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Adopting Engagement as a Mindset With Ashley Ridgeway-Washington

Sean Fitzpatrick — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0000

On this episode of Leading Through Listening, I’m joined by Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP and CHRO at JPS Health Network, to explore a transformative idea: engagement as a mindset. As someone who has spent her career balancing human and business priorities, Ashley offers a fresh perspective on what it takes to create a culture where everyone feels invested in and accountable for driving engagement.

Ashley approaches engagement as more than a program — it’s a shared commitment that defines how we work, connect and grow together. “[It’s] very much like a healthy marriage,” she says. “Everybody’s got to own it. Everybody’s got to show up. … Some days, it works well. Some days, it doesn’t. But we’ve bought in and we’ve decided that we’re going to be engaged.”

In this conversation, Ashley shares actionable insights on creating leadership accountability, building active listening into everyday practices and driving meaningful change through data and culture. Listen in as we explore the intersection of engagement, accountability and impact.

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Responsibility for Engagement Belongs to Everyone

Ashley believes that engagement is everyone’s responsibility. She doesn’t see engagement as something owned by HR or even leadership alone‌ — ‌it’s something everyone in the organization has to commit to. “Engagement’s a mindset,” she says. “It is behaviors. It is the little things we do in our normal ways of working. It is eye contact. It is leaning into positive intent. It is avoiding assumptions. It is being impeccable with our word.”

HR’s role in this process is to provide the tools and resources that help people show up for each other every day. “I view HR as two things: culture stewards and engagement catalysts,” she says, emphasizing the need to create environments where employees and leaders alike can take ownership of their contributions.

But for that attitude to really catch on, senior leaders must model the behaviors they want to see across the organization. “When your senior leaders have set the tone and said, ‘This is how we’re going to roll,’ they model that and it continues to permeate throughout the organization,” she says. This top-down modeling, paired with grassroots buy-in, creates the foundation for sustainable engagement.

Listening Is Your Leadership Superpower

If everyone is responsible for achieving engagement, then everyone’s voices must be heard. Ashley shares a wealth of strategies for building a culture that values employee voices. “Employees need to see companies show up at the moments that matter most to them,” she said, citing the importance of addressing key life events and workplace concerns with authenticity and care.

At JPS, listening isn’t a one-time event — it’s baked into everyday practices. From annual engagement surveys to quarterly pulse checks, Ashley and her peers in leadership are consistently seeking input from employees. But what really sets JPS apart is how they use the data. Ashley described an “engagement flywheel” that ensures feedback informs decisions at all levels. “Leaders are incorporating that into their agendas,” Ashley says. “They’re listening as a part of their team meetings. They’re listening as a part of rounding.”

Ashley also shared a powerful cautionary tale from the downfall of Enron, where employee feedback warning of issues was ignored. “It is critical that organizations are actively listening and tuning in to the sentiments of employees,” she says, “particularly those on the front line because they are the closest to the work.” It’s a reminder that listening isn’t just about gathering data‌ — ‌it’s about acting on what you hear.

Data and Accountability Make Engagement Tangible

For those who think of engagement as “soft” or intangible, Ashley provides a compelling counterpoint: data. She’s a firm believer that engagement can and should be tied to measurable business outcomes. “Data doesn’t lie,” she says. “There is a real hard cost. We often think about engagement as soft, mushy stuff, but … for the first time in modern healthcare, labor costs are the difference between profitability and loss.”

Ashley shared an example from her time at Christus Health, after noticing consistently low engagement in some parts of the business. To counter this, she introduced a tiered leadership program to hold managers accountable for engagement. Leaders were grouped into tiers based on their engagement performance, and those who consistently struggled were given targeted support. “It became foundational,” she said. “Doing good work was no longer good enough. You had to do good work and engage your team.”

Top-performing leaders were given recognition in the form of symbolic awards, like Yeti cups labeled “Tier 1 Leader.” These simple gestures created a culture of healthy competition and pride, transforming engagement from an abstract concept into a tangible goal.

My conversation with Ashley left me reflecting on how leaders can truly make engagement a part of their organizational DNA. Her approach‌ — ‌anchoring engagement in shared accountability, active listening, and data-driven insights‌ — ‌is a powerful framework for driving real change.

But what resonated most is Ashley’s belief that engagement is a journey, not a destination. “You are really pursuing progress and not perfection,” she says. That’s a reminder for all of us to keep moving forward, learning and adjusting as we go.

People in This Episode

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington: LinkedIn

Resources

The Power of Moments

Transcript

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I view HR as two things. Culture stewards and engagement catalysts, right? We provide the tools and resources that the entire organization needs to create the workplace that they all want to be a part of. And so, I often akin engagement as a cultural attribute. Very much like a healthy marriage. Everybody’s got to own it. Everybody’s got to show up. Some days you show up, you like them. Some days you show up, you don’t. Some days, it works well. Some days, it doesn’t. But we’ve bought in and we’ve decided that we’re going to be engaged. Engagement’s a mindset.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Hi. Welcome to another episode of Leading Through Listening, a podcast where we dive into real stories of how leaders have transformed their employee experience. We explore topics like innovative strategies for aligning business and human capital priorities, fostering leadership that truly listens, and actionable steps to drive engagement and performance. I’m your host, Sean Fitzpatrick and today, I’m excited to welcome someone who has dedicated a career to helping organizations unlock the potential of their people through robust culture and engagement strategies.

Our guest is Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP and CHRO at JPS Health Network. She’s a seasoned advisor and executive coach who has worked for Fortune 500 companies, non-profits and startups to develop best-in-class people and culture practices. Ashley is known for her ability to balance business and human priorities, showing leaders how engaged employees drive innovation, flexibility and long-term success. Her unique expertise combines HR, DEI and legal acumen with deep understanding of organizational performance metrics.

Today, we’ll explore Ashley’s insight on securing executive buy-in for engagement initiatives, translating culture into measurable outcomes and using metrics to build a compelling business case for prioritizing people strategies. Ashley, welcome to the podcast.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Thank you so much, Sean. It’s so great to be here.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Well, Ashley, tell me a little bit about yourself, personally and professionally.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. So I currently serve as a senior vice president and chief human resources officer at JPS Health Network in Fort Worth, Texas. We are Tarrant County’s safety net, and so we take care of those patients that can’t always get care elsewhere. I will tell you I am sitting in my purpose in this role, but it took me quite a bit of time to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I’m a reformed attorney by trade, grew up in healthcare HR, and then took a stint in tech and realized that I prefer people to widgets, but I often say that my passion and purpose in life sits at the intersection of people and possibility. And so, I’m happy to be working in that space and sitting in that purpose here at JPS.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

When you started off an attorney, where did that inflection point happen? That’s quite a different career path, though there is alignment with some things around compliance and legal, but that’s quite a change. Is there anything in particular that made that change happen for you?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So the reality is I stumbled into my passion. I was an unhappy attorney, like many people, took some time off to have a family and did some work as a legal auditor. And quite frankly, the EEO person at the employer I was with walked off the job. The VP of HR came into my office and said, “You’re the only barred attorney in the building and we have a charge of discrimination due tomorrow. Can you help?”

And the rest is history.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. Yeah, sometimes that happens. You just fall into roles and then you realize, “Boy, I really love this thing.”

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Yeah, absolutely.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

That’s good. One of the things that we do with organizations is try to help organizations improve business performance but also create a great place to work for employees. And sometimes they’re conflicting goals, hopefully they’re not, but sometimes they are. So I guess it’d be interesting to hear how you go about helping the executive teams you work with. How do they balance the people priorities and the business priorities so they’re not always thinking short-term because people issues sometimes take longer. Tell me a little bit about how you go about navigating those types of things.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. I think when you start with people at the center, you recognize that whatever it is that you’re accomplishing, whatever you’re going after — and for us, it’s high quality patient care — that it is human ingenuity that drives that. And so, it is in the best interest of the business to have happy employees. What I would also say is that when you have extended goodwill and done right by employees, when you have kept the things that they need front and center, what you will find is that they’re also incredibly willing to reach compromise and go above and beyond.

And so we often believe that in order to advance short-term gains, we’ve got to take a back seat and we can’t always look to the future. But I will tell you, what I have found is that when employees see that there is a mutually beneficial value proposition and when they recognize that an organization actually cares about them as humans, they will go the distance with you. They will sacrifice, they will make swaps, they will do the things that really allow the business to balance both.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

When employees feel that care that the executive team or the organization really cares about them, are there things that you’ve seen that either have pointed to that say, “Oh, there’s a real good example.” They’re saying, “I really like what that executive or leader or manager did” or maybe even ones that really did the opposite and they caused them, the employees go, “Okay, obviously, you guys don’t care about what we think about this organization or our role here.”

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure, we’re human. And so I read, many years ago, “The Power of Moments” by Chip and Dan Heath, and if you’ve not read that book, I would encourage you to read it because foundational to a authentic and positive employee experience is understanding that employees need to see companies show up at the moments that matter most to them. They will take less pay, they will do really hard work, but when someone dies or someone is born or something pivotal happens in their life, they need to both feel and see the support of the organization.

And so I would say generally speaking, that really does create truly goodwill. And then I would also say that in this environment, particularly as it relates to generation Z, our ability to actively listen, to proactively actively listen and make changes or realign based on employee preference and what we’re hearing from employees is really important.

I read an article once about Enron and so the whole journey, the fall of Enron. And there was a researcher that basically went back and looked at a decade of employee engagement surveys and other listening mechanisms. And what they saw in the downfall of Enron is that employees knew it all along and they were sounding the alarm in many ways. And so it is critical that organizations are actively listening and tuning in to the sentiments of employees, particularly those on the front line because they are the closest to the work.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. I guess when you think about employee engagement and the culture of the organization, how do you get leaders more involved or demonstrating, get the most senior leadership team? So sometimes, not always, you see them, “Okay, yes, we’re on board. We should be doing regular feedback, either an annual survey and then pulse surveys in between, and different listening mechanisms. But then they send it over to often the human resource group, is okay, “There you go, go.” And we’ve seen some of the most powerful surveys is when the executives are driving it. Yeah, HR is still doing all the heavy lifting in the back end, but they’re really driving what they want to learn, they’re driving why it’s important, they’re driving the followup, but not all organizations do that.

So I’m often wondering how does HR, how do they see their role in helping become more positioning as really executive? So if we were asking employees who’s running this survey, who wants to do it, and they’re, “Oh, the executives want to learn about this.” That would be the ideal versus, “Oh, it’s an HR initiative.” Not that HR’s bad but it, in general, not always, has the best perception. So it’s interesting to think about how you would go about doing that.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I view HR as two things, culture stewards and engagement catalysts, rights? We provide the tools and resources that the entire organization needs to create the workplace that they all want to be a part of. And so I often akin engagement as a cultural attribute, very much like a healthy marriage. Everybody’s got to own it. Everybody’s got to show up. Some days you show up, you like them. Some days you show up, you don’t. Some days, it works well. Some days, it doesn’t. But we’ve bought in and we’ve decided that we’re going to be engaged.

Engagement’s a mindset. It is behaviors. It is the little things we do in our normal ways of working. It is eye contact. It is leaning into positive intent. It is avoiding assumption. It is being impeccable with our word. And now I’m leaning into my favorite, the four agreements, but the bottom line is engagement is something that every single person at an organization must own if it’s actually going to be what we want it to be.

And then I view that there are some folks who are part of that mix who I call super influencers or super users, and those are executives. They have the chops and the influence and the authority to be able to really galvanize that. And so we certainly will prepare them with tools, but ultimately, what I found is when your senior leaders have set the tone and said, “This is how we’re going to roll,” they model that and it continues to permeate throughout the organization.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, I like that concept you mentioned about engagement being a two-way street because It’s not all about the employees providing feedback. “What have you done for me lately? Can you improve this, improve that?” Then they’re just throwing everything back onto they’re part of the organization. Everyone’s part of the organization so if you can make it part of it’s owned by you, part of it’s owned by your manager, part of it’s owned by leadership. It’s not all one team or one group driving it. So I like that perception and I think it’s a really good way to think about it.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So Sean, I have to say this. I do a lot of focus grouping and I have committed agreements, so team commitments that we have as we’re having this space together. And I often say when you come to this space, just know I’m not a vending machine and I’m not Santa Claus. You can’t sit on the organization’s lap and lay out a wish list and have no accountability. You can’t put a quarter in and get a bag of chips out. You don’t put thoughts in and get engagement out. This is a journey that we all take together.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. It reminds me, so sometimes we get invited in to do some of those also, and when you go through the process and you have them, “Okay, clarify what you’re meaning on this feedback and then how would you go about solving it?” And then you ask, “What are the steps this team could take?” Or people that you, all of a sudden, you hear for a while. You got crickets. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, you want us to do something?” But then you get over that hoop or obstacle and then you get to see some people realize, “Yeah, maybe this is not just a venting session.”

It’s a dialogue and it’s an opportunity for them to provide feedback and get feedback and also take accountability for some of the roles. So yeah, I like your “I’m not Santa Claus.” I’m going to have to steal that from you. I’m going to use that probably from time to time. And I’m not a vending machine. You can’t just put nickels in or quarters in and get something out. That’s good.

You’ve worked for a wide variety of organizations and whenever you’re working with executives, how do you get them to pay attention to engagement initiatives or feedback or alignment if they’re not on board or, “We ran a survey three years ago and it didn’t work.” Or sometimes I even hear, “CEO, I don’t believe in surveys, they’re not effective or they’re not useful.” Do you ever run across anything like that? If you have changed their perception, how have you gone about approaching that?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So data doesn’t lie. There is a real hard cost. We often think about engagement as soft, mushy stuff, but it is absolutely hard in many ways. And I will tell you, for the first time in modern healthcare, labor costs are the difference between profitability and loss. And so as I speak to leaders within my own organization, even beyond that, I do a fair amount of coaching. I will share the data, I will ask them to provide me the data and let’s look through it. Let’s look at the cost of turnover. Let’s look at your vacancy rate. How long have these critical roles been open and who’s doing that job and are they doing it well? Just look at your cost of voluntary turnover in one year. These are people who negotiated to be with you. Left a job that they were at. They negotiated the salary they wanted. So it’s not that, it’s something else.

And so, often, I will lean in to data to help executives understand the cost associated with poor engagement. And then when you get past that, you really start to talk about the value proposition associated with a culture that feels like we’re all in this together. And so we start with the data and then we come back around to the heart. And what we basically talk a lot about is when you don’t have an engaged staff, you are leaving money and innovation on the table. And who wants to do that? If you had data that told you you could be 30% more productive if you just treated people with basic dignity and integrity at work, who would walk away from that?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

You would think, yeah, it would be very… it’s a fairly low cost. It takes time and behavioral change, but it is not a big capital investment to change over time.

You brought up an interesting concept around the cost of turnover or voluntary turnover. Do executives have a clear picture or a pretty good sense of what the actual cost is? I know it does vary based on the type of role and how easy are they to find. It’s getting harder now with lower and lower people with unemployment being such as it is where there’s still lots of opportunity, particularly in healthcare. It’s one of the fastest-growing sectors out there. But would they be able to say, Okay, for a $75,000-a-year professional you have there, would they know how much it probably costs to replace them, both the hard and soft costs? Would they have that clear in their mind?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I would say probably not, but that’s why strategic HR is so important because your business partner should be bringing that to the table as a part of the standard business review. The days of personnel are over. I mean, that is not the value proposition of strategic human capital these days. Our job is to be managing labor and costs at the P&L level. And so part of that review is looking at the employee, what I call engagement health and talking about these are the number of dollars that we lost. And I’ve gotten a lot of feedback recently from colleagues, other CHROs, we talk a lot about talking about turnover in terms of just full-time employees or just first-year, but ultimately, anyone who leaves your organization and causes a disruption in business continuity costs you dollars.

Now, some of that’s positive. We want some of those folks that are not working to… we want to promote them to patient.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Self-select, yes.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Yeah.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Self-select out of here.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

But ultimately, we should be lifting those costs up to the business and helping to educate on how we mitigate those costs and create a culture we can all be proud of.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I’ve often heard and seen it, and it varies, but for a professional, maybe not an executive and not a manual, early in their careers, but somewhere 1.5 times their salary. Is that, and I know it’s hard to generalize, but how do you think about those numbers?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. So there are a lot of calculations out there. Because I’m in healthcare, I tend to lean into, most of mine are clinical roles, to NSI, which really gives some best in practice. And so what it says on average to replace a bedside nurse is about 60 grand. That doesn’t include the opportunity cost associated with those people working on that. It doesn’t include executive search or any kind of search you might do. It also doesn’t include the cost of temporary vacancy to fill that role when someone leaves. So when you start to look at that, you’re talking about probably all-in $100,000.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Just to replace, yeah, for a loss.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Just to replace.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

So it starts that up pretty quickly.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

It does. It does.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. Interesting. Now, do you track, in your organization, you track involuntary leaves, regrettable loss, all of those core metrics? They all are somewhat different. You’re right. They all impact the organization because someone left, but they can impact it in different ways and sometimes even on top of that, strategic roles, people are either really hard to find or replace versus less strategic at the time and strategy and direction changes. How do you go about thinking of all of those metrics or tracking all of those? Do you guys typically do all that in your organization?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

We do. We have HR analytics dashboard, my bible. I look at it probably every other day, sometimes every day, depending on what’s going on. And from my perspective, I believe the data is a part of the story. Data is really important, but it also helps us to give context around what else is going on. And so I tend to pull together both for the HR committee of the board as well as my senior leadership team a quarterly overview of where we are from an employee engagement or employee health standpoint to talk about what information is giving the indications that we need to attend to a certain thing or that we need to lean in a place.

And so everything from exit interview data to one of the things we do is our CEO breakfast, which our new employees really like. About their 60th day, new employees get to come in, white tablecloth, hot breakfast, and they get to converse with each other and executives. At the end of that, we ask some questions about their onboarding experience and whether they feel like they have a best friend at work and they’ve gotten sticky. And so all of that information together helps me to piece together what the sentiment of our teams are and where we need to deploy additional support resources or rethink an approach.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, they say the first couple of months of a new employee are critical, because you’re either going to get them connected to the organization both socially and in their job. And if you do a good job there, it really can keep people longer and be more engaged throughout their career.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

You have 45 to 60 days. In the first 45 to 60 days, an employee has already decided whether they’re going to stay with you in year one. If they are disengaged by day 30, they’re already looking for a job. And in healthcare, a nurse can go somewhere — a bad nurse can go somewhere tomorrow. So the reality is it’s so important to create that stickiness to make people feel welcome and they have wayfinders and buddies and support that just help them as humans be grounded in that space so that they can then start to learn the landscape of the work.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, because they made a big decision in terms of changing and joining this. So you want to make sure that, okay, yeah, you made the right decision. There’s this concept in buying bigger on the markets like cognitive dissonance. It’s like, “Okay, did I make it? Did I do the right thing?” You’re nervous going in. So the more you can do, I think, upfront, it pays off handsomely. And you’ve probably seen that in the work you’ve done.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Absolutely. And you’d be surprised just how little stuff, check in with somebody, send them a note, send them a recognition via email, peek your head around in their workspace and ask them if they’ve had lunch or bring them a packet of M&Ms, things that are virtually free really do make the difference in their first 90-day experience.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, those little things. It’s not so much the gift or the M&Ms. It’s the concept that, “Oh, people recognize me. They see me. I’m part of the team now.” And it’s that whole area of just feeling like you’re involved in the organization early on, and that seems to make a big difference.

It’d be interesting to hear a little bit about what’s your measurement strategy there? How do you go about measuring? And then if you think, you talked about when you work with a board on the HR committee, they probably look for, okay, how’s the culture there? How’s engagement? How do you go about pulling this? Do you have annual surveys, pulses? Do you do focus groups where you collect data and summarize it in? How do you go about… What are the measurements that you guys use on a regular basis and what do you find most effective?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So our primary listening mechanisms are Gallup. We’re a Gallup employee survey —

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Hence, the best friend at work question, yes?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Yes, absolutely. So we do Gallup annually and then we do a pulse. We actually listen to every employee, so part-time, PRN, full-time, as well as our clinicians. Last year, we had 95% engagement in the employee and 84% engagement with clinicians, which is unheard of, 75% of our part-time and PRN listen- I mean, share their voice with us.

So those are our two primary ways. But in the interim, we do a lot of other stuff. We work a lot with our leaders. And so, one of the really cool things that we did a couple of years ago, and this predates me so I can’t take credit for this. We’ve just enhanced it, is we’ve anchored all of our leadership development courses to our Q12, which are the questions that we ask and are indicators of engagement.

So every time we teach a new leader any new skill, we ensure that we’ve infused those Q12 behavioral attributes and ways of working into their training. And what has happened is we’ve created an engagement flywheel. So leaders are incorporating that into their agendas. They’re listening as a part of their team meetings. They’re listening as a part of rounding in bedside, shift, report and stoplighting. And so although, we have these big listening mechanisms, we are listening all along at the department level, which is where I think the magic is actually occurring. And then beyond that, we have focus grouping and specific strategies for new employees.

We’ve also started the process this year of isolating where we start to see people cliff that three- to five-year mark in healthcare and how we can start to get into some stay conversations and stay interviews. And so we have two big bangs, but we have infused active listening into every facet of our employee touches so that we can keep a pulse on where employees are expressing concerns and rounding and being able to do some service recovery real time.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. Yeah, it sounds like, yeah, you’ve got a lot of good core metrics. What I really like is how you’re infusing some of those into that management training, management development so it becomes part of their way of thinking on how… the culture, really. If you’re building that into their thinking, you’re building that into the culture because they represent often an important part of the culture and what it’s like to be working around here. So I really like that. That’s good. That’s powerful.

When you’re in an organization for a long time or you’ve seen it over time, sometimes it takes a while for some of these things to… Initiatives you do, you learn things maybe on feedback or from employees, then you implement them or they inform decisions that you guys are working towards. And there’s some examples that you can point to where some of the initiatives have had great or good long-term business impact. So you’ve adjusted this culture and now we’ve seen changes out six months, nine months, 18 months, two years because sometimes it takes a while for this stuff to show up.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. So I’ll go back to my Christus Health days. That’s where I grew up in HR. And I think about when I first came there, I was, I don’t know, 30-something-year-old leader and very, in many respects, idealistic and altruistic. But I had this crazy idea and I went to my senior leadership team and I said, “I’m looking at this engagement data and every year the same people are struggling and everybody knows it. We can name them off the top of our head, but nobody’s doing anything with them. There’s no accountability. And can I submit a proposal that changes that? Can we hold them accountable? Can we actually talk about whether these people should be leading people here?” And my leaders trusted me to build something. And it was a couple of things.

It was a tiering, for lack of better word. So we had those folks who were superstars, we had those people in the middle, had people who were really struggling, but it wasn’t just calling out who was great and who wasn’t. It was really working with strategic business partners, as well as talent management to cultivate some action planning that was really comprehensive and was both at the team level and with the leader. But the other thing that we did was we celebrated those at the top of the organization like crazy.

So we printed Superman capes and we did the Yeti cups and it said tier 1 leader for that year on down. And I will tell you four years later, when we got ready to make the decision that after your third year you would be invited to step away from the organization in a leadership capacity if you couldn’t improve your scores, what I can tell you is this. I believe there were less than three people across the organization of 50,000 people who were invited to do something different. Those who no longer wanted to be engaged, most of them self-selected out.

We found that at the end of the day, many people wanted to be better. They didn’t have the tools. And so we saw a tremendous increase in those folks migrating from the bottom quartiles up even to the top quartile. And I will tell you that cup every year was, I mean, like a bonus. If you didn’t have your cup, it became a cultural thing. I mean, leaders will say, “I don’t want tier 2 leaders or tier 3 leaders on my team.”

So it became this thing. It was this friendly competition that really built the muscle of engagement and it helped leaders to buy in. And four years later, tier 1 leadership was just the way to be. I mean, it was part of the question around whether you got stretch assignments or you got an… I mean, it became foundational. Doing good work was no longer good enough. You had to do good work and engage your team, and you had to own engagement. And that became the prototype for our leadership.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting, yeah. And I like the example of the cups. It’s like a symbol, right?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

It is.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

If you go, there’s some research that’s out there, you’re like, “What’s culture like in your area?” Well, it’s based on some underlying assumptions we have. And those assumptions then get representative values. And then those values get… you see them as symbols often in the organization. And symbols could be plaques on the wall. It could be anything, but in this case, they’re cups.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

It’s just a cup.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

And people, they tie into that. And it represents the culture and part of the culture in many ways. So I really like that. That’s interesting.

We work with a lot of what we call small to mid-size, 150, 250, 300, 500-person organizations. And maybe they’re just starting out on their journey on trying to understand employee engagement, get leadership buy-in, maybe they haven’t done systematic surveys on a regular basis and they really haven’t got a listening program. What do you suggest for them? How would they go about getting started or what are the things they might want to look at if you would think of a couple of things so they can build some momentum?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I would say I have three pieces of advice. First, if you’re a relatively new company, build it in and don’t try to bolt it on. What we know about any cultural attribute is when it is infused in ways of working, it works. Trying to layer inclusion on top, trying to layer engagement on top never works. It has to be the way you work.

Secondarily, I would say start asking the tough questions of yourself and of the organization. And actually, even if you don’t have an engagement survey, and I will tell you now, there are a lot of really good inexpensive tools out there. So find one to start to gather sentiments and identify what the strategy will be to listen, share feedback and start a two-way dialogue.

And then the third thing that I would say is something that I started saying, a member of my team started saying it, and it stuck: “Good, better, best — never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best.” Keep pressing forward. You are really pursuing progress and not perfection. So continue to move forward, measure your success, celebrate your success, recalibrate, and go back at it because engagement is a journey. It is not something that happens overnight. It’s gradually, suddenly, all at once, and then it’s super fragile. One thing can throw it off, and so just keep it top of mind and keep moving forward toward it.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Well, Ashley, that’s great. And just some of the things I pulled away from here is how you see, first of all, engagement as a two-way street, right? It’s not just all about, “Hey, what am I going to do for you today or tomorrow?” It’s what are you also going to do to help engage yourself or engage in the work that’s being done in the organization?

And your tip around build it in. You gave it right at the end, but you gave a really good example early on in what you do in your organization on how you build some of those metrics that you ask in the survey into your leadership training and competency development and capability development. Those two points in themselves are fantastic.

And then the last point, and I think I agree with you, is just start, so the good, better, best. Just start somewhere, get going on it because it is a journey. It’s not a sprint. You don’t have to be perfect right out of the gates, but if you’re committed to it and you’re building it into your business, it will happen over time and you’ll learn more about how to build a better workplace that’s great for the employees and also good business at the same time. So thank you very much.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Thank you. It’s great. I appreciate you.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Thanks for joining us today on Leading Through Listening. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube Music so you don’t miss a future episode. We’ll see you again soon.

The post Adopting Engagement as a Mindset With Ashley Ridgeway-Washington appeared first on TalentMap.

Self-Leadership and Betting on You with Laurie Ruettimann

Sean Fitzpatrick — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 18:35:52 +0000

On this episode of Leading Through Listening, I’m joined by Laurie Ruettimann, a speaker, author of Betting on You and an outspoken advocate for personal accountability at work. Laurie’s candid insights challenge conventional workplace thinking, especially around leadership and engagement. Laurie explores how the changing nature of work requires both leaders and employees to embrace a more holistic, self-directed approach.

“We fix work by fixing ourselves first,” she notes, stressing that personal agency is critical in navigating the complexities of modern careers.

Our conversation touches on how employees can redefine success on their own terms, how leaders must shift their roles from managers to mentors and why self-leadership isn’t just a personal responsibility but a collective one. Listen in to begin rethinking your relationship with work.

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Music

Self-Leadership: Moving Beyond Career Management

Laurie challenges the typical understanding of leadership as something bestowed by title or position. Instead, she suggests that self-leadership is about internal growth and making deliberate choices. “Self-leadership … is the art and science of individual accountability,” she explains. Laurie’s view isn’t about striving for the next promotion but about taking responsibility for the full scope of your life — both in and out of the workplace.

She observes that the modern workforce, especially younger generations, are increasingly uninterested in rigid career ladders and more focused on aligning their work with their personal values. “More and more younger workers want to be considered part of a collective. They like a brand, they like a mission, they like an idea,” she says. “But they can manage themselves. They believe in self-leadership — and they actually need less from managers.”

Autonomy in the workplace doesn’t mean complete independence, but rather a more fluid relationship between individual agency and organizational culture.

The concept of self-leadership also requires a deep understanding of when to take ownership and when to adjust your environment. Laurie challenges employees to ask themselves, “Why did I enter this workplace, and what am I bringing to it?” This introspection is at the heart of her argument: success at work starts with understanding your own values and aligning them with your actions.

The Evolving Role of Leaders and HR

Effective leadership is a partnership, not a hierarchy. Laurie’s vision of leadership is one where managers act as enablers, not just supervisors. “We have a real opportunity for leaders and managers to be advisors, to be mentors, to be coaches — or at least not to be the task masters or task mistresses that they were back in the 1980s,” she says.

HR plays a pivotal role in this evolving model. Laurie argues that HR professionals must rethink their purpose beyond compliance and policies. She challenges them to become facilitators of leadership by enabling managers and employees alike to step into roles of self-leadership. “You are creating an HR business partner, a people business partner, who’s really focused on resourcing when needed, enabling, coaching and getting training into the organization,” Laurie says. “But it’s not your local HR lady’s job to plan the picnic anymore.”

Laurie suggests that organizations should foster environments where both leaders and employees engage in meaningful, reciprocal conversations. This kind of environment creates space for innovation and employee engagement rooted in real connections, not mandated procedures.

Life Crafting: Redefining Success Holistically

Laurie introduces the concept of “life crafting” as a broader, more integrated approach to success — one that blends personal fulfillment with professional achievement. She pushes the conversation beyond traditional “work-life balance,” framing the issue instead as an ongoing, intentional process of designing your entire life. She encourages listeners to ask: Who am I? What do I want, not just at work, but in life?

During the pandemic, many people were forced to rethink their careers in the context of personal priorities. Laurie believes this reflective moment isn’t over and should continue. Her idea of life crafting invites us to continually reassess not just our jobs, but our relationships, hobbies and community engagements. For Laurie, the future of work is deeply interconnected with the choices we make outside of it.

Laurie’s approach offers an important caveat: work can fund an interesting life, but we can’t rely on work to fill emotional voids or serve as the sole source of meaning. “If we’re not engaging in relationships with family members, we’re not connected in our community, if we’re not out there doing volunteer work, if we’re not learning and growing — we’re not thriving,” she says. “Work is never going to satisfy that pit.” This holistic perspective on work pushes the boundaries of how we define success and well-being in the modern world.

People in This Episode

Laurie Ruettimann: LinkedIn

Resources

Punk Rock HR

Betting on You: How to Put Yourself First and (Finally) Take Control of Your Career

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

Transcript

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, we do have a 21st century workforce working within 20th century parameters where people have to stay employed for a lot of reasons under this idea of full-time employment because in America that’s how we get our benefits or in some countries you rise up the ranks and you get to a leadership role. And more and more younger workers want to be considered part of a collective. They like a brand, they like a mission, they like an idea, but they can manage themselves. They believe in self-leadership and they actually need less from managers. And so we’ve got this real disconnect between the way our systems are structured and what the 21st century worker actually wants.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Hi, welcome to another episode of Leading Through Listening, the podcast where we’ll dive into real stories of how leaders have transformed their employee experience. We’ll explore topics like innovative ways to build leadership by focusing on how to ask the right questions of your people. We also cover how to understand what they’re saying and most importantly, strategies to involve them in the change you want to make.

I’m your host, Sean Fitzpatrick, and today I’m thrilled to welcome someone who embodies what it means to lead with intention and empathy. Our guest today is Laurie Ruettimann, an acclaimed leadership expert, LinkedIn Learning instructor and thought leader who has helped countless organizations transform their leadership practices. Laurie’s LinkedIn Learning courses have garnered over two million views. They cover leadership transformation, management readiness, self-leadership and more.

She challenges traditional management mindsets and guides leaders towards creating workplaces where employees are heard, valued and empowered. Laurie is known for her no-nonsense approach to leadership and her passion for helping managers navigate the complexity of the modern workforce. Today we’ll explore some of her insights on how leaders can ask the right questions, listen openly and lead in a way that fosters loyalty, growth and transformation. You can learn more about Laurie and her work at her website, LaurieRuettimann.com. Laurie, welcome to the show.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, Sean, thank you so much. I’m really honored to be here. How you doing today?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Very good, very good, thank you. You have a very interesting journey. You started off in the HR world and then you’ve sort of migrated or navigated yourself into a real expert on helping advise and challenge the way HR thinks about itself. And I guess what I’d like to start with before we get into some of the details on leadership is just tell me about your journey. How did you get here?

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, Sean, it’s a bunch of bad mistakes and accidents that brought me to where I am today, like anybody’s journey, right? But also good leaders and mentors and people who had wisdom along the way. You’re right, I did start out in human resources and worked with people who are great and worked with people who maybe should have had other jobs. And in the process I learned that we fix work for other people by fixing it for ourselves first. And I really took that lesson to heart and asked myself, do I want to work in HR or do I have a passion around leadership and work and the economy and power and politics? And when I kind of figured out what my core values were, that’s when I decided that I wanted to go out and consult and advise and more importantly write and speak about the world of work.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I read your book, I thought it was really good. Betting On You, I thought that was a fantastic book around bringing this mindset of just taking responsibility for yourself, whatever role or career you’re in and sort of driving your own career forward. So it’d be great to hear a little bit about why you end up writing that book. I often find when you’re writing, it does two things. It conveys information and value to others in the published form, but it also crystallizes your thinking and clarifies your thinking. That whole process does that. So it’d be interesting to hear a little bit about how that book might have helped your thinking around leading yourself.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, thank you for asking. I’ve been blogging for many years and talking about the world of work, and one of the things about storytelling is that it’s always better when you can include the personal in a business story. And so that was my approach to blogging for many years. And people kept asking me to write a book and tell more of my story and I thought, all right, I don’t want to write a memoir, but I want to write something that’s fun and interesting that is both for the leader and the worker around my thoughts around career management and leadership and presence and all the good stuff. And I have this one thesis and that thesis is that, as I mentioned before, we fix work by fixing ourselves first and imbued in that is this idea of self-leadership, which is the art and the science of individual accountability.

And even when I’m talking about human resources or I’m talking about the unemployment numbers or the world economy, I am always really always talking about self-leadership because I think we are individually responsible for our experiences in this world. And so throughout the book, there are stories around how I took individual accountability both personally and professionally, but also how I teach it and how I make sure people see individual accountability rooted in leadership, rooted in well-being, rooted in the employee experience.

When I think about the employee experience, for years I thought it was a leadership responsibility, but now I see through research, through consulting, that it’s also the employee’s responsibility. That if they’re not getting what they need, it’s time to look inward and ask why are my values so misaligned and what can I do to fix this? So that’s really the heart and soul of Betting On You, and thanks for the really great review. It’s been almost four years since it came out and it’s always nice to hear that people enjoy it.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I’m glad you brought that up, that sort of engagement or the employee experience, it is a two-way street. So it’s not just, ‘Hey, leader, manager, boss, what have you done for me lately?’ It’s that individual responsibility of how do I craft my role? How do I craft the relationships that I have? And that brings me, going from your book to some of your LinkedIn Learning courses that you’ve authored.

You talk a lot about some of those courses around self-leadership. I guess it’d be interesting to hear from a leadership or manager, what does that look like? What does practicing, an example of self-leadership might look like? In particular how it helps others, and I’m going to make this complicated here for you, bringing in your HR background now, how does HR help leaders, managers, individual contributors take more of a self-leadership role? What are some things that they could do?

Laurie Ruettimann:

I think it’s really fascinating when we talk about self-leadership because rooted in self-leadership, individual accountability, is this belief in oneself that we can control our destiny, that we can control our outputs. And right off the bat, so many people enter into a work relationship and don’t feel they have any control.

And so my question to those individual workers is why did you enter into that relationship in the first place? That it was a one-way relationship, knowing that the environment may be toxic, may be terrible, it may have limited growth, it may not be a good values match, how did you get here? That’s a huge metaphysical question, but I think when HR professionals are dealing with employees who are dissatisfied, instead of trying to create programs or address things through meetings, it’s a simple question to ask to the worker like, what’s going on in your life that brought you here in this moment to my office where you are so absolutely dissatisfied and maybe can we talk to the EAP? I think that’s a real good resource.

A lot of times we live lives outside of work that make us so desperate for a job identity and we bring all of that baggage to our jobs and wonder why our jobs let us down. And so the point of Betting On You, at least from a worker perspective, is that you could really work in any kind of job. You could have any sort of career, but it’s important for you to know who you are, what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for, and also to live a big, bold, interesting life outside of work and bring that good stuff to your job. Know that your job is supposed to fund the really interesting life outside of work, not that a job is supposed to fill a void in your soul because the rest of your life isn’t going well.

And I think that was an interesting and important discussion to have around the pandemic when the world was difficult and when the world was bleak, people were looking to work. And I think work can have a part in making us feel satisfied and important and like we contribute. But if we’re not engaging in relationships with family members, we’re not connected in our community, if we’re not out there doing volunteer work, if we’re not learning and growing, we’re not thriving, work is never going to satisfy that pit. There’s no HR program to make somebody want to learn. HR can’t make people curious. And I think once we start having more honest conversations about that, well then we’re on the right path to really talking about true “engagement.”

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I tend to agree with you, but it’s also challenging because people are so busy and you’ve just a lot going on to have someone sit down and you’re asking them to reflect in many ways, on some really hard things that they may never have reflected on before or if they may have thought of but quickly dismissed because the work to go through that is not easy. And in fact, I would almost argue you go through that type of self-reflection almost throughout your entire life. You’re often reflecting and changing and reflecting. One of the things you hear a lot about, especially with the Baby Boomers retiring and so on, a lot of them, once they retire, they become depressed or more anxious than when they were [working].

In fact, you hear about them now, a lot of them are deciding to go back to work or taking back work on part. So the whole focus is when do I retire, what’s my number, what’s my date? And then when they get there after maybe a honeymoon period of three or four months, six months, they’re like, my life’s not as cracked up as I wanted it to be. How do I get back in? And that’s often what they turn to. May not be the right thing or they may not need, but they turn to work to fulfill them again. So it’s a challenge because to get people to sit down and focus on themselves and reflect on themselves is something that people don’t do a lot of or not everyone does.

Laurie Ruettimann:

But that’s the beauty of a new model of leadership. Because before we would have these leaders who were really focused on KPIs or MBOs back in the Gen X day when I started out, and now we have a real opportunity for leaders and managers to be advisors, to be mentors, to be coaches, or at least not to be the task masters or task mistresses that they were back in the 1980s, right?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

The environment we’re in now really enables that, or at least the opportunity is there now compared to 50 years ago where sometimes you literally didn’t have that options of flex. But the options available to a lot of people now in terms of the type of work they can do, where they can work from, how they do their work, how often, there’s so much more opportunity and flexibility it probably is a good idea if someone isn’t happy to now take that chance to sit down and figure out what is it that I want to do? Because there is so much out there that you can do.

And I wondered, maybe you might’ve noticed that, I think Covid helped accelerate maybe some of that thinking because people had a break and they slowed down and said, you know what? I don’t know if I still want to do this type of work. I want to maybe do something different or I want to explore, because it forced them to be home with their family every day. It forced them to see different sides of themselves and then this is not so bad. It’s a little bit different to maybe I sort of enjoyed that a little bit more than I thought I did. So I wonder if you saw that, that it might have accelerated the thinking around how to think about work and where it fits in your world in terms of your mindset.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I think that’s a really important point. There were so many of us that were forced to re-examine our lives during the pandemic, and now with this pushback towards return to office or limited flexibility, many people think, “Oh, I don’t have the freedom to do that anymore. I can’t think critically about what I want to do with my life.” And I would say the opportunity to do that is when you have a paycheck versus when you don’t. So if you’re in an opportunity where you’re feeling really pressured and you’re feeling like, oh, I have to perform, sure, you have to perform, but it’s important to think about can I perform in a different way that serves me but also allows me to have a work ethic, allows me to do what I need to do at work and do it with excellence, but also come home and live a really great life?

I think what happens is people just get so caught up in the moment that they don’t do anything well, and that’s often by design. We started the conversation talking about designing our jobs, job crafting, I really believe in taking a step back and doing life crafting. Who am I? Where do I want to go? Back in the day, we used to joke about interview questions like where do you want to be in five years? And you’re like, I don’t know where I want to be in five years. Well, I hate to tell you, you should really think about where you want to be in five years because five years is not guaranteed to you. Five years is a gift.

And the more agency you can have in making your decisions, the happier you and your family are going to be and the better you’re going to perform at work. So take an active role, that is the essence of self-leadership. And not only Sean, does it apply to workers, it applies to leaders, too. Leaders have a higher disengagement rate than employees at this point. Managers are exhausted. They’re tired. And so again, we fix work for others by fixing it for ourselves first. Start to address your issues. You’re the canary in the coal mine, and when you fix it for yourself, you’re going to have a positive downstream effect on your entire organization.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I like that concept of life crafting. It sort of opens up even broader beyond just the work and thinking about, well, what do I want? Yes, work’s a component of it, but I’ve got a broader sort of experience out here. How do I sort of think about all aspects of my life and how do I craft it in a way that works for my personality, my style, what I like, what I don’t like, that type of thing. I really like that concept. If you haven’t already, you should trademark that one.

Laurie Ruettimann:

There are no new ideas in this world. And so life crafting, taking a more human-centered approach to work, all of this is out in the ether. And I’m inspired by great thinkers like Amy Edmondson and Brené Brown and Dan Pink, and they’ve been inspired by others and we’re just all kind of in this really interesting ecosystem of rethinking the world of work. And I’m really grateful for the leadership of others and hopefully people learn from me as well.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Well, you brought up Amy Edmondson and she has done some really interesting work, particularly around this concept of psychological safety in the workplace. Well, you could almost argue psychological at home too would probably be important sometimes. But really the whole concept I think describes work environments or any environment where candor is expected and you can really speak up without fear or fear of retribution that you might say something that’ll get you into trouble because you’re saying it with the mindset of here’s what’s happening, here’s the way I see the world.

You’re not trying to say things that are going to be vindictive, but you might say things that might upset somebody in the group or environment you’re with, but that’s okay because that might be the way someone seeing it. So that whole fear of retribution is still prevalent both in today’s workplace and today’s homes. And how do you create an environment where we can speak up as to things we like about our work or about other environments and we don’t like so much about our work, get people in a safe spot where they can start to explore these ideas and concepts.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I’m really lucky to be friendly with Amy Edmondson. She’s been on my podcast Punk Rock HR twice, and she has this new book out that’s all about intelligent failure. I believe it’s called The Right Kind of Wrong. And what I’ve learned from Amy over the years is that psychological safety doesn’t give us the freedom to just show up and complain about things and expect that our bosses are going to listen, and it doesn’t give us the freedom to go wacky at work and try things that aren’t intelligent.

Instead, she really believes in almost like a beta-test approach to the world of work. So for example, if you work in an environment that’s really risk-adverse and doesn’t have a history of psychological safety, it doesn’t mean that in very small ways you can create psychological safety in your own micro environment. You can listen to people, you can test the water with the people around you and create a movement that gets a little bit bigger and a little bit broader hopefully within your organization.

She doesn’t say, “Wait for leaders to just open up this world of psychological safety.” She says, “Try it with yourself. Try it with your community first.” And that’s really inspiring to me. Make sure you’re not so critical of failure. Make sure that when you’re making a new venture into something different at work, you’re going slow and you’re thinking through this process intelligently. It’s almost like don’t wait for others, although hope that others catch up. Try it for yourself, and go slow and go small. And so these little experiments Amy talks about in her work have really motivated me and inspired me.

Oftentimes, we just expect everything once we try something new, everything is either great or it’s not. And with binary thinking, you’re set out to failure. Don’t throw the baby out with a bathwater. Just because you work in an environment where an idea was shut down doesn’t mean that you can’t take a little nibble at the apple in a different way down the road.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

That’s interesting because I know often we do employee feedback, employee surveys, and often that’s one of the comments, “Oh, we provide ideas, but no one listens or our manager never listens to us or leaders don’t care what we say.”

Laurie Ruettimann:

Yeah, not every idea is great, by the way, that’s what you say to those employees.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

That’s true. You’re right? Not every idea is great. And some of them, they might have listened and said, “Well, it’s not a good idea. I can’t do anything with it.” But I also like the idea of advising or coaching team to say well, maybe that approach didn’t work, but try a different one, experiment with a different one. That whole idea of taking small bites as opposed to painting everything with, oh, it’s just not safe to speak up here.

Well, maybe just in that environment, that time, it wasn’t, but maybe you could try over here or try a different way there. I like that concept of experimenting, taking little bites. It sort of reminds me a little bit of agile thinking, agile [inaudible 00:19:26], we just try something, evaluate it, make some changes, try something again on little sort of sprints or adjustments and work towards something that you’re going there in a iterative type of way as opposed to a big jump or a big gap going from here to there immediately type of thinking. So, interesting.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Sean, I have often heard from leaders and workers alike, “Oh, this environment is toxic.” But when you’re unhappy, every environment feels toxic. And a lot of times when people speak up or people are in work environments, they’ll just up and quit and they’ll go on to the next job. And lo and behold, six months, a year later, they’re still unhappy. And that is called the arrival fallacy. You get promoted, you get a new job, you relocate, everything’s supposed to be great, and nothing has changed because you haven’t changed.

And so for me, one of the lessons I’ve learned in life from working with really talented individuals, from studying them, is that if you expect change and you hit a roadblock, it’s not enough just to say, well, this is the roadblock and it’s stupid that it’s here. It’s really important to look at yourself and look at what you did to get there and see if there maybe could have been a different approach.

And I think that’s core and critical to self-leadership: Looking at your role in this. Not blaming yourself, I’m not talking about victim-blaming, but really assessing is my strategy right? Is my attitude right? Are the questions I’m asking, right? Are my expectations even realistic? And if they’re not, what can I do to better align what I want for my life and my career with my reality?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

What about thinking about maybe from an individual to a team level? So I’m thinking about HR in particular as a group or department. As a group, sometimes you’ll hear them complain individually, oh, well, no one listens to HR or HR has power.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Wait, HR people complain?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I would really like to see HR become much more leadership-driven, thinking differently about the HR role, transforming their role really to a place where they can be a force in organizations.

I really do think that’s happening, in that people have so many options now, the value of human capital is so high and HR is really, or should be, in a really good position to have a big influence on the organization, but they still seem to struggle getting beyond the administrative, policy-driven side of the business and not really business advisors to the chief executive officer or chief administrator or whoever it is, and the leaders in the organization. And I don’t know, what advice would you give to leaders and managers in HR that want to transform, want to change, but they can’t or they’re struggling getting their department to where they want to move to?

Laurie Ruettimann:

So I have three things to say. First of all, the head of human resources at any organization is the CEO. The people responsible for delivering a great employee experience with great benefits and a wonderful work environment and challenging work and feedback and all of that are the leaders who report to the CEO. And then HR should be the talented group of individuals to make that happen. Oftentimes, we get the HR department that the CEO wants, which is the department to clean up people messes that they don’t want to deal with. And in that way for decades, for almost a century, HR is given a bad rep.

On one hand, CEOs are like you, Sean. They’re like, “Oh, we hate our HR department, they call me all the time.” And they’re like, “Oh, my HR leader is terrible.” Can you help me find a new one? And the answer is no because you don’t want an HR leader who’s truly focused on enabling your leaders and your managers to lead people in a 21st century economy. You just want someone to babysit. You want someone to blame when talented people won’t stay at your organization.

Any HR issue is not really the fault of HR, it’s the fault of leaders and managers making decisions about how they choose to interact with their “human capital,” their best asset, the most important thing at the organization.

So I always take issue when people say that HR professionals, they’re wishy-washy or they don’t get things done because they’re not really given a mandate in most organizations to get anything done. They are given a confusing amount of messages internally. And from there, they try to eke out a people strategy, a technology strategy, a recruitment strategy, and it’s a mess, but it’s not a mess because of the individuals doing the work. It’s a mess because of the CEO and the leadership team.

If you work at a company like that, vote with your feet and get the heck out. Go find an organization that truly values you. You know, many HR leaders these days followed the advice that we were giving out in the early 2000s. They have their MBA. They’ve run their own family businesses or small businesses. They’re leading volunteer organizations. They are true business professionals, but the only job opportunities out there are these mealy-mouthed, old-school HR positions. So if that’s one you find yourself in, go find a job in operations, go find a job at a consulting firm, go find a job somewhere else, and force HR departments to change by making it difficult for your CEO to attract talented HR people. That’s what I say. What do you think about that, Sean?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

When I think about HR, HR’s job is not to improve. Because often when we work with our clients, they think, well, that’s HR, they should look after employee engagement or they should look after job [satisfaction]. And I’m like, well, no, it’s the leader’s role to engage their people. HR are there to facilitate, to maybe help the leader do a better job or help employees and help them with their direction and to provide the tools to be the grease in the process, but they’re not the core gears.

I really agree with that, but boy, it’s challenging in a lot of organizations. Even managers still think, well, that’s a HR initiative, that’s a HR job and it’s really getting that mindset changed over time that no, HR or people is the job of the leader. HR is just to help facilitate that and make it go as smooth as possible, but they’re not responsible for engaging. You are. So I really like the think with your feet or decide with your feet if you’re not liking it there and you don’t try to change something when you have a leadership team that’s not willing to take on the responsibility that they really should be taking on.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I think there’s an opportunity for technology here to really change the game and it is changing the game. When I worked in human resources, you had an HR generalist, you had a benefits specialist, you had a recruiter, and now the model is completely different. Thanks to BCG and McKinsey and all these consulting companies that came in, you now have outsourced HR service providers. You have technology that can provide a lot of self-service within the organization, and you are creating an HR business partner, a people business partner, who’s really focused on resourcing when needed, enabling, coaching and getting training into the organization. But it’s not your local HR lady’s job to plan the picnic anymore. That job doesn’t even exist anymore really anywhere in North America.

So I see a change happening, but I also, to your point, see a true distaste for dealing with human problems. And I’m sorry, but that’s the cost of doing business and having people employed for you. If you have workers, you’re going to have human problems. You’re going to have conflict, you’re going to have sickness, you’re going to have illness, you’re going to have caregiving issues. People are going to have babies. People are going to be sad. They’re going to bring their personal problems to work. And again, you write in all sorts of stuff into your budget to deal with the cost of doing business. You’re going to have to write in time for managers to deal with workers who are just always inherently human. Until we have an all-robot workforce, we’re going to have human problems and that’s not an HR job to deal with.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I recently read a study that just got published in the last week or two. It’s people that are probably in their late twenties, early thirties in the workplace right now, and they’re asking, would you take on a manager role? And for the first time ever, less than half said yes. So most people said, no, they don’t want to take on, they want to just continue on being an individual contributor. And that’s a change because what they sort of fought about is like, “Oh, it’s too much work and not enough reward.”

We’ve seen this now for a couple of years: the level of engagement with executives. So the top leaders in an organization have full autonomy, they drive the business, they decide which direction, they tend to have fairly very high levels of engagement and then individual contributors, people doing the work day-to-day, they tend to be pretty good levels of engagement. And then you’ve got this middle layer of management and they are so disengaged, generally speaking.

And it’s unusual. If I go back way back in the data 15 years ago, we’ve been doing this for a long time, it used to be senior leaders had really high, mid-level managers pretty high, frontline, medium or so, but it’s flipped now. It’s senior levels, still very high. Middle managers are the lowest, and then individual contributors have higher levels of engagement than middle managers. So there’s a real challenge in this middle management level, but we need them. You’re not going to be able to run organizations without them, but certainly a lot less people want to be doing the job. And how do you create an environment where that level of management or that role or function actually works? And that’s broken right now in a lot of organizations.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, we do have a 21st century workforce working within 20th century parameters where people have to stay employed for a lot of reasons under this idea of full-time employment because in America, that’s how we get our benefits. Or in some countries you rise up the ranks and you get to a leadership role. And more and more younger workers want to be considered part of a collective. They like a brand, they like a mission, they like an idea, but they can manage themselves. They believe in self-leadership and they actually need less from managers. And so we’ve got this real disconnect between the way our systems are structured and what the 21st century worker actually wants.

And so if you hire someone as a full-time employee, you’re going to expect that they’re going to show up with all this kind of baggage like they did in the 20th century and expect their employers to solve it for them when I think we need to be having a more mature conversation, not only about job crafting and life crafting, but really work crafting. What does it mean to gain knowledge, skills and abilities, but manage yourself in the 21st century? What does it mean to be responsible for providing for your retirement, making sure you take care of your own health and well-being, but still getting some employer support?

We need to be having more mature conversations but unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons why we don’t. Tax structures, union structures, works councils, all of it is an old way of thinking about the new world of work — and wait until we start to talk about AI and those robots who do come. It’s going to disrupt everything.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Well, Laurie, I really appreciate your time. It was a fantastic discussion, learning about your way of thinking. I really like that idea of taking responsibility, taking self-leadership, and not only self-leadership about work, but this whole idea of self-leadership, about the holistic individual. How do I want to lead at home? How do I want to lead in the community and how do I want to contribute or lead in the workplace? That idea of life crafting concept, I just think that’s fantastic in terms of that self-responsibility.

And some of the tips you threw out there, like that idea of psychological safety and maybe that way didn’t work, but try another small bite of the apple or try a different way to think about things. That’s a real way that people can try to do different things in either their home or their workplace and do things differently to make a better environment for themselves. And then if I understand you right, if you start with yourself and make that change there, it’s going to affect your environment and the broader world out there. So thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Thank you. It was great to be here and I wish everybody to stay well, be safe and be brave.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Thanks for joining us today on Leading Through Listening. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or YouTube music so you don’t miss a future episode. We’ll see you again soon.

The post Self-Leadership and Betting on You with Laurie Ruettimann appeared first on TalentMap.

How Leaders Who Listen Can Transform Organizations With Paul Mastrangelo

Sean Fitzpatrick — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 16:03:17 +0000

On this episode of Leading Through Listening, I’m joined by Paul Mastrangelo, president and owner at First Domino Consulting. Paul brings a wealth of knowledge as an organizational psychologist, specializing in workplace behavior and the transformation of organizations through employee insights. In this conversation, we dive into how listening‌ — ‌not just hearing, but truly listening‌ — ‌can be a game-changer for leaders aiming to foster real change in their organizations.

Leaders, especially in western cultures, don’t traditionally ask questions because they perceive that as undermining their authority. “There’s an expectation for leaders to be leading and knowing the answers,” Paul says. “So I don’t want to ask questions, because that makes me appear as if I don’t know.” But asking the right questions the right way can make all the difference.

Tune in to our first episode to hear Paul’s take on humble inquiry and why it’s critical for leaders who want to build trust and drive meaningful change.

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The Magic of Humble Inquiry

A fundamental concept of good leadership, Paul says, is humble inquiry — a powerful approach where leaders ask questions not to assert authority, but to genuinely understand and connect with their teams. It’s about stepping back from the need to have all the answers and, instead, showing curiosity and respect for your team’s knowledge. “If you’re trying to lead the witness, you can bring that person down a path which may not be accurate,” Paul says, emphasizing the importance of asking open-ended, neutral questions to get honest and complete responses.

Humble inquiry, Paul explains, involves leaders admitting when they don’t have all the answers and inviting their team members to share their perspectives. This approach not only enhances the quality of the information gathered but also builds stronger, more trusting relationships. “The people who need to define the culture are the ones who are in it,” Paul explains, highlighting how crucial it is for leaders to ask questions that allow employees to express what really goes on in the organization.

Creating Psychological Safety

Building an environment where people feel safe to speak up is a cornerstone of effective leadership. Paul explores the concept of psychological safety, explaining how humble inquiry fosters honest and open communication. “I’m going to put you in a box in terms of leading you towards just giving me the information I want, and maybe you’re filtering, right, because you don’t really want to vary from what I’m trying to lead you to,” he says. “I’m asserting this authority and you now can’t be open. You can’t really say it like it is. You have to say it the way I framed it.” This close-mineded approach, he says, can stifle openness.

Paul also highlights the role of vulnerability in leadership. To foster a culture of openness, leaders must first demonstrate their own vulnerability. “In order for us to really have this type of relationship where you not only answer my questions in an open, honest, and accurate way, but you’re even giving me information I hadn’t even thought to ask about … I have to share a certain amount of vulnerability.” This willingness to be vulnerable creates a space where employees feel more comfortable sharing their true thoughts and concerns.

Leading Change from the Ground Up

Paul introduces a fresh take on change management with his concept of designing “infectious change,” which focuses on engaging influential employees to drive change throughout the organization. This approach contrasts with traditional top-down change management strategies. Paul suggests that leaders should bring those closest to the work into the conversation. “If I can change a small group of folks and get them on board, but they’re influential, they’ll get other people on board,” Paul explains. This method empowers employees and increases the likelihood of successful, sustainable change.

One of Paul’s key strategies involves forming peer-nominated teams to help lead change. He describes how leaders can ask employees to nominate peers who are well-respected and influential to work alongside them in developing and implementing changes. This creates a ripple effect. When influential employees buy into the change, they naturally bring others along with them. This bottom-up approach ensures that change efforts are more organic and better received by the entire organization.

Paul also emphasizes the importance of creating a space for creativity and adaptability. “Creativity, contrary to popular belief, is not something you have or don’t have. It’s a muscle that you can build and develop.” Leaders need to foster environments where employees feel safe to experiment and share their ideas. This approach not only sparks innovation but also ensures that change efforts are grounded in the reality of what will work best on the front lines — a question that people in those roles are best-suited to answer.

People in This Episode

Paul Mastrangelo: LinkedIn

Resources

Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

Transcript

Paul Mastrangelo:

In order for us to really have this type of relationship where you not only answer my questions in an open, honest, and accurate way, but you’re even giving me information I hadn’t even thought to ask about, so I’m really gaining information there, but in order for us to do that, I have to share a certain amount of vulnerability. Because really you’re being vulnerable, so in that situation that we’ve been describing, there’s some accident or incident that’s taken place. And if you’re going to say, “Well, to be honest, Paul, we don’t always adhere to what the manual says.” Now you could imagine if I blow a gasket, “What do you mean?” That’s an action. But you’re trusting me, you’re saying, “Hey, I’m going to be honest with you, Paul, here’s the situation.” Well, the only way you’re going to do that is if I’ve done the same back to you.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Welcome to Leading Through Listening, the podcast that explores how great leaders don’t just speak, they listen. Hi, I’m Sean Fitzpatrick. I’m here to explore how the simple act of truly listening can revolutionize your leadership and transform your organization. And the goal is really to discover innovative ways to build stronger leaders in organizations by really asking the right questions, understanding your people, and then involving them in meaningful change.

And I do want to welcome Paul Mastrangelo. Paul is an organizational psychologist and has got a wealth of experience in this area.

Paul Mastrangelo:

Thanks, Sean, appreciate it.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Before we dive deep into some of the topics we want to cover off today, I want to talk a little bit about how to really ask good questions, how to really bring the concept of humble inquiry to leadership. But a lot of our listeners might not really know what an organizational psychologist is, even if they exist. So maybe you might just want to tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us what an organizational psychologist studies, why they exist in the world? And maybe just touch on a bit of your background over the years. And I think that’ll set the stage for some context of questions that we have coming up.

Paul Mastrangelo:

Sure, it sounds good, Sean. An organizational psychologist is someone who studies behavior, like all psychologists, but it’s really about the behavior that occurs in the workplace. And that can be anything from who do we hire, how do we develop them, how do we motivate them, how do we get them to form teams, become leaders. It’s all in there, there’s almost nothing that doesn’t take place in the workplace in terms of human behavior. And of course, we work about a third of our lives. And so it’s pretty good stuff, it’s important.

In terms of specifically how I fit into that world of organizational psychology, it was back in 2002 when I left academia and actually took a consulting position. And it was with a firm that used the employee survey as the impetus for change, like a catalyst for change. And we were working with some very large companies at that time, and I won’t go through all the ins and outs, but there was an acquisition, there was a merger, there was this, that and the other. And that led me to where I am now.

So as you know, I actually have my own firm, First Domino Consulting, where we’re concerned with what happens on the other side of the survey, how do we actually take this information and create change and transformation in an organization. And of course I’ve been working with TalentMap along those same lines as well, which I know you know well. So yeah, that’s how I fit in.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

That’s great. Well, thanks, that gives me a better sense. So you’re someone, and people like you, organizational psychologists, it sounds like they have a lot of deep, specific knowledge around understanding behavior. And I suspect there’s a lot of learning and experience you gain on how to ask questions to understand behavior.

What are some of the things you’ve learned about asking questions and thinking about how to solicit the type of information? Because I think about when I go to a doctor, of course they ask me a whole bunch, how’s your blood pressure, how’s this, how’s that? How’s your heart rate? They diagnose a whole lot, and then they might prescribe something.

How do you guys go about doing it, from your perspective and your thinking around that?

Paul Mastrangelo:

So we’re thinking about how to measure a particular construct. How do you measure love? How do you measure employee engagement, whatever that is? Personality?

The wording of the questions that we’re asking is critically important, and even one word or the arrangement of words can make a difference in how [inaudible 00:04:50] respond. And so you’ve got to make sure that you are being, I guess, neutral in the way that you ask a question. Because if you have a certain bias, you’re trying to lead the witness so to speak, then you can bring that person down a path which may not be accurate. They’re responding, you asked a question, and they have responded, and yet the information you’re getting is somewhat tainted or not quite complete. And if you don’t recognize that, then the information you provide could be faulty or could be misapplied or even counterproductive to what you’re trying to do.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

So how you ask a question, whether it’s in a one-on-one interview or in a discussion with staff or managers or even on a survey, it sounds like it’s a really important component of the process. And maybe not every manager, every leader, every HR professional goes about doing that correctly, which could have caused problems or what is an example of where it could cause problems?

Paul Mastrangelo:

So we were talking earlier, and I think you mentioned Humble Inquiry, which is for those who don’t know, a book by Edgar Schein and Peter Schein towards the end of his life.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

And Edgar Schein was quite well known also, he’s an academic I understand. And he also wrote a lot about culture, and really started to frame the concept of culture really well and well accepted for what I understand.

Paul Mastrangelo:

You are exactly right. A good addition to the conversation. He is very well known in organizational development, a researcher, has written several books, has defined what culture is that many people consider the definition, artifacts and values and assumptions, etc. So he took a lot of that rationale and interactions with people.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I know when we work with our clients, and probably when you work with some of our clients also, and with yours as part of First Domino Consulting, if you ask HR professionals or leaders about them defining culture, would they use some of Schein’s concepts or how do they think about culture? Because if you go into thinking about measuring culture, one of the things I think you probably are talking about is having a pretty good definition of the concepts you’re measuring. Or at least the better you define the concept, maybe the easier it is to measure.

Paul Mastrangelo:

For culture, I think a lot of folks do recognize, oh yeah, there’s this sense of how we do things here. And how we do things after a while can become what I call a shared habit. It’s like after a while we’re not even thinking about it. Oh, I see you, you see me, we sit at the same spot around the table, we do things. We don’t even have to ask each other certain questions because we already know. And that starts to spread among other people in the organization. And I could try to take a sidetrack around that. Certainly culture is now used in a non-academic way. Like, “Hey, how’s the culture around here? Is it good?” And I’m sure Schein would say, “Well, good for what?” Good for innovation, good for getting to know people, good for customer service. And there’s so many ways to answer that.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

That’s often how it’s used. Even when you’re let’s say going recruiting people or interviewing people, “What’s the culture like there?” A candidate might ask. But culture can be a very specific thing.

Paul Mastrangelo:

That’s right. So let me connect it back. Originally you said, “Oh, let’s talk about questions.” And it’s funny because what Edgar Schein would say is the people who need to define the culture are the ones who are in it. You need to ask them in an open-ended way, hey, what goes on here? How does it work? And that’s a question, but it’s a question that’s very neutral and open-ended obviously.

So it speaks to the cultural aspect because a lot of times what people really want to say or what they think about or how they would respond can be shifted one way or the other the way that question is formed. So going back to his book, Humble Inquiry, one of the things that he’s saying is leaders, particularly in Western society, leaders are set up, I guess, there’s an expectation for leaders to be leading and knowing the answers. So I don’t want to ask questions because that makes me appear as if I don’t know.

However, if I am going to ask questions, I’m going to make sure I’m going to ask it with authority. ‘Sean, what happened here? Why did you not press that stop button the way you should have?’ And so his point is there’s a bit of a catch-22 that goes on for leaders, again, particularly in Western society. So this idea of, well, I’m not going to ask a lot of questions. I’m going to do more talking than asking or listening. And when I do ask, I’m going to limit you, the person I’m asking, I’m going to put you in a box in terms of leading you towards just giving me the information I want. And maybe you’re filtering, because you don’t really want to vary from what I’m trying to lead you to. I’m asserting this authority, and you now can’t be open, you can’t really say it like it is. You have to say it the way I’ve framed it.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

So I have to almost respond, what does my boss or my leader want to hear almost is what they typically-

Paul Mastrangelo:

Yes.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Why do they ask that way, why aren’t they more open, I guess?

Paul Mastrangelo:

I can think of some reasonable explanations and maybe some not so … something I can’t quite stand behind. So in certain settings, we really do have to get right to the point. Imagine if you’re talking to a doctor in the emergency room. Hey, tell me exactly what happened during the accident or how much blood did he lose? Obviously that’s going to be very specific because I need it fast, fast and it has to be connected. And I think leaders find themselves in that situation, I only have so much time.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

So in some cases it’s okay to ask that way, it’s not always bad.

Paul Mastrangelo:

Exactly.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Okay. Because you were inclining that we’re taught one way, as leaders, generally in western countries, western society, Europe, North America and so on, to be strong in terms of how we ask questions.

Paul Mastrangelo:

You’re exactly right. It’s almost like we’re taught to use the one tool, but we’re not really taught or encouraged to use some of the other tools. So this idea of saying, “Hey, how’s it going? What’s going on?” So let me explain the two words, humble and inquiry, and then we can get to an example.

So the idea of an inquiry is, I don’t know, I have to express my ignorance. You’ve got information and I’d like to know about it. But it’s done humbly in the sense that I’m not trying to exert any authority over you. I’m trying to respect you. I value our relationship. So it’s almost like there’s this connection here. It’s like, wow, Sean, what’s going on? Can you give me a sense of how you’re doing? Or can you give me a sense of what the situation here is?

And you could imagine a situation where let’s say there is some sort of accident or production shutdown or something that you can imagine a leader being tempted to go, “What the heck’s going on here? Why didn’t you do this?” And maybe there’s an urgency there that requires some of that.

Whereas the opposite approach, this humble inquiry, as I said, would be something like, “Can you give me a sense of what happened, tell me what you’re feeling?” And of course these could be things about a situation, it could be the emotions. “What are you feeling right now?” Or maybe something else that’s in terms of directing what the conversation is, but still doing it in a way that’s very, again, curious, humble. And saying to you, I’m here, you are the person who’s got the information, I just want to know what’s going on from your point of view. And so it relaxes people. It’s a part of that psychological safety concept that we hear about, the ability to speak up.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Okay, yeah. What are some of the positives around that? So one is maybe you get better information or insight as to what happened and what’s going on. Hopefully they’re less guarded in terms of what they share with you, more open and honest. Any drawbacks of that approach versus our more telling type of questions approach?

Paul Mastrangelo:

So you hit the nail on the head in terms of the honesty and accuracy. I can say, just to add on one more line there, I think one of the benefits is, if we have established this relationship over time where we have this humble inquiry exchange frequently, you are now probably feeling comfortable enough that you don’t even need to wait for me to ask. You’re going to just offer up some information. “Paul, I think you should know that the machinery here is old, but some of our employees don’t always adhere to the safety policies. And perhaps that’s what happened.” So I think there’s that aspect.

In terms of disadvantages, and I even hesitate to use that word, but you have to be prepared to have an openness, a transparency, an authenticity. So one of the things that they’ll talk about is, in order for us to really have this type of relationship where you not only answer my questions in an open, honest, and accurate way, but you’re even giving me information I hadn’t even thought to ask about. So I’m really gaining information there. But in order for us to do that, I have to share a certain amount of vulnerability because really you’re being vulnerable.

So in that situation that we’ve been describing, there’s some accident or incident that’s taken place, and if you are going to say, “Well, to be honest, Paul, we don’t always adhere to what the manual says.” Now you could imagine if I blow a gasket, “What do you mean?” That action. But you’re trusting me, you’re saying, “Hey, I’m going to be honest with you, Paul, here’s the situation.”

Well, the only way you’re going to do that is if I’ve done the same back to you. “Sean, gosh, tell me more about this situation.” Or your family or a previous experience. “Oh gosh, I had that same experience.” And so now we’re starting to relate to each other at a different level in terms of the relationship.

I don’t know if all leaders are ready for that. They got to prepare themselves. That’s a different kind of relationship for many folks, not for all, but a lot of folks would have to think about, boy, do I want to open myself up to have more of these conversations and be a little bit vulnerable so that I can learn more about what’s going on and maybe even learn more about myself?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. If you look out five, 10, 20 years plus into the future, and now there’s so much change going on, but one of the fundamentals, beliefs we have when we work with organizations is those closest to the work have some of the best ideas on how to improve the work. So those doing the job, whether it’s on the line or as a software developer or a marketing specialist or whatever, they have lots of great ideas. What you’re talking about is creating an environment, whether through how you ask the questions, humble inquiry, being inclusive and including people, psychological safety, for them to start bringing those ideas forward.

I guess if I think about some of the work that’s happened in management over the last 30, 40, 50 years even, often when you became a manager, it’s because you were really good at a job, and you did all aspects of the job and then you got promoted to that leadership role and so on. And that worked well maybe. When things didn’t change as rapidly, you maybe could pick up the new things that evolve.

Things now are … with AI and all the machine learning that’s going on and technology, plus all of the disruption and uncertainty in the world, things have evolved and changed so quickly, I don’t know how a manager could keep up and do the job that all their direct reports are doing.

So I’m wondering if the way work has changed, gotten more complex, lot more specialists, lot more deeper insights that people have when they’re doing the work, how does a manager get the best information to do the best work for the organization? And maybe humble inquiry or starting to move down that way is really a mindset or a philosophy they should start to think about or embrace.

Paul Mastrangelo:

I think you’re spot on, Sean. And it connects to a couple of different things that I’ve been working on and working with our clients and some other clients over the years. This idea of leadership needs to change. It’s not just about me telling you what to do, it’s about me being there when you need me. It’s about me leading when you need me to lead. And yet sometimes, sometimes I need to be the follower and you’re the leader because you have that specific information about your expertise or your area or about your market, whatever that is.

And so one of the things that I know I’ve been talking with our clients about, and I’ve been doing this for, oh gosh, when did this first start? It might’ve been about 15 years ago. This idea of a peer-nominated team to work with a leader.

So for you and I, we often work with companies who have just done some survey, an engagement survey, and they’ve gotten results back, and maybe they’re thinking about making some changes. If I can stereotype for a second, the stereotype, what I was talking before, about this western leader, I will sit down and I will come up with what we will do to change the situation, I will communicate it, I will tell you why this is so important and you will just follow. You’ll do as I say.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

You’ll do it.

Paul Mastrangelo:

That’s right, that’s right. Now imagine a different kind of leadership style, which is me saying, “All right, yes, thank you so much for your survey feedback. I recognize there are some things that we need to change. I really think this is the important area and I’d like to try to hit this particular metric or this benchmark, this level of performance for us.”

But I want to involve more people who are closer to this issue. So if it’s something about customer service and the connection there, let’s get some folks who work with the customers, and I want to work with them. And if you’re saying that it’s not just your group, but maybe we need some other part of the organization, perhaps the service department, perhaps it’s some folks in sales because maybe there’s a gap between what sales folks are saying and the actual product and services we’re delivering.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

You talked about peer-nominated groups or bringing in people that are closer to the work to solve. What does that look like from or what could it look like in terms of following up on feedback and survey feedback and so on?

Paul Mastrangelo:

One of the things that I would say to a leader is, let’s ask the employees — it could be through an email, it could be something very informal — could you identify one or two people who could represent your (and it might be department, it might be location, it might be part of a process) one or two people who could represent your area to work with me, the leader, so that we can start to address this particular issue that’s coming up, maybe from the survey itself. And so people will do that. And you don’t have to treat it, it’s not like an election or anything so specific, but now you could say, “Wow, wow, Sean is definitely one of the people who folks respect, he must be knowledgeable, he must be someone who will speak up.” And so he’s going to represent them and maybe he represents one or two of the groups that I need on my team, the location and a function for example.

So if I collect folks like this and start working with them, it’s interesting, unlike when I identify who’s going to be on a team or when someone volunteers to be on the team, now there’s a little bit of pressure. If you’re on the team, Sean, you’re going to feel some pressure from the people who nominated you. Like, “Well, I got to speak up, I’m sort of there representing them.”

And yet there’s also a bit of responsibility. So here we are as a team and we’re saying, “Wow, you know what? I guess it’s not the problem that we thought it was. It’s actually something like this. Let’s try something different.” Now you’ve got to go back to the group who put you there and say, “Wow, as it turns out what we thought was the cause, it’s more complex than that. We’re doing something a little different. Let’s try it out. Let’s commit to it for a little bit and you give me the feedback. And if it’s not right, I’ll bring it to the team.”

Again, there’s a trust that they have with you, and they may not have it with the leader, whoever that person is. So again, asking the right questions of certain people, but those people were brought together from everyone else in the organization or at least everyone else that’s close to this particular problem. It really helps accelerate that trust-building and the change process, improving the workplace. And that’s what it’s about.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

What would a manager’s role then be in this approach where you’re involving people on the frontline in different roles, in terms of taking the data that you got from the survey, for example, and in trying to understand it better. What’s a manager’s role in that? What do they do, how do they play?

Paul Mastrangelo:

I almost split it into two categories. If you are the leader of our team, you might say, “All right, there are some things that are within my span of control, and I want to do some things and we can work on that as a unit.”

On the other hand, there might be something that’s at the organization level, a macro level action plan. And so I think if you are in a situation as the leader of our team, maybe you just don’t happen to be one of the folks that’s on that peer-nominated team, not everyone can be on that team, but yet you can actually be thinking about, how do I support this and how do I coach the people in my team? So they start to understand more about how our actions and their actions actually contribute to what we’re trying to achieve at that macro level.

So I almost feel like in one role, they’re modeling, if you will, what they see at the top. “Okay, for this macro level problem, I can see this team. All right, I’m going to do the same thing with my department or my team. I’m going to see if I can hear, ask some questions, maybe form this group, start to try things and be successful.”

But on the other hand, they’re also, they’re leading that role, but now they’re following, they’re saying, “All right, there’s something else going on here. And so I want to make sure that I am contributing when I’m called upon. How can I help us fit in line, maybe provide some information or be a part of it even though I might not be leading that particular change.” So they’re asked to do a little bit of both. Maybe all employees are, we’re all leaders and followers in a certain extent. And that’s just a great example of it.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Depending on the situation. Yeah. Now let’s push that a little bit further. Say you put together a group for a team, peer-nominated or someone that, I like that idea where they have suggestions and ideas going back to, okay, customer services is not doing very well within the organization, how do we improve it and get people that are closest to the work involved in coming up with further ideas on how do improve it? Because maybe the survey just identified symptoms but not fully the root cause of those symptoms. They need some kind of framework or structure.

Because you’ve worked with teams, you bring people together and all of a sudden they start brainstorming and then generating solutions right away and then say, “Oh, that’s a stupid idea, that can’t work.” And you get people shut down in these teams. What kind of methodology or framework do you have to help move a team of people, professionals, which means some might be hourly workers, some might be professionals, some might be all in different environments and skills and knowledge, to work together to solve something that they may have not worked together before on to solve?

Paul Mastrangelo:

I think a lot of folks have read about change methods and models that are out there. My humble opinion, a lot of those popular change models are actually not based on empirical evidence. In other words, it might be their experience and then they’re saying, “Hey, this is what’s worked well for me and you should do it.” And that’s fine. They’re not horrible.

But one of the things that I’ve done over the past decade or so is I tried to do it in reverse. I tried to say, “Well, do we have empirical evidence of how people can influence others and change their behavior?” Whether it’s a sales position, a counseling position, if it’s leadership development, whatever the situations are. And so you put that together.

And the model or methodology that I started talking about, I use a metaphor with a theater. So if you’re trying to produce a particular show, you’d want to write the script, you’d want to build the cast, you’d want to rehearse for ideas, you’d want to set the stage, you’d want to engage the audience, and then plan for some sort of improv, some improvisation.

And just to be clear, so writing the script is basically saying I need to know how this thing’s going to end. Even when you watch Saturday Night Live or a comedy skit, there’s a lot of improv, but they always know how the skit’s going to end. And it’s the same thing with change. We need to know what the definition of success is so we know when we have gotten there. And I need to make sure everyone understands this is what success looks like.

We want to build the people who I’m going to be working with. And we talked about that already. With a peer-nominated team, folks who are close. But making sure that they’re influential to others too. We want to rehearse for ideas. Once I’ve got this group, I can actually create an environment where they can be creative. Creativity is, contrary to popular belief, it’s not something you have or you don’t have, it’s a lot about a muscle that you can build and develop. So we can work on that and try to be better about creating ideas.

And we can then set the stage, the idea of using nudges and persuasion, either in our communication or in our leadership style to try to arrange things so people will inch closer to the right types of behaviors. And then engaging the audience. Basically what that means is that we’re getting people to feel that they belong with people who are changing. “Hey, what’s going on there?” “That’s just some flavor of the month, blah, blah.” But if we can get them to just slowly try some things and aspects and then come back to them and say, “Look, you’re doing exactly what we’re asking for, we’re on the same team.”

And then finally, this plan for improv, this is a way for saying that all of us, human beings, when we change our behavior, we do it in stages. And sometimes what looks like resistance, so you might be seeing me, “Gee, why isn’t Paul doing the behavior that he needs to do?” But it could be because I fully want to, I’m planning to do it, I’ve got to own it on my own, I got to figure out my style. How am I going to talk to my team about this particular initiative that you’re leading? So there are ways that I’ve got to be going through these stages. And maybe if you are my manager, you’ve got to understand those stages and help me get through them to progress.

So you put all that together, and I feel like it’s empirically-based, it’s evidence-based, but it’s a lot different from some of the other things that you read out there in terms of how do you organize a change.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

It sounds interesting, it’s almost like an organism evolving and changing as the change happens. But it also comes across for a manager, if you’re a manager, you’d be like, “Ooh, how do I control that? That sounds messy!” Because going back to what we talked about at the beginning, in North America, western Europe, a lot of our culture’s around control, even that … managers, often they control systems and control processes. So they would maybe look at this and go, “Ooh, I’ll have no control over how this goes.” So how do they guide it or lead it in a leadership way, in a humble inquiry type of way and not in a direct telling type of way? Or is this methodology better than ADKAR and some of the more traditional change methodologies that are out there, which are maybe more of a built on the telling type of approach and this is more of a humble inquiry type of approach?

Paul Mastrangelo:

I certainly think so. The approach that I just described, that methodology, is something I called ‘designing infectious change’. This idea that if I can change a small group of folks and get them on board, but they’re influential, they’ll get other people on board. And we’re using all the techniques that pave the way for that to occur.

It’s funny, in working with some of my associates, we’ve been talking about that. If you’re the change agent, you might be part of the survey team or maybe the HR person who’s working with the leader, the senior-most leader in this change effort, how do you prepare the leader? Say, “Hey, you can’t slam your fist down and say this is the way it’s going to be. In fact, we need something very different where you’re humble and listening more than speaking up.”

So part of that is the preparation I think, that’s almost like coaching from within, and having that relationship between that change agent and the leader. But if I can go back to the survey for a second, Sean, and I know we’ve talked about this. There’s this concept of a lot of times leaders think about survey results as if it’s a report card. You can imagine a million and one scenarios, Covid, return to work, different issues that are going on, changes in law, in products, in consumers, there’s so many things going on right now, and certainly in the way we work itself, of course employees are going to say, “I’m not feeling so good right now. I don’t feel good about this. We could do better here.”

And so if you could get the leader to say, “Look, don’t think of this as a report card, think about it like it’s a scouting report or reconnaissance.” So you know as the leader, you’re trying to navigate them, guide them through some challenges that are coming up.

But if the feedback is, oh my gosh, they’re really hung up about something that happened a year ago. Oh gosh, this other policy change, that really hit them hard. Well, in order for me to make sure I can hit my goals, I got to make sure that I’m calming them down, I’m getting them re-energized, re-engaged. And if that’s what’s holding them back from this survey, it’s not about me, it’s about us. And I got to make sure I can change them.

And so I think if we can present the survey to leaders in that way, that helps relax them. Now suddenly I don’t have to be defensive, I can suddenly think, oh, I see, this is information. I use information. I know what my goal is. This is just people information. And so it’s almost, we’ve come full circle. It’s the way that you position the context around this. If everyone has that same goal, then there’s no need to fret. We can calm down. We’re going to hit this challenge and we’re going to work together and we’re going to hit that goal.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. I like that idea that the survey’s not a report card. But a lot of leaders are still hung up on the scores and want a higher score and whatever. As opposed to, I like the idea of positioning it as a scouting report, a reconnaissance or just information gathering to understand where we’re at and where we got to go. And the survey can help in part inform that. And it’s also a dialogue. Often when we talk to customers and clients, and you know this, we often talk about a survey as a, it’s a starting point, a catalyst for discussion, for ongoing conversation as opposed to a score. And I think that’s such an important aspect.

Well, Paul, I really thank you for your time. Thank you for being involved. Maybe you could tell listeners how to reach you, where you are and what type of work you’re moving towards as we wrap up here.

Paul Mastrangelo:

So first of all, thank you for having me on. Love the work that I’m doing with TalentMap, that’s good. If you’re interested in more about that infectious change design, you can check that out at firstdominoconsulting.com. You could reach me at paul@firstdominoconsulting.com. So that’s easy.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

And are you on LinkedIn, Paul also?

Paul Mastrangelo:

Yes, sir. You’ll find me on LinkedIn as well, that’s Paul Mastrangelo. It’s spelled just like you say.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Excellent. Good. Well, thank you.

Paul Mastrangelo:

Thanks so much, Sean.

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