TRANSCRIPT
Gissele: Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re gonna be talking about rethinking how we do business in a time of great upheaval. my guest today is Jeff Ma, who is a director of product development at Culture Plus host of the Love as a business strategy podcast and bestselling author of love as a Business Strategy coming up through a decade in the gaming industry. Jeff eventually found his niche in project management and agile coaching at Soft Way.
As he continued working with teams and clients in Scrum and agile environments, however, he started seeing the stronger underlying importance of culture in truly high functioning performing teams. Pushed by a combination of his own introspection, feedback from [00:01:00] his colleagues, and a whole lot of uncomfortable practice, Jeff shifted head first into a new mission that he shares with his team.
To bring humanity back to the workplace. Nowadays, he’s hyper-focused on helping people find a workplace culture that allows them to be their whole selves, their best selves. Jeff is leading the development of various products and tools that are crafted with the culture of love at its center. As a facilitator of Culture Rise and other experiences in the Culture Plus Suite, he’s also connecting and transforming leaders around the world directly helping them to improve their mindsets, behaviors, and leadership capabilities.
Please join me in welcoming Jeff. Hi Jeff.
Jeff: Hello, how are you, Gissele?
Gissele: I’m doing great. I think this is a perfect conversation to have nowadays because I feel like the world is in a little bit of an upheaval when it comes to the economics, I [00:02:00] think,
Jeff: In terms of a lot of things. Yeah.
Gissele: Yeah, for sure.
So to get started I wanted you to tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this work.
Jeff: Wow. So it’s, it’s actually a lot of the book that we wrote, love is a business strategy centers around this change. But, you know, I was just like anybody else working a, you know, a, a kind of a job in a nine to five kind of technology company called Soft Way, which I still do today, but software was very different back then.
But basically software went through an interesting change. Around 2016, it almost went outta business. And the story centers around our CEO Mohammed, who’s a co-author of the book as well. But it starts with Mohammed and kind of grows into others. But the gist of it is, mm-hmm. That when we’re kind of in our worst moment where we had done mass layoffs, morals, and all time low
Gissele: Yeah.
Jeff: Things are not looking good. Mohammed kind of had a moment of, of. [00:03:00] Self-realization in which he went to actually a football game, a University of Houston football game, which he’s a huge fan of. Mm-hmm. But they played a game that was really important. It was like their 10th, 10th straight victory with no losses that season, if they could pull it off.
But they were down by by insurmountable amount in the fourth quarter, and all the statistics showed that it was over. They had a 0.1% chance of winning, and basically people were already leaving that game, leaving that stadium turning off their TVs, and Mohamed decided to stay in that game. He witnessed one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the program.
And they came back and won. And that really invigorated him to try to figure out what it is that makes a great team resilient like that. And that coach in particular, that, that was a rookie coach his first year, and he took a team of, you know, not particularly talented players and brought them to this level.
he wanted to really [00:04:00] understand that secret and what that was and what, what he said in what that coach said. Tom Herman, what he said in a co, in a press conference afterwards was that it was love that that brought them through and, and so Mohammed kind of went on this mission over the next, you know, I would say we’re still on it to this day.
So over the next decade or more, but it, it set us on a mission to uncover what that meant. And in, in that process, it shifted our focus, not, we still, we still ran the business, but it shifted our focus also to how do we really impact culture? And we learned that that’s through behaviors and mindsets and attitudes.
And then we developed our pillars of love. So. Anyways, there’s, that’s the, that’s the Cliff’s Notes version of the story. But there’s a lot more to it and a lot of things that we did wrong along the way. But ultimately that brought us to where I am today. ’cause I have my own personal journey within all that, which brought us to our mission to bring humanity back to the workplace.
And that’s [00:05:00] what we do today.
Gissele: Yeah. Oh, what a great story. One of the things that I really wanna emphasize is that I even tell my kids too, it’s not over till it’s over. Right? Like, it’s not over till it’s over. Unless it’s over, it’s not over. And so you, there’s always an opportunity to turn it around.
So I love that messaging. Absolutely. The second one is, is it’s amazing to see like the whole concept of love sort of. Be spoken about in sports because as a mother who has kids in sports as a, partner to somebody who has been involved in sports leadership as well, it’s not often something that people talk about.
And there’s seldom a conversation about love and business. And so What were people’s reactions when you were talking about, oh, we need to bring more love in a business.
Jeff: Sure. I mean, if you go all the way back to when Mohammad first got this epiphany that he wanted to pursue love.
’cause at the time he thought, he asked himself, do I love my team? Do I love my, the [00:06:00] people of my company? And he said. No, if I’m honest, I don’t. And so he went on this mission to practice loving and learn love. And so he did some weird stuff, you know, like he would go around the office, like all of a sudden he, the, one of the first things he did, he gathered everybody together in a, in a meeting.
And we thought this was because we’ve been doing so poorly, we’d just done layoffs and things like that. We assumed that this was kind of. The end. Yeah. This is the meeting of like world Yeah. The beginning of the end.
Gissele: Yeah.
Jeff: But he got everyone together and he said, I just want everybody to know that I’m not giving up.
I wanna fight. And I, and I love you all. And we were all just like, what is happening? Like, who is this man?
Gissele: Like, oh, what is going on with? It was person, she’s finally lost it.
Jeff: Yes. We thought he had gone off the deep end and what, what followed though for days, then weeks, then months, because we thought it might just been a flavor of the month, you know, or some sort of, he read a book and he wants to, you know, he’s just trying something out.
But
Gissele: yeah,
Jeff: what [00:07:00] started there and really hasn’t ended since was this really big shift in how. He looked at the world, but how he treated others, it wasn’t this night and day overnight, like he just transformed a different human. But he started doing a few things differently, just here and there. And then he would stick to that.
He would start like he, had classically brought this giant Tupperware of food that his wife would cook for him. His wife is an incredible cook and she makes this amazing stuff every day. He said he has this huge. Meal for lunch every day. But he started going around and just asking people around lunchtime, like if they had any food and if they didn’t, he would just like pour a huge portion of his food onto a plate and was like, you gotta eat this.
It’s really good. And it always was. But he would do this every day and I, I think he. Skip most lunches ’cause he gave away all his food every day. Or he would people would be working late trying to hit a deadline. And as they’re, as they’re finishing up, they look up and he’s still there and he ordered some like food or dinner or something to make sure people weren’t, he’d just still be there.
And he would leave [00:08:00] like notes. He left me like a handwritten note that. Expressed appreciation, not just for me, but also for my family. And he said, here, here. And he put like a, like, I think it was like a hundred dollars bill in there from his wallet. Oh wow. And it was all crumpled up ’cause it was in his wallet.
But he said, here, I want, I want the, this is for your wife and your kids. Can you, I wanna make sure that you spend it on them this weekend. I know how much you’ve been away from home this last, you know, and, and just stuff like little things like that. Really started. You know, changing, you know, our perception over time of just him and of, of him at the time, but not just him, we started kind of following suit.
We all started thinking, Hey, this, this is something that we can all practice and do together. And so it’s, it shifted our culture over time in a very, very potent way. I kind of forgot the question you originally asked as I went on this story. Oh, no, no. This
Gissele: is, this is, this is perfect. This is perfect.
Because I [00:09:00] think it, it goes to show that, that it’s contagious, right? Like fear is contagious. Hate is contagious. Love is contagious, right? And so if people start to demonstrate love, then that helps fill other people’s buckets, and then they have more to give. And so it sort of spreads.
And I’ve always been so curious how the leadership really sets the tone for the whole business. But that’s because people give their power away to the leadership. they determine that they’re going to follow suit, right? So if they stopped following suit, then the person would have no leadership whatsoever.
You have a group of people who choose to follow a specific individual, right? Yeah. And so for the longest time, I would see. Because I was in leadership, I was a director at a children’s aid and had been management for many, many years and saw how people, like, they had a little bit of the baby bird syndrome, which is like, tell me what to do, tell me how to act, right?
Mm-hmm. And so cultures [00:10:00] that help breed that independence, that, that upliftment are really, really powerful. And I think in this time of great upheaval. I would hope that we would be moving towards those kinds of cultures that help elevate everyone. What are your thoughts on currently what’s happening in the world in terms from a finance perspective, and what are some thoughts around how maybe this love culture could help us address some of them?
Jeff: Wow. It’s a big
Gissele: question. Yeah.
Jeff: Yeah. Jump, jump right into it. I, I wouldn’t consider myself. An expert in the field of economics and finance and world, especially at the world level, at the political level. Fair enough. And things like that. But love as a, an important factor in, in business has been a driving kind of passion because I believe that business as a whole is driving the world.[00:11:00]
And so if you’re talking about finance and we can get political, we can all this, but if, if you look at kind of what’s happening, ultimately, you know, money is, is power and it is, you know, the power follows the money. Money follows the power. And then you have, you know, to some extent, you have, you know, government officials and you have all these things and then you have.
The influence, right? You have the billionaires, you have the lobbyists, you have the special interests, you have money. That makes a lot of decisions at the end of the day. And so when it comes down to it, I think what businesses choose to do and how business cultures evolve, really impact the world at a scale that we don’t really appreciate, right?
Like,
Gissele: hmm.
Jeff: Like, yeah. Call it something simple like ethical business or morals. But really there’s more to it, I think. Mm-hmm. And I think it does come down to [00:12:00] change that’s needed, but what that looks like is yet to be determined and, and I think it’s, it’s gonna take time, but I don’t know that we all agree on what that looks like, what that needs to be yet.
And so I think the easy thing to do is to kind of. I guess stick to what we do know, which is, and I think, I think love is a pretty universal language and I think no matter what you believe and what you you fight for and kind of where you stand on different spectrums, I think there’s this universal, you know, binding that love creates.
When we access it and when we, when we allow it to. And I think that’s gonna be the key to us overcoming our differences and kind of the conflicts that are in play. Because I think these conflicts are necessary for us as a society and as a people of this earth.
Mm-hmm. To get through, but. You [00:13:00] know, I think people are, everyone’s looking for kind of a quick decision that everybody’s happy with something that happens, that everybody agrees with, that’s just not gonna happen.
Gissele: Mm-hmm. And
Jeff: so it’s gonna take work and I think that work is not something people are willing to do unless we are doing it out of love.
And so Right. You know, not a direct answer to your question, but definitely where I stand when it comes to those intersections.
Gissele: so speaking about the, the hard work that you have had to do as a culture for the company what sort of outcomes have you guys seen not only in your own company from using sort of the, the ethic of love, but also in the people that you’ve worked with and have coached?
Jeff: Yeah. So when it comes to the work that we actually did for ourselves and that we do for our customers and our partners today it come, it very much comes from this very intentional place of discomfort [00:14:00] when we talk about love. Earlier you called it a contagious element. We, we actually look at it as an environment that you create.
Mm-hmm. And so it’s not that it spreads so much as you create a space in which it is the norm and, and
Gissele: beautiful.
Jeff: We act, we actually learned this in a very interesting way. It’s because, you know, Mohammed He has a brother who manages our India office. We have an India, an office in India, and his brother Taj, he manages that side of the business.
And when I first visited India, I. I sat in a car that Taj drove. He drove me around, I think from the airport. And just for the first day, he drove me around. And what I learned about Taj Ray quickly was that he is a very, in my opinion, reckless driver. And I feared for my life at several times in those, in those car rides.
And, but to him, it’s nothing [00:15:00] right To him. It’s like, this is like, this is how I drive. This is normal. Mm-hmm. But to me it’s like, I feel like he’s doing donuts and, and, and this is like in India where there’s like, no. Roads or lanes and lights or signals. People are just everywhere. You’re surrounded by people.
Right. But he, he’s just driving like mm-hmm. However he wants. And so, yeah, I, you know, that’s, that was my experience. And then we had this aha moment because he was kind of known for that behavior. I. And then he visited the US and we decided, hey, let’s see how he drives on, on US roads to see if he, you know, how he pulls it off.
And then you know, he gets in and he like puts on his seatbelt and then he like drives to a stop sign and stops. And he looks both ways and he turns and uses his signal and we’re like, what is happening? I, we didn’t even know he knew he had a turn signal. ’cause that’s not used at all.
Gissele: Right.
Jeff: We realized that he, he had changed his behavior almost overnight.
Gissele: Mm-hmm. [00:16:00]
Jeff: And we, when we really asked why. It was, you know, because people often say you can’t, you know, people often just take a stance. Like you can’t really change behavior because you’re, you’re born a certain way. You’re raised a certain way. Yeah. It’s just how you are. And you know, he was born and raised in India the way and, and was taught to be able to drive that way.
But as soon as you enter an environment where it’s clear what the norms are, it’s clear what’s expected, it’s clear what’s right and wrong, or what others expect of you. It becomes much easier to change something, even if it’s not, you know, quote unquote natural to you. And it becomes natural to you when you spend time in that environment.
And so we went about on a mission to truly alter our environment, not just change a behavior here or there, but really how do we create environments that create change in the end, in in people for behavior, right? And so yeah, I thought I’d share that anecdote because I think that that’s similar to how we have to look at change in the [00:17:00] workplace and change at a global scale.
If we talk about culture, I think it’s imperative that we understand that we have to create this environment, and that doesn’t just mean kind of creating a policy or a rule or using new fancy words about culture. I think it really is this element of how we individually treat each other and having this consciousness of like what that, what impact that has on others.
Gissele: Yeah. Agreed. And it is an individual journey for us to change. Right. And so because individuals make up that culture, and so, like you said, putting a policy and procedure isn’t gonna change. You know, when you compare the policy versus the culture, the culture wins. Hands down. It doesn’t matter what policy you have.
Right. And I love that you said that, you know. A lot of this journey has to do with discomfort ’cause it’s very true. Some of the, the most uncomfortable things that we feel are sort of the path [00:18:00] towards growth. Right. Absolutely. What role do you feel fear has in sort some of the more negative business practices?
Jeff: All of it. Love as a business strategy was, was written as we told stories and came up with all of our philosophy around love as a business strategy. We, we had an inside joke that really like this alternate universe, kind of bizarro world, you know, inverse of love as a business strategy is love, is a, is fear as a business strategy.
Gissele: And
Jeff: basically like we wrote the book to try to counter that because fear from our perspective. Is the current business strategy. That’s what we’re trying to change, right? And so it shows up in everything. I mean, if you, if you just simply imagine you, anyone listening right now can do this. You can just picture somebody coming to you and saying, Hey, there was a meeting on the calendar yesterday we were all there.
You weren’t there. And like, they’re just letting you know [00:19:00] that you missed a meeting yesterday. Like. That moment in all of us invokes all kinds of feelings. And we don’t always recognize that it’s a source of fear. I mean, there’s the, there’s the pure, just like, oh, I’m gonna get fired. Kind of fear. Oh, I’m in trouble.
Fear. But there’s also like fear of letting people down. Fear of not living up to your own standards, right? Just fear. Fear of, you know, the impacts that that creates for others. There’s other types of fear that drive us and cause us to react and. I think that that fear also leads to us doing things like that discomfort that it creates it each time we face that fear.
We kind of are, are faced with a kind of fork in the road, if you will, just to simplify it. Obviously there’s more than two choices at any given time, but most of the time it gives us this choice of what we call choose your hard. So there’s this myth that. There’s an easy and there’s a hard, but the reality in life is that it’s all hard.
It’s just [00:20:00] hard and harder. And more times than not, the hard is right in front of you and the harder is the impacts and the consequence later if you don’t choose this hard. And so you’re, you’re often faced with this crossroad. Like for instance, in my example of missing a meeting, you know, the hard might be to, you know what?
I apologize, I missed this meeting. I messed up. Can we talk about it? Can we, can you help me understand like how to get back on track or what I, what I can do to make this right? The harder would be making excuses kind of like, you know, I. You know, kind of kicking the can down the road or some sort of, you know, just like deflection technique or any of these kind of tactics to just kind of make yourself feel safer.
Kind of like, whatcha you talking about? What meeting? Like, oh, like I didn’t, I didn’t do that. Someone else must have moved. Somebody must have, yeah. You know, and like all this deflection, but you know, the harder that you pay for it down the road First [00:21:00] of all, those tactics are usually seen right through, or, you know, people can, their BS meter kind of goes off and you don’t, you don’t form a relationship with this person or the team that’s necessary to overcome future mistakes and errors.
And so you become seen as less reliable. You become seen as someone who kind of skirts their way out of things and they’re not gonna rely on you. And you’d also missed out on an opportunity to really show vulnerability, show courage, and show leadership or whatever it is that you need to show in that space.
And so it might feel like you chose the more comfortable, you know, easier. Path in the moment, but there’s these little costs for it that we don’t realize that if we had chosen the hard, our future is much, much better. And the same is with especially true with conflict, which happens all the time. If personal conflict, relational conflict.
Within the workplace, it’s just, it’s just rampant. But we have built a culture where we’re [00:22:00] afraid to address those things and it’s not appropriate to address those things. It’s, it’s like nails on a chalkboard to imagine going up to our coworker and saying, Hey, I disagree. you know, like having a direct conversation about.
Something that, that feels like conflict is very uncomfortable. Feedback is hard. You know, telling someone that they, they did something wrong is just difficult. And so when you have all this built up environment, like I said earlier, environment that makes that difficult. Nobody does it and nobody wants to burst that bubble.
And everyone wants to smile and be happy, be happy and like be friendly. But nobody wants to be honest and nobody wants to like bring forth those realities. And we’re all choosing this hard right now. That’s. Down the road. This, you get thrust into change. You get thrust into conflict that can’t be avoided and nobody know.
Nobody has the relationships to get through that together. Nobody has the resilience to actually come together as a team and face it. Instead, we’re all busy. Deflecting, hiding, playing it safe. Yeah. And trying to point the [00:23:00] finger at somebody else and we fall apart and so. That’s just a, a critical piece.
This, this, that level of discomfort to practice that is a critical piece of what we practice and teach others. And what I do, I mean, it’s, it’s imperative. Being able to have these uncomfortable moments changes everything.
Gissele: Yeah. I think one of the things I learned when I was In leadership and in managing people for many years is that people don’t know how to emotionally regulate enough to stay in a conversation.
So what happens is that when somebody gives feedback, there’s all of these difficult feelings, like you were talking about, shame, guilt feelings of unworthiness, and people don’t know how to stay in that. Those feelings and how to like, you know, use compassion and use love to, to regulate themselves enough to know that, oh, it’s not personal.
so I, I’m gonna be able to receive this and then be able to process it. But I [00:24:00] don’t think that we have done enough work. I think we were raised by people that couldn’t regulate emotionally. And so we have a generations of individuals that don’t know how to emotionally regulate enough to have difficult conversations.
And I remember in my old workplaces, people didn’t wanna have those conversations and people weren’t truthful about things. But like you said, it’s a pay now pay later.
just thinking back on your journey in particular, what helped you lean into those difficult feelings? ’cause it can feel quite uncomfortable, like it can feel icky and yucky. What helped you be willing to work from that place?
Jeff: So, you know, discomfort is kind of my job nowadays, I think. Mm-hmm. Okay. As, as, as Culture Plus has grown and evolved, what I do most days is work with leaders, teams, and companies.
In [00:25:00] what we call experiences. But some call them, you know, if you want to really boil them down, they could be called workshops. But they’re very, they’re designed to. Be uncomfortable and to access those parts and practice. We call them culture practice workshops where we’re practicing that muscle of leaning into discomfort and it’s because that was the journey I had to go on.
I think, as I mentioned earlier, Mohamed, our CEO went on his own personal journey, but at no point in that early phase of his journey did he turn to us and say. Here’s what I’m doing. You guys need to do it too. Like you got, you’re a leader, so you also have to do this. He never did that. And in fact, that’s kind of why it worked, was he was very much just doing and showing and demonstrating and leading by example, and the rest of us started, you know, learning and following and growing in that way.[00:26:00]
But that journey included a lot of those conversations naturally, not, not as a. A mechanical kind of way to fabricate anything. It was just literally like if we’re gonna. If we’re gonna be loving, we have to learn to be honest. And so we had these tough love conversations mm-hmm. Where it’s like tough feedback given in a, in a way that’s as earnest as possible, but not avoided.
And we learned very quickly that that was the, that was the key because we hated it. It was very uncomfortable. And, and, and, but every time afterwards we felt, man, we really did grow a lot stronger after that. And I think we all know this, I think we all deep down know we could all name someone in our lives that we can have these kind of conversations with.
But they’re just not at work. You know, like, we’re just like, just not at work. Mm-hmm. When I go to work, I don’t want that. I just wanna do the work. I just want to go home afterwards and just like, go back to my family and I’ll, I’ll [00:27:00] do all that stuff there. And we’re just like, for some reason we’ve just gotten to this point where we’re like, just, we don’t want this at work when we get to work.
I just want like severance, you know, any severance fans, we. We just wanna like, yeah, like have
Gissele: your brain. this part of my brain’s gonna work, this part of my brain’s staying home.
Jeff: Yeah, but that, but that’s just crazy, right? That’s wild. That you go, ’cause we spend more awake hours at work than we do anywhere else in our lives with our families, with, you know, our friends, our loved ones.
Like we’re spending all of our, like most of our lives at the end, we have been spent with these coworkers and it’s like we don’t get to just. Divorce ourselves from these realities of our lives. If we’re having a bad day, it follows us into the workplace, and if we’re frustrated at work, it follows us back home.
So it just kind of doesn’t it just, when you really break it down, it doesn’t make sense to. Think that discomfort has no place in the workplace. Because if, yeah, if you ask anyone what they would want in, in the workplace is Harmony. You want everyone just to be harmonious and you pass [00:28:00] by. How are you?
Great, awesome. Hope you have a great weekend, and just all this stuff. And, but like underneath Harmony is always this like unspoken honesty. And people have a lot of honesty to give and know where to put it in the workplace. Nowhere to let it out, you know, like no one’s lying to each other at the workplace, but we’re definitely not telling the truth, if that makes sense.
There’s people who have annoyed us for years, and instead we go around talking about them in ways that we may not realize, you know, like, oh, we wanna get this done, maybe we should give to Gissele. It’s like, oh, well, let’s not give to Gissele, Gissele. You know, she can’t be, you know, you know, that’s just Gissele, you know, like, like, and it’s like we, we kind of, oh, that’s just Jeff.
That’s just Bob. You know, like these people we just frame them up as just, that’s just who they are and no one’s gonna talk to them. And. It just becomes this culture and this like gossip and this, this deeper thing that grows into something. When you look back, you’re like, oh my [00:29:00] gosh, this culture is is broken or horrible or something.
You can’t put your finger on why, and I’ll tell you, you can trace it generally back to just these little forks in the road, these little hards that weren’t chosen of just being. More honest and less harmonious. Like it’s okay if we all kind of get upset for a little bit here, because afterwards
Gissele: Yeah.
Jeff: humans are incredibly good at bouncing back from that and, and repairing what was broken to making it stronger. It’s like a muscle. You have to like tear the fibers to rebuild it stronger. Like that’s what we’re doing when we’re working out. We’re just tearing those muscle fibers. So we gotta do with relationships, you gotta break ’em down a little bit to, to uncover the strength inside them.
So.
Gissele: It’s easier to do that when it’s like micro things than waiting for it all to build up And I will say that I had this similar experience of what you were talking about. People were seen as one dimensional characters that they were never gonna change because they did something 20 years ago that nobody actually told them about, that people just kept [00:30:00] talking about them behind their back.
And I’m like, well, did anybody ever speak to them about it? Oh no. Even the work plans weren’t honest. Like they didn’t outline exactly what behavior they needed to see and what they were doing. They were just kind of theoretical.
And I’m like, well, how’s the person gonna change if they’re not gonna know exactly what it is? You expect them to do I truly believe in truth. Now, I do have a way in terms of how I communicate the truth, and I begin by giving the person the benefit of the doubt.
for example, it might not be your intention, but this is the impact of what you said. You may not have meant it, but this is, so I validate myself while I also give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they didn’t do it on purpose but that doesn’t matter because the impact is still. Whatever.
And so that, I find that that opens up the dialogue a little bit more, but it’s so interesting to observe how we are not talking to one another in the workplace because it just feels so uncomfortable. And I just wanna say one and more [00:31:00] thing, but what you had said earlier before, which is really thinking about
Vulnerability in, in coming together. We’re taught that professional means emotional distance, right? growing up we were taught that professionalism meant emotional distance, but my experience has been that the more we do that, the more we dehumanize other people because we’re not allowed to feel our emotions as difficult as it might be at work.
What has been your experience in terms of what may, be some other factors that lead to that dehumanization process?
Jeff: Well, I think I covered an example of the big one, which is just lack of honesty over harmony.
Jeff (2): Mm-hmm.
Jeff: I think this, this unspoken rule of. What you’re allowed to bring to the workplace is just, is just the big, the big killer.
But one of our six pillars, we have six pillars of love, and one of them is one that I think just never gets talking, spoken about, which is forgiveness. [00:32:00] Yeah. And, and you just don’t hear that word in the workplace. And everything we just kind of described is actually sourced in what we call unforgiveness.
Right? is that 20 year ago mistake. Yeah. That stays with you. And you know, as much as we want to like just call it, oh, that was a professional mistake, and whatever, There’s an element of unforgiveness built into that, that sentiment.
Mm-hmm. If, if we, if we truly loved and cared and, or, or you know what, even if we, we didn’t, but we just truly thought it was a professional work skill mistake, that’d be a very easy. Check the box. Here’s how you’re supposed to do it. Do it like this next time. Mistake that we could just correct and move on.
But the fact that it hangs with us for years and years and years, and it follows our reputation, means that there’s more to that story, right? There’s more to what happened, and there’s hurt feelings. There’s impacts that people haven’t gotten over, [00:33:00] and there’s assumptions about the person’s character or the person’s, you know.
All these things follow it, and they just go into these big balls of messy things. And, and what we don’t talk about enough is just forgiveness. Yeah. Like the ability to just, yes. Have the difficult conversation, but have it lead to moments of, you know what, like, I didn’t know that that’s where you’re coming from.
I didn’t know. And, and here’s where I’m coming from. And now that we can share that openly, you know what, maybe I can find it. In my heart to maybe understand you in a different way and try a different thing, like little steps towards forgiveness are never spoken about, but forgiveness, lemme tell you, is hidden behind like every dollar.
Made and lost. It’s hidden behind every decision in a boardroom. Mm-hmm. In a meeting. And like it’s hidden behind performance reviews and decisions on who gets what project. It’s hidden behind how meetings go and like how we, how much we enjoy our work. Like it’s all. Be really, [00:34:00] really deep behind the scenes, just hiding in the shadows because it’s just there.
And when you’re, when you go to work, you can, I mean, if we’re honest with ourselves, we, we can name a few people at work right now that we have some unforgiveness towards. Mm-hmm. Whether it’s intentional by them or not, we wouldn’t know unless we talk about it. But in our minds, we have it all laid out. I mean, that’s the power of the human storyteller is that we’re just built to be these.
You know, historically we’ve, we’ve evolved as a species because of our ability to tell stories about how we mm-hmm. We’ve, we’ve written them down, we turn ’em into movies. We’re in credible storytellers. And when we don’t have all the facts, that same skill turns into the ability to assume and to fill in the blanks.
And, you know, you know, we have, we have data point A, we have Data point E, and somehow we can tell you exactly what BC and D are. Even if we have no proof, evidence or, you know, testimony around it. And so that’s what happens in the workplace. Like I said, we spend more time with these people than anybody else.
Of course, things are gonna [00:35:00] happen, you know, conflicts arise and all these different, you know, scenarios that come across daily. If we’re not trying to have an active, you know, level of forgiveness with each other, we are going to fall and slip into. Spaces of distance and stuff, like, it’s much easier to just stick to, you know, I’m the boss, so I’m just gonna make these decisions.
If you don’t like it, then just deal with it. Just work. You know? I don’t, you know, no, no tears allowed, no feelings allowed. But the reality is sometimes, you know, like that decision you made just made, made me feel unvalued. It made me feel hurt, and it made me feel like what I do here doesn’t matter. And.
Like being able to say that out loud and then being able to have someone respond to it and say. Whatever it is they need to say. I mean, that’s a different conversation to have at work, but let me tell you, from that point on, [00:36:00] you’ll work very differently together and we have this fear that it’ll go really bad.
Like, oh my gosh, you’re gonna get into a big fight. But I find that while that may be true, there is, I’m not gonna say there’s no chance that things don’t escalate mm-hmm. Into something uglier more often than not. We learn something about each other and we find a more common ground because we were willing to be genuine and vulnerable and courageous with each other.
We respect each other more for it, but we’re just, we’re just so scared of that. Let’s call it arbitrarily, 1% chance that, you know, things will blow up into a, into a massive fallout. That we hold back and, and then, like you mentioned earlier, it does blow up one day because it can only go so long. Yeah.
And then there’s your data point there. That’s why people don’t wanna speak up. ’cause they’re like, oh, that, that blew up and that blew up. Yeah. And that blew up. But they don’t realize that all these blow ups are like big old time bombs. And if you just let it, if you just let it go, if you just practice it every day, [00:37:00] you’ll never have the blow up.
You’ll just have constant little, little uncomfortable moments that build stronger bonds. So. I love that.
Gissele: Yeah.
Jeff: Again, again, I rambled, forgot the question, but there you go.
Gissele: No, no. I think you answered it perfectly. I love that you talked about forgiveness, because at least the majority of workplaces that I had worked at, like that wasn’t even on the radar the way that.
Conflict was managed, or mistakes were managed with usually punitive approaches. It was like sort of like, you know, three strikes and you’re out or there’s, but people don’t learn from that. They only see themselves as victims, right? Like they don’t see how the impact of their behavior or their mistake, it doesn’t leave room for growth.
It only leads more fear, meaning that, that people then become afraid of making a mistake, and then they’re more likely to hide mistakes so they don’t see how it’s all interconnected, right? Yes. If I use punitive approaches, [00:38:00] then people are not gonna be honest. They’re going to try to hide stuff, and they’re more likely to make mistakes.
And so, and that’s in the medical literature, the more likely that, like for example, doctors were able to be honest about mistakes, the more likely that patients were to forgive and not necessarily sue, and then get to some resolution. But it’s interesting how we’ve gotten so far away from that humanity in the workplace.
It’s, Fascinating. you mentioned vulnerability a couple of times. People don’t like to be vulnerable. How do you get your clients to kind of get past that fear being vulnerable?
Jeff: Well, I think vulnerability is one of the, one of the hardest things to do. And at the same time, one of the easiest things I think that a leader can do, like when you say, where can I start?
What should I do first? My first thing, like, just go be vulnerable first. It’s one of the easiest things you can do right now. Everyone can right now go be vulnerable and. [00:39:00] One core thing of being vulnerable is just recognizing your own, your own weakness. I think sometimes we feel like vulnerability is gonna require some sort of huge, deep outpouring of our deepest, darkest secret or some sort of re big reveal.
Mm-hmm. But vulnerability is sometimes is just, Hey, I, I don’t know the answer to this. I need help.
Gissele: Yeah.
Jeff: I messed, I messed up like. That’s so hard to say in the workplace that I, mm-hmm. I messed up. That’s my fault. Because it’s like, why would I admit to that? Why? Like I’d rather find all the reasons why I made the right decision and it just happened to be somebody else.
It happened to be some situation, or it’s the economy or whatever it is, right? Yeah. But to just, just straight out say like, I made a mistake, period. No excuses, no other like things and be real about it. To genuinely share that, that’s the very core of vulnerability. Mm-hmm. And you can practice that today.
And like I said, it’s hard as hell.
Gissele: Yeah,
Jeff: nobody wants to do that. But it’s [00:40:00] also very easy. It’s like straightforward. It’s like there’s no other steps to it. It’s like, step one, admit your mistake, step two, nothing else. Like you’re done. And, and so, you know, when it comes to practicing that or helping others practice that, I think you have to everything that all, a lot of our fears are rooted in belief.
I. They’re rooted in, if I say this, then I believe that they are gonna respond this way. And, and our beliefs are, are, you know, they’re scientifically like, kind of evolutionarily built into us to protect us. Like I, I believe that if I, you know, leave my front door open, then I’m inviting danger and strangers into my house.
Which is not safe. Like we have beliefs that are good for us, but we also have beliefs that are no longer serving us that we hang on to. And I think. That that’s what comes into play. That’s what comes in the way of vulnerability [00:41:00] being more practiced, more regularly, is that we have beliefs that if we, if we show that side of ourselves, we’ll be judged, that we’ll be criticized, that we’ll be ostracized or wherever it is.
Those are formed in beliefs, and so science has shown that the way to change a belief. Is through experiences like our beliefs are formed through experiences, something’s happened to us. We’ve experienced something that creates that belief. So the way to change it is you can’t just tell people, Hey, you’re wrong about your belief.
they have to experience something different. And so that’s why we do what we do actually like our cultural practice workshops. And it really, everything we do, we never, that’s, we never go and just say, here, here’s step one, step two, step three, here’s all the things you’re doing.
Like, it is never like that. It’s, it has to be a real experience. And so if I’m helping a leader really access vulnerability, we’re gonna be genuinely bringing up conflicts that exist. Like currently and then [00:42:00] having you, like you and your colleagues address it and we’ll coach you through it. Like we’ll be there to moderate it and to show you that it give you kind of a safer, safer way to get through it.
Gissele: Mm. But when
Jeff: you get through it and realize, oh wow, I just talked about something, I’ve been really, I was never gonna talk about that ever. I would take that to my grave, but I just said it out loud and it was received and I’m alive. We can all be adults about it and we can all appreciate it. That’s when you start unraveling this belief like, oh, so it’s not the end of the world.
Like, and I do feel a lot better getting it off my chest and I really respected how they responded. Like these little experiences we have then start chipping away at these beliefs we have until you can get to a point where, you know what, and it’s never gonna get easy. Just just to be clear.
Vulnerability will never be easy. But you do at least get to a point where you recognize that it’s worth, it’s worth the work and it, it is the easier of the hards to [00:43:00] choose at, at at any given time, and that’s where we want to get to. Right. A a strong culture is one, not one that’s perfect and happy and rainbows and butterflies all the time.
A strong culture is one that’s actually kind of tough, rough around the edges and kind of raw and real. So the strongest cultures are those who are like kind of in it, kind of, you know? Mm-hmm. Going at it at times. But because that’s because we’re unwilling to let those things kind of just sit idly and become unforgiveness, we will fight for a good culture and that, that takes work.
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jeff: Yeah. And
Gissele: it takes courage. Yeah.
Jeff: A lot. Yes.
Gissele: as we’re coming to the end I wanted to talk about leadership. Because the model that we have, at least that I grew up with was that power over, you know, like doesn’t show, errors and mistakes. And I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing sort of dying off.
what is your perspective on what real power is and how has [00:44:00] that changed over time?
Jeff: Right. So power has been categorized into two different types. there’s personal power and then there’s, oh god, gosh, I forgot the term itself. Is it
Gissele: systemic?
Jeff: It’s like, okay, I don’t wanna hang on too long to it. But basically, yeah, that’s okay. The two types of power, there’s there’s, there’s power that you can wield. Because you’re given it. And if you were to lose that title, position authority, you no longer have the power. And then there’s personal types of power, which they follow you wherever you go.
Like they are part of you. They can’t be taken away from you. Right. And, and I think it’s really important to understand that power is not good or evil on its own. Mm. It is not inherently flavored in one way or the other. It’s like a hammer. You can use it to destroy something or you could use it to build something as well.
Mm-hmm. And it’s how we use power that creates this idea of, of, you know, good, bad leadership and all this other stuff, [00:45:00] right? Mm-hmm. And so on one end of the power spectrum, you have like coercive power, reward power, legitimate power. Like, you know what I’m the CEOI have the power to fire, hire, and fire and give bonuses and all this other stuff.
And this is that power that you know, you can wield. Good or evil, right? You can say, yeah, you can use it in ways that are not too good or you can use it in ways that really healthier, unhealthy, really. Yeah. Yeah. But then you have these personal types of power, and I think this is where leadership is. I.
It’s just been missing for a very long time. So when we talk about bringing humanity back to the workplace and you look at leadership, we’re looking at, we’re looking to try to build a generation or you know, a future of leaders where this is the type of power that’s valued, expected, and wielded in the right way more often than the others.
There’s always a place for those legitimate types of power. But the personal has of power, which is like your expertise and your, your influence, [00:46:00] right. your power to be influential and it’s called Referent Power, essentially, which is where people follow you because you know, like you’re a leader because you’re followed A lot of times when we work with a lot of businesses, yeah, we don’t, we don’t call their their managers leaders.
We say they’re managers because leaders. Leaders have to be followed. Like you have to earn leadership. And that, that’s because this referent power comes by way of essentially being liked, if you will. But basically respected and followed for who you are and how you hold yourself and how you handle situations,
Sometimes we have a problem at work or some sort of thing that, and we’ll call up a, we’ll call up a friend or we’ll call up a trusted, mentor that has no expertise or knowledge in the situation at all. But we really wanna hear what they have to say about it. And that’s kind of reference power at work because you want, you wanna follow kind of what they think and feel about it because you respect them in that way and you feel that way about them.
[00:47:00] And this type of power, again, can be good or evil. Just to be clear, it’s, not inherently good or bad. Yeah. There’s referent power, you know, if you look at like mobs or mean girls, if you watch that movie yeah, that’s, that’s referent power and play cliques and like, you know, things used in like bad ways.
In fact, some of the, some of some of your worst culture kind of situations might have some reference power in play in terms of. People who are causing this toxic culture to get worse and worse because they are kind of rallying people through leadership, through this power to be more toxic, to be more gossipy, to be more, you know, all that.
So I. I think understanding these types of power is super important as a leader. And to ask yourself, I have to ask myself this all the time. What type of power am I wielding at any given time in a situation? Yeah. And, and I think we’ve gotten really comfortable at just wielding our kind of big coercive reward.
Like, like sometimes we feel [00:48:00] like, oh, I want culture to get better. So instead of doing coercive power, I’m gonna do. Reward power, and it’s like that ’cause that’s so much better. But reward power can just as easily be kind of abused, misused. Mm-hmm. It has terrible outcomes. Sometimes it could be good, but yeah.
It doesn’t make it like, it doesn’t make, doesn’t change culture if that’s still the type of power people are following. What really morphs culture is when people start, kind of like in my example with Mohamed like behaving differently, showing up differently, treating people differently. Hmm. You know, you think of someone when you start thinking of someone as a human and thinking of ’em differently.
Now you’re talking about real impacts and real changes. Because I don’t just view it as a job anymore. I view it as a relationship. I view it as, as a team, as coming together and really, really working together. And that, I mean, that that changes everything. Everything, everything.
Gissele: Yeah. When Mohammad became the lighthouse, right?
People followed, right? Yes. Like through his behavior, [00:49:00] his willingness to change, and he became that lighthouse that other people went, Hey, wait a minute. I’d like to be like that lighthouse. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So a couple more questions. The first one is, what is your definition of love? The unconditional love or love?
Sometimes people get stuck on the word unconditional. So what’s your definition?
Jeff: Ooh. I had a whole, on my podcast, I had a guest that came and did a whole. A whole episode on definition of love, and I learned a lot because love is a super loaded word that we use in English to mean a lot of different things.
Whereas he was bringing about, like in, in like Greek, there’s like, and I, I forget, I have to go back and look, but there’s, I think there’s like six, six or seven words for love Be depending on what, like there’s the love for like a, it’s agape. Like a romantic love. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Agape
Gissele: arrows.
Yeah.
Jeff: Yes, there’s, and it’s like all these, there’s like the friendship type love. Mm-hmm. There’s the love of like a food or like a, like a activity. And [00:50:00] so when we say love, just to be clear, we are not talking about the romantic, obviously we’re not talking about all that. But what we are talking about is, and the reason we use our sports story as an analogy is because this love is doing things out of care for others.
And if you look at some of the strongest. Like sports team analogies, those real like gritty winning teams, it’s because those players go out in the field to fight for each other. Not for themselves or some other purpose, right?
Gissele: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jeff: And, and you know, a lot of people are like, oh, I love, you know, my workplace is pretty cool.
We are like, you know, we’re like a family and I cringe. I’m like, Hmm. Yeah. Because I’m like, Ooh, is that what you want though? Because we don’t get to pick our family, you know? We don’t get to choose. We don’t get to leave. Like
Gissele: Yeah. Families can be dysfunctional.
Jeff: Yeah. Families can be very dysfunctional.
Mm-hmm. and that’s where you’re like, you’re almost obligated into a family. You’re stuck in a family at [00:51:00] times. But then you look at like a team where we choose to be there. We tried out to be there. We earned our spot there, and then we have a common goal and we look to our left and our right, and we are pulling each other forward together.
That kind of love and care, putting each other your heart in, you know, someone else’s hands. That’s the kind of love we’re talking about. I know I’m getting very like. Philosophical about it. Not, oh, it’s great. It’s not concrete. But that’s the kind of love that we’re talking about because that kind of love also includes accountability.
Yeah. And I think that’s super important in in, because when we first went on our journey to try to figure out love. Man, we swung that pendulum so far the wrong way. It just became, for a moment, it was like just nice. It was just being nice and soft and quote unquote care caring all the time. So if someone, someone had a little cough, oh, oh, we love you.
Please go home. You know, go home. You’re sick, we’ll take care of it from here. Just go, we love you. Oh my [00:52:00] gosh. And then they go home and we look around, we’re like, do any of you know how to do that person’s job? I don’t know how to do that job. And then we all just fail together. That’s not love, you know, that’s sympathy.
But then we learn that real love is actually, you know what? Like we have to have tougher conversations. We have to be a little more real to each other, and that takes more than just, you know, soft gushy feelings.
Gissele: Yeah, absolutely. Love that. Authenticity is love. Love us. Yes. Yes. So final question. Where can people find you?
Where can people work with you? What do you wanna share with the audience about your work? Sure.
Jeff: Absolutely. If you enjoyed my voice for whatever reason, you can hear as much of it as you want. I. At Love and the Love as a business strategy podcast, which is available in all major podcasting. But if you wanna also learn more about what we’re doing, you can go to love as the strategy.com because we are, we have Love as a business strategy, which is our first wall Street Journal [00:53:00] bestseller.
But later this year, I don’t know when you’ll be posting this, but basically October of 2025, we should be coming out with Love as a Change Strategy, which is our next, it’s our follow up to the book, and we’re very proud of that. A lot of really good stories in that one. So follow along. For those books you wanna check out, go loveasastrategy.com to check out like information on both of those.
And if you’re interested in kind of just the actual work we do, if you’re like a business interested in kind of finding out more about the programs and practicing culture with us, you can go to culture-plus.com, which is weird ’cause it’s like culture minus plus.com. But it’s, it’s
Gissele: it’s culture.
Jeff: Plus do com.
Mm-hmm. Dot com. So yeah, check us out. You can find me on LinkedIn or anything. And I, I hope, I hope to hear from some of you.
Gissele: Yes. Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your wisdom. And thank you for tuning into another episode of the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. Have a great day.
Jeff: Thank you.