Confidence Classic: Build an EPIC Workplace Culture That Drives Results with Jessica Kriegel, Chief Scientist of Workplace Culture

0:00You would be shocked at how many organizations are not clear on the results that they're trying to achieve. There's just this kind of general idea of success and growth that is constantly being pursued without clear definition of when will we know that we've won and what does it look like to win? Those things need to be clear and aligned within an organization. Otherwise, you're on a spinning hamster wheel that you never get to the end of. On this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up.

0:39Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with me this week. Okay, today's guest is Jessica Fregel. She's the Chief Scientist of Workplace Culture for Culture Partners, leading research and strategy and best practices for driving results through culture for 15 plus years. Jessica has been guiding global, national, Fortune 100, and other organizations across finance, technology, real estate, and healthcare industries on the path to creating intentional cultures that accelerate performance. Imagine that. As a keynote speaker, Jessica leverages her current research in 15 plus years of global organizational culture innovation, providing leaders with the map and tools for how to build cultures that deliver results.

1:21Jessica, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. Oh my gosh. So you guys totally caught my attention, you and your team, when you sent me a note and said, according to recent data, nearly 30 percent of Americans have reported being diagnosed with anxiety or depression, and more than 90 percent of American employees desire emotional and psychological support from their employers. I mean, that's some major, major numbers. Yeah, it's disturbing. And people are scratching their heads, leaders, on what to do about it. They're noticing the impact in the workplace as it pertains to the data that they track, like absenteeism and the actual use of the health benefits that are being offered.

2:03But it's creating a culture challenge because culture, the way we define it, is how people think and act at work. And when your thinking is an anxiety and your actions are based in fear and you're struggling and you're depressed, that affects the way we think and act at work, which affects the people around you. And so this is a major problem for businesses. And they're just at the beginning of starting to have creative solutions that make an impact. Most people are still totally lost on what to do. How did you get into this line of work? Like, how were you in a bad work environment? Yes. So my background, I spent 10 years at Oracle.

2:43And at Oracle, I was doing this sort of culture transformation work. And the longer I was there, the higher level of executive I got to work with. So at the end of my time there, I was working with the chief marketing officer, the chief operating officer. Oracle has these different general managers that are basically mini CEOs within Oracle that are acquisitions they've made that didn't get destroyed and turned into larger big Oracle, they called it. So I was working with executives at the top of their game, right? I mean, if you're in the C-suite at a company like Oracle, you've made it. And what I noticed was a complete lack of understanding on how to drive culture.

3:25They were really good at how to drive results and how to drive strategy and pivot when strategy needed to pivot. I mean, Oracle's results speak for themselves. But culture in different pockets, and I'm not speaking overall, I'm speaking about different pockets that existed, struggled sometimes because it feels so touchy-feely and like woo-woo. and people don't know how to scale or change intentionally culture because usually what's happening is culture is just getting created accidentally through a series of various experiences that people have and then they create a story in their head and then there we are.

4:00So that's how I got into it. When I left Oracle, I became a CHRO of a technology company myself and then I became responsible and I became the executive that I had been coaching for so long and saw how challenging it was. It was like my empathy levels went way up because I understood the stress and the conflicting motivations that exist, right? You want to help your people. You want to do the right thing. You're also having pressure from above about driving results and all of this uncertainty in the economy and with competitive landscapes constantly shifting and new technologies. It's just so much.

4:35And so I see that anxiety and fear going up for executives as much, if not more, than it is for the frontline workforce. So where do you start people when, whether they're an executive that is in a leadership role and they're facing the same situation that you're describing, or they're an employee that's confronted with going to work every day, where should people start? Well, the first thing that we need to understand is what we're trying to accomplish. And you would be shocked at how many organizations are not clear on the results that they're trying to achieve. There's just this kind of general idea of success and growth that is constantly being pursued without clear definition of when will we know that we've won and what does it look like to win?

5:19Those things need to be clear and aligned within an organization. Otherwise, you're on a spinning hamster wheel that you never get to the end of and you don't get to then celebrate that success. Now, when I say you would be surprised, I'm talking, you know, as we've done now consulting with the Fortune 100. I mean, you think that these executives have figured this out, but you go into an executive team. Like, for example, one company a few months ago, we walked in and we asked everyone, do you know what the number one goal is for this company? And they said, yes, it's revenue growth. I said, great.

5:52What is the revenue growth goal? And I went around the room and the chief marketing officer said it's 5 % growth. And then I went to the COO and they said, actually, it's 7 % growth. and then we went to the CFO and they said, actually it's 6 % growth and everyone has a different opinion about what the growth number is. So we looked over at the CEO and we said, okay, what's the growth goal? And the CEO said, very funny guy, well, it's somewhere between five and 7%. And the reality is they were all right, but the reason that they had different numbers in their head is because one goal was the number that they put in the budget.

6:28One goal is the number they told the board. One goal is the number that is the stretch goal. One goal is the number they really think is realistic. And so when you have these executives that aren't even aligned, like how can you possibly get your team behind what the goals are? And that, I think, one, clarity of results, it's actually the number one driver of engagement and it's also the number one predictor of success and something that is very often missed. What do you mean by driver of engagement? When you look at engagement, the way that we were looking at it in this particular study that we did about a year and a half ago, we were looking at, as people rate their culture highly or low in the study that we did across multiple organizations, we looked at a number of different factors that help drive their engagement up or down, right?

7:13And the number one thing out of all of the factors that we asked them about was just being clear on what it is we're trying to achieve here, that clarity. And sometimes that looks like defining purpose and giving people a why, but that clarity of the end goal is the number one driver That stands alone above the rest is the thing that can drive engagement forward. So once you've gotten them to go ahead and define, all right, here is a goal we all agree upon. We're all on the same page. Where do they go from there? Once you know what the results are, which is often a missing link, what most people do is they think about, OK, well, what do we need to do in order to get those results?

7:50And they kind of focus on the actions, right? And that we actually call the action trap. That is not what you want to do. because if you just focus on actions in order to get the results, then you're constantly having to micromanage activity, you know, actions. Like if I'm the head of a sales team and I know that our goal is to close$40 million in bookings this year, then if I'm just focusing on action, I'm calling the salespeople and saying, did you talk to the client? How many clients did you talk to? How did the client's call go? Did you track that client call in Salesforce? You know, that's like action management that leads to burnout, not just of your employees who are annoyed that you're nagging them, but it also leads to your burnout as a leader because you're having to manage activity across everyone on your team, going back to these executives experiencing more and more stress and anxiety.

8:40So we have to eliminate that. That's playing checkers. We need to play chess. And so what you have to think is what motivates action, right? What motivates the sales guy or the sales girl to make the call, to make 10 of those calls, to track those calls and do all the activities that we kind of know need to get done. It is their beliefs. It's their mindset. It's what they think about the value that they offer to the company, about their colleagues, about whether Salesforce is a useful tool or a data entry nightmare, about how many calls they need to make in order to hit their number, if that number is actually doable.

9:15It's all about the beliefs that they hold. So that's really where you want to start. Understand if these are the results that we want to achieve, what beliefs do my people need to hold in order to take the right action to get those results? And the question that you, if you're a leader listening to this right now, can ask your team is, what are the commonly held beliefs across this team that may be getting in the way of us achieving those results? And what do we want those beliefs to be? Once you figure out what those kind of existing roadblock beliefs are and what they should be, now you can start intentionally helping nurture the right beliefs that will get people to take the right action without you having to micromanage them and then ultimately will help you achieve the result.

9:59And winning is fun, right? Winning creates a lot less stress than losing. And so that helps reinforce a positive feedback loop of continuing to drive results.

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13:24So what is the way somebody finds out what a commonly held beliefs are? Because I know you know this, like I do from corporate, that what leaders might be saying, oh, these are the beliefs of the team and what actually is. There's oftentimes a big gap. So how do you encourage them to undercover the truth? Yeah, you have to ask the question and not in the form of an engagement survey and don't do it in an insular boardroom with just the executives present, you have to invite people to a conversation. Just imagine that. You have to talk to people. So often executives feel like the scope of how many people they would need to talk to to really listen to the organization is so large that they just don't do any listening.

14:05They're like, I couldn't possibly get to the team. So therefore that's just not going to be on my list. But having as many conversations as you can is super informative. And so this also doesn't have to be rocket science because we have facilitated tens of thousands of these conversations where we go into companies and ask what are the commonly held beliefs and what do they need to be? And you pretty quickly, when you have a diverse group of people in the room, diverse is, and they represent all the different factions of a company, right? You have some executives and some frontline workers and these team and those team and this generation and that generation and, you know, all of the different kind of ways that employees show up in the company.

14:43the themes become pretty clear. I mean, it's very rare that when you just ask people to shout it out, I mean, give them five minutes to think about it, write it down, and then start sharing their insights. Everyone kind of comes around the same themes because there is a shared reality that they're all reflecting on, right? Not to say that there aren't outliers, but it's not as hard as it may seem to uncover what those shared beliefs are and what they need to be because they're shared beliefs. By definition, everyone's got them, right? Right. So once you've identified the shared beliefs, which I'm sure there's going to be some shortcomings versus where you would actually want them to be.

15:19How can you help people to adjust their beliefs? Great question. So what creates our beliefs? Where do your beliefs come from? And this is not a cool workplace tool. This is actually just the way that people work. It's how humans are. Right. All of our beliefs, the beliefs I have about whether I'm a dog person or a cat person, about whether I want to be a shoplifter or a keynote speaker. All of those beliefs come from the experiences that I've had up until now. So when I was a child, I had a family, I had extended family, I had schoolmates, I had experiences with my church or not going to church.

15:56Those all are belief-shaping experiences. And we continue to have belief-shaping experiences every day at work, When my boss sends me a text message, when I go on to a town hall, when someone leans over and whispers something about that person, these are all experiences that will shape my beliefs about the way that it is around here, which is what many people think culture is. It's just like, that's the way we do things around here, right? Right. So the question is now, what are the experiences that are going to shape new beliefs? So we need to be intentional about how we show up and the experiences that we create for each other.

16:32And this isn't just a management thing, because, you know, I was at Oracle for 10 years and Larry Ellison did not create the culture that I experienced. Right. It was the people that I worked with day in and day out on Zoom calls in conversations. You know, I never spoke to Larry like he wasn't a factor. Maybe he made some decisions about the strategy and sets the tone at some esoteric level. But at an exoteric level, in terms of day to day experiences, it was my colleagues. And so frontline people have just as much responsibility for culture in that way. So what experiences do we need to create in order to shape the right beliefs?

17:10That's the key question. And I can go into some examples of experiences, but ultimately it's like, what experiences are we creating for each other? That's where we start. Yeah. Give us some examples that you have. Yeah. So low hanging fruit, easy, fun, and free things that you can start today is the way that we recognize each other for the work that we do. What gets recognized and what doesn't, right? The way that we tell stories, what stories get told on town halls or just on a conversation when we're meeting with the team and we're talking about something that happened this last week? What about feedback?

17:46What feedback are we giving for what works and what doesn't work? And then all the other experiences like, does my boss log in to a Zoom call when he's on vacation on the beach in Hawaii? If he does, that's an experience that leads me to a belief that he thinks that vacation isn't really vacation. You know, those are all examples of just being conscious of the way we show up that is going to shape the right belief. So what you want to do in this process is just recapping, right? You start with results. Then you figure out the beliefs that you want. And then you become explicit about those beliefs.

18:21Label them. Name them. Say, these are the beliefs that we want to hold. And so then all of your recognition and your feedback and your storytelling should tie back to those explicit beliefs that you identified. So for example, if you want to drive a belief of taking accountability, right? If people took accountability, they would take the right action and they would get the right result. That's a very common one that our clients end up at. So if we want to drive, take accountability as a belief, when I recognize someone or tell a story about someone, I'm not just going to say they did a great job on that presentation.

18:55Well done. Because that's just talking about what they did. It's not connecting the dots. I'm going to say, I want to recognize them for taking accountability. And the way that they took accountability is insert what they did. And by doing that, you're going to help us achieve our key results of$40 million in bookings or whatever the thing is. So you want to make explicit, which is often implicit. it. A lot of the time people just assume you figured out all the other stuff. I said, good job on presentation. I assume everyone knows why that was a good presentation, how it's going to impact the organization and how that's a demonstration of the belief that I want to nurture.

19:31But no, people don't necessarily see that. So saying it out loud helps intentional culture creation. I mean, that is culture creation and action right there. Here's the thing that's so confusing to me. And again, I know that you understand this when you're in the job and you're doing a job and everybody's overloaded and under so much pressure and you have quarterly goals to hit. And like you were saying, stock price and all these variables and the economy and cuts. There are so many elements coming at someone in that day to day to actually pick their head up, to be cognizant of something like this seems like next level hard.

20:07How can a leader accomplish their day to day as well as rise above it and step back from it to say, what is this culture? because that's what I don't see happening. Yeah, totally right. And part of the reason is because people are feeling higher levels of stress, higher levels of anxiety, and we go into fight or flight mode and we're not zooming out, right? So we often focus on what's urgent instead of what's important. And this is where the balance of responsibility leans a little bit more heavily with the leadership in getting us to take the time to do that. And they need to demonstrate that in how they tell stories and how they recognize people and how they give feedback.

20:48It really needs to start with leaders in terms of kicking off that behavior so that people now see there's an expectation that all of us recognize each other and tell stories in this way and get explicit about the way that we give feedback. And leaders need to do that. This is literally your job. When you see leaders not doing that, it's lazy leadership. It's just bad leadership, right? So then it becomes a talent management strategy or effort around, do we up-level these skills, which is a lot of the work we do is really about scaling these skills with an organization so that leaders are encouraged to do it and they do know how to do it.

21:25And if they can't scale up those skills around these particular things, these are not leaders and we need to move them out of the organization. And so how are people able to identify when someone is just a weak leader that needs to go? Well, I mean, there's a million things. It depends on how they're a weak leader and how they need to know. There is, first of all, listening to employees and getting feedback from people is key here. But also, if you have a culture that is aligned with results in this way, where you're being intentional about the beliefs you want to nurture and you're creating experiences accordingly, it's going to be evidenced in your processes who's doing that and who's not, right?

22:05I mean, for example, it's not all just conversations. We have a Slack channel called Recognition and people recognize each other regularly. And it's pretty clear over time who participates in that Slack channel and who doesn't and which leaders do and which leaders don't. I was just recently given feedback because it was like three months where I didn't give any feedback and I didn't give any recognition. And I'm an executive on the team. Right. And the people who came to me and said, Jessica, you're not providing feedback. And I think that's important that you do that. They were people, they don't report into me, but they report into my peers.

22:38You know, we have created a culture in which providing feedback is a safe place. So these people weren't afraid of telling an executive like, hey, it's not okay that you haven't posted. They were welcome to it because we just have this norm of behavior because we have been intentional about it over time. Culture activation and creation, it is about consistency, right? You can't just do some team building offsite and expect your culture to change. You get a three-day high from that. Maybe you figured out your Myers-Briggs and everyone's really excited about that. And you went go-kart racing. That's fun.

23:15Awesome. But that's not culture creation, right? Culture creation is really about consistency of how you show up. Oh, that's so good. So many companies spend an inordinate amount of money on these getaways and then come back and go right back into basics. And back to what you were saying earlier, because I was a sales leader in corporate America for 25 years, just tasking leaders with the data points, the sales calls, the closes, that is how the majority of companies operate. And it's such a big swing to get them to change from what you've always done that may or may not have been getting you the results you need.

23:54I would imagine they're not getting the results and it's probably easier to convince them. But what about the people that have been getting the results just managing data points? How do you get them to see this differently? A lot of the time data is used as a weapon in corporate America. They're not really looking into understanding and using data to uncover insights. They're using data to justify decisions and have an excuse for why they made a bet that they made to then go back if it fails and say, well, the data showed us this, it was a data mistake, you know, or whatever. So data in corporate America, I think can be a mess often, frankly, you know, but how you figure that out is really all about ultimately organizations are made up of a bunch of people.

24:38Like here's the secret that I don't talk about very often, like corporations aren't real, you know, they don't exist. Like it's a construct in our minds that we all operate. But really, to answer the question, to go way back to the beginning of this conversation, like the number one thing, we did research actually with John Fraze, who's the head of labor strategies at Anchor, and I partnered just a few months ago to look at 50 ,000 frontline workers in America. So these are the manufacturers, the healthcare workers, the people who are on the frontline day to day. And we asked them a whole host of questions.