Leading with Respect: The Key to Trust, Engagement, and Culture w/ Dr. Gena Cox
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with organizational psychologist and author Dr. Gena Cox on understanding the impact of respect and disrespect at work.
A few reasons why she is awesome — she is an organizational psychologist, executive coach, keynote speaker and author. She’s the CEO of Feels Human LLC, a consultancy helping leaders to enhance their influence and impact and build inclusive cultures, she’s a contributor to Forbes, the author of her award-winning book “Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel” and she’s been named by Thinkers50 on their Coaches50 list for global executive coaches.
Connect with Gena, and learn more about his work…
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“So I think leaders of organizations have got to ask themselves, what does it feel like to work at, or with, or to interact with the people in their companies? And then they have to choose to focus on in my, in my recommendation is you focus on respect because it’s such a powerful tool at a relatively low cost, a relatively low lift..”
Dr. Gena Cox
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Dr. Gena Cox, and here’s why she is awesome. She’s an organizational psychologist, executive coach, keynote speaker, and author. She’s the CEO of Feels Human LLC, a consultancy, helping leaders to enhance their influence and impact and build inclusive cultures.
Sounds like a topic for today. She’s a contributor to Forbes and the author of her award winning book, Leading Inclusion, Drive Change Your Employees Can See And Feel. I love the word of feel. And she’s been named by Thinkers 50 on their Coaches 50 List for global executive coaches, and she’s here for us to have a conversation with.
Hello, Gena.
Gena Cox: I am delighted to be here and looking forward to this energetic conversation.
Russel Lolacher: Oh, coffee fuel, Gena, all coffee fuelled, but it will be. I’m excited to talk about this cause we’re talking about respect and it’s an interesting term. Basically, especially depending on how you define it. But before we get there, I’m getting, I’m jumping ahead. I have a question I have to ask, which I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Gena Cox: I think I’ll go with the worst. Those are always easy to remember. I’ve spent a lot of years in corporate America as an employee and as a leader, but the one experience that stands out for me was the time that I went to work for a company where, when I did my first interview with the leader that I would report to, he kept me waiting for 45 minutes in the lobby of the hotel where we were going to do the interview. And that was a red flag, but silly me, I took the job anyway, and it went downhill from there because in the very first week that I joined the company after flying from one coast to the other to attend my new employee orientation, they informed me that that within the next two days, I needed to be back on the opposite coast in order to be in front of a client at eight o’clock in the morning.
So that was strike number two. It went sort of downhill further from there. For the next several years, what I discovered was that the person I reported to really didn’t see employees as humans, didn’t see me that way anyway, more as sort of tools to get things done. And that has actually been a great impetus for the work that I have done in the years subsequent to that.
Russel Lolacher: What would you have done differently? Cause I’m guessing this was you at a very young age, starting into a career, don’t know how the game’s played or don’t know what good leadership looks like. So in hindsight, what would you have done? Just walked out?
Gena Cox: Here’s the thing. It wasn’t at that point in my career. It was at a point when I should have known better. But the reason I didn’t do the due diligence, at least the reason I decided to move ahead with this opportunity, even though I had this red flag is because I really, really liked the organization.
I was very familiar with the organization. I knew many people who worked there. And this particular individual I did not know as well. But because I really wanted this particular experience, I just sort of talked myself into… in pretending that I didn’t see those red flags. But I would say the advice I would give to someone, you know, who is earlier in career or even someone like me who should have known better but didn’t do better is that when you see a red flag, it’s you know Maya Angelou always says when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. And so that is the lesson that I got from that. It’s what I tell other people is you know, a lot of these decisions that we make ought to be factoring in the intuition that we have about the experiences that we have.
So we have an experience, we have to evaluate it. And our bodies and our brains and our hearts tell us something, and we tend to ignore the hard part. But we ought to pay attention and act accordingly. Because I should have just turned around at the, maybe even the, at the 45 minute mark when the manager came down, but he didn’t, he didn’t apologize in the very first… that was the first thing he did. That’s when I should have turned around and walked away.
Russel Lolacher: Interesting that our topic is going to be respect today. Cause when you see that it’s not even happening in the first few moments of meeting someone out of the gate…
Gena Cox: And I’ll tell you, Russel, that actually is the essence, I think, of respect, because when people, the feelings that people have in their interactions, the judgments that we all make about one another happen very quickly. I think we don’t recognize how quickly in those sort of micro experiences, those first few minutes, that’s really where the rubber hits the road. So we worry a lot about long term, and we miss the impact that these few seconds of interactions can have, whether at the beginning of a relationship or even later on.
Russel Lolacher: So let’s, and I think people, a lot of terms we use in the workplace we never define. Things like leadership, diversity. We use them all the time. We throw them out. Like they’re just candy or things we put on a poster, but we don’t actually define them and respect, I think is another one that we may use as a corporate value, but we actually don’t say what it is so we have nothing to measure against. In your experience, how would you define respect as it pertains to the workplace?
Gena Cox: Yeah, I have a very specific definition of respect and that is people feel respected respect It’s present when people feel seen, heard, and valued and all three of those elements must be present Those are not three words that are new to you. You’ve heard the word seen, the word heard, the word value before. But the reason I like that definition is that what respect really comes down to is whether both people in the interaction, or at least the receiver of the international of the of the outreach or the communication believes that the other person sees and values their humanity. Respect is about sort of seeing the essence of the other human on the other side. And the only way that you can convince me that you are experiencing my fullness as a human is if you let me know that you see me, you hear me, and you value me.
Russel Lolacher: We’re talking about this today, you write about this topic, so we’re obviously talking about something that needs to be addressed or fixed in the workplace.
Gena Cox: That’s what I think.
Russel Lolacher: What is the state of respect that you would say today?
Gena Cox: The state of respect is actually very sad, probably… sad is a good word to use when you’re talking about respect. Because respect is one of these concepts that we all probably heard when we were small from the, from the time we were children. It’s nothing new to us. And most people think they know what respect is.
And so we go through life, as you say, sort of working around this concept, but we’re never really defining it. But the state of respect is such that respect turns out to be the, the, the factor, the element, the aspect of employee experience that gets cited most often when employees are asked what were the reasons that drove them to voluntarily leave an organization.
So, whether you’re looking at data from McKinsey or Pew, or you’re looking at data from, what’s it, what’s the name of the, of the entity that, that really plays going and rate their employers… Glassdoor. Whether you’re looking at the Glassdoor data which MIT, the folks study, extensively their databases are studied extensively, regardless of what the data source is that you’re looking at, respect is always going to be in the top three, and it’s going to be cited by more employees than any other factor as to why they leave organizations.
And then if you look at data about toxicity in the workplace, that has become another popular topic in the workplace for people to talk about. Toxic employers, toxic environments, what they’re really talking about is the absence of respect when people behave in ways that are only self serving and do not consider their impact on those around them in the ecosystem in which they operate, that is actually the definition in a way, it’s the absence of respect.
And so these things matter a great deal. We, we kind of know intuitively that they matter a great deal, but they’re not getting enough attention.
Russel Lolacher: Why? Why? Because I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s happening. It’s obvious. Is it something that’s always been there and we’re just more aware of it now, or is it getting worse?
Gena Cox: Well, first of all it is something that’s getting more attention. I’m one of those people that cringe whenever I hear a leader use the expression ‘soft skills’, but leaders use the expression soft skills quite a bit because we’ve been conditioned to use it. It’s a cultural norm in, in this country, at least that we would say soft skills.
And by soft skills, we’re talking about Oh, the things that have to do with the human experience that really aren’t as important as the things that have to do with the other factors of production, like the money and the marketing and the sales. So we… it’s not that important. That’s how most of our leaders have been trained and that’s how most of them behave to this day.
It is only since the, unfortunately, since the COVID 19 pandemic that I, as an organizational psychologist, who’s been talking about these things throughout my career can say that I really have had more conversations with executive leaders, leaders of all types, where these kinds of topics have been front and center and not poo pooed.
So it is relatively new that American business leaders are really starting to focus on issues like being and burnout and, and, and day to day employee experience with enough. It’s a focus that they can really understand what the issues really are about. So I do think that’s different, but I think there’s also a chance that things might also be getting worse.
And the reason I think things might also be getting worse partially is partially because, of course, if you, if you use the pandemic, it’s a nice little marker in time, sort of the, like a natural experiment, the before and the after. Employees have been saying for a long time that we, we, we, there’s something missing that we aren’t having the positive experiences at work with our managers and in the cultures writ large that we desire.
That’s not necessarily anything new. But during the pandemic, it became clear to employees that because now they have many, not everybody had more opportunities to work away from the office, more employees took those opportunities. And when you ask them why, of course, it was health. We don’t want to get sick. And it’s easier not to have a commute. But the big reason people cited as to why they were really delighted about these remote opportunities is that they had a feeling that they could control more of their day to day experience even as they were doing the job. So now I no longer have to deal with this annoying co worker in the same way.
My manager, who obviously didn’t care about me as a human in the first place. Ah, you know what? We don’t have to have the same kind of interaction. That was a clue that, and so you started to hear about things like the great resignation and, and all of the great this and the great that. And, and, and on Tik TOK and on Instagram, younger employees were overtly saying, you’re not going to control me in this job anymore. I’m going to do things my way. I’m going to quit when I want to quit. I’m going to slack off if I feel like slacking off. I’m controlling my, my experience because you’re not doing a good job of, of creating a good one for me. So Russel, I think both things are probably true that we, we know about this thing about employee experience.
But we may not have been giving it enough attention, and then also employees do perceive that things aren’t, are getting worse as far, rather than getting better with regard to their day to day employee experience.
Russel Lolacher: And you brought up a few topics there that I find really interesting having done this show for quite a while and have conversations I’ve had is I don’t want to point the finger at leaders being horrible because leaders are being horrible. It’s because they’re not trained to be proper leaders.
Executive are some of the bigger problems because to be blunt, they’re not leaders, they’re managers. And they’ve been promoted to a point where they don’t have to have those quote unquote soft skills because they’ve been rewarded for their success and productivity. So they’ll be the first ones to freak out when people go I want to work from home.
And they’re like, no, you can’t work from home. And then the next two words they’ll use is adaptability, resilience, and innovation. And yet the workplace is changing and you can’t handle it because you’ve never been taught to be a leader. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a systemic problem it seems to be that respect is the baseline.
It should be the baseline, but I mean, it employs a lot of people to be able to teach them if they don’t understand respect, but we’ve got a bigger problem here.
Gena Cox: Oh, we absolutely have a bigger problem and I also agree with you that while I certainly say that executive leaders are responsible for fixing this. I mean, I everybody is, but I mean, it has to start at the top. Right? I do also feel that executive leaders writ large have not been trained to fix this. Right? And so if you go to our top business schools in the United States, you will find one or two courses that might be about organizational leadership, organizational effectiveness, or something to do with people. And it’s almost as if these are, these tend to be somewhat electives, and they tend to be a smaller number available to choose from.
And people sort of do them because they have to, and oh we’ll do it, right? So I think that if you look at what is taught in our primary or large business schools, which are great, generally speaking, but they don’t tend to emphasize the human aspect of the leadership responsibility as much as they ought to.
Many of the courses that fall into this category tend to be electives and I always get the impression that they’re perceived as less valuable as than the courses on finance and finance and sales and marketing and so on. So there’s some work that the folks at Rice University have been doing that I really buy into. There’s a book called Leadership Reckoning. And what this book is about, it’s about what if we really taught our leaders who are coming through MBA programs, what if we taught them how to be leaders?
Rather than just teaching them leadership,. The distinction is significant because to your point, if we graduated people from MBA programs who were effective leaders and coaches and so on, we might be a lot further down the down the path towards a positive employee experience for all because I think those leaders just don’t recognize how important these issues are.
And so I do think there is this great opportunity to teach leaders about why, about how to be their most effective by enhancing their focus on the employee experience. Another thing I would say, Russel, about which I have a great deal of evidence that I’ve reviewed over the years, is that the one aspect of this issue that leaders do talk about is the word trust. So if you ask leaders, what is the one emotionally based outcome that they care about, they’ll say trust. That’s the one they’ve been taught to care about. And it’s wonderful. But here’s the thing. Respect is a precursor to trust. You can’t have trust without respect. And so I talk a lot about respect because it is a behavior that we can define. It is a behavior we can teach leaders how to exhibit and how to require in their organizations.
It is a way of being. It is a point of view about how people will interact with one another, that if leaders understood how much power it had, and how it directly impacts trust, trust, they would be able to sort of move the needle on trust by enhancing respect.
Russel Lolacher: It’s funny. I’ve seen more and more lately online where people talk about leaders need to have impact. I’m like, no, no, they need to have good impact because there is unbelievable experience, to your point, your, your experience as an employee was a negative one and that’s 80 percent of any time I ask a guest what their experience is.
It’s always bad. That’s trauma. And it’s usually like for decades ago. So it’s, it’s a funny thing that people say impact and don’t clarify that it’s good because there’s so much bad impact that people carry with them for so long. And respect would be such a nice way to, to S to start that conversation.
So let’s, let’s fix everything, Gena. So, so what does it look like? What does it feel like to lead with respect?
Gena Cox: Yeah. So first of all, I think respect requires the point of view that you have to have a connection with the person or persons on the other side. You, the leader, have a team, a team of one, a team of 5,000, it doesn’t matter. Each person in that group needs to have some small, even if it’s small, belief that you care about their experiences.
And in order for that to happen, it isn’t enough to sort of say I know my employees. People have to feel connected to you. And you have to feel connected to the employees that you’re responsible for. Connection doesn’t mean you know every detail about their lives or that they come into work and, lay all of their problems on your lap. That’s not what we’re talking about. But it does mean that you have enough of a sense of what is it that energizes Gena versus what is it that sort of really makes her not her best and how can we make it possible to provide more of those experiences where Gena feels energized. So when I say that respect is about being seen, heard, and valued, feeling seen is, is sort of like the entry ticket.
It’s about does the person that you are leading or with whom you’re interacting, because this goes not just for leaders and the people they lead, but it goes for any interaction. Feeling seen is about just the very notion that literally when a person shows up in the space, they have the belief that that other person with whom they’re interacting is sort of seeing that, seeing them there.
They, they are acknowledging them. It’s kind of like when you’re a parent and the child walks into the room, the child, people always say mothers and dads will say Hey, hi, so and so because there’s almost like this automatic acknowledgement. I see you. I know you’re there. That’s a little dramatic example, but it’s really about that part.
When I went to a holiday party one year and this very same manager that I’ve mentioned before, who I will never forget for unfortunate reasons, walked up to me. And the first thing he said to me was, he didn’t say, Merry Christmas. He didn’t say Happy Holidays. He didn’t say hello Gena. He said, have you seen, and gave this other colleague’s name.
Have you seen Pat? Like, no, I haven’t seen Pat. Just got here. Have you, have you seen me? I mean, like I didn’t say that, but that’s what I wanted to say. It actually is a classic definition of, of how not to have somebody feel seen, but you do need to feel seen. You need to feel heard. And feeling heard is really about.
Having the opportunity where there’s space for your ideas so you can put those small or big ideas out into the world in which you’re operating, and that the people with whom you’re interacting, especially your leader, can give you some evidence that they heard that you had this idea, give you credit for the idea, perhaps even give your idea the opportunity to breathe and sort of have the influence it deserves if it deserves it, and then for you to get some credit for those ideas.
It’s kind of like when I was once working for an organization. And I was walking by the mail room. This is back in the day, obviously, when the mail rooms were the biggest thing. Now, I don’t know if they’re as important, but everybody, it sounded like they were having a party. They were laughing and giggling.
I stuck my head and said, it was so funny. What’s going on? And what I was told was that this, these two, this company was acquiring another company in another state. And so they were in the due diligence process. And what was happening is that they were getting hundreds and hundreds of FedEx packages every week that were coming from the other company that was obviously preparing records and sending them there, and vice versa, they were sending hundreds and hundreds of individual FedEx packages to the other company in the other state.
What’s so funny about that? How come nobody figured out… in the process, lots of these letters were getting lost. So people were always calling up and saying, Hey guys, did you see this so and so is expecting this to be here by 10 o’clock or whatever. And so they were laughing because they were saying, Why didn’t anyone figure out that we could have maybe like a 10 am dispatch time and a 2 pm dispatch time to consolidate? And conversely, we could ask the other side to do the same thing. We’d get four big packages. Those would be a pain in the neck, but we could track them more easily. We would know where everything was. It would be more efficient. So how come nobody figured that out?
We figured that out. I said why don’t you tell somebody to do that? You know what, because whenever we tell our managers about the great ideas we have, nobody wants to hear them. Either they don’t implement them or they don’t give us credit when they do. That’s a story I’ll never forget. That’s a real experience that I had that taught me so much about this whole thing, about being heard because every individual employee wants to be believe that while they can’t have the influence and the impact of the CEO, they can have the little bit of influence they can have in their world.
And so in their world, they were being disregarded. So that’s feeling seen and feeling heard. Feeling valued. Feeling valued is not just about is my paycheck fair and equitable and all of that. That’s obviously everybody wants to be compensated fairly for the work that they do. But feeling valued is also about things like knowing about the promotion opportunities that might exist or other jobs I could apply for in an organization, in other words, understanding what the opportunities might be not discovering that there are opportunities, but they only go to other people and I never even knew the opportunities existed. It’s about making sure that they’re, that you don’t just pick the one or two people who have the client facing positions and nobody else gets those client facing positions. And so once they got the client facing positions, they automatically have an edge because now they’ve had that experience and they just keep running with it.
Nobody else gets that kind of experience. And of course, it’s things like awards and patting people on the back, but it’s also about saying thank you. It’s the simplest thing. Sometimes the seen, heard, and valued idea, that model sounds very simplistic, but when broken down into its component parts, you see that it’s about all, especially this whole recognition thing.
It’s about the things that we all yearn for, but you don’t have to make it complicated. And if you could do those three things, everybody with whom you’re interacting and you will feel respected because it will get reciprocated.
Russel Lolacher: And you make a really great point on top of the framework as well on that is the fact that a lack of respect will perpetuate lack of respect because it’s being modeled for them as you’ve illustrated with the mail room example is that they weren’t being seen. So they were like if I’m not gonna. If they’re not going to, I’m not gonna.
And it just becomes this cycle that just erodes and erodes and erodes the workplace culture.
Gena Cox: Yes. Yeah, it’s one of the things where whenever I hear conversations about so called toxic environments, I just sort of sit back and listen because I know there are going to be a few behavioral markers that will come up no matter where this is taking place. The first one will be that there are one or two people who are perceived as stars and they get to do whatever they want.
Half of what they do is good because it either generates revenue or maybe they’re thought of as the best designer or whatever the thing is that the company thinks is the path to revenue, right? They’re good at something, right? And then the other part is going to be, however, they treat everybody poorly. Clients don’t like working with them. They’re jerks. They’re all of that stuff. And then the third thing is going to be, but our leaders allow this to happen over and over. And so we put those three elements together. We have the toxic environment and everybody else learns what? Oh, don’t even bother. We know the organization doesn’t know the difference between treating humans well and treating people poorly.
Don’t complain about the people who are toxic because they’re never going to fix it because they’re only focused on the dollars. You know what? We’ll just go ahead doing blithely doing what we do and we’re not going to give our best because why bother?
Russel Lolacher: I call this group the missing middle because most leadership seems to be, it’s either all their effort is on the rock stars because they’re the ones that are making them look good. They’re the ones that are delivering. Or the problems, which are the ones that are the issues or things that come up.
And there’s this 60, 70 percent in the middle that just get no opportunities, not connected to, not seen, because they’re not the ones that are yelling the loudest. They’re not the squeaky wheel as it were. So they sit there and to your point, they’re perpetuating the toxicity because they’re seeing how the rock stars are being treated and they’re seeing how the problems are being treated and they’re just being ignored.
Gena Cox: That’s right.
Russel Lolacher: So they perpetuate this problem. So it just breaks my heart.
Gena Cox: Yeah, it’s horrible because the other thing it teaches you is it teaches you to just keep your head down and do your nine to five and then escape and go home and live your real life, which is really not what leaders want. They would really like if everybody came in and wanted to give their best, but it is only engaged employees who do that.
And the thing about being engaged is not just having pride in your company and believing that, it’s supporting the mission and believing in the mission. It’s, it’s clear. There’s clearly this element of it that has to do with how does it make me feel when I do whatever I do every day?
And if how I feel is that either I feel dismissed or ignored or forgotten or whatever, then I’m not engaged. And if I’m not engaged, you’re never going to get the most. So when we think about engagement, I actually say, let’s just go ahead and think about what is it that drives this engagement. It’s, it goes back to the same respect stuff.
These same three simple ideas are missing probably when employees say they don’t feel engaged or when they have low engagement scores on a report.
Russel Lolacher: Who’s responsible for this? Who’s responsible for ensuring an organization is a respectful organization? Do we just point at HR? Do we just say executive? And if it’s not there, then it’s your fault?
Gena Cox: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Like, who’s responsible?
Gena Cox: It’s absolutely not HR. And by the way I’ll mention this, this point very quickly, and then I’ll go to the direct answer, recently, as you may know, SHRM has, has really been focused on something they call a civility initiative. And I think civility is fantastic, right? And if for whatever reason, HR has decided that they’re going to focus on trying to teach people how to be civil, which is, which is great.
It is not a bad thing, but it is not the same thing as respect because civility is really about sort of the day to day pleasantries and not being rude. And that sort of thing is wonderful, but it doesn’t get at the guts of the matter, which is how do you make me feel at the end of the day in terms of, of, of my humanity?
So I don’t think HR should focus… is responsible for all of this. And if HR would focus more on respect, I would be delighted, but HR has always been an arm, a tool of leadership, right? Although we might pretend it’s something else. The purpose of HR departments is not primarily to support employees or culture.
The first obligation to the HR, of HR, at least as far as the executives and the boards would see it, is to protect the interests of the organization. And so I do think the buck stops with the board and with the senior leaders of a team, of an organization. Because when they talk about, when we talk about culture, which is something that leaders do talk a lot about, they talk about it in a very abstract fashion, as if it’s this thing and we just kind of put it in a box and we move it around and we get magic.
But really, culture is what does it feel like to work in this place every day? What does it feel like to interact with this organization every day as an employee as a as a partner business partner, you know as a supplier… everybody in the ecosystem. What does that really feel like? It’s kind of like when I go into my local fancy, the local drugstore.
I’m not going to name names, but the big ones that are on the corners of every city and you walk into the store from the very first two minutes or so, know exactly what the culture of the organization is. When you see that the people, the first of all, the people who are there are busy but they’re trying to ignore you.
They’re trying not to make eye contact either because they really don’t think they have time for this or they just have been taught a lot interacting with the customer is not all that important. Culture… that’s what culture is about. So I think leaders of organizations have got to ask themselves, what does it feel like to work at, or with, or to interact with the people in their companies? And then they have to choose to focus on in my, in my recommendation is you focus on respect because it’s such a powerful tool at a relatively low cost, a relatively low lift. There’s this big debate that’s been going on about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Should we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion?
Is it a bad thing? Is it woke? Is it reverse discrimination? Is it all about affirmative action? All of that. And there are many, reasons why that conversation has evolved in the way that it has. I don’t need to go into the reasons why it has evolved in the way that it has. However, I know that the origin of DEI work, it was intended to help sort of level the playing field in the culture sense.
To try to ensure that everybody who shows up for work would have approximately a similar kind of experience. And so they wouldn’t, their experience wouldn’t vary as a function of what they look like and how they thought, whether they were neurodiverse or whether they were gay or whatever. That those things would be relatively neutralized because everybody understood that those really weren’t the things that determined whether a person was a poor or a great employee.
That was sort of the general idea of DEI. Let’s sort of make things better and then everybody could sort of get it. And so things have gone off on a variety of tangents, but one of the tangents that that it has not gone on, which it should go on, is that DEI work really… I always say inclusion talks to diversity.
It should always have been predicated upon the day to day experience of employees and organizations and trying to guarantee or support the idea that those experiences would not vary as a function of what you look like. Okay, let’s say we could agree on that. If we could agree on that. Then the one thing that it ought to have been focused in at the core should have been respect.
It should still be respect, right? Because if you ask people from minoritized groups or historically disadvantaged groups, what is the one thing that they wish they could get from the people with whom they work and their leaders? They don’t say I want a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. They don’t say they want implicit bias training.
They don’t say they want ERGs. They say they want to feel respected when they come to work. But nobody has ever been paying attention to this particular outcome and not recognizing that if they could deliver that outcome, it would benefit every single person in the system. So, I think if leaders understood that more clearly, and I put the buck, the buck stops with the top level leaders and the board, if it’s a publicly held company, they would say, let’s stop trying to worry so much about, do we have enough square people, enough round people and enough triangle shape people?
Instead, they were really focused on what is it? What happens when they show up? Do they show up and come into an environment where it feels like you’re the 11th guests at a 10 a dinner party where there are 10 place settings. And there’s no knife, no fork, no spoon, no glass, no plate, no chair for you.
And you’re like manager, why’d you bring me here? Didn’t you know that I would need these things? Why am I, why do I feel I’m being treated differently? That is often the experience and it is the evidence that respect is not present and inclusion isn’t present. So focus more on those things instead of worrying about whether DEI is good or bad.
Russel Lolacher: One of the bigger challenges I’ve noticed talking to executives is they will talk about the cultures they want and have no concept of the culture they have. And it’s like they’re trying to build a roof without understanding they have no walls like it’s they’re, they’re looking, shooting for the stars.
And it’s like, but you have a culture and they think they don’t, they think that they need to create and do these steps and checkbox exercises to create these cultures when I’m like, no, no, there already is one. You may not be a part of it, but it is whether it’s, and there’s a thousand subcultures, it’s not one homogenous, organizational culture.
Two people can have a culture, but it’s that bigger picture, but also it’s a macro and a micro.
Gena Cox: Yes.
Russel Lolacher: Almost that you have to look at culture and it’s so much about want, not about is, which frustrates me.
Gena Cox: I worked for many years in employee experience measurement where I worked for companies that was doing employee surveys over 500,000 employee groups globally and all of that. And there were some pretty consistent patterns that were fascinating to me, which was that companies would pay so much money to do employee surveys.
But back in the day, I say back in the day, because I, I don’t do this kind of work anymore, but I would hope that a few things have changed. But one of the things that used to consistently happen was that when we would do these employee surveys, they always had a culture component. There used to be something called like a DEI report and then a separate thing called like a culture report.
And then they would be the general employee report. The general employee report is the one that would that where the senior leaders of the organization would get all the details and they would get all the numbers and the comparisons and so on and they would feel like they knew everything. They didn’t get the dei report that stayed in hr and the culture report was often thought of as something, we’ve got to be really careful because we don’t really want leaders of the organization to know how bad things are. I I think that was the reason nobody ever told me that was the reason. But sometimes there would be data that the executive team did not see. And so to your point that the executive team doesn’t always know, whether the company is small or large, the one thing that all any executive leader of a company ought to know is what does it feel like to work here?
Realistically, not your, not your sort of pie in the sky, aspirational idea that you kind of wished or hoped for, but what does it really feel like? And people can tell you this. So I do think it goes back to the notion of being connected. Senior leaders and organizations need to have enough conversations with people who are not at their peer level, who are much lower down, to really know what’s going on.
Russel Lolacher: And that leads me to the next question of, okay, so you wanna lead with respect, how do you prepare for that? I’m assuming you just don’t wait till you walk through the door, turn on the computer and go, now I’m respectful. Like is, I’m assuming there is a bit of work we need to do ahead of time to be the people that lead with respect.
Gena Cox: Yeah, I mean, so this is what it is, there’s definitely this individual component. And when, and when I work with organizations on this topic, I said, okay, philosophically, the top level leaders have to believe there’s things you have to believe in order to put the effort in to make sure that this could become a norm for the organization.
It’s not going to happen if that doesn’t happen. But then I go quickly to this individual level, because regardless of what your personality is, you can be respectful, right? Regardless of how you were raised, you can be respectful. But you might not know what respect is. You might not know how much it matters.
So I gotta teach you all of those things. And then I have to teach you how to manifest respect. And I use that same simple model. But, but, but I always go then to sort of the level of asking sort of two very simple questions. One of them is think about your current situation. Is there one person with whom you work that you really wish was more respectful towards you?
I asked people to think about that one simple question. Everybody comes up with one person, often more than one person, but I say pick one. And now think about what would have to change in order for you to feel respected by this person based on the framework we just laid out. What do we need to change? And people will start writing furiously.
Okay. Now, what would have, what, how do you, can you think of a way, and I coach on this, so that you can then start to ask for those things that you want from this person or show this person how much you would love to have those things. And we work on that as well. And then get them to the point of saying, okay, now what will you do?
What’s one, what’s the first thing, what’s the one thing you will do to get started with this knowing it’s going to be a process. It’s not an on and off switch, right. And I try to encourage them to take the first step. So we do that. Then we do the next thing, which is, is there any one person with whom you wish, with whom you work that you think wished you were more respectful towards them?
And they can come up with a person, they can say, I know that I’m not always great dealing with Susie. And then it goes through that same, a similar process what would have to change in order for Susie to feel more respected by you? And then we go through the process again, all the way down to, okay, now what’s the one thing you will do to start this journey of enhancing your respectful interactions with Susie?
And then, so they leave with two, at least two actions, but obviously many more things. And it gets to the point you’re trying to make, Russel, which is yes, there’s a strategic view of respectful organizations. It always comes down, though, to the one on one, one to one interactions. And those one on one, one to one interactions often have micro moments in them that are way more powerful than we recognize.
Russel Lolacher: Can it be too far gone? Because I mean, we’ve talked about toxic workplaces. We, you gave a great example off the top where people were just being treated like cogs in a wheel. Can there be such a broken amount of respect that it’s just like, you know what? It doesn’t matter what I coach you and teach you we can’t fix this culture?
Gena Cox: I can’t, I don’t know if I could say that because… I can say this, I have seen organizations that have said they have given lip service to the idea of making change in their culture, but haven’t really done the work and therefore nothing ever changes. And I try to figure that out early on and stay away from them because they just make me look bad because they’re never really going to do anything.
But I do think that in the end, the leaders of an organization have to sort of sit down and have and sort of own what the problem is. They have to, you have to have a certain level of honesty with yourself in an organization about what’s really going on here and decide, is this something, is this really how you want to be?
Can this deliver the future? Can being like this deliver the future to which you aspire and probably organizations, usually organizations that don’t have these markers of respect also aren’t successful financially, or they’re not growing and all of that, but, but nobody’s really focusing on that as a cause.
They’re thinking about some other aspects of the operation that are the reasons why they’re not being successful and they’re missing. That’s foundational thing. So I do think it is possible for things to be made better, but only if the top level leaders of the organization say it is that important that we make it a priority. I’ve worked with organizations that have had, I won’t name the names, but one company I always think about has something called the company way, X company way. And the company way was a model of respect and it was really how they say, this is how we will behave in this company and not only will we behave in that by putting it on a nice piece of paper and putting it on our website and stuff like that, we’re going to build it into our performance reviews for every employee in the company, we’re going to build it into our compensation programs for executive leaders of the organization.
In other words, and we’re going to ask our, our business partners, our suppliers and so on, are they experiencing, what are they experiencing when they interact with us? And of course, our customers and our clients, we’re going to every aspect of the ecosystem, and we’re saying, this is what we aspire to be.
This is how we will behave when you see us behaving that way. Yay. When you don’t see us behaving that way, let us know right away. It almost has to be to that level to have a change. But I will say another thing and most organizations that have not had strong cultures in general, the thing that has usually been the most successful and getting them to something positive has been to let the CEO leave the organization because in fact, when top level leaders behaving ways are inconsistent with these kinds of aspirations that they’re not, and if they don’t change it, they’re not willing to change, or maybe they can’t change.
That means you’re basically saying, okay, we’ve accepted that it will always be this way. The only way, if, if, if the top level leadership doesn’t buy into these positive ideas and doesn’t behave in that way, doesn’t hold people accountable who report to them for being, behaving in these positive ways and tolerate toxic behavior, those people will never have respectful organizations.
So I’m not saying we should go off and start firing CEOs left and right, but we, but usually organizations know if it is, if the problem really resides in the behavior of the top level leaders.
Russel Lolacher: The organization does, but the CEO doesn’t, and that’s, that’s the key piece. And that’s the thing is like, we talked about a lot on the show is that you cannot be a great leader without two things, self awareness, situational awareness.
Gena Cox: That’s right.
Russel Lolacher: And how do we know our role as leaders is not leading with respect? Like how, how do we self assess?
Gena Cox: I don’t think that all leaders are good at this because a lot of it has to do with personality. First of all, some leaders. are the type of people who believe they’re always right and who feel they have the answers and who kind of operate with a certain level of impunity that they think leadership means, I am it. I’m the center of the universe kind of thing, right? Not all, but some. But then also money, many leaders have not been trained to focus on these issues as we, as we have said before. So there are some who have, some who do and who make this their, their, the thing that they focus on every single day. But I don’t think that there is, it is, self awareness is not necessarily something that comes very easy to top level leaders.
Because people who report to top level leaders who behave this way are, are very unlikely to be telling them the truth on the day to day basis. So in a way, they’ve And by default, creating an environment that is self defeating, because now you’ve created an environment where the people who could tell you what’s really going on will not tell you what’s really going on.
And so you are making your judgments about this, about your feeling on the basis of your feelings and your preconceived notions about your effectiveness, and often it’s possible to be very wrong. But I, but I’ve coached many leaders, so let me say out of the other side of my mouth that I have coached leaders…
I, I once coached a leader who worked who ran a very large division of a very large company. And he would get into the elevator on the, in the mornings and go up to the 42nd floor. He would turn his body and face the corner of the elevator towards the front corner of the elevator. He didn’t want to interact with people on the elevator. He had a problem. He had other problems. But he had done that for years. And no one was giving him any kind of honest feedback about what, how his impact. Anyway, I did work with him. He did get better. He eventually left the company on his own because he recognized that he, there were some things that he might not ever be able to change.
And I think that was actually a really good decision. So coaching can help having a confidant or two would help, but I do think it’s very, very hard for people at top of organizations to have the self awareness to know these kinds of things if they’re not willing to sort of talk directly to people at all levels.
Russel Lolacher: Can we, with, if we’re leaders that do understand this, if we get this, but we want to make, I mean, we’ve sort of mentioned that we can only control, we can control in an organization that we can control what’s around us and who we engage with, but as a leader, who’s trying to model this, can we help our teams lead with, like, can we coach in this way?
Gena Cox: Oh, yeah.
Russel Lolacher: In sort of helping others lead with a respect?
Gena Cox: Yeah. I mean, I love the word that you use the word coach. I’m a trained coach and people think that trained coaches are, have magical skills. We have magical skills, but the magical skills that we have are not that we know the answer in every situation. What we do know is we have very keen observational skills.
We’re taught to have very keen observational skills. We’re taught to be self aware, to know what it is that we’re doing and being part of the solution is a big part of what we ought to be doing. And we also are very good at trying to help people think about a situation in a way where they can derive the solution themselves.
And any leader can do this, right? It’s a practice. It’s a habit. It’s a way of thinking, right? So whether that is to say that when you, I think, I think the first thing, the first step would be to, to recognize you probably have to change some of your behaviors. For example, when you know that Susie and Paul sit around the board in the meeting, the board, the table in these meetings that you have every week, and you know that Susie, as Susie tries to say what she has to say, you know that this other person has a tendency to sort of interrupt and try to shut her down, not just, not because she’s the woman, although that could be the reason, but because they have these two entity, these two divisions in the organization that are often at loggerheads because they have a little bit of conflict in the way that they get resources, right?
For example, often the sales organizations and the customer service organizations, you think that they would always be in lockstep, but they tend to be in conflict often because the sales people are focused primarily on getting to this transaction to get into this sale and the folks in the customer service to say you might have, we might have to do some things differently, or we can’t give them everything that you have promised because we’re not set up to do that or whatever. That’s a natural kind of conflict. I’m the CEO. I’m leading the VPs that run these two entities. I know this dynamic. And yet every week, I let this thing play out. I have to say, be able to say, okay, head of sales. We want to hit the target at the end of June, and I know that you’re concerned that if we don’t do this thing that you’re asking for, we won’t hit it, but I’m telling you, going forward, we can no longer promise our customers that we can do X by X by Y time, because that might sound good, but it’s self defeating, and then I say to the other person, when you’re having a, when there’s something that we can’t deliver that has been sold, then we’ve got to come up with some way internally to fix this, rather than waiting for it to get to the point where it becomes something that only the customer sees for the first time and is in shock, and now we have a bigger problem.
I, CEO, have to change the way that I manage the head of sales and the head of customer service, as an example. And then I have to do that consistently. And when one or the other behaves like a jerk, I have to say, that’s not the way we do things here. We won’t do this anymore. Going forward, let’s do something that is going to be productive and get us to a solution because now the other heads of the other groups are watching all of this play out.
They’ve watched this play out for two years, right? And everybody comes in and they see the same thing play. So I know that that this sounds very pie in the sky and so on. Because I know that these groups all have norms that have been established, but it is, it does take that kind of saying, okay, from now on, we’re not doing, we’re not doing this anymore.
We’re doing something different and we are going to call out the problem and not pretend like we don’t know what it is.
Russel Lolacher: I love an end to that because I think honesty is one of the biggest pieces and psychological safety has to be laid out, obviously, but honesty leads to respect, leads to trust. I think it’s, it’s, it’s the foundational work that is so, so vital here. Thank you so much, Gena, for being here. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it respectfully.
Let’s, let’s finish it up with the last question, which is what’s one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?
Gena Cox: Yeah I think I’ve already given it away. It was when I said is there one person with whom you work where you think there’s a chance to have a more positive relationship where you’re going to take responsibility for it? Because you’re not, you can’t change the other person. You’re going to take responsibility for it.
It makes the biggest difference. If that person is Russel, think about Russel. Think about what it is that you know that you could do differently or that ought to be different. Just one little thing. And if you would promise that today or in the next few days, you’re going to put it on your calendar.
You’re going to reach out to Russel. You’re going to say, Hey, Russel, you got 15 minutes. I just wanted to chat with you or have a cup of coffee or whatever you can do. You’re not going to try to tackle the big problem in the first interaction. What you’re going to try to do is to put Russel at ease.
So let Russel know that, you know what? I see that Gena is trying to do something here with me that Gena has never done before. You’re just trying to re establish a connection. That’s the most important thing you can do, and we all have people, we all have these scenarios. In other words, I guess what I’m saying, Russel, is it always starts with me, with I, with us.
With us, with me. I can’t change the world. I can only change myself.
Russel Lolacher: That is Dr. Gena Cox. She’s an organizational psychologist, executive coach, keynote speaker, and author. She’s the CEO of Feels Human LLC. And she’s got a book you really should be checking out called Leading Inclusion, Drive Change Your Employees Can See And Feel. Thank you so much for being here, Gena.
Gena Cox: Oh, Russel, it has been the energetic, fun conversation I thought it would be. Thank you.
Russel Lolacher: Yes, we hit our goal. Thank you so much.
