Human-Centric Work & Leadership with Leanne Holdsworth

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork Podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human- centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Interested in transforming your workplace into a more empathetic and innovative environment? This episode offers crucial insights you don't want to miss. Dane engages in conversation with Leanne Holdsworth, an influential figure at Cultivating Leadership and the mind behind the book, A New Generation of Business Leader, which explores the role of social responsibility in modern business. Listen closely as they dive into three pivotal topics. Explore open hiring, an unconventional recruitment approach designed to minimize discrimination and create a more inclusive workplace. Decode the five leadership mindset Leanne identified through her comprehensive research. These paradigms could redefine how your teams collaborate and thrive. Finally, learn about the deep framework, a methodology Dane advocates for designed to foster innovation without excessive control while preserving the essential human elements that make a team effective. So teamwork makes the dream work, and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team, put on your headphones, and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork Podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of the HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm joined by Leanne Holdsworth from New Zealand. So one of my neighbors of sorts. Leanne is the co- author of Human Work and she's an advocate for human work. So we were just talking about bringing that human- centered leadership, human- centric leadership to teams, and I'm excited to have this conversation today. So welcome, Leanne.

Leanne Holdsworth: Hey, Dane, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be speaking to somebody from just over the ditch who happens to be living in the US. Great to be here.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, you bet. So what was it that brought you to be passionate about doing this work in this field? It's really timely. There's a lot going on. How did you get into it?

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah, thanks, Dane. Well, I love that open question because the thing that I care most about is that we live in communities that care for each other. And so I have a background in the corporate world, and so something that I know about is how organizations work. And I can speak the language of the corporate world. Each stakeholder group has its own language, and I can speak that language and I'm conscious about the level of influence and power that organizations, businesses, in particular, can have on our communities because of the size, the economic might as we bring the collective of businesses together. And so given I care about our communities and people having what they need and children being taken care of and the wellbeing in our communities, I think how might we be able to leverage the power of organizations and particular businesses to be able to contribute towards those kinds of social outcomes? And so it's from that lens that I've come to this idea of human work and I'm really most curious about if we all just nudged our workplaces just a tiny bit towards making them more human, what impact might that have on families and on communities when the human being gets to leave work at the end of the day feeling a little bit better about who they are and therefore are less likely to go home and kick the cat?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's very true. And I've personally... My wife and I actually have to think very intentionally about the bad days I have at work and how I transition into the house because it's not that someone's a bad person, but when you carry home a lot of stress and strain, you can walk into a really excited child running to welcome you or a partner in a stressed conversation. And you can certainly not be there for them at a very important moment. So I think that's a really good call to action.

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah, I think there's something around who you are as a human when you walk into the home at the end of the day. And there's also something about how a workplace can enable us to learn and grow to be the best versions of ourselves we can be too. And so it's not just about who we walk into the home at the end of the day to be. That's fundamentally important, but it's also this thing about as individuals, can we continue to grow and lean some more into our own sense of personal purpose to be able to be impactful in the world to contribute towards more collective outcomes. And I might just jump in here, Dane, and just say that I have the privilege of living in a country where we have, as Pakeha, that's what we call ourselves as those who are not indigenous to this country. So my ancestry goes back to England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but I live in a country where the indigenous folk, Maori people, have more of a voice than some other indigenous communities in other countries. And so although there's an enormous amount of decolonization still to be done here in New Zealand, inaudible, I learned so much from the worldview that is different to my very western worldview, which is quite individualistic. So I learn a lot from my Maori friends, from teachers in the Maori world, from those in the Pacific nations, like I spent a year living in the Pacific Islands in Niue, but it could have been Fiji or Samoa or Tonga or any of those countries. There's just such a much greater sense of collectivism that exists. And I think that if we can learn a little bit more about that, we can hold this idea of it's not just about the individual growing, but it's about the impact that individual growth can have for others as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that a lot actually. I've always enjoyed my time with a lot of the Pacific Islander communities through the rugby community, and you see it on the sidelines. It's a real day out. It's a community event. There's stalls, there's food where a lot of the other parents are just sat there watching their kid and it's different. And I'm intrigued. Maybe if you could expand a little bit more on what you're seeing there, particularly in New Zealand with the Maori culture, what do those social outcomes look like if a company is leading well and if some of those individuals are coming back to their communities and able to leverage that power that whether it's a balance sheet, whether it's information, whether it's resources, are there any good examples that you've seen there that show one plus one equaling three?

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah, beautiful question. Well, one of the challenges that we have with the book is that we wanted it to be as diverse as possible. So Human Work, the book has been influenced by 11 leaders that we interviewed from around the world. And so, one of those leaders was from here, from inaudible New Zealand, and the other 10 were from the Philippines, the Netherlands, the US from all around the world. And we really wanted to get this very, very diverse group of voices so that we actually didn't end up with a narrow story. And we got to learn from leaders in very, very different contexts. So the leader that we interviewed from New Zealand, her name is Janice Lee, and she's the founder and CEO of a social enterprise here in New Zealand called Koha Kai. She is the leader in the book that has the smallest organization and yet has this impact in the community in such an extraordinary way. And so just the way that she brings more human work into her organization is that she, it's deeply in the foreign language, the purpose of the organization that she provides opportunities for people in the disabled community to be able to have meaningful work and actually learn how to take care of themselves by cooking. And so Koha Kai makes school lunches, for instance, does a whole heap of cooking with a sector of the community that often doesn't feel like they belong. And so that's just an example of that more collective way of seeing things. And then another leader that we interviewed, Joseph Kenner, you might have heard of him, he's the CEO of Greyston Bakery. They're the makers of the brownies for Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, wow, I didn't know that.

Leanne Holdsworth: So they also have a model that is very connected to community in terms of human work. It's not just about what happens to the employees inside, but it's about how that ripple effect impacts their communities. And so they have this model of employment, which it's called open hiring. And so this model of open hiring, the body shop are using it now. But basically anyone can come along and put their name on the list to become, what do you call it? Have a opening job, someone who's working on the floor for Greyston Bakery, and they don't need to provide a CV, they don't have an interview. It's like the next person on the list gets the job. So that means that if you're just out of prison, if you're a solo mom and you've been out of the workforce for 15 years, anything, you are guaranteed to get a job. And so yeah, it's not just about this idea of what we do for our people inside work, but it's also like where's the boundary between inviting people in and creating a bit more belonging in community just because of how you employ and who you employ.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, they're both great examples because you're right, and this ripple effect, this word that you're using there, I think that's really true. And it's important because work opportunities to work, opportunities to come and connect with others are far more critical currencies for a lot of families than just the paycheck. Now, I know that sounds odd. Hey, you need to get paid to pay your rent and buy food, et cetera, et cetera. But the reality is a lot of hiring practices, going back to that open hiring piece, have got so much bias and discrimination in- built. And if you're going with an open hiring policy, then it truly is merit- based. Hey, turn up, let's see how you perform. Let's see where you grow to. And I think in a world where learning is becoming more accessible through technology, I think it's going to be really important for communities to realize, well, who's here and how do we activate and engage our community members to be part of this organization, whatever the organization is, for profit or not, and how do we continue to grow as a community rather than these individuals and bringing people in who aren't really contributing in the wider sense.

Leanne Holdsworth: I mean, I love what you're saying inaudible. The reason for that in particular at the moment is as we think about the impact of AI and the ways in which people will either be in or out of the workforce for the future, how are we thinking broadly as a society about people being able to receive the benefits of belonging in a workplace which are not going to be satisfied by having some universal basic income? I think the future of work and the way in which we think about human work are massive intersections, and we've only just begun to scratch the surface.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it is early. It's funny, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he said, when we met in March last year, so 14, 15 months ago, he hadn't really heard the phrase future of work. I was telling him about the podcast and our view there. And then he said, now that he's known me for a year, he sees it everywhere. But it is only just starting to catch. I think COVID accelerated us, and you make a good point, AI is both potentially a benefit, a resource to allow more people access to more skills and more types of work. But it could also be a huge obstacle if workforce has become automated and you've got more robots and more technologies in there and less people actually interacting to get the work done. It does raise some existential crisises for certain communities.

Leanne Holdsworth: And so many of these things hitting communities, lower socioeconomic communities more harshly than those more economically resourced.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, we've actually got a show soon to release. We had John Boudreaux come on as a guest, and he talks a lot about the disaggregation of work. And his story is wonderful because he talks about his father who used to work for IBM doing the blue collar work, actually going in and bug fixing in the big mainframe computers not feeling like he was really given the opportunity, the recognition that lets say the salespeople at IBM who sold those units got. And so John's genesis story there in life, seeing how his dad was experiencing work to now has led him to be very focused on, well, who's out there engaging these new technologies to improve the experience of blue collar work communities? And I think that's really important because it's not always where people are going to point the technology because knowledge base work is far easier to disrupt. There's already a lot of data there. But if you do it in the right way, going back to that ripple effect, you've got to think that you create much more lift, much more marginal benefit for every minute of time or dollar of resource that you pour into those exercises.

Leanne Holdsworth: So much for us to contemplate over the next few years, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: Much. So we've gone down a rabbit hole there on ripple effect, and we'll come back to that towards the end. But tell me a little bit more about the book. So you talked about these 11 leaders that you went out and interviewed. For those listeners that are looking for a snapshot of what's presented in the book, what were the key findings, key themes that excited you all as you moved through that project?

Leanne Holdsworth: Well, I think one of the most surprising things that we learned from the project was that we thought that we might end up with a book that might help people know, well, you do this and then you do this, and then once you've done that, then you do this and then you're done. I mean, okay, we didn't think it was ever going to be that simplistic, but have a bit more of a sense of, well, how do you do this thing about make organizations more human? How do you do it? And the thing that was most surprising is that out of those 11 stories of leaders who are very intentionally creating human workplaces, their approach to doing that was all so different. And so what we noticed was that there tended to be some mindsets that they either had in common or that were a number of them held. And I've thought about those mindsets really almost like as doorways in to how do you make work more human? And for some of the leaders, they talked about this way in, like it's the way. Like, " Oh, found the way to be able to make work more human." And then the next leader would be like, " Oh, I found the way." And then the next leader would be like, " Well, I'm trying this. I'm not sure how it's going to work. And I tried this. That didn't seem to be." So we ended up with these five mindsets that seem to be helpful from these leaders, and therefore we are sharing them with the reader to be able to say, look, if you are curious about being able to make some moves towards making your organization more human, play with these mindsets. And so those five leadership mindsets that we saw playing out across these leaders, the first one was learning and growth. There was a group of leaders who tended to come through this door of, Bob Keegan calls them deliberately developmental organizations, organizations that are really intentional about creating spaces for humans to grow from a vertical development perspective. So there's a group of leaders that really come in through that door. And then there's this mindset of love and care. There were leaders who spoke about the human being in front of them in the workplace, having a relationship with that human being that helped with this mindset of how would I like somebody, I loved a child, a parent, a sibling, a friend, how would I like that person to have a work experience? What would I like that person to have had a work experience to be like, right? And so then imagining the human being in front of them being somebody who was just deeply loved by someone. And so that generating the sense of real care and compassion for the human being in front of them, not like they were treating them, they were someone that they deeply loved, but knowing that they were loved by somebody, right? And so I loved hearing stories from leaders who were really talking about electrifying across the organization this concept of care for each other. And then we had leaders who came in the doorway of everyone's a leader. In other words, how can we give as much decision- making as possible to those who are experiencing the impact of the decision? Yep. Yeah, I think you talk about this quite a bit, Dane. Yeah,

Dane Groeneveld: I love everyone to leader. It really invites people in and makes them realize that you believe in their passion, their key skills, what they're excited about doing. And I think using your word from earlier, electrifying, I think if you get that right, if you can stand behind the slogan of it, then it's massively powerful.

Leanne Holdsworth: Massively. And one of the leaders told us a story about a hotel chain. It wasn't their story, but the leader who shared the story is Bob Chapman. Bob Chapman is the CEO of Barry- Wehmiller in the US and Barry- Wehmiller have been doing this truly human leadership idea for years and years and years. I went and studied there maybe five years ago, and they invite people in to come and learn from them about what they're learning about truly human leadership. So they've had a lot of experience, they've tried a lot of things. And he shared with us a story about a hotel that was the CEO came in on a Sunday for some reason, and he started to have a conversation with one of the cleaners, the... What do you call them in the US?

Dane Groeneveld: Janitor.

Leanne Holdsworth: Janitor, okay. One of the janitors. And he was asking her about why she was working on a Sunday. He doesn't normally work on a Sunday. It was a bit like, " How come you're here?" And she said, " Well, the rosters get made and I'm rostered on, and I'm quite often rostered on a Sunday." And he asked her, " What would you be doing if you weren't working on a Sunday?" And she said, " I'd be taking my mum to mass, to church." And he said, " Well, what would you prefer to be? Presumably you'd prefer to be doing that." And she said, " Well, yes I would, but I'm rostered on, so here I am." And so he went away Monday morning, he went, sat down with the senior team and he said, what I want is I want to know that those janitors have a say and when they work, I don't care how we do it, but this is ridiculous. They've all got different needs and different types. Why we centralizing this decision- making.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a powerful story too. And it actually ties into what John Boudreaux and I were talking about last week, which is giving people agency in certain roles, frontline roles like a janitor or a pharmacy worker, where you always need to be there for a customer at certain times and certain shifts is difficult, but one of the things you can give them is some autonomy over their scheduling. That's a really important way to be human.

Leanne Holdsworth: I love that, Dane, that you're pointing to this idea that there's so many folk who are not frontline who we are having this conversation about hybrid work and whether we're working in the office or away from the office. And for those of us with the privilege to be able to do that, that's fantastic. But for those many, many folk who are not in that situation, as you say, how can you give them some autonomy?

Dane Groeneveld: There was actually a story of CVS here in the US, one of the larger pharmacy stores, and what they worked out is that they can't give people a lot of autonomy. But if you're in New York and you want to go and work in Florida in the winter, you're already trained in how to work in their systems, you're already a badged employee. If you can find your way to Florida, then you can work for a couple of months there and pick up shifts and still frontline work, but you're giving them just that little bit of agency and how they do it.

Leanne Holdsworth: That's beautiful. So then I've talked about three other mindsets that we learned about. So that was learning and growth. Everyone's a leader in love and care. And then the other two that we heard was one was belonging. And I already shared with you a couple of stories, one from Janice Lee and one from Greyston Bakery, about this idea of how do you create belonging not just in the organization but as it butts up against the community? So this idea of belonging, which includes authentic diversity and inclusion moves, but it's more than that, it's more than that. It's like those, how might I inadvertently be creating exclusion by where I sit at lunchtime? By the kind of folk that I continually go to have conversations with? Where are there opportunities for me as a leader to be able to broaden out who I say hello to? Who I invite into particular projects? Like this inclusion- exclusion idea becomes like you see opportunities for it everywhere once you start playing with this mindset of belonging. And then the final mindset was or is human systems. And this mindset was a mindset that we didn't hear a lot of leaders talk about. And it's something that we are really active about in our organization cultivating leadership. And it's really holding two ideas. One is complexity theory. When we are dealing with human beings, we tend to be in the complex domain, and yet how often we try to look for linear solutions to things to do with people. And it is generally just not like that. And I sat down with a client last week, had two days with them where they invited me into help them understand a bit more about the results from an employee engagement score. And they're pretty much looking for an action plan. Like, " Well, we've got these scores, so what's the thing we should do? And then what should we do after that?" And so it's just such a joy to be able to work with an organization like that who's open to learning about, well, actually what we know about working in complexity is we can't plan, predict and control these things. Actually we are working with humans. So what we need to do is try things. We need to experiment, we need to gather some different perspectives, we need to ask some different questions. How do you deal with the realm of complexity? And when we are talking about making work more human, we're in the realm of complexity. So really thinking about our systems and how well we hold the complexity of the human being and the complex adaptive system that is an organization. So there's that idea with human systems. And then there's the other idea, which is, and how human are our systems anyway? Do we want to take some stuff away? Have we become so bureaucratic that we've added and added and added and we've forgotten to say, if we were really truly human, might there be some things we might want to take away here?

Dane Groeneveld: I've always thought about that. When you go back to industrial revolution and where we took these cottage craft industries where people made something they were really proud of and then we said, " Hey, you are no longer making the basket. We just want you to make the handle." And how does someone feel about sitting there having to punch out 10 handles a day rather than one basket a day when they can actually compare their work against a fellow basket weaver or whatever it might be? We did take away a lot of the fun, a lot of the measurement and meaning of work for a lot of people that was fairly, not inhuman, but it was dehumanizing some of the work.

Leanne Holdsworth: I think you're really onto something, Dane, in terms of this idea of meaning. Yeah, Dan Pink's work on motivation, which helps us understand that there's autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Help us become motivated. And there's a group that's not very well known, but this outfit from the UK called Human Givens, and it helps us understand a little bit more about the things that we need as humans to really thrive. And this idea of being able to have some sense of meaning or purpose and what we do, and I think it's just a matter that's far too simplistic. I think that we suffer from a lack of imagination and many, many times of not being able to really help our people tie in what we do to the impact that we make in the world. We just haven't thought it through enough because so many organizations now are really purpose- driven, but we haven't done a great job always of helping somebody at a barbecue on a Saturday night talk about what they do with a sense of meaning that can get lodged on them.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, you're right. Talking about complexity. We've created so much complexity by the breakdown of tasks that we all do that no one really knows how their task ends up in the hands of a customer that appreciates what's been done. It's all just, am I serving an internal customer, an external customer? Does someone just look at my work every day and tear up half of it and which parts are they picking? Feedback's a big problem in a lot of businesses. So this concept of human systems is really interesting. And I think going back to AI, which you touched on earlier, one of the promises of AI is that it can take humans out of the dehumanized work. All of a sudden you don't have to be sitting there key entering numbers into a payroll spreadsheet because you could actually be having conversations with people, or you could be looking at solving a system architecture problem because you know about the data that goes in, but you're not key entering data. And because that's pretty thankless work. It's important work, everyone needs to get paid the right amount of money, but it can be thankless work. So that's definitely a system that some of our businesses could spend some time humanizing. That's really cool.

Leanne Holdsworth: So that's really the five mindsets that we really noticed at play with the leaders, but also just from our own research, we really wanted to create a book in the world where people could pick it up and see some of themselves in it and see the breadth of this because so much has been written by so many incredibly well- educated folk about various elements of this idea of more human work. But we really wanted to just get a bit of a sense of what's the landscape and where is the breadth of where we might be able to start? Does it have to be learning and growth if that's not something that really excites me as a leader or us as an organization. So really that breadth of things just feels like a bit of a, I don't know, one contribution I suppose, to being able to see the whole landscape.

Dane Groeneveld: And you're right, because learning and growth really important to me personally, but some of my other team members might want to see your example there, Janice Lee, having disabled people from the community come and learn how to cook. Other people might get far more value out of seeing that these three people were able to come in, learn cooking skills, contribute at work, but also have something more to do in looking after themselves and family members at home. We've all got different drivers.

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah, completely. And that example of Janice Lee, that's just one of many in the book around belonging. So it might be, as you say, I am not that interested in learning and growth, but I'm really interested in belonging both here and where we, but up against the rest of the community, let's get creative and think about how we might be able to nudge in that direction just a tiny bit.

Dane Groeneveld: And we went down a deeper dialogue on the ripple effect. And before we pressed record today, we talked about the lack of empirical data out there. So it's hard to show right now what that impact of belonging is in a community around Janice Lee's business or other businesses. You can guess at things, but because there are so many factors at play to really pinpoint social outcomes because of the way leaders are driving human work, that's likely something that it's going to take a lot of collaboration to pull together

Leanne Holdsworth: Completely. I'm hoping that there might be a PhD student out there or almost PhD student out there who's curious about this because I think we've got so much of the business case on why making work more human is a good idea, both for individuals. We've got plenty of data about mental health in the workplace. From an organization perspective, we've got plenty of data on engagement, we've got data on belonging, we've got data on toxic culture impact, so we've got plenty of that. But what we don't have, as you say, is this empirical data on what if every organization became 5% more human in terms of being intentional about creating more human workplaces, what impact might that have on our communities? And it's just one of those things, isn't it? The danger of this, of saying, well... I don't know, I could go down this rabbit hole here, Dane, but maybe I will.

Dane Groeneveld: Let's do it.

Leanne Holdsworth: Bear with me if you don't mind. But one of the things that really got me into this sense of purpose was when I was 30 and I had my first child and it was the first experience that I had in my life where I felt like I really could not cope with something like it was just too big for me. Up until then, I'd made a big show at being successful at everything that I'd done. So I went smack into this wall of holy, I'm going to be responsible for this human being for the rest of its life and I'm 30 and I have no skills to be able to do this. And our first child, Liberty, she was born into a very supportive family. I had my mum living with us, I had a very supportive husband. I'm like, how do women do this in unsupportive environments? And so my solution to being able to manage my challenge of, oh, I can't cope, was actually six months later to start volunteering and domestic violence and to see what I can do to serve women who are in this situation who don't have the support that I have. And I had a few years of volunteering in that world, and what I got to see was that there are so many kids who are being raised in environments where not only are they not safe, and not only are their physical needs not met, but their psychological needs are just being trampled all over. And that was a massive contributor to me knowing how I was going to spend the rest of my work life, which was let's activate the power of businesses to be able to contribute in this space because I don't know, I don't have the evidence. I don't know whether or not when, say that victim of domestic violence comes into the workplace or the perpetrator of the domestic violence comes into the workplace, is there if we brought love and care or belonging or learning and growth or all of those mindsets just a tiny bit more, might a light go on for that perpetrator? Might there be a greater sense of empowerment for the victim of the domestic violence to actually take action, because it's so hard as a victim of domestic violence to take action and leave? So it's really, if it was my first experience, I thought before then that all children had all their needs met, I came from a very privileged background. And it wasn't until then that I realized that we have some work to do. And it's not like it's the responsibility of business, it's the responsibility of all of us. And as human beings, we are all everywhere. We're in our churches, we're in our workplaces, we're in our sports clubs. So everywhere we are, we not out of the ability to be able to make an impact here. And so given I know business, given you know business, Dane, it makes sense that we're playing with this idea of how can we do this better?

Dane Groeneveld: And I actually think that domestic violence and psychological safety for kids growing up is a good example. We had Debbie Agar on the show last week actually, and she's got a platform called Village and they actually provide access to coaches as well as a library of content. That is, to your earlier point, it's allowing a business to leverage its resources, in this case, money and centralization of people around a system to then give people access to this is how you deal with domestic violence, or this is how you deal with divorce or bereavement or postpartum depression or whatever it might be. And it is becoming more human. And you've got to think the advent of tools like that and the availability of tools like that help teams adopt some of those leadership mindsets.

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah. Oh, that sounds fantastic. I'm going to listen to her podcast. Thanks.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I'll connect you after this. But I think there's also another factor at play here, which might help us gather some empirical data over time, which is, if there was a theme there that you mentioned of these leaders that you interviewed around trying, they talk about it as a doorway, but they're constantly trying, they're constantly iterating. And I think the companies that have proven, again, just getting really narrow on the case business concept, the companies, the businesses that are proven to be trying these mindsets, engaging their people, engaging maybe their customers or their vendors in this way of thinking, surely over time, while the data might not be directly causal, you're going to see some emergence of data points that probably deserve a little more scrutiny to say, " Hey, did this team by embracing learning and growth grow three times faster than their peers in a similar market? Okay, what was it?" I think there's definitely something that's going to come out of that in the not too distant future.

Leanne Holdsworth: I think you're right, Dane. I think it's much like the struggle of the data capture feels to me hardest at the edge between the organization and the community. But if we think about the data capture in terms of teams, it feels like a lot more manageable because we've got comparison. The only question I've got about this, and I'm curious about what your thoughts are about this, I have seen a team entered down this path without the blessing of the chief executive and it turned bad. It doesn't always have to, but it was a very large organization and I noticed that, I don't know what the term was if it was a chief people officer or CHRO who were not involved in this because they wanted to have a very similar approach for all teams and this one team went maverick. And so what is it that we can do that can enable our teams to try things without having to centralize the way we do people? So I'm curious about what your experiences with that and how we might be able to bring this idea of human work in at a team level.

Dane Groeneveld: I think it goes back to your point on the human systems mindset. So many leaders and corporations kind of revert to lowest common denominator. What program can I run out? So it's consistent for everyone. I think right now in today's world of work, leaders who truly stand behind making work more human have to create a safe space for pilot projects because you're never going to get this right on first go. You could spend millions of dollars and have all the smartest people around the table. But like you said about the book, there is no one approach. So I think if you can create safety around a pilot project, all of the sudden you're saying, look, this department over here, this team, this site, they're going to be trying something new for the next three months, six months, 12 months, and we're going to observe what works and we're going to invite some of you all to determine do you want to apply that process in the rest of the organization? But I think you need to start out intentionally with it being a pilot. I don't think you can have a manager going rogue and just starting it for themselves. So maybe it's that balance. I mean, we've got an acronym here in the business that we've started using around innovation, which is DEEP. And the D is define the problem you're trying to solve. So in this case, the problem we're trying to solve is we're trying to create more human work, more belonging, more community interface. That's the problem we're trying to solve, which is a big complex problem. Okay, well, if the problem is belonging community interface, the E then becomes engage the right stakeholders. Now maybe the CEO or the chief people officer needs to be a stakeholder that's engaged in the project at the outset, even if it's just an hour meeting to explain why. And then the second E of DEEP is really to explore what else is already being done in this space within the organization. It may just be harnessing something that's already there. It may be that there's a tool or an organization, a foundation that can come in and help you really shape what you're going to focus on for the next few months. And then the P is pilot. We've defined the problem, we engaged the stakeholders, we explored what we could do, and now we've got a pilot and it is a pilot. This isn't a company- wide silver bullet, and we're finding that that's helping us when we're trying to identify best practices, next practices.

Leanne Holdsworth: I love that. That's such a complexity friendly approach to dealing with a complex challenge, Dane, I can take that away with me.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, please. It's only through lots of failed pilots that we've realized you've got to get those stakeholders engaged and do a bit of exploration first because there are very few unique ideas these days. So someone else has had the idea and tried something, so why don't you go and try and learn from them before you run into all of them learnings the hard way?

Leanne Holdsworth: I love that so much because at the end of the day, we just wrote the book so that we might nudge the business community a little bit more towards talking about the relationship between the human being and the organization and not to say, this is the way to do it, or even we've got quite a lot of practical tips in the book, but they're just things to try because the context always determines whether or not this thing will work. Hey, and so if what happens in the world, as we say, well, all we are doing here is we're popularizing the idea of human workplaces. We're not necessarily going to be able to hold your hand too much about how to do it, but it might be that when you're at a barbecue on Saturday night, it might come up in conversation. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I think that is powerful. And I love the barbecue on a Friday night or a Saturday night construct because you're not in front of a customer, you're not in front of a boss. If you can have something good to say about your job and the impact that you have through your job in the community, within your team and your family, that's something that I think all humans deserve.

Leanne Holdsworth: I love it. And then I'm also, you've made me think as you say that, and imagine if not only at the barbecue on the weekend, but also in the workplace, we eliminated the conversations that were complaint conversations about how things are not working, how that person over there, that team over there, the othering that is so rife in our organizations.

Dane Groeneveld: It is.

Leanne Holdsworth: If part of the outcome of these conversations was that we had less of that and we had more of a shift towards a collective sense of purpose and empowerment and therefore less blame for looking up the tree to the terrible boss. Wow. I think that would be a major success.

Dane Groeneveld: I think it is. I think it is. So I think with those mindsets that you've identified in the book, I'll tie it back to Gary Ridge, who I know we got connected through. Gary talks about culture equaling values plus behaviors, times consistency behaviors is a real lever for achieving some of those mindsets. Because if one of your behaviors to that example is, Hey, we don't complain about others, we talk about our experience and what we want to see different, then there's a real show of strength there behind exploring and moving past the system breakdowns to what is human.

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Dane Groeneveld: Super fun. Well, Leanne, it's been a great conversation. I know you've got a trip to Europe to prepare for, to go and get with the wider organization. I'm really excited to keep working together on finding some empirical data behind what is human work and how it plays out in the community. So we're going to have to stay in touch.

Leanne Holdsworth: I'd love that, Dane. Hey, thanks so much for the conversation. I loved it.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, it's been great. And how could others that want to find the book or find you and maybe participate in some of these pilot projects, how do they best find you?

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah, thanks, Dane. We have a website for the book. It's humanworknetwork.com. You can find all my contact details there and contacts with the rest of the team.

Dane Groeneveld: Great.

Leanne Holdsworth: Yeah, I'd love to hear from as many of you as possible. We're really wanting to build more of a community of those that really care about this so that we can amplify each other's voices.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, I love it. And I'm going to send you an email with a few other connections too.

Leanne Holdsworth: Thanks, Dane. Appreciate that.

Dane Groeneveld: Got a lot of excitement flowing here. Well, you have a great trip. Safe travels and thanks again for joining us.

Leanne Holdsworth: Thanks, Dane.