807 Jessica Kriegel:

Jessica Kriegel:

If you look at Socrates 2,500 years ago, he’s quoted as complaining about the younger generation, saying that they don’t value hard work, and that they chatter and care too much about luxury rather than work ethic. The complaints haven’t even changed in 2,500 years. I mean, those are the same complaints we have today about young people.

I believe that this is a defense mechanism to deal with change, that we need to put other people down in order to feel better about the fact that things are moving faster than we’re comfortable with the pace of change.

This is classic in-group/out-group. I’m a millennial, and those Gen Zers are a terrible version of want to be us. And I’m a baby boomer, and those millennials are so different, and they’re not like us. So this is a way of bolstering our self-esteem artificially by putting other people down. And that’s why it’s all made up, and it doesn’t allow us to really connect and have an interpersonal experience based in authenticity.

You’ve heard all the stereotypes about Gen Z, Millenials or Boomers and probably repeated so often it’s hard not to buy into what my guest today, the workplace culture expert Jessica Kriegel decries as simplistic, judgmental and simply not true. She says each generation gets labels put on them, some positive, some negative, and all of them mostly 100% wrong. So today we change the narrative and talk about what executives and entrepreneurs really need to know about how to create great workplace cultures that deliver on impact and financial growth.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is on a mission to use data-driven insights to “quantify culture” –and help companies dismantle the chaos of poor morale, low performance, and missed financial goals. And while she’s at it also dispel the notion that generational stereotypes have any basis in reality – other than a false and destructive ‘us vs. them’ narrative. Dr. Jessica Kriegel is the chief scientist of Workplace Culture at Culture Partners, founder or The Culture Equation, and author of Unfairly Labeled: How Your Workplace Can Benefit From Ditching Generational Stereotypes.

Every company is seemingly clamoring for the secret sauce of a great company culture. So, what is the magic elixir? What is it that inspires people from all walks of life and generations to join together to create value and impact for others? To go the extra mile and enjoy the journey?

Nope, not perks and ping pong tables. Nope, not even extra money. Those things may help, but my guest today says the core of a great culture is alignment of purpose.

That is, aligning every individual team member’s personal purpose with the purpose of the company – and that of course necessitates truly knowing your purpose.

For more than 15 years, Jessica Kriegel has been guiding global, national, Fortune 100 and other organizations across finance, technology, real estate and healthcare industries on the path to creating intentional cultures that accelerate performance.

As a global consultant for a human capital management solutions provider, Jessica consistently saw highly-stressed leaders failing to deliver against lofty financial goals. She knew that if these leaders could transform their cultures, performance and profitability would follow. But, because culture is often viewed as an intangible, these leaders didn’t know where to begin. So, Jessica set out on a personal mission to ‘quantify culture.’ Her doctoral research and consulting engagements with Oracle, Toyota, Lockheed Martin, Federal Reserve, and Bank of America to name a few, led to the Culture Equation – a tested model where strategy combined with culture to deliver consistent results. Recently she sold her company Culture Equation to Culture Partners, where she is now the Chief Scientist of Workplace Culture, applying data-driven insights to dismantle the chaos of poor morale, low performance, and missed financial goals and translating seemingly soft skill programs into monetary values.

Today we dive deep into organizational culture and leadership and start by dispelling just about everything you thought you knew about generational stereotypes.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jessica Kriegel and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

And Jessica, welcome to Wings.

Jessica Kriegel:

Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

What was the spark that got you interested in workplace culture?

Jessica Kriegel:

I think it probably began with bad workplace culture experiences, frankly. I remember when I just graduated from my MBA, I was working for a tech startup, 1,000 people in the human capital management space. I was training and consulting and I just loved my job, I was so eager and excited and passionate and engaged, and I had my very first performance evaluation, and my leader said, “You knw, you’re like one of those millennials. You just need to bake a little bit longer. I’m going to give you a two out of three on interpersonal skills.” And I was just crushed.

I didn’t know what she meant by, “You need to bake a little longer. That feedback was not clear.” I felt judged because she said, “You’re one of those millennials,” whatever that meant. And she downgraded me on interpersonal skills with no understanding of how I could do differently. All she said was, “You’re not good enough to get a three out of three.” And so it didn’t help me improve, and that was bad culture, and so I think trying to help people not have those kind of negative experiences at work is the underlying cause of why I’ve done all of this work that I’ve done in my career.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s always a spark for entrepreneurs. We see a problem and we’re like, “Oh my God, no one else is doing anything about it. I guess it’s me.”

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, exactly. How can I help with what I know?

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. So let’s get into this. Because you’re interested in generational dynamics, your whole book, Unfairly Labeled: How Your Workplace Can Benefit from Ditching Generational Stereotypes. This is a real thing where people get kind of put in a box, like all millennials, are this way, and all Gen Z is this way. Break that down for me. You’re essentially saying that all of that is just not true.

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, it’s stereotyping. It’s putting a label on a group of people. Everyone born between these 20-year age gap, you’re all having one personality, you have one value system, you like to be managed the same way; it’s just overly simplistic and judgmental and not true. And what it does is it makes people feel not seen. It makes them feel judged and separate. It creates an us versus them mentality in the workplace that no one wants to be a part of. And it’s not just millennials who feel that way, now it’s Gen Z, and it’s also baby boomers.

Every generation has labels that have been placed on them that some are negative, some are positive, and they’re all wrong. When I did my doctoral dissertation, my studies were around generational dynamics, and I thought that I was going to crack the code on what millennials wanted, and no one could tell me that I was wrong because I did the research at a doctoral level and I was a millennial, so I was going to be credible in the field.

And what my research actually showed was so much inconsistency in the literature, so much lazy data collection and research that was turned into headlines, and wasn’t actually solid research, and it made me realize that the entire field is made up. It’s just a cottage industry, and we had to stop. So that is what led to my first book. I felt like I had something people needed to hear, and I wanted everyone to know so that they would stop judging each other and stereotyping.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Jessica, what is the basis of all this? If this is all just kind of fake stereotyping, lazy thinking, how did it come about, and why does it get so much attention? There’s so much attention on it, it almost makes it real even though it’s not.

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, it’s come about through human psychology, and it is not new. If you look at Socrates 2,500 years ago, he’s quoted as complaining about the younger generation, saying that they don’t value hard work, and that they chatter and care too much about luxury rather than work ethic. The complaints haven’t even changed in 2,500 years. I mean, those are the same complaints we have today about young people.

And so I believe that this is a defense mechanism to deal with change, that we need to put other people down in order to feel better about the fact that things are moving faster than we’re comfortable with the pace of change. That’s what’s going on. And Henry Tajfel talked about in-group/out-group dynamics, that everyone wants to be a part of an in-group, but if we become part of an in-group that boosts our self-esteem, there’s then therefore an out-group.

Anyone who’s not in the in-group, right? And this is classic in-group/out-group. I’m a millennial, and those Gen Zers are a terrible version of want to be us. And I’m a baby boomer, and those millennials are so different, and they’re not like us. No one in any generation wishes they were a part of a different generation. No baby boomers out there being like, I wish I was a Gen Z, and vice versa. So this is a way of bolstering our self-esteem artificially by putting other people down. And that’s why it’s all made up, and it doesn’t allow us to really connect and have an interpersonal experience based in authenticity.

Melinda Wittstock:

So well said. I mean, as someone who has a team of people from all generations, there’s certain experiences or shared experiences, I guess; people have cultural references and things like that, but that doesn’t really tell you anything about someone’s character, because there’s so many other influences on them.

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what makes up our personality is a series of thousands of experiences we have in our childhood, including experiences with our family, with our community, at school, with church, with all the socioeconomic status, with race. I mean, we have all sorts of influences; these experiences develop our beliefs. And this is actually the model of culture that we share at Culture Partners which is, experiences lead to your beliefs. It’s just the way that humans work.

You develop beliefs in your childhood based on, here’s what I think is right and wrong. This is what I think is true and not true about me and my community and my place in the world. Those beliefs are what determine your actions. That’s what makes you decide to go to college and become a CEO, or shoplift and go to jail. And those actions are going to get you results. Every action leads to a result. Some are good and some are bad. And at a fundamental level, that’s what determines someone’s makeup, not some 20-year-wide age bracket that they happen to fall within. And that’s how you change culture too, is you get at experiences that people are having in the workplace, so you can intentionally foster the beliefs that you need people to have to take the right action, so that you can get organizational results. I mean, it’s just the way people work.

Melinda Wittstock:

So tell me, what makes a great workplace culture?

Jessica Kriegel:

What makes a great workplace culture is when people are connected to purpose, their own purpose, and that purpose connects to the larger organization’s purpose. So when I have purpose fit, that’s when I’m winning. Culture fit, I think, is a complete sham. If you’re trying to hire for culture fit right now, rethink everything that you’re doing, because culture fit is just a way for this unconscious bias to seep into the conversation that we’ve been having.

I think millennials are the right culture fit. When people hire for culture fit, they’re essentially thinking, who do I want to go get a beer with? And then you start to hire people who walk and talk and act like you. And that’s terrible. You want to hire people who are driven by the mission, and who are going to feel motivated by what they’re accomplishing, and getting meaning out of the work that they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. So we hire for purpose fit.

Melinda Wittstock:

A hundred percent. So give me an idea of the type of ways when you’re hiring a team to test for that, and counter your own unconscious bias, just even in the questions you’re asking, to see if people fit the purpose, I guess.

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah. Well, the first question I ask in every interview I do is, what moves you in your life? What is the purpose that you see yourself fulfilling as a functioning member of society, and how does this job help you get there?

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s a great question.

Jessica Kriegel:

And a lot of people haven’t actually thought out what their purpose is. They can’t articulate it. They haven’t done the work that a lot of these companies have done, which is coming up with a six word catchphrase, that is our purpose. And I think people need to do that. Come up with a personal purpose statement. I have mine, and we have a Slack channel at our organization, which is called the Purpose Fit Slack channel, and we ask people to share their purpose and how they can enable that purpose in their work here. And so we talk about it explicitly in our workplace.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so funny, you think of all these tech companies that thought great culture was having a ping pong table or such. I mean-

Jessica Kriegel:

Oh yeah, ping pong culture is out. I think the market has evolved. I thought about writing a book called Ping Pong Tables Don’t Make Great Culture or something like that, to get people out of the box of thinking that it’s all about happy hours and interesting perks like that.

But I think, actually now, we’re talking to Fortune 500 CEOs and CHROs, and they’ve evolved past thinking that ping pong tables are the answer, and a lot of people are doing really honorable work in the area of employee engagement, and they are providing benefits around mental health, and they’re doing these things that they hope will move the needle on culture. But what they don’t see, what they’re still dismissing or they’re disconnected from is the fact that culture is the key to change behavior that can actually deliver financial results.

And I think a lot of CEOs, they care about culture, but they don’t actually realize that culture is how you drive results. And we just completed some research with Stanford that shows culture focused, people focused companies have correlated, higher correlation with financial impact than strategy focused companies. And I mean, that’s just a big difference maker. So we’re evangelists, our mission is to help people understand the power of culture and driving results, and it’s not just a nice to have, and it’s not about making people happy.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so the purpose piece of it is so critical, and you’re right. I mean, I think a lot of people don’t necessarily know their purpose, and perhaps it takes a while and life experience to actually understand that purpose. How do you get people to that place where if they don’t really quite know what their purpose is or they’re kind of still looking for it, to assist them into that place, whether they’re a prospective team member or they’re already on your team and they’re growing as a person?

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, I mean, it’s an exercise in self-reflection. And we ask some key questions that help spark the imagination, and we ask people to be thoughtful and reflective about it, journal about it, take a couple days off and meditate throughout the day, sit in the middle of the woods and really think about what your mission in life is. What is the meaning of all this? Why are you here? And some of the questions we ask to help foster that creative thinking is, when are you in flow? You know Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, which is when you’re really focused on something and you feel like you’re in the flow, meaning you are not stressed out, but you’re engaged and time kind of loses, you lose sense of time because you’re so into what you’re doing. That’s one way of understanding your purpose is, when do you feel that?

Another is, what legacy do you want to leave? And by people thinking about the bigger picture of their life and what they will have left behind, that allows them to get to meaning. One really interesting study we see, I’m a mom. And I was reading in the New Yorker the other day, it said, parents are less happy than non-parents, but they have more meaning in their lives. And, same thing at a country level. If you look at countries that are wealthy and have strong systemic support structures like Norway and Finland, they’re happier than countries with corruption and war torn dynamics like Sierra Leone and Togo, right?

But people in Sierra Leone and Togo, they self-proclaim that they feel like they have a lot more meaning than the people self-account for in Finland and Norway. So, it’s not about being happy. It’s about having meaning. When do you feel like you have meaning in the way that you’re living your life? That’s what we want to connect people to.

Melinda Wittstock:

So tell me a little bit about the folks that you work for and your clients, and how you inculcate this change. Say you’re working for an average, your regular kind of Fortune 1000 company or perhaps a startup or whatever. What’s the process that you take them through to help them understand this, and implement what they need to have great purpose-driven cultures?

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, I mean, first we take them through, well, we use the culture equation, which is a model I created before I sold my company to Culture Partners. The culture equation is, your purpose plus your strategy amplified by culture is what gets you results. Culture is the exponential power there.

Purpose and strategy are important in business, and they are critical, but the purpose is the why, your strategy is how, your culture is the way you get results. And that’s what we take people through a journey. We work with people in over the course of three years, and we take them through what we call the culture equation journey, getting aligned and clear on what their purpose is, what their strategy is. We do the strategic planning work with them, and then understanding what kind of culture needs to be aligned to that purpose and strategy in order to drive results.

And we use, at the core of our methodology, the results pyramid that I talked about earlier. That results all come from actions of the people on your team, and those actions are going to be driven not by process and systems, but by beliefs. And so you have to get at the mindset of the people, the way people think and act in your team in order to drive sustained behavioral change that actually gets results. And the way you do that is through experiences.

And so we have a systemic process that is very simple, but is also sustainable that allows people to create intentional experiences that scales. Because our companies, our clients are large organizations, and we’re usually working with a CEO who totally gets it about culture, but they can’t scale themself. And so how do you scale this culture facilitation in an organization, intentional culture creation at large? And that’s what we walk people through in this three year journey that we take them on.

Melinda Wittstock:

That is absolutely fascinating. And so what tends to be the before and after? So as a result of this, you mentioned that companies drive better results. Give me a sense of that before and after.

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, I mean, we measure success on whether or not you’re hitting those top three results that we help you identify on the front end of this. We’re not moving the needle by moving the needle on employee engagement. Sure, we will look at employee engagement scores, but that’s not how we measure culture. We measure culture on your top three key results. And most of our clients, their top three key results are something around revenue, something around profitability, could be market share, and usually something around the employees, or it could be around innovation. I mean it varies, but we help them come up with three key results, which are meaningful, measurable, and memorable. And there are things that everyone in the entire company understands are the goals for the organization. And when everyone understands that, now we can all be facilitating movement towards those key results. And whether we’ve been successful is whether you achieve those three key results, and we have had wild success with the companies that we’ve had in achieving those kind of key results.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s such important work. And so tell me a little bit more about your entrepreneurial journey. So you created this company and you ran it for what, 10 years before you sold it? What were some of the things that you learned along the way that you didn’t anticipate about being an entrepreneur?

Jessica Kriegel:

There’s a mindset, an entrepreneurial mindset that you read about and you see about, and you watch these online videos of people talking about risk-taking and what it takes to hustle and be an entrepreneur. And I don’t know that I ever really had that, frankly. And I was not a risk-taker, and I didn’t like a lot of what it took to be an entrepreneur, and it was hard.

And having said that, it makes sense, because I didn’t set out to build a business. I did some research at a doctoral level and learned something myself that I felt like people needed to hear, so I wrote a book, and then suddenly people were asking me to speak at their conferences, and then suddenly people were asking me to consult their businesses based on what they heard at the conference, and suddenly I was getting referrals for other companies, and it just kind of grew, despite myself.

And so I fell into it. And when I sold my business last year to Culture Partners, I was nervous about the lack of autonomy that I might be walking into. And I talked to the CEO of Culture Partners when we were negotiating and he said, “You just got to decide if you want to do this alone, or do it with us.” I was like, oh man, I kind of want to do it with a team. That sounds awesome. And so selling my business was the best thing I’ve ever done. I feel so grateful to be partnered with the people at Culture Partners. I’m learning from them every day. I’ve had an impact on their IP in a way that I think is meaningful, and has made a difference for their clients, and so that feels really good too. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s meaningful. Going back to purpose fit, we have the same purpose, and it feels really good. But I don’t fit the stereotype of what an entrepreneur looks like, I’ll put it that way.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love this sort of accidental entrepreneur kind of aspect to how that happened, and it’s the best way. When people are approaching you rather than you running towards them, it seems much more in flow. What was the emotional aspect of going through the sale of your business? I’ve seen a lot of founders, and myself as a serial entrepreneur know a little bit about this, where it’s hard to sell your business, because it’s sort of a part of you. Did you go through that? Was there trepidation? How did you walk that path to get to the point of selling your business?

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, I did have some trepidation, and I think it culminated in that conversation I just said where I was like, “I don’t know.” And he said, “You just got to decide if you want to do this alone, or do it with us.” And that opened my eyes to what I was potentially leaving on the table if I walked away from the deal. The opportunity to have a team of people that all cared passionately about what I care about. And what’s interesting is when I did the negotiation on the price, we’ll use silly numbers just to not reveal too much, but let’s say that I expected to sell my business for $5. And he was saying when he first came at me with an offer, we hadn’t talked money. He was like, I’m going to give you $3. And I said, oh, I was expecting $5 or $6… Or, I was expecting more, is what I said.

And he said, well, why don’t you come at me with what it is that you expect? And I thought about it and I’m like, okay, I’m going to tell him $5 to $6, because I’d be happy with 6, and I would accept 5, even though I wouldn’t be as happy about it, right? So I said, somewhere between 5 and 6 would work for me. And he came back and said, “Okay, let’s do 6.” And it blew my mind because he knows I would’ve been fine with 5. It blew my mind that he came back at me with 6 because it was, I said, “You’re coming at me with the top end of my counter negotiation. I’ve never seen that before.”

And he said, “Yeah, because I want you to know that I’m all in on you, and I want you to be all in on us. And so if you need 6 to be all in, then let’s do 6, because we’ll get that money back.” I mean, it just transformed any fear, trepidation. I just instantly knew what a standup person I was going to be working for, and so excited to… I’m all in. I mean, I’ve never been more all in than I am now, more than when I was by myself, frankly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ah, that’s amazing. And so where do you see it going? What is your kind of vision for your future, and how, as chief scientist at the company that acquired you, what’s next for you? Where do you see yourself being in five years’ time?

Jessica Kriegel:

Oh, I learned a long time ago that you make plans and God laughs. So I have no idea where I’ll be in five years because I even just look at last year, I mean last year at this time I wasn’t thinking about selling my business. So, here we are.

Having said that, I’m writing a book right now, and I’m that book with the CEO of Culture Partners, Joe Terry. And we’re writing about, how do you get people to give a S-H-I-T about work? We think we know how to get people to care. That story I just told was a great example of, Joe got me to care. He got me to care by being abundant in his thinking, by coming forth and being authentic, and not trying to take, but rather trying to give, it made me want to care even more about the work I’m doing. And so we think we have something special that CEOs need, and so we’re writing that book right now, and so hopefully that takes off, and we get to talk about that with as many people as possible. We want to create a culture revolution.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for the work you’re doing, it’s so, so important, and next time I see all these things that show up in my inbox about millennials and Gen Zs.

Jessica Kriegel:

You can ignore them. You can delete them.

Melinda Wittstock:

Delete them. Exactly.

Jessica Kriegel:

Don’t even open it.

Melinda Wittstock:

A hundred percent. What it actually reminds me of this, I guess I’m the top end of Gen X, and I remember doing some quiz, I don’t know, on Facebook years ago, how millennial are you? And I was like, 99% millennial. And I’m like, what? Okay.

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

All right.

Jessica Kriegel:

So silly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right? It’s just silly. Anyway, well look, what’s the best way, Jessica, for people to find you and work with you?

Jessica Kriegel:

Yeah, so if you want to go to podcast.culture.io, we have, as the chief scientist, we’re constantly pumping out new research and eBooks and guides. We have toolkits on how to drive a culture that gets results. So go to podcast.culture.io and download some of our goodies for free, and it’s a gift for your listeners.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Jessica Kriegel:

Thank you.