Create a Workplace Where People Like to Work

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Randy Grieser. Randy is the CEO and founder of Achieve Center for Leadership and Workplace Performance and the Crisis in Trauma Resource Institute. Randy is the author of The Ordinary Leader and the coauthor of The Culture Question kind of our topic today.

He gives presentations on leadership and management principles to a wide range of audiences in business, education, health, and government settings. He believes in, and Randy, I agree with you on this, he believes leadership requires us to always be intentional about what we do and how we do it. Thank you for making the time for us today.

Randy Grieser: Thanks for having me on your show.

Anita Brick: Well, I really enjoyed the book. Maybe we can start. So we're all on the same page here with a very basic question. What is the culture question?

Randy Grieser: We were thinking about what the title of the book would be. We really gravitated toward the culture question because we wanted people to go like, well, what's the question? What do you mean? That's curious? Fundamentally, we want people to think about culture. We want people to be engaged in and care about their own workplace culture. Getting to two kinds of questions around culture, which is one: How does your organization's culture impact whether people like where they work or not? The reality is, it does impact whether your workplace is viewed as an organization that is vivacious and engaging at a healthy workplace, or whether one that is not healthy. And the second part of the question is, well, what can you do to make it better? And how do we go about creating workplaces where people like to work? The key that we found and of course the thesis of the book is the culture.

Anita Brick: Well, I do find it interesting and I think everything really does start with culture. And you talk a lot about this purpose and values. And this student said, “My company doesn’t communicate purpose and values. There's a gap between an idealized purpose and set of values and the day to day reality of a non senior leader. What actions could I take to help bridge some of those gaps?”

Randy Grieser: Let's begin with a response to the first part of that question, which is purpose. This is clearly something that we see all the time, where we have organizations who actually have very inspirational missions and purposes. They're compelling, they're engaging, they have a set of values that actually look good on paper and sure, we should all have organizations that are respectful or honest, whatever the list of your values are, but when we actually get to the heart of the purpose and mission, we're not living them out.

And all this is to say, the students' question is not uncommon. It's absolutely not uncommon. And to the second point of her question, as a non senior leader, what actions can I take to bridge the gap that becomes hard? Practically some of the things that this individual could do is to ask questions. One practical thing you could do is simply have a question. Talk to other people, peers and people of influence and say, are you struggling with this as well?

Anita Brick: Might there be a starter question to get the ball rolling for the person, especially if they don't know you very well? Feels comfortable? Are there any starter questions to get the dialog going without scaring the other person?

Randy Grieser: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we always talk about when it comes to any question, one of my favorite phrases is I'm curious. Curiosity is not threatening. I'm not judging you as a leader. I'm not judging you as an organization. But I'm curious about how our values were created. I'm curious about who was involved in these values. I really like some of these values, and the other ones I find kind of confusing. I'm curious what they mean. And so often when you use that term, I'm curious. It really brings a potential level of defensiveness down because it's done in a non-judgmental way. In fact, we have a t- shirt that says shift judgment to curiosity. Be curious. Don't be judgmental.

Anita Brick: Got it, I love it. Meaningful work. Also a very important part of a healthy culture. And an alum asked this question. She said, “I feel that it's very difficult to provide meaningful work to each member of my team. I manage managers, each person has a different definition of what is meaningful. Any advice on how to get better would be greatly appreciated.”

Randy Grieser: The first thing I wanted to chat about is, well, what is meaningful work and what we came up with. It's kind of the sweet spot of three things coming together, and one of those things is a person's ability. That person is able to do the job well. Another thing is that people actually want to do the job. They're interested in the job. And three, that the individual purpose of the individual aligns with the work of the organization, and it's within that sweet spot. We have meaningful work, and this is harder to do than you realize.

A friend of mine who is an accountant by trade actually is working as an addictions counselor now. She liked numbers and she had an interest in numbers, but she actually never worked in these areas. It aligned with their purpose, which was helping people. And so it wasn't meaningful. Even though she had the ability and even though she had the interest, it didn't connect to the purpose. And so it's really difficult to find that. One of the things that we do is we continually ask our staff, when we meet with them on a regular basis, do you have enough work that is meaningful? And sometimes they say, no, I don't. And we start to shift things around and go like, well, let's change some task up. Let's give you this task to do. We believe it's really fundamental for everyone to have something they do that gives them a sense of satisfaction. And again, it doesn't need to be everything, but it needs to be something.

And one of the things I've always been amazed at is how we're all busy. So typically when you ask an employee, do you have time to take this on or on a stretch? They say things like, well, you know, I have so many of these other things to do, but if you actually give them something meaningful, they'll find time for it. So having intentional conversations with staff, do you have enough you do to bring you satisfaction? Do you have enough to do that makes a good use of your abilities you're interested in, and also connects with your purpose? And that'll really help you get on the same page about what is meaningful work.

Anita Brick: I like that. What if there's a conflict between the KPIs that a team is being judged by? What if that doesn't fit with what's meaningful for people? Does it mean that somebody has got to go or they need to be moved to another team?

Randy Grieser: Sometimes that's what it means. I mean, we see that all the time where people are working in an organization that is just like, you know what? All of a sudden I realize that this isn't a fit for me sometimes, fundamentally, you the individual needs to leave, typically when it's a situation of purpose. If it's about abilities and interests, when you have a large enough organization, you know it's easier for leaders and managers to kind of move people around.

One of the most unused gifts we have within an organization is unused talent that our employees bring. We hire so many people for a specific position. They come into a position and they're doing an okay job there, but you start to see that they have gifts in areas you didn't even realize in the interview process. And what are you going to do with that knowledge? Are you going to actually use that information, or are you going to let them sit there and pull away in the position you hired them to be in, even though we're not using as much of the expertise as we could? When you're in a large enough organization, there's no reason the leaders shouldn't regularly be meeting with people and saying, what additional tasks can we do? How can we move people around?

Now, the same reality is sometimes when we're hiring someone to talk on the phone, that's what we need. We need someone to talk on the phone. I think you can talk to your supervisor. Say I really like working here. I really like the purpose of the organization. I like you as a supervisor. I'm finding some of my jobs a little boring. I'm wondering if I could get something with a little more challenge, or have those conversations.

Anita Brick: The way you approached it, no offense, but doesn't that almost sound like you're bringing a problem to your manager rather than coming from a place of I've been thinking about it and I would love more responsibility, and I thought about A, B and C as opposed to tell me where I can have more responsibilities. It feels like there's some due diligence and bringing potential solutions that would need to be part of that.

Randy Grieser: I like your point there, right? Like I mean, I often say to people, it's okay to come with a problem, but also bring a solution. Again, using that framework. When you go into there, have some ideas in mind where you would like to focus your energy on offering. You know, I think I could add some really unique perspectives by working on this sort of project or by doing that.

And sometimes, let me be frank, it may be that the work I'm doing used to bring me satisfaction, but I've been doing it for five, six, seven years and I'm just not finding the challenge anymore. So it wasn't that I never liked it, but now, you know, I'm kind of ready for a new challenge, and this is what I'd like to see it be.

Anita Brick: Got it. This is interesting. This is a student who's a new leader. He said, “How can I begin to build a culture where people feel authentically appreciated, as opposed to something that seems fake or forced? So how do you bring genuine appreciation, genuine gratitude, as opposed to it seeming like something manipulative?”

Randy Grieser: As a leader, if you truly want to authentically appreciate someone, you can't just check off your weekly list or your monthly list. I gave someone a token validation. One of the most important aspects of employees feeling appreciated is feeling like their leaders will actually want to spend time with them and care about them as a person, not just as a means to an end. It means having a better product or providing a better service. But at its core, you care about me as a person. We did some research where we received responses from over 2400 people. We asked people 20 different questions. The two questions with the highest correlation were do I like where I work and do you trust your supervisor.

This is just something that came out of the research when we analyzed it. And the two highest correlated questions with I like where I work is I trust my direct supervisor. And as a leader, nothing's more important than trust with our employees. Trust us as a leader, they will work towards our goals or mission, our strategies and visions. Not because we're coarse in them, not because we're giving them a carrot or beating them with a stick. But they're working towards it because they bought into it. We're able to influence them. They're inspired. So trust is huge.

The second question that was highest correlated to that was whether my supervisor cares about me as a person, not as if this person is really exceptional at coding or this person is really exceptional at marketing. But at the end of the day, I am a human being. And so if you want to cynically appreciate employees, whether that's for, you know, their actual tangible operational expertise they bring to the workplace, one of the things that a research showed is that a great place to start is actually caring about leadership. Now, what does caring leadership mean? That doesn't mean that I have to be someone's therapist. No, I just simply mean that we spend time with people.

You know how many times when I'm speaking or teaching in public, I say, when's the last time you sat in a lunch room with your staff? How few people raised their hands right, were too busy working and were too busy doing this. So we just need to actually spend some time. We handle the case when you come back, do people greet me and say, how would you vacation? Or is it just business as usual when someone comes back on a weekend? What are you doing this weekend?

And so as a leader, if you ask someone the question, hey, it's been a really good week at work, what are you doing this weekend or after the weekend? What did you do this weekend? And if we're not asking just some fundamental questions that show I care about you as a person. When it comes time to actually validate or show appreciation, it's not going to come across as authentic. If you want to be an authentic leader, if you want to authentically appreciate people, you've got to have some level of caring as well.

Anita Brick: Well, you're absolutely right. How do you balance? I was thinking about someone I've been working with. He feels that the care is unevenly distributed. One of his peers is invited at least once a month for dinner. For the better part of an evening, he's never been invited, and he's been at his company for more than a year. How, as a leader, do you make sure that you don't play favoritism?

Randy Grieser: I mean, that's tricky, and it becomes even trickier if you're actually genuinely friends with someone. Let's be frank. We always use the phrase that we don't have to be friends with everybody at work, but we need to be friendly. Being friends with some people at work means I actually do like hanging out with you, like I want to get together. And the challenge of that becomes when you are a leader and how is that landing on other people? So as a leader, because you're in that position of authority, because you're in that position of power, it's become upon you to be a bit more intentional about that, to be intentional about how this is landing with other people after you've gotten together for that steak dinner and beers on a Saturday night and Monday morning, are you boasting about that in front of everybody in the workplace? How do you think that makes other people feel?

This is a gray area question. I mean, I'm not going to come out and be like, well, you should never be friends with people that you supervise because I don't think that's realistic. The reality is, right, you like some of the people that we work with and we're natural friends, but that doesn't mean that we can be friends in the same way we can be with our other friends. We need to be much more intentional about it. And I feel for this person. My hunch is that if this person is expressing frustration to you with friends outside of the workplace, it's feeling like somehow by not having that sort of relationship with their manager or leader, it's going to get in the way of their ability to be picked for certain projects. Or maybe the other person that is favored tries and fair enough.

Anita Brick: I agree, and I think that this one person I'm thinking of, I think he's planning his way out the door because he doesn't feel like it's going to change.

Randy Grieser: What is this person craving if you don't care about me as a person?

Anita Brick: You're right. Do you actually care about the other person as a person because they get steak dinners, but not me? It's tricky on both sides.

Anita Brick: Well, it seems like we've segwayed into some of the challenges. There was a student. I think it's a tricky question, a good one, but a tricky one, he said, “How do you deal with toxic people, especially if they have more power and influence than you do? And sometimes you need the support of these people in order to advance.”

Randy Grieser: Let's be frank, one toxic person can really kill a culture. Most people I meet with and talk to have been part of that experience when by some miracle, that toxic person is either fired or transferred, or sadly, sometimes they're promoted to some other place, right? One of the jokes in this is how you get rid of toxic people. You promote them well, regardless, they're away from our team. Now, what does everybody do? They do the happy dance for a couple weeks. People are on cloud nine. They're like, oh wow, this feels so great that this person isn't there.

There are toxic people in the workplace. As employees, we have influencers, and have a chief. We've worked hard to create a culture where people like to work, really trying to be a test pool for all these things that we've talked about in our research for this book came out of our experience and when we were not a healthy culture. But even now, when we have a really healthy culture, there are issues along the way. Sadly, we just let someone go. A couple months ago, it was the first time in four years that we let someone go, because they were really kind of, you know, being toxic and ruining the culture.

And we had in our organization what I call a cultural influencer. She's someone who has been with us for ten years, and she's not necessarily a formal senior leader, but she's someone with influence. And she came to me before Christmas, and she was confident and comfortable enough to come to me and say, Randy, I want to know why this person is still working here, because she does not live our values. You say that in our values that we embody and practice what we teach, that we're flexible. And yet this person doesn't do this. And I have no clue why you guys in leadership are allowing this to continue.

She was actually quite assertive, but the point is, if you have receptive leaders and managers within your organization, be a cultural influencer. And again, don't do this in this demanding directive way of, you know, this person has to leave or I'm going to leave too, but be like, you know, I'm really curious, using that curious language again, I'm feeling very uncomfortable.

Anita Brick: I think to your point, and to the students question, some of it is you need to socialize it, socialize it with people who already know and trust you, where you have credibility so that it can have a foothold and then potentially expand from there to then have influence, either in helping the toxic person change behavior, which you know, doesn't happen very often, or moving someone out.

Now, do you have time for a couple more questions?

Randy Grieser: Yeah, sure.

Anita Brick: Okay, good. An alum said, “I feel that I am the disrupter and dissenting voice on our team, and my voice is not very well received. What advice would you have for someone like me who feels their voice is important but not heard?”

Randy Grieser: No no no no, we need disruptive voices. Interesting that this question has come up because as a leader, I love disruptive voices. I was just reflecting with another senior leader that's working with a team and a committee, and they brought some results back to me. And actually my first response was, I think you guys all think too much the same. I think you need someone who disagrees with you.

So disruptive voices are important. One of the questions again, I mean, with this particular person, I would say go to your direct supervisor with that curious question. Again, say, hey, I'm kind of curious about how you're finding my approach to being disruptive. Do you appreciate it? Because sometimes I feel like I'm not being appreciated for it. Or frankly, maybe you're not being disruptive, appropriately enough. Maybe you're being too judgmental with things. So when you say that you are disruptive boys, are you a curious, disruptive voice or are you saying well, that's just a terrible idea.

No one’s going to like that. I don't like that kind of a disruptive voice either. If you want to be a disruptive voice, you need to be open to the feedback that people give you where it's like, you know what? Well, sometimes when you give us that feedback, it really lands the wrong way. The issue is not that you're disruptive, it's how you're being disruptive. And I would encourage that person to think about that.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right. I know someone who has great ideas and he's super smart at an intellectual level. However, no one ever listens to him with his words and his affect. He tells people they're stupid. He's very, very disruptive. So you're take on that, I think is right on point, is to take a step back and say, all right, am I being curious? Am I being constructive or am I being judgmental?

And no one likes to be judged so that's a really, really good point. We've covered a lot of ground, and the book absolutely covers a lot of ground as well. If someone wants to start implementing things to make their immediate environment healthier, have a healthier culture, even within their immediate team. What are three things that a person could do today to nudge his organization to have a healthy culture, assuming that they're not part of senior leadership?

Randy Grieser: This can be a long answer, but I'll try to keep it short. One is to ask questions. Be asking questions of the people you work with. And again, not judgmental questions, but just curiosity questions. Why are we doing things in this way? When's the last time our purpose statement has been visited? And who even created it? And our values? One of the things that I think people should be more intentional about is spending time talking about these things. One of the things that we ask our staff, we meet formally once a year to kind of just ask these questions about, are you happy with your work? One of the questions we ask is, what are you doing to contribute to a healthy workplace culture?

And we want to have a conversation. We want to keep people honest. Creating a healthy workplace culture. Responsibility does lie primarily with leadership to set the tone, but it requires everybody being on the board. Everyone has to be committed. Spend time with people asking questions. We miss opportunities to connect at a human level. I see this in organizations all the time. We show up at a meeting and of course the meeting starts late. Which, by the way, is one of my big pet peeves. And so for five minutes we're all looking at our phone. We need to communicate and talk and engage with people. And so if you're not having lunch with people, be intentional about doing that.

I came back from a vacation at lunchtime. I was tempted to keep working, and I intentionally said no. There's a group of people meeting for lunch. I'm going to go downstairs and have lunch with them. It's important. That is one of the starts to creating a great culture is actually carving out time to have human relationships with people, instead of just robotically relationships people, you know, at a practical level, we identified six key areas to focus on being very thoughtful about your purpose and values, making sure that they're real and not just place cards that you put on a wall, but they're actually lived purpose and values providing meaningful work, which we've already talked about.

Making sure your leadership team focuses on people you know, you can do so many things well, but if your CEO might be this visionary leader, you might even like the people you work with. But if your relationship with your direct supervisor is not good, if your direct supervisor doesn't care about you as a person, you know it's going to be very difficult to like what you work. Also, identify focusing on meaningful relationships, really working at creating great peak performing teams because the reality is most of the meaningful work we do and are not done within the context of an individual, within the context of a team.

And finally, practicing constructive conflict management. As soon as you have a toxic level of distrust and disrespect, type of environment, everything else is out the window. So really working to create a culture where it's respectful. So that's the summary of our six core principles that we talk about in the book.

Anita Brick: Great. Randy, thank you so much. This was really good. And with human relationships, which is what the culture is, it can be challenging because even if people were one way last week, they could be different today. So thank you for giving us a little bit of a roadmap and some practical advice on how we, regardless of where we are in an organization, can have a little bit of influence.

Randy Grieser: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Anita Brick: Randy has a wonderful site. It is called Theordinaryleader.com, which is actually the name of his first book. You'll also find a bunch of stuff about the culture question as well. Thanks again Randy and I hope that we stay in touch.

Randy Grieser: Perfect.

Anita Brick: Thank you and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brook with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.