CT Leong converses with Josh Plaskoff, founder of the Interhuman Group, on defining and driving the employee experience. Josh delves into contrasting management methods, the importance of relationships over systems, and how real leadership requires empathy, listening, and fostering community. Highlighting actionable insights and real-life examples, this episode explores the deep, often complex interplay between leadership, organization culture, and employee engagement. Listen to innovative strategies used by leaders to enhance both process and human connection in the workplace.

Key Takeaways:

• Holistic Employee Experience: Employee experience is not just about perks and superficial changes; it is a holistic consideration of perceptions, emotions, and relationships within the workplace.
• Leadership and Relationships: Effective leadership transcends managing systems and processes, focusing instead on building genuine relationships with employees and understanding their journeys.
• Inclusive Design Thinking: Organizations should incorporate employees in the design process, leveraging their insights to create more meaningful and effective workplace initiatives.
• Courageous Leadership: True leadership involves stepping into the unknown with courage, fostering environments where both structured order and creative chaos coexist.
• Purpose and Meaning: Organizations need to reconnect with their core purposes, ensuring that employees find personal meaning and intrinsic motivation in their roles.

Chapters:

0:00

The Leader's Role in Shaping Employee Experience

5:07

Experiencing Depth Beyond Measurement

6:11

Balancing Efficiency and Community in Organizational Success

7:59

Balancing Systems and Human Interaction in Leadership

15:02

Transforming Leadership Through Deep Listening and Community Building

18:39

Rethinking Leadership and Responsibility in Modern Organizations

23:04

Rediscovering Organizational Purpose to Enhance Employee Experience

26:46

Employee Experience Design: Leaders and Employees Co-Creating Journeys

32:34

Transformative Leadership: Empowering Employees to Define Company Purpose

36:30

The Importance of Empathy and Dialogue in Leadership

39:27

Connecting with Josh Plaskoff on Leadership Insights

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Josh: linkedin.com/in/joshplaskoff

Josh@interhuman-group.com

Interhuman Group: www.interhuman-group.com

Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda



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I'm your host for today, CheeTung or CT. I'm the co founder of EngageRocket. We're a leadership listening and insights tool to help school district leaders improve teacher retention, engagement, and student achievement outcomes. And today in our studio, It's a great privilege for me to be speaking with Josh Plaskoff.

He's the principal and founder of the InterHuman Group. He's also one of the top 50 most influential people in tacit knowledge management, and one of the top thought leaders in employee experience. Great privilege to have you on the show today. Welcome, Josh.

And so what we really focus on is how do we enhance the employee experience to create great work environments that also are productive work environments. This is based on work that I had been doing for, this 20 to 30 years in different organizations, Fortune 500 organizations and nonprofits. And some of the stuff that I teach also at the university.

Because it's called the Interhuman Group, it's all about the human relationship. That's the core of the whole process.

And I was working on work for the federal government on citizen experience. And then I thought why can't this also apply to employees? And so it really was the combination of several different fields. It was user experience from the computer world design thinking, which came out of Stanford and organizational development and those three fields combining with each other and the tools from those fields.

So it's really not the employee experience. It's about how do you design for the employee experience. To do that, you have to think about what is the employee experience and the key there is the word experience. We tend to think of experience in a very superficial way as bringing your dog to work or just things that make people happy.

So there are different aspects that they touch. And each one of those has a certain kind of meaning and impact. And so you're looking holistically at those perceptions and those relationships and thinking about the whole experience. So how do they think, how do they feel, what are their fears, what are their passions, what are their hopes?

All of those human kind of emotions and human kinds of attributes are part of that employee experience. So that's where it becomes complicated because it's not as simple as just saying, oh, it's, how happy people are at work or how satisfied they are at work. It's a pretty superficial concept.

This goes much deeper to understanding the human being in that context.

Like it's no one's job almost. And so how do we think about this? And, ultimately as a leader, I intuitively I feel like I should care about this because I care about my people. I care about the humanity of my organization, responsible to my shareholders.

I'm responsible to everyone else. Why should I care about this?

So you have to figure out what that means and what it means to me in terms of thinking about experiences, we tend to think in terms of representations of things of numbers of measurement of things. And so he could have said it's eight feet deep. But that's not really addressing the thinking that's necessary for the experience of that depth.

But the monk in the water whose feet is dangling and who smells the water and feels the fear, but also the courage, and he hears the parents saying, don't go on the deep end and all of those other things that are happening. That's the whole experience. So our thinking is very limited because we're taught a backwards view of how reality is and how organizations are.

But in reality, that's the engine, not the efficiency and effectiveness. But then it's a balance between those two. And this is where, you brought up this challenge here is you do have shareholders and you do have employees. And so you have to find a balance between those.

And there's a tension that you sit in and we try to get rid of tension because we don't like it. We look at it's an either or it's either the machine, or it's going to be what I call a community, but it can't be both. In non profits, it's usually the community because they don't want to sully themselves with all the money stuff and the processes that's going to hurt our feelings about each other.

And if you don't have that, then you won't get the efficiency and the effectiveness. So it's not a matter of one for the other. It's focusing more on the people side of things, the employee experience side of things so that you can get good processes. So that you can make good decisions. So that you have a staff that's committed to it.

Now we brought up culture. Culture comes up a lot and really that to me is another word for what we're trying to do here. But again, that's another fuzzy word that people don't quite understand. Because what we're talking about with this is meaning. People are driven by meaning.

We try and control things. We try and predict things but unfortunately when you deal with meaning and you deal with the people stuff, it's hard to do that. You can design for it, you can facilitate it, you can nurture it, you can have an openness for it, but you can't necessarily force it, or even, use the word drive, you can't really drive it. You, you surf it, I'm from California, so I like surfing. So you surf the wave, if anybody's watched the Olympics, you surf it, you're given something and you have to learn how to work with it, rather than try and control it, and that's a different way of thinking and a different way of leading than is what is generally taught. Because it's usually taught: how do you drive things out of the organization? How do you reward people when they do things? How do you reinforce them? How do you communicate one way? But it's actually totally different. It's actually more interactive and having dialogue, co creating things together rather than the leaders taking the lead on things.

But when you're dealing with human beings, you can't. Because we're not that way.

And those people that think in those other ways are weird or, I don't know what's wrong with them, but actually they're looking at the same picture and getting a different view, and both of those views are valid views that have to come together.

The one thing that I would change in the person that's the systems person is, it's not just about putting systems in place, it's about the relationships that people have to those systems and gain from those systems. That's the key. If it's just a training program where you're sheep dipping people through a learning thing and saying, okay, now we're done.

So this is what makes this complex. That's why it's so different because it's you're rowing the boat and building it at the same time, you're dealing with structure and chaos at the same time. You're dealing with pushing things down the organization but caring about people and bringing them along with you at the same time. And it's this really complex kind of world that we can do but we're not taught well how to do it because we try to oversimplify things into equations or into you know this either or this it's either this way or this way, it can't be both. And that comes from old philosophical thinking. Greek thinking that it's either this or this and it can't be both. But what we found is the world actually works more as a both and. Light is both a wave and a particle at the same time depending on how you look at it. How could that be?

All of those things, they're all of these relationships. And so even when we look at organizations, a lot of times what we do to try and solve problems is look at the structure and how do we change the structure of the organization, which is again, playing with things rather than looking at what are the relationships that people have to the work or to each other or to the purpose of the organization or to the vision of where the organization is going.

Leaders go into a room and say they don't have enough communication. Okay, we'll create 10 more websites for them. But if they listen deeply, it's not about the number of websites. It could be about how the language that they use pushes them away. It could be about how they're not getting the information.

They're not seeing the transparency that they want. It could be that it's not timely enough. It could be so many different things. And so people jump to conclusions about superficial data. And that's a problem because you're making a lot of assumptions. You're addressing a symptom, but not the real issue. So that's another thing I've seen is this reliance on quick and dirty kinds of things rather than it's good to have analytic tools, but then also how do you talk with people about that?

Whether it's taking something that's a strength and really enhancing it, or whether it's something that's getting in the way and and getting rid of it. Another thing that I've seen is just the nature of leadership. To me, leadership is not about controlling, predicting, driving. Really it's the other way around.

And I think servant leadership has a good approach to this or other leadership models that have approach to this, which is really that the leader's job is to create more leaders. That's their job. Their job is not to just create followers, it's create more leaders. So how do they create leadership out of the organization, out of the people in the organization, make them be able to make better decisions, to participate in the process.

Because you're self aware and you invite other people in to participate or you're able to go and learn. You can't say I don't know you're not going to learn. So we have this somewhat distorted view, I think, of leadership and what leadership's role is, where they don't engage people appropriately, but sit at the top and drive down.

And that's why I move away from terms like driving and, all that kind of stuff, because I don't think that's what we're trying to do. I think what we're trying to do is really nurture community within the organization, the ability to work together and collaborate and co create.

And listen to different voices and argue with each other because that's part of the process, but in a creative way, and that I think those are the major things that I've seen aside from not understanding the depth of experience, which we already talked about.

You go into traditional leadership development programs, for high potentials and so on, it's all about the driving It's all about the i'm gonna feed you this fire hose of knowledge and you're gonna be a know it all when you come out. You better know it all because the organization is going to hold you accountable for knowing it all. It's so different from what you're saying.

Is there any way at all we can reconcile this without completely upending the status quo?

Life is about finding out who you are in relation to other people and to other enterprises. And part of it is organizations to some extent changing their view of what is expected of people and understanding that these are people, they're not resources, they're not means to an end.

But we don't view things that way. We've gotten wrapped up in things. We've gotten wrapped up in numbers and sizes and growth and big things and everything else, rather than going back to: it's also about people. And it's about the community themselves and the community that the people are in. And so it is a shift and I think it's a difficult shift because I think that we've been convinced of a certain kind of way of thinking or a certain narrative about business and about organizations and about even life in general.

And so I've talked with a number of people lately that are rethinking What is the purpose of my life here? Why am I in this business where I'm not helping people and making things better? All I'm doing is pushing papers. Or why are they asking me to do this work that really is not necessary?

And instead of doing work that I know is going to be more necessary. So I think there's some movement to rethink things a little bit, but any large transformation or paradigm shift is difficult and takes time and it's challenging and it's painful. Part of it is people individually thinking about where they're at with things and this is why I do what I do. I've made my decisions about where I think things should go and what I think is important and that may be the fringe. But that's okay because that's how I want to live my life.

I'm done. But you're right. It is so challenging. I don't want to minimize that's it's scary, but also part of leadership is courage and courage is stepping into the unknown. It's not about stepping into the known. We tend to think of leadership as, how do I step into things that are known by all the analysis and data and, all that kind of stuff.

And, it's going to be known. No, leadership is about stepping into the unknown. And having the courage to be able to step into the unknown and then, and deal with the uncertainty and make the best of that uncertainty and see things that maybe don't exist. That's what real leadership is about.

So it's it's asking a lot, but it's a thought. It's a thought.

The firm exists to increase profits. Whereas now we're saying that firm exists to improve the lives of its employees. Or and, or as customers.

Why do you exist? What's the purpose? Because people want to know that they're contributing to some kind of purpose. And that's one of the key things for employee experience. They have to be connected to something greater than themselves in some way. Now it's gonna be different for different people.

That's another thing is the purpose that the company puts up can't be. You've got to understand it the way we understand it. No, it's a trigger for them to find out what their own personal meaning is in it. But once people have their own personal meaning to a purpose, then you don't have to do all those motivation games and all of those reinforcing games and have the number charts of who's making the most recognition and all, you don't have to do all that because people are intrinsically motivated because they're contributing to something greater.

Is that all you do? Because that wouldn't get me to wake up in the morning. So, why do you wake up in the morning? And then they eventually get to we're saving these lives, or we're doing this, okay, now you're getting to something that's meaningful. The money will come from that if that powers your organization, it will come because people will be enthusiastic and, sales will be better and they'll connect with customers and they'll see authenticity and they'll see all these things that people want in an organization, the relationship and passion and excitement and quality and all those kinds of things are going to be important for everybody.

One of the core things is getting back to why do you exist? What is it? Why do people want to come to work here? And I've worked with several companies where we did that. And the transformation in the organization was unbelievable. It was a whole different place.

It really starts with what they're looking for a job, and it never really ends because once they leave the company, the experience comes with them. They're going to talk about it. So it never really ends. But then as they go through that journey of applying and, getting their letters and going onboarding and growing and all of that, there are ups and downs that are part of a journey.

By getting the employees actually involved in that process, not the leaders doing it, but the employees doing it, they actually can see the journey and see where some of those challenges are and express those and actually participate in the process of changing the organization. I think a lot of times leaders think that it's all on their shoulders to do everything, but it's not.

I'm looking at an analytics of what's going on in terms of the experience. Where are some of the strengths that you can really dive into and where are the ones that are blocking it that may need to be addressed. Then, how do you address those things? What are some ways to address them?

How do you look at different types of employees? So there's a tool called a persona that's used a lot in marketing. It's also used in design thinking, which is idealized people, but they actually have names and they have pictures so you can relate to them as human beings.

But you have four or five, maybe six different personas that represent groups within the organization, groups of employees, and those different personas react in certain ways or have certain needs. So you use those to understand different groups of employees so that you can empathize with them and you can engage them.

And that the output is result of all that. So it actually contributes to that process of getting others to think in a similar way and to play and be involved rather than the leaders telling people, Hey, you're going to do this.

It's like vision statements. Okay. Vision statements, put them on the wall. And they're really not useful to the people in the organization because it's representing the five, six, three day process that the leaders went through of arguing and playing with ideas and seeing things and visioning the future.

Start your own visioning process. Then it becomes valuable. And this is the same thing. That process gets people to start moving and thinking in a different direction, but it's orchestration and it's a dance that you're choreographing.

But you can also recruit lots of people to help. There are lots of people out there who have energy and you look for those people with energy and say, Hey, join us, let's get you involved in some way, even if you're at the bottom of the ladder, if you're a brand new employee, it's fresh out of college, but you're excited about stuff.

That's okay. Bring them in. Partner them maybe with somebody who has more experience, but also has energy. And then they can learn from that person, so you get a double bonus out of it. Not only are they producing and getting involved, but they're also learning. From the more experienced person at the same time.

So you actually get a twofer out of it.

So very much a driving model. Very much about execution, measurement. Their mission statement, vision statement was very kind of MBA speak ish, to be the best in class and leverage, that kind of stuff. There was a transition of leadership. Unfortunately the morale was pretty low because they had been driven pretty hard.

The employees were going to create the purpose. And so we ended up doing was collecting flip charts of statements from all over the organization, from employees and forging those into five different purpose statements based on what they came up with and putting them out for vote with the employees.

And we created an employee group that was going to help facilitate this whole process of representatives of the organization. They ended up getting back the votes and actually there were two that were tied and they realized that there was one word in one that they really wanted in the other.

So they combined them and then that became the purpose statement. And not only that, they decided to put together the values of the company as well. So they came up with a purpose. They came up with the values and they pushed it up to the executives and said, this is the purpose of our company. And these are the values that we want to live by.

Another organization I know is really active. It's a manufacturing organization and actually they are doing a significant amount of employee experience work where they are giving much more freedom to the people in the organization to socialize with each other. Participate with each other to have flexibility that you usually don't have in a manufacturing kind of environment.

So it's still in its infancy, but it looks like it's doing some really good stuff. I think there's some examples from history too, like the Saturn car company was an experiment in this. Unfortunately when the leadership changed, they didn't like it because it threatened their power and they shut it down, but the idea of the union working together, partnering with the organization at all levels and having 90 people essentially design the workplace together from all walks of the organization. That was an experiment and it worked really well, but it didn't fit the model that the new leaders wanted, which is we're going to control things.

Zappos had a lot of this. So there are pockets of this. There's some that are doing really well in certain areas and challenging in other areas.

Go and talk, not electronically, but in person, just go talk to people, find out what they do, watch what they do, talk with them about it. Understand more what their challenges are, what their dreams are, who they are. And just connect in a better way. And I think that leads to more empathy with people, because I think that's core to this is empathy.

I think another thing that's related to it is to promote more dialogue in the organization. And I use dialogue instead of discussion. Discussion is when you come in with agendas. You may have idea about things, but the idea of dialogue is you put everything out on the table and see where it goes.

You're always open to being wrong and you're always open to it synthesizing into something that may not have existed in the beginning. And so the art of dialogue is really critical. And we're not very good at that. If you watch the political arena right now, there's no such thing as dialogue anymore.

You can still do it virtually. It's a little more difficult, but make sure your cameras are on. Don't do it with just a voice because you want to see people and you want to see their reactions. At least it's a little richer than being there.

So they shouldn't be eliminated from that experience to say, okay, what do I want in terms of my job in terms of being meaningful for me in terms of who I am and being a leader that I want to be. And having the impact that I want to have and being able to say what I want to say.

They're not separate. They're part of this experience. This is an us. It's a, that's a complete us.