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This is the Executive Connect Podcast - a show for the new generation of leaders. Join us as we discover unconventional leadership strategies not traditionally associated with executive roles. Our guests include upper-level C-Suite executives charting new ways to grow their organizations, successful entrepreneurs changing the way the world does business, and experts and thought leaders from fields outside of Corporate America that can bring new insights into leadership, prosperity, and personal growth - all while connecting on a human level. No one has all the answers - but by building a community of open-minded and engaged leaders we hope to give you the tools you need to help you find your own path to success.
Melissa Aarskaug (00:00.96)
Welcome to the Executive Connect podcast. Today we have Dr. Mary Donahue to talk about harnessing digital psychology for workplace wellness. Dr. Mary is a leading digital psychologist and a CEO of the Digital Wellness Center, where she brings together digital wellness, AI, and psychology to transform mental health and reduce workplace stress.
Dr. Mary, welcome.
Dr. Mary Donohue (00:33.792)
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and I'm grateful to be on with you. I your work very much.
Melissa Aarskaug (00:41.494)
I love it. I'm so excited. The feeling's mutual. I'm excited to dive into your journey, your background. And I want to start off by asking you just to share a little bit about your transition from academia to the founder of the Digital Wellness Center.
Dr. Mary Donohue (01:01.046)
Well, I actually started out as an entrepreneur and I was in PR. I was on television for a long time. And then of course, once you get to a certain age and that's anywhere over 37, just so you know for TV, you start to age out. And so I went into PR and loved PR worked in, we had offices in Toronto, New York and San Francisco, but in that course of events, I had,
I got to meet Paul Newman and I was working with him and he said, Merit, why don't you go back to grad school and get your doctorate because you're super smart, but nobody's going to listen to you until you back it up with evidence.
Like, I don't know, but how many people make such a pivotal statement in your life? And so that for me was like, you know, okay, kind of sounds like a good idea. Sure, I'll go in. And I wrote my alma mater and they said, yeah, you know what, we're starting something in September. This was end of, or this was July. And so I went through the application process and, you know, I was fortunate enough to get in for September and I started school and I didn't tell anybody.
Melissa Aarskaug (01:55.372)
Makes sense.
Dr. Mary Donohue (02:16.086)
So I kept working, but then kept going to school. Then, make a long story short, the crash came in 2009 or 10, and so we moved on from that. unfortunately, I found out I had leukemia. And so I started to just focus on school. Now I have chronic leukemia, which won't mean anything to your audience, but all cancers are blood diseases. And so it means I constantly have this blood disease.
and how we treat it and what we do to it is what, like it's been fascinating learning. So I started out in academia, but for me, it just didn't work. There isn't the same excitement. Like, you know, when you're doing your job and you're just like, yes, and you want to talk to everybody about it and do it. And I loved the students. Like, I loved the students. I taught homeless students who had come back to school.
I had like the quote, the worst students and I had the best students. And we had the best classes and I had the best time and I'm still in contact with them. But I realized that that kind of lifestyle probably wasn't for me. Like I like doing science, but I like doing science on the edge, not applying for an ethics and 14 months later or 15 months later getting your ethics. So I just wanted to look at how to change all
And that's sort of how I got into doing what I was doing. I graduated and ended up going to Arkansas to do a lecture at the University of Arkansas Sam Walton College of Business. And I met a few people there and I presented a paper with them and they said, hey, you you should go work at Walmart and get some experience at Walmart. And I thought, yeah, yeah, that's a good idea.
Because you know, that's what everybody does, right? We just, I'm going to go be a Walmart vendor. That's sort of how it started.
Melissa Aarskaug (04:19.86)
I love it. love the diverse kind of changes for you. So in your journey with very different industries, are there any key experiences and lessons learned throughout your journey that you can share?
Dr. Mary Donohue (04:35.888)
yes, grab every opportunity you can. You know, I know the discourse on a woman being in business and I think we've all experienced different things in business. But for me, the greatest mentors of my life have been men. For example, at Walmart, Jabel Floyd and Michael Camp taught me about scale, profitability.
the business, the customer, how they all work together, how to measure it. then, you know, with Walmart, if I deal in behavior modification and I design systems for behavior modification, and if you think about how I started, which was in PR, that's modification. It's just modification of the news. And so when we look at behavior modification, it's the same
So the lessons are grab every opportunity, ask every single question. I think the biggest failures in my life, Melissa, were always because I didn't, like I just didn't say I didn't know, I don't know. And now I have no problem saying, I don't know, how do I do this? And I think that probably in academia, isn't like you aren't encouraged. I guess I just didn't have the right mentors.
in what I was doing. so I just, when I got into the business world, like my friends really stepped up and took me under their wing and said, this is how we do it. And that's awesome. And I think you have to also ask people to mentor you because if they have a skillset you don't have, this is funny coming from me, but you could, you know, you could go back to school. Sure.
But if somebody mentors you, you learn it just so much faster. Like I would ask Jabo if I could spend time just understanding how he managed people and how he managed the distribution center. And with Michael Camp, I would do interview after interview on how he spent his time and what he did and how he did it. And then, you know, there's another friend of mine who ran part of P &G.
Dr. Mary Donohue (06:57.65)
And I spent time with him understanding how they work to scale and then bringing it all back down to a small business that needs to sell. So I ended up in the end selling that business because of what they taught
Melissa Aarskaug (07:11.572)
I love what you just said. think it's such an important nugget of wisdom. And it's just like children as they grow, they learn by watching and monkey see monkey do. And I think you're spot on with, you could go to school and spend four years getting a degree, or you can, you know, sit behind somebody that's doing a role that's successful in that role, learn from them. And it really cuts down your learning curve, right? So asking,
You know, another fantastic point you pointed out is we all don't know everything and asking, you know, I think it might be this, but let me get, let me ask a colleague or a peer who I know is an expert in this area and let me get back to you. And I think you're right. It does take some confidence to be comfortable saying and asking that, you know, I don't know this. I know when I,
graduated with an engineering degree, everybody thought I knew everything about civil engineering, like, you know, water and, and transportation and environmental and I had different expertise. And, you know, I had to teach myself, like you were saying at the beginning, to learn that at the beginning, I wasn't comfortable saying I don't know, because I wanted to be known as competent and capable, you know, and a go to person in my subject.
I love what you said. want to switch gears a little bit about, cause I love what you said. You just take opportunities, run with them, learn from them and kind of lean into all the opportunities you've had and the mentors you've had. I want to talk a little bit about the motivation behind the center, the center's focus on digital wellness. Can you share a little bit about, you know, that?
Dr. Mary Donohue (08:59.272)
of course. And that degree is really, really hard. Congratulations for getting through it. One of my cousins did that degree and I was like, Whoa, that's way more work than I ever had to do. That's a lot of math.
Melissa Aarskaug (09:15.842)
Yeah. You know, and it's funny you say that because, you know, the typical civil engineer does not look like me. And probably my first day of civil engineering school, showed up just probably in this color shirt with lipstick and blonde hair, smiling, friendly. And people are like, are you in home ec? I'm like, no, was on the CE 101. So that was the start of my journey. So tell me about yours in the...
Dr. Mary Donohue (09:22.304)
Yeah. No, not at all.
Dr. Mary Donohue (09:37.13)
you and home
Melissa Aarskaug (09:45.353)
Center's Focus.
Dr. Mary Donohue (09:47.79)
Well, the Semper's focus is to heal. And all of it started because I had created a mentoring system and had amazing clients and we had a generational communication system and I have a book on it and all of these things. And then COVID happened and the world was locked down. And so Microsoft was dealing with the exponential growth of teams and I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at a few teams events and be part of that.
Eventually I presented all this research and my theories to the people that worked with Mr. Gates in research. And like, again, you you're always going for peer review, so why not just go up there? But what I began to notice with Walmart, American Airlines, all of my clients in the government armed forces was this exhaustion.
And it was affecting teams, was affecting productivity, and it was affecting people's mental health and their lives. And so I took all my learnings and the books called Message Received, like you can see exactly how I did the research and what I did. But I began to go into history. I'm a big believer of we've always been in this time before, so how do we fix
Like there's really nothing new under the sun. It's just looking at applying them differently. And as an engineer, you know that, right? Like the principles of what you do are the same. It's how you apply the principles that are different. And true innovation is creating something, you know, I think Einstein was like, it's something brand new, but it's brand new based on a principle. Okay, that wasn't an exact Einstein quote that you get.
what I'm talking about. And so I went back in history and I looked at workplace health and safety. And Purdue had done some amazing work on workplace health and safety using something called micro breaks. Now they failed, but to do what they wanted them to do. But what they did notice in these micro breaks, and you can go back and see all these studies, it's great, is
Melissa Aarskaug (11:39.202)
I got the board.
Dr. Mary Donohue (12:07.99)
that when people were participating in micro breaks, which is something like, you know, in my case, it's less than three minutes, but in their case, I think it was 47 seconds. Their heartbeat slowed down and their breathing became deeper. So when you're stressed and you're at work, what we do know is you sometimes are typing harder. You're breathing from your chest or your throat versus your
And the more stressed you get, the more you, and you go into, like I was in workplaces, like I would walk around Microsoft in Seattle or in Arkansas or any of those places and do observational research. And you can physically see the signs of stress. So I thought, well, I think that's something I can help with. So I started to design little breaks. And eventually what we did is found a system that was a push system.
that helped people lower their incidences of stress. we asked everybody to beta with us. So, know, pay us X amount and you can beta this with however many people you want and pilot it, people call it now. And it worked. And then we kept refining it and refining it and refining it. And eventually that the digital wellness center became way more of a business.
than the mentoring because people weren't meeting face to face anymore because of COVID. So that's sort of how it all started.
Melissa Aarskaug (13:45.824)
I want to talk a little bit, think a lot of times people think, people start businesses and they just become a giant success. They don't have any challenges along the way or adversity. So I want to talk a little bit about the beginning stages of when you were building the business and maybe some challenges that you faced and what you learned from those at the beginning.
Dr. Mary Donohue (14:09.056)
Well, we still are in a building phase. in our third year. Most businesses don't take off till year five. And the first thing is it has to be built on truth, a scientific fact or something you've proved. Don't build a business for you, build a business that consumers want. So in my case, I knew what my consumers wanted and needed. Nobody knew how to get
And that happens to me all the time. Like this is how I started another product that's of the digital wellness center that's really taken off. So first of all, find out that if there's a need, if other people want it as much as you do, then you have to prove it. In my mind, everything has to be proven with data. If it isn't measured, I mean, who am I talking to an engineer? If it isn't a Drucker, if it isn't measured, it isn't real. And
what's the value for the client? Like how are they going to make money from this? Because you can't, you know, I'm not a not -for -profit, I'm a for -profit company. And that leads me to the next point. How are you going to fund this? So I was crazy. I started funding it during COVID myself. And then I decided, okay, I'm going to need to sell my shares because I don't, I just don't have enough capital.
So how can I do this? And I did the rounds of different venture virtually, and it just didn't click because you're literally selling part of your soul to someone. And I went into a program that Netflix, Facebook, and one other company, I can't remember, put like for startups like mine that were using rudimentary AI.
and you know eventually they would buy you. But what I learned from them is a lot about how to properly get venture capital in the valley but also which was interesting is why women don't ask for capital early and why they always try and work on a shoestring budget and don't pay themselves.
Dr. Mary Donohue (16:34.206)
Now I've been there with my first two businesses. That was crazy. I didn't pay myself. I undervalued myself, whatever. I am too old for that now. So those are really the starting points. And then you have to know you're going to have colossal, I'm crying on my desk. I'm going to crawl under my desk. I hate my life. Fails. And then, you know, you're going to pick yourself up. And as a business person, I've put our house.
I've spent all of our retirement fund, I've done all of that. But you really truly have to believe in what you do. And result is every single morning I wake up, I'm helping thousands of people. That's a life purpose right there. And so I'm incredibly passionate about what I do and I'm constantly trying to learn more. And we did get a great, amazing partner. His name is Aaron, my accountant introduced me to
And the two of us just clicked and it wasn't hard. wasn't laborious. There wasn't a lot of anything. It was just, yeah, let's do this. Now, I think we thought it was gonna be more successful right away. Like we still were like, oh yeah, this is gonna pick up in the first 24 months. And then we had to sort of reset and say, yeah, people just don't move that quick after COVID.
Melissa Aarskaug (17:55.69)
Yeah, you've had some really big partnerships, like you mentioned in the beginning with Microsoft and Walmart and American Airlines. I want to talk a little bit about the problems you mentioned, a little bit of the problems you're solving and as it pertains to the digital wellness product, like the more leaning into the problems you're solving right
Dr. Mary Donohue (18:20.874)
So funny thing, when you're a scientist, and I still am a social scientist, I still present my research every year, I go for peer review, I do all of that. There's never a moment that you say Eureka. I mean, that's a great movie moment, but it doesn't happen. What you do say though is,
It's super interesting. So how one of our products that's really become an important business block for us was developed was my brother during Thanksgiving weekend, that $17 ,000 on the kick of a football.
And that's a lot of money. And his physiology changed. He lost the color in his skin. He was like really like anxious and drinking lots of beer and doing all these things. Now, my family is Irish. Drinking lots of beer and betting money is pretty much what we do every Thanksgiving weekend. But, you know, he was different. Something was different. And what I noticed with him
was his language was very not positive to my daughter, because he's a phenomenal uncle. And I was just like, what's going on? So eventually we figured it out. But what I did was use all those little breaks I talked about earlier to get him to calm down. And then when he calmed down, he told me what was going on. But then I looked at the environment he was in, because it's always environment that causes behavior.
And okay, and 95 % of the time and 5 % of the time it's like, know, it's in you. But anyway, and my dad had just died. My other brother was in Singapore. His partner wasn't with us. My mom was like, we had instead of 40 people, we had four. It just wasn't. And that set me on this path of understanding why people make bad decisions when they're gambling.
Melissa Aarskaug (20:27.882)
Mm.
Dr. Mary Donohue (20:35.69)
because I didn't want anyone else to do this. And concurrently, I was working in oncology, trying to use my micro breaks to reduce the stress people experience when waiting for a physician. So the more you wait for a physician, the less you hear when the physician is talking to you. And I've had physicians report to me
70 % of what they've said to a patient isn't heard. The patient comes back and has only heard 30%. And so that's really scary because a physician could say you have six months to live, let's discuss your quality of life. And what they're hearing is, you know, in six months you'll be better.
Dr. Mary Donohue (21:23.126)
So I presume the same thing was happening in gaming when in fact it was. So then how do we begin to create a safety belt for people so their minds can't go that way? And do you know how the mind works in stress? Do want me to just show you super quick? Okay. I just didn't know if we had enough time or anything, because I know I talk a
Melissa Aarskaug (21:38.058)
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Yeah, we got a lot of time.
Dr. Mary Donohue (21:45.778)
Okay, so when, if you think about your brain and language and stimulus,
Your language, your quick wit is right here in your, this is your prefrontal cortex, right here in this frontal part of your brain. And all of that, it's your intrinsic brain is what I was taught it was. And then here is your mammalian part of your brain. And back at the bottom of your neck is your reptilian brain where fight or flight is and the physiology of your body is managed. So think about your mammalian brain is just over your ears and your wit.
right here in your head. And so there's chemicals that go through your brain and it connects everything. And it's, like a, just a beautiful machine. Well, when dopamine is too high, you're like super happy or you're really angry or you're just like, you're really, do you know what I mean? Like that's overhyped. And when it's too low, you're like, -huh. Or you're depressed.
or you think the worst is gonna happen. And your body language shows both. Like if you were to walk through an airport, you'd see people in both. If you walk through a casino, you'd see people in both. If you walk through a hospital waiting room, same thing. And so what happens is you can, know, that can be modulated. Those levels can be modulated by introducing serotonin into the brain. So how does all this happen again? So your intrinsic brain,
Here's some words. It says, got this. So let's do it. Hi, how are you?
Melissa Aarskaug (23:29.346)
How are you?
Dr. Mary Donohue (23:30.55)
Good, thanks. How's your day? Awesome. Happy to be here. So our intrinsic brains are working perfectly. We got it. Everything makes sense. We know the patterns. Our mammalian brain is not required and our reptilian brain is not required. Our dopamine is totally fine. So now I'll tell you an experiment I explained in the book. We sent an email to about 34 ,000 people and we said, hi, how are you?
Melissa Aarskaug (23:32.544)
Great, happy to have you here today.
Dr. Mary Donohue (24:01.942)
And in technology, transportation, government, and armed services across the board, what we got was really nothing. Nobody responded. Because people, like just the average person gets 140 emails a day. 40 % of those have to be answered. They're 80 % in meetings. So you're already working 10 hours a day in an eight hour day, and you're already angry and stressed. So that's really important fact to remember. Then I send you another email.
that says, how's your day? Well, in government, everybody responded with, what do mean? Why are you wanting to know how my day is? no, am I getting a new manager? And technology, my God, am I getting fired? In the armed forces, my God, there's another change. So you see how the same six words cause totally different behaviors. And that's because your mammalian brain hasn't been able to recognize patterns that are normal.
on digital because we've only been there since 2007. And so then your reptilian brain comes into play. If your mammalian brain can't find anything, it starts to move you into fight, high dopamine, low dopamine. Just for the sake of today, let's just go with those simple explanations. And so what our micro breaks do is they bring in serotonin and they just calm it down so you make a better decision. What we found in beta testing this is
Does somebody quit gaming? No, no. It just helps them make, instead of betting $17 ,000, maybe they'll bet $5 ,000 or $500, because they're taken out of, in Tim's case, low mood, but in other people's case, high mood. And so all of that came from beta testing with Microsoft American Airlines, the armed forces, and I did papers.
those clients like Microsoft and the Armed Forces, we all presented and talked through peer review. And what I was talking about, what you learn is you get feedback from everybody. Okay, this kind works for me, this didn't. And so when we go through all of those processes, and I hope I'm answering your question, because it's such a long answer, you're probably like, what the hell did I ask her? But it's understanding how your brain responds on digital.
Dr. Mary Donohue (26:26.238)
and then creating a solution for that. Because your brains are really stressed right now. And my job is to calm them down with
Melissa Aarskaug (26:35.234)
I love that. I know you answered the question great. I'm curious, so we talked a little bit about your brother as it pertains to other clients you've had or people using your product. Do you have any success stories? Like you were saying, maybe betting 5 ,000 instead of 17 ,000. Do you have any success stories that you can share with some of your clients?
Dr. Mary Donohue (27:00.47)
can. mean, my brother's doing just great right now. But he like, again, we're a seatbelt. So we work for all clients, not just at risk clients in problem gaming, your audience might not know this. But currently, they say that less than two to 8 % of gamblers turn into problem gamblers. The real challenge is keeping that 92 % safe. And that's my job.
So our huge success stories, and I have lots of papers on this, were with the armed forces. Armed forces were dealing with the hashtag Me Too during COVID and then transitioning into at work from home. And they've never done that before. They're very, you know, military organization, which is we see people, we tell people what to do. In some cases, they yell, it's just a different world. And in other cases, it's very
you know, no matter how hard you work, this is the level you're gonna get until you are, so it's a very different world. And then when you go to work from home, it's like, what, what is going on to my brain? I can't, I can't, I can't do this. And so what we were seeing was high, high, high stress. And at the same time, many, many people were being questioned about bad behavior.
in a number of different areas, both male and female in terms of sexual exploitation. And so we started using our breaks to calm people down before they went into that. And what we found at the end of the first month was 33 % were having better days and were managing their stress better. And they found
extra 45 minutes every week for themselves, which was huge in during COVID. Do you remember all of us were working? And we saw similar numbers with Microsoft sales team, where they hit all their goals at the end of the year when they were forced to work. Like it would just use our limited three minute breaks over a four week period.
Melissa Aarskaug (28:56.576)
Hmm. Yep. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody was struggling.
Dr. Mary Donohue (29:18.774)
What we know with the science is that's exactly what it's supposed to do. And it increases trust. We know it's gonna increase trust by 9%, which is incredibly difficult to do, but we are easily able to do that. And again, it's just based on the science. If you treat the brain properly, behavior modification, as we talked about earlier, like if you can give people the right environment for the brain to calm itself down, then you get the right response.
Melissa Aarskaug (29:46.86)
That's great. I want to talk a little bit about how -Stride uses AI to gamify stress reduction. Can you share a little bit about
Dr. Mary Donohue (29:56.424)
Yeah. So when you were in school, did you get like stars from your teachers and stuff like that? Did you work really hard to get those stars?
Melissa Aarskaug (30:03.819)
I did.
I was pretty proud of those stars, Dr. Mary. I put them on our refrigerator, my bedroom, the mirrors, they were everywhere when I got a star at school.
Dr. Mary Donohue (30:10.642)
I
Dr. Mary Donohue (30:17.15)
I love that. And you know what? Most people wanted that star when they were in primary school, just like even a little red star on a piece of paper. And so to earn that, you knew what it was going to be. You knew what you had to do. So as teachers, we always try and find the positive in what students are doing. Now, let me ask you another question. Have you ever played Candy Crush?
Melissa Aarskaug (30:42.355)
Absolutely.
Dr. Mary Donohue (30:43.862)
Do know when you play Candy Crush, it's really super easy at the beginning?
Melissa Aarskaug (30:47.82)
Yep.
Dr. Mary Donohue (30:49.482)
And why is
Melissa Aarskaug (30:51.052)
They want to keep you playing, winning and playing and, yay, I did it. Great.
Dr. Mary Donohue (30:54.955)
But how do feel when you
So what I just did was give you the baseline of why we used gamification, because winning makes you feel good. Earning that star, getting that check mark makes you feel good. If you put the two together, you're using positive psychology to move someone forward. And that's how we began to do it. So for example, we won the Alpha Hub Award with a company called Flutter, which means like it's a cool, we're a cool new technology.
Melissa Aarskaug (31:10.721)
Yep.
Dr. Mary Donohue (31:26.646)
And why? Because we put things in a positive lens in a traditionally negative time and we make it easy for people to win. Now, for example, in Europe, you may be winning a cup of coffee or a sandwich, but you don't care because you want it. You know, when you used to turn the bottle and then you peel the thing underneath and then you'd, oh, I won 50 cents off. Like, it didn't matter what it was. It like, I got the cap. I got the winning thing.
Well, that's the point of gamification. It doesn't matter what the prize is, you just want to win. So we make sure with our AI that everybody has a few wins. Everybody feels good because the crux of the situation is 80 % of us aren't having any wins during the
We're so stressed out. And I don't want people to be that stressed. I've suffered from that stress. It's not fun. In my case, I almost died from a heart attack. So we want to make sure that we turn it around from people so they're not internalizing all that stress. And gamification is the way to do
Melissa Aarskaug (32:14.7)
Good point.
Melissa Aarskaug (32:37.942)
I love it, that's such a good point. We all do wanna win and it is really key to keeping our positive self, our emotional happiness and living a blissful life. And so I wanna talk a little bit about your philosophy on leadership and its role in promoting mental health.
Dr. Mary Donohue (33:03.006)
love that question. Thank you for asking it. I think we all need to be a lot more positive. And I don't mean Pollyanna because that would be ridiculous. I mean, actually sending a smiley face emoji occasionally. And people are like, I can't send that. It'll demean my position. Dude, no, it won't. Let's just put things into perspective here. You're not that important.
I have met super important people in my life, billionaires, presidents, prime ministers. I've met them all and they all use a smiley face because the power of a okay, I don't know if Ronald Reagan used a smiley face. I have to say probably not, but he did smile a lot. And so like we have to start thinking about another person. The internet by default makes us think of ourselves. We have to start thinking of
how our message, how our products, how our waiting experiences, how all of that is affecting someone else, not us. For example, waiting. When you're on the call, like you call your bank, you call an airlines, you call anybody to fix things, you get these stupid machines that you have to talk into. I don't know how often you've seen this, but I could be anywhere and somebody will say,
So you've already pissed off your customer, but girl already now imagine what happens to that customer service rep when you get there. So let's just change it up. Like, you know, we, create by neural beats. We create all these kinds of things that, people can start using and you just calm your customer down, give them a smiley face
Melissa Aarskaug (34:35.17)
It's so true.
Yep.
Dr. Mary Donohue (34:58.95)
People say, well, you know, you're full of shit, Dr. Mary Ann. I'm like, sorry, I probably shouldn't have said that. But, and I'm like, no, no, I'm actually not. If you look back in time to when Walmart started to when PNG started to when Ford started to when every single major company started, Microsoft gave it away for free to get people to like them. Ford.
change the work week to make workers happy so they'll work harder. Bring little happiness in. And then if we look at mental health, I know a lot of people are talking about not going back to work, going back to work, getting together, not getting together. And that's a hard call as a leader because you have to take in what your team wants to do.
What you have to be able to do is be able to be transparent with them and say, I'm fine if we all work in the office, if we all work from home, blah, blah, knowing what your policies are. But what you have to say is this is where we need to be. And if we're not there, because sometimes we think that our team members know what we're thinking and they don't, because everybody's still thinking about them thanks to the
So that's, you if you look at the first thing, the optimistic, be very clear, be very transparent. And third, which sounds absolutely crazy, but talk about the money. So we talk about it all the time as a startup. You know, this is how much we've borrowed. This is what is on our line of credit. This is who we're hiring and why we're hiring them.
I guess that one goes into transparency, but then you relate the dollar back to the job. And I think far too often people have forgotten about that. They think, you know, I have this job, but let's remember why we're here and why we're working. So that's the other thing. And it makes people much happier when they know they're working for a purpose. Like we know every dollar we're spending currently is making people happy and our team members are happy. So it all sort of falls back into play. But if people don't understand their purpose,
Dr. Mary Donohue (37:18.816)
They're not going to work well for
Melissa Aarskaug (37:22.216)
Absolutely, and sidebar, I love emojis. I think people would say I probably use too many emojis in social media, my text messaging, my communications. So thank you, Dr. Mary, for validating my usage of emojis. I appreciate
Dr. Mary Donohue (37:30.165)
No you
Dr. Mary Donohue (37:35.734)
I'm very happy to do that, my friend.
Melissa Aarskaug (37:43.202)
So I wanna talk a little bit about, you you talked a little bit, it is, people are very stressed, they're very negative. It's like you said, they'd be getting more fight or flight up top, reactionary, my boss needs this now and I'm not gonna get to do that. So it's a lot of, you know, stressful, negative environments right now.
Is there any strategies you have for the listeners and the leaders on how to create a more positive environment and maybe limit the amount of stress that happens in their day to day?
Dr. Mary Donohue (38:25.27)
There are so many amazing articles on that in Harvard Business Review and Sloan MIT does some really amazing work. U of T does some great work in this area. But you know, it's crazy. It all goes back to that principle of what am I here for? Remember we used to do 365 reviews. You're probably too young to remember that. Okay.
Melissa Aarskaug (38:52.694)
Yep, yep, no, I do, yep.
Dr. Mary Donohue (38:55.626)
They're just like a series of ridiculousness. Once a year, people tell you how crappy or how great you are. Why are you using those things once a year? To make a great workplace and alleviate stress, I have learned and I have observed and I have read in the research that you need to think about how to give daily feedback. And if you're working virtually, you have to think about your methodologies for doing
For example, if you're working with the new millennial, sorry, Gen Z years, you actually have to say, I'm proud of you. Where you're working with a Gen X, you don't have to say, I'm proud of you because you're paying them, they're happy. The motivators are different. So know your team, know the rewards your team works best to and keep those rewards. And if you're gonna change those rewards, discuss it and discuss why you're gonna change
So number one, if you know your team and you know the rewards that motivate them, not the rewards that motivate you, as a leader you have to stop thinking about you. As a team member, you have to obviously think about you, self -preservation, but more importantly, start thinking about your leader. What do they want? What do I need to do? How should I, what is my five -year plan? Am I going to stay here? Am I going to move up in the organization?
So many people don't have five -year plans now. I'm actually shocked at that. How do you, like, what are you just gonna exist day to day? How are you gonna live your yes life if you don't know where you're going?
Melissa Aarskaug (40:35.616)
Yeah, and I think of negative, the difference between negativity in the workplace and positivity is when you have a lot of positive, happy employees, they're more productive, they're gonna work longer hours, they're bringing better focus to tasks, it affects the business and it also affects that employee and their...
personal life, right? So when they're leaving their job and they're, you know, they've had a great day. Like you mentioned, they get positive feedback. They're getting their stars at work. They, they embrace their home life in the same fashion and they're bringing more energy into their family life. And when we don't strive as leaders for the, for that, not only the workplace stars, but the, the home base stars, it really becomes taxing on the individual, right?
and we're not getting the productivity, we're not getting them to show up the best way. And it may damage the entire organization. They may bring their negative thoughts and feedback and, I can't believe we have to stay late, or I can't believe my boss, I can't believe we have direction change and leadership change, and that negativity gets negativity, and before long, it takes over.
Dr. Mary Donohue (41:58.198)
Fire those people right away, by the way. Like gone, as soon as you find them, gone. But what you just said is so true and we've known it since 1930, I think, Elton Mayo. You're such an engineer, you picked up on it. You probably taught this in school. Elton Mayo was actually asked by General Electric to go into one of their plants, Hathorn plants. Mayo was really one of the first organizational psychologists ever.
Melissa Aarskaug (42:00.404)
Right. Right. Yes.
Dr. Mary Donohue (42:28.386)
And so he went in and he did the typical test, like group A, group B, group C. And group A got nothing, like they just got to carry on every day. There was nothing that changed in their lives, no variables. Then group B got a hello from the study people that were running it. Maybe a house your day. And group C, they, you know, got to be asked questions about their work.
they got to talk to the study people. They were group C. Well, you can imagine what happened based on what you just said. Group A became incredibly bitter. Even though they didn't want to do the study in the first place. I think that was how it went. But that could just be one of the interpretations that I read. I can't imagine that somebody said no. But anyway, group B,
performed really well and group C performed exceptionally. So what Mayo deduced from all of this is if you're nice to your employees, if you give them time and you treat them like humans, don't forget this was 1930, you were basically a slave in a bureaucracy, you'll do well.
And then you talked about going home and your horrible home life. Well, it's a horrible title of a research, but it was the kick the dog syndrome, where when you have a crappy day, you go home and you're really bad to the dog and you're bad to your kids and you're bad to your wife. And that just brings up a horrible cycle. And then you go back to work and you're bad, bad, bad. So how do we change that element? Do we help you change jobs? What do we do? And so.
Melissa Aarskaug (44:14.954)
I love it. love it. think, you know, you also mentioned another really fantastic point about understanding who you're working with. Some people are, they're visual learners. They have to do their doers and then layering on. forget who wrote the book, Dr. Mary. It's like the four love languages or five love languages. Yes. It's great book if you haven't read it, but talking about, you know, if you have employees that are words of affirmation,
Dr. Mary Donohue (44:34.708)
Yeah, I like that book too, yeah,
Melissa Aarskaug (44:43.938)
and they're visual learners and you're showing up and sending them plants and, you know, telling them writing down what they have to do. You're losing them, right? Because they don't, they're not getting it, right? It's like English and French, right? They don't speak the language. And so I think you nailed on a point. Understand who your employees are at a human
Dr. Mary Donohue (45:04.918)
Exactly.
Melissa Aarskaug (45:12.692)
and how they receive that feedback, right? So if you're writing them an email and saying, hey, here's the feedback, it's very different than sitting down with them and talking to them about it. It's very different than sitting behind a team's meeting or sitting with them in person. So I think spot on points about the way to lead a team these days.
Dr. Mary Donohue (45:37.334)
Well, the whole book is on that. I actually give you sentence patterns for each different type of learner. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, visual, kinesthetic. What are the drivers? All of those things. And what you just said shows that you are an empathetic leader.
Melissa Aarskaug (45:52.716)
Yes.
Dr. Mary Donohue (45:53.93)
because you're paying attention and you probably have listeners that feel that same thing. Or maybe you have listeners who are followers and are saying, my leader would never do that. Okay, so how do you shift? Like where do you want to be? you want to work with this leader or don't you want to work with this leader? Like, do you have to pay your mortgage? Then you have to start practicing empathy to get empathy back. I love the way you just said
Melissa Aarskaug (46:18.4)
Yep, absolutely.
One kind of in closing being mindful of time I want to get I know we covered a lot and I hit you with a lot of different things. I want to just I guess in closing get any final thoughts tips for the listeners or anything that you feel that we may have missed. I know that's a lot. That's a lot.
Dr. Mary Donohue (46:44.874)
You know, I don't think we've missed anything, but I would hope that people take away from this podcast that A, there's self -care and there's self -care at work. And yes, the two are connected, but how do you do both? For example, how do you practice self -care? When you're nice to someone else, like when you send a little fun emoji, guess what? You start to feel good.
So realize that that's it. Take mini breaks, whether you use the digital wellness center or whether you use something else that you have crafted. For example, maybe you want to do two yoga movements for two minutes or something, I'm not sure. Again, clear that brain, get that prefrontal cortex cleared somehow, get your serotonin running through your brain. And last but not least, what we were just talking
which is make sure the message sent is the message received. Understand who you are talking to and what they need to hear to get done what you need them to get done.
Melissa Aarskaug (48:00.194)
fantastic. think how we communicate these days are not you might say something you think is exactly clear. Oh, I was very clear about what needed to be done. And people maybe get 10 % to 30 % on what you're saying. So being clear, concise, and then asking for confirmation on what they heard. And if it's not what you asked
clarifying so you're both in agreement okay I know I need to get this assignment done by Friday this Friday at noon not next Friday of a Friday after that just being very clear and concise and asking for
Dr. Mary Donohue (48:41.77)
And calendar invites, send calendar invites. This is due this day at three o 'clock with reminders one day in advance. Just so you know, this is due.
Melissa Aarskaug (48:52.352)
Yep. Yeah, I love it. All fantastic information. Thank you so much, Dr. Mary for being here. You're a wealth of knowledge. Get her book, follow her journey. She has so much to share and thank you for doing all the good work you do for the community. And I appreciate you being here today on the Executive Connect podcast.
Dr. Mary Donohue (48:58.986)
Thank you. Lots of fun.
Dr. Mary Donohue (49:10.774)
Thank
Dr. Mary Donohue (49:16.98)
I appreciate you and I really love your work. Keep going. Keep doing it.
Melissa Aarskaug (49:22.774)
We're gonna keep plugging along Dr. Mary, that's the Executive Connect podcast.
Dr. Mary Donohue (49:27.808)
Thank you, Melissa. Be well.