Happiness at Work and Brand-Building w/ Dr. Tessa Misiaszek | builders podcast

0:00What are people connecting to that makes their work meaningful and allows it to have purpose in a way so that employees who spend the majority of their life working on happiness at work. her most recent book called Branding as a Business, and then we hit a bit at the end about healthcare in America. In our first segment, we have a weekly check-in with Editor-in-Chief Marty Beckerman. We talk about the interesting origin story of the slinky, whether or not taller men are paid more, and could it be true that Napoleon was actually above average in height? Just a show note, if you liked the discussion on branding, and we hit on Nike a little bit, I'd like to call your attention to episode 13.

1:02Sometime last year, we talked to former Nike CMO Greg Hoffman about brand identity and emotion by design. Thanks as always.

1:18Well, each week we talk to editor-in-chief Marty Beckerman about what he and his team are covering in the Bee newsletter. Marty, how are you doing? I'm doing great, John. How are you? Good. One of my favorite things that you do is talk about the origin stories of all kinds of products. We talked about M &Ms a few episodes back. I'll set this one up. I was back home in Chicago for Christmas, and my nephew, Theo, opened up one of his presents, and it was a slinky. and that was crazy because I got a slinky and I think my dad got a slinky when he was a kid. So it's still chugging after all these years.

2:02You covered that in the newsletter. How did it all start? So the slinky was originally developed for the Navy for warships in 1943. It was made by a naval engineer named Richard James in Philadelphia and he was trying to stabilize dials and equipment on the warships. And one of them, he noticed, fell off his desk and kept going. And immediately it struck him that this would be a great thing to sell to children. No word on whether it actually ever went into the ships, but he sold$100 million in the first couple of years of slinky. That is not adjusted for inflation. Adjusted for inflation, that's a billion dollars in the first couple years of Slinkyhood.

2:53So that wound up being a great investment for him. And we won World War II, maybe with the help of Slinkies. Who knows? That's great. That's truly a win-win for him and for us, for all of us. Really cool story. Life was simpler back then. Wow. Wow. The other thing you're covering is sort of at least your premise is based on the movie Napoleon. Talk about that, Marty. Sure. Well, we always try to draw business lessons from hit movies and TV shows for our segment Hollywood B-School. So we're talking about the new movie Napoleon with Joaquin Phoenix. um interestingly napoleon was not as short as uh his image implies um part of this was british propaganda to make him sound more diminutive and part of it is that the french inch was shorter than the british inch so joaquin phoenix is not depicted as a short guy uh in the movie now what is the business lesson there the business lesson is that uh being seen as short actually will hurt you.

3:58And I can say this as a guy who's 5 '6 on a good day, 5 '5 and a half on a bad day. Is that French or British, by the way? You know, we're not in the metric system here, so let's be generous and say French. So over lifetime earnings for every inch of height, a man will make an extra$4 ,200 dollars per year. So that adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It seems like companies for years now have been trying to address every possible bias there is, but the bias against the vertically challenged still stands, no pun intended. We're getting the short end of the stick again, no pun intended.

4:42And I think we really need to incorporate this into our diversity and inclusion efforts. No question. And by the way, In diversity and inclusion efforts. Okay. That pun was intended? That was intended and it was horrible. Okay. Well, there's a really interesting story. I'm excited to read about it in the newsletter. Tell me, though, a little bit more about the British propaganda part. So how tall was Napoleon versus how he was depicted? Historians think he was closer to 5 '8 to 5 '10, which was average, if not slightly tall, for his time. Yeah, interesting. And then the British just drew him up in the newspaper as - Right, it was the cartoonists who made him look super short.

5:30And I should add with these studies that find that short men have less compensation and are promoted to leadership positions less often, they looked at, is that true for women as well? One study found that it is true for short women as well. Another study couldn't find that result. It didn't seem to matter. My guess is because women can wear high heels, whereas guys look kind of goofy in platform shoes. So even though I do get Instagram ads for platform shoes, I should add. Is that right? But like hipster, like cool platform shoes, not like designer platform shoes. What happens if I'm 7 '2 or 7 '5?

6:14Am I just going to be, am I destined to be a billionaire? Well, uh, sadly for the guys who are seven to, uh, the earnings plateau around six feet tall, you, you earn$4 ,200 more per year per inch up to six feet. And then, and then society has determined you're sufficiently tall enough. You don't need the extra, uh, billions. So, okay. All right. Well, thanks Marty. Uh, appreciate that. And everybody as always, you can sign up for the B newsletter free at business.com. Thanks.

6:51Hi, Tess. How are you? Thanks for joining the podcast today. It's wonderful to be here, John. Thanks for having me. You got it. One of the subjects I'm passionate about, you have a podcast about. It's called Happy at Work. And so you've been talking about the concept for several years on your podcast with your co-hosts. My question about being happy at work is actually from the perspective of a manager or leader. So if you believe you have this hypothesis that having happy employees is good for business and or you just want your employees to be happy, what do you need to know as a manager and leader about that?

7:33Yeah, I mean, I think that that's such a great question. And And it's funny because the co-host of the Happy at Work podcast and myself, we've debated, can you really be happy at work? Is that an oxymoron kind of in his statement? But what we think is really important around the concept of happiness at work is really what are people connecting to that makes their work meaningful and allows it to have purpose in a way so that employees who spend the majority of their life working can really derive satisfaction from that experience. And so a lot of my work over the past, gosh, probably eight to 10 years has really been looking at this intersection between human capital management, employee engagement, talent management, and the marketing space.

8:28How do you look at a brand? How do you actually think about your brand purpose, your brand values, and then how do you kind of intersect the two primarily so that when you are a company that has a certain type of brand, brand essence, brand personality, that that actually gets operationalized through your people. And so it's always been really interesting for me personally to see certain types of companies that espouse all these wonderful brand values, and you assume it's probably the best place to work because of what it says it cares about or because of its purpose. But oftentimes you go to those places and their employees are miserable.

9:12And so from a manager or leadership perspective, I really think it is when we talk about happiness at work, I think it's really important for owners of companies, leaders, managers to think about how are they actually being authentic in the way that they represent their company, what their company's mission is, what the purpose is, and then really think about how to make that meaningful for their employees. And if employees find that meaningfulness in work, then what we find in the research is that they're going to have a more positive work environment. They're going to be more engaged at work.

9:51They'll be more productive at work. And as a result, hopefully they'll be happy at work as well. Yeah. It was funny what you said at the beginning about, can you be happy at work? And maybe you can only, maybe, maybe you can only be like happy-ish kind of thing. But during my best and happiest times as an employee, it's really unrelated to the perks at work. And it's more like, am I looking forward to actually doing the work? Part of it might be recognition. Part of it might be being able to see the fruits of my labor, that sort of thing. And definitely, authenticity is a big part of that. Are you doing something where you feel personal satisfaction?

10:39I wonder, as I was preparing for this interview, I had a question about whether you can hire for happiness. I guess what I mean by this is if you could categorize people as like naturally glass half full or glass half empty or naturally, maybe natural is the wrong way to say it, but someone who's going to come in and be like a happiness quotient adder versus subtractor. Can you figure that out in the hiring process? Or is that totally like, like, sorry to interrupt. Is that totally like, you know, how the company is doing? Yeah. So, I mean, I think that that's a really important question. And there are a lot of folks in the organizational psychology space and positive psychology space that has looked at positivity and optimism and, you know, can, are these things that can be measured?

11:44What I have really focused on in my work is can you build a culture and can you actually assess a person, an individual for who they are, their competencies, what really drives them in their work, and then be able to match them to the right role so that they are making those connections, that they are motivated because their drivers, their competencies, the way that they bring certain skills to the workplace are being best leveraged or best used in their work. And then, of course, I think it's important as a workplace to really see your people as assets of the organization. And if you actually value them as assets, truly see them for being what will make or break the strategy of your company, what will make and break the success of your company, and you invest in them that way, you invest in their learning and development, you invest in really helping them to find those connections to meaningfulness of work, that you really help them to kind of find their purpose and whether it ends up being with your workplace or whether you help them on the ladder of their career to connect to another opportunity.

12:56I think just having the positive intent to create those types of conditions to allow people to reach their highest self at work, we'll be able to create that positivity at work. So I'm not an expert on being able to measure a person's optimism. The only other thing I would add, though, and one thing that I have done a lot of work for or in is empathy. And I have worked for a company that we actually did look at empathy as a muscle and certainly saw, have seen research around empathy scales and being able to really help a person develop that empathy muscle so that that can help them make more meaningful connections at work.

13:38And again, in the experience I've had in being able to work with individuals, coaching them on building these types of skill sets, whether it's through empathy, positive psychology, or utilizing these types of tools in the context of their work, we have seen that they are happier at work as well. So I really think it's not about saying, okay, I'm going to assess the happiest people and have them come work for me. Because if you end up putting even the happiest person in the wrong role or doing the wrong job, given what their skills, their drivers are, their motivations, they're probably going to end up unhappy anyways.

14:19So I think it's probably better to take an individual, be able to really assess what they do well, and then try to match them with the right role and then develop a culture of learning, develop a culture of development so that they can thrive at your workplace. And then hopefully you can find them to be happy. Totally. Is there a playbook that you would have if you were hiring someone? You hired them for a role, they went through the interview process, and now you're trying to course correct. Is this person able to be their best self? Are they doing what they believe they were destined to do, et cetera?

14:59How would you begin to establish that relationship? Because someone might be hearing this and say, okay, I want to show more empathy. I don't know what to do. So it's interesting because I think certainly during the hiring process, it is important to align on values. And I used to do this exercise. Actually, I was a hired CEO of an empathy training company. And when we actually hired all of our employees and went through the interview process, I would actually put our core values in front of the employee, the prospective candidate, and then ask them to really respond to any of those values and maybe tell a story of why a certain value might be meaningful to them.

15:42And honestly, within that split second, I could see who would actually glance at the paper, push it off, and then have something kind of contrived that they had already rehearsed versus the employee I remember I ended up hiring. She actually looked at it and then started to kind of get emotional because she felt so connected to the values in it. And then she told this incredibly authentic story about her own experience and why she felt so connected to those values. And again, I think in the recruitment process, it's important to be able to assess. It's important to have those types of experiences and to really get candidates to story tell so that you can try to glean into who is their most authentic selves and what are the types of experiences they bring to the role.

16:32But I definitely think that once you have a candidate in the door, And if you're thinking to yourself, oh, gosh, I probably need to course correct here. I think it's just really important to have great communication, empathic communication, that really allows them to open up, you know, offer transparency, give them a path of learning and development, really understand where they want to go with their career trajectory and help them get there. And really approach the situation with positive intent. I think all of those factors are really important, especially in, say, the onboarding process of the first three to six to nine months that an employee will join an organization.

17:10The last thing I will also say I think is really important is learning agility. So when you think about learning and development and being able to offer a path of learning to employees so that they can develop themselves and always try to be, you know, becoming the best version of themselves as well as learning new skills for the job. Having a sense of learning agility is really important to that. And that would probably be one particular aspect of a candidate that I would probably try to assess for is do they have that kind of agility, that learning agility, that growth mindset that allows them to really be open to what are the opportunities and to always be willing to learn and grow?

17:53At my company, one of our core values is adaptability, because in most really fast-growing cultures, jobs, roles, organizations are going to change constantly. And so whether it's external forces or doing it yourself, I think that's a really important thing. And I would almost recommend any company, maybe adaptability is too sterile of a way of describing it. Can I tell you, we just did research on this. And what we found, we actually do these, so I work with the Corn Fairy Institute, and we do these big research studies with looking at different regions of the world and what are CEOs of the future really thinking about.

18:39And our most recent study that came out of the APAC region looked at the fact that change is emergent, that CEOs are planning on change being constant, that there's no more of this planned change. I'm going to think out five years and then I'll change or pivot my business strategy. Change can happen to a company, to an individual, to a leader at any point in time. And so adaptability is one of those key skills that the individuals, leaders really need to think about as you think about moving into the future of work. Given the level of uncertainty that we have, whether it's in our markets, in our supply chains, in our geopolitical situations around the world, that being adaptable is an incredibly important skill.

19:27So it sounds like that's a great value to have for your company. And as you were going through those examples, my mind went immediately to chat GPT. And I imagine, you know, if I went to sleep a year ago, woke up today and saw how, like, everybody in my organization's using it, I would probably be really shocked because there's sort of just change rippling through everything. I wanted to ask you one more question about the happy at work. And that's how to communicate or talk about or think about unpopular decisions. I imagine that many organizations have thought about this with return to office and coming up with a policy that makes at least 50 % of the people happy might be impossible.

20:28And so recognizing that being happy at work and being understanding about everybody's personal situation also needs to be needs to be balanced by whatever policy a company has. How do managers or leaders think about those two things? What's interesting about the work I did around empathy and kind of the research I've done over the past six to eight years. And actually, my co-author that I wrote the book, Branding That Means Business with Matt Johnson, has done a lot of work looking at the neuroscience of marketing. And and with that comes empathy. And really, what was interesting is we used to have these kind of debates because we kind of came from two different schools of thought as it related to empathy.

21:15But one thing that we did agree on was that empathy is difficult to scale. So for leaders who are, you know, thinking about their whole organization or their employee workforce, it's kind of, it's difficult. You have to have a sense of self-awareness that being empathic to the many, especially around certain issues like return to office. You know, if a leader or CEO says, I want everyone to return to office and a bunch of people throw up their hands and say, no, I'm not going. It's oftentimes difficult for a leader to be empathic with them about that situation. They think to themselves, oh, come on, you used to commute all the time.

21:53We have this building here. This is the rules of working at this company. And so you just have to do it. Right. Right. However, if you think about an individual and if you're the CEO and you hear about the mom who's got the aging parent at home that they're taking care of, as well as some young kids and they need flexibility in your job, you're probably going to be more empathic to the plight of that individual than you would to the many people who are just throwing up their arms. Right. So empathy has a scaling problem. And as a leader, you need to be aware of that. And so when it comes to making these types of tough decisions, what we usually recommend to leaders is that they really need to have dialogue, that there needs to be participation from everyone that's involved, even though for a lot of leaders and owners of companies, you may think, hey, it's my company.

22:45But I will say that working in the space of talent management with a 3.5 % unemployment rate in North America and a third of the workforce really looking to gig work right now and really seeing that they have lots of options for themselves as it relates to the type of work that they'll do, whether it be remote or in an office, talent will continue to be a scarce resource. And so if you have really great employees, it is worth when you have to make that tough decision to really engage them in dialogue, to be able to share with them why it's important to you as the leader, to have them have a presence in the office.

23:25How is that time going to be utilized? Plan with them the way in which that time will be, you know, best used through collaboration or teamwork or whatever the case might be, rather than kind of forcing any sort of rules upon them. I think it's the best way to go about that. The other piece is to think about, again, that word empathy, it's around empathic communication. And there's a lot of research that actually shows, you know, kind of going back to the medical culture and the health care literature that, you know, doctors, as it relates to things like medical malpractice, used to run away from ever taking ownership over a medical mistake or, you know, don't talk about it.

24:10don't address the issue with the family, just like deal with it in court. And what we've actually found in all of the literature is that actually, if you are disclosed that there was a mistake made, if you actually share the bad news with the victim or the family, and you do so with empathy, that they are far less likely to sue the doctor or to file a medical malpractice claim because they feel that sense of human connection, even if they're hearing bad news. And so there are techniques to think about how do you have those tough conversations? How do you share bad news? How do you kind of engage in that dialogue in a way that does demonstrate empathy and you can have a far better outcome than if you try to ignore it or if you try to pretend like it doesn't exist or if you try to kind of force people into a situation that they're not quite ready for.

25:04And so those are some of the considerations to think about. You can't always have all the perfect conditions where everyone's going to be happy at work all the time. There's going to be those tough conversations. But if you do so with empathy and if you have the self-awareness that, especially in large decisions, that you're going to probably be less empathetic to the many. And therefore, you really want to engage the many in that conversation and in a dialogue so they can be a give and take on whatever the negotiation is for the new condition at work, you will have more success. I think that's really good advice about owning your mistake.

25:43I was thinking about some personal, I made lots of mistakes in my career. And I think actually I've had really great responses when I admit them, I really screwed up in this communication. Here's what I was trying to say. I'm sorry if you want to go that far. And that's really, really good advice, showing vulnerability and empathy. I want to shift gears a little bit because we've been talking about building bonds internally. Those have been the gist of my initial questions. But I want to talk about building external bonds and how to do it at scale. Your most recent book is called Branding That Means Business.

26:29Yes. And I wanted to ask you, why did you write it? And why did you choose that title? I'm sure that title was intentional. So the reason we chose to write the book about branding is that my co-author, who I mentioned before, Dr. Matt Johnson, we had had many conversations. He's an expert in neuromarketing. We had both worked around the research of empathy. my past and my career was really focused on talent management consulting. And then I moved into the marketing field. And I was really interested in looking at that intersection between marketing and HR and how do, especially because I had worked in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space, how do you really operationalize that purpose of those values through your people?

27:16And how do you invite in that diversity of perspective when really, you know, if you're espousing a certain type of value through your brand around diversity, how do you really create that inclusive environment, really operationalize that value? So we came together. It was quite serendipitous. We got this opportunity from a publisher to to write this book and we were approached to write it about marketing. and I actually had said to the publisher, I'm happy to write a book about marketing, but I think brands right now is at this, we're at this kind of tipping point as it relates to brand because we're moving into this new environment through, because of social media, because of all these different types of platforms that are really disrupting our economy right now.

28:05You know, what we used to think traditionally of brands has completely shifted And what we see now is a lot more smaller companies having these really organic approaches to building their brands and really disrupting big markets. And we've seen this disruptive innovation, as you would call it, happening more and more by these smaller players because they have such powerful brands. So I just thought in the context of marketing, that would be the really kind of cool piece to research and spend some time pretty much the pandemic researching and writing a book about. So that's that's how we landed on writing about brands.

28:45I love it. And and I think I want to talk about some of those companies that are disrupting things now. But before I do, when you introduce the book, when you're at the beginning of the book, you use examples of brands that I'm really familiar with. And you say, and I'm quoting, branding fundamentals built on the fundamentals of human nature. You use Amazon as an example, where I worked previously, talking about efficiency. And Nike, where on a previous episode of this podcast, I interviewed a former CMO. And then my son's obsessed with the brand. So I feel a pretty close connection with both.

29:23So I wonder, you know, how do you think these massive brand identities are built? Is there a single playbook? Was it organic? Was it the sheer force of nature by Bezos? Or was it tireless work and championing by internal folks in the team? I'm sure there's not just one answer, but what would you say is at the top of the playbook? I think what's at the top of the playbook and what you just said that is so key is that your son is obsessed with Nike. And I think that there's a couple of things to think about in the context of product innovation and new product design and things like that. When I used to teach actually a course in new product innovation, I used to always say to my students, you may have a purpose or an intention behind this product.

30:14But when the customer starts using it, they're going to use it for whatever job they need the product to do. And so this goes back to Clayton Christensen's work, the great HBS professor of disruptive innovation, who always used to talk about the job to be done. And oftentimes it's the customer that really determines what that is. And then as a result, if you're the entrepreneur, you're just quite grateful that they found a job for your product to do. And then you capitalize on that. You grow that. You try to make it better to do a better job for whatever purpose the customer is thinking about.