz:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, so I was struck actually in our research. It was two different stories. One story of a young lawyer who had some time off with a mental health issue, and then the organisation was so careful bringing that lawyer back in and actually slowing them down and really holding their hand all the way through. It was really amazing.

And then another story that we’ve come across where in the financial services where a director was… They have an allocation. I mean, if you’re off with mental health, you get your six therapy sessions to try and get you back in as soon as possible. It really is that instrumental, which brings me onto the final point and then I’ll shut up.

My current research with John is on what we call spaciousness. How do we create the experience of a sense of space where we can have the conversations that matter inside what I call pathologically busy organisations? There’s two stances I suppose, two orientations that we see in an organisation. This is inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s work, and Martin Buber. One is what we call instrumental. In an instrumental gaze, we see ourselves as separate, as fragmented, as utility. There’s a means to an end. The focus is on short-term, tangible targets. Busy, do it. Really important, okay? That’s necessary. Another frame is what we call the relational gaze, and that’s when we have a broader perspective. We see our interdependence, we see our relationship to one another.

We make very different choices depending on what gaze we have in the organisation, and you can’t meet a mental health issue and crisis just with more instrumental processes. You have to question the whole way we look at work. Whilst this may sound rather dreamy, actually, it comes down to, what the hell are we doing? Why are we working? What is the point? Why are we working together, and what is the point of my leadership? It’s there in those really crucial questions, actually, that we start to genuinely have the kind of relationships and the kind of conversations that help at work.

More about that later potentially. But that’s, I think, enough from me.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I love the spaciousness. In one of our earlier sessions, we were remarking on the time that a leader spent time with us, actually took the time to show us something, to help us through a challenge. That spaciousness of, I’m here for you and I haven’t just mentally moved on to the next.

Megan, I just have to give you a statistic that I pulled. This is from Headspace’s most recent data. Since 2020, the number of employees who reported their company leaders talk openly about their personal mental health has more than doubled. It was 35% in 2020. Headspace is reporting 89% of leaders are talking openly about their personal mental health, and yet employees are feeling less cared for than ever. Their own mental health gets worse.

When you hear that statistic, what comes to your mind?

Megan Reitz:

Well, what comes to my mind is one, as I said, I think we really have to be careful when it’s performative. I see performative speaking up all the time. I see leadership teams stating how they want everybody in their organisation to be collaborative. Everybody’s looking at the leadership team going, “You’re kidding. You’re all in silos and you hate each other.” That is one issue.

The other issue is we are inside what is increasingly a broken system. We are inside a system where the instrumental gaze has got out of control. And our focus on the doing, on the short-term targets means that we are squeezing out some of the other conversations that we absolutely have to have if we are to set up an organisation that enables us to flourish. The more that we end up focusing on this instrumental gaze, the less we end up being able actually to allow the kind of conversations which are relational.

For example, I mean we have in our research one phrase that is, “You need to have the small conversations to enable the big ones to happen.” In other words, if we squeeze out those conversations where we see one another as human beings with stories, with lives, if we squeeze out those moments where we genuinely encounter one another, then you can forget about the big conversations where we need to talk about mental health. And the big conversations where we need to offer a crazy idea or say, – and Amy will know lots about this – “Actually, I’ve made a mistake. We’ve had a failure.” Those big conversations can’t happen unless we nurture and pay attention to the relationships that are there.

We are in systems, economic, organisational, political, educational health systems, that are narrowing our gaze down to more shorter-term, tangible, instrumental results, I think given the latest research that we’re doing. I’d point to those two.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you.

Amy.

Amy Edmondson:

Okay, so the remit was unlocking mental health, and I wanted to share five things that I think are relevant for this discussion. But I can’t help just backing up and saying during the introductions, just even your wonderful book, Morra, anxious achievers, here I am. Yep. I’m an anxious achiever, so I’m glad and grateful to be here. And then of course the whole accidental writer, Peter, I’ve always called myself an accidental professor, really was a kind of strange, accidental left turn that landed me here. Lots of learning, lots of mistakes, lots of setbacks along the way.

Unlocking mental health in the workplace. Here is what I wanted to offer. Number one, reframe reality. I mean the messaging. Let’s get out ahead of people’s automatic taken for granted assessment of what leaders expect or of what the work is like, what the job is like in reality. We need to set expectations to fit reality. The world is complex, uncertain, volatile, and all the rest. When we don’t talk about that, we tend to feel it’s just me, right? I’m the one. I missed a deadline. The project didn’t come out the way I had hoped. I had a failure here. I made a mistake there. That’s normal and natural. Let’s normalise it. Let’s de-stigmatize it. Let’s embrace that reality together. We got to talk about it, make it discussable all the time.

Number two, and maybe this should be number one, but double down on purpose, on meaning. This ties into what Megan was saying, too. I think part of mental health is the belief that you matter. I think one of the biggest factors in reduced mental health is the sense that you don’t matter. You might not matter because you might not think what you’re doing matters, is noticed by customers or clients, or even more important colleagues. That mattering both to the world and to each other and to the people that you come in contact with every day is part of health. It’s part of being human. It’s part of what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning. Not just happiness and comfort, but that belief that we matter. And so we need to double down on talking about it. Why does it matter? Why does it matter that this organisation exists or that this project exists?

Number three, double down on community, and that builds so nicely on Megan’s relational point. We need robust, authentic relationships that are based on realistic understanding of and appreciation of each other and support a kind of desire to support and a desire to be accountable with and for each other. Let’s build those kinds of robust relationships.

I agree. When we squeeze out the life moments, that can get in the way of that important factor. I mean oddly in the early stages of the pandemic when we were all sent home and I realised something very obvious, but my wonderful faculty assistant at the time… Her name is Sarah Nicholson, she’s a genius, she’s amazing. Now she works for HBS Online and does all these fantastic course development things. But at the time I remember thinking we had to keep working. We had our remote setup, but it would’ve felt so odd and awkward to call her up and say, “Hey, how was your weekend?” That would’ve just been intrusive and weird. Whereas in our normal life before the COVID sent us all home, I would not come in on a Monday and not say that, not share some of my own tribulations and so on, building what I think is an authentic friendship and relationship.

Okay, number four, build scaffolding to invite input. By scaffolding, I mean rituals, whether those are rounds or are wonderful ways that we either do check-ins or we brainstorm ideas. Just structure is your friend on this thing. With everything that Megan and I have studied about voice and speaking up, it doesn’t happen spontaneously. It needs help. It needs scaffolding. More on that if you wish.

And then lastly, I think both for leaders but also for each and every one of us, master the pause. Meaning take a breath and ensure a productive, collaborative, caring, I don’t mean to overstate that, but just thoughtful response to what you hear. Someone disagrees with an idea you really care about. Pause, breathe. Express interest. It should be genuine. Dig in, roll up your sleeves, get into a higher quality conversation as a result of that surprise. But it’s helpful to take a breath so that you can help yourself respond productively.

Let me stop there.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’m taking a pause, Amy. You write so movingly in the book about our very human need to keep up appearances, to be seen as smart, to fear being shamed, right?

How do you help people as a leader get over that? Because us high achievers, we’ve talked about this, it’s in our DNA a little bit. But we have to at some level learn to move past it.

Amy Edmondson:

A wonderful former mentor, he’s no longer alive, Maxie Maultsby, a psychiatrist and wonderful thought leader in the space of cognitive behaviour therapy, but he called it rational behaviour therapy, his little blend, said, “We are all fallible human beings.” And then he shortcut that to FHBs, which I loved. It made me smile because it’s…

Why do I bring up Maxie? Because his point was this is just a fact, so call attention to it. Make it discussable. That’s not going away. We will always be fallible human beings. Can we thrive as fallible human beings? That becomes the question. That becomes the life question, not can you not be one. Not an option. But can you thrive as one? I think it’s A, call attention to it B, make it discussable, and C, express caring about others, others’ experiences, others’ tribulations, others’ hopes and aspirations. And then realise it’s only fair to share your own as well.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you.

Peter.

Peter Sims:

This is such an interesting topic, and I’ll share some personal reflections and then also some of the things that we’ve seen on the corporate side.

My company, BLK SHP, has worked with some Fortune 500 companies on how to de-stigmatize mental health. We started this about five years ago, so SAP and ServiceNow and BlackRock became interested five years ago. And how do you de-stigmatize mental health because it was a continuation of diversity inclusion, it was the next wave.

I think there were two reasons that there was interest from these CEOs. One is that the culture shifted a lot. I mean, organisations aren’t driving this shift in mental health. I mean, this is completely coming from musicians, artists, people who are kids talking about mental health that’s trickling up to organisational change. Every family is affected by mental health. That was just something we realised early. I think the learning and the growth may happen. There are spaces that get created in organisations that are useful. BlackRock now has 600 ambassadors for mental health.

But I think the primary source of change is going to come at the family unit level and in the culture. That is to say that young people are going to talk with their parents and say, “I’m having challenges.” They’re going to connect with that challenge from their kid emotionally and feel like they can talk about mental health differently.

I’ll just share an example personally. I’m an entrepreneur, and last year I had a very challenging year. Really for the first time in my life I experienced depression, and it was pretty severe. I was Googling everything I could, like Eckhart Tolle and every resource trying to figure out what the hell to do. I was pretty open with people about this. On the one hand I was open with people who are older than me and senior and including some CEOs who I know of in big organisations, and these guys and all men, they really didn’t know what to do with this set of questions. I think it’s a generational thing. They don’t have the tools. They were used to saying, “Just tough through it.”

The younger people I talked with who had experienced depression said, “Just be patient with yourself. Give yourself self-care. You’ll get through this.” Their advice was the right advice. I look back on that experience. I’ve talked to some of the people who couldn’t advise me in the past, and I said, “I think you’re missing a piece of the toolkit to be able to actually work through this type of situation.” It’s not that they haven’t gone through something similar, many of them had, but they just never had been around anyone who could give them perspective that was more enlightened really, just more insightful.

And so I think that for those types of leaders who are currently running most organisations, that generation, there’s a huge generational shift that’s coming. If this topic is to gain significant change inside an organisation, it’s going to be because the younger generation’s going to come up. They’re going to have a different set of tools and experiences to really drive lasting change. I’m very optimistic about that.

I just think that this is one of those topics that unless you have something that you can personally relate to, it’s intimidating. It’s very scary for people. If you don’t have the tools, I mean how are you supposed to try to respond to somebody who’s raising a topic that you just have no emotional experience with? I mean it’s asking, I think, too much of people. Within an organisational context, I think what’s most potentially empowering is to say, “Look, there’s somebody in your family who you can connect with at an emotional level.” Maybe it’s your aunt, maybe it’s one of your kids, maybe it’s one of your sisters or brothers. You can say, “Look. For them, how can you be there for them?”

Based on that emotional experience, how can you then connect with other people even if they have different situations they’re going through to be able to help them understand that this is in a best case scenario where people get treatment or where people get help, that stigma should actually be a superpower. I mean, we know with people on the spectrum or people with different mental illness disorders that this is often a source of their greatest strength. It really is a set of human questions. I think that emanates back to a generational shift that is coming aided by kids talking to their parents, and by the realisation that many of these situations are very treatable with the right type of advice.

You have to do everything in a mental health situation because mental health itself is a scary term, but it’s just what would you do for somebody in your family in this situation? And then hopefully organisations can continue to do what the leading organisations have done, which is surround themselves with support structures so that people can get sent to the right advisors.

That’s my take. It’s definitely a movement. It’s unstoppable. It’s a generational shift that’s coming. There’s a lot of confusion right now as to how people should handle the stigmas and how it’s one of those in-between periods. But ultimately it is, in terms of effective leadership, a source of finding the highest superpowers for people working with us.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’m curious about the role of story, and any of you can take this. I find in my work with leaders that even if I haven’t had depression with a capital D or anxiety with a capital A or bipolar, I’ve been through challenges. I’ve struggled, and we as humans are wired to connect to that narrative of facing challenge, learning, and building resilience.

I’m curious if any of you in your work have seen the power of helping people use narratives successfully? Or speaking up, Megan, with skill in a way that actually can shift the mind of that person Peter’s talking about who is the CEO and is like, “I’ve never felt this, I don’t want to talk about this.”

Megan Reitz:

I mean, I think Peter, really interesting what you were talking about, particularly around how many are unpracticed in these sorts of conversations. We are in such an interesting time where it’s up for grabs. What sorts of conversations happen inside our organisations? We do have a generation of people that aren’t used to that being far outside of the box of, well, it’s about business.

I think what you’re talking about is experiential knowing. When we have experiential knowing that’s very different from propositional cognitive knowing about something. We talk about things very differently when we have our own point of reference, when we can feel. Look, I’m doing this.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah, you feel it.

Megan Reitz:

When we feel our experience and then we talk from that place, it of course is very different.

And it is possible for anyone to have a conversation with anyone else, even if they may not immediately know the experience, if we foreground hugely our real desire to learn and to understand and to hear what we don’t understand and being curious. It is incredibly powerful when we speak from experiential knowing. When we don’t have that experiential knowing or can’t access that, then it’s incredibly powerful when you meet someone that looks at you and goes, “Tell me, just tell me. Tell me honestly,” and you can see that they really want to learn.

I’d say both of those orientations are incredibly helpful, and especially when you are in an uncharted territory that Peter was talking about.

Peter Sims:

I can share a thought on this too, Morra.

I co-authored this book True North about authenticity and leadership with Bill George, and there was a lot of focus on being vulnerable. Really what we found or what I learned through that process is that vulnerability as reported from a historical experience is valuable, but vulnerability in the moment is not a good playbook. And so as it relates to mental health, I think talking about experiences with mental health in your own situation is probably frowned upon.

I can do it because I own my company. But for a CEO, like the CEO of Nike or Starbucks, both of whom I know, I don’t think it’s a great idea for them to be talking about a severe depression. They can’t really do that. I think they can talk about family members or they can talk about old friends disguising the identity and talking about their experience with that situation, with that person, and what they learned from it and creating space that way.

That’s just a thought that came to my mind. I haven’t overthought this.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Can I ask you a question? First of all, I want to be… thank… I want to give you a shout-out for saying the truth. A lot of us in the mental health at work field don’t actually come out and say what you just said, which is that it’s dangerous for the guy in power to talk. I wish that-

Peter Sims:

Or the guy or woman, anybody.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Or woman. It’s more dangerous for a woman. I wish that weren’t so.

I’m going to ask a question from Frank. What are concrete initiatives to shift the perception of vulnerability? Let’s talk about stigma around mental health from a weakness to a strength. Sometimes I feel like I’m fighting a losing argument in this space. People are just not going to talk about it when they feel like the buck stops with them, unless they’re retired or entrepreneurs or whatever.

Amy Edmondson:

I have a different take on vulnerability, which is that vulnerability is merely a fact. We are all vulnerable in that we don’t have a crystal ball, so we’re vulnerable to all of the things that are coming at us of which we’re unaware at any given time.

And so I think it is when we conceptualise that being at least part of what it means to be vulnerable, it is a strength to acknowledge that. It is a strength to say, “Here’s what I care about, here’s what I’m unsure about, anxious about. Need you.” We need to hear from you. We need your hard work, we need your full engagement. Vulnerability is only a weakness in a world that expects to run on time, expects predictability, expects certainty. We don’t live in that world.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah.

Also, I think that there are so many leaders who are looking for an opportunity to share. The statistics I once dug up around prescriptions for anxiety and depression drugs in this country actually equate to about 40% of the population. And so someone’s taking them, and it’s not all young people. I think that there is a way to push.

I have another question from Elisabeth. How do we avoid preaching to the choir around mental health? The people here, both speaking and attending, surely know the importance of the topic. But how do we not just talk in echo chambers? I mean Peter, I think you were getting at that. How do we reach the people who have resistance, genuine, blissful ignorance, God bless them, or just don’t care enough to make the necessary changes?

Peter Sims:

Yeah, I would say on that question I would say figure out who their kids are, and I mean go through their family. Talk to them about their family story. I don’t know.

Reflecting on Amy’s comments about vulnerability, I’d like to believe that people can be vulnerable in Fortune 500 companies. I just think that if I put myself in the shoes of a CEO or the C-suite, which sets the tone, I mean they’re under so much pressure to hit the numbers and to have a good presentation on the next earnings call. Any sign of them having doubt is going to be potentially captured by someone that’s going to be reposted somewhere, that somebody’s going to ask a question about.

It’s like I think there’s a systemic issue based on the system that we’re in, and it just doesn’t reward any form of vulnerability in my opinion. Again, I own my own company. I can say whatever I want. It’s great to be so free and it doesn’t matter. My team knows who I am.

Amy Edmondson:

I mean, I just want to maybe make a distinction that is between my personal life, my marriage is falling apart, my life is horrible, whatever, and the vulnerability that I think effective leaders must display if they’re running large complex organisations.

I mean, for instance, American Icon, the wonderful book on the turnaround at Ford, when Alan Mulally says, “Listen. Team, we’re on track to lose 17 billion this year,” – that is a statement of vulnerability. We cannot keep going this way. There will be a point where they shut us down. Let’s start telling the truth to each other. It’s a statement that the company’s vulnerable, I’m vulnerable. If you don’t want to play, this isn’t going to work, right? I’ve staked everything on this because it’s implicit in that message.

I think to include the reality, even the reality you said, which is that earnings calls and reputations can be at risk when things are taken out of context, that’s part of the reality. Let’s make that discussion, too.

Peter Sims:

Yeah, business realities I think agree with that. I just think if people knew what was going on inside the CEOs of these companies, they’d be shocked. Because they are so vulnerable, they are so human and they can’t say any of that. They’re in a tiny little container without many real friends at all. I mean, it’s brutal. That-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

So where does-

Peter Sims:

… context-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, where does all that anxiety go? I mean, if I’m about to report earnings and they’re not good and I’m going to get attacked, I’m anxious. Where does it all go?

Megan Reitz:

There’s an irony here, isn’t there? There has been an invitation for the past five years or so, especially from people in leadership roles to employees, to bring their whole selves to work. They’ve basically been leaving out the terms and conditions.

I absolutely get that. Stating “bring your whole self to work, it’ll be fine,”  is naive, okay? We turn up at work and we are all of us. At some level it is the theatre of business, the theatre of performance. We have that going on. And if those in powerful positions have no capacity to show any level of vulnerability, then we are in serious trouble.

I was at a conference this morning, and I listened to a leader speak really well from the stage. This sounds very small in comparison to mental health perhaps, but he was talking about how to have the difficult conversations and how he gets actually quite nervous before… It’s an hour before the feedback conversation he’s supposed to be having with somebody, and he was talking, “Oh God, I’m just…” Just in that moment, you could see him as a human being. He wasn’t bearing everything obviously because he can’t do that in the position that he’s in, but he was showing just signs of, I actually, I have these feelings, I have these emotions also.

That’s such an important capacity for leaders to go into, to edge into that kind of zone. Yes, of course there are things, there are territories, there are things they can or can’t say. If they can’t say anything, then why on earth are we trying to help other people in their organisation as well? It’s a bit of a challenge back.

Amy Edmondson:

I-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Oh, sorry.

Amy Edmondson:

I just think that’s a great story, and that’s exactly what I was talking about. That regular human emotion that, say, we might all experience when we’re having to do a performance conversation and that this leader is acknowledging that, naming it. I feel anxious, I feel my stomach is… That I think is a very good concrete illustration of what it looks like to be vulnerable around an ordinary aspect of the job.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

It’s called boundary vulnerability, right? I’m human, I’m just vulnerable enough, but I’m not a mess, right? I’m not going to go on about my divorce and how my kids hate me, but I’m not sleeping well because-

Amy Edmondson:

Stress.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

… this merger is really stressful, yeah.

Peter Sims:

People don’t say that though very often, I don’t think.

I mean, I do think, yes, to highlight their emotion is great and to be able to say… Look, I’m not a cynical person here. I’m just saying, yeah, you can talk about your mother and you can talk about things in your life personally that people can grab onto. That’s crucial. You have to be able to tell those stories.

But I think to get up and say that you’re anxious about something, I mean, you can say it’s a big challenge. As Amy says, you can point out the business imperative and the business challenges that are obvious to everyone and not hide from that. That’s crucial. But that’s different than talking about your emotional wiring and your emotional fabric. I just think I’ve not seen many leaders be able to do that well. I mean, I’m trying to think of one person who could, outside of a persona in a big organisation, navigate that. I really can’t think of many examples, or any-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

You should listen to my podcast.

Peter Sims:

Yeah, maybe that’s…

Morra Aarons-Mele:

But it’s hard. I have a hard time getting, certainly people from public companies, to go on the record, it is a huge challenge.

Where do we go from here? The system’s broken. Things need to change.

Peter Sims:

It’s changing.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Where do we go from here?

It’s changing.

Peter Sims:

It’s changing. The culture’s changing. The organisations aren’t going to change this. The culture’s changing. The kids are going to change it with their parents. All these signals we get from movies, artistry, it’s all saying that mental health is part of life. The policy world is following that as well.

Amy Edmondson:

I mean, I think I completely agree with Peter. I think it is changing. I think it’s changing in a way quite rapidly, quite starkly.

I want to go back to something Megan said at the very beginning, which is near the end of her comments, which is that the system is broken. It’s not just the system in terms of mental health, it’s literally the broader system is broken. We have companies producing things we don’t need. We have rampant consumerism of things we don’t need that don’t make us happy, especially compared to experiences and relationships. All the rest of the research is pretty darn clear on what builds happiness and longevity, and it’s not stuff.

In a way, I mean I think we’re talking largely about cosmetic fixes, right? How do we fix it around the edges? Of course, I’m sure, certainly speaking for myself, I feel utterly helpless in terms of how do we address the root cause, right? How do we address the root cause of the mental health crisis, which I think has to do with people’s sense that a lot of things are broken in a very large way. Of course that is ultimately a leadership issue, so maybe there are opportunities here for leaders to get out ahead of these challenges and figure out what we really need to work on together.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Actually, Amy, that leads me to a question I have for you, but anyone can jump in.

You are a team person. You really help us think about what can be done on a team. A team is so much more flexible than the CEO and leadership in the system. If I’m a team leader, if I’m a manager who really wants to change things, how can I start modelling this productive vulnerability tomorrow?

Amy Edmondson:

To me, it comes down to three broad behavioural categories. One is messaging, the second is modelling, as you just asked, and the third is mentoring.

The messaging is just repeated and truthful messages about purpose, about challenge, about what we’re up against, why it matters, why each and every one of you are needed to do this well. The right communications that engage and inspire.

The second is modelling, and I think that’s what you asked about. Modelling is, show up as caring and passionate about the possibilities here, but curious, humble. I know this sounds like a tall order, but it’s not really as tall as it sounds… a fundamentally emotionally intelligent person who is trying to build a team fully cognizant of the reality, which is that we can’t do it… I can’t do it. I need to do my part, but I can’t do it alone. I need you. Utterly dependent on you.

Great teams have the capacity to use each other’s strengths and weaknesses to interact in a candid way, to ask good questions, to argue their points carefully with as much evidence as they can muster, to listen, to change your mind, right? There’s a kind of dynamism of a good team. I think the leader’s first job is to build a great team. At the top modelling therefore that teamwork that then others in the organisation, other teams will start to emulate.

Megan Reitz:

Yeah. Can I just say I think many managers and leaders, many of them have really good intentions. It’s about creating that space where we’re able to remember how we want to show up. Amy was talking about how we show up is really important. The question I’m holding is…

We interviewed somebody a while back and they said, “At work in my team meetings, it’s like drinking from a fire hydrant,” was the phrase, was the metaphor. It’s like, I actually now can’t breathe. I’ve got so much stuff to do.

In fact, Amy was mentioning the pause. Really interestingly, and I researched the phrase “permission to pause” has come up over and over and over and over again. How do I give myself permission to pause? How do I give others and enable others to give permission to pause? Part of this is, how do we create spaces in systems where we actually remember what it is we want to do, what our intention is? How do we show up?

Some of my other research is in relation to mindfulness, which is essentially paying attention to what you’re paying attention to now. How do we enable ourselves to pay attention to what we are attending to? How can we set up some kind of ritual every day where we just try and bring, again, that compass, the compass point of how am I showing up? What is the impact I want to have here?

Many leaders I work with, they don’t need long to reconnect with it and go, “All right, okay, “and then they make small but significant different decisions and choices during the day. But they just need that kind of capacity, that discipline, that permission, that space to just reset the compass again and again and again. Because we’re inside systems that drag us away from the compass all the time-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

All the time.

Megan Reitz:

… and we focus our attention onto stuff that actually is not the stuff that we need to be attending to.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’m going to close with a really personal rapid fire question, which you can answer however you want. I’d love you to share a way that you have learned to pause when you’re worried you’re not showing up as the leader you want to be. Or when you’re feeling anxious or having a really tough day, how do you communicate that constructively to people so they can work with you more effectively, or if you don’t?

Anyone can go.

Megan Reitz:

Well, I can say that when I’m feeling anxious, truly anxious, it is like being in a vortex where I can’t even see that I’m in a vortex. That’s what it’s like when you’re circling in anxiety. The zone of what you can see narrows.

The metaphor I have is that I have learned over time to know where my lifelines are, which ropes. When I’m in that vortex, what are the ropes I can grab hold on? One is I know there are a handful of people that I can wave at and go, “Sinking. Help.” They know, they get it.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

They get it.

Megan Reitz:

They get it.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

They get it.

Megan Reitz:

That’s one really important, know your lifelines and know who is it that you have that gets it and that can throw you a line.

The second thing that I do is I have a mindfulness practice. I train my brain, if you like, is a very basic way of saying it. I train my brain every day, mainly. Sometimes I don’t. Anyway, mainly most days I train my attention because that is a practice.

We leave our brains very much up to chance, actually. Some of us occasionally, not for a while, but occasionally we take our physical body and exercise it and don’t leave that to chance. Occasionally. But our brains, we think, “Well, they’ll just do their thing. Let’s just hope for the best.” My second thing would be, actually this thing needs some practice and it needs some training and we need to train our capacity to be able to notice what we’re attending to and to shift that attention onto things that are really helpful when we’re in those sorts of situations.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you.

Amy Edmondson:

I so wanted to add value on that one, but I really can’t because Megan’s first point was exactly what I would’ve said. I wouldn’t have said vortex, I would’ve said paralysis. But then there’s that sudden, okay, I know who I can reach out to. They’re few and far between, but I know who I can reach out to. They will just insert a little bit of perspective, and then I can breathe and do the rest of the skills that I know how to do.

Peter Sims:

Yeah, I agree with that.

I think just taking a hike is good. I usually have to reconceptualize a situation. It’s usually something I need to learn. It’s a lack of self-awareness on my part if I’m feeling anxious about something, so just try to get a pause.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah, moving your body can do wonders.

Megan Reitz:

Physical environment as well. Our physical environment, our ability to connect in with systems larger than ourselves like nature, enable sometimes that another kind of lifeline.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah.

I want to thank you three so much and thank everyone who has been with us throughout this series. It’s been so wonderful. Come talk to us on LinkedIn if you have questions. I’m going to hand it back over to Des to close this out.

Des Dearlove:

Thank you. Thank you all.

What am I going to take away from this? Well, I’ve learned about optimism bubbles, that leaders overestimate the amount people are speaking up and overestimate their listening skills. That’s always really important to understand that. Vulnerability is a fact. It’s only a weakness in a world that expects and demands predictability. I think that’s very true. It’s a generational thing. Definitely a movement, unstoppable. That’s very inspiring and I think uplifting, and it can be a source of a superpower. My big, big takeaway is lifelines.

Thank you to Peter, Megan, and Amy, and of course to Morra. This is our final session in the Mind Matters series, but recordings of all the webinars will be available on the Thinkers50 channel on YouTube, and please do reach out and get in touch if you think this content could be helpful to people in your organisation or your life or your community. Please do get in touch.

Thank you for joining us. This is Des Dearlove wishing us all good mental health.

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Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the last of our weekly LinkedIn Live sessions, celebrating the brightest new voices and ideas in the world of management thinking.

Back in January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar Class for 2024 in partnership with Deloitte. The Radar Class consists of 30 thinkers from around the world whose ideas have the potential to shape the future of organisations. Over the last few months, we’ve heard from many of them, and today is our final session. Artificial intelligence and all things digital have been on the minds of our Radar thinkers this year, as has sustainability. Another key theme has been making workplaces more inclusive and healthy for everyone, but nothing good happens without good leaders and the best leaders always want to get better. How they can do that is our topic for our final session today. We like to make these sessions as interactive as possible, so please do let us know where you’re joining us from and put your questions in the chat box.

Our guest today is Dr. Maja Djikic. Maja is a personality psychologist specialising in adult development. She’s an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and HR Management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Her research has been featured in over 50 media outlets, including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, and Scientific American Mind in 15 different countries. Her first book, The Possible Self: A Leader’s Guide to Personal Development was published in March 2024. Maja, welcome and congratulations on making the Thinkers50 Radar List and even more on the book.

Maja Djikic:

Thank you so much. It’s such a privilege to be here.

Des Dearlove:

Well, we’re very, very privileged to have you with us. Before we talk about the book, which obviously we’re going to get our teeth into, our intellectual teeth into I hope, tell us a little bit about your journey, how you arrived at this place in your career and also what a personality psychologist actually does.

Maja Djikic:

Well, I am a very bad person to ask about what personality psychology does because I could be the only personality psychologist out there who doesn’t believe in personality, and that’s perhaps a bit of a longer conversation we can have. But my journey in this area is, basically, coming from studying. Oddly enough, I started with my Master’s studying self-deception and how it is that people develop narratives about themselves and others that are very destructive. I studied collective self-deception.

I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina and we had a genocide there due to which I left the country, about a year into the war in that war. What really got me on is to understand how people behave towards each other. After a couple of years of studying self-deception, individual and collective, you would be surprised how one gets very, very down if you’re analysing genocides in various different parts of the world across history. I really got interested about, how is it that people ever get out of it? How do we grow? Yes, I see how people get stuck, but how do we get out of stuckness, and that started a long growth towards understanding how adults, who are just going about their way, what keeps them stagnant and what helps them grow?

Des Dearlove:

That’s absolutely fascinating. I had no idea you were going to say any of that. Self deception, I mean that’s a whole webinar in itself.

Maja Djikic:

It is.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, we may have to have you back for another, but I really want to talk about the book.

Maja Djikic:

For sure.

Des Dearlove:

The Possible Self, it’s a great title. What does it mean? Where did you get the title from?

Maja Djikic:

Well, The Possible Self is this idea that most people, professionals, they tend to think of themselves in terms of personality types. When you said, “What is it that personality psychologists do?”, oftentimes, what they do, and not all but a lot of time, they think of people in terms of what type of personality a person has and how that develops and what does that mean for their growth or what kind of leader they are. Instead, the idea of Possible Self came out of a realisation that a lot of assumptions that we have about personality are not true. That personality really, unlike temperament, is not genetic.

The way that I define personality trait is an early skill in dealing with your temperament in a particular environment. Basically, you’re given a particular physiological temperament and then you are in a particular family, in a particular culture, and you figure out simply how to get along. Maybe you get along by being nice, and then suddenly you end up as an agreeable personality type, or maybe you get along by being very, very assertive and then you have an assertive personality type.

If the person is a very nice personality type, when they come often as a leader and they get stuck and say, “Well, I just belong. This is how I lead, this is my strength,” I often tell them, “It’s just an early skill. You can develop yourself on the opposite pole of that skill and that would really round out and restart your development as a leader because suddenly you’ll be able to do so many more things rather than limit yourself in some ways to only something that you have developed early and internalises your identity.” The Possible Self, really, is meant to evoke the selves that we left behind. We simply didn’t develop those parts of ourselves, and so much so that we now think of it that, “Well, that’s not ourselves. We know who ourselves are.”

Even that, this idea of a kind of identity and that we know who we are, I find very problematic because we, just like all other living beings like plants and animals, we’re continually changing and growing, so anything that lives has a developmental potential. To try to say, “This is what I am,” is antithetical to how life really is, how we grow, how we continually change. To me, that statement I am, it can become very destructive to what could be and what are these other ways that we haven’t grown in yet that we could develop and continue to grow all the way until the very end of our lives.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, what I’m hearing from you is that it’s a much more organic thing, and I’m fascinated by the idea that personality in particular is sort of contextual in the sense that we adapt because of our culture, our circumstance, our situation. I mean, you might develop a different way, almost like a coping mechanism, so that’s really fascinating.

Maja Djikic:

One more thing I might want to add. Often, I hear people, I’m not sure, they always say, “But wait a minute, I have two kids that are toddlers and they’re very different,” and I tell them not to mistake personality for potential. Two kids, one of them really likes to draw and do art and the other one likes to pull things apart and see the mechanisms. It’s not that they have different personalities, they have different potential, which is reflected in different interests. We need to know that difference.

Des Dearlove:

Let’s start to unpack the book a little bit. I think it’s tempting to think that when we want to change, if we get stuck, I mean that’s what I’m hearing the language from you, that we address our behaviours, but I think one of the big messages of the book is that actually pulling on the behaviour lever is hard, and in the long run, likely to be unsuccessful.

Maja Djikic:

That’s correct. When it’s successful, it’s not to our benefit, and I’ll tell you how. We can decide that we’re going to, from now on, we’re going to get up at 5:00 AM because you just decided that 5:00 AM, other leaders get up at 5:00 AM and it’s one of those things that you want to say, “I tried this.” Every morning you use up that very limited willpower that you have and really, you get in there, although maybe you’re not a morning person. People say, “Well, it becomes successful. You just give it a little bit of time and you do 1% at a time,” and you eventually do this, you change your whole life to be starting at 5:00 AM. You build that habit. The problem is that you have now just made something very stable that is perhaps not developmentally beneficial to you.

What is developmentally beneficial to us? Changes over time. You basically take just one part of yourself and you are bending it through sheer will, which people feel like these days a glamorous thing to do. It’s like, “I have so much willpower, I can bend myself. I’ll wrap myself into a pretzel by having so much willpower,” and then you end up in a situation where you have made your life into something and now you’re reinforcing it with these habits and you think that’s a good thing to do. What we need is habits. Well, you end up in a static stagnant state in which you are bending and limiting your development because you think this is a great idea. You think this is how to lead a best, or healthier, fulfilling life.

Des Dearlove:

If we’re not just going to act through changing behaviour and adopting habits. Of course, the nature of habits is, as you say, they become fixed, they become fixed points, and then we become that early morning person who gets up at 5:00 every morning. That may not be helpful in a different context or even in a different job or a different relationship, all sorts of situations. If it’s not just behaviours, what are the other parts of us that we need to work with?

Maja Djikic:

As I mentioned in the book, basically, we have five parts, or rather there’s many parts of the self. I chose five, the ones that were most significant in our development. In addition to behaviour, motivation, emotion, your mind and your body, which I think of it not in terms of measurements or exercise or food, but in terms of carrying all of your history in neural pathways. The body is really a neural history of all of your learnings from the past. These are the five parts.

And so, I often say what you do when you try to pull behaviour one way and everything else is moving the other way, you’re basically just breaking and self fragmenting. The insight I had about how to change when you’re stuck came from understanding what it means to actually move and develop naturally and spontaneously, and that turns out not to require any real power. What you need to think about, what happens when all five parts move together at the same time, is basically you just need to watch children growing or when you develop a hobby you’re very excited about, all parts of yourself.

Let’s say you’re developing a hobby, whatever it is, you’ve taken up something like tennis or something like this. Well, what would happen is that you would suddenly notice that not only will you actually go and try to play tennis, but you’re going to think about the tennis or anything you watch, your interest is going to be moved, you’re going to have emotions about it. The whole wheel is moving naturally, and importantly, without willpower. Another detail of it is that it actually gives you willpower to do it. When we do intrinsically motivated things, if the cup of willpower gets empty, it actually pours back into the cup.

Then the question became… when people are stuck to know that they are stuck and to ask the question, “Well, why am I stuck?” Because the natural movement is to move in this way. If I’m not moving in this way, if I need to use willpower so hard, and if the willpower is at the centre of my life in some domain of my life, not at the periphery, not just getting yourself to this, but really at the core there’s something, well, then the question becomes what is it, basically it’s like throwing a wrench into this wheel of self that’s moving and removing it.

And so, what five parts of the self is you basically find out, by working on all five parts, how to remove the wrench from the wheel to then have it move and roll smoothly and naturally. The way you would know that you are done is that you wouldn’t need habits to maintain. You wouldn’t need to control your behaviour. You would just start growing naturally. Basically, what happens is that you just simply forget about self-work because you’re growing and interacting and being yourself and feeling fulfilled.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, you mentioned your model, which is the wheel of self, which I found really interesting in the book. You see, at one level, it sounds as though,  if we can pull the wrench out the way, this wheel is going to roll beautifully and spontaneously.

Maja Djikic:

Restart.

Des Dearlove:

We’re going to be in the moment and not have to impose this discipline of willpower on ourselves. But it also seems to me that this is quite internally focused work. This is hard work, this isn’t-

Maja Djikic:

It’s hard.

Des Dearlove:

You make it sound almost like it’s easy to pull that wrench out the way and we’re away.

Maja Djikic:

I always have to be optimistic because it’s actually hard work and not always the most pleasant. But I always tell people it’s not more unpleasant than how it feels for you to live your life with the wrench in the wheel. Even though it’s difficult, it’s not more difficult than trying to live all the time pushing yourself and not getting the outcomes you want. It’s hard internal psychological work.

One misconception people have, they think of it a little bit like in this long term, “Well, it’s just time. It’ll take a long time.” I’ll tell them, “If you know what you’re doing, it doesn’t need to. It can if you want it to go that route.” But for some reason, I really love more rapid change approaches. One thing that neuroscience tells us is that, basically, our brains become more plastic when they’re slightly dysregulated, and so this is why we get traumatised so quickly. Those neuro pathways get written down very quickly if you’re being traumatised.

And so, the question is, can we do the opposite? Can we do the healing, which would be rapidly riding down neural pathways in a different direction? It can be done, and if you know what you’re doing, it can be done rapidly, within weeks. Psychology, it’s the only place where that whole idea that, I don’t know whether it’s a cliche, that time heals all wounds doesn’t really happen. You can be a 95-year-old person and you can remember the way that Mrs. Smith looked at you in your second grade when you didn’t get the answer correctly. You will still have that vivid feeling of embarrassment unless you do something to change that.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If you observe children, particularly very young children, they have a spontaneity and a playfulness and a natural… It’s like they haven’t settled into these rigid shapes.

Maja Djikic:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

The pretzel, whatever shape it is, that life hasn’t formed them into, and they just seem like they can just roll.

Maja Djikic:

Yes.

Des Dearlove:

What you’re saying, I think, is that the experiences that we have, if we don’t revisit them or process them or find a way to get them out of our system, we just live with these wrenches stuck in our…

Maja Djikic:

That’s right, and that’s the thing I really want people to notice. People think, “Oh, well, I just need a different strategy.” Let’s say if I’m a leader, but I’m uncomfortable talking in front of large groups, “Oh, I just need a strategy. I need to know how to hold my hands,” but those are strategies. Or somebody, let’s say, and I know this is a very simple example, somebody who is trying to not yell at their kids as much. They say, “Well, every time I want to yell at them, I count to 10.” I tell them, “You can do that or you can work on yourself in a way that makes you not want to yell at them.” One thing is not to do it, another is not to want to do it. If you can get that motivation, the want, if you can change the want, well, your whole life changes.

I think we have some misconceptions about how change happens. It is long. It is habit based. It’s willpower-strong. I will always be this person, so therefore, people tell me I’ve always been shy, and that means that ever since I remember, so this could never change for me. Well, it turns out most people who are shy have had very early experience of rejection in social settings such that left a bit of a deep wound that they never got to heal. The first obstacle to change is for people to realise that all these ways that they think of themselves as these boxes, stable boxes, “Well, this is just who I am,” is radical acceptance, which I have nothing against, of course.

All I ask people is to say, “This is who I am now. I accept and love who I am now, and I appreciate everything now,” because you might want tomorrow to not have that pain and not to work so hard to feel comfortable speaking in front of others, to not have those little voices of imposter syndrome talking in the background and bothering you while you’re trying to have some very good ideas and share them with your team or with your board, depending on your position.

Des Dearlove:

We carry this baggage, but how can we, I mean, because we’re going all the way back to the beginning, people’s self-deception piece. We deceive ourselves. We tell ourselves, silently, we repress ourselves. We say, “I’m an introvert. I can’t stand up in front of people and talk to people.” I’m sure you’re right. Something happened somewhere, way back in the mists of time, that made us conscious or self-conscious so we don’t want to have that pain again. I mean, on a very practical level, I mean obviously read the book, the book’s fantastic, but how can people begin to look inside in a way that they can see more clearly?

Maja Djikic:

You go back to the mists of time. There’s a writer, Alice Walker, and I’m sure I’m going to misremember her quote. She says, “To heal the wound, you have to go back to its origin. You have to find the place where it was made.” And so, what you do, what the wheel helps you do is you identify the core thing. If you don’t mind, I’ll just give you an example. Maybe that’s easier.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, go ahead.

Maja Djikic:

Let’s say that you are a leader, you’re very successful, but you’re having voices at the back of your mind that when you want to give an idea, it’s like, “Oh, well maybe that’s not correct, or maybe I shouldn’t say it, or what will they think?” You think, “Okay, well I just need to shut down those voices or use my willpower,” but you decide, “Okay, you know what? Let me check this book out. Let me try to work on myself.”

I’ll tell you what the book will ask you to do. The book will ask you to, first, find this very thing that is the thing, it’s almost like you’re anchor. What is this thing that you want to pull out? You can say, “Okay, well, I want to have a sense of value. I am a valued person that I don’t need to rely so much on other people to tell me. I want to have a sense that I’m intelligent, that I am a valuable smart person who can do big things in the world.” That’s on the motivation side.

Then I ask people to stop doing whatever it is that they have been doing to try to change. I know it’s a very funny step. You go from the motivation piece of why, to you go to the behaviour, and the behaviour is mostly just don’t, don’t do anything. Stop getting up at 5:00. Stop trying to sound assertive. Stop doing power poses in the bathroom before the meeting. Just stop. Because what I want people to do is learn how to refill the cup of willpower. Why? Because the other three pieces of self that need to be moved require a lot of it.

I have people gather back the strength. When you do this, because it’s relatively short burst of inner work, I ask people try to do it when you’re not in your busy time at work, you have a little bit more reflection time, at least a long weekend or around the holidays so that you can refill a little bit because it’s going to be intense.

And then, we move on to emotion, mind and neural pathways in the body. For the emotion, we figure out what are our activating situations? Let’s say your activating situation is when I’m in a board meeting and there are 70% of people who are higher, or have achieved more than I have, I start sweating, I start having thoughts. Those are activating situations and saturating triggers.

Des Dearlove:

Bit like what you might call triggers. Yeah, okay.

Maja Djikic:

Triggers. Triggers, and what I ask people is to identify the emotion that they get. I ask, “Is it shame? Is it fear?” I direct people to understand how it is that all of these emotions are telling you something, you are under threat. There’s an obstacle that’s insurmountable for you. If you get what the emotion is, you’re getting closer, you need to define, find where the wrench was put in.

Once you have an emotion, I ask people, once you have an emotion, write down when you’re in that active state of emotion, what are the thoughts that come to your mind? Now, we’re moving on to the mind part. So, what is it? You’re stupid. You’re never going to make it. You’re writing down what I called closed constructs, which is beliefs about yourself. It can be about others or about the world. Belief about others. Something like. You can never trust anybody or you will always fail or you will never make it or you will never be happy with another person, whatever that construct is. I have people find what these are. Think about what this is. Think of it as a set of neural pathways, that there is no more openness to that. Constructs, think of it as, the reason I don’t use the word beliefs is because I want people to understand they are constructed and they can be reconstructed.

I jokingly tell them it’s like a little bit of a bowl. When a bowl is nice and open, all information can go in. Every time you interact with somebody, there’s more information that goes in. Closed construct is maybe this hypothetical person I’m talking about finds out that in third grade their teacher made fun of them, and then that locked, put the lid on the construct of ‘I’m not smart.’ Now, they’re going with this lid for the rest of their lives and acting on it without even knowing that they have this in them.

Once you identify the lid and where it’s snapped on, there is a final technique that is perhaps the most intensive and unpleasant in which you pop back open the lid through self dysregulation, within the very safe confines of an exercise, like a writing exercise. You pop open the lid, and what you do is basically you bring up those old pathways and you overwrite them with a new experience and you only need to do that for maybe 20 minutes for three days.

This particular technique is a combination of multiple techniques that I’ve seen. There’s a great writer on trauma, van der Kolk, who I’m sure you know his book, The Body Keeps the Score. He said, “Listen, we don’t know why some things don’t work and some things work, but here’s a set of things that work.” What I’ve done is that I basically put together a technique made of the things that do work into a basic three-day, 20-minute-a-day technique that can overwrite new experiences on top of the ones that you’ve had before. Which in my book I think of it, I don’t use this word a lot when I’m in a business setting, but I’m going to use it right now anyway, I think of it as healing. It’s going back to experiences that you had and adding in another experience you kind of needed to keep that construct open, to not put down the lid.

And then, with that new implicit belief, which is sometimes I don’t have the right answer, and that’s okay, it doesn’t make me a bad person. Or you see, once you open the lid, once the new information goes in, you have now reopened yourself. Now, you have a different belief about the self with which you enter the world. Suddenly, things that used to trigger you, don’t trigger you anymore. You walk into a room and you don’t feel like they’re going to all judge you or you’re going to say something. Even if you do say something, they all laugh at you and say, “Wow, that’s interesting.” It’s tough luck. Well, I’ll try better next time and let’s see where that takes us.

The way that I think of it is that I’ve simply put together what’s out there that works, but in a way that gets all the parts of the self moving rather than just one.

Des Dearlove:

No, it is fascinating. It’s really interesting stuff. You mentioned healing. We were doing a webinar yesterday evening. We’ve been doing a series of webinars to draw attention to mental health awareness month, and obviously the subject of burnout has come out a lot. We’re constantly being told we have an epidemic of burnout, and I think that’s probably true, whatever language you want to use.

You also mentioned this notion of a cup and being able to replenish. I’ve heard you talk about burnout and I found it really quite helpful, the metaphor you were using. Can you speak to that? Then I will grab some questions and we’ll put some of the people who are tuning in, some of the questions to you.

Maja Djikic:

For sure. The metaphor of a cup simply is that you wake up and you have this much willpower, and every time you do something in the day that you don’t like to do, don’t want to do, that you’re forcing yourself to do, you pour a little bit out. And so, when you wake up at 5:00, you pour out if you don’t want to wake up at 5:00. Then you have to herd your children for daycare, you pour a little bit out because it’s stressful. Then you take the transit or you are in a jam, you pour out. You go to work and you’re dealing with meetings. The point is that you’re pouring out, pouring out, pouring out until the very end.

Now, burnout happens when you keep pouring out more than you pour in. To me, we’re partially in the pandemic of burnout because, again, we have assumptions about this and the assumption is that you’re pouring in at home, but you’re pouring out at work. Immediately, that basically gives eight or 10 hours of our day of pouring out. We basically assume we’re supposed to just pour out at work and do things we don’t want to do. This is a classic stagnating mindset.

Basically, and people sometimes tell me, “Well, Maja, we live in an adult real life, which is who likes their work? Come on, who enjoys their work?” You’re laughing. I can tell you’re enjoying your work. The problem is that if you’re pouring out for eight or 10 hours and then you get home, and guess what? Maybe you have a situation at home, maybe you have kids to take care of, that it’s not always all sunshine and flowers or you have an elderly parent you need to take care of, which can be demanding. Well, basically, you’re pouring way out more than you can ever pour in. If you keep doing that, your body, this cup gets broken and now you’re pouring in, but there’s a crack at the bottom and you can never get enough.

I think what we need is to stop and to understand for ourselves and for others, “Okay, what are the things that I do that pour out of my cup in a day and what do I do to pour in?” If I’m a team leader, I need to sit my whole team down and tell them, “Okay, team, tell me at work, what pours most out of your cup?” They’ll tell you, “Oh, meetings that are too long. Meetings that have no agenda. Talking to people who are negative.” I mean, there’s a whole list. And then, my job and our job together is, how can we minimise these drainers and how can we figure out the things that pour in for most?

People say things like, “Oh, it pours in when I talk to my colleagues.” It turns out that things that pour out for everybody at work tend to be common to everybody, but things that restore them are very unique. Some people, it restores them to have lunch alone. For some people, it restores them to have lunch with others. For leaders, it’s a lot about, first, reduce as much as you can common drainers and then give people flexibility to restore themselves uniquely in the way that works for them.

This is why also it really works well to give people flexibility about where they’re working from. I mean, some people say, “Well, just the whole process of getting there is exhausting and I already have half a cup by the time I get to work, so can I please just if at all possible work at home for two days out of the week or something so that I can not be so drained?”, and so on and so forth.

Des Dearlove:

I used to think in terms of energy vampires, but that’s perhaps unfair because that puts it onto people and it’s not just people that drain your energy, sometimes it’s certain tasks and it’s certain situations and sometimes we’re our own worst enemies.

Maja Djikic:

Processes.

Des Dearlove:

But to understand which, I think we can all perhaps just pause sometimes and think, you do recognize them. If you put your attention on these things, you think, “That person, every time they walk in the room, it’s always the wrong time, so there’s something going on with that energy that that person is bringing us is sapping my energy or my attention.”

Maja Djikic:

Here’s what, you come to me and say, “You know what? When that person walks into the room, I just feel drained.” There’s two things that I would probably say. First, how are your boundaries? Can you push that? If they’re trying to talk to you or they’re not reading cues and they’re overstaying their welcome, do you know how to tell them, “I would really love to talk but not right now,” or, “We can make an appointment then,” or, “Now is the time to leave.” One is the boundary thing.

The second thing is that because often it’s basically, if the energy gets drained as soon as they walk into the room, it means that you’re porous energetically, basically they’re getting you, and how they get you, they get you through the mind. In your mind, you’re thinking, “Oh my god, now I have to listen to them complain for all of this time,” when you really don’t. You really don’t have to listen to them complain. You can say, “You know what? Sounds like you’re not having a great day. Why don’t I leave you to rest and restore in the way you want to while I go and do something else?” I know it sounds a bit cold, but this really helps us not to be drained by people.

Des Dearlove:

We have to protect ourselves. If we don’t look after ourselves, then we’re not much good to other people.

Maja Djikic:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

Listen, I’m going to jump you around a little bit because we’ve got a couple of questions.

Maja Djikic:

Please.

Des Dearlove:

One is sort of a clarification point. Alison says Maja believes in temperaments but not personality types. I think that’s what you said at the beginning.

Maja Djikic:

Yes.

Des Dearlove:

And personalities are a contextual result of temperaments.

Maja Djikic:

Basically, temperament is physiological. Maybe you have a kid who is a little bit more irritable because their tummy hurts a little bit and they develop a different dynamic with a parent because they keep the parent up at night and so on. It looks to a parent like, “Oh, it’s a cranky kid.” It’s not a cranky kid, they’re having a physiological change.

And so, you can have sensitivity to light or sound, but depending on which family a kid ends up, let’s say a kid, exactly same kid, very sensitive to sound, ends up either in a family of musicians where they really appreciate it and get them to engage with it and share that with others, or in a different family where their sensitivity is seen as really annoying and people are forcing the loudness on them and then the person just withdraws, becomes very shy, introverted. You see how a person with the same temperament ends up with two different personalities.

Des Dearlove:

Oh, very interesting. Elizabeth asks, how do we change this on a larger scale, i.e. in organisations where multiple, often conflicting motivations, wants, needs and behavioural strategies are all interconnected at once and also perhaps at odds with the set company mission and vision? We’ve been talking about it very much at the individual unit of analysis. How does this stuff play out? How can leaders use the wheel to change things around them?

Maja Djikic:

Think of each part of the wheel as having an organisational extension. The motivational part of the wheel has an organisational extension, which is organisational goals. And so, what you want is to make the two as congruent and aligned as possible. To do that, of course, you have to be transparent about the goals of an organisation, ask people about their own goals in relation to organisation, and try to activate not their strengths but their interests to keep them engaged, and then discuss very openly and honestly, motivational conflict. Why? Because even inside of our own selves, we are conflicted.

How is it that we expect that we’re not going to have conflicts with organisational goals? For example, you can have a parent who needs to pick up their kid from daycare at 3:00. Now, if you have an organisation that doesn’t ask the right kind of questions, what you’re going to have is that person slipping away from all the technology at a particular time of the day and then coming back on all the while really feeling bad and stressed versus saying, “Hey, I’m having this conflict. Can we do something? Can I work an extra hour or two in the evening or can we figure it out to have somebody cover me at this time and then I will cover them for some.

It’s basically talking about either overlap, alignment or conflict between organisational goals to come up with some adult solutions. And so, you can take each section of the wheel and then do an organisational extension for behaviour, personal burnout. What can we do as an organisation to reduce burnout in a team? On the emotion side, I think of extension of emotion into organisation as culture. What happens when there’s a problem in the organisation? Do we have ways to process it as an organisation?

The same thing, just like there’s an individual mind, there’s a collective mind. Just as there is individual trauma, there’s collective trauma. Perhaps it’s another book, I imagine, to explicitly… but I find a lot of leaders, once they learn about what it feels like for each person, they can do this natural extension into organisational space.

Des Dearlove:

Interesting. I think you mentioned engagement, and I think that’s another, obviously, we’ve got an epidemic of disengagement. Very few people seem to be engaged. If I heard you correctly, the difference between strengths versus interests. How can we re-engage people who are just… The trouble is, they might be really good at what they do.

Maja Djikic:

That is the trouble. The trouble is that being very good at what we do and only being asked to do what we’re to do inevitably is going to lead to disengagement, because engagement comes not from being able to do stuff, but comes from not being able to grow in that direction. What I usually tell people is, “Listen, I know you want people to do what they’re good at, which is their strengths. However, if you don’t have them follow their interests, which is where they want to grow, they’re not going to be engaged. They’re going to be bored and stagnating.”

The strength-based has some benefits as in everybody’s very good at what they do. Interest-based, everybody’s pouring back in their cup, being excited, they want to do more of it. What I find interesting is how it is that people try to increase engagement, organisations that try to increase engagement by giving people basically more money, more promotions. It’s basically, you are increasing their sense of safety that has nothing to do with engagement. It belongs to a different motivational system. Being safe and being exploratory and passionate are simply completely two different motivational systems.

If you want them to engage, you have to ask them about their interests, not outside necessarily work, but even inside of work, what are their most exciting projects they’ve had? What is the area they would like to read more about? When they read about work, what are they reading? By aligning them with potential projects, you’re going to get a very engaged crowd.

Des Dearlove:

You’re almost back to the play, children trying things.

Maja Djikic:

Yes, yes.

Des Dearlove:

I know you’re an advocate of adults playing and trying different things.

Maja Djikic:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, when you’re fully engaged with your work, and I’m sure that maybe you can even share, it becomes like you’re exploring in the sense as being even when it’s difficult and when you’re having conflict and obstacles and a little bit of anger and frustration that you can’t get somewhere, what you have is deep sense of fulfilment and joy. Basically, that sense of fulfilment is a sign we are growing. Part of it, if we can follow that fulfilment and say, “Okay, I’m growing from this. I’m exploring, I’m trying, I’m engaged in this,” and that’s how you know you’re growing.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, that’s good. Couple more concepts. We’re going to run out of time, but I just want to talk to you about envy may not be a bad thing if we know what it signifies, and this notion, which I think is very, very present, the sense of being behind schedule. Why do we do that to ourselves? Sorry, two things for you there!

Maja Djikic:

First, I love envy. Isn’t it such a fast way to be able to catch which part of the self is underdeveloped? Let’s say that I don’t have very good friendships and then I witness, I don’t know, I turn on the television and I, “Oh God, I wish I had friends that,” okay, well, I suddenly have identified where I’m underdeveloped. As long as you know how to say, “Oh yeah, this is what I want. How do I find what prevents me from very naturally and organically developing?” Let me take the wrench out from how I think of friendships. Or, “I love how this person speaks publicly.” Oh, okay, what is the block that’s preventing that? Envy can be such a quick, fast way to have us understand, “Okay, I have to get the wheels moving here.”

Des Dearlove:

Again, as long as we turn it internal and we don’t-

Maja Djikic:

That’s it.

Des Dearlove:

We don’t blame people.

Maja Djikic:

No.

Des Dearlove:

We realise that it’s something that we covet and that we have the power to do something about.

Maja Djikic:

That’s right. If you persist in envy, that means basically you’re not doing your work because your attention should be back to you, just like a moment of envy and then back to you. But if you keep envy, it means basically you’re not doing your work, but you envy other people for being able to grow in their way. It’s about click! and then turning back inside.

The second thing is this experience of being behind schedule. The idea there is that, and I find that people of all different generations have it, it doesn’t even matter how old you are or how successful you are, it’s basically the experience of not being fulfilled that translates, that looks for a cause. It’s a lack of fulfilment that is looking for a cause, and where it finds it is in other people’s LinkedIn profiles and says, “Oh yeah, this person got this and then they got that this time and then I was supposed to.”

Basically, we believe we’re unfulfilled because we didn’t have particular achievements or successes by a particular date, when really we’re not fulfilled. All fulfilment is in the moment so it has nothing to do with the stretch of time. If you’re fulfilled in the moment, this thought will never enter your mind. The past, the future, the schedule, whatever imaginary schedule you think there is, there is no schedule. Either you’re fulfilled, in a thin slice of time, one after the other, or not. If you’re not fulfilled, you look for where it is that you are stuck.

Des Dearlove:

This is going to be the final question of the Class of 2024 Radar webinars, so I’ll try to make it a good question. I think we just have time for it. What is the difference between happiness and joy and what can we do? What can people do to get a bit more joy into their lives?

Maja Djikic:

Fantastic question. Happiness is when you set any goal, you can set any goal, and achieve it. I can set a goal to become an accountant and achieve it, but it’s nothing with my developmental potential. Joy is when you are moving towards the direction of your development. You know what it feels like. Happiness feels like a hit and it goes away very quickly. It’s like a hit of dopamine that then very quickly drops off. Joy is you’re in the middle of an activity you love. You don’t want to be on the other side. You just want to stay in it and keep exploring. That joy, it’s basically an emotional signal that you’re in the middle of development.

If you’re feeling just happiness but no joy, turn your eyes towards where you’re stuck and start moving that wheel again. You will feel fulfilled even when frustrated and upset and sad. All of these, there is going to be an underlying joy of being fully growing in the direction you need to be.

Des Dearlove:

Presumably, if you like, that is the antidote to feeling behind schedule as well. Because if we feel that we’re moving forward, everything is as it should be.

Maja Djikic:

That’s the feeling.

Des Dearlove:

We have joy in our lives, so we take the temporal concerns out because we know that we are where we should be and we’re moving forward.

Maja Djikic:

Joy is a sign to you that you are on your path to a purpose and it feels perfect. There’s no future, no past. You’re just in the now and it feels just right.

Des Dearlove:

Do you know what? I think that’s a perfect place to finish because we are just over time. Huge thank you to Maja. The Possible Self: A Leader’s Guide to Personal Development. It was published in March. It’s published by Berrett-Koehler and I thoroughly recommend it. Thank you, Maja.

Now, as I said, this is the last in our Radar 2024 series, but we will be back with more great ideas and thinkers in the coming months. Please do check out The Thinkers50 website. Even better, sign up for our free newsletter to hear about what we’re up to, and we will look forward to seeing you next time. Maja, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Maja Djikic:

My pleasure. Thank you.

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Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50, and welcome to this special series of webinars entitled Mind Matters. Thinkers50 is delighted to be collaborating with our friends at Silicon Guild to bring you this important and timely series to mark Mental Health Awareness Month. This is the third of our four webinars. Recordings of the first two are available on the Thinkers50 channel on YouTube.

Now the title of today’s session is No More Burnout: How to Fight Back, Find Time, and Stop Letting Technology Win. Our moderator and instigator for the Mind Matters series is Morra Aarons-Mele. Morra is the author of The Anxious Achiever and host of The Anxious Achiever podcast. She was also shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Leadership Award in 2023.

Today, Morra is joined by three very special guests. Alyson Meister is a professor at IMD and a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2021. She’s an expert on leadership and organisations with a focus on health and wellbeing, identity, and diversity, as well as interpersonal dynamics.

We’re also joined by Basima Tewfik, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, and a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2022. Basima’s research examines the social self at work and includes among other things, a reappraisal of imposter syndrome.

Finally, we have Jon Jachimowicz from Harvard Business School, who is a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2024. Jon believes that people with passion can change the world for the better, something very close to our hearts at Thinkers50. His research focuses on how to empower passionate people, and make the world a more equitable place for all of us.

So welcome to you all and everyone joining this session from around the world. We do like to hear where you are joining us from, so please let us know and share your questions, insights, and reflections as we go along. Well, Morra, it’s over to you.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you so much, Des. Hello everyone from an absolutely gorgeous day in Boston, Massachusetts. If you hear birds in the background, it’s because we take good days very seriously here. We don’t get a ton of them. So welcome.

As I was reflecting on this session, I was laughing because I was thinking about this past Sunday morning when I was emailing with one of my clients at 5:45 in the morning, and it was actually a very happy email session. It was a mutually consensual email session. She was prepping for a big media event that we were working on. I was very jet-lagged and full of energy, had been up since four. It worked for us and it was fun. I love to work early on the weekends. Alyson, you and I were talking about that. We feel guilty, but we love that early weekend work.

One of the things that I stress all the time is that we’re all different and we all like to work differently. We all have our own work-life fit, as Cali Yost calls it. I work with a lot of anxious achievers and really intense, successful, hard-driving people who are extremely online and actually feel their best at work and want more of it. So I try not to judge.

The question that I ask them is, is this working for you? Is this serving you? And if you’re a leader, is this working for your team and the people around you? And if you’re a parent or if there’s people in your life who you love, is it working for them? And that’s really the question, is this serving me? Is it working for me? Is there a better way?

I think everyone I talk to right now feels like there’s got to be a better way to manage technology and all the incoming from work, those of us who work in knowledge spaces. There has to be a better way. But we feel stumped, trapped, puzzled by the cycle of responsiveness and overwork that this extremely digital age has wrought. But we have more agency than we think, we do, especially those of us with power and influence. But like any behaviour that we want to change, any addiction, right, Aly, the first step is acknowledgement and a willingness to change.

So with that said, we have incredible experts here who are going to bring us their insights on how to really honour and act on this question, is my behaviour at work serving me and the people that I care about? With that, I’m going to hand it over to Dr. Alyson Meister.

Alyson Meister:

All right. Hi everyone. So happy to be here and talk about this topic that’s really dear to my heart and one that I think we all identify with. I read one study that came out that showed that they looked at certain white collar workers and they found that over 90% of them were checking their mobile phones and their work even on every break from their work. So the first thing we do is say, we’re going to take a break, then we pull out our phone and check our Outlook or look at our Slack or Teams. And so it is a topic that I think most of us resonate with.

And I’m not going to put a blanket statement out there, like technology is evil and it’s so horrible that we need to abolish it from our lives because I think that’s just super unrealistic in this day and age. The mobile phone and our access to the internet and technology is just bringing such huge benefits as well to society when it comes to economic wellbeing and wellbeing around the world.

There’s so many exciting innovations that I see when it comes to technology and AI-driven technology. Workplaces around the world are really capitalising on different things like personalised diagnostics and preventative statistics, AI coaches and therapists. There’s games and apps where you can train yourself to become more self-compassionate, mindful, self-aware, how to have better conversations and lead with more empathy.

So there’s so much going on that’s really exciting and I am no stranger to hooking myself up to every device I can find to measure heart rate variability and all my diagnostics and statistics to see how I can optimise wellbeing. But I think sometimes all of this comes also at a cost and we have to be really intentional about our deployment and use of technology.

Other studies are showing, and I’m sure our colleagues on the line, we’re going to talk about some of these studies that show us how being connected is also keeping us unable to detach and recover from work. It’s extending our workday. It’s damaging relationships, decreasing productivity for some people. It’s increasing loneliness, social anxiety, sometimes perceived conflict with others, emotional intelligence, empathy. It has a lot of costs, our constant connection and our use of technology. So it’s really about being mindful.

As I have just a few minutes, I want to tell you about a recent study that I’m working on at IMD with Nele Dael, a research fellow at IMD, where we’re looking at the intersection of technology and wellbeing. And why we started this is really because I work a lot in the executive classroom, I work with executive teams and leaders, and over and over again, this love-hate relationship with technology is coming up.

So I conducted this micro experiment in class. So just picture the professor coming in and saying, “Who wants to engage in this micro experiment where I’m going to take your phones for the night?” Yay. And it wasn’t forced at all. It was optional, had everybody think about the benefits and some of the costs. And then we decided on a day and I collected mobile phones.

And what ensued after this was utter chaos. I had people calling from their friends’ phones and emails coming in. People reflected on their emotions. They felt anxiety and panic and that compulsively checking your phone and thinking it’s … You’re looking for it in your pocket and thinking your phone is stolen. There were a lot of positive benefits, but they came after some time. So just imagine that, how connected we are all the time. They’re like extensions of our body.

So we took this and we said, “All right, let’s explore what’s going on.” And so around 160 executives across several organisations, we looked at problematic phone use behaviours. So there’s actually scales that you can use to measure what’s called problematic phone use, along with screen time, pickups, notifications, and other objective data. And what’s coming out of this? So experiences of overwhelm, overload, exhaustion, burnout.

And let me just start with saying, what is problematic mobile phone use. People are probably wondering that. So while the scales are evolving and the measures are evolving, it’s really connected to the experience of addiction. The American Psychological Association would say addiction is really a complex condition manifested by compulsive substance use despite the harmful consequences. And so this was literally, it was later extended to behavioural engagement as well, not just substance, but actually engaging in behaviours that you can’t stop doing despite its harmful consequences. And that really came from the gambling research.

So problematic mobile phone use is really connected to this. Think of four categories of what makes a problem. First, loss of control. Do you feel that you can’t control your usage of your phone even when you don’t want to use it? You can’t stop. I have been there, scrolling through those videos and then thinking, “I just can’t stop myself.” For me, it’s diving into Reddit and getting lost in those rabbit holes.

Two, there’s dependence and withdrawal. You’re mentally occupied with this. You feel anxious or stressful if your phone is out of range. If you’re feeling nervous that you might not have it with you, and if it is out of your sight, being preoccupied about where it is.

Emotional coping. So this one is if you’re using your mobile phone to really numb yourself. You feel stress or even boredom, and so you pick it up compulsively to cope with negative emotions you feel. Okay, so that actually is limiting your use of, not only your emotional intelligence, but your emotional regulation skills of developing other emotional regulation skills.

And then fourth, those negative life consequences that any kind of addiction can have. Does it make you feel bad? Are you feeling imposter syndrome every time you open it or fear of missing out, depression or shame, loss of performance at work, on motivation, or harm to social relationships? So when your kids are asking you, “Mommy, mommy, mommy, pay attention to me.” Or you’re asking someone else, “Hey. Hey, can I get your attention for two minutes?” That can damage relationships.

So we look at those four things and how that relates to stress and overwhelm and burnout at work. And just quickly, I’ll give you my outcomes, then we can go into it after we hear from everyone. But a few things we found is that one, on average, these 160 were interrupted by their phones every 13 minutes, every 13 minutes with pickups on average around 72 to 75 times per working day. And younger working individuals, interrupted every nine and a half minutes on average. Over 50% of the people in that study would be classified as at risk of problematic tendencies according to the cyber addiction standards used for the scale. So it’s really not uncommon, it’s pervasive around most working individuals.

We found that it was really related to feeling. So problematic phone use was really connected to indicators of cognitive and sensory overload, so that overwhelm that you feel. Imagine you’re doing all these things and you’re trying to check your phone. Now of course, this is not causal, this is connected. So, well, there’s more work to be done, but it’s showing interesting directions.

And we also found that, importantly, I do want to highlight, what was the most interesting I think is that problematic phone use, what is related to the negative outcomes like stress and feelings of overwhelm isn’t time spent on the phone. It’s not how much you use your phone, it’s actually how you use your phone. It’s that feeling of compulsion and dependency on your phone that actually is much more related than the time use.

So I think that’s interesting because me, who spends a lot of time on my phone, I can somehow maybe tell myself that it’s not compulsive. Like you say, Morra, it’s for good work. And so we shouldn’t be looking at indicators just as time spent, but more about the feeling that it brings up. So yeah, I’ll leave it there with one study that we’re working on because I think it’s just such an interesting topic. And I’m excited to hear from everyone else about it too.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Wow. I have to ask you a question though, to the point of feeling, I think we can all relate, so anxious without our phone, like what if someone needs me and I’m not reachable? I know you study leader identity. Do you have any thoughts about how our identity as leaders has become wrapped up in our responsiveness, in our ability with one Slack to come in and solve a problem quickly? Does that reinforce any identities that we have?

Alyson Meister:

Oh my gosh, absolutely. I think when it comes to change, and many leaders that I work with say they want to change things, like be more connected to their families or to really listen more or delegate more. That kind of responsiveness, that need to be always available, always on, has really stemmed from, I think, first of all, things like it gives us a boost to our self-esteem and dopamine when we can solve problems for people, we can be there. We feel useful. Humans like to feel useful and feel like we have a purpose. So solving problems and being available is giving us some of that sense.

And I think also this comes down to people’s fundamental definition of what leadership is and what a leader does. What is your assumption about how responsive a leader has to be? And I think when you start pushing people and getting really to the bottom of this it’s, “Well, I feel like I always have to be there. I don’t want to let people down.” And a leader can’t let people down. A leader has to be available, those ‘what ifs.’

And if you start doing some real deep level work on, well, maybe it is okay if I put my out of office on or if I shut down and I don’t respond, and then really start practising some different behaviours around that. It’s not easy at first when your identity, your sense of self, your sense of reward is linked to being responsive. But it is possible to change, and I think it’s really important.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you for that. Jon, I’m going to hand it over to you.

Jon Jachimowicz:

Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful to have this forum and this opportunity to talk to all of you. When I think about burnout, I think about two trends that on its face don’t necessarily look like they’re super connected, but I actually think are super closely connected.

I think on the one hand, we have this trend that work, over the last 10 or 20 years there’s this expectation that it should be something that we’re passionate about, something that we love doing. And then on the other hand, we have this growing understanding that people in knowledge work, work longer hours now than they did in the 1980s. I actually think that these two things are very closely connected.

I think that people are working longer hours because they are passionate. And look, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We all love being fired up at work and loving what we do, and we love the fact that it drives us to new heights and perform better. But I also think that there’s an important challenge that we’re missing. And we miss it, I think in part because when we think about passion, we think about it as an attribute of a person, something that a person either has or doesn’t have, like I’m passionate about X or I’m passionate about Y.

But in addition to that more stable component, like this is what I’m passionate about, there’s also the day-to-day experience, like how fired up do I feel right now? And contrary to the myth that passion protects against burnout, that if you’re super passionate you will never burn out, what we find actually in our research is that higher levels of passion can actually make you more prone to burnout. That flame of passion can actually burn you out.

And here’s the underlying logic of what we find in our research. Imagine a day when you are really fired up, you’re really passionate, it makes sense that you’re going to invest more of yourself into your work, right? You’re going to work longer hours, your boss asks you to take on a task or two, you take on five. You do whatever you can in order to make a difference because those are the expectations that you have that day.

And so you work longer hours, you come home, you have a harder time letting go of what happened at work because you’re so connected to it. That also means you have less time to psychologically detach from work. You have less time to engage in potential recovery activities. So you show up the next morning at work and you’re more emotionally exhausted. You’re more burned out, and it’s harder for you to then have the emotional resources necessary to actually then feel that passion again.

So there’s something about passion that burns people out. And I think part of that is that we have a really hard time, I think particularly in our most passionate moments to be self-aware, to know what it is that we need. So I’ll give you an example. I ran this experiment with a tech company based in Europe, and I told half of all people, I said, “Look, tomorrow please set a break. You can put it into your calendar. Put it into your schedule, and just tell me when you’re going to take a break and what you’re going to do in that break. And I’ll follow up with you tomorrow to see what happens.”

And so I followed up with people the next end of the work day and I asked, “How was your break? What did you do and how do you feel?” And here’s what was surprising. Perhaps not surprisingly, half of all people who said that they would take a break didn’t end up taking a break, and they gave me a variety of reasons why it was impossible. But people who were more passionate on that day were even less likely to take a break. And they told me, “I don’t have to take a break. I feel so much energy right now.” So you focus on what you have right now rather than on what you might need in the future.

So I think there’s part of this component that is internal, but I think there’s also an interpersonal, external component, and that’s how our coworkers and how our managers see us. Imagine you’re a manager and you look at your subordinate and they look super passionate that day. They talk animatedly, their eyes light up, kind of how I’m talking right now. If my supervisor were seeing me right now, they would say, “Amazing. I’m going to give this person more work.”

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Right. I mean, he’s the guy that I want on my team. He’s into it. He’s committed. Yes, totally.

Jon Jachimowicz:

Exactly, right? And so for a lot of reasons that might be benevolent, they have benevolent reasons for why they want to do that, they want to help me, they look at me and they say, “Awesome, this person is passionate. Because they’re passionate, I’m going to give them more work.” And because I am passionate, as a result I’m less likely to say no. I’m more likely to say, “Hell yeah, I’m going to go and do that.” So it becomes this reinforcing cycle.

There’s also some malevolent reasons. You can think of managers saying, “Great, my more passionate subordinate that day, they’ll do it for the passion. If I think of who will volunteer, they’re more likely to do it or who’s going to do this for less money.” But in this way, managers actually end up contributing to the burnout. They don’t actually do the things that are most helpful for me in moments when I’m particularly passionate.

So I think there’s really two takeaways for how to think about this. One is I think for us personally to know that our most passionate moments are also the most dangerous for burnout. So rather than passion being this protective shield that protects us from burnout, it actually is something that makes us prone to experiencing more burnout. And so what does that mean?

It means that maybe on our most passionate days, we should be careful of what we say yes and no to. Maybe we hold off until we cool off a little bit, or we actually use that as an opportunity to ask our friends or colleagues or trusted mentors whether or not this is something that I should be doing. Maybe on our most passionate days, rather than using that passion to work longer hours, maybe we use that as a signal to leave work earlier and plan some time for recovery knowing that the passion that I experienced today propelled me to work really hard and really long. And so maybe I actually need more time to recover because I took more of myself to do that.

And what does it mean for managers? Well, it means that when we’re managing other people who are passionate or who appear passionate, that rather than giving into our instincts and our instincts being we should give that person more work or we should lean into that, to actually caution that person in saying, “Hey, I think you’re really fired up right now. Are you sure you don’t want to take a little break?”

Or maybe even just taking that person, say, “Hey, I’m going to take you on a walk outside and enjoying the sunshine,” just so that that person actually gets that reprieve that they might not necessarily know they need in the moment. Or maybe taking a project away that they have so excitedly said yes to and say, “You know what? Let’s revisit this conversation on another day.”

So I think as we’re thinking about burnout, it’s really thinking about the day-to-day and thinking about how things that seemingly seem to be so good for us, like that passion that drives us to work harder can also really backfire and lead us to burning out.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Wow, Jon. First of all, I’m chuckling because as someone who has bipolar disorder myself and who works with a lot of leaders who manage bipolar disorder, when you are … And I’m talking more about bipolar 2, not extremes with bipolar 1. But when you are feeling hypomanic, you are everything you’re talking about. And I know that that’s when you tend to take everything on. And then you might wake up three days later and think, “Oh shit, what have I gotten myself into?”

And you have to have people around you who can rein you in. You have to because you’re not reliable. And it’s coming from the best place of, “Yes, I love this. I’m so happy. I want to do this. Yeah, let’s go.” You have to have, I call them guardrails. Do you teach people guardrails?

Jon Jachimowicz:

I try my best. It’s hard because even if you tell someone in your most passionate moment you need a guardrail, in the moment, people will say, “Well, I don’t …”

 

Morra Aarons-Mele:

No, I don’t.

Jon Jachimowicz:

“… I don’t need it.” I mean, prospectively people know, but in the moment it’s really difficult. It’s kind of like the old issue of if you ask people ahead of time what they want to eat and you have them order food. Ahead of time, people are more likely to order healthier food because they know this is what I should be doing. But if you then ask people in the moment, “I know you ordered the healthy meal, but I have this amazing meal, maybe not so healthy, but it’s going to taste better,” in the moment, people are going to be more likely to choose and just give into their temptation. So it’s really challenging and, I think, difficult to do that.

The best way I think, is to try to make it a habit and try to make it something that you literally cannot say no to. So if you schedule something in your calendar, say at five o’clock today you’re going to go play pickleball, it’s a commitment device. You’re going to see your friends, you’re going to do it. Come hell or high water, you’re going to have to go or else you are going to disappoint your friends. Or as the German that I am, I’m going to upset my schedule, which would be extremely painful for me, not something that is possible for me.

So I think just making sure that I have guardrails that I cannot say no to in the moment or where the cost of saying no are higher. Whether that’s roping in other people or making a commitment to myself that is harder to actually renege is going to be really important.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you. Basima, over to you.

Basima Tewfik:

Great. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a treat to be here today and also hear Alyson and Jon’s thoughts. The angle I would love to take us in is to really think about what does, and more importantly, what does not cause burnout.

Having too much to do, role overload is definitely a factor that is associated with burnout. And so it makes a lot of sense to think about a 24/7 work culture. But often when we talk about burnout, there’s also a number of other additional factors that get roped in there. And these factors tend to be more intrapsychic or things that are in the minds. And so, one that is really relevant to me and my research is thinking about what I call imposter thoughts or what is popularly known as imposter syndrome.

So just as a definition to get everyone on the same page, I know we’ve all heard about this phenomenon, but I define it as the idea that other people think you’re smarter than you think you are. So think about the classic thoughts of, “Oh, I think other people overestimate my capabilities.” Or, “I think other people see me and my abilities as better than I think they are.” And conventional wisdom would suggest that when you experience these intrapsychic factors like imposter thoughts, it’s going to cause burnout.

And the logic behind this would be something around the notion of, “Hey, if I have imposter thoughts, I think other people think I’m smarter than I think I am,” I’m going to do maybe one of two things. So either I’m going to ruminate a lot and think about, “Oh my gosh, I’m not as good as other people think I am. What am I doing? Am I supposed to be here?” Or I might do an opposite tactic of, “Okay, I better invest my whole self into this. I better muster all my might and effort to try and achieve the task that is in front of me so people don’t discover that maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.”

But either way, you’re ending up feeling as if you’re at the end of your rope. You’re burned out cognitively, emotionally, and physically. And so yeah, it makes a lot of sense that hey, plausibly imposter thoughts are going to cause something like burnout or strain. But what my research is really about is actually revisiting some of these assumptions that we have around a phenomenon like this. And one that I’ve been particularly interested in is this relationship between imposter thoughts and burnout and strain.

And what’s really interesting, at least to me and hopefully interesting to others, is this notion that I actually don’t seem to find a consistent causal effect between having imposter thoughts and burnout. So what I mean by that is it doesn’t seem to be the case necessarily that when you have imposter thoughts that you’re necessarily going to also experience this burnout and strain contrary to what we seem to think is the prevailing wisdom.

And so really back this up or actually garner support of this, I want to talk about one experiment that I recently ran. So it was an experiment in which participants were sorted into one of four conditions, essentially. They were either presented with higher role overload and high or low imposter thoughts.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Could you define role overload for the audience?

Basima Tewfik:

Yes. So when I say role overload, that’s a great question, I want you guys to be thinking about too much to do in too little time. So really thinking about, okay, you have an hour and how many tasks do you need to get done in that hour? And you’re thinking, “Ah, there is no way in hell I’m going to get through everything that is on my plate in this period of time.”

And so that’s exactly what I had half the participants experience. They were doing this task and they had this Post-it note, and there were additional tasks that kept getting added to their Post-it note as they were working through. And they were just like, “The time is not expanding, but suddenly my workload is.” And then they were also, some of them were induced to have imposter thoughts, so this idea that other people overestimated their capabilities, while others were not induced to have these thoughts.

And what’s interesting is exactly what I said to you guys at the beginning. When you experience more role overload, you certainly experience more burnout. So there was that causal relationship. But what was particularly curious to me is this notion that if you also experienced imposter thoughts, there wasn’t actually any additional burnout or strain that appeared to come about. And really to unpack this even further, what I actually found is that imposter thoughts actually almost helped you rise to the challenge when you had more on your plate.

I’m still unpacking the logic of why that might be. I think it changes how you view role overload, but essentially it brought me back to this original point which is that, hey, we might not have a really full understanding of imposter thoughts and maybe this relationship with burnout isn’t exactly what we expect. But there’s probably this lingering question that you’re all having here, but why do we still have this persistent wisdom that when you experience imposter thoughts, you’re also going to report being burned out?

And I think it might actually have to do with some sort of, what I call mechanistic reasons or the way that we’ve been studying this phenomenon. A lot of the time, we’ve been studying it correlationally. And so basically what that means is I’m filling out a survey about my imposter thoughts, and then I’m also at the same time or maybe a little bit later, filling out how burned out I feel or how anxious or how strained I feel.

And when you’re doing that, there’s something that’s really possible, which is you might experience a halo effect of sorts, which is that if I’m reporting imposter thoughts, we know it doesn’t feel great. So whenever I see other things that are also going to tap into this idea of it doesn’t feel great, I’m also going to rate those highly. And so what does this actually mean for us and what is the recommendation here?

What I’d like to encourage us to think about is that when it comes to burnout, that we don’t necessarily fall back on these intrapsychic factors, this idea of imposter thoughts or there’s something wrong with me and that I need to necessarily manage it. It might actually have to do with what is on your plate, how connected you are to technology, what that might be.

And so the next time you’re getting a task from your manager or a peer, it’s worth that conversation of saying, “Okay, I already have task X, Y, and Z on my plate. Task A that you’ve just added seems really, really important. How do you want me to prioritise that? How can we shift something that’s already on my plate maybe to someone else, or maybe do we push that to the back burner? Is it no longer something important that we need to think about?” Essentially zooming out.

What I really want when it comes to imposter thoughts and burnout is for people to stop being so hard on themselves when they’re having these imposter thoughts thinking that I’m the one who’s deficient in some way, that I really need to work on this so I’m not always thinking that other people overestimate me, which doesn’t always necessarily make me feel great.

Rather think about what’s going on in the workplace, what’s going on in the relationship with your manager or your peers that you can actually have a direct conversation about, which actually might be the thing that is causing you to report that you’re experiencing burnout as opposed to something like imposter thoughts, which actually might not have a causal relationship.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Oh, sorry. Was one of you going to jump in? I was just going to say I love this so much. I love your research. I cited it in my book also because it really re-frames things that we’ve been told are bad for us, and I love that. It sounds like the intentionality behind addressing these larger systemic issues is actually good for other people. You’re saying, “Hey, boss, maybe we don’t need to prioritise this.” I’m just curious what you find in your research about how people can actually take these thoughts that they’re having and turn them into positive outcomes for the team.

Basima Tewfik:

So one of my papers is really looking at the interpersonal effects, which is what is the effect of having imposter thoughts on other people? And what I find across two field studies, so one was a study in a finance firm, one was doctor-patient interactions, as well as two experiments to again get at this causality question is that when you have imposter thoughts, you essentially seem to be doing this unconscious overcompensation effect where you’re like, “Uh-oh, I think other people think I’m smarter, so let me actually try and distract them and dazzle them with my charm.”

And when you ask people about this, are you actually being more other-focused? You don’t find that to be the case. So people don’t actually realise that they’re doing this. But what it’s showing is that sometimes imposter thoughts in some ways can have this really nice silver lining when it comes to interacting with others, and that might feed into having these better conversations. Linking this back to our discussion around burnout, it might lead to better team dynamics.

One thing I do want to highlight though is I don’t want people or managers to think, “Oh, great, I’m just going to hire everyone with imposter thoughts so that all these teams are working smoothly and everybody’s more interpersonally oriented,” because I do want to return to the earlier comment, which is it still doesn’t feel great.

So it’s this really interesting balance of how do you balance the negative affect or negative emotions you might be feeling with these interpersonal upsides? And are you in a space where you can actually capture these interpersonal upsides? So if you’re working, for example, very solo, you’re not interacting with others, imposter thoughts overall are not going to be that great for you. But if there is that opportunity to interact, it might actually be better and it might lead to more productive conversations when it comes to things like burnout.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you. Okay, I want to ask a question. We’ve got some great questions from our audience. This is a question from Indira and I’m going to let anyone jump in. What are the most common misconceptions about burnout that you’ve encountered and how can they be addressed?

Alyson Meister:

I can kick off.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Sure.

Alyson Meister:

I was thinking with that question, one thing I really want to highlight, and I think it really relates to what Basima was mentioning around anyone can struggle with burnout. It’s not a sign of weakness. There’s this misconception that somehow burnout is weakness. And I liken that to taking a really healthy fish, when you get a goldfish, and putting it in a fishbowl for the first time. You have this healthy, happy fish. If you don’t clean that water and provide food and nutrients and light, that fish, no matter how strong it is, can’t survive in a toxic environment.

So I think one of the misconceptions, and then I’ll pass it on, I’ve got many that I’ve done within the classroom, I think is that burnout is a weakness and somehow you are responsible for fixing it all yourself and you can fix it all. If you are in an environment that’s toxic, it is very, very difficult to create that protective bubble around yourself.

Jon Jachimowicz:

I think one thing that comes to my mind is that burnout isn’t binary. It’s not like you either have burnout or you don’t have burnout. To some extent, we all struggle with burnout, and I think the challenge is that we often think that burnout is something that you need to address reactively, when you are burned out, you should do X. When in reality, if you think of all of us struggling with burnout to certain degrees and certain extents, I think the broader question is what are you going to do to manage your burnout? What are you doing day to day? How are you treating yourself to make sure that your levels of burnout are within limits that you are comfortable with?

And it’s really this, there’s no such thing as no burnout. We all have things in our lives that are stressing us out, but there is such a thing as too much burnout. And again, it’s fine to be in a state of too much burnout for a little bit. There’s things in life that we cannot control. They’re going to happen, they’re going to stress us out, we’re going to feel emotionally exhausted. But it’s more about what mechanisms do I have to then bring it back to a level of exhaustion that I’m comfortable with? How can I manage that in such a way that I really feel comfortable with how things are going? And that comfortable level might be different for different people.

Basima Tewfik:

And for me, jumping on both Alyson and Jon’s comments, one thing I’m hearing from you guys and it’s occurring to me right now is also this idea of we’re very reactive when it comes to managing burnout and this idea that actually we need to start being more proactive about it. I think many of the people probably listening today as well as many of us on this call, are people who push ourselves to the limit.

And maybe thinking about, okay, if we know that we have a tendency to do that, what are we making sure that we’re doing to prevent us from getting there? So I think about Jon’s comment about pickleball earlier. What are the built-in activities that you’re treating as just as important as your work meetings, that you’re making sure that you’re engaging in to prevent getting to the end of your rope, essentially?

Alyson Meister:

Yeah, it’s so funny. So many people think you could just save up your stress for the summer vacation and then somehow miraculously you’ll get rid of it all. And then they’re very disappointed to find that two weeks back in that same fishbowl, we feel bad again. So it’s something we need to address daily, our strategies for recovery daily, weekly, monthly, not just saving it up for that next beach vacation, although it’s lovely. I’m not saying don’t do that.

Jon Jachimowicz:

Something that both of you remind me of is this research showing about the long-term effects and benefits of going on vacation. And what they find is that you go on vacation a week or two weeks and you feel great for a day or two when you come back, but then two things happen. One, you’re back in the same environment that stressed you out and two, while you were gone, work still continued and so now there’s more work waiting for you.

So you’re more likely to have to work or feel like you have to work longer hours to make up for it, putting you back into the burnout negative. And so it’s actually, I love the perspective, Basima and Alyson, it’s exactly that. It’s not just something that you can save up. It’s something that you have to do.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Recover a little every day.

Jon Jachimowicz:

Yeah.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

The other thing that I’m also hearing from all three of you in very different ways is really taking a minute. I’m going to shift to systemic stuff in a minute. We have a good question on that. But just sticking with what I can do personally is really understanding your motivations for the behaviour that might be promoting your burnout, right, Alyson? Like, why do I need to pick up my phone and respond right away? Jon, is my passion really serving me in this moment? And Basima, these very anxious thoughts that I’m having about my self-worth in the office. How is that affecting my role and what I’m taking on? And so just curious, even personal reflections about looking at your own motivations for taking on behaviours that, again, like ordering that meal, you know are going to make you feel bad?

Alyson Meister:

Ordering that meal. In fact, one study we have under review that we presented at Academy last year is on performance-based identities, which is with Ben Walker and Dan Caprar. We looked at professional rugby players, and in particular how their professional identity has become so tied to performance or perceived performance. And I think that’s really something I’ve had to take note of in the business world. I started in strategy consulting and I worked in that before coming into academia. And I think academia itself promotes this point of, you’re only as good as your last paper or your last publication.

And I think when our identities become so tied to our work performance, I think that can be really, really dangerous. And I think that ties into a lot of what Jon was saying around passion. So passion and performance, if that becomes who you are instead of what you do, for me that has been a very important revelation in helping me, and with the executives I work with, create some distance and create room for failure and for just taking a break.

Jon Jachimowicz:

I couldn’t agree more with you, Alyson, not because you said my favourite word, passion, obviously, but I think the broader challenge is that this is not just something that people deal with themselves. We’re also in a context where we’re surrounded by other people. Emma Frank and Kai Krautter and I, we did this study where we looked at what it’s like being on a team surrounded by other people who are really passionate.

On the one hand you’re like, “Great, I’m going to go and be surrounded by other people who are really passionate. That is the team where I’m going to feel the most energy and maybe the least burnout.” And that’s partially true, but what we also find is that we feel a social pressure to then also be just as passionate as everybody else. And that can also then be really exhausting.

The practices that other people adopt may work for them, but they might not work for us. And we might not necessarily be privy to all the things that other people do outside of the work context that I can observe or what they might be feeling on the inside, but I take my cues from how I look at them and what I interpret from them.

So there’s this, I know very oft said saying, “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.” I think it takes on particular importance in the workplace because not only do we see only what’s happening in the workplace, we also don’t see what’s happening outside of the workplace, what people are doing to then show up at work and be their best selves.

Basima Tewfik:

And I think to add to what Alyson and Jon are saying, I think some other motives might also be around what you think good enough is. So when it comes to imposter thoughts, some people ask me, who’s right? Is it, I am right about my own abilities or is what I think other people think of my abilities potentially more right? And I tend to argue that actually we might be the wrong one.

If we’re having imposter thoughts, we might be underselling our own abilities. We might be thinking about all the things that we don’t know how to do because of information asymmetry or whatever it might be. And so because of that, we have this standard of what we think we need to reach in order to excel at work and at our tasks. And so we’re pushing ourselves to a standard that maybe other people actually are like, “You don’t need to go to that standard. It’s great that you do and it really benefits the workplace, but that’s just not where you need to go.” So I do think sometimes we might be self-deceiving in a way that is really counterproductive.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Oh my gosh. I tell my anxious achievers to keep a brag book. That’s also evidence. So if you’re struggling and you’re going into the sales meeting and you think you’re a total failure and you’re going to get fired because you haven’t made your numbers, have your numbers from the last three quarters in front of you, and I bet you they’re good. So that when you start feeling like, “I stink. I’m a failure. I don’t even belong here,” there’s literal evidence. I have a clips file of people saying nice things about my work that I literally have to consult a lot of days because, you know.

Basima Tewfik:

I love that. I love the brag book. I was like, “We should all do that.”

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Well, everyone needs a brag book, a hundred percent, and a friend who will also tell you how great you are. Okay. Audience, dive in with questions. I’ve got a couple of good ones here. I’m going to shift outwards a little bit. We have a question from Jasper. What are your thoughts on implementing organisation-wide interventions and policies based on your findings? And that’s for anybody.

Alyson Meister:

Who do you want to start? I can jump in. Okay. Well, first of all, I guess it depends on what the finding is. Is it around exhaustion or overload or too much work or toxic cultures? But I think if we say, Jasper, it’s so important to start at the level of organisational culture. One of the things organisations shouldn’t do is say, “Oh, people are tired and people are exhausted and burning out. Let’s give them more yoga classes and more mindfulness classes. Go ahead, fix yourselves,” and then lament when it’s not working. And I think it’s great that they’re doing something, yes, but that’s not going to fix the problem, the problem of people being tired and exhausted.

We really have to take a systemic approach and look at factors like meaningful work, like I’m sure Jon will talk about, inclusion and inclusive climates and belonging and psychological safety. Things like sustainable practices, how are people learning to work? Do they have some balance in their life? And then at the very basic level, what kind of systems and supports do you have for people? If you’re in an organisation that does not offer any provision for mental health, then no matter how great the work is, people can struggle.

And so I think it’s a complex question and I think it’s just really important to start at that systemic level. Rather than start solving the symptoms, you have to really get to the root cause of what’s happening.

Jon Jachimowicz:

I am going to talk about my favourite word again, sorry. No, but I mean I think there’s three things that are challenging and I think that we need to think differently about when we’re thinking about this at the organisational level.

I think one right now when we’re thinking about how to manage people who are self-driven and passionate, we stop at the hiring phase. We say, “All you’ve got to do is find these passionate people and they will manage themselves. They will take on things, they’ll do things. They’re super proactive and we love them.” But actually thinking of passionate people as being worse at managing themselves than people who are less passionate because they have a distorted view of themselves and what they might need. I think it creates this really interesting way of thinking about how organisations might need to show up, actually getting a bit more involved, and not just letting passionate people be by themselves.

I think the second one is for all the things that passion is great, passion is also not the be all and end all of everything. People should have the ability to be motivated to work for a variety of reasons. And that might actually be really helpful to have people that have a variety of different motivations, meaning they have a variety of different approaches for how they work and what they do outside of work.

But in some work that I’ve done together with Mijeong Kwon and Julia Lee Cunningham, we find that people who love their work more are also more likely to moralise loving your work. Meaning that they will judge other people based on why they work and they will judge people harshly if they don’t also love their work. So a passion-driven organisational culture can be quite hostile to people who themselves are not passionate. And that’s bad because then you just create an echo chamber of people who all want to work 60, 70 hours a week and want to give it their all for their organization and who all end up burning out.

And I think the third thing is to think about where the organisation draws its sources from. If you’re a senior leader in an organisation and you say, “Ooh, I see a lot of burnout around me,” do you see what’s happening at the front line or at the lowest level of the organisation? Because that is where the organisation’s norms are going to be most visible.

Jen Danos has done wonderful work showing that if you want to understand what your organisational culture is like, don’t look at the people at the top of the organisation. They might be the ones that set the culture, but they’re also the ones that are least bound to it. They have the greatest leeway not to comply with the norms. You got to look at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy. Those are the people who are most punished for violating some sort of organisational norms.

And so if you are more likely to see burnout at the bottom than at the top of the organisation, maybe think of all the ways in which people at the top of the organisation are deviating from organisational norms and figuring out what is happening here in this organisational cultural context that might actually create issues. So if your senior team isn’t burned out, but you’re hearing a lot of burnout towards the bottom of the organisation, it’s still your responsibility. It’s not their fault.

Basima Tewfik:

That’s great. The only thing I would add is organisation-wide policies or interventions when it comes to burnout, they’re incredibly, incredibly difficult to do due to the nuances of given individuals. We’re all different. So what Alyson was talking about with yoga classes, that’s not going to work for everyone. Maybe it’ll work for one person, but it’s not going to work. We also hear about having no-meeting-Wednesdays or whatever that might be. But really what ends up happening is that a bunch of tasks get moved to another day. So you’re just pushing off and creating backlogs.

What I would argue, going back to a comment I made earlier, which is just actually encouraging a culture where people are talking about what is on their plate and really making it top of mind for everyone that we need to make decisions about what is most important to get done here and what is not most important to get done. What can be shifted to someone else or completely eliminated from the list of tasks? And I think really that proactive mindset, that being very clear about the workload that everybody has is the only way that we can start to really address burnout in a way that actually has observable consequences or observable benefits.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

So workload is really important at the end of the day?

Basima Tewfik:

I think that’s where I fall, and I think that’s where organisations can really come in. I definitely think there are definitely other factors, but that’s the one that really stands out for me. And I’m curious, Alyson and Jon, if you agree or disagree.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Gregory has a great comment, Monique, if you want to throw that up. “The organisation is burned out and we’re victim blaming our human capital? It shouldn’t devolve to wellness programs.” Yeah, I think that’s really true.

Alyson Meister:

Exactly. And I think there’s really one thing that’s really important, and you’ve talked about this on some of the other podcasts that you’ve had this month, is the role of leaders. Leaders really do set the culture. As Jon was saying, if you’re a passionate, excited leader, you’ll expect that of everyone. But also if you’re an under-slept and completely exhausted leader, that will be contagious to people too.

I always say leadership is contagious. So it’s so important to be aware of the energy that you’re projecting, the habits that you have, the role model that you’re setting because you can have an awesome environment to work in and you love your work. But if you have a leader that is someone that is acting in ways that are really promoting burnout, then it’s tough to fight against that, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Oh wow, my brain is just humming with so much great new information, but it’s time to wrap. I want to assign each of you a speed round before I hand it over to Des to clear us out here. I want to come back to tech. I want you to tell me one way that you are fighting back against the undeniable intrusion of digital responsiveness in our lives. And I’m going to start with Jon.

Jon Jachimowicz:

I actually think that one of the challenges that we have is that it’s actually really hard not to be online, especially in knowledge work. We derive a sense of self-efficacy and comfort in feeling needed by other people and saying, “Hey, I’ll be on vacation, but if it’s urgent, you can email me.”

My wife and I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago and we went to Hawaii for two weeks, which was magical. And I tried out this thing where I went into my phone settings and I just turned off the email. You can just turn off the email because it’s hard to not be on my phone. But at the very least, I could not receive any emails from anybody. I had an out of office. And I told people, if it’s urgent, call me.

Now, the barrier to calling someone in this society and current culture is very high. It turned out I got one phone call over a two-week time period, and about after four or five days, I stopped worrying about what emails I’m missing, but it took about four to five days. So figuring out when you are switching off to actually use that switching off time and thinking about the ways in which technology has seeped into our lives in ways that actually makes fully switching off and detaching harder.

There are great phone settings. You can turn it off and then it’s going to take a couple of days and I promise you it’ll be okay. If there’s an emergency, people can call you, but people are not going to call you for small things anymore.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you. Basima?

Basima Tewfik:

Like Alyson, I was a strategy consultant before I went into academia, so this is actually one that I’ve been doing since I was 22, which is, and it’s related to Jon’s comment, I actually do not have a push on my mail, on my phone. I realised when I was in consulting that I would get pings constantly, and it didn’t matter what time of the day it was, it didn’t matter if it was a weekend. And I realised I was actually coming away with a lot of anxiety or just operating at a high level of anxiety of like, who’s going to contact me next? I need to respond right away. And it took a while to actually get over this, I don’t need to check my email all the time. But it’s something that I do really deliberately.

The second thing that I do in my calendar is I have no tech periods that are purposely scheduled. I typically bind this with a social type of activity or something that’s related to exercise. But just making sure that I’m not going to be using my phone or not even going to have my phone in my vicinity and someone else is around me that can actually hold me accountable and make sure that that’s not happening.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Love that.

Alyson Meister:

Love it.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Alyson?

Alyson Meister:

Well, for me, I think as we know, tech is activating, right? The second we look at our phone, it’s activating our systems. There’s awesome studies by Jeanette, I don’t know how to pronounce her last name, Skowronek, but in nature, human behaviour around even the presence of our smartphone is reducing our attentional performance. So our tech is activating us. And I think in an era where tech is pervasive, I’ve been really focusing on what it means to be human and really trying to constantly connect to my body, to my emotions, to my breathing.

And so, one skill I’ve had to actively learn and actively practice is just the skill of breath. I find myself when I’m getting overwhelmed and I’m checking email and I’m on my phone and I’m getting calls and you’re getting texts to just stop and breathe and look at nature and say, “This is really, really overwhelming at the moment.” And just regulating my physiology, for me, that’s been a strategy that I’ve been employing personally that I found has made a huge difference throughout the workday. And so I really recommend the power of breath.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Breathing right now. I want to thank you all so tremendously for your time and your excellent work. I’m going to hand it back to Des to close us out.

Des Dearlove:

Thank you. Thank you all of you. Just some new things I’ve learned I’m taking away, problematic mobile phone use is like an addiction, but overwhelm isn’t how much we use it. It’s how we use these devices and we’ve got to find better strategies. Passion can make you more rather than less prone to burnout. And someone described it in the comments as the Icarus effect. If you fly too close to the sun, we know what happened to Icarus. And imposter thoughts are not causally linked to burnout and may actually be helpful to help us cope with what actually may well just be role overload. So that’s my new learnings.

My key takeaways are that burnout is not a weakness. If you put a healthy fish in a toxic fishbowl, they will become burned out. And even if they go on holiday and you put them back in the same fishbowl, we’re going to be in trouble. Burnout is not binary. We shouldn’t think about it in those terms. We all have some element of burnout and we just need to be better at managing it. And we need to be more proactive instead of reactive. So thank you to Jon, Basima, and Alyson, and of course to Morra.

Our final session in the Mind Matter series will be at the same time, same place next week. Our topic will be Leaders Speak Up: Unlocking Mental Health in the Workplace. And Morra will be joined by the wonderful Megan Reitz, author of Speak Up, the fabulous Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization and originator of the concept of psychological safety, and the tremendous Peter Sims, founder and chairman of BLK SHP, Inc.

Recordings of the first two webinars in the series are already available on the Thinkers50 channel on YouTube. This one will be available shortly. Big breath everyone. Plenty of breathing, and see you next week. Thank you.

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Transcript

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to this special series of webinars Thinkers50 is presenting in partnership with Silicon Guild. During May, we will be highlighting Mind Matters to mark Mental Health Awareness Month. We have four great webinars lined up on Tuesdays throughout the month, with some fantastic speakers. The webinars will be moderated by Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and host of The Anxious Achiever podcast. No one is better equipped to guide us through the many complex issues and global best practice in workplace mental health. We had a great session last week to kick things off with Rita McGrath, Poornima Luthra, and Andrew Barnes. It is now available to watch on YouTube.

Today, Morra is joined by three more brilliant speakers. We have Sanyin Siang. Sanyin is a professor at Duke University where she leads the Coach K Leadership and Ethics Center. She writes a column for the MIT Sloan Management Review and is the author of The Launch Book. Most importantly, she’s also a Thinkers50 award winner. Along with Sanyin, we have Lenny Mendonca. Lenny is a director emeritus from the Washington and San Francisco offices of McKinsey & Co. Among other things, Lenny lectures on inequality at Stanford, was chair of Children Now, co-chair of California Forward, and founder and chair of Fuse Corps. Most importantly, he and his wife are the founders and owners of the Half Moon Brewing Company and the Mavericks Beer Company. And finally, but not least, we are joined by Julie Lythcott-Haims. Julie is the author of How to Raise an Adult; her memoir, Real American, and Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. She’s on the Palo Alto City Council. She’s a writer, speaker, teacher, mentor, and activist.

So welcome, everyone joining from throughout the world. Please let us know where you’re joining from and share your queries, thoughts, insights and observations at any time during the session. Our title today is Be Your Own Best Friend: Tools to Manage Anxiety and the Pressure to Be Perfect. There’s a lot to talk about, so over to you Morra.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thanks, Stuart. I am so thrilled to be back with you all. I am joining you all from a WeWork in London. The noise situation is not ideal, but because this session is about being kind to yourself, I’m just going to go with it. I actually would love you to go with me on one more thing. I want to do an experiment before we dive in here. So, if you’re willing to go on this experiment with me, I would like you to close your eyes. This is inspired by a wonderful meditation on gratitude I did this morning, from a man named Pascal Auclair. I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to think about two qualities about yourself that you like or admire. Now, this could be a quality like, I make a mean coffee cake, or a wonderful coffee, or it could be something big like, I’m solving world peace. I don’t care.

Think about two qualities that you like about yourself, and really see them. See them in your mind. And now, I want you to think about two things you’re grateful for. Again, these could be small things, like an amazing cup of coffee you had this morning, or it could be something big and full of love, two things that you’re grateful for. And just hold that for a minute. Those two simple questions are tools that I use when I’m feeling like the world is hard, things are uncertain, and I’m not sure I’m up to the task. That’s what today’s session is about, and we have amazing people to share their stories, their tools, and their own personal battles with anxiety, mental health, perfectionism, inner critic, you name it.

I wrote a book called The Anxious Achiever, and I work with people who hold themselves to very high standards. It’s funny, I did a poll on LinkedIn and 87% of you said that you hold yourself to higher expectations than you hold other people. I get it, but again, do we have to do that? Do we have to do that? So we’re going to talk about that today. We’re going to talk about being practical, keeping that drive for success, which we know and love in ourselves, but being a better friend to ourselves as well. And audience, this is your session. As Stuart said, jump in, tell us where you’re from, ask the panel questions, lend us a comment. I promise I will get to you, we’re going to have some remarks from our speakers and then a dialogue. And I’m going to kick it over to Sanyin to start us off.

Sanyin Siang:

Oh, Morra, first of all, thank you for the exercise. I feel myself tearing up because there’s all these memories that are just images that are flooding in.

Sanyin Siang:

First of all,, it’s a joy to be here, and I mean that, joy to be here with friends who I admire and respect, and in a session that is formed by two communities, Silicon Guild and Thinkers50, that I’m so honoured and proud to be a part of. So I did say, on my LinkedIn when we’re talking about this session, that we’re going to get real. So, I’ll start off in my remarks with a personal… I’ll get personal, and I’ll talk about three perspectives that were helpful for me that I hope will be helpful for those who are listening, and then conclude with something that’s also personal and meaningful.

So for those who see me, I’m usually a butterflies, unicorn, and rainbows type of person. However, none of us is immune to anxiousness, to sadness and last spring, I was feeling really sad and having some not-so-great thoughts. And I talked to my husband about it, and Chad, who’s a physician, said, “Sanyin, so much of this is also neurochemistry. So, let’s get you some help.” So I started seeing a therapist, and what that insight was so helpful for was, one, every one of us face this, and we all need help, but where there’s help available to be able to accept it, because that’s our gift to ourselves. And the therapist is wonderful, she asked questions. She helped me unpack a lot of things, because there was really no reason for me to be sad, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be sad.

In the unpacking, we landed on one key thing, which is this feeling that I didn’t feel like I was worthy. I was struggling with this idea of mattering, and I was so focused on my deficiencies that I was overlooking whatever proficiencies that were out there. And as we were unpacking that, I realised, “Oh, that ties with my superpower’s work, because the entire idea of superpowers is what makes us extraordinary to everyone else is also one of our biggest blind spots, because we don’t value… It’s our normal, so we don’t value what comes easily to us.” And that extraordinariness may not only be in things that are achievement related, but it’s also the ability to be curious, the ability to bring joy capital, and we need a bigger way of seeing the full range of value or worth.

The thing is, we all have that value. We all have that worth, because we’re human beings. And so we need others to help see ourselves clearly, then we can also help others see the extraordinariness in them. So that’s one, recognize, accept. What if instead of saying, “Oh, what do I bring to the table?” We flip it, and we say, “I have something to contribute. Let’s discover what that is. And others have something to contribute because they’re human, and they have experiences. Let’s discover what that is.” And I landed on the second thing, which is this idea of withness, and that’s the underlying theme, is in order to cultivate, discover our differentiating contributions, to make the biggest possible difference in the world and to become our best selves, it’s actually with others. Joy is infectious. So let’s be infected by other people’s joy. We have blind spots. We have blind spots on what makes us good. We have blind spots on what makes us where we can be better. Let’s invite others in, and then conversely, we can be that person that helps others see they’re extraordinary.

So let’s take this idea of imposter syndrome, which I love talking about because at its heart it’s this feeling of belonging and oh, boy, I get imposter syndrome in spades. Look, Thinkers50 and Silicon Guild, I’m surrounded by the most brilliant people in the world. So yeah, when I enter into these meetings, I’m going to be questioning my intelligence. I’m in awe of all of you. I can see you’re extraordinary. I’m like, “Ugh, what do I contribute?” But let’s flip that around. Well, one is, I realised when you’re thinking about that gratefulness exercise, I was thinking, I know I can bring heart and we don’t have to compete on heart. Everyone can maximise on heart and there will still be an abundance. I bring heart. I know that. That’s what I hold on to, and then the second thing is, recognize other people may be feeling imposters.

So the best way to minimise, I found, imposter syndrome for myself is to minimise it for others. Shout out their contributions, shout how amazing they are. And then the third aspect that helped me on this journey, and it is a journey, because it’s not like suddenly, oh, I’ve arrived. I’m happy all the time. It’s a journey. The third aspect is the sense of awe. So I’ve been reading up on Paul Keltner and Jonathan Haidt’s work on awe, and then there’s a British author named Katherine Mays, that I’m just recently introduced to, and her work is on enchantment. And I think, if you look in my office, there’s plants. I love gardening because I think when we tend to things, first of all, gardeners have faith in the future because when we plant something we don’t see its blossom until much, much later. And when we tend to something, we learn to love it, and maybe we not only love what we tend to, but we learn to love what we tend to.

When I think about that, there’s so many moments of wonder in all around us, and we’re in a world where we are, talking to Martin Lindstrom, he was like, “Why are we doing this all the time when there’s this?” And so being infused with that sense of awe and wonder, and there are all moments all around us. And then finally, when I think about all those things, instead of striving for perfection, what if we strive for mending? And here’s what I mean by that. In 2020, the last trip we took before 2020, one of the last trips, was a trip to Asheville. And there my family made a beautiful – it’s crooked and everything, but I think it’s beautiful – little bowl. And it meant so much to us during the pandemic because I look at that and I think, “Oh, we’re going to go back to Asheville again. Someday this is going to be over and we can go travel again.” And one day, my 7-year-old son broke the bowl, and I was just devastated, and he felt terrible.

All right, so let’s search for how we can mend the bowl. And I found this Japanese art of kintsugi, which is broken bowls mended with gold and it’s actually an art form. So we did just that. And the thing with  kintsugi is, once it’s mended, it’s mended towards the more beautiful. So instead of trying to protect ourselves from breakage, because it will inevitably happen because we’re human, and life is messy and life is hard, what if we focus our energies on becoming master menders? Except in our life, instead of mending it with gold – by the way, this is craft gold, but in real kintsugi it’s real gold – instead of mending our lives with gold, we’re mending it with moments of awe, friendships, and a deep belief and acceptance of our extraordinariness because we’re human.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

That’s so beautiful in so many ways. It’s my turn to tear up. I’m going to ask you a question that I ask a lot of extraordinary leaders, which is, after they’ve gone through a period of pain, of learning, maybe in therapy, of introspection, how did that experience, or did it, change how you lead?

Sanyin Siang:

Well, to lead others, we have to have the right relationship with ourselves. We have to lead ourselves first. And that acceptance of one’s flaws… I play my mistakes over and over in my head. I’m learning how to be better at not doing that, but I still do. I remember something from when I was age seven and think, “Oh, why was I such an idiot?” That was years and years ago, but we end up in that moment. I think being able to accept that and say… I work with Coach K and Coach K is always saying, “Next play, do you want to look in the rear-view mirror all the time? Next play.” Having those mantras, having the advice of, these are some amazing mentors right behind me. By the way, the way I have my office set up, there are days when I want to quit, and I’m so mad, and I turn around, I’ll be like, “What would Marshall say? What would Frances say, right?” Having conversations with these amazing… It’s withness all the time. But having that better relationship with myself can help make us even more compassionate when dealing with our teammates.

When we help ourselves flourish, we help our teammates flourish. And by the way, if we want to be a quality human person, if we want to become our best selves, the best thing we can do is surround ourselves with people who want to see us flourish. So that unpacking, that compassion towards ourselves, I think it can help us be even more compassionate towards others and that’s what the world needs.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you so much. Lenny, over to you.

Lenny Mendonca:

Thank you Morra and thank you Sanyin for kicking us off with those wonderful thoughts, get us in the right mindset here. So I will start with a disclaimer that I am far from an expert on this topic and my perspective is from an N of one, from my own personal experience, having had challenges with that in the past. And let me take you back to a little over four years ago, at the beginning, the early days of COVID. And Governor Newsom in California sent out a press release that I had resigned as his chief economic and business advisor to spend more time with my family and my local businesses. And when you send out a press release on Friday afternoon, it usually means you’re trying to bury it, and that while that statement may have technically been true, something else must have been going on. Most people who knew me assumed that I had gotten in an argument or something, and I had gotten fired or resigned, and I didn’t respond to any request for what was going on for several weeks.

Well, what was going on was something very different. I had had a panic attack a few weeks before and spent the night in the hospital, and the next day after that press, I voluntarily got checked into the involuntary psychiatric ward at Stanford Hospital for 10 days for severe depression. I had not been sleeping, not eating very much and was having horrible thoughts about what was going on in the world and how it was going to end. And that was clearly not me, but I didn’t know what was going on because nothing like that had ever happened to me or anyone that I knew. Fortunately, I had a very attentive wife, and children, and friends who picked me up and said, “We’re going to the hospital and you’re going to check yourself in.” I also was fortunate to be able to have the healthcare coverage and access to Stanford University within driving distance, and those are all real privileges. And I got the kind of care I needed and 10 days later I checked out and was on the path to recovery.

Looking back, I needed that intervention. It wasn’t something that I was going to ever be able to handle myself. I was spiralling into a view of what was going on with me and the world that was not going to end well, but it took others paying attention to help me get the kind of help that I needed. And I’m really grateful for that. It was a few months of recovery, but there were really three things that helped me through that that I try and do today. One was, get enough sleep. It sounds so basic, but many of us, including me, was in an all-encompassing work environment where it was hard to sleep because it was always something else you could be doing and it was hard to clear your mind when you’re getting ready to go to sleep. And so I was not sleeping very well. That’s not a problem today.

Secondly, I made a particular point of getting out daily and exercising outside, even in crappy weather. So both the getting a little heart movement happening and being out in nature really is, was for me, it continues to be something, that helps clear my head and start thinking about other things other than what was right in front of you. And the final thing, and again, this was at the encouragement of my wife and my daughters, I decided to tell my story and I wrote an opinion piece on it in CalMatters. And I’ve probably written a hundred opinion pieces in my life, and I got an order of magnitude more response to this one than anything else I’ve ever written. And a lot of it was from people I didn’t know who reached out and said, “Thank you for talking about this,” and wanted to tell me their story.

I now will make, if anyone asks to come talk about the topic, and it’s often at business settings or government settings where people want to have an excuse to have a prop, to have someone else talk about the topic so that they can talk about it, I do that. And the combination of being able to sleep, getting out and getting exercise, and then being open and honest about my own challenge on this front, is really helpful to me. I talked about in the piece that I wrote that I, a few years earlier, had broken my leg riding a bike and you can’t hide when you’ve got a broken leg. And people see you, they ask you, “What happened?” Well, if you have a mental health challenge, people don’t necessarily see it and you have to talk about it in a way that helps people understand the issue because it’s just as pronounced as when I broke my leg, and I honestly try and talk about it as though it’s the same thing.

I broke my leg, it was painful, I had a cast on, had to do rehab, had to get back in shape again, but eventually I was walking and riding a bike again. The same thing with the mental health challenge. You have to take care of it, do the rehab, recover and it will get better. So that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thanks Lenny. I’m going to ask you a question from the audience, Michael’s question, but I’ve interviewed you. I know a little bit about your origin story. I know that you have been an incredibly high achiever in high pressure situations your whole career. As you recovered from your depression, did you reflect on that lifetime of achieving and pushing and the impact it had on your mental health? Did you feel a connection there or no?

Lenny Mendonca:

It’s impossible for me to disaggregate the proximate cause of what happened. It’s possible, as you say, more that it was an accumulation of 30 years of operating at a hundred miles an hour. But I think it’s as likely that it was the circumstances of COVID that did it, where both the external circumstances and the job I was doing made me feel like this was so bad, and we’d never seen anything like it. And I tend to be one of those  “everything has a solution“ problem-solving types, and I couldn’t see a solution to this. It was bad and it was going to get worse, and I think that’s as much of what did it. And when I, in that circumstance, thought the way to solve it was to dive deeper into it so you can understand it more and figure out something, and that just meant my mind was working all the time and I wasn’t sleeping. So, I don’t know, is the honest answer. It’s possible, but the proximate cause is as likely to have been those circumstances.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah, and that’s the hard thing is sometimes we never know, right, when we go into mental illness. I’ve got comments from Rita and comments from Tina, thank you so much for sharing your story to make this just a typical conversation to normalise mental health. So Michael asked a question and anyone can jump in, and then I’m going to hand it over to you Julie. Anyone who’s been through a dark depression can relate to this question. How do you tell yourself it’s going to be okay when things don’t feel okay? Lenny, I don’t know if you have any insight on that.

Lenny Mendonca:

I do. From my personal experience, I don’t know whether this is extensible, but to me, when I was in that darkest space, there was no way I ever thought it was going to get better. And it was, this is going to end badly for me and for others, and it was an elevator going down and I couldn’t ever see it coming back up. And that’s where the people around me were crucial because I couldn’t see it and they knew that wasn’t me. And so the answer to how I dealt with it was someone else helped and got me the help I needed, because I could not do it by myself, and to think that I could was honestly arrogant and selfish. And that’s what they told me, it was like, “No, you need help. I don’t care. You’re going to go and if you don’t go, we’re going to make you go. So choose your poison.” And to me that was the intervention that was absolutely necessary because there was no way for myself I could flip where I was at that moment in time.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Either of you want to jump in on that.

Sanyin Siang:

I think it’s this idea of belief. In the moment, it feels terrible and there’s no end in sight, like Lenny says. And the power of friendships and those around you, we can’t do it alone. But you also have to hold on to say, “Okay, let’s…” If you believe it won’t get better, you’re very lost. But if you say, “I may not feel it now, but I believe it will get better.” Now, I can say, it’s not going to get better and it’s going to stay better. You’re going to be like this because that’s life, but it will go up again. You have to believe that. And it’s that belief, surrounded by others, that can get you over to the next hour, it can be hour by hour, to the next 24 hours or to the next week, but you have to believe it will get better.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

I’ll just add, can I add that I think Morra’s start for this conversation with gratitude… Gratitude has become my superpower and I know it’s available to all of us as a superpower. The more minute we can be about our gratitude, not “I’m grateful for my health” but “I’m grateful that I was able to floss my teeth this morning because my dentist tells me that’s so important and I can see the benefits.” The more specific we can be about gratitude, the more it helps us reframe that, first of all, there are good things in my life. I am more in charge than I may feel right now. It grounds us back to that microunit of what’s going on in our own lives, rather than it catastrophizing, and I have found it to be a wonderful way to reset when I’m feeling really low.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Julie, I love that. I want to just echo what you said and what Sanyin said about going small. If you think you’re not going to be okay, and again, I’m sorry, I’m not giving medical advice here, this is all personal, minute by minute, bird by bird, and making it very focused. I’m so grateful that I can floss my teeth. And Michael, the last thing I’ll share is I have bipolar disorder, and so for me when I think things are so dark, it’s very scary because it comes back and my husband will always give me evidence that I’ve dug out before and I will dig out this time.

I went 13 years without a major depression, and when I was in one a couple years ago, he said, “You went 13 years before, you did it. Before that you went six years, you’re going to do it again. You can do it.” And so again, having someone else in your life who can be there and give you evidence, is so important. We have so many great questions coming in, I’m going to get to them, but I need to give Julie the mic because she’s the best and I think has been on my podcast more than any other person.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Oh my gosh, wow. I don’t know if that should make me anxious or grateful.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Up to you.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Thank you, Morra, for inviting me. Appreciate it. Always love doing anything with our Silicon Guild and also Thinkers50, grateful to everybody who’s decided to make us a part of their diet of content. I want to thank Sanyin and Lenny for being so open and vulnerable, and really appreciate what came from both of them. Let’s see, briefly, I am Julie Lythcott-Haims, 56 years old, she/they pronouns, I’m black and biracial. And I grew up in white places with a black dad and a white mom, and that means, given my age, that I grew up knowing something was wrong with my family and probably wrong with me. I got the message from the earliest years that we were problematic, and I think it instilled in me this deep sense of, we are transgressive. Something’s wrong with us in the eyes of others, not all others, but enough others to make me worried and afraid. And just as Sanyin said, if you have imposter syndrome, you want to shout it out in others.

I think I became that person who felt so problematic, so unseen, so not valid in my origin story, that I have become that person professionally who is seeking to help anyone I interact with know that they matter, they’re seen, they’re valued. It has become my work. I did that work as a Stanford dean, working with undergraduates, And actually, since we have Sanyin in here, I have to put in a shout-out for Stanford women’s basketball because I know she’s worked with Coach K. I was consulting with the Stanford women’s basketball team this past season on how do you instil this sense of mattering within the team? How do you focus on helping others feel they matter? And this was Coach VanDerveer’s year of beating Coach K’s record for winningest NCAA basketball coach, so I have to put a shout-out for Stanford. Go Stanford.

Okay, so Morra has me on her podcast, The Anxious Achiever, and I’m not quite sure why because I’m not anxious, but I know I’m competitive. So we start to talk about my competitive nature. I’ve been a corporate lawyer, I’m now an elected official here in Palo Alto. I’m very Type A, win, let’s go. And we’re starting to unpack where that comes from, and she’s talking to me about self-care. And people talk about self-care, what’s your method of self-care? And I’m like, “Don’t ask me about bubble baths. I do not take bubble baths. No chocolate, I do not need chocolate. I need games. I do games for fun. I do competitive puzzles for fun.”

Okay, so Morra starts unpacking. Well, tell me more. I’m like, “Well, I got this life partner, Dan, of 36 years. And back in the day it was backgammon and Scrabble, and then the New York Times crossword and we’d do it in the paper. And often he would beat me, but I was always trying to finish first. And he’s not that competitive. He doesn’t seem to care, but I care.” And now of course there’s Wordle, and Quordle, and Octordle, and Globle, and… My phone, every night I get on this phone and I’m like, “Do the puzzles. Do the puzzles. Do the puzzles.” New York Times crossword, it used to just be paper, but now you can do it online and it sends you this chime. It tells you you did it and it’s correct and I just get filled with, yes. Okay, so even when I get home late at night, like 12:00, 1:00, I go to my puzzles. It’s like I don’t complete the day. That’s my time, me time. Do some competitive word-related puzzles, geography puzzles, and I’ll stay up super late just to get that done.

So Morra’s asking me, in this realm of self-care, why do you do these games? Why are you so competitive? And I, in conversation with Morra, began to realise, for the first time, that maybe I’m so into games because in my family where I was the youngest of many and the only one who was mixed… I was so different, I was young. The language of love in my family was winning. So we played poker. When you won a hand, I felt loved. When you had a verbal repartee with somebody, when you had an argument, and won, I felt loved. And certainly every jigsaw puzzle, every crossword puzzle, Boggle, if I won, it infused in me this sense of being loved.

So I have this epiphany with Morra on a freaking podcast. I’m trying not to cry, right? Like, oh my god, I do these puzzles because I feel loved when I win. How scary is that? Enter this proposition of try a puzzle, you might feel loved but you might not, like my god. To win is to feel loved. To not win, therefore, is to feel not loved. I had this aha with Morra. We hang up the podcast, I go running out of my little office here, back into the house. I find Dan and I’m like, “Dan, I’ve learned that I need to win. The drive in me to beat you at these New York Times crosswords, where you win four out of seven times, maybe five out of seven times a week, my drive is because I feel loved when I win.” And my beloved looks at me, and he smiles so gently, and he cocks his head and he says, “So when I win, if I immediately say, ‘I love you,’ will that be enough?” And I scanned myself for my feelings and I said, “Yes,” and that’s exactly what happens now.

He still beats me four out of seven times, but every single time when the chime goes off and The New York Times… Dan beat me, he looks across the table and he says, “I love you.” And I’m like, “Thanks,” and I keep going because I’m still trying to finish, but I’m feeling it. Thanks, thanks. And that was profound. So my lessons here are, be curious about what you need and why. Whatever it is, your equivalent of the bubble bath, or the chocolate, or the crossword, be curious about where that need comes from deep inside you. It’s there for a reason. And then third, know with certainty that everybody has their thing or things. Whatever it is, we all have these core building blocks within us that have just constructed the human we are now, and if we can be curious about what someone else desperately needs and how we might be able to offer it without much cause to ourselves in the moment, then we are not only showing up for others and treating them as we want to be treated, but we’re being extraordinarily kind.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Julie, you also have helped a lot of young people and their parents separate from almost a shared investment in winning that is so powerful in your role as dean of undergraduates, dean of freshmen, at Stanford. And I guess my question for you is, do leaders need to love themselves and feel like they matter? Do parents need to love themselves and feel like they matter before they can do the work that you do, which is letting other people know how much they matter? What is that process and what are your thoughts?

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

First of all, let me be clear, I was dean of freshmen a long time ago. I left 12 years ago, not currently there.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

That’s right, but your first book-

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Yes, absolutely. How to Raise an Adult.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

… reflected on that time, as did your second.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

… How to Raise an Adult. Yeah, I’m careful not to attach brands to me that are no longer brands that I’m affiliated with, although I love Stanford dearly as an alum. Okay, do leaders and parents have to love themselves first before they can help, before they can really serve employees, serve colleagues, serve kids? I’m going to say, no, because how devastating would it be if the answer is yes, because …

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Right, because it’s really hard for most of us.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

What I am going to say is, it sure helps you to show up in a way where you can see and support another human in their growth without being attached to their outcomes they achieve. The micromanaging leader is terribly insecure, feels so insecure, they have to constantly look over everyone else’s shoulder, because they need you to be perfect, because how you behave reflects back on them, because of their own insecurity. So same with parenting, right? I need you to get that A so my friends will feel good about me, right? So when we do the work as a parent, as a leader, on ourselves to become that self-loving person who can accept our journey, and our growth, and all of that, then it’s far easier for us to successfully lead and parent. And then I think we can really resonate at that much higher level of leadership and parenting.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Go for it.

Sanyin Siang:

Morra, you and I have talked about this idea that sometimes when we’re trying to help others, we’re actually trying to help younger versions of ourselves. And also, when we write books, or write articles, or do podcasts, it’s not that we are experts, but we’re trying to help solve problems that we’re trying to solve for ourselves. We’re seeking answers and it’s through those interactions that we can think about those things. So when we love others, when we care for others, when we’re compassionate towards others, that actually flips around. I think that’s an angle towards a way of seeing ourselves and becoming more compassionate for ourselves. So I agree with Julie, we don’t have to love ourselves first, but by learning to love ourselves, we can actually be even more effective, right?

Julie, your story, Lenny and Julie, both of your stories are so moving. And Morra, I didn’t know that about you, about the bipolar. So the courage to share that, one, is for everyone who’s listening, when we feel anxiety, or we feel anxious, or when life is good but we feel sad, sometimes we default to thinking we shouldn’t feel this way and it’s that shouldn’t that makes us feel worse. So just not go there. Two, Julie, in your story about the winning, I think a lot of times we have this feeling of not enough. We need that constant validation to prove to ourselves that we are enough, but it’s never going to come because it’s never enough if we go that angle. And so I wanted to challenge listeners out there with this idea that you are enough. That’s something my friend, Sue Gordon, always says, “You have to believe you’re enough. You have to believe that your team is enough and they have to believe it too.”

Our children, same thing. They have to believe it too. And then the third is, I think all of us here we are in the roles that we’re in because we want to help others, because in a way, maybe that’s how we save ourselves, right? But we have to also learn, something I learned in therapy is, we’re not always responsible and to alleviate that sense of responsibility because decisions are not always within our control. For our kids, our kids are the decision makers of their own lives. We can help guide, but every person is a decision maker. They own the decisions in their lives. We can help, we can foster the environment and be there, but we also have to accept we’re not responsible for everyone else. We can’t be, for all the good or all the bad that happens in their lives. And that’s a really hard thing because we all want that element of control, right? So as you were all talking, those were some of the thoughts that come to mind.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Control is a big one. Lenny, I have a question for you, and actually it’s two questions, and I’m going to start with Lenny, but either of you can dive in. And Lenny, I remember when I interviewed you, I asked you if your 35-year-old self would’ve been out there telling his depression story when you were ascending in your career. And you said, “I probably not, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to and reach the levels.” And I thought that that was probably very true and a very honest thing to say that we can all relate to.

There’s a question from Indira. How can leaders and managers create a work environment that reduces the pressure to be perfect and supports mental well-being? And then I’m going to throw in a question from Lisen as well, and you can answer whichever one and we’ll go from there. Lenny, thanks for your vulnerability and authenticity. I coach and advise a number of leaders, nearly all men, who are struggling. They worry if they reveal their truth, they won’t be able to continue to lead, others will think they’re weak. As more of us speak our truth, we normalise the reality that mental challenges are part of being human, but do you have advice?

Lenny Mendonca:

So I think the answer to your first question was the same as you asked me before. I’m not sure I would’ve been able to. I think that’s partly where I was in my own head, but also partly the environment that we are in, in today’s world versus when we were in, almost 30 years ago. I do think it is much more understandable, acceptable, and particularly for younger people, to be honest and open about what they’re feeling, and including in complicated high-stress work environments. And I think that’s actually really, really helpful, and relates to my advice on your second question around how do you help create an environment. It’s honestly why, when I speak to business groups, what they want, they want to have that open and honest conversation among themselves, but many leaders are not comfortable framing that topic or helping set it up with personal stories. And so I get asked to do it because then I’m the prop that tells my personal story and then everybody else thinks it’s okay to do it, and I think that’s fine.

I’m happy to do that, but what leaders can do is help create that space. Everyone is wrestling with something at that moment in time, some more pronounced and severe than others. And being able to understand that if you don’t have your mental game on, you’re not going to have your work game on. And so treating it as though you’re Coach K, Sanyin, and someone’s hurt, they’re not going to be able to play at the top of their game. It’s the same thing with mental health. Just treat it as though it were another part of who you are and have that kind of conversation. I am continually amazed about how open people are willing to be, to talk about it if they’re given the ability to do it. And even more so in a work setting where there is the pressure to be, no, I’m on my top of my game all the time, when that’s just not true. And to be able to comment and talk about that, actually helps not just the team but that individual perform better as a result of feeling like they can tell what’s really going on.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

There’s a wonderful comment from Eric who says, “During the pandemic, I once heard someone say that leaders are dealers of hope in tough times.” I think that’s really beautiful. Julie, Sanyin, do you want to dive in on anything? I can go to our next question. I’m also curious on the role of gender in talking about this stuff, and the role of talking about anxieties and fears… Yeah, go for it.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Can I just say something on the story… to Lenny’s point, and it’s so powerful when a guy tells stories. I think we’re – to Morra’s teeing up the notion of gender – I think we are expected to tell stories and maybe be less analytical, less financial savvy, less… Right, we’re supposed to be more soft and more story-like as women, and men are supposed to be the opposite, and of course none of it’s inherently true about any of us, I think. But I want to say that when I first wrote How to Raise an Adult on the harm of micromanagey-helicopter parenting, I thought I needed to persuade audiences with data from psychologists about how this was harming kids. And from the employment realm, they’re underprepared for work. And so I thought that looking into the research in the area and presenting, making the case, but I quickly learned that of course humans learn best from stories.

They relate through stories, they remember stories. And so I started telling my own stumbles as a parent, just the ways in which I have learned the very lessons I’m trying to teach y’all. And so I, with my kid’s permission, just became the storyteller in my hour-long keynote, no slides. Story, story, story, story, story, and then try to distil the advice out. And people feel so relieved that the so-called expert has screwed up and can talk about it. My stories are funny, and they’re poignant, and they’re cringey, and I have never connected so powerfully before with folks, than when I have been willing to put my vulnerability out there and say, “Look, we’re all still here. I just told you that and I’m still here. It did not crush the soul out of me to share that story with you. Now maybe you can be more attuned to the story within you and not feel judged, but feel seen and supported.”

We are all in this together. And one of my favourite phrases in that regard is Ram Dass, “We’re all just walking each other home,” and I try to take that approach. Come on, let’s walk each other home. I am with you. I’m no different than you, and we can learn from each other through our storytelling.

Sanyin Siang:

Wow. I love that so much, Julie, and I wanted to build a little bit more on that. I think what makes this moment especially ripe for mental health challenges is different than what happened 20, 30 years ago is, one, we are increasingly siloed because of technology. We look around, I was in a coffee shop, and 10 years ago in a coffee shop I would see people talking with each other. Now in that coffee shop, people are on their screens, on their devices. And Martin Lindstrom does a lot of work on this. He’s another Thinkers50 awardee, and Martin and I talk a lot about this. We are in this moment where it’s very… Not that technology is bad, but our addiction to it has created more siloing, and it’s that siloing… Resilience comes from community, siloing is where, like Lenny said, we can’t do it alone, right?

So there’s that, and the other thing is polarisation. We’re an era of depolarization, where we have forgotten how to have conversations. And I love what Julie said in the sharing of stories, and being vulnerable, and being real, because that connection, that way of connecting is what makes us human. We were sitting around campfires sharing stories, watching the stars, at the beginning, since the very beginning. And in a world of AI, in a world of technology, we can’t compete with AI on smarts, but how we leverage AI is by being more human and this emotion connection. So I wanted to highlight what Julie said, storytelling as a powerful way of connection.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I will add to the cringe, Julie, and one-up you, which is that there’s a conversation in the chat about is it okay to cry? Is it okay to cry at work? Is it okay to cry in front of your kids? Sunday was Mother’s Day in the US, and I am in perimenopause, and I have extreme crying jags and mood swings on top of a very volatile personality as it is. And I cried all Mother’s Day, just hysterically. I was my perfectionist self, it’s Mother’s Day, I have to show up as a good mom and I travel all the time. So I especially have to be a great mom on Mother’s Day, and my perfectionism is out of control, and I’m just crying. And I put it on Instagram, which isn’t like… I put it on Instagram, a teary… And for me it went a little bit viral.

It was like all these moms out there who were like, “I’m in perimenopause too. I cried in front of my kids. I feel terrible. Am I ruining their lives?” All of us are just walking around wondering these things. Let’s talk about crying and showing raw emotion. Michael asked, is it okay to let your kids see you cry? There’s another question about crying at work. Are we at a place where that’s okay?

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

I responded to Mike, thank you for sharing that and I saw your post when it came, and just thought it was so beautiful. And what irony, like here it’s Mother’s Day and I have to perform for other people, right? I have to be the perfect mother on Mother’s Day, instead of could this be the day when I could just be my actual self and get a pass for a day?

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

So I appreciate you shared it. I said to Michael in the chat, just in terms of is it okay to cry in front of our kids: absolutely, yes. Show them that you’re human, that we have feelings, that grownups struggle with stuff. They need to see us struggle and overcome to learn how it’s done. Don’t take your full sob out on your kids. They don’t need to become your therapist. They’re not responsible for holding you in those moments. Take that to your therapist, your spouse or partner, to your friends.

So in other words, be able to share it, right? And then smile and say, “You know what? This is hard, but we do hard things. We’re going to get through this. I have hope, I have confidence.” That is where you may be acting a little bit, but your kids need to see that you do have hope for the future. Think about the parents who are raising kids in times that were excruciating in other decades. Think about parents who managed to instil hope in children during the Holocaust and who just kept that hope alive. Hope is what keeps us alive. So we want to be the bearers of that truth for our kids. We’re going to get through this. Yes, even as we show them some of our emotion.

Sanyin Siang:

I think it’s also important to contextualise, in our minds, we can’t expect others to be mind readers. We know why we’re crying and we know it’s going to be okay, but they don’t know that. And so to be able to contextualise it and there isn’t a habit of people being able to show emotions. So people, at work especially, so people don’t know how to take that when I cry. So I remember I was doing an interview with Keith Reinhardt and he’s telling this beautiful story about he and his wife, and I started crying, and it’s like, I’m crying because I’m crying because this is so beautiful, because I’m happy, right? Just to contextualise it. So contextualising it and like what Julie said, to say, “Okay, I’m crying because I’m frustrated, but I have hope in the future,” right? That helps people know where to place that emotion and that it’s okay for them to share that emotion.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Emotions have to be scary, right? They can be real and they don’t have to be scary. And that’s a gift we can give other people. You’re right by showing that we can be both.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Can I jump in and say, I didn’t even know I had anxiety until my kids had anxiety and they were diagnosed, and then I was able to see some of my own patterns and behaviours a little bit more clearly. And I realised, my mother, who also lives with us, has stiff upper lip British person, no place for feelings, and a whole lot of patterns around controlling her anxiety. And in other words, I was able to learn from my kids’ experience like, oh, wait a minute, I’m that way. Wait a minute, I’ve got this tightness inside me, or I get really stressed out in the kitchen. I need everything to be… And I’m offering this because I think there’s so much more available for kids now than was the case when we were growing up.

You might be diagnosed with something, you might be able to get some treatment, you might be able to get some meds. And for many of us who are Gen X and boomers, we’re still coming to terms with stuff nobody really knew about us. And we may have figured out a hack to get ourselves through life fairly successfully. But I am relieved to discover there’s a name for what I would just call, sometimes I just really get impossible to be around, really snippy, really tight. So learning about my own journey, by watching my kids go through theirs, is just the reverse of what you think it’s going to be, but nevertheless.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

We have to wrap. I want to offer each of you a quick opportunity to reflect. I’ll leave this question from Indira. What are the long-term effects of not addressing anxiety and the pressure to be perfect in one’s professional life? How does striving for perfectionism or any of the winning we’ve talked about affect personal and professional relationships over time? I think Julie, your experience of having a name for it by learning through your kids must have felt so freeing. So I invite you to reflect on that or to share one way that you are your own best friend, a tool you use.

Lenny Mendonca:

I will just say, since I’ve become much more open and willing to talk about my own circumstances, my professional relationships, in addition to personal ones, have become much, much stronger. It did not, at all, detract from my ability to lead. In fact, if anything where people could feel that they could come talk to me about something that they may have felt threatened about raising before. And in addition, you have very different kinds of conversations, and as a leader, you can help coach others in different ways if you understand the broader circumstance within which they’re operating. So I would just say, while in an earlier time in my career, I might’ve felt it was going to be career limiting, or unprofessional, or as you might say, Julie, unmanlike to do that, I think exactly the opposite now.

Sanyin Siang:

I think about this conversation we just had. I’ve known Morra, Lenny and Julie for years, and I felt we got to a deeper level in this type of conversation because we’re vulnerable with each other. And imagine, for the listeners out there, this can be the type of conversation that you can have with your family, with your friends, people you trust. And what would happen when you start having these types of conversations? You may discover that this feeling, the sense that you think it’s only endemic to you, that others feel it too.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Yeah.

Sanyin Siang:

And we can figure out ways, share ways, get advice from each other for ways, because we all need, like Morra, what you said about your husband, those touchstone memories, that reminder like you’ve been here before, you know what? Different contexts, but you’ll be able to get there. We all need that from each other. So as I reflect on being in this conversation and how I’m feeling so much more helpful and so much more in love with all of you, imagine if we can do this more often with those others and those in our friend circles. We all have agency to do that.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:

I know that striving for perfectionism means I only feel as good as the last thing that I did. So a perfectionist is always in search of some external proof that they are worthy. And so it haunts you, it eats you up inside. And I think the long-term effect, I’m not a psychologist, but that continue hollowing out of the self, erodes you, literally, and it makes you really hard to be around. And what I want to offer is apology or at least just acknowledgy. Acknowledgy instead of apology.

I said to my kids one day, “I’m so sorry, I get so stressed out in the kitchen. I don’t know why I am this way. I’m curious, I’m working on it. I know I get anxious. It’s not about you,” and my kids’ eyes just filled with this love like, okay, mom, thanks. And I was like, “So I’m working on it, just know that I’m working on it.” And I got all of this grace back in response. I think we can also get that in the workplace, depending on the workplace, but I want to offer that being that transparent about the fact that you know you’ve got a thing and you’re trying to work on it, can really earn you a lot of grace from the people in your lives, whether work or family.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Grace and space. Y’all are the best. I’m going to hand it back over to Stuart to close us out, and I just want to thank you tremendously.

Stuart Crainer:

Wow, what a great discussion. And I’m a stiff-lipped Englishman. We’re all master menders now. Be curious what you need and why. You are enough. And I’ll be putting Julie’s Wordle story to work when I get home. I salute you all for your personal honesty. I think a number of people have commented on that because the sharing of stories is so powerful and something we hugely appreciate at a personal level. Get back to Morra’s opening invitation. Think of two qualities you like about yourself. Think of two things you’re grateful for. These were fantastic starting points on our ending points for today. So thank you to Morra, Sanyin, Lenny and Julie. And thank you everyone for joining us. Any audience which references Tolstoy is good with me. We hope you’ll be able to join us next week at the same time, when joining Morra will be Alyson Meister, Basima Tewfik, and Jon Jachimowicz from Harvard Business School. Thank you all and please be kind to yourself.

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Transcript

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to this special series of webinars. Thinkers50 is presenting in partnership with Silicon Guild. During May, we will be highlighting Mind Matters to mark Mental Health Awareness Month. We have four great webinars lined up on Tuesdays throughout the month with some fantastic speakers. The webinars will be moderated by Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and host of The Anxious Achiever podcast. No one is better equipped to guide us through the many complex issues and global best practices of workplace mental health. Today, Morra is joined by three brilliant speakers. We have Andrew Barnes. Andrew is the co-author of The 4 Day Week: How the Flexible Work Revolution Can Increase Productivity, Profitability and Wellbeing. He’s also a founding member of the World Wellbeing Movement, and a member of the Thinkers50 Radar class of 2023. Yeah, it is very early in the morning where Andrew is, in New Zealand, so we especially appreciate his early rising.

Alongside Andrew, we have Poornima Luthra. A Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Poornima is the author of The Art of Active Allyship, co-author of Leading Through Bias, and was a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2022. And finally, but not least, we are joined by Rita McGrath. Rita is a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of Seeing Round Corners and The End of Competitive Advantage. She’s also co-author of Discovery Driven Growth, the founder of Valize, and a much valued member of the Thinkers 50 Community.

So welcome everyone joining from throughout the world. We really appreciate you joining us today. Please let us know where you’re joining from and share your queries, thoughts and insights at any time during the session. Our title today is How to Make Work Better for Everyone’s Mental Health. There is a lot to talk about. Over to you, Morra.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you Stuart. It’s such an honour to be here with you all. And Stuart, I really enjoyed talking to you about your own workplace mental health on the episode of the Provocateurs podcast we recorded last year. So folks go check that one out, Work and Mental Health. Work actually has the biggest impact on our mental health. More than even our spouses or romantic partners. And as someone who’s been married for a really long time, that statistic is always just, wow, to me. Work is so crucial for our mental health. And the state of work today is both good and bad for us. For those of us who are professionals, work is important to our well-being, actually. It provides our sense of community, often. It provides a sense of mastery, right? We are career-identified people who see our identity in our career, and that can be a very, very good thing.

But work can also be extremely damaging to our mental health. And I’ll tell you what, post-pandemic, the statistics are not getting any better when it comes to people’s rates of anxiety, depression, stress, and physical symptoms caused by poor mental health. Every day my inbox is flooded with stories that I always say would make your eyes burn, of people telling me stories about a boss who the mere sound of their voice can provoke an anxiety response.

Have you ever had that experience? Where you see a name in your email, or you hear someone you think walking down the hall of your office, or these days a Slack pop-up, and you’re instantly anxious? You think, “Oh my gosh, what have I done wrong? What’s going to happen now? Is the other shoe going to drop?” We’re operating in a time of great uncertainty and sometimes that doesn’t bring out the best in all of us.

And so, on any given day, 20 plus percent of Americans are showing up at work – and I’m sorry, I only have American statistics for this, but you can globalise – 20 plus percent of Americans are showing up at work with a diagnosed mental illness. But a hundred percent of us have mental health. And many of us are existing in a state of languishing, of stress, of feeling increased … Especially anxiety.

And so, today I want to really dig deep on some groundbreaking ideas that can help us make work better for people. Better. And the good news is when you make work better for people’s mental health, you make work better for everybody. Andrew, I know you’re going to tell us about that as well. So it’s fabulous to be here with you all. And I’d like to hand it over. We’re going to have a format where each of our presenters gives us their pitch, the best of what they have to say on this topic for about five minutes. And then we’ll open it up for a Q&A. This is your time, listeners. If you have a comment, if you have a question, pop it in the comments. I will get to it and we’ll have a discussion as well. So Rita McGrath.

Rita McGrath:

Hi.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

You are going to start us off.

Rita McGrath:

Okay.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Give us the big picture from a strategic point of view on what leaders need to think about to make work better for mental health.

Rita McGrath:

Sure. A couple of things that I think are relevant to what we know works and what we know doesn’t. And I’m going to draw on the work of a number of different people. And the first person I’d like to invoke is Paul Le Blanc, who is just in the process of transitioning out of his role as president of Southern New Hampshire University. And among his many, many accomplishments there, is he basically took back online education from predatory providers who landed students with a whole lot of debt and not much in the way of credentials.

He basically rescued that whole sector with his team. And he has a brilliant new book out called Broken, about large systems, and one of the observations he makes is that when you try to scale any system … So you think about workplaces, right? It’s easy to make mental health a central concern when there’s just four or five or 10 of you, right? But once you get to a hundred thousand of you, a million of you, goodness knows. Once you get to scaled systems, you kind of lose the humanity of those systems.

And as you would argue,scaled systems hate humanity, right? We love precision, we love replication. We don’t like messiness, we don’t like variation. And so, one of the things that he recommends is that we observe some of these principles of how you keep humanity in a scaled system. And so, it’s things like make sure that you have humans at critical touch points so that when there’s an issue, the humans can intervene.

So as an example, at Southern New Hampshire University, the heroes of his story are the counsellors. These are the people that are trained to say, “Well, if a student asks about next semester’s tuition, are they just asking about next semester’s tuition? Or are they worried that maybe they can’t pay it?” So what you’re doing is you’re replacing really expensive, high-priced talent with people who are more affordable, but you’re putting them in various touch points within the system.

So I think it’s scaling systems, but recognizing that you want to accomplish messy humanity. I think that’s really great. And you want to standardise what you can, and standardise the hell out of everything that you can. But then, use humans for the rest. Okay, so the first point is mass scaling systems, but keeping humans at critical touch points.

Second thing is some work that’s been done by Keith Ferrazzi and a number of others, which looks at this whole kind of, “Do we need to be in the office? Do we not need to be in the office? Where are we?” And what Keith’s work has done is he said, “On a five point scale, if you measure the question of team commitment to one another.” And the questions like, “Does my team have my back?” That left to its own devices, humanity gets about a 2.8 on a five point scale, left to their own devices. Now in the pandemic-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Of “have your backness.”

Rita McGrath:

Have your backness, right!

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Wow.

Rita McGrath:

But in the pandemic, that dropped down to about 2.3. So what a lot of leaders did, and I think this is a grievous mistake, and this is something you can take action on right away is … So the answer for a lot of leaders is, “Oh, if we just get everybody back in the office, things will be fixed.” But the fixing is going back to 2.8. It’s not going to the threes, the fours closer to fives, where you actually have real team commitment, real team cohesion.

And I know Morra, you’ll relate to this, which is, what you have to do … And it doesn’t matter whether you’re remote or whether you’re together, is you have to be very intentional about building in team processes, making teams cohere better. And some of it’s surprisingly simple. For example, once a month you stop everything, you take an hour and you just go around your team and you say, “Okay, how’s your energy? What do you have energy for? How are you feeling? What’s going on with you?”

Because the fact that my mom’s in the hospital, you may not know that. All you’re observing is I seem to be really distracted and I’m not delivering the way I should be. You don’t know why. So just taking those kinds of breaths and pauses can help a team cohere much more vigorously. Whether you’re together or whether you’re apart. I mean, I think this whole return to office thing is kind of the lazy person’s way of saying, “Oh, well, if we just get everybody together in the same space, things will magically work out.”

That’s luck. Maybe if you’re lucky, that’ll work out. That’s not being intentional, and it’s not taking control. Then we have the theme of ownership. And we know that humans are very motivated when they either have actual ownership or feel that they have ownership, feel they have pride, feel they’re aligned around something that’s common and important. And a great example of this is what Pete Stavros is doing over at KKR, is that when KKR, which is a private equity firm, buys into a company, they actually create ownership stakes for the employees, frontline employees.

So a great example of this would be C.H.I Overhead Doors recently got acquired by New Corp. And the average payout for an ordinary line worker in that situation was $176,000. Can you imagine that? And money doesn’t buy everything. It doesn’t buy happiness, it doesn’t buy mental health, but not having enough money is actually kind of a detriment to any of those things.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Actually, and when it comes to the workplace, we know money as a financial insecurity is probably the largest driver, certainly, of anxiety in the workplace. And that makes sense.

Rita McGrath:

Absolutely. And that actually ties to the next thing I was going to bring up, which is Zeynep Ton’s fabulous work on Good Jobs. And then Zeynep is a member of the Silicon Guild. So you can definitely look her up. And she’s fascinating to me because she basically got into this by accident.

She’s an operations researcher. And what got her started on this tack was she was studying these workforce management systems where you provide just enough labour at just the right amount of time so you have no waste of labour. But it turns out the human toll of this is absolutely terrible. And so, she’s written two great books. The first one is called, The Good Job Strategy. The second one is called The Case for Good Jobs. And what she talks about is what we know constitutes a good job. And her main theme is stop thinking about human beings as centres of cost.

Start thinking about human beings as centres of revenue, as centres of growth, as the ability to raise the top line. So in short, what makes a good job. Focus, simplify, standardise and empower. Cross-train, so that if I’m normally a fruit and vegetable person at Trader Joe’s, I can actually go help you out in frozen foods if you run into a crisis, because I sort of have enough knowledge to do that.

Operate with slack so people have time for learning. People aren’t so strung tightly that they are going to snap at any moment, and predictable wages, living wages. Predictable hours and alignment with values. And if you create good jobs, it can actually drive your top line. And then, the last thing that I’ll touch on is what we know about burnout. And I know, Morra, you’ve done a ton of work on this. But we know what drives people to be burned out. Too much work, no control over what you work, toxic bosses. No recognition, no rewards, a lack of a supportive community, a lack of a trustworthy environment. A sense of unfairness, and no great match with our values.

So each of these things to me are … We’ve studied this. We know this. This is not some giant mystery. I would argue that we know how to create great, supportive mentally safe workplaces. We just for some reason, don’t regularly do it as much as we should.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

2.8. Rita, what I don’t hear you saying, and I’m sorry, I’ve been told my jacket makes noise, so I’m trying to hold my arms, although I want to gesture. What I don’t hear you saying is invest more in a meditation app, do more yoga on site. I hear you talking about fundamental human agency. Dignity, listening, connection, fairness as so key to mentally healthy work.

Rita McGrath:

Well, and what I would also add, just one last thing, is a lot of the solutions you need to think about are structural. So we know that human beings have very evolutionary mechanisms for how we relate to one another. We tend to like and gather people who are similar to us. We tend to flock to people that we already know. We tend to empower others who are similar to ourselves. And so, if you’re going to break that, you actually need some kind of structural mechanism.

So I’ll give a quick example. There was an investment bank that was basically sued by women for exhibiting gender bias in how they assigned roles and tasks to people. And therefore, under the guise of this lawsuit, these researchers were able to get ahold of the bank’s data. And what they found was that women were indeed systematically assigned less attractive, less lucrative accounts. But that when you measured the … And the excuse the bank gave was, “Oh, well, they didn’t perform so well last year, so they didn’t get the pick of the crop when it came to the good accounts.”

But when the researchers actually matched the women to the men on accounts of similar quality, the women actually outperformed the men. But what was happening was it was an old boys club. So the best accounts were given to your best friends. If you want to break that kind of thing, you actually need structures. So what the bank was forced to do by the courts was to use an algorithm to randomly assign attractive accounts across their employee base and voila, overnight being biased managed.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Wow. Intentionality. Thank you so much, Rita. Andrew, I’m going to hand it over to you. I’m sure much of this is resonating. Having read your wonderful book. Tell us how we can work four days, please.

Andrew Barnes:

Well, thank you, Morra. Look, you’re absolutely right. There were a lot of points that Rita made which resonated with me, but I’m a complete fraud, right? I mean, I started this not on a work-life balance kick. I was trying to work out how I make my company more productive.

And the heart of the four-day week movement was this piece of research that said that people were actually only truly productive for two and a half to three hours a day. And in fact, if you’re a Canadian, it was one and a half hours a day. And I thought, is that happening in my company, and can I do something about it? So my thesis was that there is a lot of busyness in work. And if we eliminated the busyness, the overlong meetings, the … I love the statistic that if you get continually interrupted at work generally every once every 11 minutes, it’s the equivalent of working under the influence of marijuana.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’m sorry, say that one again for the listeners.

Andrew Barnes:

Apparently it’s … The amount, when you are interrupted, continually interrupted at work, because it breaks your thought processes and you statistically are interrupted once every 11 minutes, takes you 22 minutes to get back to full productivity. The impact on cognitive ability is the equivalent of operating under the influence of marijuana. There you go.

Rita McGrath:

And a lot less fun.

Andrew Barnes:

A lot less fun. Absolutely. So the idea was quite simply with data, no research, no nothing that I thought that I would set a challenge to my people that said, “Look, if you can deliver the same amount of productivity in four days rather than five, I will pay you for the five days. I’ll pay you for output what you normally do. You work less, but I need to get the same levels of productivity. I need to get the same levels of customer services.” It’s what we call the 180, 100 rule. And we just gave it a go.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Can I ask you a question? You didn’t have everybody just work Monday to Thursday, right?

Andrew Barnes:

No, we didn’t. So what we’re talking about in the movement, some people do that, but we can’t. We have a retail outlet. We have retail branches, 17 across New Zealand. We have to work normal business hours. So I have people, and this is quite key to how it works. I actually have people who will take a day off. I have people who take a couple of half days. I will have working parents who will work five days a week, but compressed hours.

And the compressed hours means that they can do the childcare, right? Now, this was not how it started. How it started is we just sat there and said, “Hey, we’ll rotate days off every week and you can have a day off.” And we were lucky enough to run some research alongside that from Auckland University. Auckland University of Technology. And what we found was empowerment, enrichment engagement scores went up 40%. They went up to the levels the researchers said they’d never ever seen in New Zealand. Stress levels dropped. More people said they were better able to do their job working four days rather than five. And we found that sick days halved.

Now, none of this was me going, “Hey, I want people to have better work-life balance. I want people to be better able to do other things other than work.” It was really just a very simple experiment. But what became very clear, and this is then morphed into the four-day week movement. It’s not rocket science. Healthier, happier, more engaged employees are more productive. Who’d have thought?

It really is not rocket science. And so, what we’ve done is we’ve now created a thing called Four-Day Week Global, which operates in about 30 countries now. We’ve run these pilot programs for small, medium-sized companies,a  six month pilot. We have local researchers from leading universities that work alongside them. And what they do is they analyse the impact on employees and on business. And what we’re finding is, and this was the results from the US trial and also the UK trial. Revenues went up 33% over a period when people are working less.

Now, there’s an interesting experiment in Japan from Microsoft, they did an experiment on this. All they did was eliminate unnecessary meetings. They got a 39.9% improvement in productivity. So when you stop doing unproductive stuff, your productivity goes up. But the key part of this is that I have the right with my business, and we apply this model to the whole program. That this is a gift. It’s not a matter of right.

So in other words, there is mutual responsibility between the organisation and the employee. Now, this comes to the points that Rita made. I am actually treating my employees as adults. There is, they are responsible for rethinking how they do their job. Because actually they know their job better than you do. And they know the things that are stopping them being productive. Now, equally, they know the things that are stopping their colleagues being productive. And the way this works is it’s not just an individual goal, it’s a team goal.

So if the team doesn’t deliver its outcome, I have the right to say to my people, “Guys, I need the productivity. You didn’t deliver it, we’ll have to go back to five days a week.” Now, I’ve only ever had to do that once in six years.

And that was right at the start. Because suddenly an employee says, “Actually, I’m getting this fantastic thing. I’m having a chance to spend time with my granddaughter. I’m able to work out. I’m able to do some exercise. I’m able to care for family members. And so, people are getting experiences they can’t put a price on. They’re sharing that with their colleagues, and their colleagues recognize that they get the time off important to them only if their colleague can get the time off that’s important, in turn, to the other person. It’s got to be a mutual win-win. So what we find is team creativity, team cohesion goes off the scale.

People feel empowered. Stress levels are dropping by 40, 50%. You are also finding, and this is the key bit as a business person, that people value the time off far higher than you are prepared to pay for it. So in the U.S. trial, 15% of people said at the end of the trial, “You couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to five days a week.” Another 15% said it’d have to be 75% more salary.

And about 50% said, “Really, it’s going to have to be in the order of about 50%.” So what this tells me is that the real issue here is we don’t have enough time. We often try and put things like, let’s have free lunches at work. Let’s have ping pong tables. Let’s do this. Most of those are a ploy to keep you in the office. And that’s what’s deemed to be good.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Right. Face time.

Andrew Barnes:

Absolutely the Googleplex, all of these things. But when it boils down to it, what people actually need is they need time. They need time to reconnect to themselves. They need time to reconnect with their families, and that is the thing that puts the stress often into work. Now, again, Rita’s, right. There is some appalling leadership out there. We have masters of business administration. I’d like to think we should have masters of business leadership. Because this is really about empowering and leading and rethinking what leadership is. And it isn’t about dictating how people do things. It’s about empowering them to rethink. Now-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Can I … Oh, sorry. I was going to ask you a question, but go for it.

Andrew Barnes:

No, no. Carry on.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

We got a fabulous comment from Aleksandra Walicka. And she says, “You present great stats and it all makes sense. Are people in positions of power just not having the same issues that we all are?” And you’re a leader. You’ve written about your own mental struggles and those of people around you when you worked in the City of London. What was the aha moment for you that bridged the disconnect between probably what staff are feeling and what leaders are feeling? As a leader, how did you make this connection?

Andrew Barnes:

There’s a fabulous book by a chap called Nick Hornby called, Fever Pitch, which is about soccer. Sorry, I have to translate that for our American audience. And he’s talking about Arsenal football club in it. And he has this phrase, and I apologise for the language in advance, “Is life shit because arsenal are shit, or the other way around?” It’s an extraordinary profound statement because actually your mental attitude is coloured often by the environment you find yourself, rather than the environment being colored by your mental attitude.

So really, what was this about for me was I recognized that I was not performing well because of the environment that I was in. And if I could change the environment a little bit, then that would change my own mindset. And what that would do, I thought would be, produce better outcomes. But the problem is, and I’ll leave it at this point, is most people are like me.

I’m an old white guy. I’ve lived/worked in the City of London. I’ve been trained to think that working longer equals working harder. And what I’m arguing for, and it doesn’t matter by the way … People doing four-day week are in manufacturing, Lamborghini, Panasonic, Volkswagen, all doing reduced hours work. Or the police department, the City of Golden, fantastic. They’re doing a four-day week. All of these things. We can be in health, we can be in logistics, we can be in any business you like. My personal favourite is a fish and chip shop in Suffolk which has gone to a four-day week. But the real issue here is that you can rethink how you work by empowering your people. And when you empower your people, you get better performance. And actually the biggest issue here is not, not doing a four-day week. Your biggest issue is your biggest competitor does it first?

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah. Thank you. There was just a study out in the JAMA that actually measured decreased correlated, decreased rates of anxiety and depression with greater work flexibility. And so, this stuff has a profound effect, no surprise, on our mental health. Thanks, Andrew. Poornima, over to you.

Poornima Luthra:

Hi Morra. Hi everyone. I’m going to build on what we Rita and Andrew have talked about, and Rita brought up bias. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Andrew, you brought up how much the environment has an influence on our mental attitude. So let’s take a look at that topic. So when we look at the theme for today, it’s make work better for everyone’s mental health.

And it’s important for us to keep in mind who everyone is. We know that work isn’t experienced in the same way by people who come from marginalised communities and groups. And this is across a range of intersectional identities. Across gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, age as well. Race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background, class, caste parenthood choices. So when we look at the intersectional nature of human beings at work, we know that the workplace isn’t experienced in the same way.

And there’s decades of research that shows us that when people are chronically treated unfairly, when they’re chronically experiencing discrimination, it has a huge impact on stress levels and stress disorders like anxiety and depression. And then we also see lots of data points out there that would show us that, for example, women and particularly women in senior leadership roles are more burnt out.

We see a rise in quiet quitting. We see a rise in the great resignation that we saw post the pandemic as well. But what we also know is that there’s an inequity in the mental health support that people get. So one thing is talk about the organisation and the environment, but also the kind of help that people are getting when it comes to addressing mental health concerns is varied. And we know that there’s sufficient data out there that shows us that marginalised ethnic communities as well as the LGBTQ plus community, they don’t get the kind of support that others are getting.

So we know that there’s an inequity and we know that there’s this discrimination. So then we come to the question, well, then what can we do? How do we then create spaces where work is actually better for everyone and not just some people? And that requires us to look at it from a more intersectional approach that mental health isn’t experienced and the workplace isn’t experienced in the same way.

And that requires us to put equity on the table. To create and nurture spaces that are fair, where everyone is able to show up as themselves, that they’re not covering a part of who they are. They’re not hiding or masking a part of their identity just so that they’re able to fit in with the dominant norms. And also that they feel that sense of belonging. Because we know that when people feel that sense of belonging, we know that they then have those reduced impact of stress and anxiety that we do see when people don’t experience belonging.

So then it comes to question, well, what is causing this, right? And what is causing these factors for those who are part of marginalised communities? What are they experiencing? And it comes down to what Rita, what you brought up. It comes down to bias and discrimination, right? And the bias and discrimination that exist in our system structures, policies, practices in the culture of our organisation have a tremendous impact on the decisions that are made, who we’re favouring, Rita, as you talked about earlier.

But also in our interactions with each other. So when we think about, well, what do we need to do differently? One of the core things is to make sure that our organisations are truly inclusive, that they’re truly fair. And that means getting down to the core of both the system side of it and the cultural side of it. And that means looking at system structures, where is bias embedded across the entire employee life cycle in hiring practices.

And a really good example here is we know that neurodivergent individuals who form about anywhere between five to 15% of the population, depending on how we define it, are actually very reluctant to apply for jobs. Because the very idea of going for a traditional interview, sitting across a panel for a good 45 minutes to an hour, needing to make eye contact, that’s so stressful that it prevents neurodivergent individuals from even applying for a job.

And so, we’ve really got to rethink some of these practices that we have in our organisations that actually open up for both attracting talent in and then retaining talent as well. Now, we talked about the … Andrew’s, of course, talked about the four-day work week, thinking about flexible working options, parental leave, gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s things like that that actually create spaces where intersectional identities feel like they don’t need to cover up, and that reduces the stress that people are experiencing. Faith or meditation rooms, quiet spaces as well. So very practical things that can be done to make sure that we’re creating spaces where we can show up as ourselves. And I’ve got one more …

Morra Aarons-Mele:

… I just have to jump in really quick with a connection about disruption, which is I know from working with many leaders, specifically with ADHD, that the modern workplace where we are, Andrew, being interrupted every 11 minutes, although it feels like it’s way more, is almost impossible to manage. For example, if you’re working with something like ADHD, you’re set up to not be able to do your best work because your Slack is on.

Poornima Luthra:

Yeah, absolutely. And creating those spaces. I think there are lots of organisations, at least here in the Nordics where I am, who are actually starting to pay a lot more attention to what kind of workplace environments do we create so that we’re able to then make sure that neurodivergent individuals are able to thrive in that environment.

And that means that work looks different. It doesn’t look like it’s from a nine to five kind of setup, it looks different, it looks flexible. It’s working from home for part of the day, or part of the week and coming in for a certain period of time. It’s about having those quiet spaces, noise-cancelling headsets. Booths where you can do your work in a space where you’re comfortable, where you don’t have that sensory overload. But it’s creating these options. And the thing is, we often think about these things as, “Oh, these benefit people from marginalised groups,” but it actually benefits all of us.

Introverts, to be honest, all of us could use a little time out in the middle of the day with all the sensory stimulation that’s going on, and take a moment. It has this positive impact overall. Who doesn’t want to have some quiet time, perhaps in a quiet space? Gender-neutral bathrooms benefit not just the trans community, but benefit so many women as well with menopause and all the changes that are going on in women’s bodies. So there’s a lot that we can actually enable to happen by making these small changes. They’re not big changes, but they create environments where we’re being inclusive. And that actually brings me on to one of the last things that I wanted to put on the table is culture.

Because I think culture is such a big part of nurturing spaces where we all feel that we can thrive, where we all feel that we are not experiencing that levels of anxiety, stress. And this is not embedded in a strategy or a roadmap. This is embedded in our day-to-day interactions with each other, right? At the coffee machine, by lunch, during meetings. This is where what is commonly known as microaggressions. I’m not the biggest fan of the term, microaggressions. Micro somehow suggests that it doesn’t have as much of an impact.

In fact, in my book I write, I call them termite biases, because they’re very much like termites. They’re so subtle. You don’t know your beautiful wooden cabinet is infested by termites until it’s too late. And that’s what these day-to-day, non-inclusive behaviours feel like. They’re hidden in compliments. They’re hidden in humour. They’re hidden in casual things that we say to each other. And that’s where actually there’s so much stress that happens. And people feel it, and it’s so gradual that it creeps up. And when you are from a marginalised group, you don’t even necessarily notice it when the first instance happen. You may not notice it at the second. You may make a mental note, but you’re like … You might brush it aside, you might even gaslight yourself.

But over time, the stress that it adds to feeling included, to feeling excluded in that space, that is a huge mental load that people from marginalised groups take on. And I think that’s something we really need to put on the table and really think about, how our actions … We might mean well when we say something, a compliment for example. But reframing ourselves to thinking about impact versus the intention. And for me, that’s super important because I think when we’re trying to nurture inclusive spaces for intersectional, for different people, we often think we’re doing the right thing, but we don’t realise the harm or the impact that it has on others. And that’s where really my work on active allyship comes in. We’re really enabling those behaviours so that we’re creating spaces where not just some groups thrive, and not just some groups where work is better for their mental health, but everybody gets to thrive, and everybody gets to have an environment where their mental health is protected.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Can you give us an example of active allyship that is beneficial to mental health?

Poornima Luthra:

Yeah, of course. So one of the behaviours that I talk about, so in my book I’ve got seven behaviours. And they start off with more individual behaviours and then build to more team and organisational behaviours. And one of the behaviours, empathetic engagement. So when we live in a world, cancel cultures out there, and we’re also fearful of addressing each other’s bias and discrimination that we might witness or experience. And to be honest, my current research is actually focusing on fear. We have a lot of fear when it comes to nurturing these environments. And for many of us, we actually are passive. We stay away from it because we’re like, “Yeah, okay, inclusive workplaces sounds good, but I’m not really feeling up for engaging on bias and addressing something that I’ve noticed or something that I’ve experienced.” So empathy is so important, and I’m a big believer in asking questions in the right tone.

And so coming from a place of empathy, knowing that today it’s someone else’s bias that you might be engaging on, tomorrow it could very well be my own, right? As I write in my book, “If you have a brain, you’re biased.” Everyone has biases. And these show up, and they show up in such a myriad of different ways. And we don’t even notice it. So many of them are unconscious. So using questions is very, very powerful. So the next time you notice someone at lunch saying something that could be harmful to a particular community, it might be your own community, it might be another community, but you just notice it, have that conversation.

Take the person aside, have that one-to-one conversation. “Tell me where you’re coming from.” Open-ended questions to engage in that dialogue. I think we’ve created an environment around us where there’s just so much toxicity associated with creating these inclusive spaces that we’re all very scared. And actually what it takes is actually very simple things. Simple open-ended questions, sharing how someone from a particular community may have experienced that comment that you made or jokes that you made. And the person might just say, “Gosh, I’d never thought about it that way.” But we’re not creating spaces where we can have these nuanced conversations that are safe, in safe spaces, to take those risks. To admit when it didn’t go quite as I planned or it landed differently from how I thought it would because my intention was good, but the harm was done.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’ll never forget when I interviewed Amy Edmondson, who will be a member of this series in the last Tuesday of May, I said, “What’s the number one thing that you could do to create a more psychologically safe environment?” She just said, “Ask good questions.”

Poornima Luthra:

Exactly.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

And listen.

Poornima Luthra:

And listen without needing to respond. But listen with wanting to understand. I think we live in a world where we are listening to respond. We’re so quick to jump in with defensiveness, with justification. But listen to understand, to understand a different viewpoint. To understand how someone might experience the very same environment that we’re in, in a different way that causes them stress but doesn’t cause you stress. There are ways in which we can have those rich conversations and it brings teams closer together. It makes us appreciate the environment we’re in, and it helps us to nurture a better space for each other.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I think the thing about listening, and before I answer some wonderful questions from our audience, is really your point, Rita and Andrew as well, about consideration of others. And sometimes the best way to create a more mentally healthy environment is to stop assuming that the way you do things is the way that’s good for everyone else on your team. Just because you like to send emails on Saturday morning, or you love a lot of meetings, or Slack is your best friend, that has effects for other people.

Andrew Barnes:

Yeah, look, I think you’re absolutely right, Morra. The point is that often as leaders, I think that we naturally assume that everybody wants to climb to the top of the greasy bowl. And actually, they don’t. Most people want to have a decent job. They want to have time with their family. They want to have a good life. And a lot of people are quite happy with that.

But if all we ever do is we judge everybody by what drove us, then that means you end up with that culture where I think it’s okay to send an email late at night. Now, I will know that when we shifted the four-day week, my biggest problem – actually my board were the biggest problem – but the second-biggest problem – I will say, I fixed that by announcing it on national television first – but the biggest problem actually is the leadership team. That the leadership team has to rethink, re-change how they approach … and the only people I made it compulsory to work a four-day week was my leadership team. And they had to walk the talk. And that’s to your point, you’ve got to change the culture, and you’ve got to change it so it reflects what everybody wants in the organisation.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Rita, we got a good question a while ago that I want to start with you, because it’s something that we know makes humans anxious. And this is uncertainty. Anna Nielsen writes, “There’s a lot of neuroscience that shows that people benefit greatly from certainty. In my work, it’s crucial to create a sense of certainty for employees about how they’re expected to approach and handle conflict. What does the panel think?” And I’m going to start with you, Rita, about certainty and mental health at work. And again, how can a leadership team try to create a sense of certainty when it ain’t there necessarily?

Rita McGrath:

Well, yes and no, right? I mean, even in the most certain of times there’s always the unexpected that can happen. So one of the things I encourage senior leaders to do is what I call absorb uncertainty. And what I mean by that is you spell out for people your view of what the world is as best we can today. So that they’re not wrestling with this just sort of unfathomable uncertainty.

So let me give an example that might make that more clear. So I was working with a team that was launching a new product in the insurance space in America. And what you need to know to understand this example is that in the United States, insurance products are regulated state by state. So how many states have approved your plan is how many you’ll be able to access on launch date. So that’s the big uncertainty.

And so, I’m witnessing this conversation between the project manager who was the leader in this case, and the operations chief who was responsible for pulling this off. And they’re having this conversation about, “Are you ready?” And the operations guy is like, “well, I’m not sure …” Just blah, blah blah, just not getting anywhere.

So I kind of pulled the project manager off to the side and I said, “Well, have you told him how many states you expect him to be ready for?” And the project manager looks at me, he says, “Well, I don’t know.” I said, “Yeah, but that’s not an excuse. You are the leader in this situation. Your job is to put a stake in the ground and say, this is how many states you think we’re going to be dealing with, and then ask the operations guy whether he’s ready.” He says, “Well, I’m not getting anywhere as it is.”

So we went back in the room, said, “What if I told you, I think it’s going to be 15 states on launch day, and then maybe ramping up to 20 in a couple of weeks after that. Could you tell me whether you’re ready or not?” And the change in the conversation was electric. Operations guy, like, “15, oh, absolutely. This is the plan. This is how I do this. This is what …”

Now what I want to point out to our listeners is not one single fact changed from the first conversation to the second one. It was exactly the same data, but what the leader had done in that case, was he lifted from his people the burden of possibly being wrong, possibly failing. Back to Amy Edmondson, right? Possibly having to say, “Yes, I’m ready,” and then maybe it’s 40 states and absolutely no way would he be ready for that. So absorbing uncertainty I think is an absolutely crucial leadership challenge when you’re in states of high flux.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Poornima, Andrew, want to say anything about that? Or …

Andrew Barnes:

Yeah. Look, I will do it in a different way. And one of the things is I hate gig. Hate it with a passion, loathe it. If you look at-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

You mean the gig economy?

Andrew Barnes:

Yeah. So the Foundation for Young Australians has done a lot of very interesting research. Everybody under the age 25 is the most stressed generation there has ever been. Serious incidences of mental health. Most of the … about 25% of the jobs that are being created down there are gig jobs. Now, why I dislike gig is because there is no emphasis on training.

There’s uncertainty of hours. There is actually quite often people getting round … We’ve got very strong laws in New Zealand as it would be the case in Scandinavia around minimum wage, sick pay, holiday pay, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody cares really in the states, but that … And so there, we gig coming in and they get round our employment laws. All we are actually doing is we are building up problems for the future. We’re building up people who haven’t got skills, haven’t got training, haven’t got security. And actually we have got to recognize that convenience doesn’t trump everything else.

And that’s why I like my model because I give people the flexibility that they are craving. But I don’t lose the hard-fought-for employee protections. I shouldn’t be saying this as an employer. But employee protections, which a century of struggle in my home country, the UK, gave us these sort of protections. We cannot lose those. And yet, we are creating an economy where we actually think it’s okay to make people not work when they want, which is what they think. They work when I want them to work. And that’s the gig economy. And thus endeth the lesson.

Poornima Luthra:

I can weigh in with, there is a lot of research that shows us that inclusive organisations are more resilient. And they’re resilient because inclusive cultures mean that we are creating psychologically safe environments. Of course, the work of Professor Amy Edmondson, but also thinking about a culture of growth and learning, and unlearning, more importantly.

And we know that change is the only constant, which means that in an inclusive environment, we’re creating space for taking those, making those intelligent failures that Amy Edmondson talks about, but also creating opportunities where we’re unlearning and learning constantly. And so, it’s in these kind of environments where there is that resilience that’s built into it. And in moments when there’s flux, when there’s uncertainty, when there’s rapid change, we see that these are the organisations that actually pull through and come through on the other end with employee morale and employee mental health more intact than when they don’t have that inclusive culture.

So you could think of inclusive cultures as the foundation. And no matter what is changing on the top of it, it is this foundation that is pulling the organisation through. But I think we have a misunderstanding around what inclusive cultures actually are and the role that they play. We assume that it’s meant for just the marginalised communities to get a role in the organisation. It’s a pizza pie approach to looking at it, that if we provide something to one group, we’re taking away from the other. And this actually stems from misunderstanding around what actually it means to nurture an inclusive workplace. Because it actually, if we do it right, it weathers the storms.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Okay, my last question is going to be a speed round and it’s going to build on a question from Deborah Hagar. What three things … You don’t have to say three, you could pick one, can leaders do individually to develop a culture of equity as Dr. Luthra envisions? And I’m going to expand equity to include mentally healthy consideration for people’s need to be seen, to have agency, for people’s need to have a life and have time. For people’s need for their whole self to be recognized and not treated with bias and injustice. If you all were coaching a leader who said, “I really want to do this right,” what would you tell them? Whoever wants to can go first.

Poornima Luthra:

I am happy to go first.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Go for it.

Poornima Luthra:

For me, number one is be aware and consider the impact of your actions. Always give that pause/thought to, my intention might be, okay, what is the impact that it’s having? How can I understand that more? Number two, check in. Check in with your colleagues. Check in with your team members.

I know what works really well with some of the leadership teams that I work with is where at the start of a meeting, it could be a weekly meeting, it could be a daily meeting. At the start of it, just having that couple of seconds saying, “What frame of mind am I in right now? What’s happening in my life? How am I showing up today?” I think that quick check-in is so important so that we build that understanding that we’re all humans. And as human beings, we’re not always working at that level of productivity. There are moments where we’re going to have ups and downs and to create an environment that is more humane, that is more about humanity. And the last one for me is always ask ourselves, “Whose perspective, whose voice is missing? Who’s not being heard?” Those are my three.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Amazing.

Rita McGrath:

That’s great. I can go next.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Go for it.

Rita McGrath:

I think the first thing you want to do is try to introduce what the people at Amazon call mechanisms. So human beings are flawed and inconsistent and messy. And if we intend to do a good thing, want to lose weight, right? Eat less, move more, how complicated could that be? But when it comes to actually doing the thing, it’s much harder. So I’m a big fan of what I call mechanisms. So one mechanism is introduce a no interruption rule. So if you’re debating or discussing something, let everybody have a minute or two to get their opinions out before they get interrupted by others in the room. So that would be an example of a mechanism. Second thing is definitely give yourself a little checklist for diverse points of view. And I don’t mean that in a politically correct sense.

I mean diverse schooling, diverse backgrounds, diverse upbringing, diverse functions. Because we know that when it comes to unknown and unfamiliar tasks, diverse teams actually perform better than homogenous ones do. And then the last thing I think we want to be very mindful of is giving and getting really rich feedback. And it doesn’t have to be a whole big thing. It could be just in the moment. And making that normal so people … I mean, the last thing you want, right, is your boss to come to you and say, “I have some feedback for you.”

I mean, the instant response it creates is this flight fright reaction. So make it part of everyday conversation. Say, “Hey, that didn’t go so well, I don’t think.” And maybe make it with a little humour, right? There’s no reason feedback has to be this horrible thing. So I think getting rich … And feedback’s really just a way of confirming learning. So if you think about human learning, I have a theory about how the world works. I go see what happens. If my theory is wrong, what I expected to happen didn’t happen, I need to understand that better. And so, getting rich feedback is super important to learning in those kinds of environments.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you.

Andrew Barnes:

Well, I guess the first thing is, don’t kid yourself that people go over the top for a flag or a mission statement. We quite often whack those things on the wall and assume that everybody is going to buy into that. They don’t. It’s a complete waste of time for most of the time. Because what you are actually doing is you are actually often dictating down rather than listening up as to what is actually important to people.

So I think that’s number one. Number two, communication. We’re rubbish at it. You’ve got to understand that communication as a leader comes at lots of different levels, and you have to pitch that communication. It could be anything from doing the town hall, to actually just sitting down with a bunch of your employees at any point in time and making sure that the message is understood.

And that means that it’s not just being communicated by you, but it’s being communicated by your leadership team. And finally, because it really is what I’m standing for at the moment, just put in a four-day week. It’s not a silver bullet. But actually it forces you to question what your leadership team works like, how well you are empowering people, how well you’re listening to what they are wanting to do. And you’d actually be amazed that by giving people more time, by giving people authority and accountability to change how they work, what that leads is a more empowered, more engaged workforce. And that is a very powerful thing.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you all. I am always reminded of one of my favourite quotes from Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett from Kent State who says, “Work is school for grownups.” And we bring our whole selves messy and flawed as they are, but ultimately we want to go to a place that sees us, that respects us, that teaches us and gives us something important and valuable to do for our time, and make friends and have some fun along the way. And so, I think that the fundamental basics of what we learn about how to be good people, and listen, and see are so important. And plus, we should pay people fairly, right, Andrew?

Andrew Barnes:

Yeah, absolutely.

Poornima Luthra:

Absolutely.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you so much for your time. I’m going to hand it back over to Stuart.

Stuart Crainer:

Great discussion. Thank you everyone. Respect, dignity, treating people like responsible adults. Listening, ask whose voice is missing? Say no to interruptions. None of this is rocket science. And if you want to change things, announce it on national TV first. So thank you to Morra, Poornima, Rita and Andrew. And thank you to everyone for joining us. We really appreciate it.

You can check out Andrew’s work at 4dayweek.com. Four, number four. Rita is at ritaccgrath.com. Find out more about Poornima’s work on LinkedIn, or at the Copenhagen Business School website. And Morra can be found at Morraam.com. We hope you’ll be able to join us next week at the same time when joining Morra will be Sanyin Siang and Lenny Mendonca from McKinsey. Thank you very much and we’ll see you next week.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Bye.

Rita McGrath:

Bye everyone.

Andrew Barnes:

Bye.