The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.
Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!
This podcast provides general information and discussions about health and wellness. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The podcast owner, producer and any sponsors are not liable for any health-related claims or decisions made based on the information presented or discussed.
Jen:
Hi WorkWell listeners! I’m really excited to share that my TEDx Talk, The Future of Work, is out! It combines my personal story with practical ways we can all come together to create a better world of work by focusing on human sustainability. Just search for Jen Fisher TEDx on your preferred search engine to watch my talk and please join me in the movement to make well-being the future of work by sharing it with your networks!
Our modern world of work is constantly changing and at a pace that our human brains weren't designed to keep up with. With so much uncertainty, many of us are simply trying to survive in the workplace, but how can we move from surviving to thriving at work? And what are the skills that will help us navigate an ever-changing workplace?
Jen:
This is the Work Well podcast series. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, and I'm so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things wellbeing. I'm here with Gabriela Rosen Kellerman. She's an author, entrepreneur, startup executive and Harvard trained physician with expertise in behavioral and organizational change, digital health, wellbeing, and ai. She's the co-author of the book Tomorrow Mind with Professor Martin Seligman. She has served as Chief Product Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUp, a transformation platform for global professionals and is head of BetterUp Labs. Its research arm that studies whole person development. Gabriela, welcome to the show.
Gabriella:
Thanks so much, Jen. Great to be with you.
Jen:
It's great to have you. So I want the listeners to get to know you. So tell us who you are and how you became so passionate about helping people thrive at work.
Gabriella:
Yeah, so I'm Gabriela Rosen Kellerman. I'm the Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUp and the author of Tomorrow Mind. I'm an MD by training. So from a pretty young age, I knew that I wanted to help people live at their best and I want the MD route to get as deep and thorough a, a scientific grounding in what that means and, and the tools that we have available. And it turns out on the psychological side of things, the tools that we have available for living and thriving, at least as of 20 years ago when I was training are, are, are not that great. So I, I really wanted to innovate and expand those and help populations thrive and eventually found my way to working with large enterprises to help people do well at work, which, you know, is ultimately in service of the bottom line for the business, but at the individual level, it's in service of a long lifespan and a successful career and wonderful relationships and all of those things. So that confluence of incentives and outcomes has been a really wonderful place to work on these problems.
Jen:
Yeah, and, and we definitely all need that. But before we, you know, jump into kind of what does it look like going forward, can you take us back a little bit? Right. Like what, tell us about kind of these tools and resources and probably all well-intentioned at the time, but what is it about them that stopped working?
Gabriella:
Our brains are designed in quotes because it, you know, happened through evolution and adaptation, but designed for one world of work, which is hunting and gathering. And so that is a world where we feel really well and at home, and there's a lot of leisure and exploration and creativity and a deep social fabric in that world. And all of these things make a lot more sense in terms of our native capabilities. It in that world. That's not to say there's no suffering for hunter-gatherers. There certainly is, especially in this day and age, that's a highly impoverished community, et cetera. But to the extent that there is much less of a mismatch between the ways our brains want to operate, quote unquote, and the ways that we need them to operate at work that's the world where, where it makes a lot more sense.
Gabriella:
So every world of work since then has required adapting and some of those skills translate nicely to any given world of work, and some of them really don't. And that mismatch can produce a fair amount of, of struggle and suffering. And so in today's world of work, you know, very different from all the ones before. The same is true. Some of the ones that are carry over nicely, creativity as one. So the idea that we're all creative, that we all need to be exploring and coming up with novel solutions, which was part of the hunter-gatherer way of being that is again, really important. And actually the source of a lot of meaning and wellbeing when it's encouraged in, in the right ways versus, say in the assembly line in the industrial era, where it took a lot of creativity to come up with those machines, but you really did not need any to operate them.
Gabriella:
So that's a, a, a set of skills that we now get to return to, and I think that's really beautiful. Right. And then there are also different ways of being, in particular the the way that we have to navigate change, which is constant and threatening. And, you know, we're, because of the hunter gatherer lifestyle, we're wired to see change as a potential source of danger. It's fight or flight is our respo hardwired response to major challenges. And that's not adaptive when the changes are coming and the challenges are coming, you know, significant challenges every quarter, less so every month, and plenty still every week or every day that we're seeing, you know, we can't live in a constant state of high cortisol. We can't live in a constant state of thread, and so we need to adapt. So to now shift over to the second part of your question, Jen.
Gabriella:
What were the tools that we have to help us with those things? For many, many years that most of the history of psychology and psychiatry, those fields have been focused on helping people who are ill, which is really important. And you know, and, and there are many acute needs. We have focused a lot less on how do we help people who are fine and, you know, and, and maybe like within normal realms of let's say stress or mild depression or mild anxiety, but like, it's not an optimal way of living. And also it's not helping us adapt to the things that we're all coping with. So it's really been in the last 20, 30 years that the scientific community, parts of the scientific community within psychology and even now psychiatry, have come around to say, how can we apply this scientific arsenal toward the problem of living well and take the same sorts of approaches of designing interventions and testing outcomes to help people who don't necessarily have a diagnosable illness, but who want to live better, right? And who want to be able to adapt and not be struggling all the time. And that is, I think that the source of, of most of the evidence that we, we offer in our book, it's really the, the place that our own research starts from. How do you help large populations thrive?
Jen:
And so what does that look like? Like what does thriving at work look like? Is it, you know, I mean, I think some people would be like, well, that that just means being happy, but that's not what it means at all.
Gabriella:
It's a great question. And thriving by definition, it's an authentic experience to each person. So there is like an individual signature, but typically it means that we have high levels of positive emotion. So that's where your happiness piece would fit in. We have high quality relationships. We feel a sense of achievement, so we feel like we're accomplishing things and we're proud of those things. We feel a sense of meaning and purpose in what we're doing and we feel really engaged, like we're really into it and we're really excited about like, working on those problems. That's kind of the emotional experience of it. There's the, the outcomes it drives for us, which is, you know, long, long and meaningful relationships successful careers, whatever that looks like to you. So if you're climbing a ladder, it might be promotions and increasing responsibility. If you are looking to explore and expand skills, it might be successfully jumping from one field to another.
Gabriella:
And there's no ceiling on what we can accomplish there. So if you can imagine like a number line and zero might be average wellbeing or average levels of, of mental health, and anything below zero is where we're struggling. Something like a negative six, negative seven, you might be in, in some serious trouble and like a negative 10 you might be in an inpatient psychiatric facility. Hmm. And then on the flip side you know, all the positives are your above average. So the project of thriving is how do you get people not just from like a negative six to a negative two, which is really what traditional psychology and psychiatry is about. How do you get people to a positive 3, 4, 5? How do you help them push to the limits of their own potential? And there isn't a ceiling. Like we don't think that number line ends at any place in particular. And the science is so young, right? We don't, we don't know. Maybe. And, you know, one of my hopes for us, and one of the things I feel like I work toward is how do we move that zero up a couple notches so that the average is more like a two mm-hmm. , and maybe in a couple hundred years the average could be a seven. You know, like where, who knows how much we can move that population curve
Jen:
May, hopefully it doesn't take a hundred more years. I'm, I'm a little more optimistic, I think, or at least a little bit more hopeful for.
Jen:
So, so, you know, it's interesting because, you know, you talked about kind of this, you know, this hunter gatherer brain and you know, this 70,000 year old brain and the rate of change and constant change, especially in our workplaces. But I even think about, you know, things like not even just the, the constant rate of change, but even things like the way that email is designed, right? And the impact that it has on kind of our, our our psychology and, you know, even physiology in terms of like the, the ways in in which we're working is, did you guys look at that at all?
Gabriella:
Yeah. So those forms of communication have come up in two different strains of our research and, you know, a significant negative impact to your point. The first is around social connections. So we did a study with Sonya Luba, Miki mm-hmm. at uc, Riverside, who's one of the world's experts in connection and happiness. And we looked at what types of acts of connection builds the most kind of the deepest bond between people. And so part of the practical implications is like, if I have a few minutes at work and I wanna use it to feel connected or build a relationship, what should I do? And so things like email or a instant message or a text message, all of these asynchronous things don't really build relationships mm-hmm. the way that shared time does. So even if you're not in the same place, you can call someone, you could get on a video call with them.
Gabriella:
Those things, that synchronicity is much more impactful. The other piece though that this comes up, and this may be a little bit more to what you're getting at, is when you look at the creativity research, creativity entails the activity of a brain network called the default mode network. Mm-Hmm. . And that's like a deep associative thinking. We need that in order to come up with our best ideas, and that is interrupted by the busy work of things like emails and messages. And so if we don't create space to really step away from those things for significant periods of time, we're actually not gonna get to those same richness of creative outputs and, and all the good stuff that goes along with that. Right? There's, again, so much wellbeing that comes from that network so much engagement. So it, it is a disservice that we have not learned to, to psychologically adapt to those tools and their availability.
Jen:
And can we learn to psycholo, do you think we can?
Gabriella:
I really do. Okay. So I think, you know, I think that if you look at the history of, of the psychological response to major technological transitions it does feel people we go through and it's very reasonable feeling of threat. A feeling of like, this is the end of times and we're not gonna be able to overcome it. I think that's one of the beautiful things about our brains is we, we do learn to adapt. It just, it takes a period of time, I think. Yeah. We have a lot more of doom and gloom to come in my opinion, in terms of what we learn about how bad social media is for us, how bad these productivity tools are for us. But I think that, you know, the more we can learn about how bad they are, the more then we can start to learn how to adapt successfully.
Jen:
Yeah. And I just, and I think about that kind of in terms of you know, all the conversation. I know this is an area of, of expertise for you. All of the conversation right now about AI and mm-hmm. kind of the fear that is being created around AI and you know, it's going to take all of our jobs and what are we gonna do , and, you know, and so that, that's kind of where that question was coming from. Yeah. But also kind of stepping back, you know, know what I was referring to with email was more of like that fight fight or flight response, right? Like the, like the dinging and the binging and the Yes. For someone like me who, you know, lives with anxiety, when I get an email that elicits kind of those same brain chemicals of the flight or fight response because it hits me in the wrong way, or I'm just having a bad day, or I think somebody needs something and they mean something else, right. That email is just not a great tool for those types of communications with one another. .
Gabriella:
Totally. It's such a great point and such an important example. And that that this like deluge of inputs, any of which could trigger that kind of a response, it's a huge part of what we need to learn to adapt to. And, you know, there's, there's lots of tools that we can use and there are, I think, and we have some of them in our book, these tools around like emotional regulation in those moments. And they do work and they work well, but the idea that we would have to do it so many times a day in response to so many different inputs. Yeah. Not to me as like, we actually need better boundaries on what those inputs are, so we're not constantly feeling that way. And and I think we have a lot more to learn about kind of the, the right hygiene for ourselves in interacting with these tools.
Jen:
Yeah, absolutely. Cuz I think you know, even, even those of us that perhaps know know the negative impact still struggle, at least speaking for myself, I know the, the negative impact, I still struggle with what those, you know, what those boundaries look like and what's the right hygiene. So I definitely have a lot more to learn. So I wanna kind of switch to a little bit of the positives on how our brain works. Mm-Hmm. , you know, like, can, can some of that give us an edge at work? You know, instead of it, you know, needing to change, can some of that old, that old brain actually give us an edge ?
Gabriella:
Yes. So there is a lot of hope in our book and our message. You know, we, we get to return to things like creativity now. Yeah. And in this beautiful way this way that is rehumanizing after many years of the dehumanization of, of the industrial era. So to be able to be more creative. We also talk about perspection, which is this uniquely human ability to think ahead about the future. We spend about a third of our our thoughts are about the future and they're planning and they're imagining, and we need everyone in, in the workplace to be trying to get an edge on what's coming. And to, but also to learn to do that in effective ways, ways that don't lead to, you know, anxiety and rumination to, to your points. But also that are more realistic, that are a little bit broader in the ways that we imagine what could happen.
Gabriella:
So that's something that was important in in the hunter gatherer reality. And, and there's a, a return to that as well. The other thing I just wanna mention on this point, which I think is so important and really flips the paradigm for us, is that we think about resilience. Resilience is one of those five skills in our book. Mm-Hmm. , it's the most foundational because it's really about the ability to, to cope with these changes as they come and keep coming. We typically think about resilience as being able to bounce back from change. And that implies like, okay, there's a way of breaking under a challenge and then there's a way of just bouncing back so you're not harmed. But the opposite of breaking under a challenge is not just bouncing back. Bouncing back is like an average response to challenge the opposite under the spectrum is getting stronger through the challenge. And it could be any size of, of challenge, it could even be like true trauma. We know that there's a certain portion of the population that has the ability to come out of that chapter feeling more centered, a greater sense of clarity and meaning, a greater focus and ultimately psychologically stronger because of what they've been through. Now, that's not to say we should all look for traumatic experiences, you know, or that that's, well,
Jen:
Well we all went through covid, right? So I guess we can say there's that .
Gabriella:
Yeah. We have, we have been through a, a pandemic for sure. But it, you know, it really changes the, the paradigm when you say, okay, my goal here is to become, to have the ability to get stronger because of these things. And what would that open up in terms of not just how strong you could become, but how you feel about these changes coming right. To, to be able to say, oh, there's a new we're gonna go through a yet another acquisition. Okay, this is another chance for me to grow stronger in this way. That, that actually is how some people live. And to be able to start to develop those skills where we can embrace those moments as opportunities for growth. And to do that authentically, to do that, you know, even selfishly as like, oh, I wanna grow stronger right now, I'm gonna try to get involved there and see what I can do. That's a, a, a pretty powerful way to be a very empowered way to be in the midst of so much change.
Jen:
And is that based on like post-traumatic growth? Is that what you're talking
Gabriella:
About? Exactly, yeah. Post-Traumatic growth and also this idea of anti-fragility.
Jen:
Mm-Hmm. Yep. Yep. So, so you talk about the five skills, and you just covered one of them being re resilience. Can you talk about the other four and why they're important and kind of how they're all connected?
Gabriella:
Yeah, sure. So the acronym is Prism. Mm-Hmm. . These are the skills that we see as essential for the workplace in the 21st century. The PS prospection mentioned that a little bit, thinking ahead about the future are as resilience, I as innovation, creativity, we touched on that too, s's social connection mm-hmm. specifically what we call rapid rapport. So the ability to quickly build trust across difference, and we need that trust in order to collaborate at work. And that's a huge part of how we create value. We need that trust in order to connect with our customers. And, and more and more, especially in an era of ai, anytime a human is interacting with a human, there's higher and higher expectations of what that yields. And so rapid rapport becomes important there too. And then the m in Prism is for mattering.
Gabriella:
It's the sense that our work matters. That even when we have to stop one thing and start something completely new, our efforts are not for not and that's both an internal sense and how do we cultivate that so we don't hit these existential crises about why we're working at all. It's also about how as leaders, we help cultivate that for the people who report to us, because managers are increasingly being asked mm-hmm. to narrate, mattering, to help people understand why did what they just did for nine months, that now they have to walk away from, why did that even matter? Why did they even bother? And why should they bother following the manager in this next chapter?
Jen:
Yeah. And I, I wanna talk about trust a little bit because I feel like we live in a world that is kind of increasingly feeding us information and telling us not to trust it. Mm-Hmm. . And so trust is, you know, more and more, I, I think, difficult to come by or to at least feel in particular maybe for many people in the workplace.
Gabriella:
Yeah. you know, if we, if we think about that hunter gather reality, which is where our brains learned to cultivate trust, it was living with more or less the same group of 50 to a hundred people for our entire lives. , right? That's like the number of people we could put on, you know, that we, that we have that with is still probably about 50 to a hundred that we've, we've known that length of time, but we're working with thousands or tens of thousands of people over the course of our careers that we have to get there with somehow, even though they're strangers. And yes, it's through the lens of race and ethnicity and religion, but it's also through the lens of geography and function. And you were part of this company that merged with that company, and I was over here in the mother company the whole time.
Gabriella:
You know, all of these different dimensions of difference that make us fundamentally strangers, our, our brains are wired to see people that we've known for those our whole life as in us and everyone else is a them. And when we see someone as in us, we feel close to them. We are much more able to, to bring our full selves to bear and collaborating. We're less suspicious. We have a lot more empathy for them. When we see someone as, as a them, it's, we hold them at a distance. And so we're not gonna get to those great outcomes either for our companies or for ourselves when we do that. The trick is how do we quickly recategorize someone from them to an us? And that's what we're exploring. And this idea of rapid rapport is these kind of hacks to rewire the brain, to receive someone as an us, to receive someone as part of us, as part of who we are and, and someone that we can therefore extend all of this beautiful machinery around trust too.
Jen:
And, and I know in, in the book you, you give us lots of hacks or practical strategies for each of the five key skills. But can you give us maybe one hack or or practical strategy for, for each of the five that maybe you haven't covered yet, or,
Gabriella:
Sure. I'll
Jen:
Your favorites start .
Gabriella:
Yeah. Well, I'll start with the rapid rapport, which we just talked about. So one of the reasons that it is so hard for us to connect with people today is that we always feel rushed. And when we're in a rush we are less likely to feel empathy toward people. We, we are less likely to take the time to connect. And so we need to actually disrupt that rush mentality, that hurry mentality. It's called time famine. How do you disrupt that? So one of the best ways to disrupt it is actually to give time to someone else. So exactly the thing we think we don't have time to do exactly the thing. We wish that we were naturally feeling more inclined to take 30 minutes or even 15 minutes and do something kind for someone else. To my point earlier in the, in the podcast, try to do it synchronously.
Gabriella:
So, you know, spend, maybe call them and help them with a problem and, and spend that time together. What happens is we, we actually shift our brain out of that time famine into a time abundance mentality. So notice after the 15 minutes or the 30 minutes how that happened, notice how you feel a little more centered, a little more able to extend yourself to others. That is a, a way of being that makes it easier to get into trust and connection with people. Let's see, on the prospection how do we think about the future in, in a more effective way? So one quick hack on that front is perspection happens in two phases, and the first phase is really quick and it tends to be a little more optimistic. And then we go quickly into evaluation mode, and that's more pessimistic.
Gabriella:
But a lot of good stuff happens in that first phase, and you wanna try to extend it. So when something new comes up, some new prompt about what the future could be like, or what your team needs to deliver, try to spend a little bit more time in this first few seconds or minutes of expansive, divergent, optimistic thinking. Allow yourself to lean into the optimism of it and the what positives could come. That is a, a great way to both broaden your thinking and, and get access to some of the more positive emotions that can come up when we think about the future. So I love to give one for all the managers listening on creativity. So the, the trick of creativity, one of the keys to creativity is something called creative self-efficacy, which is how much confidence do we have in ourselves as a creative?
Gabriella:
And because of this previous world of work, this previous way of building in in the industrial era where we really didn't need to be creative, we have a culture and a school system and all kinds of things that have grown up around an idea that only certain people are creative. So a lot of people come into the workplace at age 25, 30, 40, even 50, 60 year olds I'll talk to who, who still really don't see themselves as creative, even though we all have that creative ability, that's part of who we are as a species. And so one of the best things you can do as a manager is help build people, build that up. And it's very simple to do. Managers, parents and teachers are in an extremely powerful position to help people build their creative self-efficacy because of that power distance and that influence that they have.
Gabriella:
So what that looks like is for each person on your team with some regularity, try to notice things that they're doing that are novel, useful, and surprising. That's the three criteria for a creative output, novel, useful, and surprising. It could be really small, it could be the way they close out a customer call with a new phrase or a tone in their voice that was unexpected, but really effective. Notice that, call it out. Tell them that you saw it, you thought it was really thoughtful, creative, clever, funny, you know, whatever the right adjective. But that nods to this idea of creativity and innovation and novelty that helps them build up their creative self-efficacy. And as people's creative self-efficacy gets higher, we know that the quality of their creative output increases. So you can really give someone a gift and it will also generate more creativity for, for the team that you lead.
Jen:
I love that. So, you know, I guess one thing that comes to mind is, you know, for the five skills, for the prism skills you know, I I, I've often heard of these still today, kind of referred to as soft skills, and I personally don't like that term cuz I think a lot of the things you're describing are some of the hardest skills, right.
Gabriella:
Yeah.
Jen:
Because they're not, cuz they're not technical ones. And so what do you say to someone that believes that these, you know, that these are still like kind of soft skills and, and the technical ones are kind of still more important or still what's going to be needed in, in the future world of work?
Gabriella:
Yeah, it's a really great and important question, and I will say as like a meta observation that the language in what we do in this space and what, and what you do, Jen and what I do and everyone working on this project of thriving it's so important to be able to shift the language as necessary in order to win over these voices. Because any word we choose and while being by the way, is now one of them yes, , it's going to become, it's gonna become diminished. It's gonna become like, oh, that's a nice to have, not a must have. Right? And so I think it's about not letting go of this point that this is where performance comes from and gathering more and more data and the, I mean, the, the evidence is so abundant now, but we need to keep bringing it back.
Gabriella:
And I, I try and every talk that I give to really go to, okay, what is the, the world's largest studies of performance, what do we learn about what it takes? And by the way, it's always gonna come down to mindset. It's not experience, it's not hard skills, it's something about your mindset. So if mindset is the term that works great if meta skills is the term that works great. If we just need to stick with something like resilience for a while, as a way in, find the language that people can make room for in that moment and, and know that we're gonna have to adapt because the second that we coined something, it will be diminished. I don't, I don't like that, I don't think it's good. But being very practical, I think that's part of the, of the challenge is how you adapt and get ahead of those critiques.
Gabriella:
I just try to keep coming at it with evidence and more and more data. You know, there's great studies that show the relationship between worker wellbeing and the share price of the company. Yeah. You know, like really just try to make it as bottom line as possible for the skeptics out there. And I think over time it, it, you know, we are, we are seeing progress in that. I think that we're a lot farther than we were 10 or 15 years ago, but it's still a huge part of the conversation we have to keep coming back to. And these tools and, and this form of support is always gonna be, you know, on the chopping block in these moments of economic belt tightening, we have to keep making this argument of like, this is actually the thing you need most right now for the workers. Whatever workers you're retaining in your workforce, this is what you need in order to get the most out of them. Keep making that, those arguments, keep bringing in those, that evidence and doing those studies to convince the skeptics.
Jen:
I I mean, I think you've kind of already answered this somewhat, but I wanna hit it directly on you know, you talked about it in terms of creativity. You talked about it in terms of resilience. Are these skills, I mean they're skills that can be developed, but some people obviously I guess are more, you know, innately capable when it comes to these skills. Like, talk to me a little bit about that.
Gabriella:
Yeah, this is a very important point. All of these things can be developed. So we're not, this is not a take a test and, you know, you're diagnosed adios, as we would say in certain parts of medicine. Like there's nothing we could do. This is the opposite of that. This is all skills that we can build. In many cases there's skills we don't develop naturally. We have to work on them to build them. There are people who are naturally more resilient and that has to do with, with some aspects of how we are in the world. They, you know, you can think of it as personality that lends itself more towards some of the drivers of resilience, but there is no one who cannot learn to become more resilient as one example. And that is such an important part of the message is we can all grow in these things. And by the way, the people who are super resilient can still grow even more. Again, there's no ceiling on where we we are in this, in this realm of potential.
Jen:
So and I guess it's, you know, if, if I'm trying to build some of these skills, I mean, do I focus, do I focus on all of them at once? Do like, how do I identify areas that I need some personal growth or development?
Gabriella:
Yeah. So I mean, I would start by reading the book and I don't just mean that as a I agree
Gabriella:
, I just mean that as a shameless plug. But I think to really familiarize yourself with the five, and yeah, you may, you may feel really inspired and called to one. If you are someone who feels like they're struggling and having a tough time, and I don't mean in a that any kind of clinical sense. I mean, you know, in the, in the realm of just like, things are really hard for everyone right now. Resilience is the place I would start. And in the book we break down five drivers of resilience and you can go through the five again, that's a five within a five. So there's the five prism skills, and then within resilience there's five drivers. You can go through those five drivers and identify which of those you feel pretty good about and which of those is really where you can, you're gonna wanna focus. Once we are resilient, it lets us open up to these other skills in a different way. But if we're starting from a place of struggle, I do think focusing on resilience is, is the place to go and just get yourself onto like some steady footing Yeah. Before you try to, you know, reach for these higher order skills.
Jen:
Yeah. I love that. So, you know, a lot of the things that we've talked about so far, Gabriela, are really like skills that an, you know, an individual a person can invest in and can develop and grow in themselves. But are there ways that we, you know, as human beings, as leaders, as organizations can actually design work differently? So it better supports kind of our, our human nature and the essential skills that you all discuss in the book? Cause I feel like that's a, you know, it's one thing to constantly be trying to develop and hone the skills, but if you're not in an environment that actually brings, you know, kind of enhances those, then it always feels like a struggle.
Gabriella:
Yeah. so there, there are certainly environmental factors and the book is intended to, the primary audience is individuals. It is also targeting leaders and then kind of as a third order the organizational layer. And there's yeah. Details and tools for each of them. You know, as, as leaders, so much of what we're calling for is a shift from thinking of a manager as kind of telling people what to do to thinking of the manager as the coach and the enabler of these meta skills. Because the work that's coming at people, it's coming faster than the manager even knows about it. And it's really about how do you enable them to respond as those things come up in real time. And coaching is a huge part of what that means. It's about how do you unlock capabilities for people, again, these enduring human capabilities versus hard skills.
Gabriella:
And when we see managers do that, you know, there, the team itself becomes more resilient. The levels of burnout drop the levels of job satisfaction, life satisfaction rise for everyone on the team. And it becomes a really safe and comfortable and happy place for everyone, regardless, honestly, of the organization around you. At the organizational level there, it, it really depends where the org is and their journey toward understanding this topic. And some organizations, it's really just about how do you come along in the journey of, of accepting and honoring the importance of these deep ways of being to our performance and to the bottom line of the business, right? There's just some very early maturity ways of accepting that and, and understanding the level of investment that's required. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we try to call out in the book some of the hidden barriers for even organizations that invest a lot in these areas.
Gabriella:
And one of them is this structural divide within hr between the total rewards slash benefits on the one side and the training or learning and development on the other mm-hmm. . And, you know, ultimately if our wellbeing is the source of our performance, those things really should be in the same org in the same team. The investments should be coordinated united probably the same line of budget, the same source of programming, you know, one shared vision under one shared leader. And that is it doesn't sound for people who are outside the world of hr, like a particularly radical thing to suggest, but for those of us who've lived our lives in it, it's, and you know, it's not meant to be threatening or at all to diminish, it's the opposite. It's the work is so important, but it's not gonna be able to be successful if we're fragmenting the needs of, of a holistic human being with one brain that serves all of these things in a mixed and messy way in into lines of budget. That really came from the industrial revolution. We go through that history of how these two parts of HR came to be. It has nothing to do with the science of wellbeing. It, it has nothing to do with the science of performance. So calling for us to rethink some of those hidden barriers
Jen:
Or, or even the way that the workforce experiences it, right? Mm-Hmm. they don't always know or understand the backend structure of it and, but yet it impacts them.
Gabriella:
Totally.
Jen:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Gabriela, this was such a great conversation. Thank you so much. There was so much in here, but there's still so much more in the book that people can engage and, and learn from, from you on. So thank you for writing it and thank you for being on the podcast today.
Gabriella:
Thanks for hosting Jen, and thanks for the great questions and and for all of your insights.
Jen:
I am so grateful Gabriela could be with us today to talk about thriving at work.
Jen:
Thank you to our producers, rivet 360 and our listeners. You can find the Work Well podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various pod catchers using the keyword work Well all one word to hear more. And if you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. So you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you'd like to hear on the Work Well podcast series or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jen Fisher or on Twitter at Jen Fish 23. We're always open to your recommendations and feedback and of course, if you like what you hear, please share post and like this podcast. Thank you and be well. The information, opinions and recommendations expressed by guests on this Deloitte podcast series are for general information and should not be considered as specific advice or services.