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My guest for Episode #292 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Dr. Jessica Kriegel, Chief Strategy Officer of Workforce and Labor at Culture Partners and an internationally recognized speaker.
Known for her transformative ‘Culture Equation,' Jessica has been featured on CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, and more. At Culture Partners, she leads pioneering research and strategy with Stanford University, working to reshape the DNA of Fortune 10 and 500 companies for long-term success.
Jessica holds a doctorate in Human Resources Development and Educational Leadership from Drexel University and is the author of Unfairly Labeled, a book that challenges generational stereotypes in the workplace. She also hosts the podcast “Culture Leaders,” where she dives into the essence of true transformation.
In this episode, Jessica shares insights on leadership, culture transformation, and her unique journey through pivotal career experiences. Jessica discussed her favorite mistake—a whirlwind promotion at Oracle to Head of Strategy for the Head of Cloud, a role she describes as “seven promotions” above her current position at the time.
Although the experience quickly led to burnout due to overwhelming demands and a relentless work pace, it also became one of her most transformative learning experiences. Jessica credits those six intense weeks as the foundation for her “Culture Equation” framework, which she has since applied to drive organizational change and foster alignment between purpose, strategy, and culture.
The conversation also explored the critical role of leadership in shaping workplace culture and addressing challenges like burnout, disengagement, and generational stereotypes. Jessica emphasized that culture is fundamentally about how people think and act to achieve results, and leaders must align beliefs and behaviors to operationalize strategy. She shared her perspectives on overcoming employee disengagement, fostering innovation through psychological safety, and breaking free from generational labeling in the workplace.
Jessica also discussed her TED Talk, “How to Help People Give a Shit,” highlighting how employees' perceived apathy often stems from overwhelm and a lack of agency rather than genuine disinterest.
Questions and Topics:
- What’s your favorite mistake?
- Would you say six weeks is an unusually fast burnout cycle?
- Was the 3 a.m. call part of a broader pattern of disrespect or just a one-off incident?
- Are these patterns common across organizations, or are they specific to individual leaders?
- How do you define culture?
- Did you face challenges getting your TED Talk title approved?
- What advice do you have for leaders to address this challenge of employee disengagement?
- How do you see leaders' perceptions of mistakes influencing workplace culture?
- What led you to write your book Unfairly Labeled?
- How do you think generational stereotypes impact workplace dynamics?
- Do you believe evolving workplace expectations are driven more by technology than generational differences?
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- Full transcript
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is Dr. Jessica Kriegel, the Chief Strategy Officer of Workforce and Labor at Culture Partners. Jessica is internationally recognized for her transformative “Culture Equation” and has been featured on networks such as CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN.
At Culture Partners, she leads pioneering research and strategies alongside Stanford University, with the aim of reshaping the DNA of Fortune 10 and Fortune 500 companies for their long-term success. Jessica holds a doctorate in Human Resources Development and Educational Leadership from Drexel University. She is also the author of “Unfairly Labeled,” which challenges generational stereotypes in the workplace, and hosts the podcast Culture Leaders, where she explores true transformation with her guests.
Mark Graban: Jessica, thank you for being here on the podcast. How are you?
Jessica Kriegel: Good. Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
Mark Graban: We're turning the tables here. I had the opportunity to talk with you on your show and I'm happy we can continue the conversation here. Before we dive into everything related to culture and your work passions, I'd love to hear your story. What's your favorite mistake?
Jessica Kriegel: Well, my favorite mistake that's work-related happened during my time at Oracle. I had been there for many years, working in HR and doing organizational development. My clients were Oracle executives, and one day I was asked to work with Sean Price, the newly hired head of Cloud. He was known for his transformative leadership and appreciated the power of culture. In my first week working with him, he asked me to be the Head of Strategy for the Head of Cloud at Oracle—a major leap from my individual contributor role in HR. I was thrilled and said yes without hesitation.
For the first few weeks, I was ecstatic, but soon realized the job was unsustainable due to its demands and pace. I remember being called at 3 a.m. to convert a PowerPoint to a PDF and then found out he didn’t care that I was in a different time zone. Within a month and a half, I reached out to my former boss and requested to return to my old position. Fortunately, she welcomed me back.
Despite being a mistake, this experience was transformative. The work I did with Sean formed the basis of the “Culture Equation,” which I've since developed further at Culture Partners. It taught me that significant learning and success can emerge from failures and burnout.
Mark Graban: I'm glad it led to something positive. Six weeks is an accelerated burnout cycle, wouldn't you say?
Jessica Kriegel:
Or. Yeah, it was. I can't tell you it was. I mean, not only. There was also this expectation to go into the headquarters.
Jessica Kriegel:
I lived in Sacramento and it was Redwood Shores. So I was driving hours and hours for no reason. And then I would show up and there would be no reason to be there. It was completely illogical. And he was.
Jessica Kriegel:
Here's the follow up story to that. He died just a few years later. Theoretically, he was a very healthy person, but I think that the pace at which he was running himself and the stress from the demands and the expectations were so high that, you know, I believe that the disease that he got was a result of this high intensity stress environment. Pushing himself so hard. So, yeah, I mean, it was beyond.
Jessica Kriegel:
I've worked with a lot of executives who think that they're super busy and I see what they're doing. And I think not as busy as I was for those six weeks. I mean, it was burning the midnight oil every night, you know. Yeah, it's like investment banker, Wall Street Journal levels of, you know, 90 hours a week or whatever it was.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's busy and then there's stressful, there's demanding and then there's disrespectful. I'm just curious, was that 3am call, was that kind of a sign of some sort of pattern of broader disrespect or was that just a matter of working hard and him thinking time pressure was the most important thing?
Jessica Kriegel:
I think that he put a lot of pressure on himself.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Jessica Kriegel:
And I think that at the highest levels of the biggest companies in the world, the expectations are severe. You know, there's, there's excellence and then there's the door. Those are the two options. And so he came in and he had to prove himself. And he probably felt pressure from outsiders and from himself and he was very willing to push that pressure onto the people on his team.
Jessica Kriegel:
And there were a lot of people who thrived in that environment and there were a lot of people who left in that environment.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Do you see a difference in the work that you're doing now? Is that even more true at the Fortune 10, Fortune 50 level? Is it once you get to a certain size company, Fortune 500 All Inclusive, is that, are those demands similar or does it, is there variation in culture and expectations across those companies?
Jessica Kriegel:
It's so uniquely particular to the leader and their value system. You know, I mean, I have seen that kind of pressure at small mom and pop shops and I've seen very little pressure at the Fortune 10 actually, because people value family or work life balance or the see perspective or they don't want to be run by fear or whatever it is. So it and within one company, it's not all the same story either. Right. It's who do you report into and how much leeway will they give you ultimately?
Jessica Kriegel:
And there's a spectrum.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And you know, you're around Silicon Valley, are you also working with startups where what's this, this kind of recent phrase, it's almost a meme of founder mode. Have you heard the discussion about this?
Jessica Kriegel:
Yes, absolutely. And I've worked for a founder. So after I left Oracle, I went and became the chief people and culture officer at a small tech SAS firm. We were, you know, 50 employees in the US and another 150 in India. And it was a totally different vibe.
Jessica Kriegel:
We didn't have the kind of burnout culture. What we had was a founder who wanted to be in control of the most minute decisions and therefore was in everything and completely disempowering all of his employees at every level to make any kind of decisions. And all sorts of strange things happening with, you know, unethical decisions being made with the company money and hiring people that were family members that were unqualified for the work. And I mean there was just so much chaos and it was just amateur hour, you know, that that creates a different kind of burnout because you're having to deal with this philosophical and value based burnout, not just how hard are you working the midnight oil.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And I mean, it maybe also gets you thinking Boy is this place, is this doesn't seem like a successful culture. Why am I going to keep pouring myself into this?
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, so I mean, what is culture? Right, let's start there. Culture is how people think and act to get results. And so at Oracle, for example, in that place at that time, the way people were thinking and acting to get results is work as hard as you can and don't stop working and push, push, push. At the smaller tech firm it was get away with it.
Jessica Kriegel:
However you can. Just make it work, get it done right. And if you have to lie a little bit, lie a little bit. If you have to promise something that isn't really built yet, then promise something that isn't really built yet. Those are different ways of thinking and acting.
Jessica Kriegel:
Neither of them really worked for me, obviously. But there were other places at Oracle that were so nurturing and so wonderful and the way that people thought and acted to get results was innovative and, and boundary pushing and learning focused and work life balanced, you know, so you just got to find the place that works for you.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, well, so I was going to ask you for your definition of culture because that's a word that gets thrown around and people may have different definitions or mental models in, in, in their mind about what that means. So maybe, you know, the follow up question then is about the culture equation and that as a way to think through culture.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, so that was what I invented with Sean in those six weeks. And we needed a way to transform the way that people were thinking and acting at work. Because Oracle was an on prem company. That's what all their 95% of their revenue came from on premise products. And we needed to move it to be a cloud company.
Jessica Kriegel:
And that doesn't just require product development, that requires an entirely different way of speaking with customers, different customers that we're speaking to. It requires a different business model within the organization. It requires the education of like what is the cloud? Right. This was many, many years ago when this was cutting edge stuff at the time.
Jessica Kriegel:
And so we had to understand how can we get people to not only embrace this new thing, but also not be afraid of it? Because think of the equivalent would be AI. Today, a lot of people are resistant to adopting AI because it feels like it's going to replace their jobs. And they're not wrong. Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
It is going to replace their job. So how can you as a business leader get people to embrace something that is not in their best interest? It's a very strange game. Right. And the way that we did it at Oracle was we educated people that there's two paths here.
Jessica Kriegel:
You can either get on board and your job will get lost, but you could get another job doing this, something else. But you've got to learn how to do that new thing or you can resist it and eventually you'll get pushed out anyway. Right. So the culture equation is about putting all of that together and very simply, what it is, is it's your purpose plus your strategy, powered by culture to get results. And so the purpose is your why, the strategy is your how, and the culture is the way.
Jessica Kriegel:
And what Sean understood in this transformation to cloud was you can't just have the strategy, which is what most leaders do. Right. They focus on strategy. Oh, we're going to invest in AI. There's your strategy, it's done.
Jessica Kriegel:
It's not hard to change strategy. All you got to do is get a couple of executives in the room that have decision making power and you look at some new decision or idea and they say, let's do that. You put it on a slide and boom, your strategy is different right now. How do you get people within the organization, especially at a large organization, to operationalize that strategy through the way that they think and act? That's the culture piece, is how do you get to the hearts and minds?
Jessica Kriegel:
And that's what we were figuring out was ultimately the beliefs that people have about the nature of the work that you're trying to get them to do, about the strategy, about you as a leader, about each other, about the company, about the customer, about their own purpose, those beliefs will drive their action, and that is what's going to get you the result. You as a leader have to go deeper than just focusing on telling them what to do. You got to get them to believe that we're going in the right direction.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Jessica Kriegel:
And that's ultimately the, the amplifying power of culture in driving business results. It's getting people to have the right mindset, to have the right belief so that you can really drive action.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, yeah. And as I want to come back and talk more about your, your TED talk, but you know, the things you're talking about there about culture are so much more meaningful than, let's say, you know, perks, you know, ping pong tables, free food, some of the kind of superficial things that people often, I think, describe culture as being when it's really more to this core of what, why and how and.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there's different evolutions of understanding. So the mass public probably still thinks of culture as Ping pong tables and are you forced in the office or not? And, you know, pizza parties. Right.
Mark Graban:
We're having fun.
Jessica Kriegel:
For CHROs and CEOs and COOs who are leading the organization, I think they figured out that that wasn't culture maybe five, 10 years ago. Right. And five, 10 years ago, they started thinking culture was like DEI and ESG and all of that bring your authentic self to work stuff. That's also not culture. Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
And now I think we're finally turning the corner on. On executives and, and CEOs. That's not culture either. Culture is ultimately, it's like how people think and act at work. There is nothing more powerful that for a CEO to drive results than how people think and act at work.
Jessica Kriegel:
And, and so they're starting to figure that out now. And part of that is I see it as my mission. And at Culture Partners, it's our mission to evangelize for the power of culture and driving results. Because there's a win win where businesses can succeed and people are happy and they're in a culture that works for them.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So I. What are your thoughts on the way people think and act about mistakes as a leader? When. When an employee makes a mistake, what, what, what do you see happening or what do you try to coach people through related to that?
Jessica Kriegel:
Well, you probably know way more than I do, and all of your guests have probably shared that it is hard to admit mistakes, especially in a leadership position, because we've been elevated to be an authority. Right. That's. Leadership is you are now higher than everyone else, you get paid more, you got a title that looks fancier, and you are above them, literally in the organizational chart. And so therefore, you got to make sure that everyone trusts that you know what you're doing and that you make sound decisions.
Jessica Kriegel:
And this is part of why we see this data driven insight obsession right now. Not because leaders want to make sure they make the right decision. It's because leaders want to make sure they have data to justify the decisions that they've made so that if the decision was wrong, they can say, well, the data set. Right. The total cover your tail situation.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
And. And yet when we read the leadership books about the greatest leaders in the world, they are the humble servant leaders who spoke to the frontline workers, were in the factory floor doing the work side by side on weekends, who were asking questions, who were listening. You watch Undercover Boss, and it speaks to the American public so much because that's what they're looking for in leadership. And yet there is this massive disconnect between what you actually see in leadership, especially the leaders that get the headlines like Elon Musk and Donald Trump and these people who are well known for the opposite of humble leadership. Right, right.
Jessica Kriegel:
Arrogant leadership is what they are known for and revered for. And it just blows my mind. And so why is that and what's the answer? I think that the answer why that is is because the a great idea to be a servant leader and to be humble and people do feel compelled to follow those kinds of leaders. But the system of corporate America does not actually incentivize humility.
Jessica Kriegel:
Right. It incentivizes you justifying your place. It incentivizes getting results at all costs, and it incentivizes short term results over long term thinking.
Mark Graban:
Sure.
Jessica Kriegel:
And so we have to work against the systemic structures in place that are trying to squeeze us into being bad leaders. You know, and some of us do and then we crack the code and some of us don't. And we crack the code and, and that's the game of leadership. It's figuring out how to be the thing that technically the system doesn't want you to be, but the people do.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, there, there thankfully are some rare exceptions. You know, people can be, I guess countercultural maybe is an applicable word. You know, I think of, you know, there's a SAS tech company I've been involved with called Kinexus where the co founders have been very intentional about creating culture. And they're not those type of, excuse me, arrogant leaders that you describe.
Mark Graban:
They don't inject themselves into every single decision. You know, I think they're cultivating kind of a very healthy culture and at the Fortune 100 scale or they're probably higher up in that list. Toyota, I think, is a rare company that emphasizes things like leading with humility, long term decision making. That's probably even more rare than the humility piece. So there are some companies that I think are successful because they have a culture that flies in the face of what might be out there on, you know, TV shows or being taught in business programs.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. And then some go too far in that direction. That's the other mistake that can be made. You look at REI right now, they've been getting really bad results for two years, I think it is. And they are known as the company that invests in their people and the co op model and the perks and the we are not open on Black Friday and all of these things that are countercultural.
Jessica Kriegel:
Right. Which are all about the employees and. And it's not working for them. And I think they've become a little bit so entrenched in we are this culture, and they've made them. Their equivalent of the pizza party is being closed on Black Friday.
Jessica Kriegel:
Right. They're committed to this idea because that's the vibe of who they want to be perceived as. But, like, maybe you should open on Black Friday. Maybe there's another way of being. And so sometimes our culture can be so strong that it also works against us.
Jessica Kriegel:
So we have to think of it not as the Persona that we want to be, but rather how we want people to think and act in order to get results.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And that how to get results piece is so critical. We don't want to have a great culture, happy culture. I mean, I think I learned over time, I think the difference in language between employee satisfaction and employee engagement. Like, employee satisfaction as just the end all, be all could.
Mark Graban:
Could lead to business failure, where I think, you know, employee engagement goes hand in hand with customer focus. And, you know, thinking of rei, and I've only been in an REI store a couple times, so I'm not that outdoorsy, but big, big brand, famous brand. Of course. But if customers want to shop on Black Friday, I don't. But a lot of people do.
Mark Graban:
How much are they hurting themselves? Yeah. That time will tell, right?
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. And it's interesting, I just wrote an ebook about that where I think, so customer or. I'm sorry, employee satisfaction is what we were measuring before the 1990s. Right. That was kind of, are you happy here?
Jessica Kriegel:
And that was a good enough measurement. And then a bunch of management consultants got together and said, you know, what's better than satisfaction is engagement. Because it's also. Engagement is defined as to what extent you are focused and paying attention to the task at hand. Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
And engagement is better than satisfaction to CEOs because it's tied to productivity. To what extent are you focused on and paying attention to the task at hand? But I think we've overdone it, especially after Covid, where engagement has become productivity obsession. And that's what's leading to a lot of burnout. You saw some of the peak levels of.
Jessica Kriegel:
Excuse me, some of the peak levels of burnout post Covid, because people were working from home from the morning until the end of the day. So. So in this ebook, I suggest kind of a new path forward, which is employee fulfillment. And employee. Employee fulfillment is all about do you feel like you can fulfill your own purpose by helping us with our Organizational purpose you're fulfilling, meaning you're fulfilling the goals.
Jessica Kriegel:
Your fulfillment is much more important than just your engagement, your focus on the task at hand, or even your satisfaction, which is really about feelings. And feelings aren't facts and feelings are fleeting. Right. So I think you're, you're going to see an evolution in the way people measure whatever that employee number is, which again, we got to be data driven. Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
Maybe. I think we're going to start to see a move towards employee fulfillment and away from engagement as we move into the next decade.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's a great word. That's a more meaningful word. I mean, I think. How do we find a word and an approach that's win, win, not just satisfaction. I mean, I've been.
Mark Graban:
We could be sitting around eating ice cream and talking about movies all day at work and be really satisfied and then go out of business engagement. If that's just all for the company benefit. I mean, I think the movie office space and the big huge banner is this good for the company. You know, that scene, a really exaggerated but not too much mindset versus, you know, something where, you know, I think sometimes people in healthcare have a good idea about, you know, I hear it more expressed in healthcare, but I think it applies in other businesses. Take care of the staff so they can take care of the patients.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I think in a very mutually beneficial, non paternalistic or maternalistic kind of way when we say take care of, but, you know, support the employees, engage them so that they can do the things they want and need to do.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, you see that in tech a lot too. Ex for cx, you know, your employees will not take care of your customers unless they're taken care of.
Mark Graban:
And the shorthand ex. Employee experience.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yes.
Mark Graban:
And CX customer experience. Yeah.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yes, thank you.
Mark Graban:
Goes hand in hand. So I wanted to ask a little bit about your, your TED Talk. You know, first off, on the title, how to Help People Give a Shit. Was it hard to get that title through? Or they're like, hey, it's your talk.
Jessica Kriegel:
No, it was not hard at all. I think that's why I got through.
Mark Graban:
Okay, well, good.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah.
Mark Graban:
So how so? I mean, so maybe first off in the problem statement, like, what are the symptoms of quote unquote, people not giving a.
Jessica Kriegel:
Well, I think it was the thing that I was hearing the most from executives that we were working with is that people just don't want to work anymore. Remember that got really popular for a while though. Millennials don't want to work. Gen zers just don't want to work. They just don't care about the goals of the organization.
Jessica Kriegel:
I can't get them motivated. No one's taking accountability. I mean, it was the number one thing we were hearing so consistently for so long that I started to dig into it, and what I found was, I'm calling it. I'm making this up right now, the apathy paradox. And it was essentially the paradox of what seemed to be apathy, according to the executives, that employees were apathetic, right?
Jessica Kriegel:
They just don't give a shit. And then we would work with the employees, and we were doing interviews. We were walking on the factory floors. We were working with them in workshops and doing breakout sessions. We were getting feedback from them.
Jessica Kriegel:
And as it turned out, there was a distinct lack of apathy from those people. What wasn't? They weren't checked out. They were so frustrated. They were so overwhelmed.
Jessica Kriegel:
They were so fearful for their future, for job security, for the economy, for their pandemic, for global Armageddon in whatever form in fashion it takes. This year, you know, oh, we now we got a war in Ukraine, now we got a nuclear. What, you know, now the election. Everyone has got something to fear right now. And so they were being so overwhelmed emotionally that what do people do from a psychological standpoint, standpoint, when they're feeling so overwhelmed is they dissociate.
Jessica Kriegel:
They shut down.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
And so it's about caring so much that you check out, and it looks like not caring. And so actually, what was happening was people were caring a lot, and there was so much care that it felt so overwhelming that they couldn't handle it anymore and they checked out. So therefore, that's really what we found was the key to get people to give a shit was to kind of unlock their ability to give a shit by not dissociating in order to therefore get back to work. Right?
Mark Graban:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a professor at University of Texas, Austin, who, Ethan Burris, who's done a lot of great research on, you know, why do people choose to not use their voice? And, you know, he said, you know, it comes down to two main things, fear or futility. And I think, you know, that to me, that was insightful. I always thought.
Mark Graban:
I've sadly worked in workplaces where fear was prevalent. It was being demonstrated that it was dangerous to speak up and challenge things. But I think that insight, what you were saying, reminded me of that People may shut down because they've spoken up and nothing happens, so they stop speaking up. I think executives then often Misdiagnose that as they don't care. Like, no, they've just, it's been demonstrated that that caring and speaking up didn't lead to anything.
Mark Graban:
So why bother?
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, absolutely. I've had that experience. I've had both the fear and the futility experience. I remember one time I was in an executive leadership meeting and what we were talking about was something that was a fundamental difference in beliefs between me and my boss. And I had tried to talk to my boss about this a thousand times before and I could just tell I wasn't going to change his mind.
Jessica Kriegel:
And so there we were in the executive meeting and he's presenting this thing that is, I totally disagree with and he's asking for feedback. And on any other day I would have jumped in and said, well, let me talk about, you know, But I had reached the point of futility and I knew that if I spoke up it was just going to be a career limiting move. I was just going to be making a bad impression. And so I remember repeating in my head over and over again, just be quiet, just be quiet, just be quiet, just be quiet, you know, And I was quiet. And we, and he was so pleased with himself.
Jessica Kriegel:
At the end of the meeting he was like, well, great, I guess we're all on the same page. I was like, absolutely. And we walked out of the room and I was so glad I didn't speak up because I knew it wouldn't gone anywhere. It just would have given him a bad taste in my mouth. And he is once again talking about the systemic incentive to be quiet.
Jessica Kriegel:
He's in charge of my salary, he's in charge of my job security. He's in charge of my career development, he's in charge of my budget, he's in charge of my headcount. He's in charge of everything that I need in order to be effective. Right. And to have what I need.
Jessica Kriegel:
So it was futile and you know.
Mark Graban:
An executive, you know, maybe again misdiagnosing the situation of we're all on the same page, you know, that, that culture where people shut down, stifle themselves when they, when they want to or, or need to speak up. I don't think anyone would say rationally that that's, that leads to innovation and success, but they somehow get in that trap anyway.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, well, it's the very thing that doesn't lead to innovation. Innovation requires risk. When one firm that we were working with asked us to come in to help create a more innovative culture and they ended up creating a failure CV that everyone had to write up. And in order to be part of this innovation committee, you had to submit your failure cv. Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
And everyone and the leaders would share their failures first at the beginning of meetings to help. And then when a failure happened, it was celebrated on town halls and team calls and in emails where they would say, look at this great mistake that she made. Thank you so much for putting yourself out there. And, you know, it took some time, but it was. It was leader led.
Jessica Kriegel:
The leaders had to go first.
Mark Graban:
Right, right, right. Maybe final question for you, Jessica. You brought up some of these generational dynamics questions, so maybe this brings us to your book, Unfairly labeled. So when you say things like, oh, millennials don't want to work anymore, when that phrase was really flying around, I saw there was some professor, I forget where, had gone back and found news articles going back to the early 1800s, different variations of the young people today don't have the same work ethic.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. I mean, I can go back even further. Socrates 2500 years ago was quoted as saying, young people today value chatter in the place of hard work and luxury. I mean, the complaints have not changed in over 2000 years. Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
So, yeah, it's just the. It's the nature of people. And something about getting old makes you bitter towards the young people. I actually experienced it so funny, like, five years after I wrote my book, which the whole point of my book is to say generational stereotypes are all. Stop saying that.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Jessica Kriegel:
Don't think about your workforce in terms of generation. It's going to take you down the wrong path. Right.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Jessica Kriegel:
And five years after I wrote that book and created an entire keynote career around spouting off the lessons from my research and my, you know, the power of not buying into this generational stereotypes, I found myself having thoughts about young people today. I was like, those Gen zers are totally. And I'm like, wow, I can make this a career. And I still fall into that trap. So there is something biological about it.
Jessica Kriegel:
I think so. I have empathy for the people who do it, but as a leader, you cannot buy into that.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Well, there's a bonus mistake that. That you've admitted.
Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, there you go.
Mark Graban:
Thank you for. Thank you for doing that, Jessica. And then, you know, I think on, you know, there's those complaints about generations, and then you hear things like, well, maybe it's a complaint, but I would view as a positive of Gen Z. They want to do work that has purpose. Yeah.
Mark Graban:
I'm Chad.
Jessica Kriegel:
Baby boomers don't care about purpose at all. Right. I mean, just that language is exclusionary. Think about when you say someone is this way, then what you're saying is the others aren't. And so, yeah, anyway, I cut you off.
Jessica Kriegel:
But it bothers me even when it's positive.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I mean I'm Gen X and Gen X has the stereotype of being the slackers who don't care and all that.
Jessica Kriegel:
Cynical.
Mark Graban:
Cynical. But maybe we quickly got cynical. No, I don't know. But I mean, yeah, I think all young people in a workplace, the thing we're often describing about that, that this new generation might be just a description of young people. And then sadly, workplace cultures kind of drum that out of people.
Mark Graban:
You know, the kind of top leg up.
Jessica Kriegel:
What's happening with workplace culture is employee expectations are changing. Right. And, and more due to technology and social media than due to generational dynamics. People are sharing information more and more. So your brand and your culture are now one in the same.
Jessica Kriegel:
If your culture is crappy and people post about it online, your brand is going to be worse off for the matter. Right. So we're sharing information in a multi directional way. We're more transparent than ever, sadly, according to the executive. I mean the executives wish there was less transparency, but we can figure out each other's pay, we can see what we're reviews.
Jessica Kriegel:
We're leaving on anonymous job sites like Glassdoor and Blind. And people are posting on social media. They're literally quitting live on air with their manager being stream cast to the entire world and the manager doesn't even know it. So those things are making leaders up their game. Expectations are changing and the young people are being blamed for it because of their generation.
Jessica Kriegel:
But this is silliness.
Mark Graban:
Or bullshit. I like that.
Jessica Kriegel:
Or bullshit. Yes. Thank you.
Mark Graban:
So our guest today, Dr. Jessica Kriegel. I hope you'll check out. I'll put links in the show notes, the Firm Culture Partners, her podcast Culture Leaders, her book Unfairly Labeled and the TED Talk. I want to make sure I get this right, how to help people give a shit.
Mark Graban:
If I'm going to curse, I want to be accurate. I don't mind the words. So thank you for bringing so much more than the word shit to the conversation, Jessica. I really appreciate your insights and your story and you being here today.
Jessica Kriegel:
Thanks so much for having me.
Key Takeaways
- Favorite Mistake Lessons: Jessica's experience at Oracle, though intense and brief, taught her invaluable lessons. She learned the importance of cultural transformation, which eventually led to the development of her “culture equation.”
- Pressure in Leadership: High-level positions in large companies often come with enormous pressure and expectations, sometimes at the cost of health, as seen in her story with Sean Price.
- Understanding Culture: Culture isn't about perks or surface-level gestures but deeply involves how people think and act to achieve results.
- Navigating Apathy in the Workplace: What might appear as apathy in employees is often a response to overwhelming stress and fear about their future and job security.
- Challenging Generational Stereotypes: Stereotypes about younger generations in the workforce, like being lazy or uncommitted, are long-standing but unfounded, and leadership needs to address real challenges like engagement and culture inclusively.