When Work is Good with Moe Carrick

0:00Today, I speak with Mo Carrick. She is the author of When Work is Good. And it's so important because when I'm excited to go to work, the times of my life when I have been, or I'm excited to be at work, it's better for me, I'm happier, better for my family when I go home, better for the organization. And so we discuss these topics, we discuss alignment, meetings, having a purpose, and much more. Thanks for listening.

0:29Hi, Mo, how are you? Good to see you. Hello, John. So good to see you too. Thanks for chatting with me today. Yeah, thanks for chatting with me. I want to start here with the title of your book, When Work is Good. And I know that that phrase evokes a positive feeling in me, but I'm curious, how do you define good? What does it mean for work to be good? Yeah, it's such a good question because it can be good for us and terrible for our employer. It can be good for our employer and terrible for us. So to me, what it means is that when work is good, it's actually good for both. It's good for the employer, it's good for the employee, and it's good for the world, you know, in a broader way.

1:06There's a subtitle to the book, which you've seen, I know, because you've spent time with the book, which is why it drives results and how you can build a workplace people love. So I think often, you know, we landed on the title because what we see is A, too many people are miserable at work, so work is not good. And B, so many employers are focused on sometimes the wrong things. And so they're not able to attract and keep the vital talent that they need to keep the doors open, to keep growing year over year, to meet their mission. So we really spend a lot of time in the book is really focused on how can business leaders and business owners do both?

1:46How can they create a workplace that's good for people and good for their bottom line? Well, I want to ask a little bit later about maybe areas that organizations focus in the wrong way, but maybe to take a step back for the audience that might not be familiar with your work or your practice, could you talk about how you help organizations and leaders today and then your background, what led you to this part of your career? Absolutely. So Momentum is a small but mighty firm based here in the Northwest. We're in Oregon and we focus on three main areas with clients. We work in both a coaching and a consulting capacity on building conscious, brave cultures, helping leaders be good for people and creating teams who care, which is really all about team health and team cohesion.

2:31I also write and speak often on subjects that are related to in particular, small to midsize businesses, which are going to be, you know, 50 to really 500 or more employees. But a small business is still 5 ,000 in place. So we think small, we think mom and pop, but that's not actually how the world defines small businesses. So mostly what we love to do is come alongside business owners and business leaders to help them make the modifications and the transformations that are necessary to bring out the absolute best in their people, which is critical. Did you know that Builders is sponsored by business.com?

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3:51You were saying at the outset about organizations focusing on the wrong thing, and they're not ill-intentioned. It's just focusing on the wrong thing. What's an example of one or two areas that you would diagnose as an incorrect focus? Well, a common space that I see is a simple one. It's how do we design and run our meetings? You know, meetings are the currency of transactions in workplaces. And I don't know about you. I've heard this topic come up certainly in your show, and I'm sure you see it, John, in your work. But most people today, especially leaders, feel like they're in too many meetings.

4:29You know, they say things like, I don't have enough time to think. and my weeks are so packed that I can't actually execute the work at hand. And when we unpack that and look at it, when we do meeting audits, when we really dig in, what we notice is that the meetings themselves are often focused on information sharing. And information sharing is the most inefficient thing you can do with a meeting. A meeting is for dialogue at its best. It's a chance for people to exchange ideas and to have conflict and to materially move their insights and their alignment forward to productively move the work.

5:10What ends up happening is that meetings are focused on the wrong thing. We're looking at metrics together. We're reviewing spreadsheets. We're updating people on projects. We don't need meetings to do that. So we can become more efficient. we can stop losing time, energy, and focus with excessive meetings by designing them really well so that they leverage what meetings are good at. I agree with that. And I know I look at my calendar in the morning, I'm flipping on my phone, what have I got to do today? And some meetings, I look at them, I'm like pumped for them. And other meetings, I'm like, I'm just going to have to get through this one.

5:47How would you set up a meeting culture for success? I don't know if I'm asking the question the right way, but what would you give people as some tips for making the most out of meetings? Yeah, totally. Well, the first I already mentioned, which is we have to audit our meetings. You know, we have to look at what are we, how are we meeting today? And really getting real with that. And then once we've audited our meetings and we've looked honestly at like, which meetings do I host? Which meetings do I attend? And then I think part two is to really look at our meetings through a design lens, which is to understand what's the intention of this meeting.

6:26And then if it's a meeting that's currently ongoing, what's the outcome? Is the intention meeting the outcome? If not, it needs to be redesigned. If yes, there's probably something good about it. It might be a meeting that we want to keep. And good design, again, for meetings in particular, as one example, is design that allows for dialogue, for exchange of information, for meaning making, for conflict, for us to be able to innovate and create. We have to have the conversations that matter. What I often see is in meetings in organizations, large and small, is the majority of people are passively sitting there and receiving information, which means they're not bringing their best.

7:08They're not engaging with the content. They may not even be internalizing what it is that's happening, which is why people get so frustrated and they say, oh, we have a communication problem at our company. And when we look at it and we do a meeting audit, we're like, you don't have a communication problem. You're communicating all the time. You have a connection problem. people are not connecting to your information and they're not connecting to each other. So I think we have to look at our meetings. We have to, we have to potentially redesign them. And we also have to bring some rigor to like, which meetings must we participate in?

7:42And that's really hard because meetings mean other things in organizations than just the meeting agenda or the meeting intention and outcome. For example, am I included in that meeting or not. Right. I can remember years ago, um, a boss that I had, she had had a historically a director level meeting, which I was part of. And then one week that meeting came by and I didn't, I wasn't included in the invitation. And I was disappointed. I felt diminished. I felt unseen. So I talked to her and my one-on-one like what's going on. And she, what she said was after that meeting wasn't really serving us.

8:19I've redesigned the meeting. It's just with these three people, because this agenda for this particular topic doesn't require all the directors, including you. She had a really good strategy in terms of helping me understand where was I going to get that connection and that visibility as a director, which was what I felt the loss of. Like, oh, I'm not in a meeting anymore with my boss and these other directors. Like that was a good sort of power play and also like a way to feel seen and valued in the organization. So she had some other strategies and other meetings that she did want me involved in that she was redesigning to make more efficient.

8:57So we have to get honest with ourselves around like, what does inclusion in this meeting mean? And if it's meeting someone's needs to be seen or someone's needs to feel connected, where else can that happen if it's not going to happen in that meeting? Being and feeling seen and feeling important, there are kind of two lenses to it. One is within the organization and one is vis-a-vis your manager. Yes. And I kind of want to split it up and talk about both. I know there's a concept. I'll talk about the manager part first. There's a concept that you talk about on your website in your book about people first management.

9:33What does that mean in practice? Could you flesh that out a little bit? Because if I was to try to be cynical about that concept, it's like we need to focus on the strategy and we need to focus on the results and et cetera. So maybe connect those two ideas for me. Yeah, I love that you're cynical about it. You should be. We should be. And even I, when I think about that language, I have a little bit of cringe because without context, it's actually not that helpful because the implication I think of saying people first is, oh, this company is naive or has their head in the sand about business, about strategy, about profitability, about vision and goals.

10:17And, and how can they only, you know, we can't only build a business that is intended to help people feel happy. Like that's not, that's not what people first mean. So to me, what people first means is that we are recognizing and acknowledging that people are what make our companies great. Period. Period. Everything we do in an organization is created by people from strategy to insight to customer relationships to profitability. It happens to people. Now, I recently was talking to somebody who challenged me hard on that. They were like, nope, not sure anymore. Not with AI. Right. And to which I said, you know, good point.

11:01AI is at the table with us right now. And AI is helping us make our organizations great. But AI is also people. AI is just regurgitating what we have put into it in a faster, efficient way to help us crystallize ideas. But organizations that are using AI well, in my opinion, are putting it alongside people in the context of facilitating ways that people can do what only people can do. And AI is doing what AI can do best. And they were not threatened by it. I think if we were to ask a group of CEOs anonymously, like, are people what makes this company special? I think they would all say, yes, probably.

11:47But what's a way of having it be genuine and authentic and in practice? Because 100 % of companies have something on their wall that says, our people are what, you know what I mean? And so, but not 100 % of companies, you know, actually create this feeling. So what's one of the things to do to kind of get you over the edge from lip service to, you know, really making it happen? It's a good question. And it's not an easy question to answer, nor is it an easy practice put into play. But you're spot on. And I always think of it as like the toxic rowing poster. You know, as a former rower myself, I get very offended when I see people in an eight person shell with, you know, teamwork makes the dream work.

12:33Like, what does that even mean? Like, does it mean anything? So I think we have to really recognize that the the words we say are one thing and the behaviors that we practice in our organizations are another thing. And as human beings, we are very, very smart. we're very sensitive and emotionally intelligent which means that we can smell a rat so if a company professes one thing and practices something else we know we know from the minute we enter the doors of that organization now customers know too the employee experience and the customer experience are tightly connected and i think you know because of the digital age we actually have more transparency there than we have ever before.

13:19It's pretty hard to hide if you're not running a company in a way that's consistent with what you practice. And a good example of that is Glassdoor, Glassdoor reviews. An employee who has a terrible experience, no matter what's hanging on the wall, they're likely to say something. They're certainly going to tell their friends and their family the experience that they had. What we think about, what we practice a lot of momentum is helping leaders and leadership teams in particular, but also boards if the organization is governed by board to really make investments in structures and practices that walk the talk of what they say they value.

13:57Because those systems and practices are how we know that the people first goal or practice is actually manifesting in behavior. I just had a small example of this with a client yesterday. I was working with a senior team in a large healthcare system, and they were struggling because they had to do a layoff, not uncommon, it's coming up in the next few weeks. And they were feeling some angst about, you know, we're an organization that prides itself on a healthy culture. And we feel grief and sadness at this layoff. and what what the conversation ended up turning to that i thought was really a good example of both what we say by people first and how we operationalize these practices is that they circled back around to what is their role as leaders in relationship to the entity and their role as leaders is to make sure the entity survives if there's no entity there's no jobs right so ultimately as leaders in any system whether we're a non-profit a government agency for profit, a fortune 100, we have to make sure the entity is healthy and survives.

15:12That also then ensures that we have good jobs that give people meaning and contribution and purpose and help them support their families. And when we can center on that, we can do hard things because the business requires it just like we do in our homes and in our lives. We have to do hard things. My husband got a traffic ticket recently and he had to go in front of the judge, talk about why he was going 90 in the 70 zone or whatever. You know, like that's a bummer. That's a hard thing. That's a consequence of the world. And the same thing happens in an organization. If we've grown too big for what the market can facilitate, we need to make changes.

15:53And that way the business survives and we can continue to provide jobs. In this case, the leaders recognize that they have a mindset and it's a mindset that's consistent with their culture and all that stuff. What are some structures and processes to achieve alignment throughout the organization? Because the leaders have to help the individual contributors or their other team members feel the same way. Totally. Well, there's the basics, which I know you're familiar with, right? We always want to make sure that senior leaders in particular are spending time and understanding mission, vision, and values, which are, you know, why do we exist?

16:37What do we do? And how do we do it? Now, values are one of the common places where the poster on the wall doesn't match. You know, we say we value people, but then we have some practice that's actually really corrosive to trust. And values, misalignment. So one of the things that we've begun doing with leadership teams and teams throughout organizations is to focus on translating values into team agreements that are behaviorally grounded commitments that help us define how we do things here. This is what I mean by structure and processes. When we have clearly defined team agreements, we now know what good looks like around how we're supposed to show up every day.

17:18And we can talk about it in performance conversations. that single thing having a set of team agreements that don't become a poster on the wall but they actually become something we revisit often around how are we doing they're aspirational we're checking in on it those agreements now are driving a certain kind of culture that we can see and feel in action does that make sense yeah i i think so i'm thinking i'm thinking kind of um about a previous experience I had working at, at Amazon, where Amazon's incredibly consistent with, with what their, their values are. And I would encourage anybody who's not familiar with them to go look at Amazon's leadership principles.

18:02And, um, the, the first day when you're onboarded, essentially the onboarding is what are the leadership principles and how, how do they manifest themselves in practice and what does it, and what does it mean? And then if you're going to interview somebody, at Amazon, you have to go through training where you're interviewing on the principles. And then if you go to a company meeting, the company meeting, the theme of the meeting is about one of the principles. And when you're doing your review, you're reviewing yourself based on the principles. And it's just like, it's so, it's so consistent that, that people very, very quickly get on the same page about what things mean.

18:42I was incredibly impressed with their dedication and consistency to those things. Yeah, no, I have worked with Amazon as a client as well. And I agree with you. It's really reinforced in those regular touch points. My only complaint about their leadership principles is there are so many of them. Yeah, there are a lot. There are a lot, that's true. Which is a lot. But I think it's a good example of consistency in practice and having behavior sets, having habits that we practice every day in our business that reinforce what we say we believe. And again, it's not about perfection. It's about being able to say, oh, man, I had another client a couple weeks ago.

19:25So, for example, one of their team agreements, which we could think of as a leadership principle, too, kind of depends on how you want to name the things in your system. One of their agreements was that we talk to each other, not about each other. It's a behavioral agreement that reduces triangulation and remormongering, and it facilitates direct feedback and conversation. And in this leadership executive team meeting, someone had shared that they had heard something through the system about another senior leader complaining about their strategic function in a way that didn't feel consistent with the values and said, hey, I'm concerned.

20:02I heard it came up through my team that you were bad mouthing the finance group, you know, in one of your staff meetings a couple of weeks ago, and that's not one of our agreements. and they talked about it. And that person was able to be accountable and say, gosh, you know what? You're right. I was so frustrated with this issue we've been dealing with. I did leak that disappointment. It publicly, I can do better. That's a great way to have, you know, a set of agreements, a constitution or whatever that you can go back to, because then, then you're not, you're not saying that the person was bad.

20:35It's like the behavior, the behavior is inconsistent with this. And like, let's talk about it. Yeah. It's really, really smart. What should the role of HR or culture or people resources, whatever the group's called, be in all of this? And what are some common mistakes or a common mistake that those functions make when they're trying to do good, but it doesn't end up that way? Yeah, really. It's really common. And I see it in a couple of different ways. So my background is in organizational development, but I'm also a senior a HR person has served in interim VP roles and like what we would call traditional HR as well.

21:14So it's like the fields are very adjacent. And I think that some of what where HR and culture and people resources go awry is on them. And some is on all the rest of us in terms of where we put those functions strategically. So it's a good example of what we were talking about earlier, John, which is like, what does people first mean? Too often, I think today, HR in particular has become a compliance function, whose job is to protect the entity from litigation. This is particularly true in the US, but in the global West, I would say. And that's not a bad function. Like we need to protect from harm, we need to make sure that we have strategies in place that Totally.

21:58People and customers and everything else. But when that's the primary focus of the human resources function, it's difficult for them to get time, attention and energy focused on anything else, such as things that prevent litigation, like building real leadership competence and ensuring clarity and good onboarding and, you know, all those kind of things. So I think that's one issue is that HR people become too focused or asked to be too focused by their system just on compliance and control. I think another is that often those functions are buried in the organization from a strategy perspective.

22:38So they might, especially in small or medium sized organizations, if they exist at all, which most companies smaller than 100 people don't even have HR as a function. Once you get up to 100 people, they might have a generalist. You know, a company of 500 people probably has an HR function, but they may be doing payroll, comp and benefits and litigation prevention. You know, they're often too small, but they're also often buried in the wrong function. Like they're underneath the chief administrative officer, but they're three levels down or they're in operations, but they don't have a central reporting structure.

23:16And so I think it's important for the organization to think about what is our people function, whatever we call it, HR, people and culture, people experience. What do we want it to do for our organization strategically? And how do we ensure that it has a seat at the table? Because this is part of our strategy. And then when we do that, we want to make sure that our HR team or our people experience team is deeply grounded in organizational leadership at a higher level. I think somebody who, and I'll use Mary Barra as an example, the CEO of GM. Okay. So she was an HR, she had HR background. And I was just reading and just posted on this in LinkedIn because I had forgotten about her story a little bit.

24:05but she had been in HR. She'd been in several functions. She had been in the operation as well. And her most recent senior job before she became the CEO was in HR. And she had a deep well of experience with the business overall. And she was grounded in the role that both people, excellence and culture could play in the organization's success. And she's largely seen as the one who turned GM around from bankruptcy to being still a fairly mighty organization. And I think about that when I think about what I often see happen in HR, which is that HR is not grounded in the business. They haven't spent time looking at the strategic levers for the business overall, which makes their scope too narrow to be able to make recommendations that actually can have a strategic impact.

25:01So I think the profession as a whole needs to go back to some of its roots around organizational behavior, around leadership theory and practice, around the business models themselves and the metrics and strategies that get us there. Because without it, that HR or people experience leader can't drive at a senior level, which is where I think they should be. Yeah. Maybe to tie a lot of this together, because we're talking about alignment within an organization, people first. And back to what I asked at the beginning, when work is good, there's a component which you talk about, which is about being purpose-driven.

25:41And wouldn't we all like to work at a purpose-driven organization? And it's easy to say, oh, we're building technology to help with climate change. Then there are 99 % of companies that are making widgets or they're B2B companies or whatever. How do you become purpose-driven in an authentic way when it's not as obvious of how you're going towards world peace, if I could be just cheeky for a sec? Right. Totally. Absolutely. Well, there's the short way around and the long way around. The short way around, as far as I see it, is that our need for purpose is a human need. And our research, which is based on 1.5 million data points, centers on seven human needs that answer the question why we work.

26:31And one of those needs is purpose. The way we define that, though, is not, to your point, it's not about I want to work with an organization that has a mission that's aligned with my personal values, although that could be something. what's even more powerful and it's underneath purpose is I'm doing something that matters to someone and that can be small that can be I remember I remember one time years ago I was traveling with a client actually in Rwanda and I got to work with Moses who was my driver he drove me all around Uganda and Rwanda on three trips for three weeks at a time and this was a low-level job.

27:11He was my driver, but he loved his job. And I asked him one day, like, why do you love this job so much? And he just paused and he goes, you know, I get to interact with people and help them see my country. And I'm so proud. And I was like, okay, that's like how he makes sense of his job. I can remember many years ago, I was a house cleaner in acute care, not house. We used to called the housekeeper, but I was in maintenance in an acute care hospital. It was in my 20s, you know, college summer job. And I actually didn't have, I didn't think that job had much value to me. I just liked it because I got to live near my boyfriend and I got to work seven to three, you know, in the summer.