The Venn Diagram of Performance, Success, and Productivity
How Deloitte's Chief Well-Being Officer is helping us rethink well-being at work
I am traveling this week and will be speaking at ASAE Annual in Atlanta, GA. Follow me on Linkedin for updates, the details of my talk, and in the meantime, enjoy a shorter edition.
Video: Reimagining Well-Being to Create a Better World of Work
Jen Fisher is the Chief Well-Being Officer at Deloitte, Author of
, the Host of the WorkWell Podcast and a Co-Author of Work Better Together, a book she co-wrote with a friend and mentor of mine. If you have 15 minutes and haven’t heard Jen’s story, you should watch her TED Talk. I won’t give away all the details (because you should watch) but one of the most poignant parts of her talk is that while Jen is a cancer survivor, she admitted that talking about burnout was harder for her at times than talking about her cancer diagnosis.The other message that I think will resonate was around what lead her down the path to burnout. Like many of you who read this newsletter, Jen was a high performer and hard worker, and when she looked around her, she saw that other people who were successful were working all the time and being rewarded for it, so she decided to do that as well. “This is just what I have to do to be successful. I was praised for it, I copied what other people did, but while I perceived them to be successful, I had never defined success for myself.” The intersection of high performance, productivity and success is a rough venn diagram to be in, and I’m glad Jen is sharing her story of how she was able to break free.
But this is why it’s hard to fully break through on the overton window when it comes to how we think about work. If we’re all looking to model and copy what we think is successful based on looking at others around us (and it gets rewarded) it can be hard to think differently unless you actually define your own version of success. And even if you do, when you are a part of a system that consistently rewards a version of success that doesn’t align with your own, it makes it difficult to think and act differently.
As an entreprneuer, people often ask me if I would return to corporate, and while I will never say never, I really am enjoying the work that I do right now and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. One way to manage your unique expectations of success is to design the system for yourself. Truthfully, that is one of the reasons why I decided to do the work that I do within the container of entrepreneurship. I design and set the conditions of the system, and that autonomy allows me to cultivate work in a way that works for me. But certainly comes at risks and costs, and while while that may work for me, it may not work for everyone.
But that to me is what makes people who are in the system advocating for a better world of work, such as Jen. While I’m grateful well-being has entered the lexicon of the workplace culture, it’s clear it has a way to go, and Jen is leading the charge to redefine the role that well-being plays in the workplace.
Article: Building Trust, Transforming Relationships
For the past decade, I’ve been a fan of Tasha Eurich’s work on self-awareness and was honored to become part of her community. Recently, one of our projects was to start a
substack which just launched this week.The first edition is on the role of trust, and features some insightful content on this topic from some of my colleagues like Matt Stone and Susanne Mus. As I’ve researched and learned more about the role of trust one of the counterintuitive points that always gets me is that most of us think of trust as something that we will give to someone else when they prove they are trustworthy when in fact trust works the other way around. TLDR: Find small ways to demonstrate trust to your peers, colleagues and co-workers, and you’ll start building more trust with them, and becoming more trustworthy. Triple true if you are a leader!
Podcast: Thinking Differently About How We Attract and Retain Diverse Talent
I met Cat Ward last year through a colleague and I was glad to finally have her on The Edge of Work Podcast. I have listened to this episode a few times, and each time I get fired up about continuing to do the work that I do each day. Cat is a VP at Jobs For the Future and as you can tell from listening to this episode, is incredibly passionate and energized by the idea of creating a better world of work that allows people to use their talents to shine.
One of my favorite quotes from this episode comes when Cat is talking about how the systems and structures for how we attract and develop talent are outdated, antiquated, and not inclusive. She reminds us that while no one person is bigger than a system, “people create systems, so we can create a better one.”
In any kind of changmaking type of work, there is a real reality that a leader must face in acknowledging that they can have a big ambition to change something but they operate in a world much bigger than themselves. Cat’s quote serves as a reminder that while it can be easy to feel small as one person, any kind of change starts with one person.
In every episode, I ask my guests what a better world of work would look like, and this was her answer: “It looks like opportunity being equitably distributed, and the world of work as we know it reflects the diversity and the dynamism of the communities where we live.”
Shoutouts
Enjoy seeing some of my friends win, so here are a few shoutouts:
JD Elliott hit 50,000 downloads on his Future of HR podcast.
Lorraine Lee who has been a master at virtual events crushed an IRL keynote
Muriel Wilkins just signed a book contract for her second book (Teaser: she’s a guest on The Edge of Work coming out this week!)
Massimo Backus started a newsletter, The Leadership Mind
Dr. Janine Lee is presenting some of her doctoral research at a Google Cloud Conference
Finally, If you’re still reading this, I recently went on a podcast to tell my personal journey with learning how to speak up and share my voice, and how it fueled my own career success. If you listen I’d love to know what you think, as I’d like to start keynoting on this topic.
Have a great week!
Al