Love as a Business Strategy with Jeff Ma
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“When we talk about love, what that looks like is putting people at the center of your decision making.”
— Jeff Ma
The Meaning Of Bringing Humanity Back
"Bringing humanity back" is a mission statement that implies that humanity has been lost in the workplace.
The word "back" is intentional and signifies the lost essence of what business is meant to be.
"Humanity in the workplace" means bringing out the best in each other and not just doing good for humankind.
"Work Is Who We Are"
"What do you do?" is a common question that people ask when they first meet someone, and work has become our identity.
Since we spend most of our lives working, hating our job can lead to dissatisfaction with our lives and cause health and mental issues.
Improving work can help people feel fulfilled and satisfied and bring back the human aspect of work.
Humanity At Work
Every business has some humanity in it, especially in the beginning stages
Business should be about collaboration, energy, and understanding
The Industrial Revolution created assembly line workers, but work today is done through creativity and innovation
The idea of having a company remember how it felt when it first started and how fulfilling it was, is one of the steps to bringing back humanity at work.
Love Is Universal & What Is A Culture Of Love?
The language of love is universal and impacts people's lives in all environments and upbringings.
The concept of a culture of love in business is about caring for and supporting people.
Love in business means putting people at the center of decision-making.
The Three Ways Love Shows
Love shows up in three ways: patience, forgiveness, and tough love for the team.
In a culture of love, people are given space and time to improve and live up to certain standards.
Tough conversations and setting expectations and accountability are necessary for loving one another.
If someone is not a fit for the organization, tough love may mean parting ways with them.
Pillar #1 Inclusion
Inclusion involves making people feel welcome and loved
Inclusion requires intentionality to ensure each person is thought of and welcomed
Inclusive culture can be polarizing, so it's important to start by making each person feel welcome
Pillar #2 Empathy
Empathy is often contrasted with apathy and sympathy and is something that is talked about a lot but may be misunderstood.
Apathy is caring for the business but not the individual, while sympathy is caring for the person without the context of the business.
Empathy in a work context means supporting people within the context of the business, which may involve providing tools and support but also allowing them to fail and learn.
Empathy involves understanding where someone is coming from and helping them work through their problems rather than simply giving them what they want.
Pillar #3 Vulnerability
Vulnerability is the ability to admit mistakes and say, "I don't know."
In the workplace, vulnerability is difficult because of the expectation to have all the answers.
Leaders build a career off being right, and vulnerability is the willingness to be wrong and ask for help.
Vulnerability creates a safe place where people can say, "I'm sorry," "I don't understand," "I screwed up," and "I need help."
Psychological safety is required to create a safe place, and it requires all six of the pillars.
Creating a culture of vulnerability starts with the leader, and it requires self-awareness and the ability to look at oneself.
Pillar #4 Trust & Relationships
Building trust is key, even though it involves vulnerability.
Trust is built through sharing personal experiences and hardships.
Trust is at the center of all relationships.
A study on trust found three components: consistency, expertise, and relationship –The relationship component outweighs the other two in building trust.
Pillar #5 Empowerment
The power of empowerment comes from building relationships with trust and empathy.
Empowerment shows up when people are not doing it out of fear but out of the desire to not let others down.
Empowerment cannot be achieved without the other four pillars.
Pillar #6 Forgiveness
Forgiveness is often overlooked but is a leading cause of business issues
Lack of forgiveness affects decision-making, budgets, and relationships
Unforgiveness is a silent culture killer
Forgiveness is essential for creating a culture of love
It's A Journey, Not An Overnight Fix
All six principles come together to create a culture of love
There is no sequential order to follow, and all six principles should be practiced simultaneously
Taking action to create a culture of love requires pragmatism and a willingness to forgive.
Small steps are important in this journey toward inclusion
Self-awareness is crucial in this process
Leaders need to seek feedback to understand their impact on others
It's about the impact over the intent
Understanding how you come across is important in creating a positive culture.
The first part of self-awareness is hard, and the second part, asking for feedback, is arguably even harder.
This is a journey, a process that takes time and effort
Thanks for listening!
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Mike: Let's do it. Okay. Jeff Ma is a thought leader who's transforming the way businesses operate. As a co-author of Love as a Business Strategy and the host of Love as a Business Strategy podcast, he has a passion for bringing humanity back to the workplace.
Jeff is also a co-founder of Culture Plus, a company that aims to transform employee and leadership behaviors with a focus on love, inclusion, empathy, and trust. He aims to change the way we think about the workplace. I first met Jeff when I was a guest on his podcast not too long ago,
and we were so in sync with the way we thought about things. I thought, man, when I launch this podcast, I've gotta have him as a guest as well. So, Jeff, thanks for doing this. Welcome.
Jeff Ma: Absolutely. It was a great conversation. I looked for any excuse to come back and have a chat with you, so thanks for having me on the show.
Mike: Excellent. Well thanks for doing it. Hey, so I wanna start off, you write in your bio it says you want to bring humanity back to the workplace. Talk a little bit about what that means.
Jeff Ma: It's a very short phrase, but it's a little bit loaded and we did it intentionally. It's a mission that we set out on as a team, as a group, as individuals, and it really is the driving kind of force in my own personal life as well. The first word that's most loaded is back bringing humanity back to the workplace.
It implies that we've lost it and we had a lot of conversation around this, like, do you wanna say back? Can we just say, bringing humanity to the workplace? And we truly do believe that there's an essence of what business has always meant to be a collection of humans who come together to create something together, to work forward.
And in today's climate, more often our adversaries in our opposition are within our own walls. A lot of times it's our boss, or it's the structure. It's the coworkers that we seem to have to fight past to get what we want to get done. And that word back is intentional because we do think there's that intentionality of what business is meant to be that we've lost over time.
And when we say humanity in the workplace, we're trying to just, we're not just talking about, you know, the business itself, doing things that's good for all of humankind, but we mean kind of coming in together to be able to bring out the best of each other. And the reason we're so passionate about this statement is because we really looked at our own lives and the lives of our loved ones and everyone around the world who, you know, work is everything.
Jeff Ma: You meet somebody, the first thing you ask is, Hey, what do you do? Because it's almost, it's who we are now. Work is just our identity. It's everything. Not intentionally, but we spend most of our time in our life before we die working. And if you look at that and you think, man, I hate my job. You put two and two together and you kind of hate most of your life.
And what does that do? That creates stress, health problems, depression, mental health issues. It creates just a general. You know, dissatisfaction with everything you have that's important in your life. And of course, that's not for everybody. Cause I'm not saying it's every business, every human, every person, but it's a mission that we stand behind because we feel like if we can make that better for anyone and for any organization, especially in the long term.
We know it's gonna take time. We're actually helping people. We're actually helping. You know, the world change and evolve into how we think work should be done, and in a way that makes people feel fulfilled and satisfied, and we can be human again.
Mike: So you started off, you focused on that word back and. Should you say bring it back in, you know, humanity, back into the workplace. Does that mean what? Is there a time you can point to where you think humanity existed in the workplace and we got away from it?
Jeff Ma: I actually think every business has it at some. You think about the two, you know, ex developers who sit in a garage and decide to start their own business. I mean, there's so much humanity in there. It's just me and you, Mike. We decide to start our own business. I mean, I'm gonna listen to your ideas.
You're gonna listen to mine. We're gonna get excited, we're gonna get frustrated, but we're gonna work through our problems. I'm gonna tell you what I feel and you're gonna say, got it. I'm gonna fix that. We're gonna work like two humans. Coming together and getting stuff done, and it's gonna be magical.
We're gonna get more done in a week than many large organizations get done with large teams over months. Right? And we all know this, like we know what's possible with just a few people in a garage and a computer, and that's humanity at work. And so it's not really an era. It's not the sixties, it's not the seven.
It's bringing it back to what business was always meant to be, which is this collaboration, this energy, this understanding, and that comes from our humanity. What gets in the way of a team of 30 people doing amazing things is when we show up and we're like, well, I'm just a cog in this machine. I'm not the human here, so I'm just gonna do my piece.
Get it for approval. Step through those yellow tape lines and tread carefully and not look bad and preserve my space and my safety. And what do you get? You get a, you get very slow, very inefficient, less creative, not innovative spaces. And when we say back, we mean let's bring it back. And yes, maybe, you know, you can look at the Industrial Revolution as a place where work kind of really took form.
That's how it is today. And that was all designed, that was all, we all, we're all assembly line workers. We all do that part. We put the machine together and now we have the system. But today, that's not how work is done. You know, work is done through creativity, it's through innovation. Everything is a creative problem solving process no matter what.
So it's due for a change. And so it kind of plays in both of those spaces, we can bring it back to where we were doing things that fit the economy and the work that's being done. And we can bring it back to when we first started and when we wanted to have an idea come to fruition and do that type of work.
Mike: Yeah. And I love the latter of what you just said, the best, like bring it back cuause I don't know if I believe in the twenties or the fifties or the seventies or the, were things better. I don't know. I think in some ways, maybe things were even worse than today in a lot of ways in the workplace.
Although I'm sure you can point to you, you could point, you could make both arguments. But I love the idea of having a company, think back to, remember when you started this thing and remember how it felt and remember how fulfilling it was and remember the respect and trust we all had for, you know, how do we get back to that?
So I love that. I wanna go backwards to, you know, in reading the book and knowing your podcast, I wanna go back to how this all started for you and your company and your partners. In what, I think you guys in the book called The Darkest Day. Give us, maybe a short version, but give us a version of what that means.
What was the darkest day and how did that cause you and your partners in the company to kind of flip and say, wait a minute, maybe we need to create a little bit of a different culture here.
Jeff Ma: Absolutely. I've been at Soft Way, which is, kind of the parent company, if you will, of Culture Plus. I've been working here for over 10 years and the CEO, Muhammad Anwar. He and I are very close. I've been alongside him in this journey all the way through along. He's a co-author of the book, of course, along with others.
And the Darkest Day simply put, was a day where we had to do a large, like a 30% layoff, in the organization. And Soft Way's a technology company.
We've done a lot of other things along the way and we still do. But at its core, at its root, it's a 20 year old technology company, and it's always been trying to keep up with technology trends, doing all these things.
The Darkest Day was where we had a realization as an organization that we were on the downtrend and in a dangerous spot. But more importantly, it was also a moment of awakening for specifically Mohammed first who, as he was going through these layoffs, it wasn't just the darkest day because of the layoffs itself.
It's how we did the layoffs. We had modeled ourself in our growth after what we thought was correct in the corporate world, which just means we had the C-Suites, we had to make decisions, and they came to layoffs. It was this very cold calculated business decision. And we did it in that way as well.
When layoffs were done, we actually pulled everyone who was being laid off to another room. We brought all the people who were staying to a different room and we handed paperwork. We handed them boxes and they packed up. They were escorted out. It was, thinking back, just gives me kind of like, just chills thinking that we did it that way and it was no one got to say goodbye.
No one got to really, you. People who stayed, walked out of that room and it was a ghost town. And we just spent weeks after that, just awkward, uncomfortable, wondering if we're next. Communication was not clear, poorly, poorly executed, layoff, to say the least. But what it did was it set specifically Mohamed, and then by chain reaction over the following years, those around him, including myself, on a realization that this wasn't just, you know, business, this wasn't just the economy.
This was something deeper rooted and we took an inward look at ourselves at how we were leading and how we were actually being present in our organization. And we didn't like what we saw. We realized it was our culture. We realized the toxicity that we created as leaders. The way we treated people, the way we ran our meetings, the way we had all these conversations was really what caused all of it.
One way or the other. And so interestingly enough, we started working on it for ourselves. This was not for Culture Plus that didn't exist yet. This was just trying to save software, just trying to survive. And rather than saying, you know what, we gotta just put our heads down, work harder and like squeeze out every last penny.
We said, you know what? If we're gonna survive, we need to thrive and we need to come out better. Than what we were before. And so in this turmoil, in this time where we couldn't even, we didn't even know if we're gonna have paychecks for people the next month, we still took aside intentional, a lot of intentional time to look at ourselves workshops for ourselves.
We would take everybody, on a weekend, on a leaders to read letters written by employees present and past about their experience, about what they saw from their leaders from us. It'd be heart-wrenching. We had such blind spots to how we made people feel even with the best intentions.
And it set us about this path that had us really learn about what it meant to introspect and understand what our leadership impact looked like and what our behaviors were causing. And it created this unintentional curriculum that we follow. These new kind of principles we started forming. And was it perfect?
No. Was it everybody? No, everybody was on a different path, but it did change the very DNA in which we kind of operated. And to kind of try to keep the story short, we fast forward a few years, we've been working on it a lot and we're working with one of our larger clients, very large client, very conservative kind of workspace.
And they've been working on their culture. They've been having a lot of culture initiative. But they've also been working with us this whole time. I mean, from all the way back. They've been working us for years and years, and we started noticing that the meetings we have together had been getting longer.
They've been asking us to basically work on site with them. Whole weeks we'd spend just working with them, our teams and them. And we had the conversation and it turned out we just like working with you all. Like we feel like we're more productive around your energy and we like the way you treat each other.
And when we go in a room with you folks, it feels like we can be ourselves and be more comfortable. And these middle managers that we worked with actually went to bat for us with their leadership and said, we want these folks to come teach us. It was crazy. Like, it's hard to explain how crazy.
It's because this is a very conservative, very, very multi-billion dollar organization and these folks reputations are on the line where reputation is a big deal in this organization. And they're saying, we want Soft Way to come help us with our culture. And their bosses are like software.
You mean like the soft, like they do software, they do like software, right? Like they do technology. Why would they teach us culture? And they said, you, you just have to like, we want what they have. We've done it with all the other consultants and all these culture experts, and all we have is the t-shirt to show for it.
We don't have any change. And so it was this crazy moment in our history where for some reason, we had like two weeks to pull this off. We found ourselves pulling together all our learnings, pulling together all of the like activities and like experiences that we've given our own leadership team just for ourselves over turning them into something that could help others.
And we created an experience called Senneca Leaders out of that, and we did a pilot. The rest is kind of history because from there it was a huge success. We ended up after that going all around the world, teaching thousands of leaders. Same, the same thing. Meeting people, but learning a lot.
Jeff Ma: Learning about how the language of love is really universal no matter where you go, no matter your environment, no matter your company, your upbringing, these messages resonated and we have stories of people's lives who are impacted and it really shaped, this is where bringing humanity back to the workplace became a center stage in our mission cause we saw the difference it was making.
And shortly after that, it just thrusts us into this path of Culture Plus where now we do Seneca leaders, you know, for even more. And it's our flagship kind of offering in which we've refined and turned it into what it is today. But I mean, I know that you asked for the short version, but that is where we accidentally, but now wholeheartedly pursued culture as a service.
Mike: I love that. And I wanna dive into some of the details of, the major principles within the whole idea. But you used a word, and I'm sure we will continue to use a word
in this episode that you don't hear very much in business. And that's the word love, right? Well, love. How does that fit in business?
We're talking about profit. What do you mean love? So talk a little bit about this idea of a culture of love. How do you go from we're really screwed up. We screw up a, you know, laying people off and we do that wrong. And our culture's not what we want it to be. You know, shifting from not just let's create a bigger yeah, better culture.
This idea of love at the center of it. Talk a little bit about what that means, what is a culture of love, and then we'll dive into the different components of it.
Jeff Ma: Sure. I think it's important to start with what we mean by love. And when we say love, we don't mean, you know, that romcom where you're hot best friends your soulmate, and you don't even realize it until the end of the movie. It's not romantic, you know, hugging or kissing love. Get that outta the way.
What we mean when we say love is like you have my heart in your hand in the way of I am here for you as a human. I'm here to support you. I care for you. It's a care and as in a business, when we talk about love, what that looks like is putting people at the center of your decision making.
It's as simple as. And instead of just looking at numbers first, we're looking at our people, the people that it impacts, the work that it takes, and having that care.
For people as you make business decisions every step along, along the way, right? So when we say love as a business strategy, it doesn't mean you show up to work and everyone's just giving each other, you know, holiday cards and hugging. And, you know, a lot of people, will use the term family to describe a really desirable workplace.
Like, ah, I love my job. My team is like my family, and I'm like I don't know if that analogy is what we want, because in real life we don't actually love our family all the time.
Mike: Have you ever worked with a family business?
Jeff Ma: I have not.
Mike: I have, and trust me most do not want that. Do not want that culture.
Jeff Ma: Exactly. And guess what? We don't get to pick our family. We get to pick where we work. We get to choose what we do when we get towake up in the morning, and so the analogy I like to use is like a sports team even like an underdog sports team where you show up to really make everyone else better and to make everyone else succeed.
You don't do something for the glory for yourself. You don't do it just so that you succeed and other people around you are in the way. You're all fighting for this real outcome, and even when everything is down, you're behind you. You know your team's about to lose. That's where it's strongest.
That's where love helps you get through it. You come together in victory or defeat. You come together and you share it together, and there's a real love in that space when we have to go through the trenches together, like that. And that analogy is the closest I can probably present, and that's the one I like to use.
But at the end of the day, it's really more about doing things more for others and more often, and that's a simple way of love, of thinking about love. How that looks like in a lot of practice will often be in, in those conversations that are difficult in places that don't have love, real love.
Those conversations just don't happen. At all. If it's uncomfortable, it's probably not happening because why would you want to disturb the peace? Stand out and cause trouble? Ironically, when people think love is this soft, gooey kind of mushy thing, what they realize on the other side is that real love is actually hard and it's tough.
It's actually telling somebody, Hey, because I love you, I need to let you know this is what you're doing. This is how you're impacting. This is how you're succeeding or failing, giving them that type of conversation, that type of feedback. And that's hard. That is sitting down and being like, I'm putting myself on the line here.
I'm putting myself out there, and I hope you can receive it in a message of love. And, that's what you would do for someone that you truly love, right? If you have a friend or a family member who's struggling or doing, and they're not seeing a perspective. You know, no matter how hard that conversation is, you're gonna go have it because you wanna make sure that they can succeed.
Mike: I'm glad you bring that up because it's so easy to think for people to think about a culture based on love. Even the way you describe it, it's not romantic love. It's like a sports team. We care for each other. It's so easy to go there and take it. To a level of, well, I guess we can never let anybody go.
I guess if someone is a bad fit for the team, if they're not li living our culture, we've gotta continue to love them and how could we love them and fire them? How do you marry that? I know you talked about having the difficult conversation, but what if that difficult conversation is hey, you're just not the right fit for this team.
We might not be the right fit for you. How do you marry those two? Those two seemingly contradictory ideas.
Jeff Ma: Yeah, love shows up in three ways in that situation, the first way it shows up is in patience. So yes, in a culture of love, you have people get more chances because, and it's not just, oh, go try again. I'm talking about they have tough conversations, they get real feedback. Talking about how you know, hey, this environment is meant for everybody to live up to a certain standard or principle of how we treat each other and how we wanna show up.
And we have that tough conversation and we set expectations and accountability for each other because that's how we love one another. And yeah, they're given, you have to have patience and love to give them space and time to figure that out and go on their journey. The second way love shows up is in forgiveness.
If they are able to make progress, we also are able to move forward with them and not hold what they've done in the past against them. But I think the third and most important way love shows up is that if you really love your team, you can't allow kind of the toxicity or the negativity or the inability of one person.
To bring everyone else down. It's out of love for everybody else that you have to part ways, right? And so it's happened, you know, especially in our transformation journey. Not everybody was on board with this. It's not the job they signed up for. I don't blame 'em. You know, when they interviewed and they joined, we were not yet doing this stuff.
So as we transformed, you know, it was very clear that some people, and again, not saying this negatively about them. It's just that this is not what they came here to do, right? They came here to do, they wanna build their skill, they wanna build their craft, they want to grow, climb a ladder in one way or the other, and that's okay.
But sometimes the way that, that was impacting others, because culture is a thing where it's made up of every single person in the space, it brings other people down with them. And if you love the team, unfortunately, you also have to have tough love for the person who needs it.
Mike: Yeah. I'll tell you one more way I acquainted to love. Maybe this will be a fourth for you, is I actually believe that everyone has the ability to be an A player somewhere.
Jeff Ma: Oh yeah for sure.
Mike: And it may not be in your organization. So I actually think you can, out of love, tell somebody you are gonna be much better off.
You could be a superstar doing X, Y, and Z, but we don't have that here. We don't need that skill here. That's not our culture. So, I agree. I think that's an important distinction to make cause people could out of love, keep someone around who doesn't fit within the organization for literally a year and a half, two years or more.
So, that, that's an important distinction to make. I wanna dive in. I believe Jeff, you've got in the book there are these six pillars of love, take us through and let's go kind of high level first and then we'll dig in wherever it makes sense to dig in. But take us through, I think the first one is inclusion, right?
I'll kind of prompt you to go one at a time and help us understand what these pillars are.
Jeff Ma: Sure. So the first is inclusion and just to kind of set the premise for all six pillars, we don't view these as soft skills cause when you read them. Inclusion, empathy, vulnerability, trust, empowerment and forgiveness. These sound like soft skills to many people.
And it's important to kind of note that we see them as critical skills. We see them as actually building blocks of your team dynamics and how a team operates. So they're not just oh, nice to haves. They're kind of like these piece, these building blocks that make your team successful. And so, they're not in particular order and in fact they kind of all have to be in check and in balance cause they all influence each other.
But the first one's inclusion. DEI , D, E and I, all these topics are very, very, very important to people right now. And inclusion is no different. And I try to simplify this conversation, especially for this show. I'll keep it very simple because there's so much talk about inclusion, right? And it goes into diversity, it goes into equity, it goes into all these pieces that are all very, very important.
But when we talk about inclusion, high level speaking in the context of just love, we like to simplify it down to when people feel welcome. They feel loved, and that may seem too simple, but I think it's most impactful right there. We can go into race, we can go into identities, we can go into gender, all these different elements, and yes, we need to make sure that stuff is balanced and thought of.
But at its very core, when people really feel like they belong, when they feel like they're welcomed and invited a lot of these pieces look a lot different. We're not just talking about awareness of different, you know, racial biases and hidden, you know, these are all very polarizing things when it comes to inclusion.
You get people in the room talk about inclusion. People feel like they're being accused of being a bad person. Just naturally, just like, oh, what do you mean I'm not racist. I'm not any of these things. And that's just what's in there. That floats through our heads immediately. But I try to diffuse that.
I start from a place of, we wanna make sure each person in this type of culture is thought of right? And welcomed to the spaces that they'd want to be. And that requires intentionality. And I know I could keep going, going on inclusion, but I don't know how much time you wanna spend.
Mike: What's an example though? and I wanna move on. I do wanna move on to the other pillars, but I think what you bring up is so important and I think it's almost too easy to say, well, we got this one covered. You know, everybody feels welcome. We're very inclusive. But, what do you see, even a company that thinks they're like if somebody's blatantly doing something wrong, we probably don't need to bring up that example because it's obvious, but what's an example of someone not being inclusive, not welcoming?
An example that may not be so obvious where someone listening might go, oh crap. Yeah, I kind of, I'm not doing that, or I am doing that.
Jeff Ma: I'll give a really simple one. I'll give it really simple and almost to the point of silly one, but it's a thing. When we talk about food, we don't don't always think of it from the lens of inclusion. And a lot of times you go to an event, you know, a company sponsored anything and you have vegetarian stuff and everything else.
And the vegetarian stuff is often somewhat of an afterthought. I don't know if people realize that vegetarians like warm food too, but they do. And there are a lot of vegetarian foods that everyone enjoys.
And then you have, other restrictions, halal, vegan, you know, gluten free, all these things. Now, I'm not saying that if you don't do, if you don't do these things, you're not being inclusive.
But it's the process in which we as leaders and as organizations think about how we view that process and how we go through those decisions that really show inclusion. It's like, hey, we wanna welcome all of you, and it's not just for you. Here's a separate box for you to eat. While everyone else enjoys these things.
No. It's like, look, this is an incredible vegan cupcake and they're so delicious. Everyone can enjoy these. Here's an incredible option that's added for everyone to enjoy, and we're all part of it, and I know it's, and people will be like, well, that's just food. But I'm giving an example of somewhere small to think, because these changes come from small places.
And there's hundreds and thousands of more of these opportunities in a business day in a workday. But just even at a company function, how much inclusion are you putting into the thought of how we want to welcome our team? Right?
Mike: Love it. Love it. Let's move on to, second pillar, which is empathy right?
Jeff Ma: Yep. So empathy, the way I like to talk about it is I like to contrast it with apathy and sympathy. We talk about empathy all the time. You know, it's something we want our kids to have from a very young age, and we use it, we use the word so much today. It's like you gotta have empathy. And I think it's lost a little bit of its understanding.
And I think we actually learned this the hard way as an organization, as leaders because we actually said, Hey, we're shifting to this humanity in the workplace love ideal. And one of the first things we did from the old version of our behaviors to the new was we took that pendulum and we swung it all the way to the other side.
And this was like a huge learning era for us because everything became soft and lovey and just, everyone used to be nice and everyone used to like, and we would say we were empathizing with each other.
But I'm talking about like if someone says, ah, man, I'm not feeling well today. I'll be like, oh, Frank, just go home, man. Like, we love you so much empathy. Can you imagine how Frank's feeling right now? He just needs rest. Like, just go get that rest, man. And then he leave and we look at each other and be like, do you know how to do Frank's job? I don't know how to do Frank's job. No one can do Frank. Like, we're screwed. We got nothing left here.
And what we did was we practiced sympathy. And I think there's a big difference that we have to be able to realize between sympathy and empathy. And if I bring it into a work context, just strictly work context, apathy is where you care for the business and not at all for the individual. And that's what you see a lot of.
That's why we wrote a book. That's all the, that's the leave your personal problems at the door, come get the work done. We're all adults here. We don't need to hear about anything else. Let's just move forward ignoring all these other pieces. We can see that one's easy to understand when you come to sympathy.
It's actually caring for the person without any context of the business, without caring for the business at all. And so now you're just saying, oh, whatever people need or we think they need, let's just give it to them and make sure everybody's as happy and comfortable seemingly the surface as And we were guilty of that for a very long time. It's only later that we kinda learn what empathy might look like. And that's where we help people, support people in the context of the business. And a lot of times that means they need to do the work. They need to be given the tool, they need to be given the support, but they need to do the work.
They need to figure out the hard way. And sometimes it means they need to be let loose and fail. But it also means we need to understand more of where they're coming from and what someone's going through in order to support. When we say empathy, I like to use the analogy of a child.
Disclaimer not to treat your employees and coworkers as children. I'm just talking about the actual essence and feeling of empathy, which is where they come home from school, they hate it, they hate their math homework. They just, they don't want to do it, and they come complain to you as a parent, caregiver or whoever.
Do you take that homework, throw it in the trash, get 'em ice cream and say, let's just forget about it. Or do you do some work. You pull up a chair, you sit down, try to understand what is actually frustrating. Maybe it's not the homework itself, maybe it's something else entirely. It could be a number of things, but truly trying to understand, and this is where the empathy comes what they're going through when they have this problem, and then showing them how to work through it, helping them work through it.
That is what I try to capture as the feeling and essence of empathy in a work environment.
Mike: Excellent. Excellent. Let's move on to vulnerability.
Jeff Ma: So vulnerability is very, very simple. I make it very simple again, with time. Vulnerability is the ability to say, Hey, I messed up. And I don't wanna oversimplify to that. I know we all, vulnerability is a well understood topic, but in the workplace that's really hard to do. I can say this all day, but when you go back to your job, tell me how often you can really stand in front of stakeholders, other folks, your boss, even coworkers, and just say, I did not, I dropped the ball here and I did not do what I should have done, and I need to make it better.
And it doesn't come easily and for me, it's a sure fire sign of where your culture is a lot of times is the ability for people to do this. How frequently, how comfortably and how they're received when they do it, because, vulnerability is a lot of things. But again, in the sake of kind of helping the listeners really narrow in on what I mean, it's saying I don't know everything and no one does, but we've created this facade in today's kind of corporate world.
You. You have to have all the answers. And if you don't, it says a lot about you as a person, especially leaders. They build a career off being right, and vulnerability is this willingness to be wrong, this willingness to be wrong and not know and ask for help too. So it's almost all these things combined.
Again, vulnerability being a very broad humanistic topic in the workplace. I like to narrow it down to that.
Mike: Love it. So basically it's creating a safe. It's a safe place where people can say, I'm sorry, I don't understand. I screwed up. I need help. How do you know, in a world where, as you said, you get leaders that believe their job is to be the smartest person around the table, is there something you would recommend to help leaders create that safe space?
So that folks on the team do have that safe place to show and feel vulnerable.
Jeff Ma: So a lot of my answers to any one of these pillars is often gonna be sitting in the other five. And vulnerability is no exception. When we talk about a safe place, we're talking about psychological safety, whatever you wanna call it. It actually requires all six of these elements to create psychological safety because, that's one of the goals when we talk about a place that's really built with belonging and you're having high performing teams, everything that we want in a business.
It's made up of people who practice these things with each other. And so vulnerability is not only a key component of it, it's a key output of it. And so this is where you have people, this is where we struggle to really catch up to this culture business because it's very easy to get bogged down. Like, well, it's like a chicken and egg thing.
Like if we're, if nobody is vulnerable, nobody's safe, and if nobody starts it, then who opens up that can of vulnerability and it comes down to relationship. It comes down to the individual relationships that actually exist in that space. If you and I did that startup we talked about earlier, I would be willing to bet that you and I have a high level of all six of these pillars, vulnerability, to say the least, right?
I'll be able to tell you exactly what I messed up on. You'll forgive me. We'll move on. We'll work through it. Now we add another employee, okay? Is that person going to be right out the gate vulnerable with us? Well, it depends on what they see. It depends on what we demonstrate for them in that environment.
Now, add 10 more employees. Now add a hundred more employees. How does that scale? And that's where we face our problem is that now we have meetings where you and I are in it, but so are 12 other people. Are you still willing to be wrong? Are you still willing to look like a fool in your mind in front of all these new folks?
Maybe, maybe not. But the second you are, you give permission to everybody else to do the same. And they see their leader as a human. And so, I'm not saying it's all on leaders, but we are all leaders in our own right. We're influential in our own spaces. And it does require a level of self-awareness. Require the ability for you to look at yourself.
Because a lot, the problem is most leaders aren't going into this space going. I'm perfect, I'm awesome. I can do no wrong. But their behavior and how they come across and the way they defend themselves naturally does, and it immediately kind of tells everybody, this is the kind of space we work in.
He doesn't make mistakes, neither should you. And mistakes are treated like X, Y, or Z with punishments and repercussions and these things, those things come unbeknownst to a lot of leaders.
Mike: So I'm hearing two things. One is, as the leader, you, if you want your team to embrace that vulnerability. It's gotta start with you. You've gotta feel it. But I'm also hearing, I think just as importantly as it's not, and I could fall into this trap, it's not, oh, you know, forget about everything else going on.
Let's do this vulnerability exercise, and at the end everybody's gonna feel more vulnerable. And I'm sure there are some pretty good exercises, but you're saying no, you've gotta encompass all six of these pillars. And we've only been through three. So we gotta get through the other three. But it's not let's do this vulnerability exercise.
We've gotta embrace all of these ideas and it's gonna come out of those. So we've talked about inclusion, empathy, vulnerability. Let's go to the next one. Trust.
Jeff Ma: Big one. Big one, and actually, even though they call it vulnerability what you're most building in them is trust, vulnerable trust. So I know the word vulnerable is still in there, but it's different, right? When we talked about vulnerability, it really is that ability to make things safe. But when we talk about trust and vulnerable trust, that's where that activity comes in.
If you share about your life, you share about a hardship, you share about an experience, I hear and see you. As the person you are and not just the spreadsheets you make and the output you create, I start seeing you as a father, a husband, whatever. And that is powerful because we build vulnerable trust with each other through those types of moments.
Jeff Ma: And I talked about relationships being key. Through all these pillars and trust is at the center of that conversation. There was a study done around trust, really measuring trust as best as you can, measure trust, and it came up with three components of trust. They said there's the consistency, the expertise, and the relationship, and they measured these in their own way.
I won't pretend to say I ran this study myself, but what they found. And by consistency we mean like, hey, if you say you're gonna do something, you do it. And you show up on, you know, on time, reliably time and time again. Expertise is your, you know, your skills, your PhD, your demonstration of knowledge in these spaces.
Both of those, which I would argue that most, you know, if you're hiring good folks, if you have good teams, those two are pretty strong a lot of times. You know, and we will, you will hear you ask a team, do you trust each other? And they'll say yes and they mean those two elements. Most of the time it's like, of course I trust I'm gonna give 'em a job to do.
They're gonna bring it back, it's gonna be awesome. They're gonna tell me if they can't do it, great. But what they found the study was that the relationship piece outweighed the other two by far. In other words, the best easy example is as a much of an expert as you are, as assistant as you are. If you and I don't get along anymore, if we have a falling out.
If you say something that I hold onto and I no longer like you, for lack of a better word, those other two really don't matter. When it comes time to make decisions, when it comes time to collaborate, when it comes time to trust each other, I don't, I just don't. I can't trust you. And so what that says is, if we're not intentional about the relationship side of trust, the component of relationship.
Then we're missing out on the biggest piece of trust, and that is often not focused on in the workplace.
Mike: And is it fair to say in trying to kind of define in my own way what that relationship trust is versus consistency and expertise? Is it fair to say it's trusting in your positive intent? Trusting that you are doing the best you can. You're not trying to hurt me or the team trusting in your intent versus are you gonna get it done on time.
Do you have the skills to do it? Is it that intent? Is that a good way to define what that relationship trust might look like?
Jeff Ma: You framed it beautifully and I would just add that in a way, that level of trust is, I won't say the destination of it, but it's kind of the goal, the direction you're trying to build trust into, because that does not come easily. It's hard and trust is never ending. You can always build more trust, but what you just described is always my end state, my end goal, because as humans, we fill in a lot of blanks.
Jeff Ma: If you give me three facts about the day, I'm gonna fill in all the rest of the blanks. So that includes your intentions, that includes your circumstances, that includes all of it. And the power of real vulnerable trust is that it helps us fill those blanks with more reasonable, more positive and more questions that we can go validate, with that person.
And that's so important because if I just say, hey, Mike did this, I'm gonna be like, why the heck would Mike do that? He knows I know this. He knows I need that and he just screwed me over. Like all these things. Just instantly we jump to what do we usually do about it? We go get revenge. We go tell somebody else and we spread that rumor and all these things that build toxicity stem from that one place of just saying, you know what?
I know Mike and I know Mike wouldn't do that on purpose. I know Mike, he must have missed something. Let me go talk to Mike. Because that intention must be different, and that's so powerful. So you hit the nail on the head.
Mike: Love it because that is missing from a lot of people. A lot of or and it's not, there aren't some people that always assume negative intent or assume positive intent. It's in the heat of the moment, right? I mean,
Jeff Ma: It's human. It's human nature. It's human nature. You, you give me a fact, I'm going to paint the story around it. And unfortunately our minds. We'll form sometimes it's not a negativity thing, it's literally just how we connect dots.
Mike: Love it. Let's move on to, the fifth pillar. Talk to us about empowerment.
Jeff Ma: So, you know, we learned empowerment. Our very first as a team. Our lesson in empowerment actually came in, the story I told earlier where I mentioned a bunch of middle managers in a large organization went to bat for us. To have us come teach them culture. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't, we had not consider, we didn't come to them and say, Hey, let us teach.
Let us do this thing for you. They came to us and said, we know you're capable of doing this, and we want you to do this, please, and we're gonna bet on you. And the power that comes from that, I'm telling you, we. Sleepless nights, putting that together, not because we were under this financial pressure, not because we were getting trouble, not because we were being whipped from behind, unless we're like, we need to make this the best darn thing we've ever done and just nail it.
We wanna blow 'em away. And we were fired up. We were energetic even late into the night working on that stuff. And that was the first taste of the raw power of empowerment. When you have these other elements, trust, right? They had empathy for us. They had trust for us, right?They included us in their decisions and in their process.
And we're sitting here facing this insurmountable task, seemingly at the beginning. But when you empower people, they're able to go above and beyond.
And so a lot of times people say, empowered I, oh, I'm a leader who empowers others, but they get it a little bit crossed with like simple delegation. Like if people are empowered to just do their job description, I would argue that it's not necessarily empowerment.
It can be in a lot of ways, but when you empower people, you set them up, you build that relationship with them, and you let them know where you are coming from and what you expected them. All these good things. But the empowerment shows the power of empowerment shows up when they're doing it, not out of fear of losing their job, not out of fear of repercussions, but fear of letting you down almost.
It's more of a, it's not rooted in fear, but if I had to pick a fear, it's not wanting to let you down. It's really wanting to show up and just blow you away because that's what raw empowerment.
Mike: And you can start to see how all these come together because if you are not inclusive, if you don't have empathy, trust. vulnerability, it's pretty difficult to say. I'm not gonna do any of those other things, but I'm gonna, I like this empowerment thing. I'm gonna do that and screw all the other things. No, that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. Talk to us about, the last one, forgiveness.
Jeff Ma: Ooh, my favorite one. Forgiveness is out of this list is the one that stands out because it's probably one that you haven't seen plastered on a wall of some sort of new vision statement that somebody wants to do. Cause it's just not talked about. And yet I would argue that forgiveness or unforgiveness, lack of forgiveness, is a leading cause of a lot of your business' bottom line issues if you trace it back.
And what I mean by that is, decision making. Where do budgets go? Who goes on what project, what, how you treat or react to good news, bad news. All these things are flavored with forgiveness or lack of forgiveness, and it's one of those things that when you say to someone, they're like, oh, well I don't have that.
I don't have any problem with that. I love everyone I work with, everything's great. But when you really drill down to, when the relationship is not there, when that trust and intent is not there, and we start filling in those blanks, we are sitting there frustrated with somebody, somebody did something that makes our job harder.
How do we sit in that space? And unfortunately, a lot of us is, we're sitting in unforgiveness. We're sitting in, ugh, Mike cramming more work again. And it may be a moment, it may pass. I may see you again. Hey, Mike. What's up man? It's great. But when something else comes up, it was unaddressed and it sits and it remains and something else comes up like, ah, I should go to Mike about this.
But I'm not, I don't wanna deal with that right now. It's little, but it builds, and it's with Mike and it's with Jim, and it's with Mary, it's with everybody else. And unforgiveness is the silent, lingering, culture killer. In so many organizations, because we don't talk about it. We don't come back and say, you know, it's unheard of to say, I wanna talk about how that interaction made me feel.
But if you're talking about, if you care about each other, if you're talking about the welcoming that we want to have of each other, if you wanna talk about the including and the empathy we want have for each other, how can you have that without forgiveness? How can you love without forgiveness you just can't.
And we put it at the end of this list, not because it's more or lesser than anything, but because it's kind of the period at the end of the sentence where it's like, look, you can do all five of these other things, but if you're not seeking forgiveness and you're not offering real forgiveness to others, unfortunately the other five are only gonna get you so far, right?
You're only gonna, you're gonna hit a wall when it comes to really growing in a culture of love and that's just, people would think about it and they go, that it make sense, but do they actually practice it? It's one of the hardest ones.
Mike: So, the good news is all of these come together, right? It's not one versus the other. It's not sequential. All of them come together to create this culture of love. The challenging thing for people is, man, it'd be much easier if you said, well, that this one comes first. This one comes because I know what to do.
I know what to do first. So for those folks that are hearing this and saying, I love what I'm hearing, but I don't have this today in my organization. What do I do? Right? It could seem overwhelming. So I've gotta do all these six things all at once and I'm nowhere close to it. Let's get pragmatic as we start to kind of bring this to a close, let's get pragmatic and what should someone do first?
Is there one? Hey, first thing you need to do is this. So the first couple things you ought to do is this. What actions should people take if they want to create something close to this.
Jeff Ma: Yeah, so the first place I would start with anybody I talk to is self-awareness, and because that's usually the big block. And it's invisible for most. By definition. But if you think of self-awareness simply as how you think you're coming off to other people versus how you're actually coming off to other people and not a lot of us take the time to understand that.
And if you think about it, the only way to really acquire your self-awareness gap is on the you side introspection. So you don't have to go and make all these drastic improvements right away on these six pillars we just talked about. It's understanding these six pillars and trying to work out where you sit in them.
Am I welcoming other people? Am I building relationships? Am I, what am I? How am I treating other people really and why? Like really getting down to you know, this is the type of leadership I've been taught and this isn't what I'm stuck with. And just understanding components of yourself. Very, very powerful work.
That's one end of gap. The other end of the gap can only come through feedback. It's the only way you're gonna get it. The only way you build self-aware is how do you actually come across to other people and that's the hard part, I mean, the first part's hard enough for some leaders, but the second part is arguably even harder.
Jeff Ma: Because if you think about it, you need some of the components that we just talked about to have that conversation. But what I always encourage people is this is a journey. This is a process, not an overnight fix. This is not something that you can just slip a switch and now it's there. So you have to find small ways to work.
I mentioned food earlier as an example for this large thing called inclusion. But guess what does it make it like not worth doing? Just cause it's so small. We view every step in this journey as small. And so it's really saying, you know what? I'm gonna go ask for feedback. I'm this big leader that everybody like kind of gets quiet when they enter the room.
Let me find out how I really come across these people. I want to hear from someone. And you ask someone and they say, man, Jeff, you're the best. You're the best boss I ever had. I love it. Perfect. No notes, you know, do what you keep doing what you're doing. I take that as a red flag. I'm like, I'm asking for somewhere to improve for you and how I treat you, how I treat people, what can I do better?
If you say a hundred percent it's impossible, and that's okay. You don't have that relationship yet. You don't have that ability for them to feel safe enough to share something. So we work on it. And your goal is not this one destination where, oh, now everybody's like perfectly comfortable with you, like, we're human.
This is gonna take time. You're gonna have some people here, some people there, and it's this long, long journey. But really, you asked what is the first step, and I'm giving you the step. It's literally this over and over and over that's as simple as it is to be honest. It's never losing sight of reducing your self-awareness gap.
You just, there's no point in which you're like, I'm completely self aware. There just isn't, there's something you're saying in a meeting, there's a way you come across as a joke. You tell there's a way that you deal with tough situations that you don't know how people take that, and leaders don't like to hear this because they're like, well, I'm just being myself.
I'm just doing what I do. And if they get it the wrong, if they get it the wrong way, then that's too bad for them but it's why this takes work. That's why this takes courage to kind of try and do, because at the end of the day, that's, you're gonna see it's like exponential returns on this type of effort because you are going to naturally start practicing these six things.
I never have people go in and say, you need to start working on vulnerability. Just like, just focus on vulnerability. Just do that because there's nothing to do. I like, I really don't want you go in a space and just fake vulnerability. I don't want you to just stand up in front of people and fore say, I made a mistake statement and leave and act exactly the same outside of that.
What I want you to do is think about the mistakes you have made, introspect yourself, how that impacted other people, and eventually go seek feedback on how that played out for them, and understanding that impact, understanding your influence. We always say it's about the impact over the intent, right?
You don't intend to rear-end someone with your car, but the impact is still there. So leaders. As far as I've seen, generally have the best of intent. We all want to be great leaders. We all wanna do good. We all wanna have success, but we rarely see the full picture of our impact. You have the higher up you go, the more true it is.
If you walk as a high level leader and you walk into a room and you say, oh, I really thought that presentation will be blue, not red. Guess what happens when you leave that room? Hundreds of people scramble to make that presentation blue and not red. And it was just a passing comment, but your impact, that's the level of your impact in that space.
It's very different from coming to this space and saying, hey guys, I wanna have an honest conversation. Don't take everything I'm saying as law, and I want to hear from you all. You know these types of different ways. You'll learn by kind of gaining that self-awareness, knowing what happens when you enter a room, what happens when you speak to people, and how you come across.
Mike: Yeah. What I love about what you said is it's too easy to think of culture as something that happens out there.
Jeff Ma: Mmm.
Mike: Like, you know, the company has to fix their culture and by, by saying, wait a minute, the culture is me looking in the mirror and me starting doing these six things. Not only is that, that's kind of a smaller project, cause you're always working on yourself, but more importantly that's all we have control. So I love that. I love that idea of it's not about this exercise or let's get together and create a vision of what we want our culture to look like. There may be a lot of important things to do, but it's more about looking in the mirror, so I love that. Tell us, a little bit more about Culture Plus and how you guys help your clients and where, and this stuff will be in the show notes too, but tell us about Culture Plus how you help your clients and where should we go if we wanna find out?
Jeff Ma: Absolutely. I appreciate that space. Love as A Business Strategy is the book and the podcast you can go to. It's a long url, but loveasabusinessstrategy.com is where you can find more information about that. And it'll cross link over to other things as well, like Soft Way and Culture Plus.
You can also go to culture-plus.com if you wanna learn more about the organization itself. And we are still doing the Seneca Leaders programs that we do for the public. So if you want more information on how you can sign up and join us and kind of learn in this space, it's a one day experience to transform your mindset in the very way we just talked about.
You could find out more on that website as well. You can go to any of those URLs or even senecaleaders.com. We bought a lot of URLs. So you can use 'em all. And, yeah, likeI hope to, you can also just reach out. I mean, I love having these conversations. Find me on LinkedIn, reach any of the authors.
In the book we even provide some resources. So if you're reading the book, there's some links in there to jump to learn more. Cause we couldn't fit it all in the book. So we put a bunch of, more like 2 0 1 stuff on the website. So we hope you check that kind of stuff out and kind of reach out to us and have these conversations.
We love, this is a passion of mine and the teams and we really love, we can talk about stuff all day.
Mike: Love it. Listen to the podcast. Read the book. Go to Culture Plus culture-plus.com. Awesome stuff. Jeff. Thanks so much for doing this.
Jeff Ma: It's a pleasure. Thank you so much.