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Pinaki Kathiari & Chris Lee challenge traditional best practices in the workplace
Pinaki Kathiari (00:00)
Welcome back to Why Does It Feel So Wrong To Be Human At Work? We're at Between the Seasons, and we're joined again by ⁓ Ellen Griley We had a fabulous conversation last week, and this time we're just going to kind of dig a little bit deeper for a few minutes and see if we could get into a little bit what can we do about situations and scenarios.
Chris Lee (00:20)
of just continuing. I feel like when we're talking about mental health and we're talking about how being conscious of mental health, how it informs internal comms, I feel like it's too important of a topic for us to try to contain it within 30 minutes, right? So I really like this topic because we've touched on so many things about the human aspect of the employee experience.
Bree Bartos (00:35)
to break the year.
Pinaki Kathiari (00:37)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Lee (00:46)
But when it comes to how we engineer that experience, we're not really talking enough about the emotional reception or the emotional receptiveness, receptivity of employees to kind of accept different types of messaging at what time, what channels, those kinds of things. And I think it's really important. We tend to think a lot about reach and how do I make sure this message is getting to the maximum number of people without really thinking about.
you know, not just the context of they're probably reading this over their dinner hour or they're reading this and there was just a huge, know, update about ICE or what's happening in Iran or something like that. And there's just, it's such a noisy and emotionally noisy environment right now, isn't it?
Ellen Griley (01:26)
Mm-hmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (01:33)
Absolutely. When we were doing research ⁓ way back when, I had to work on Company's website and we were doing user research before. The user research team came back with some fabulous data, but it was kind of realizing that people are looking for cars at just very different scenarios. Mom with a two-year-old on her lap is shopping for a car versus someone who is just doing it.
on a mobile phone while they're in a subway. You just think of all these different scenarios. So it gives us a sense of people are just in different places while they're interacting with you or your product at any given time.
Chris Lee (02:14)
I found my mind just going off on so many tangents. There's so many things I'm curious about. And to be honest with you, like, so I work at Gallagher. So we published the state of the sector survey that you referenced there. And I just, there's so many things to think about, but I think probably the most important thing to really think about is exactly what you're addressing and tackling, Ellen, is, you know,
Pinaki Kathiari (02:16)
Yeah.
Bree Bartos (02:18)
You
Chris Lee (02:37)
there's this weird pressure on corporate comms folks to be perfect with everything that they pump out. So everything like, you know, we talk about uncanny valley with like just a weird AI slop and with just anything that's CGI and everything feels a little bit Stepford wives ish, but it's weird in this corporate ecosystem that we don't actually step back and think about how
like how comic book like it is, the corporate, the stuffed corporate environment, the corporate communications, we always talk about authenticity in the communications and it just, it's bullshit. We don't, we're not really truly authentic in how we communicate to employees. And so we raise a bar unintentionally by making everything perfect. So every communication that goes out, it's gotta be, you know, spell checked, it's gonna be edited, it's gotta be approved by the director, the senior director, the VP.
And just goes on and on. And so it's actually like this relentless push of perfection, perfection, perfection. And it's not actually creating a psychologically safe space. Same thing with videos. Like they're a little bit too polished and a little bit too perfect. And I do think it's time to truly lean into authenticity.
Ellen Griley (03:31)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bree Bartos (03:51)
Why does it feel so wrong to be human?
Ellen Griley (03:51)
Yeah, I...
Chris Lee (03:54)
Mmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (03:54)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (03:55)
I think that Chris, that's something I mean, I think about it all of the time really. And I think the biggest.
thing that we're probably getting wrong right now, and that I see kind of across the board. And I did this, you know, everybody kind of does it, is we write these communications, we do our work, and we expect that the person on the other end is going to open that email with 100 % cognitive capacity and 100 % emotional capacity. And then, and when you make that assumption,
Chris Lee (04:26)
Love that. Yeah.
Ellen Griley (04:31)
What you don't do is all of the helpful work that can meet someone where they are. And that is as simple as when you're going to hear from an employer, when you're going to hear from your company. So when you send that bi-weekly newsletter, you never say, this is a bi-weekly newsletter, right? But yet you see that all the time.
Chris Lee (04:45)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Pinaki Kathiari (04:52)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (04:52)
The
New York Times says it's a daily paper. I worked in alt-weeklies. We would say we're a weekly paper. You see that all the time in these other areas of our life where we encounter information. Everyone else says what their cadence is. But we don't tell employees and remind them, hey, you're going to hear from us once a week. We're going to get together for a quarterly town hall. All of these things that kind of
bring someone back into that state of like, okay, I know, I know, at least I'm going to know more about this topic at this date. And it can make it really, you know, that that whatever they're carrying, can make it a little bit easier to hold.
Pinaki Kathiari (05:24)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Lee (05:33)
Love that. Yeah.
Bree Bartos (05:34)
Love that.
Pinaki Kathiari (05:34)
Brie,
So, Ellen, last week we talked about this, your journey kind of started with noticing that there's these two sides in different
circumstances, whether it's there's Ellen at home and then there was Ellen at university, Ellen at home versus Ellen at work. How did you kind of manage that or how would we give other people advice to kind of start bridging those two sides together? Even if it, first of all, even if it should be together, like should I be more authentic at work and should work come into my home? And should I, and how would we navigate that?
I said that all weird. I can ask that question again if you like.
Chris Lee (06:14)
That was the weirdest possible way you could have...
Ellen Griley (06:15)
No, I loved it.
Chris Lee (06:16)
No, I'm just kidding.
Ellen Griley (06:17)
No, I'm picking up on what you're putting down. And I'll get a little vulnerable here and I'll share that when I left my last in-house role.
It was the strangest experience of my life and in many ways very sad because one of the things that people said to me as I was leaving, and this came from not one, not two, this came from multiple people that I had worked with. They said, thank you for being human.
And I...
How can I be anything else? I just don't know how to be anything else. But the reason why that's vulnerable to share is because it's really hard and really weird to be a human at work. I wasn't always that, you know, very buttoned up leader. I mean, what you see is what you get. And sometimes what that meant was,
I could come in a little hot, like people can. I call it passion. And other times what that meant was I could cry. And I remember being in a meeting about AI adoption. This was probably 14 months ago, maybe, maybe 12, and had just read some of the most terrifying things imaginable in a New York Times article about
you know, the future of what was going to happen. And ⁓
Pinaki Kathiari (07:55)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (07:59)
I think that that sometimes is hard for people to see. the reason I started crying was I just was advocating in this meeting to say, hey, I think we really need to be intentional about how we're rolling this out. And as I was making my argument, I'm really good at that, it caught up with me. And so the advice that I have
Bree Bartos (08:22)
Mm-hmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (08:22)
Hmm.
Ellen Griley (08:28)
That is a work in progress for me. That is what we were talking about earlier. That is about understanding your nervous system and understanding the things that you can do to regulate in a moment, how to co-regulate, you know, maybe after that moment or recover from that with people quickly, you know, ⁓ co-regulated even in that meeting as people were, you know,
Pinaki Kathiari (08:48)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (08:53)
pinging me behind the scenes saying, thank you for saying this. They could see, they were feeling it too, right? But I think I could have handled it maybe with a little bit more composure that would have also not necessarily impacted other people. And so it's this, when we think about...
Pinaki Kathiari (08:56)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ellen Griley (09:17)
how we negotiate this, it's ongoing work. And it's also really important to note that this is entirely an individual decision. When we think about, bring your full self to work and show up and all of these things, I'll be honest, I am a white woman with a lot of privilege. And so I can show up with, you know,
Pinaki Kathiari (09:22)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (09:43)
tears in my eyes, I can show up with wet hair. There's a lot I can do in corporate America working remotely that not everybody can do without having it, you know, impact the way people perceive them. And so, you know, the but the biggest thing that I think that people can focus on is really just
figuring out the ways where it's comfortable for them to find connection. Connection is so important. Community is so important. When you look at things like what we discussed last episode with the polycrisis in Greece, what I found so interesting, and we saw this in COVID too, what I found so interesting is that when people are in uncertainty, when people are facing these really difficult times, community pops up.
Pinaki Kathiari (10:09)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (10:32)
It's not popping up enough right now, we're still pretty divided right now, but community pops up as a way for people to get, you see all these different clubs, you see all these different things in response. So finding the people that you work with who can help you, you know, just where you can say, hey, it's really hard for, is it weird right now? Are you feeling this too? I'm feeling this too, right? That can help you co-regulate.
And you know, the other thing is just really understanding and getting curious about.
I'm feeling a kind of way right now and ⁓ naming that emotion, right? Emotions don't stay, we think that they stay with us so much longer than they do and they really cycle through us quite quickly. So being able to say like, I'm feeling really activated right now and I think it's because of this and just kind of interrupting that flow can be a huge way for you to kind of navigate through work in a way that respects.
what you're carrying, but maybe also helps you find that that composure in the moment.
Pinaki Kathiari (11:33)
I just read the book, Nonviolent Communications, and a lot of that talks about how we don't know or aren't really taught from our youth on how to identify our feelings. And so I really, really recommend that, or really recommend also whenever you're feeling that like uppity, to just think what's making me feel this way and what is the feeling that I'm feeling and understand that for moving forward. Because I think you're right, like for me, it's always been about
Well, my kind of like two sidedness was always that, you know, I am not white and I'm son of an immigrant. And now I'm in like meetings with like C-suite. And at first I'm like, I didn't know how to really behave, know, we're in our hands and, I don't know where to put the forks and knives either. So I bought a book on etiquette and that it was called How to Be a Gentleman. And it was all around keeping people comfortable. And that's, guess,
understanding. And so that helped me try to at least kind of now feel like I can belong here. And in that atmosphere, keep everybody around me comfortable because the odd person out doesn't keep everybody comfortable sometimes. We don't know what we're going to get from the thing that we don't understand. And so that's one of the things for that. The other thing I want to ask. So one of the things
Earlier on in my leadership, I realized that I couldn't get any strategy launched off the ground. couldn't get things going unless my kind of like team had a good relationship with and was really comfortable with it. And I realized that I just kind of pushed strategies and pushed ideas and it got met with resistance. And so I switched up the style. said, Hey, like I'm realizing this is not work. Let's work on this base layer of relationships first. And I started doing things like I noticed if things got
Ellen Griley (13:16)
Hmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (13:29)
tense in a room where I'd stop the topic and I'd start to explore what's going on here. Let's alleviate this thing first, and then we can get back into the topic. And sometimes it could happen there, or sometimes I'm like, all right, let's break for a moment and come back or pause. Any advice in that scenario? What things to do while you're just kind of like right in the moment, either from you, Chris, as well, or Bree as well?
to jump in, like how do you kind of get into a place where your things are going wrong, people are there, how do you start regulating yourself and start regulating the room now?
Ellen Griley (14:09)
Developing a healthy, healthy capacity for awkward silence is a great, great place to start. Truly, right? I mean, it's, again, it comes back into that when you're feeling a kind of way, right inside, and you've got that, that energy cycling through you. We all ultimately want to stay alive. We all ultimately want to find comfort, right? And so these things that we do in meetings are actually related to, to,
Bree Bartos (14:14)
Yeah.
Pinaki Kathiari (14:22)
Huge, what you just said.
Ellen Griley (14:39)
keeping ourselves alive the way that our mind and our body works. Our mind and body doesn't know the difference, right? Our mind and our body is just like, cool. You feel like you're being chased by a tiger. Let's act accordingly even though you're in your meeting, right? And so I think it's... ⁓
Pinaki Kathiari (14:41)
Yeah.
Ellen Griley (14:57)
What I like to do, there's a couple of things. There's two things that I like to do. One is before we even get into that meeting, when this is an, like the idea is germinating, when things are just kind of swirling, I love to ask a simple question. I love to say, here's the goal, here's where we're headed, and here's why we wanna get there. How do you think we should get there?
And just seeing it through their own eyes and how they would get, it helps me understand the difference between all of the information that I'm bringing, which is in many times a lot more than they know, right? Not in terms of life and skills, but I've got context. I've got meetings with leaders from above. I'm carrying in a lot and I'm seeing the patterns quickly, right? But asking that, how would you get there?
allows you to see kind of the delta and the distance between where you are and where they are. And then you can kind of work to find that middle ground. I think in a moment, there's a, when you look at the kind of the traditional trauma-informed principles that are the foundation to trauma-informed healthcare and trauma-informed education, one of the biggest principles is choice. And I think about this all the time because we live in a world that is
relentlessly because I said so. This world is one big because I said so. And when you don't have agency and when you feel like you've got very limited options, it can cause you to feel a kind of way on the inside, right? And when you give somebody choice to say, Hey guys, we've got to solve this problem. And we've got here, here's some options.
What do you think? What do you want to do next? And allow people just to feel like they have some semblance of agency in understanding and processing through whatever it is that you're asking them. That can be return to office. That can be AI transformation. You can still give people choice. And we just aren't giving enough of it.
Pinaki Kathiari (17:01)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Lee (17:08)
I love that point.
know we're going to wrap up here, Ellen, but I love that point about the importance of giving agency because I think that's where people feel safe and they feel like they have some semblance of control, especially in a corporate work environment where, know, Pinaki, you and I have talked about the experience in school and how education is set up in public education.
You know, the school is also, you we talked earlier, Ellen, about this bizarre world of corporate culture. High school is kind of the same thing. It's got all the same features. You have bullies, you have people who suck up, you have your own very specific language that the cool kids use, and it's the same thing in corporate environments. They have their own cool language, there's a specific way you should dress, there's so much pressure to conform.
Pinaki Kathiari (17:45)
Kindergarten is the same.
Bree Bartos (17:50)
You
Chris Lee (18:02)
into this different area. And of course, you got to respond to authority figures and some people are just better at it than others. And I just, I find there's so many parallels and I love what you're saying about agency. When you're a kid in high school, just a stupid kid, you never feel like you have agency. So you're constantly craving that. And I think it's just fast forward to your corporate lives. It's difficult. I find code switching, constant code switching is exhausting. It's exhausting for even the best of us. So
Pinaki Kathiari (18:27)
Exhausting.
Chris Lee (18:32)
Just to wrap this up, Ellen you've given all of us and all of our listeners so much to think about, and I'm really appreciative of you being here and having this, what I think is a really important conversation.
Pinaki Kathiari (18:47)
We're just kindergartners out here. We're all just chugging. You know, actually, I'll end with this real quick story. I was on a flight back and I was sitting next to a professor who studied immigration and some of the more negative or horrific sides of immigration.
Ellen Griley (18:48)
Thank you so much. We are all just four year olds, really.
Chris Lee (18:50)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. ⁓
Bree Bartos (18:55)
four-year-olds with their tablets
Pinaki Kathiari (19:12)
And kind of spending this life researching such a topic, I asked the question, like, how do you stay positive or how can you stay positive? And it was just like that. It was just to kind of realize that we are just humans and we're just here. And when you kind of understand that amongst everyone, it starts to help you deal with what's happening around us, little by little.
I hope that helps. We are just kindergartners at the end.
Bree Bartos (19:41)
Yes, and if you're looking
for some positivity and trying to be a more positive person, my advice for that is just try to find one moment of joy each day. Just try to recognize like, you know what, I really enjoyed my coffee this morning. It was better than usual and that's a moment of joy. Take that moment and recognize it. Find the joy in your day.
Chris Lee (20:00)
Take
the W, yeah, 100%, wherever you can get it.
Pinaki Kathiari (20:03)
Anything
could be a W to do it. It's also Buddhist philosophy. Go to sleep thinking about what you're proud of today as opposed to what you're gonna do tomorrow. With that said, thank you so much, Ellen, for joining us again. We really appreciate you.
Bree Bartos (20:05)
Yes.
Chris Lee (20:13)
Love that.
Ellen Griley (20:13)
you
Bree Bartos (20:19)
Ellen, where can our listeners find you at?
Chris Lee (20:23)
You
Ellen Griley (20:29)
Internal-calms.com. I'm laughing because of, as we heard last week, that can be a little bit of a mouthful, but not as much as equilibrious. So, internal-calms.com.
Bree Bartos (20:37)
and not as much as why does it feel so
Pinaki Kathiari (20:37)
You
Chris Lee (20:37)
you
Bree Bartos (20:39)
wrong to be human at work. We love long names.
Chris Lee (20:41)
You
Ellen Griley (20:42)
Yes.
Pinaki Kathiari (20:43)
Yes.
Ellen Griley (20:44)
Yes.
Bree Bartos (20:45)
And of course, follow Ellen on LinkedIn. They have a great LinkedIn account, always very active on there, sharing great articles. We'll have all the links in the description below.
Pinaki Kathiari (20:54)
Absolutely. Thank you, everybody. We'll be back next week. We'll see you soon. Bye, everyone.
Chris Lee (20:58)
See ya,
bye everybody.