Are you ready to rethink workplace culture for lasting happiness and performance?

In this episode of the Happier at Work podcast, Aoife O’Brien sits down with Matthew Cook, co-founder of The Shift, for an in-depth discussion on how organisations and leaders can intentionally shape workplace culture to foster happier, more engaged teams. Drawing from personal experience, ongoing research, and real-world examples, Matthew explores why company culture is more prominent post-COVID, how the “psychological contract” between employer and employee has shifted, and what leaders can do to create teams where everyone thrives.

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

• How the psychological contract at work is now more transactional, with employees expecting more than just what’s on paper.
• The need for organisations to intentionally design (not inherit) their workplace structures and cultures.
• Practical steps leaders can take: from self-awareness and introspection to adaptive management and fostering new mindsets within teams.
• The growing importance of EQ (emotional intelligence) and AQ (adaptability quotient) for managers and leaders.

Related Topics Covered:

Mindset at Work, Societal Shifts, Leadership & Responsibilities

Connect with Aoife O’Brien | Host of Happier at Work®:

• Website
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Connect with Matthew Cook | Co-founder of The Shift:

• Website
• LinkedIn

Related Episodes You’ll Love:

Ep 289: Leadership Choices that Define your Culture

Ep. 267: Creating a Positive Workplace

About Happier at Work®

Happier at Work® is the podcast for business leaders who want to create meaningful, human-centric workplaces. Hosted by Aoife O’Brien, the show explores leadership, career clarity, imposter syndrome, workplace culture, and employee engagement — helping you and your team thrive.

If you enjoy podcasts like WorkLife with Adam Grant, The Happiness Lab, or Squiggly Careers, you’ll love Happier at Work®.

Join Aoife O’Brien for weekly insights on leadership, workplace culture, career clarity, imposter syndrome, and creating work that works for you.

Editing by Amanda Fitzgerald.

Website: https://happieratwork.ie LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ

Mentioned in this episode:

Thriving Talent book - out now

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As employees, what should we be expecting from our workplaces beyond the signed contract? And as leaders, how do we directly shape the culture and how our employees experience work on a day to day basis? These questions, plus a whole lot more, are answered in today's episode of the Happier at Work podcast. I'm your host Aoife o' Brien and my guest today is Matthew Cook and we talk all things workplace culture. I know you're really going to enjoy this conversation and if you want to take it further, don't forget to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. Get involved in the conversation podcast at happieratwork ie or get involved in the conversation over on LinkedIn. That's the place I typically hang out. Let me know what's one thing you're going to do differently after listening to today's episode. Matt, welcome to the Hacker at Work podcast. I'm really excited for this conversation because I know the last time we got together things just really took off.

I really, really enjoy conversation. For people who haven't met you yet, do you want to let listeners know a little bit about your background and why you do what you do?

Awesome. Yeah. Delight to be here. Thank you. My name is Matt, co founder at a company called the Shift. We're a learning and company culture consultancy, which is an alliterative mouthful, but it basically means we get to spend our time thinking about how do we create environments, cultures, mindsets which enable people to flourish. And I'm just utterly obsessed with people.

Love it. And was there something that kind of prompted you into this line of work? Did something happen or like what has piqued your interest so much in this area?

I never thought I would be doing this essentially HR adjacent people culture, that world. I studied philosophy, which is amazing if you like thinking about big ideas, but doesn't necessarily lend itself to a particular career path. I started my career in advertising. I loved the creativity. I was a creative strategist. I loved thinking about the people, the consumers, the strategy. So I was working on brands in advertising and I joined a startup at the time, kind of tennis people and there wasn't hr, there wasn't ops, and I got to do that on the side. I was just fascinated, like, oh, we could invite this company in.

There's no learning and development. We could, we could do this bit of training and started to realize that I was spending most of my time thinking about how do I help the people in the agency rather than thinking about the briefs that I was actually being paid to do. So very fortunately loved the founders of that business. And I presented to them and I said, I think you need someone looking after culture. And I realized the night before my big presentation that I needed to add a final slide which said, oh, and that's. And it should be me. Why it should be me? They might said, yeah, great idea. We'll get someone that is actually trained in this.

Fortunately, they took a punt on me. This is many years ago. And I moved internal to the agency, focusing on their people, their culture, their brand. And this was before COVID so culture at the time wasn't as well known as a term. Certainly you wouldn't have thought of company culture. You'd have probably thought of like, I don't know, sneakerhead culture or niche culture, or arts and culture Sunday time supplement. You wouldn't have thought about company culture. And it was kind of bubbling up a little bit.

Often confused. Yeah, hr, people, culture, the nice Venn diagram overlap. And just very fortunate I kind of fell into this role. Looking back, it's very clear that the thread has always been people. Throughout my whole life, I used to hold up signs on the underground that had, like, positive messages to get people talking. It was so clear in hindsight that this was kind of the destined path. But certainly when I was squiggling my way along, I wouldn't have been able to say, I'm going to be in people and culture.

Yeah, love it. I love what you had to say as well about this idea of culture. And do you think that that's, like, since COVID for example, that it's. It's. It's come to light a lot more? Like, I suppose I've been in this area for quite a while now and I just never. I never saw that, like, oh, wow, now it's starting to really take off. Or now. Now we're talking about it a bit more openly.

Maybe that's just me with my being kind of in my little bubble of talking about this stuff all the time. Anyway.

Yeah, the inf. I think Covid was an inflection point for putting company culture into mainstream consciousness before then. I remember pushing boulders uphill, trying to talk about flexible working, remote working, something that overnight companies just have to adapt to. I think also what people started to realize was the contract that they had with companies was much more than simply what was written on the paper. So people started to realize that actually the football table in the office, the free beers, didn't actually make their culture. When you took all of that away and everyone had to work remotely, suddenly people Started to notice the gaps, the holes. And since then, I think people have got a lot more knowledgeable about the employer employee relationship. People see it, you know, we can talk about discretionary effort that you shifts in people's expectation and what they're willing to do, going above and beyond.

And certainly I think now I'd be curious whether this is just a bubble, but from the people that we talk to when we're doing kind of manager and leadership training, many of them know of the term psychological safety. And I know you interviewed Amy. What an absolute legend. But certainly 10 years ago, you know, a fringe academic term would not have been on people's minds. Yeah, but employees know about that. They kind of demand it. They're expecting that in a way that they weren't, to my knowledge. Yeah.

Yeah.

I have to keep updating my number. What is it? Six years ago was Covid. So before then.

Oh, it's scary. Yeah, it is scary. When you say that, I'm like, Covid, Wasn't that like two years ago or something? Yeah, like it's. Yeah, it's. It's hard to believe that it was already six years ago. I mean, there's so much that we could unpack here. This idea, like, you didn't mention it explaining explicitly put that employer employee relationship and the psychological contract, not just the written contract that we have with people, but actually what do we expect from work and what should our employers expect from us? So I'd love to start there. Like, what should we be expecting? We should be expecting to be in a safe environment and, you know, psychologically safe environment as well as a physically safe environment.

So what other things that you think that we should expect from our roles at work?

Yeah, we're doing some research at the moment that dig in, digs into this. So it'll probably be out by the time this podcast is out. But certainly one of the things we're experiencing, you put it beautifully, the psychological contract, not just the pen and paper contract, that it's become a lot more transactional over the last six years. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think people are just more conscious of everything that is being asked of them and the whole package, rather than simply what's on the paper. So that would look like, you know, it talks about discretionary efforts. So the expectation to go in above and beyond. And almost by its very nature, the language above and beyond implies I'm not being rewarded, remunerated for this.

Yeah.

So why Essentially, you know, there was a big pushback around discretionary effort a couple of years ago and I mentioned the contract being more transactional. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think to a certain extent, many organizations have kind of got away in the past with asking a lot of employees a lot more than maybe they should. The downside of that, certainly from a company perspective, you need to be far more intentional about how you're building connection, belonging, psychological safety. I do think there's been some trade offs around that more transactional relationship. So we often say the trade off with remote work has been freedom and autonomy and trading instead connection and camaraderie. And you know, there's pros and cons both ways. I think people don't necessarily know what they've lost a little bit.

So, yeah, definitely the, the psychological contract is a lot more. People are a lot more aware of it than they ever were.

Yeah. That it's not just what you're, what you're actually getting. It's not just about the money anymore. It's kind of how you, how you feel about work. And kind of going back to your earlier point, Matt, like, one of the things that I was thinking about when you were speaking was when I worked in corporate and the expectation that you play at a level above the level that you're currently at for at least six months before they even consider giving you a promotion. Like, are you seeing that still play out in companies where you're expected to, you know, talk about going above and beyond. You're basically doing the next level, but you're not being compensated in any way for that. You're dangling the carrot of a potential promotion.

Yeah. This is fascinating because we work with companies on their progression frameworks, their performance development, performance management frameworks, and it's often a really interesting discussion around what features do we need to look for for a promotion and do we expect someone to be doing that role already? Are we promoting them because they show the potential to do that role? Is there a mixture of. They are operating in some regards at that level, which gives us the confidence to promote them, but we also know that they're not quite at that level. So we want to promote them with stretch. The danger, I think in the, the framing that you mentioned is people get resentful when they have been doing that role for however many months and they still haven't been promoted. And then by the time they get that promotion, it's not great. I've been promoted.

It's.

Yeah, you only of course, finally. Which I think is a detriment I think my, my steer is often more towards potential.

Yeah.

Because you get so many other benefits in terms of engagement. You know, we talked about the transactional relationship that's more likely to inspire loyalty because people be. Feel believed and you have to have the support to enable them and you don't chuck them in the deep end. But it's a really interesting shift that you mentioned there because definitely that was the default way of thinking, the more traditional way. And now I think it's incumbent upon people to. And is kind of one of our mos is to. To not fall prey to the traditional. The default kind of.

Just because it's the default to investigate, interrogate it. And maybe that is still right for your culture or maybe it isn't, but to then design whatever process and culture supports your specific organization.

Yeah. So rather than defaulting to. This is how we've always done it. Thinking about, well, how can we challenge this thinking? Because again, if I think about my own particular circumstances, if you're operating at that next level, it doesn't become about the title anymore. It becomes about the achievements that you've had in, you know, playing at that level. And if you're looking for another role, you're not looking for that same level anymore. You're looking for the next level up. You know, and that was certainly me when I was kind of looking externally because I was getting kind of annoyed.

I'd love to bring us back to this idea of potential and being able to recognize people's potential and not necessarily promoting based on performance, let's say, like their performance up to now. But see, seeing the potential in other people and thinking about how could they potentially perform at that, you know, in a different role or at the next level up.

Yeah. To be clear, I think you need to be performing at your current level and before we can assess the potential of whether you're performing at a slightly different level. And it comes back to a few things that are so interrelated when it comes to progression. One is the progression parts that are available. Definitely. We're seeing and working with organizations that are trying to untangle managerial responsibility from progression. So that's one aspect.

Yeah.

Which is the only way to progression progress at this organization is to become a manager, which is a completely different skill set. And often people aren't trained on compared to. Actually I'd love to be able to have as much responsibility as much career possibility so that other companies don't think, oh, you, you weren't a manager. But I just love what I do, and I'm excellent at it. Why can't I just be paid well to do that thing? That is really helpful. So there's one aspect which is either progression, pathways set up well enough.

Yeah.

Another aspect which is related is, if you talked about it, are we focused more on title and role than we are on skills? Yeah, I think a big shift this year. It's been happening for a number of years, but a big shift this year is a focus more on the skills rather than the roles, because the job description is going to get changed in six months. You know, the rate of change, the amount that AI is suddenly able to do that it wasn't able to do. If we focus, I think, on job titles and roles, we get stuck thinking about a ladder, we get stuck thinking about linear progression. It doesn't give the flexibility. But when we think about what skills do we need to develop, it's so much broader. And also from, I think, a individual's career perspective, when they start to think about the skills that they have, it's a lot easier to also see yourself in different roles and in different organizations, in different companies, because you're looking at the skills rather than. Does my current title mirror a potential other title I might want to move to?

Yeah, I think. I mean, titles, I think, over time have sort of become meaningless. I think they're oftentimes, they're unique to a specific company as well, that, you know, different levels do kind of different roles and things like that. I would love to come back to this idea. Like, when you talked about untangling the manager responsibility, I thought that what you meant was that take the. They take the promotion decision away from managers and so that it's like, independent of what the manager says. So the manager might think someone's performing really well and they want to hold on to them and they want to hoard the talent on one side or they want to get rid of them. So they're going to be like, oh, yeah, that's.

They're definitely a really great worker on the other side. So that's kind of where my head went with that. But I also would love to explore in a bit more detail what that might look like, what you were actually talking about, the individual contributor. But actually, I can, you know, why should we pay people more? Are they gaining that level of expertise? By the way, I'm a big proponent of this as well, but I just love to get your perspective, maybe looking at both of those different things.

Yeah. So talent hoarding can be an issue for sure, but I wouldn't want that to guide the way we design the process for progression.

Yeah.

Because I think a manager is so much closer than anyone, often to an employee's actual capability. They're having, hopefully having the one to ones regularly. They're talking about development, they're understanding their workload, they're helping them through blockers, they're coaching them ideally. So I think a manager should be close to that decision. If there's a fear that a manager might be talent hoarding and preventing the progression, I think that's a different issue I'd want to address separately. Yeah, but I wouldn't want that. I wouldn't want to design a bad process because we're trying to mitigate issues from elsewhere.

It's like you're. Yeah, it's that whole. The whole idea of the 1% who are underperforming and now we have to put in checks in place to check everyone and it kind of diminishes the entire workforce and makes everyone frustrated because of the very few people who are actually warrant that kind of.

Totally. It's like you go into a shop and there's. Oh, there's a sign out the front that has a really weird, like, no, you can't be topless with flip flops in a snorkel. Because one person at some point came in wearing that, I don't know, and was disruptive and suddenly like. Right, that's the, that's the message we have to send to everyone.

Yeah.

And you end up designing it. Yeah. Like you said, around the 1%.

Yeah. Can we come back to this idea of manager responsibilities? Because you did talk about some of the responsibilities that we have as managers. But I'd love to expand, explore that in more detail for anyone who's listening today who is a leader. Because I know, you know, times get busy, we're under a lot of pressure. There's AI, there's, you know, maybe we don't have enough people on the team. Like, there's all of these things that are happening that are contributing to our own experience of work as leaders. But can we maybe come back to the basics of what are the responsibilities for a manager?

Yeah. I have so much sympathy for managers. I think they're getting squeezed from every single angle. They're getting squeezed from the top down to be brilliant practitioners and doers and still be delivering and executing. But at the same time, they need to carve out time and find time to be brilliant coaches and pastoral leaders and make sure they're there for their team members. When they need them. And not only that, the relationship between employee and manager has also changed. So we start to see, you know, manager as therapist in a lot of relationships.

So that there's an added pressure there.

Extreme. Yeah, yeah.

The emotional support is very different and it's needed. They need to obviously demonstrate much higher EQ than maybe they needed to, or maybe they were expected to it. They probably always needed to, but the expectation wasn't there. Whereas the expectation is now. Employees will know about psychological safety and if their manager is creating it for them or not. So, yeah, my starting point is so much sympathy for managers and the reason I think that's important is because they're also probably the most pivotal people in the organization for enabling culture and performance. We talked about Amy Edmondson. When I chatted with her, we talked about that there are as many cultures as there are teams.

Essentially, the idea that every single manager will be creating a subculture in their team. And whilst you may think you have an organizational culture with values and hopefully you do, that is going to show up in different ways within your teams, depending on your managers. So that they're pivotal, but they're overwhelmed, they're overloaded. Our report from last year dug into this and we found 48% of managers often feel too busy to manage effectively.

Yeah.

Sadly, a whopping 72% don't ask for support.

Yeah.

They don't necessarily feel.

I feel like I can do this on my own. I need to show that I'm capable. Yeah, yeah. Makes total sense. Yeah.

So they're. They're under pressure and you talked about kind of, what skills do they need? One bit of really fascinating research. I always get the bank one. It began with N. It's either NatWest or Nationwide. I'm going to go for Nationwide.

50.

50. They were doing some research into how to help their managers and their default position was we should probably send them on training course. Great.

That sounds like. Yeah, legit.

Makes sense.

Yeah, makes sense.

We need to support our managers. We're seeing in exit interviews that. That. That the manager scores could be higher. What they found was actually that it was a cultural issue. So we talk about mindset shifts or culture shifts. They were thinking it was a mindset shift issue, learning and development. And what they found was actually that the managers had the capability, they just didn't have the time.

Yeah.

And once they carved out that space, then it really helped the managers manage well and do the rest of their job. So I think it's. It's not only a skills issue. You know, there is a cultural issue at play here and I think it's, you know, useful for organizations to dissect the two and understand what role is the system and culture playing.

Yeah.

In our managers doing really well. And then let's also talk about the mindset shift. So what skills do they need? We can, you know, I mentioned eq, the evolution, I think in leadership has largely been from IQ to EQ to begin with. So from what knowledge, facts, trivia, experience do you possess? Which is super, super important, but maybe a foundation now to then eq. So can I use my emotional intelligence to adapt my management style, my leadership style to get the best out of each individual, the context, and then a new shift towards aq? So my adaptability quotient?

Oh, yeah.

Am I able to thrive in an environment of change? Certainly over the next five years, you, EQ and AQ are going to be the most important skills of a modern manager and leader. And again, at a managerial level compared to a leadership level, they might not be responsible for the change, but they're having to receive the change, ask the right questions, and then manage their team and support them through change that they're not necessarily responsible for.

Yeah, or, or not necessarily in agreement with. So this change has happened. I haven't had any say in it and now I need to communicate about that change and I need to be, you know, toe the company line and be on the side of all of this for the change. Matt, there's so much I want to unpack from what you've said there and just to also say that a lot of what we're talking about actually comes out in my thriving Talent book. So it's interesting that all of this stuff you're saying, I'm like, okay, you know, check out the book. For anyone who hasn't got it, the first thing I'd love to come back to is the idea of subcultures. When you talk about subcultures, and again, I touch on this in the book, I think it's really important, the fact that we do have subcultures and it's to be expected. But where do you think they come from when we're talking about values at work and our values and behaviors should come from how, you know, how we talk about the corporate values.

That's probably an entire conversation for a different day, how we come up with those values and whether or not they are the lived expectations experience. But do you think then at an individual leader level that they are creating a little subculture based on their own Personal preferences for their values and for their behaviors, or how do you think that kind of comes about?

Yeah, I mean, I think you put it perfectly. There's going to be organizational values which are ideally guiding behaviors, decision making at that organizational level. They should be a rubric that people can turn to and ideally assess whether a decision has been made in a certain way, whether, you know, one to ones are happening in a certain way. The types of ways we communicate, eventually it should hopefully be more subconscious than conscious that that is, you know, the culture, the classic how we know what's expected.

It goes back to this idea of expectations, I think, doesn't it? We know what's expected here and we know that this kind of behavior is acceptable and this other kind of behavior is not acceptable. And therefore we need to stamp out or we need to report or we need to do whatever we need to do to make sure that the behavior that we don't want is not happening.

Yeah, totally. And it should flow right through to processes, systems. You'd imagine much of the organization, if they've embedded their values well, is aligned in such a way that the default way of behaving for most people when they're not able to think about it because of the system they're working in, just naturally aligns more towards those values than another. So we could often talk about like even over that is, is that we value collaboration even over speed. So if you've embedded that effectively, I mean, just the way in which you're behaving should should result in more collaboration, more communication, more democratic processes and conversations than a maybe private equity firm which is so much more focused on results, performance and speed. Neither is right or wrong, but they've designed it hopefully in a way that their culture strategy supports their business strategy and creates the kind of environment. So that's kind of at the organizational level. But each individual will have their own personal values.

A manager is going to have their own personal values, even if they've not ever dug into it or thought about it. They're going to have some kind of operating system internally that guides what they think is right, how they communicate, how they make decisions. And they'll have behavioral preferences. They'll have managerial preferences that maybe they picked up from previous managers. Personally, I love loads of autonomy and freedom and I got very lucky that one of my earliest managers just gave me all this space and I could come back to him if I needed questions. But that may have been incredibly difficult for someone else who preferred more instructions and to learn by watching. Yeah, and I think if the manager is not aware of their default preferences, that can be quite tricky because what we ideally want, we don't want to. I don't really want to round people out.

I think you want to play to your strengths, and we're all going to have preferences. But to be able to use your emotional intelligence, to know when that's not working and to not keep using the same tool, you know, if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So to be able to be like, okay, maybe I need to use a wrench, or whatever might be more appropriate for this. And that's going to create a little subculture.

Yeah, I talk about that specifically in the book, in the driver section. Like autonomy, I specifically call it, because it's a universal need that we all have. But it's not about giving people a whole load of autonomy. Like you say, it's about finding what's right for the individual. So some people like more guidance. They like to be told a bit more what to do or what the, you know, how to kind of play within the lines, if you like. And then other people or the other things that kind of impact on that is it changes over time, depending on how long you're in a role, how long you're in your career, depending on your capabilities in a specific area as well. Like, there's all of these things that contribute to these factors that influence us.

The other thing that struck me as well, and this can be within subcultures or cultures generally, like, you use the example of, like a private equity firm

that's more focused on, like, performance results,

the speed, the performance, the results. Some people will excel in that area and other people will just kind of flounder and wither away and not really perform at their best at all. And I think as individuals, it's our responsibility to understand that, but also as leaders, it's our responsibility to recognize that and to create the kinds of environments and the conditions where people can thrive. But before bringing someone into a team or into an organization, just knowing what those things are, what are the conditions that. That an individual needs and are they going to get that within this team?

Definitely. You've touched on maybe one of my bugbears in kind of HR and culture, which is you can't be everything to everyone, and you shouldn't be trying to be and nor should you want to be. And the reason it's a bugbear is I think we haven't. Many organizations haven't adapted since COVID and I think they made the Right choices through Covid to prioritize employee wellbeing and the culture and you know, cameras off during video calls because it was super stressful. Like I'm, I'm now having to work from home. I've not got the right setup. I'm in my bedroom. And we were really caring, empathetic in.

And it was necessary then. But I think what ended up happening, even in policies, organizations tried to become everything to everyone. So if you wanted to work from a completely different place, that was absolutely fine. If someone wanted to come in and then they all struggled when they started to realize, well, maybe actually we need to. For our organization, it is important that people come in for a day, two days, whatever it is. There's no, there's no right or wrong. But they were straining because their promise had been kind of everything to everyone.

Yeah.

And when it comes to kind of culture, the reason we use private equity, we work with, you know, a real range of companies from law firms to charities to government quangos to private equity. And it's fascinating as someone who's obsessed with culture, because I don't think there's a right or wrong culture. There's only a right or wrong culture for your organization.

Yeah.

And one of the frustrating things is that we go back to kind of the default mindset when we don't interrogate what, what culture we've just inherited from maybe the traditional way of doing things. We don't realize that actually it might not be the one that's appropriate for us. So a private equity firm is, tends to be more focused on results, performance, agility, speed over democratic decision making, collaboration, things like that. And that's great for what they do. That's a culture that is aligned with their, with their business, their organization. You probably don't want a NGO structured in the same way because you, you need to make more democratic decision making. You know, the people that you're impacting aren't the people in the company. You need to have, you know, a much greater, you know, co creation with the people with lived experience.

You need to slow things down. Maybe, you know, not you still need to make decision and act fast around age, but you know, you want a different culture that is designed specific specifically to serve what your organization's purpose is.

Yeah.

So I think it's fascinating because, yeah, there's not a right or wrong, but there's definitely healthier or unhealthier versions of it.

Yeah, I love that, I love that perspective. And you used a specific word there, Matt. Design and designing culture. Can we talk about that at kind of the organizational level, first of all? And thinking about that and maybe querying the kind of culture that we've created, but then also at the individual manager leader level that we can be like, okay, so I've inadvertently created this subculture within my team. Now. How do I think about if I want to change what I'm doing now?

Yeah. So I'll start with the structure as maybe a rhetorical question, but why does a charity structurally look the same, like CEO at the top hierarchy, all the way down, structurally look the same as a law firm that looks the same as a private equity firm that looks the same as we've just inherited that there is a way of structuring an organization and the structure will then impact your culture? There are other. There are many examples of organizations doing this differently and thinking of completely radical models. Holacracy is a completely flat model, but it's rare because those are the ones that are intentionally designing the structure, knowing that that's going to impact the culture. So the. Where we're almost shafted from, from inception because the way in which the company and organization has been set up wasn't designed intentionally. It was. This is how a company looks.

This is how an organization looks. So that can be really challenging. And then from that, you kind of inherit other cultural aspects around. Okay, well, we companies have managers, so we need managers. Okay. If we have managers, there's promotions, there's progression. And you start to realize that, oh, none of this has really been designed intentionally. None of this has been set up to thinking about, what do we need to achieve and how do we want to go about doing that in the best way.

And when you start with that question, you start to realize that many of the assumptions and the default ways of doing things aren't maybe fit for purpose. And that's not to say you throw it all out. You might look at it and go, yeah, actually, that perfectly aligns with what we're trying to do. Great. But it requires a lot more intention, a lot more energy, because it's harder to be intentional about all of these types of decisions rather than just picking up a blueprint and hoping that it works.

Yeah, I love that. And the fact that it's been inherited, like, this is the way we've always done it. And we should be kind of querying everything in. In that sense, should we have that sense of innovation or agility as kind of a default? Like, when I think about cultures and when I think about the words that people use, I Think of things like respect, respect and transparency. But I think of those things as they're so obvious that we don't even need to say those words. They shouldn't be part of our, you know, these are our five core values because they're just kind of a given. Any thoughts on that or any, anything to add in relation to, like, should, should we also be building in innovation or agility into these? Like, just to query how we're doing things, look at, at the process of how we're working.

I love this topic of values because it's so marmite. And the reason I think it's so marmite is because most of the time it's done so badly. So inevitably employees roll their eyes at, oh, we're doing a company values project. The reason I love it is because I know when it's done well, it can be so impactful. So we work with a lot of organizations helping them define and create genuinely useful values. And to give you an example, so Enron had the values, integrity, respect and excellence displayed in their lobby. And then their leaders went to jail for fraud, one of the biggest cases of fraud in history. So clearly it's not enough to just having nice sounding words.

And when it's at their worst, that's what company values are. Words on a piece of paper, a poster, maybe on the company website. But when they're done, well, signatures. Yeah. Email, signature. Yeah. The employees know about it simply because they've been told to, to memorize it. Or maybe the only people that know about it are the new employees because they've gone on the company website and they memorized it for the interview in case it came up.

So I think values get a bad rep generally, but when they're done, well, they can be incredible accelerants of culture and performance. You talked about respect. I think this is a fascinating one. So if you have the value, in my opinion, in our humble opinion, if you have the values, integrity and respect, you may have bigger problems if you need to have that as a reminder.

Yeah.

You know, you may have bigger challenges. You shouldn't need to remind people of that.

Okay.

We, we talk about it as like the floor, verse ceiling. Like that's the floor, you know, that is the barrier to entry.

Yeah.

And there was a study by the universe, something for ethics. I'll try and dig it out when my brain jogs it. Which looked into like what are just the six common values that we should all have as ethical human beings. And it had things like respect, integrity, compassion, and we kind of treat those as, that's your foundation. We don't need a value that is

going, you don't need to explicitly say that. But actually this is how we should be behaving in the first place. I mean again, we could probably have a whole other episode about why people don't behave with respect or when these kinds of things come up and what to do about it. But yeah, I'll let you go on.

Yeah, now and you're absolutely right and I'm not saying they are crucially important. So they absolutely need to have systems and processes and behaviors around what happens when that isn't being met for sure. But what I don't think is they need to be embedded into your values. We see values as kind of like for now and for the future. What are we encouraging? What do we want to see more of? If these four, you know, three or four values were all that people kind of fell back on, is that going to create the culture that we need? And you mentioned the word innovation. So if we think about innovation, agility, I think at its core I agree with you that that is something that every company needs to be thinking about. If you're not, you're probably not going to have a company in five years time. It really depends on the, on the organization.

It may be that for some of them we realize that that's their flaw, that they, they need to be embedding that in everything that they're doing. But it isn't going to be an accelerant of the culture. We also tend to avoid any one word values. There's a great study which looked at the prevalence of values on company websites and real long tail distribution that basically 65% of companies had the word integrity, 53% had collaboration, 48 had customer, 35% had respect. They all, all the companies seem to have the same word. But as we saw with Enron, just having the word isn't enough. So we try and create something that's a little bit pointier. So we distinguish between hollow values and useful values.

So a hollow value is ubiquitous. It could be said by anyone. So respect could kind of be said by anyone. It's vanilla. No one would really dislike it. I talked about the difference between a private equity firm and a charity. You should want a value that someone that is so radically different to you doesn't want. Great example.

I overheard it was never really a value, but it was a principle. Apparently at Goldman Sachs they talked about long term greedy, which is just such a brilliant phrase. The long term part was where we need to build relationships. Like we're not short term, we're not going to screw over people just to make money. The greedy bit. We want long term relationships and maybe that means doing stuff for free right now because we're long term greedy. But we are greedy. We're a bank, we want to make money.

And for Goldman Sachs that is absolutely perfect. And it is awful for most other organizations and quite rightly most other organizations might go, I hate that language. And great. That for me makes it a really good value because it, it, you know,

it's not, it repels the people who, who shouldn't be working there.

Yes, exactly. It's, it's a real statement about how we behave and what we want. So yeah, I think there's a big issue with many hollow values. Whereas the useful values, you know, they're not right for every organization. And that's okay because all we care about is is this right for this organization?

And how, how does it make you different as an organization? How do you stand out rather than having say the same word as 60% of the other companies out there?

Yeah, exactly. And I should maybe give another example that isn't just long term greedy for people to think that, that that's all we work with. We work with a wonderful law firm who were the first B Corp law firms are doing brilliant work for People Planet Profit. They do lots of work with charities and NGOs. And they were thinking about this a long time ago and they realized that the rest of the market had kept up with them and suddenly the language that they used didn't feel relevant anymore, didn't feel exciting.

So where, where they started is not where they're going there, where they want to go to now.

Exactly. Yeah. And you know, values are maybe only five years. They don't have to be set in stone. It's not, this is who we are immutable. It will never change. So we were working with them on their values. And you know, one of them was pioneers at heart, which is just such a beautiful phrase.

Pioneers at heart.

Yeah.

The fact that they had been pioneering many of the kind of landmark cases was so beautiful. Champion each other, you know, not just care, not just collaboration. Champion each other. It's so much sharper, much, much pointier. When you think about champion each other. What does that ask of me? What does that ask of you? And act with conscience. No, really nice, you know, integrity could have been used, but it's too nebulous. Whereas act with conscience is a really clear indicator of how we should be working.

Love that. Coming back to this idea of individual teams and leaders, like, how do we actively shape the subculture then within the team that we've created? So maybe we have kind of defaulted to this is how I've always behaved. I. Or we've picked up some bad habits from an old bad boss that we used to have. What kinds of things do you think that individual leaders can do to really shape the culture within their own teams, if not have. Have an even greater influence on those around them as well?

Yeah, I think the. The start, the starting point is, I think whilst you may not be able to impact the organization at the level we've just talked about, there's so much you can do as a manager and a leader, and so you'll make such an impact on your immediate team members. You know, often we, you know the classic aphorism, people don't leave companies, they leave bad managers. But the reverse is also true. People stay for good managers because they know that it's. It's not always the case. And the relationship you have with your manager dictates your week. And it's the difference between something really sucking and something being hard.

But okay, so I think it's, you know, even if managers don't have, you know, I can't shape the organization's values. It's such a big company. Just focusing on what's within your control I think is really powerful. And knowing that you will still have such a big impact starts with that introspection. Understanding your default preferences and realizing that there isn't just one way of doing things. This is what we talk about with, like, mindset shifts. The quote I love with this is, I think it's Einstein or everything always gets attributed to either Einstein or Churchill, but I'm fairly certain it is Einstein. You can't solve a problem using the same mind that created it.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's not just about new skills, new knowledge, but having those real mindset shift moments where suddenly you're like, oh, like you have a completely new perspective, a new vantage point on the problem. I love therapy, and I think it's the clearest example where suddenly, like, you've been working on something for months and you feel like you're not even making any progress, and then you turn up a week later and you're like, ah. And you see it differently. I think coaches can have that same effect. Mentors can have that same effect. So I think it starts with, like, that gathering of perspectives, but your own perspectives and seeing what are the default ways that I respond to pressure, to stress, to conflict. Am I conflict averse? Do I lean into it? Do I avoid it when there's uncertainty? Am I waiting for greater clarity before I'm communicating or am I comfortable communicating? We actually don't know anything and that's okay. So getting a sense of kind of your default behaviors, your default styles, some, some psychometrics can be great for this.

I tend to be pretty skeptical of psychometrics because I'm so fearful that people interpret them as like a personality test. Well, this is just me, this is who I am.

They give themselves a label and then therefore that's how they behave because of that label. 100 kind of box themselves in.

Yeah, definitely. And I really want to avoid boxing people in. But it can be useful as long as we're conscious of the scope of the psychometric to realize like, oh, okay, I have a natural tendency towards granular data, facts, logic and getting really deep into the details compared to being comfortable with more airy, fairy, nebulous, creative, visionary, future orientated things. So yeah, I think it starts with that introspection, understanding the natural tendency towards different, you know, aspects of work and just starting to get more comfortable with adapting. You know, you're. Like I said earlier, I don't want to round people out. We're not trying to become average across every single domain. But, but just knowing that you can approach that differently with this particular person is going to create a dramatically different subculture than someone that maybe is less aware of that and doesn't realize that they're creating maybe kind of a monolithic culture within their team.

I like this idea of adaptability and I think it's come up a couple of times as we were speaking and just having that maybe curious mindset and approaching things with like, I don't have to do this the way it's always been done or the way I have always done it. I can maybe approach it in a different way, especially if it's not working or if, if current circumstances call for something different. Especially I think in the day of AI where we, like for me, we have information at our fingertips. It's no longer about the information that you have. It's about judgment and discernment and how to use the information that you have to have the impact that you want to have at work.

Absolutely. Yeah. I'm absolutely obsessed with all, everything we talked about. But the mindset shift part, because it's so fascinating the idea that, you know, first of all that we can always learn and grow I know you've talked about kind of growth, mindset before biological level. The neuroplasticity of the brain, you know, can shape the different neurons, can fire, different pathways can be created. But also the fact that there's some great research by Lisa Leahy and

Richard

Keegan which looked at adult developmental psychology. The fact that we used to think it was like linear, but actually they're more like plateaus. And this is where I think that moment of like, oh, suddenly you can see something differently, that you kind of suddenly make these huge leaps in yourself and often that comes from that introspection, the adaptability and yeah, gaining that new perspective on yourself, but also on how you relate to the world.

Matt, we've covered so much on today's episode. I think it all kind of comes back to this idea of culture and how we can shape culture as individuals, how we can shape it as leaders, and how we need to think about culture from an organizational perspective as well. Is there anything that you feel like we haven't really touched on, that we haven't covered that you would like to share?

Yeah, we've, we've bounced around beautifully. I think maybe just to, to pull it together. I guess the governing thought that sits across all of this for me is that the structures and systems that shape society, the workplace, how we think, have all been inherited and mostly aren't fit for purpose now, let alone a future which is readily being disrupted by AI. So, you know, at a societal level, we've inherited a three stage life model which is you, you, early years of learning, going to school, studying, big, middle years of working and then end years of retirement. That's not going to work for a, you know, a society that's living to 100. We're gonna have to radically rethink that system, that structure. When we think about workplace, we've been talking about cultural systems and workplace systems haven't been set up for the modern world of work. They were set up basically for the industrial factory line for manufacturing, you know, Ford assembly lines.

And we're still trying to, you know, have those as knowledge work, remote knowledge work, where you've got teams in Poland, Bali, wherever, and we're still set up for the factory line so that system doesn't work. And then think about the mindsets that we've inherited that are no longer fit for purpose. So I think, yeah, the shift, the reason I like the term the shift, it's not a. I think change can feel very abrupt. Change often people associate with like, okay, well, everything that came before was pointless then where shifts is that incremental shifts. And we want to help facilitate the shift societally in the workplace with people individually to help them flourish. Because my fear is that, yeah, we're, we're limiting potential, we're limiting flourishing, depth, joy, happiness, because the systems aren't set up in the right way.

If I think of the term being happier at work, what does being happier at work actually mean to you?

Yeah, it's the happier at work. I think about happier with work as well. Like it being an aspect of our life. I'm fascinated. I'm so ambitious and driven. But I'm also ambitious for my personal life. I'm ambitious for joy. I.

I'm ambitious for creative projects. So happier at work is being as ambitious for the impact the work as it is for the boundaries and the personal time.

And if people want to find out more about what you do, if they want to reach out to connect with you, what's the best way they can do that?

Yeah, best place is probably either the Shift.company or find me on LinkedIn as Matthew Cook. I've got a very bright green background, hard to miss.

Brilliant. Love it. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed today's conversation.

Thank you. It's flown by. This is amazing. Really appreciate. Yeah. Everything that you're doing.

That was Matthew Cook talking all things workplace culture. I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and I would love to know what's one thing you're going to do differently as a result. Feel free to let me know on [email protected] or get involved in the conversation over on LinkedIn. Don't forget to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform.